But Discovery networks is starting to release shows and specials on Bluray as well as DVD. The best example has got to be Planet Earth. It's an amazing show and example of the capabilities of HD.
Just a hint, get the british/BBC version of Planet Earth with David Attenborough doing the narration instead of the annoying US/Discovery channel version with Sigourney Weaver.
Coincidentally this difference is one of my favorite examples of why I prefer BBC documentaries over Discovery Channel "documentaries", even if the content is pretty much the same the Discovery channel version of anything is likely to be annoying and edited for commercials...
A major problem with tech support jobs is that you're very likely to end up working only when your employer thinks they need you, so don't expect to get 40 hours of work per week. They call this efficiency, one of those things they brag about in the weekly company newsletter, together with profits of course. Also, profits are always up except when it's time to negotiate wages, then profits are magically down for a month or so and they can't possibly afford more than purely symbolic raises.
I can tell you from personal experience that it's hard to survive on 20-25 hours worth of pay per week, even though in my case it was more like $15-17 per hour. Especially if you have student loans to make payments on (no other debts for me but since my parents aren't filthy rich I had to take out a college loan that, while very low-interest still need to be paid back).
Well, help desk technicians are worth about $12/hour, honestly.
"Help Desk" is the low-end of the IT totem pole. It's a job that requires few qualifications beyond "Knows how to install software and update drivers".
I disagree, even working first line tech support requires a lot more knowledge than that, and in most places (outside of the typical IT "hot spots" like San Francisco) there is enough competition for IT jobs that a lot of first line techs for ISPs will have a lot more knowledge than what is required to do their jobs but will still come off as dimwitted when talking to users since management doesn't give a crap about supplying them with information,
I've experienced an ISP changing the type of CPE they use and not providing tech support with any information about this until customers started calling in about it and the tech support team complained and asked for information about the new CPEs. And even then the only information given for several months was "Yeah, it's a xxx brand converter, model yyy", detailed technical information (and pictures and sample units) wasn't given until almost six months after the introduction, and by then we'd pretty much figured out everything by the answers given by higher-level techs in tickets and just keeping track of what information we could get from the customers.
This btw, was not an isolated incident, many companies simply don't supply their tech support departments (or outsourced tech support) with enough information to do their jobs properly, and then when something goes wrong they blame it on incompetence from tech support. I don't know how many scheduled outages (maintenance) I've seen reported to the NOC only to have someone from upper management send a department-wide email essentially telling all the techs that they're idiots for not knowing about the planned outage even though no information about the outage was given, or when upper management refuses to put information about any outages on the ISPs website because that would be admitting that there's a problem...
A lot of what one does when working tech support or helpdesk is to constantly try to figure out how things work since no one bothers to tell you anything (and why would they, everyone knows that tech support is just a bunch of high school dropouts, err, what? most of you guys are college educated? That can't be... LIES! I will not let reality interfere with my preconceived notions! Shut up or you're all fired! Also, keep smiling, here at MajorISP Inc we all like our jobs! It's company policy damnit!).
Yes, I'm bitter, I've had way too much contact with endusers and unreasonable management over the last couple of years, and not just in one company either, it seems to be an industry-wide trend.
You'd still most likely have a "gateway machine", only it would only be doing packet filtering and not address translation, and this is a good thing since it allows end-to-end connectivity, one of the things that the internet protocol was supposed to help provide.
I've actually been waiting for both something like this and IPv6 for a long time, but I suspect the day when I can monitor the temperature of my fridge and oven as well as if they're powered on or not using SNMP is pretty far off.
I believe it is related to the recent problems with the shuttles where they've noticed problems that could (and did) result in disaster on re-entry. In such a situation it's probably nice to have a backup shuttle to be able to rescue the crew of the damaged shuttle.
That said, I've always wondered why it isn't standard procedure to have a sort of "rescue capsule" ready for launch during shuttle missions. I suspect cost is one of the reasons...
Maybe I'm not reading this right but am I to understand that you're saying that being able to have a Slashdot free of the idle section is as important to you as clean drinking water?
If I'm understanding you correctly then I suggest you go outside and get some fresh air, or just browse the idle section for a while.:)
As someone who currently works in first and second line tech support (and is looking to get out but constantly gets rejected because I lack sysadmin experience):
- register and renew domain names
A trained monkey could probably do this.
- setup a pair of properly configured DNS servers for multiple domain names.
Did this as an experiment with FreeBSD+BIND and Debian+BIND at home but now I'm back to using only one server since it's only for my LAN (and my ISP won't give me more than one IP address so I can't use it for my "real" domain names).
- setup a properly configured mail server for multiple domain names
I have a working solution with Sendmail at home with an IMAP server, admittedly it's not tied into an SQL server or anything (uses system users) but for my purposes it's good enough, I've investigated more advanced solutions but I currently see no need to mess it up since it's working fine.
- setup and maintain a mailing list manager
Never done this, never had any reason to but from what I've read it shouldn't extraordinarily hard.
- configure a packet filtering firewall
I've done this with various combinations of operating systems and firewall software. This includes a NAT router for IPv4 that also acts as an IPv6 gateway.
- configure a router and get ISP connectivity
This would depend on what you mean by "a router". Cisco router running IOS? No, never had access to one and I see no point in eBaying some POS one just to toy around when I have a working solution. *nix box with two or more NICs? Yup, done that dozens of times with and without NAT and packet filtering. Consumer-grade NAT router? See the "trained monkey" answer.
- subnet an office network
Doesn't sound too hard, never done anything bigger than two 192.168.x.x/24 setups though. Basically I haven't had any reason to do so but I doubt it would be very hard unless we're dealing with thousands of hosts and other similar difficulties.
- configure a DHCP server
Did this a couple of years ago, realized I had no use for it and turned it off again. I am running rtadvd for my IPv6 subnet though.
- configure a switch
Never done this, never had a switch capable of being configured though I've considered getting one just to be able to learn how to.
- setup a tftp server to install images of OS of choice to workstations, over the network
Did a temp setup for network install of some Linux distro a few years ago, never did any remote install setups though.
- setup an LDAP server with a properly designed DIT
- configure all network services to use the LDAP server for authentication
Never did either of these but I've been reading up on it since I'm considering setting up something similar at home.
- setup a database server, file server, web server, remote access server, etc...
Done it too many times to count.
- setup a network monitoring solution to make sure you or your team get alerted if any of these services goes down.
Only partially, I don't have real-time tracking of every process running on my home server but I do monitor a bunch of stuff using mrtg, rrdtool, snmpd and shell/python scripts.
- make sure that all of this runs at an acceptable level of performance.
Define "acceptable", I've done tech support for companies who think a customer lookup based on customer number taking three minutes is perfectly acceptable (while I consider it horrible, when the max average call time is 6 minutes and just finding the customer takes 3 minutes something is seriously wrong).
Sounds like a previous employer of mine, their policy was "Don't be drunk or high at work, if we catch you intoxicated at work then your choices will be therapy/rehab or losing your job.", a reasonable policy in my eyes.
What kind of "flagrant disregard" of the law does it show? And in what way is this a liability for the employer? Finding out that a potential employee likes watching Formula 1 races on TV is probably more of an indication of a possible liability in that it is more likely that this person drives in an irresponsible way than it is that someone who occasionally smokes marijuana is likely to have a drug problem (or be a hardened criminal).
To me this would indicate that you're not choosing your friends well, which indicates a judgement problem; possibly that you're not willing to make tough calls that hurt your friends or make your life a little tougher. Perhaps that judgement (and/or friends) are your real problem. Surely the people you choose to hang out with reflect on your personality.
To me it indicates the person isn't boring and paranoid. Also, you cut out my point, that it's not a very wise thing to judge someone based on random pictures off the internet as they most likely say little about that person's work performance (there are obviously extreme cases where there is an indication of a problem that should be further researched). The big problem is that a potential employee is likely to be dismissed without being able to "defend" themselves and that the person doing the dismissing may very well some uptight clown at a recruiting firm hired by the actual potential employer.
Don't forget the possibility that the person who is anti-X is just the HR drone who's tasked with picking n candidates to interview, in that case it is quite possible that the candidate being pro-X would never become a problem except for the fact that the HR drone filters out his application because he/she happens to be anti-X.
For starters you can tell a lot about people by the company they keep.
And by looking at pictures you're judging that person's friends by their looks which I'd have to say is a pretty prejudiced way of determining who someone is...
secondly as for photos if you're friend posts pictures of you doing things you don't want you future employer seeing then don't do those things or at the very least, don't do them around people who have cameras.
Welcome to the 21st century, practically everyone under 30 has a camera phone or a digital camera on them at all times these days, and the same is true for a lot of people over 30 as well.
True. However I would argue that for a large number of people (possibly the majority) getting wasted and doped up indicates personality traits that could effect job performance (especially if you do it frequently, it wasn't a one time thing).
The problem is, of course, that while your friends' facebook galleries might indicate that you're ocnstantly drunk and stoned at a glance the truth is probably that those three drunken pictures of you from three different parties were taken weeks or months apart, not all in the same week.
Also, the illegal drugs would show you are willing to violate the law when you deem to better for you (or more fun, or whatever). I think it's a fair assumption that someone who is willing to use illegal drugs is more likely to be willing to do some other illegal activity (especially if it doesn't seem obviously harmful, like petty theft) than someone who doesn't.
Considering that a lot of people have used cannabis these days it really doesn't indicate shit, especially considering a lot of intelligent people feel that the illegal status of cannabis is, quite honestly, bullshit.
To sum up my point, judging someone based on a bunch of pictures their friends thought it would be fun to upload (most likely because the pictures in question were considered humiliating) is probably not a good idea as it says absolutely nothing about that person's work performance.
Safari uses webkit and it's buggier, slower, and more bloated-feeling in general than Firefox or Chrome(at least on a windows box).
On OS X my experience is that Safari/WebKit is a lot snappier than Firefox although I will admit that I rarely use Firefox for extended periods of time so I can't really tell how well it handles running for days on end with lots of tabs open on OS X, but I know the Windows and Linux versions tend to start using a lot of RAM after a few days.
I partially agree with you, there needs to be more than one rendering engine for (X)HTML out there. But WebKit would probably be good as the "reference" engine, unlike IE development isn't controlled entirely by a single company that's more concerned about squashing competition at all costs.
Also, a big problem with IE when it became the "standard" was that both MS and Netscape had been pretty much making up their own standards for a long time, remember all those "this site viewed best with Internet Explorer/Netscape Navigator" warnings?
I think WebKit should be coded to conform as closely to the W3C standards as possible and perhaps even be treated as a "semi-official" reference rendering engine.
Seriously, wireless access to the internet should be regarded as a low-bandwidth, low-reliability and mobile solution, not something that you try to sell to unsuspecting customers because you're too cheap to lay down fibre (or even copper in some places).
It sounds to me like you're using your wireless connection as a low-bandwidth way to access the net. And I can tell you from experience that if you up the bandwidth then reliability will suffer (Ever had to explain to a business customer without an SLA that there is nothing you can do about 50-60% packet loss on their radio link because you can't control the weather? I've had that "pleasure"...).
Oh no, not another one of these "Once we've solved the problems with interference and the shared bandwidth nature of wireless it's gonna be teh awesomes cos I likes has a wireless-g rooter n its awesomes".
Seriously, wireless access to the internet should be regarded as a low-bandwidth, low-reliability and mobile solution, not something that you try to sell to unsuspecting customers because you're too cheap to lay down fibre (or even copper in some places).
It's like ADSL here in.se, around 1997-1998 it was stated by politicians that the plan was to provide fibre or equivalent connections to most of Sweden but that this might take a few years and in the meantime DSL would be quite common, especially in rural areas. Well, it's ten years later, ISPs are generally touting ADSL2+ Annex.M as the coolest thing available (24/3 Mbps) and there are a few test customers with VDSL2. The 100/100 fibre connections for everyone? Yeah, like that's gonna happen, they blew all the money they got for that on buying DSLAMs....
This country is going to be taken over in November by an ideologue socialist (presently masquerading as a moderate to garner votes) as President and an technological moron as VP.
If you are implying that Obama is a socialist then you seriously need to remove your head from your ass and pay attention to the rest of the world, Obama is pretty far out to the right, only in the US and a few other countries would he be considered a socialist...
Well, "inactive" depends on what you mean, there are plenty of applications that use the processor while running without user interaction so in that sense they wouldn't be inactive.
Right now I have four GUI apps running that are minimized or on other virtual desktops that are all using more than 10% of one core each (or 5% of total "capacity") essentially draining 20% of the available processing power of my desktop machine, or 40% of a single core if I restricted them to one core.
And this is not a lot for me, normally I have more apps running on my desktop and this is also why, for me, it would be nice to have a couple of extra cores, to make sure that if one of these apps decides to go nuts for a few seconds it won't affect other things. Also, there's multithreaded rendering which speeds things up a lot when dealing with hi-res renders (using Mental Ray or another renderer that allows you to set the number of threads to use).
While your point is true for the average "Operating system + one app at a time" user there are a lot of us out there who feel limited by two cores since we actually do a lot of multitasking. In my case it's a "bad" habit I picked up when I built a system around an Abit BP6 (SMP Celeron board) years ago.
Four cores would be pretty nice since it would allow me to run cpu-intensive apps without shutting down other cpu-intensive apps.
How odd, I previewed the comment and it looked fine, edited a couple of words but didn't change the tags and then submitted the comment, that's what I get for trying to multitask (slashdot + work).
I don't have a problem with college degrees, I'm college educated myself. This makes the rest of your post invalid and if you had read a bit more closely then you may have noticed that what I was complaining about was how companies, post dot-bomb, have taken to requiring a lot more than what is really required because:
They assume people who aren't overqualified on paper are worthless and lie about their skills (since they hired a bunch of idiots who said "I knows computer stuff and junk, man." back in the late 90's).
There used to be 50+ qualified applicants for every posted IT job (around here anyway) around 2002-2003 and they've gotten used to this, and now when they can't find 20 "perfect fits" for every job ad they post they whine about how there's a shortage of skilled workers...
Well, it's obviously not only people with degrees that are getting hired. But here (in Sweden but not outside Stockholm) your chances of getting a job without the magic combination of a degree of a degree and several years of experience is pretty low, while in Stockholm I've seen ads for UNIX sysadmins with "high school or equivalent" as the only requirement, too bad it's impossible to find somewhere to live in Stockholm...
Slashdot Mirror
But Discovery networks is starting to release shows and specials on Bluray as well as DVD. The best example has got to be Planet Earth. It's an amazing show and example of the capabilities of HD.
Just a hint, get the british/BBC version of Planet Earth with David Attenborough doing the narration instead of the annoying US/Discovery channel version with Sigourney Weaver.
Coincidentally this difference is one of my favorite examples of why I prefer BBC documentaries over Discovery Channel "documentaries", even if the content is pretty much the same the Discovery channel version of anything is likely to be annoying and edited for commercials...
/Mikael
A major problem with tech support jobs is that you're very likely to end up working only when your employer thinks they need you, so don't expect to get 40 hours of work per week. They call this efficiency, one of those things they brag about in the weekly company newsletter, together with profits of course. Also, profits are always up except when it's time to negotiate wages, then profits are magically down for a month or so and they can't possibly afford more than purely symbolic raises.
I can tell you from personal experience that it's hard to survive on 20-25 hours worth of pay per week, even though in my case it was more like $15-17 per hour. Especially if you have student loans to make payments on (no other debts for me but since my parents aren't filthy rich I had to take out a college loan that, while very low-interest still need to be paid back).
/Mikael
I disagree, even working first line tech support requires a lot more knowledge than that, and in most places (outside of the typical IT "hot spots" like San Francisco) there is enough competition for IT jobs that a lot of first line techs for ISPs will have a lot more knowledge than what is required to do their jobs but will still come off as dimwitted when talking to users since management doesn't give a crap about supplying them with information,
I've experienced an ISP changing the type of CPE they use and not providing tech support with any information about this until customers started calling in about it and the tech support team complained and asked for information about the new CPEs. And even then the only information given for several months was "Yeah, it's a xxx brand converter, model yyy", detailed technical information (and pictures and sample units) wasn't given until almost six months after the introduction, and by then we'd pretty much figured out everything by the answers given by higher-level techs in tickets and just keeping track of what information we could get from the customers.
This btw, was not an isolated incident, many companies simply don't supply their tech support departments (or outsourced tech support) with enough information to do their jobs properly, and then when something goes wrong they blame it on incompetence from tech support. I don't know how many scheduled outages (maintenance) I've seen reported to the NOC only to have someone from upper management send a department-wide email essentially telling all the techs that they're idiots for not knowing about the planned outage even though no information about the outage was given, or when upper management refuses to put information about any outages on the ISPs website because that would be admitting that there's a problem...
A lot of what one does when working tech support or helpdesk is to constantly try to figure out how things work since no one bothers to tell you anything (and why would they, everyone knows that tech support is just a bunch of high school dropouts, err, what? most of you guys are college educated? That can't be... LIES! I will not let reality interfere with my preconceived notions! Shut up or you're all fired! Also, keep smiling, here at MajorISP Inc we all like our jobs! It's company policy damnit!).
Yes, I'm bitter, I've had way too much contact with endusers and unreasonable management over the last couple of years, and not just in one company either, it seems to be an industry-wide trend.
/Mikael
You'd still most likely have a "gateway machine", only it would only be doing packet filtering and not address translation, and this is a good thing since it allows end-to-end connectivity, one of the things that the internet protocol was supposed to help provide.
/Mikael
I've actually been waiting for both something like this and IPv6 for a long time, but I suspect the day when I can monitor the temperature of my fridge and oven as well as if they're powered on or not using SNMP is pretty far off.
/Mikael
I believe it is related to the recent problems with the shuttles where they've noticed problems that could (and did) result in disaster on re-entry. In such a situation it's probably nice to have a backup shuttle to be able to rescue the crew of the damaged shuttle.
That said, I've always wondered why it isn't standard procedure to have a sort of "rescue capsule" ready for launch during shuttle missions. I suspect cost is one of the reasons...
/Mikael
Maybe I'm not reading this right but am I to understand that you're saying that being able to have a Slashdot free of the idle section is as important to you as clean drinking water?
If I'm understanding you correctly then I suggest you go outside and get some fresh air, or just browse the idle section for a while. :)
/Mikael
As someone who currently works in first and second line tech support (and is looking to get out but constantly gets rejected because I lack sysadmin experience):
- register and renew domain names
A trained monkey could probably do this.
- setup a pair of properly configured DNS servers for multiple domain names.
Did this as an experiment with FreeBSD+BIND and Debian+BIND at home but now I'm back to using only one server since it's only for my LAN (and my ISP won't give me more than one IP address so I can't use it for my "real" domain names).
- setup a properly configured mail server for multiple domain names
I have a working solution with Sendmail at home with an IMAP server, admittedly it's not tied into an SQL server or anything (uses system users) but for my purposes it's good enough, I've investigated more advanced solutions but I currently see no need to mess it up since it's working fine.
- setup and maintain a mailing list manager
Never done this, never had any reason to but from what I've read it shouldn't extraordinarily hard.
- configure a packet filtering firewall
I've done this with various combinations of operating systems and firewall software. This includes a NAT router for IPv4 that also acts as an IPv6 gateway.
- configure a router and get ISP connectivity
This would depend on what you mean by "a router". Cisco router running IOS? No, never had access to one and I see no point in eBaying some POS one just to toy around when I have a working solution. *nix box with two or more NICs? Yup, done that dozens of times with and without NAT and packet filtering. Consumer-grade NAT router? See the "trained monkey" answer.
- subnet an office network
Doesn't sound too hard, never done anything bigger than two 192.168.x.x/24 setups though. Basically I haven't had any reason to do so but I doubt it would be very hard unless we're dealing with thousands of hosts and other similar difficulties.
- configure a DHCP server
Did this a couple of years ago, realized I had no use for it and turned it off again. I am running rtadvd for my IPv6 subnet though.
- configure a switch
Never done this, never had a switch capable of being configured though I've considered getting one just to be able to learn how to.
- setup a tftp server to install images of OS of choice to workstations, over the network
Did a temp setup for network install of some Linux distro a few years ago, never did any remote install setups though.
- setup an LDAP server with a properly designed DIT - configure all network services to use the LDAP server for authentication
Never did either of these but I've been reading up on it since I'm considering setting up something similar at home.
- setup a database server, file server, web server, remote access server, etc...
Done it too many times to count.
- setup a network monitoring solution to make sure you or your team get alerted if any of these services goes down.
Only partially, I don't have real-time tracking of every process running on my home server but I do monitor a bunch of stuff using mrtg, rrdtool, snmpd and shell/python scripts.
- make sure that all of this runs at an acceptable level of performance.
Define "acceptable", I've done tech support for companies who think a customer lookup based on customer number taking three minutes is perfectly acceptable (while I consider it horrible, when the max average call time is 6 minutes and just finding the customer takes 3 minutes something is seriously wrong).
- be able to auto
Sounds like a previous employer of mine, their policy was "Don't be drunk or high at work, if we catch you intoxicated at work then your choices will be therapy/rehab or losing your job.", a reasonable policy in my eyes.
/Mikael
What kind of "flagrant disregard" of the law does it show? And in what way is this a liability for the employer? Finding out that a potential employee likes watching Formula 1 races on TV is probably more of an indication of a possible liability in that it is more likely that this person drives in an irresponsible way than it is that someone who occasionally smokes marijuana is likely to have a drug problem (or be a hardened criminal).
/Mikael
To me this would indicate that you're not choosing your friends well, which indicates a judgement problem; possibly that you're not willing to make tough calls that hurt your friends or make your life a little tougher. Perhaps that judgement (and/or friends) are your real problem. Surely the people you choose to hang out with reflect on your personality.
To me it indicates the person isn't boring and paranoid. Also, you cut out my point, that it's not a very wise thing to judge someone based on random pictures off the internet as they most likely say little about that person's work performance (there are obviously extreme cases where there is an indication of a problem that should be further researched). The big problem is that a potential employee is likely to be dismissed without being able to "defend" themselves and that the person doing the dismissing may very well some uptight clown at a recruiting firm hired by the actual potential employer.
/Mikael
Don't forget the possibility that the person who is anti-X is just the HR drone who's tasked with picking n candidates to interview, in that case it is quite possible that the candidate being pro-X would never become a problem except for the fact that the HR drone filters out his application because he/she happens to be anti-X.
/Mikael
For starters you can tell a lot about people by the company they keep.
And by looking at pictures you're judging that person's friends by their looks which I'd have to say is a pretty prejudiced way of determining who someone is...
secondly as for photos if you're friend posts pictures of you doing things you don't want you future employer seeing then don't do those things or at the very least, don't do them around people who have cameras.
Welcome to the 21st century, practically everyone under 30 has a camera phone or a digital camera on them at all times these days, and the same is true for a lot of people over 30 as well.
/Mikael
True. However I would argue that for a large number of people (possibly the majority) getting wasted and doped up indicates personality traits that could effect job performance (especially if you do it frequently, it wasn't a one time thing).
The problem is, of course, that while your friends' facebook galleries might indicate that you're ocnstantly drunk and stoned at a glance the truth is probably that those three drunken pictures of you from three different parties were taken weeks or months apart, not all in the same week.
Also, the illegal drugs would show you are willing to violate the law when you deem to better for you (or more fun, or whatever). I think it's a fair assumption that someone who is willing to use illegal drugs is more likely to be willing to do some other illegal activity (especially if it doesn't seem obviously harmful, like petty theft) than someone who doesn't.
Considering that a lot of people have used cannabis these days it really doesn't indicate shit, especially considering a lot of intelligent people feel that the illegal status of cannabis is, quite honestly, bullshit.
To sum up my point, judging someone based on a bunch of pictures their friends thought it would be fun to upload (most likely because the pictures in question were considered humiliating) is probably not a good idea as it says absolutely nothing about that person's work performance.
/Mikael
Safari uses webkit and it's buggier, slower, and more bloated-feeling in general than Firefox or Chrome(at least on a windows box).
On OS X my experience is that Safari/WebKit is a lot snappier than Firefox although I will admit that I rarely use Firefox for extended periods of time so I can't really tell how well it handles running for days on end with lots of tabs open on OS X, but I know the Windows and Linux versions tend to start using a lot of RAM after a few days.
/Mikael
I partially agree with you, there needs to be more than one rendering engine for (X)HTML out there. But WebKit would probably be good as the "reference" engine, unlike IE development isn't controlled entirely by a single company that's more concerned about squashing competition at all costs.
Also, a big problem with IE when it became the "standard" was that both MS and Netscape had been pretty much making up their own standards for a long time, remember all those "this site viewed best with Internet Explorer/Netscape Navigator" warnings?
I think WebKit should be coded to conform as closely to the W3C standards as possible and perhaps even be treated as a "semi-official" reference rendering engine.
/Mikael
Seriously, wireless access to the internet should be regarded as a low-bandwidth, low-reliability and mobile solution, not something that you try to sell to unsuspecting customers because you're too cheap to lay down fibre (or even copper in some places).
It sounds to me like you're using your wireless connection as a low-bandwidth way to access the net. And I can tell you from experience that if you up the bandwidth then reliability will suffer (Ever had to explain to a business customer without an SLA that there is nothing you can do about 50-60% packet loss on their radio link because you can't control the weather? I've had that "pleasure"...).
/Mikael
Oh no, not another one of these "Once we've solved the problems with interference and the shared bandwidth nature of wireless it's gonna be teh awesomes cos I likes has a wireless-g rooter n its awesomes".
Seriously, wireless access to the internet should be regarded as a low-bandwidth, low-reliability and mobile solution, not something that you try to sell to unsuspecting customers because you're too cheap to lay down fibre (or even copper in some places).
It's like ADSL here in .se, around 1997-1998 it was stated by politicians that the plan was to provide fibre or equivalent connections to most of Sweden but that this might take a few years and in the meantime DSL would be quite common, especially in rural areas. Well, it's ten years later, ISPs are generally touting ADSL2+ Annex.M as the coolest thing available (24/3 Mbps) and there are a few test customers with VDSL2. The 100/100 fibre connections for everyone? Yeah, like that's gonna happen, they blew all the money they got for that on buying DSLAMs....
/Mikael
This country is going to be taken over in November by an ideologue socialist (presently masquerading as a moderate to garner votes) as President and an technological moron as VP.
If you are implying that Obama is a socialist then you seriously need to remove your head from your ass and pay attention to the rest of the world, Obama is pretty far out to the right, only in the US and a few other countries would he be considered a socialist...
/Mikael
Well, "inactive" depends on what you mean, there are plenty of applications that use the processor while running without user interaction so in that sense they wouldn't be inactive.
Right now I have four GUI apps running that are minimized or on other virtual desktops that are all using more than 10% of one core each (or 5% of total "capacity") essentially draining 20% of the available processing power of my desktop machine, or 40% of a single core if I restricted them to one core.
And this is not a lot for me, normally I have more apps running on my desktop and this is also why, for me, it would be nice to have a couple of extra cores, to make sure that if one of these apps decides to go nuts for a few seconds it won't affect other things. Also, there's multithreaded rendering which speeds things up a lot when dealing with hi-res renders (using Mental Ray or another renderer that allows you to set the number of threads to use).
/Mikael
While your point is true for the average "Operating system + one app at a time" user there are a lot of us out there who feel limited by two cores since we actually do a lot of multitasking. In my case it's a "bad" habit I picked up when I built a system around an Abit BP6 (SMP Celeron board) years ago.
Four cores would be pretty nice since it would allow me to run cpu-intensive apps without shutting down other cpu-intensive apps.
/Mikael
How odd, I previewed the comment and it looked fine, edited a couple of words but didn't change the tags and then submitted the comment, that's what I get for trying to multitask (slashdot + work).
/Mikael
I don't have a problem with college degrees, I'm college educated myself. This makes the rest of your post invalid and if you had read a bit more closely then you may have noticed that what I was complaining about was how companies, post dot-bomb, have taken to requiring a lot more than what is really required because:
/Mikael
Err, I mean "but outside Stockholm", not "but not outside Stockholm".
/Mikael
Well, it's obviously not only people with degrees that are getting hired. But here (in Sweden but not outside Stockholm) your chances of getting a job without the magic combination of a degree of a degree and several years of experience is pretty low, while in Stockholm I've seen ads for UNIX sysadmins with "high school or equivalent" as the only requirement, too bad it's impossible to find somewhere to live in Stockholm...
/Mikael