Apples and tomatoes.. Unless your company already owns a fully equipped data center with excess capacity you have to factor in colocation space, power, cooling, backups, network infrastructure, and security. And if you're not colocating in a space where you can purchase bandwidth you have to factor in the cost of the physical circuit(s) (T1/T3/Metro-E, whatever).
We haven't even begun to consider availability. What if your app can't tolerate 4 hours of downtime (for the HP monkey to come swap out your motherboard)? Now we need redundant servers, redundant connectivity, generator and ups capacity, highly-available network infrastructure, load balancers, etc. Let's not forget the highly paid staff/consultants to implement and maintain all of this.
What happens when your app takes off and you need to scale rapidly? Now you have to procure and install servers, keeping up with the infrastructure required every step of the way.
Also, don't forget in 5 years that $13,000 server you just bought will be a boat anchor. Time to purchase a whole new round of hardware.
I'm not claiming cloud computing is the end all solution for everything, there are certainly drawbacks.. But you cannot compare the cost of a $13,000 server to a $6,000/year instance lease as apples to apples.
While I agree with most of your comment I don't understand why do you think that a worker can't take this property after being laid off:
I actually posted that response from experience. I was laid off from a large financial services company in April. While no one physically prevented me from leaving with my belongings, I left in a highly pissed-off state and left behind my personal keyboard, trackball, and other miscellaneous property. Totally my fault, but I was just pointing out that you may not always leave a position by your own choice, and the circumstances of your departure might not always be amicable. And if the situation is REALLY bad, you might show up to work one day to find the door padlocked, and all of your personal effects inside.
After listening carefully to their presentation during the interview, ask one but no more than one "difficult" question, something where they'll have a hard time accommodating you if they're not set up that way. Some questions include:
I'm sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with a couple of these...
1. Will you put me in an office instead of a cube?
For most jobs and companies this question will only signal that you're pompus, pretentious, and demanding. Smaller companies are going to have extremely limited office space, and will have their own criteria for how it is allocated. Larger companies will generally have plenty of office space, but will have draconian policies on how it is allocated. If you're being interviewed as a junior developer and your team's senior developers are in cubes, you WILL be put in a cube. Even *if* you find a company that's willing to be accommodating, how it is going to look to your peers (even superiors) who are in cubes that you demand and receive an office?
2. I have my own [chair/computer keyboard/mini fridge]. Is it alright if I bring it in and use it?
Again, I think this is pretty demanding for an interview question.. Save it for after you've completed 30 days on the job and find you simply cannot tolerate the company provided chair/keyboard/fridge. In many offices which have generator/UPS power those utilities must be sized based on the predicted load of the building, so personal fridges, fans, heaters, etc will be banned for this purpose, or by fire/safety regulations. Lastly, even if they do let you bring in your $1000 aeron keep in mind that if you are asked to leave unexpectedly (laid off or fired) you may not be allowed to collect your chair/keyboard/etc and take it with you.
3. I have particular brands pens and pencils I use as a matter of personal preference. Will you reimburse me if I buy them from Office Depot or am I expected to use only the office supplies the company provides?
Ok, this is asinine. How much is a box of good pens? $10? You're going to quibble in an interview for a position that pays $75k - $100k a year over a $10 box of pens?!?! I would tell the interviewee to promptly get stuffed.
4. After I've been here a few months and fully integrated with the rest of the team, are you willing to consider having me telecommute for part of the week?
5. How flexible are your work hours? Can I come in at 10:30/leave at 3:30 in order to avoid rush hour traffic?
Valid questions, but again, save them until you have completed your first 30 days. Work the schedule your manager dictates for the first 30 days then ask for accommodations.. This gives you time to prove yourself as a team player, and gets you a lot of face time with your peers while you're new and people are forming their first impressions about you. Being the guy who comes in at noon, leaves at 8pm, and telecommutes 3 days a week generally isn't going to win you many friends, unless that's a common scenario for the company, in which case you would have been informed that anyway.
RAID allows you to get your data back online quickly after a drive failure, and/or allows you to present multiple drives as one storage container. That is ALL. RAID does NOT protect you from:
* Viruses running wild on the network deleting data * Executing "rm -rf *" in the wrong directory (and other sysadmin mistakes, like getting the arguments mixed up in a cp or mv command) * Your house/office from burning down and taking your data with it (maybe not a big deal for movies, but definitely a big deal for digital photos) * Losing all of your data when a pipe bursts in the ceiling above the server * Losing all of your data when the power supply shorts and sends 110v to all your drives (this actually happened to a friend of mine) * Losing some or all data due to a bug in the RAID controller firmware or a bug in the software implementation of RAID
Etc, etc. I could think of 1000 examples, but those are a few. I don't have the right answer for the original question, but RAID is never an appropriate answer to backup (unless you're talking about replicating from an onsite RAID array to an offsite RAID array, but that's a whole other discussion).
From what I've read I think people understand this perfectly well. If your hard drive crashes 3 times in 6 months you'll have to start calling EA to get your game reactivated.. Annoying, but not earth-shattering. Here's what I think people are up in arms about: what happens if you've burned through your 3 installs then want to install your game again in 3 years, when Spore 2 is out and EA decides they will no longer activate Spore 1? What about in 5 years time when Microsoft acquires EA and decides they will focus exclusively on the Xbox 2014 and will no longer activate PC games? What about in 8 years time when IPv6 is common on the internet and spore still requires an IPv4 network for activation? What about in 10 years time when Madden 2018 is such a bloated pile of suck that it collapses upon itself creating a super-massive black hole which swallows all of EA? Ok, so the last one is just an unprovoked shot at Madden, but the point is companies and technology change. Depending on a company to willingly activate a game you've *purchased* for $50+ effectively means you're renting the game. THAT'S why people are making this a Big Deal.
The other side to this is people are now fully aware that people pirating the game simply grab the torrent, install, and go. It's the legitimate users who have shelled out the $50 that are jumping through the hoops. So in this case DRM has done NOTHING to thwart pirating, and everything to annoy EA's customer base.
I'm guessing he wants a FOSS version of FileMaker Pro;
Yup, that's it.. While not FOSS, I really like Brilliant Database. It's cheap, brain-dead simple to use, supports one-to-many relationships, and even has a 30 day free trial. I used it to put together an simple app for managing voicemail numbers at a previous job (we had a pool of 3,000 DIDs we assigned to consultants as they came and went - a real db would have been overkill, but a spreadsheet was cumbersome). I created the DB in one afternoon and never had any problems with it.
Not affiliated with them at all, just a happy user.
Actually, most (if not all) of The Wall album was actually written by Roger Waters. David Gilmour does perform the songs often (or at least, DID - not sure if he's still performing much), but the quote should probably be attributed to Roger Waters
If i can cause the plane to crash using my iPod during takeoff, why can i now use WiFi during the flight?
The "no electronic devices during takeoff and landing" rule has little to do with interfering with the plane's electronics. It's more because if things go wrong during takeoff and landing they expect the passengers to be able to make a quick exit. Hard to do if you have your laptop out and wrapped up in headphones for your ipod, psp, etc. Guess they figure if things go wrong above 10k feet you're either doomed anyway, or if the plane is able to make a crippled landing you'll have time to put your electronics up before you have to deplane. This is also the reason they dim cabin lighting during night takeoffs and landings - the idea is your eyes are more adjusted to the dark, and you can more easily pay attention to things going on outside the plane if you have to make an emergency evacuation.
Phones during flight is a whole other issue. I've been on flights where I've thrown my phone into my carry-on bag and upon leaving the flight realized it was on the whole time. The fact that I'm here typing this makes a good case that it doesn't cause the plane to fall out of the sky. As others have said this regulation probably has more to do with protecting the SkyPhone monopoly and passenger comfort than anything else.
My problem with getting rid of the $1 bill... How do I pay the stripers?
I assume you were going for "funny" here, but just in case someone wants a real answer...
Some strip clubs already use their own currency inside of the club.. You ask your waitress for $20 in "Naughty Bux" or whatever, and use that for tipping. The idea is the same as getting chips in a casino, or "disney dollars" in disneyworld - you don't think of it as your money, so you spend it more freely.
Check out NetBotz products (now owned by APC). They do full environmental monitoring (watch temperature, humidity, airflow, and listen for noises like alarms, etc). They also have water detectors, and can even be set up to control contacts which you can feed into relays to trigger stuff (lights, pumps, HVAC, etc). They also have cameras which are capable of detecting motion and e-mailing you the first x seconds of video after motion is detected. They are primarily intended for data centers, but I don't see why they wouldn't work in this case as well if you have the money to spend.
Inversly, if your total used credit is greater than 1/2 of your maximum credit, that hurts your credit rating. So, if you can, raise the limits on your cards, and it may just help your credit rating rise.
While your advice is correct, there's another aspect to consider here.. Some companies I've run across (mainly mortgage companies) consider your credit limits as outstanding debt when figuring your debt to income ratio. The theory is that even if your debt today is 1/2 your limit, tomorrow you could max the card.. So for that reason they will add up your current debit using the limits of all of your unsecured cards, then calculate your debt to income ratio from there. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I wanted to point out that it does happen... Be very careful when asking companies to raise your limit just to get your balance under 50% of the limit - this could come around to bite you if you apply for a mortgage that is close to your debt-to-income ratio limit.
Amen.. This is such a no-brainer to me. I implemented a similar service at a previous employer back before AD was even heard of (1997 or so). Basically I wrote a web UI which the helpdesk could access to add/change/delete accounts, which only updated entries in a mysql database (the web app never talks directly to individual servers, for security reasons). Each server in turn queries the DB once an hour and updates the local passwd, shadow, smbpasswd, sasldb, group, etc files as accounts are added/changed/removed. The only drawback is it takes up to an hour for a change to fully propogate though all servers. The good thing though is that to the apps the authentication is local (they just use the local files), so if the DB server poops its pants those services (samba, dovecot, sendmail, etc) are still available. Plus, the apps don't need to have intelligence about the DB, LDAP, NIS, etc.. They just use their local files like always. I rounded this out with freeradius with an sql module (for wireless, vpn, and dial up), and mod_auth_mysql for apache for the intranet. This allowed us to offer ONE username/password for every possible service on the network, and fine grained control via the web UI of each user's access to each service. Through the web UI we could enforce strong passwords, auto-generate the user's login, etc, etc. I *never* had to touch servers for accounts (other than root, which was never handled from the db), and the helpdesk really liked having an easy to use UI rather than being forced to ssh or telnet directly to servers (which would have been a nightmare). The only issue with this setup is each server needs to be able to talk directly to your SQL server, but as long as you manage this correctly (restricted permissions, etc) it's workable.
I was a victim of this, I find it just as bizarre as you. A couple of years back I met a friend at california pizza kitchen for lunch.. That day I only ate half my pizza, and brought the leftovers back to the office, thinking I'd stash them in the fridge and have lunch the following day. So the following day I arrive to work about 11:30am, and I walk in the break room and it smells of recently reheated pizza. I think "nah, no way" and head to my desk. About 2pm I head in for lunch, and sure enough 2 of the 3 slices that were in the CPK box are gone. I'm furious. Really mad. My name was plastered all over the box, it's not like it could have happened accidentally. So I figured the culprit would eventually return for the last slice since they enjoyed the first two so much. Time was limited, so I did the best thing I could come up with on short notice. I took the pizza to my desk, and looked in the janitor's closet for the nastiest industrial degreaser I could find. I took it back to my desk and REALLY soaked the pizza.. Sprayed it several times on the top and bottom over a period of half an hour so it'd REALLY get soaked in. My hope was the person wouldn't notice it until they took the first bite. So I stash the whole thing back in the fridge.. Sure enough, the following morning I find the CPK box in the trash, and sitting on top of it the last slice with a single bite taken out of it. Revenge never felt so sweet, and I never had anything else stolen from the kitchen.:) The bastard ruined my lunch, I felt pretty vindicated in ruining their snack.
I sell computer and network equipment on ebay. I think it's pretty telling that I can't sell something for $200 that CDW is selling for $3000, and they have 130 of them in stock- so they must be selling.
You have to look at who your buyer is.. If I'm buying computer/networking equipment for the house I don't mind so much taking a chance and saving a few bucks (refurb linksys routers, switches, etc). However I am an IT Manager for a small business, and there's no way in hell I'd buy networking equipment off ebay, unless it was a rare/hard-to-find piece of equipment I was trying to replace and couldn't buy new. No way I want to explain to my users who can't get in the intarweb that the $200 switch I just bought off ebay died. Companies like CDW thrive because of accountability - if that $3000 switch I just bought from them dies there had better be a replacement at my door ASAP.
They're also taking a chomp out of grocery chain profits since I refuse to shop at a store that forces me to do their work for them. What's next, stores that make you stock their shelves?
Have you BEEN to a grocery store lately? Have you SEEN the ass-monkeys they pay $5.25/hr to work the checkout lines? Believe me, I'd much rather do it myself.. I can't tell you how many times I get home and find the wasp spray in the same bag with the produce, ice-cream in the same bag with the rotisserie chicken that's 9000 degrees, etc, etc. Here's a great idea - let's put all of your groceries in the cart, then put the 40lb bag of dog food that was under the cart right damn on top of everything. Morons. 99% of the time the little 14 year old girl behind the counter is too busy flirting with the 15 year old twirp doing the bagging to pay attention to what they're doing. I say good riddance, the days of people well-paid and well-trained to know how to properly greet, check-out, and service the customer are long gone. They should be replaced by technology.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day of RFID-enabled carts. The cart should keep inventory as I put products in, and when I'm ready to check out, I go to a terminal, wave my credit card, and I'm out the door.
They host torrents to illegal material, they know so and refuse to do something about it. That makes them culpable.
They host text files which list ip addresses. Yes, I'm sure they're aware people use those text files to ultimately end up with files which infringe upon copyright of american corporations, but under Sweedish law this is not illegal. So they are not 'culpable' for anything under the laws of the country in which they live and operate.
I doubt there are arguments to be made that Googles cache is illegal or has anything whatsoever to do with the pirate bay. Their intent appears to be criminal, Googels isn't.
Oh please.. So, if I sell you a crow-bar, and tell you it's really effective for breaking into houses, I'm a criminal? But if I sell you a crow-bar and tell you it's really useful for removing nails from lumber, I'm not? Once you bring intent into a legal proceding all logic goes out the window (and yes, I'm aware there are laws such as "hate crime" laws which attempt to quantify the intent of the accused - I think they are useless, too).
This sets a precedent. If they actually get away with this
"Get away with this"?!?! That's absurd. AOL owns the servers. If AOL wanted to configure their servers to only accept mail from MSN that would be their right... Or deny e-mail from China, or declare all e-mail from hotmail as spam, or turn them off all together and stop providing e-mail. AOL is not obligated (morally or legally) to do ANYTHING with their mail servers.
AOL is not charging anyone to accept their mail - they are ONLY charging if you want to be exempt from their spam filters. This is totally within their right, whether you agree with it or not. If AOL users don't like the policy they will leave AOL for another provider - no one in their right mind could argue AOL has a monopoly on internet access.
The rock station names are in fact stupid (Fred, Ethel, Lucy??? WTF?), and you're right, it isn't ad free. Also, they've started the annoying habit of having a stupid jock talk over the songs now just like commercial radio. Ugh. BUT, they DO in fact stream the artist names and song titles. On some receivers you have to hit the "display" button to show this info.
With P2P, you have a point. But VoIP? The bandwidth requirements are piddling. We're talking mere kilobits. You can run it over a (high speed) modem connection. And even video doesn't tax a 5 megabit broadband link, unless it's extremely high quality.
I agree 100%. Everyone so far lists VoIP as the #1 reason for increased bandwidth, but if you have a 3mb connection going to 6mb or even 15mb or 25mb isn't going to improve your VoIP quality at ALL. The only thing that is going to help is proper end to end QoS and lower latency.
The ONLY use for such bandwidth is leeching off P2P networks. More bandwidth == More ISOs. I challenge you to find any other consumer-level use for enormous bandwidth. Full-on virtual reality maybe, but that's so '80s...
Maybe I'm being trolled here, but I think you're WAAY off the mark. Off the top of my head:
Video on Demand (yes, including pr0n)
Transferring large files to/from work
Remote/Offsite back ups
Remote file storage (think SAN, but for consumer use)
Peer to peer legit file distribution, such as Steam
Rapidly download legit ISO's/installers, such as Linux, BSD, America's Army, etc
Right on.. I watched and actually enjoyed Beauty and the Geek mentioned in the summary. The creative force behind it was Aston Kutcher, you know, of Punk'd fame. You know when it came time to edit each episode he laughed it ass off AT the geeks, not with them. Hardly a great example of geeks being cool. I know plenty of people that laughed their ass of AT the show, but no one that said "hey, I want to be a geek" after watching it.
...but can it tell when you've had enough for the night?
Absolutely - the production model will have an LCD display on top that periodically flashes up photos of fat women. When it hears you drunkenly slur "I'd like to get me some of dat" it will automatically charge your existing bar tab to your credit card, call you a taxi, and call your wife and make excuses about why you're coming home drunk. The deluxe model will even automatically cancel your meetings/classes the following morning, and automatically purchase roses to be delivered to your wife.
Hmm, this is giving me a new patent idea.. A PR template for technical interviews!
Q: How did your team accomplish X? Q: What would you do differently regarding X? Q: What did you learn from implementing X? Q: When will you support X? Q: What research did you do on X?
A: What a great question! Thank you for inquiring about X. We care deeply about X. As any project evolves developers must spend much time dealing with X and balancing it with Y. We think in this project we have achieved the best balance between X and Y. We look to make even more improvements in our next product, which we encourage you to try. Thank you for contacting our company with such a lovely question. We value your input!
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Apples and tomatoes.. Unless your company already owns a fully equipped data center with excess capacity you have to factor in colocation space, power, cooling, backups, network infrastructure, and security. And if you're not colocating in a space where you can purchase bandwidth you have to factor in the cost of the physical circuit(s) (T1/T3/Metro-E, whatever).
We haven't even begun to consider availability. What if your app can't tolerate 4 hours of downtime (for the HP monkey to come swap out your motherboard)? Now we need redundant servers, redundant connectivity, generator and ups capacity, highly-available network infrastructure, load balancers, etc. Let's not forget the highly paid staff/consultants to implement and maintain all of this.
What happens when your app takes off and you need to scale rapidly? Now you have to procure and install servers, keeping up with the infrastructure required every step of the way.
Also, don't forget in 5 years that $13,000 server you just bought will be a boat anchor. Time to purchase a whole new round of hardware.
I'm not claiming cloud computing is the end all solution for everything, there are certainly drawbacks.. But you cannot compare the cost of a $13,000 server to a $6,000/year instance lease as apples to apples.
While I agree with most of your comment I don't understand why do you think that a worker can't take this property after being laid off:
I actually posted that response from experience. I was laid off from a large financial services company in April. While no one physically prevented me from leaving with my belongings, I left in a highly pissed-off state and left behind my personal keyboard, trackball, and other miscellaneous property. Totally my fault, but I was just pointing out that you may not always leave a position by your own choice, and the circumstances of your departure might not always be amicable. And if the situation is REALLY bad, you might show up to work one day to find the door padlocked, and all of your personal effects inside.
After listening carefully to their presentation during the interview, ask one but no more than one "difficult" question, something where they'll have a hard time accommodating you if they're not set up that way. Some questions include:
I'm sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with a couple of these...
1. Will you put me in an office instead of a cube?
For most jobs and companies this question will only signal that you're pompus, pretentious, and demanding. Smaller companies are going to have extremely limited office space, and will have their own criteria for how it is allocated. Larger companies will generally have plenty of office space, but will have draconian policies on how it is allocated. If you're being interviewed as a junior developer and your team's senior developers are in cubes, you WILL be put in a cube. Even *if* you find a company that's willing to be accommodating, how it is going to look to your peers (even superiors) who are in cubes that you demand and receive an office?
2. I have my own [chair/computer keyboard/mini fridge]. Is it alright if I bring it in and use it?
Again, I think this is pretty demanding for an interview question.. Save it for after you've completed 30 days on the job and find you simply cannot tolerate the company provided chair/keyboard/fridge. In many offices which have generator/UPS power those utilities must be sized based on the predicted load of the building, so personal fridges, fans, heaters, etc will be banned for this purpose, or by fire/safety regulations. Lastly, even if they do let you bring in your $1000 aeron keep in mind that if you are asked to leave unexpectedly (laid off or fired) you may not be allowed to collect your chair/keyboard/etc and take it with you.
3. I have particular brands pens and pencils I use as a matter of personal preference. Will you reimburse me if I buy them from Office Depot or am I expected to use only the office supplies the company provides?
Ok, this is asinine. How much is a box of good pens? $10? You're going to quibble in an interview for a position that pays $75k - $100k a year over a $10 box of pens?!?! I would tell the interviewee to promptly get stuffed.
4. After I've been here a few months and fully integrated with the rest of the team, are you willing to consider having me telecommute for part of the week?
5. How flexible are your work hours? Can I come in at 10:30/leave at 3:30 in order to avoid rush hour traffic?
Valid questions, but again, save them until you have completed your first 30 days. Work the schedule your manager dictates for the first 30 days then ask for accommodations.. This gives you time to prove yourself as a team player, and gets you a lot of face time with your peers while you're new and people are forming their first impressions about you. Being the guy who comes in at noon, leaves at 8pm, and telecommutes 3 days a week generally isn't going to win you many friends, unless that's a common scenario for the company, in which case you would have been informed that anyway.
Just so it's pointed out: RAID != Backup
RAID allows you to get your data back online quickly after a drive failure, and/or allows you to present multiple drives as one storage container. That is ALL. RAID does NOT protect you from:
* Viruses running wild on the network deleting data
* Executing "rm -rf *" in the wrong directory (and other sysadmin mistakes, like getting the arguments mixed up in a cp or mv command)
* Your house/office from burning down and taking your data with it (maybe not a big deal for movies, but definitely a big deal for digital photos)
* Losing all of your data when a pipe bursts in the ceiling above the server
* Losing all of your data when the power supply shorts and sends 110v to all your drives (this actually happened to a friend of mine)
* Losing some or all data due to a bug in the RAID controller firmware or a bug in the software implementation of RAID
Etc, etc. I could think of 1000 examples, but those are a few. I don't have the right answer for the original question, but RAID is never an appropriate answer to backup (unless you're talking about replicating from an onsite RAID array to an offsite RAID array, but that's a whole other discussion).
From what I've read I think people understand this perfectly well. If your hard drive crashes 3 times in 6 months you'll have to start calling EA to get your game reactivated.. Annoying, but not earth-shattering. Here's what I think people are up in arms about: what happens if you've burned through your 3 installs then want to install your game again in 3 years, when Spore 2 is out and EA decides they will no longer activate Spore 1? What about in 5 years time when Microsoft acquires EA and decides they will focus exclusively on the Xbox 2014 and will no longer activate PC games? What about in 8 years time when IPv6 is common on the internet and spore still requires an IPv4 network for activation? What about in 10 years time when Madden 2018 is such a bloated pile of suck that it collapses upon itself creating a super-massive black hole which swallows all of EA? Ok, so the last one is just an unprovoked shot at Madden, but the point is companies and technology change. Depending on a company to willingly activate a game you've *purchased* for $50+ effectively means you're renting the game. THAT'S why people are making this a Big Deal.
The other side to this is people are now fully aware that people pirating the game simply grab the torrent, install, and go. It's the legitimate users who have shelled out the $50 that are jumping through the hoops. So in this case DRM has done NOTHING to thwart pirating, and everything to annoy EA's customer base.
Yup, that's it.. While not FOSS, I really like Brilliant Database. It's cheap, brain-dead simple to use, supports one-to-many relationships, and even has a 30 day free trial. I used it to put together an simple app for managing voicemail numbers at a previous job (we had a pool of 3,000 DIDs we assigned to consultants as they came and went - a real db would have been overkill, but a spreadsheet was cumbersome). I created the DB in one afternoon and never had any problems with it.
Not affiliated with them at all, just a happy user.
Actually, most (if not all) of The Wall album was actually written by Roger Waters. David Gilmour does perform the songs often (or at least, DID - not sure if he's still performing much), but the quote should probably be attributed to Roger Waters
If i can cause the plane to crash using my iPod during takeoff, why can i now use WiFi during the flight?
The "no electronic devices during takeoff and landing" rule has little to do with interfering with the plane's electronics. It's more because if things go wrong during takeoff and landing they expect the passengers to be able to make a quick exit. Hard to do if you have your laptop out and wrapped up in headphones for your ipod, psp, etc. Guess they figure if things go wrong above 10k feet you're either doomed anyway, or if the plane is able to make a crippled landing you'll have time to put your electronics up before you have to deplane. This is also the reason they dim cabin lighting during night takeoffs and landings - the idea is your eyes are more adjusted to the dark, and you can more easily pay attention to things going on outside the plane if you have to make an emergency evacuation.
Phones during flight is a whole other issue. I've been on flights where I've thrown my phone into my carry-on bag and upon leaving the flight realized it was on the whole time. The fact that I'm here typing this makes a good case that it doesn't cause the plane to fall out of the sky. As others have said this regulation probably has more to do with protecting the SkyPhone monopoly and passenger comfort than anything else.
$1 coins would never work for them.
Actually this can easily be worked around.. See my comment here
Here ya go. Of course, at $49.99/ea, they'd be VERY expensive to deploy over the whole house..
My problem with getting rid of the $1 bill... How do I pay the stripers?
I assume you were going for "funny" here, but just in case someone wants a real answer...
Some strip clubs already use their own currency inside of the club.. You ask your waitress for $20 in "Naughty Bux" or whatever, and use that for tipping. The idea is the same as getting chips in a casino, or "disney dollars" in disneyworld - you don't think of it as your money, so you spend it more freely.
Check out NetBotz products (now owned by APC). They do full environmental monitoring (watch temperature, humidity, airflow, and listen for noises like alarms, etc). They also have water detectors, and can even be set up to control contacts which you can feed into relays to trigger stuff (lights, pumps, HVAC, etc). They also have cameras which are capable of detecting motion and e-mailing you the first x seconds of video after motion is detected. They are primarily intended for data centers, but I don't see why they wouldn't work in this case as well if you have the money to spend.
The only thing I haven't figured out is the whole bathroom thing.
Hmm, yeah, problem solved
Inversly, if your total used credit is greater than 1/2 of your maximum credit, that hurts your credit rating. So, if you can, raise the limits on your cards, and it may just help your credit rating rise.
While your advice is correct, there's another aspect to consider here.. Some companies I've run across (mainly mortgage companies) consider your credit limits as outstanding debt when figuring your debt to income ratio. The theory is that even if your debt today is 1/2 your limit, tomorrow you could max the card.. So for that reason they will add up your current debit using the limits of all of your unsecured cards, then calculate your debt to income ratio from there. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I wanted to point out that it does happen... Be very careful when asking companies to raise your limit just to get your balance under 50% of the limit - this could come around to bite you if you apply for a mortgage that is close to your debt-to-income ratio limit.
Amen.. This is such a no-brainer to me. I implemented a similar service at a previous employer back before AD was even heard of (1997 or so). Basically I wrote a web UI which the helpdesk could access to add/change/delete accounts, which only updated entries in a mysql database (the web app never talks directly to individual servers, for security reasons). Each server in turn queries the DB once an hour and updates the local passwd, shadow, smbpasswd, sasldb, group, etc files as accounts are added/changed/removed. The only drawback is it takes up to an hour for a change to fully propogate though all servers. The good thing though is that to the apps the authentication is local (they just use the local files), so if the DB server poops its pants those services (samba, dovecot, sendmail, etc) are still available. Plus, the apps don't need to have intelligence about the DB, LDAP, NIS, etc.. They just use their local files like always. I rounded this out with freeradius with an sql module (for wireless, vpn, and dial up), and mod_auth_mysql for apache for the intranet. This allowed us to offer ONE username/password for every possible service on the network, and fine grained control via the web UI of each user's access to each service. Through the web UI we could enforce strong passwords, auto-generate the user's login, etc, etc. I *never* had to touch servers for accounts (other than root, which was never handled from the db), and the helpdesk really liked having an easy to use UI rather than being forced to ssh or telnet directly to servers (which would have been a nightmare). The only issue with this setup is each server needs to be able to talk directly to your SQL server, but as long as you manage this correctly (restricted permissions, etc) it's workable.
I was a victim of this, I find it just as bizarre as you. A couple of years back I met a friend at california pizza kitchen for lunch.. That day I only ate half my pizza, and brought the leftovers back to the office, thinking I'd stash them in the fridge and have lunch the following day. So the following day I arrive to work about 11:30am, and I walk in the break room and it smells of recently reheated pizza. I think "nah, no way" and head to my desk. About 2pm I head in for lunch, and sure enough 2 of the 3 slices that were in the CPK box are gone. I'm furious. Really mad. My name was plastered all over the box, it's not like it could have happened accidentally. So I figured the culprit would eventually return for the last slice since they enjoyed the first two so much. Time was limited, so I did the best thing I could come up with on short notice. I took the pizza to my desk, and looked in the janitor's closet for the nastiest industrial degreaser I could find. I took it back to my desk and REALLY soaked the pizza.. Sprayed it several times on the top and bottom over a period of half an hour so it'd REALLY get soaked in. My hope was the person wouldn't notice it until they took the first bite. So I stash the whole thing back in the fridge.. Sure enough, the following morning I find the CPK box in the trash, and sitting on top of it the last slice with a single bite taken out of it. Revenge never felt so sweet, and I never had anything else stolen from the kitchen. :) The bastard ruined my lunch, I felt pretty vindicated in ruining their snack.
I sell computer and network equipment on ebay. I think it's pretty telling that I can't sell something for $200 that CDW is selling for $3000, and they have 130 of them in stock- so they must be selling.
You have to look at who your buyer is.. If I'm buying computer/networking equipment for the house I don't mind so much taking a chance and saving a few bucks (refurb linksys routers, switches, etc). However I am an IT Manager for a small business, and there's no way in hell I'd buy networking equipment off ebay, unless it was a rare/hard-to-find piece of equipment I was trying to replace and couldn't buy new. No way I want to explain to my users who can't get in the intarweb that the $200 switch I just bought off ebay died. Companies like CDW thrive because of accountability - if that $3000 switch I just bought from them dies there had better be a replacement at my door ASAP.
They're also taking a chomp out of grocery chain profits since I refuse to shop at a store that forces me to do their work for them. What's next, stores that make you stock their shelves?
Have you BEEN to a grocery store lately? Have you SEEN the ass-monkeys they pay $5.25/hr to work the checkout lines? Believe me, I'd much rather do it myself.. I can't tell you how many times I get home and find the wasp spray in the same bag with the produce, ice-cream in the same bag with the rotisserie chicken that's 9000 degrees, etc, etc. Here's a great idea - let's put all of your groceries in the cart, then put the 40lb bag of dog food that was under the cart right damn on top of everything. Morons. 99% of the time the little 14 year old girl behind the counter is too busy flirting with the 15 year old twirp doing the bagging to pay attention to what they're doing. I say good riddance, the days of people well-paid and well-trained to know how to properly greet, check-out, and service the customer are long gone. They should be replaced by technology.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day of RFID-enabled carts. The cart should keep inventory as I put products in, and when I'm ready to check out, I go to a terminal, wave my credit card, and I'm out the door.
They host torrents to illegal material, they know so and refuse to do something about it. That makes them culpable.
They host text files which list ip addresses. Yes, I'm sure they're aware people use those text files to ultimately end up with files which infringe upon copyright of american corporations, but under Sweedish law this is not illegal. So they are not 'culpable' for anything under the laws of the country in which they live and operate.
I doubt there are arguments to be made that Googles cache is illegal or has anything whatsoever to do with the pirate bay. Their intent appears to be criminal, Googels isn't.
Oh please.. So, if I sell you a crow-bar, and tell you it's really effective for breaking into houses, I'm a criminal? But if I sell you a crow-bar and tell you it's really useful for removing nails from lumber, I'm not? Once you bring intent into a legal proceding all logic goes out the window (and yes, I'm aware there are laws such as "hate crime" laws which attempt to quantify the intent of the accused - I think they are useless, too).
This sets a precedent. If they actually get away with this
"Get away with this"?!?! That's absurd. AOL owns the servers. If AOL wanted to configure their servers to only accept mail from MSN that would be their right... Or deny e-mail from China, or declare all e-mail from hotmail as spam, or turn them off all together and stop providing e-mail. AOL is not obligated (morally or legally) to do ANYTHING with their mail servers.
AOL is not charging anyone to accept their mail - they are ONLY charging if you want to be exempt from their spam filters. This is totally within their right, whether you agree with it or not. If AOL users don't like the policy they will leave AOL for another provider - no one in their right mind could argue AOL has a monopoly on internet access.
The rock station names are in fact stupid (Fred, Ethel, Lucy??? WTF?), and you're right, it isn't ad free. Also, they've started the annoying habit of having a stupid jock talk over the songs now just like commercial radio. Ugh. BUT, they DO in fact stream the artist names and song titles. On some receivers you have to hit the "display" button to show this info.
With P2P, you have a point. But VoIP? The bandwidth requirements are piddling. We're talking mere kilobits. You can run it over a (high speed) modem connection. And even video doesn't tax a 5 megabit broadband link, unless it's extremely high quality.
I agree 100%. Everyone so far lists VoIP as the #1 reason for increased bandwidth, but if you have a 3mb connection going to 6mb or even 15mb or 25mb isn't going to improve your VoIP quality at ALL. The only thing that is going to help is proper end to end QoS and lower latency.
The ONLY use for such bandwidth is leeching off P2P networks. More bandwidth == More ISOs. I challenge you to find any other consumer-level use for enormous bandwidth. Full-on virtual reality maybe, but that's so '80s...
Maybe I'm being trolled here, but I think you're WAAY off the mark. Off the top of my head:
Video on Demand (yes, including pr0n)
Transferring large files to/from work
Remote/Offsite back ups
Remote file storage (think SAN, but for consumer use)
Peer to peer legit file distribution, such as Steam
Rapidly download legit ISO's/installers, such as Linux, BSD, America's Army, etc
Right on.. I watched and actually enjoyed Beauty and the Geek mentioned in the summary. The creative force behind it was Aston Kutcher, you know, of Punk'd fame. You know when it came time to edit each episode he laughed it ass off AT the geeks, not with them. Hardly a great example of geeks being cool. I know plenty of people that laughed their ass of AT the show, but no one that said "hey, I want to be a geek" after watching it.
Absolutely - the production model will have an LCD display on top that periodically flashes up photos of fat women. When it hears you drunkenly slur "I'd like to get me some of dat" it will automatically charge your existing bar tab to your credit card, call you a taxi, and call your wife and make excuses about why you're coming home drunk. The deluxe model will even automatically cancel your meetings/classes the following morning, and automatically purchase roses to be delivered to your wife.
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