$600??? You're joking right? South bay is at over 99% capacity. No vacancy. Cheapest single-bed apartment I know of is mine, and my rent (controlled) is $200 under the asking price of $1250.
Rent has gone up 20-30% in the last 3-6 months. You're lucky to have found a place...
As someone living in California, I am somewhat up to date on this...
They are looking into around a dozen new power-plants in the (San Francisco) Bay Area. PG&E is pushing really hard to build the plants, but the tree-huggers are screaming for proper ecological impact reports.
I wish they hadn't shut down the nuke plant in Monterry Bay... LOTS of power. Too bad they were dumping the coolant water (non-contaminated) back into the ocean, which raised the temp enough to seriously screw up the (very) local ecology...
It's a big political mess here right now, for power, and everything else between the rather conservative/libertarian views of the "valley" and the "tree-hugging" hippies living in Golden Gate Park.
I prefer the term "Boofing"... I "boof" the box every 6-12 months... People where I used to work thought I was crazy, but then they always commented on how much faster my comptuer was...
What really amazes me is how installing software on windows bogs it down, without it even being loaded. Just having something like MS-Office eating a Gig of HD space isn't that bad, I've got just as many MP3s (legal, not being shared), and they don't cause problems. It's just the 5-10MB of data that was just thunked into the damn registry. Why do they need to register 200+ classes?
I like my Debian boxes. So nice to install, so fast, I set them up, they run, and since I don't worry about public attacks (firewalled heavily by other people), I can pretty much just let them sit and serve me files.
I started with a commodore, using the command-prompt, and moved up to a PC with a prompt, and that's how I learned computers, in elementary school. Probably not uncommon for the people on this site.
Now, my little brother never used anything other than 95. Loves computers, mainly games, but couldn't use a command-prompt to save his life, and can't even setup Master/Salves correctly on an IDE chain. Called me to try and help over the phone...
He's a smart kid, too.
He's a Senior and high-school, and can get into any school in the nation, from his test-scores and grades.
So why can't he figure out why the new game he installed whacked windows? Why can't he install a new HD? Because all he's ever used is point-click. He's never actually learned how things work.
One of my proffessors once made a statement about "experts", one I've also heard from a few now-retired computing columnists.
Essentially: A real expert does not know how to do 100 neat things (tweaks) with a piece of software (or other product). Instead, they understand fundamentally how it works. From that, they know how to do the same 100 "neat things", but they also know why those "neat things" do what they do.
For me, it's the shells, shell-scripting, and the architecture that's used.
Command-line is probably the best (most flexible, and therefore most usable) interface. Now, that doesn't mean I want to spend all my time typing the command prompt. What I want is the ability to easily setup scripts that call these command-line apps to do things for me. Or maybe write a GUI interface for a command-line app.
By separating out the functionallity into Daemons or command-line apps, you can easily re-write one, without worrying about the other. IMHO it's much better than DLLs... Although using symlinks for libs is better than MS's ugly approach of just writing over the old version with the new version. Why can't I have both???
A generic operating system that allows me to configure it specifically for the purpose I need is the ultimate app.
The first three were definitely the best, but the total count for the series was 5 in-order books, plus two prequels. I've got all but the last in-series book now.
Last I checked, the pacific plate was going under the North Am plate, along the San Andreus. Damn it, now I have to go do some research.
I'm really looking forward for Northern Cal. to lose most of the people in Souther Cal. That will be nice. Just keep the central valley, Silicon Valley, and the Sierras(Tahoe). But if LA/Holleywood were to dissappear, I wouldn't shed a tear.
Asimov, and two foundations, at "opposite" ends of the galaxy...
However, I'm not sure where you're getting the third from. The "Galaxia" decision? Or was it something in "Foundation and Earth", which is out of print, and I haven't gotten my hands on again yet. (own the entire rest of the Foundation Series).
I asked this same question to one of our engineers. Problem is that different wires have different capacitances/inductances. Creates a condition called Skew. Bits don't all travel at the same speed from one device to the next, instead they arrive in a window. Granted, for Ultra160 SCSI, that's a pretty damn small window, but it's hard to control that window. One reason why my new UltraLVD SCSI box's internal SCSI cable is actually 34 twisted pairs for most of it's length, but the effect is still there.
I saw Princess Mononoke this last winter some-time. The English dubbing was excellently done. Better than most older movies that were voice-overs. I was very impressed with the face that the english made sense, and managed to unobstrusively synch with the screen.
Anime is one reason I would like to learn Japanese. That, and when I have a pair of japanese students in my training class, I can determine if they are trying to make fun of me or not...:)
If it was just an app crashing, why the hell would they have to tow the damn ship back to harbor to fix it?
What if that app was required to interface with the propulsions systems??? We don't actually know, this whole thread is pure speculation, but Sheldon and Phfreakazoid have good points.
And no, I'm not an MS lover. I dislike NT greatly for many reasons.
However, if you (as a user on the ship) cannot send any commands to the engine of the ship because the only method for doing so, a database application, has crashed then you aren't about to tell it to go "ahead, full" or anything else. If it can't hear you, it's not going to do anything.
At least the system was smart enough to go dead, and not suddenly attempt to take off at full throttle.:)
This isn't going to go anywhere. You know that, right? They aren't going to give up their stand...
Your point is excellent. The article did NOT state anything technical other than that the consoles stopped working. They probably got "A Domain Controller was not avail.... etc." and freaked out.
Now, I could see the DB server dying, and all the client's not being able to work. But, as you stated, that's a far cry from a dead LAN. Just a bunch of apps without a server to get data from.
Divide by 0 taking out the network? not likely. Dr. Watson will catch that...:)
Don't you just love the mix of NT, and clueless users?
network interface that requires its drivers to be downloaded from the internet as being the type of policy an intelligent company whould have?
Now, you're making the assumption that our network interfaces are ethernet. Nope. They are interfaces to control networks. Very different kinds of networks than an ethernet-like data network.
However, it is a valid assumption, and I should have clarified it.
Now, if we made people download the latest drivers via our own cards, shipped minus drivers, well, that is pure idiocy, I agree.:)
I work for a small company. I've worked for larger companies as well. I have NOT seen the above in a tech company. I DO get this when I call AT&T or Sprint, but they still tend to know thier system better than I do (internal system).
Currently, I'm suckered into support. But my company has 4 support ENGINEERS. We're it. We deal with, "Where are the drivers for this damn thing!", to "I'm trying to do this , and I get this wierd error. Any ideas?". The first guy didn't read the damn slip of paper that came in the interface card's box that said to download the latest drivers from the web. No reason to ship a disk. Out of date before they get it... Second guy is a Senior Progammer trying to eek every last processor tick while doing recursion in an 8-bit micro... Not much common sense, but a smart guy.
Not every place hires idiots for support. I wouldn't mind a trained monkey between me and the dumb calls, but someone well enough trained to send me the truly fucked ovwer, or the ones intelligent enough to be doing something intersting.
I personally feel that your rant is more flamebait than anything else. I'm sure a large number of people here actually work support, like the one whose post you replied to.
Yes, at my company, support is entry-level. But it requires a degree in engineering, and some experience in the real world. You don't take calls immediately, but after 2 weeks of training, you can handle 50% of the calls we get: "how do I download?", "why doesn't my card work?", etc., etc, etc. A little knowledge of resolving IRQ conflicts and your up to 75%. Those remaining 24% are usually programming intesive people using our communications layer, and not able to program "hello world". The 1% I left out, are interseting calls from people doing interesting things, and running into interesting problems... Not that it happens very often, but it does.
So why don't you lay off support people. Even if they are trained monkeys, it's better than being on hold...
the bottle design and the dread "dynamic ribbon device" are recognizably associated with Coke
Yes, but if you look at the new screenshots for Macromedia Flash 5, it looks just like an Adobe product.
The icons they use, the placement of things, all look very Adobe. There are differences, but they are minor. Minor enough for it to still be mistaken as Adobe.
It seems that Macromedia's new user interface strategy is to simply copy Adobe.
Definitely. Follow the this link and then follow the link to the Basic features. They have really done their best to copy Adobe.
It's one thing to have tabbed toolbars, and be able to drag/drop them. But it's a whole other game when you do your best to follow Adobe's interface standard of the trashcan icon, visibility, and such for layers, etc. That screen-shot looks like it came from Photoshop.
I think Adobe is not completely in the right, as they are minipulating their patent rights some, and not directly suing over the use like this. But they are persuing someone who is really trying to look/feel like Adobe, and Adobe has some patents they can throw around, so they are.
"Our patent and other aspects of our user interface are key to the user experience and functionality of our products; they are essential to differentiate our products and brand from others."
They should have trademarked their UI, if they want to be able to sue for people not being able to differentiate our products and brand from others that's what trademarks are for.
Being from near Detroit... I've seen some really bad areas. I haven't seen anything other than downtown Philly.
That having been said, ever been to downtown Toronto?
They did an excellent job of buying up vacant/abandoned land, leveling it, and then reselling it later to developers. Made a lot of money doing it, too. THAT is how you clean up a city.
You missed this/. article about the Internet's dependancy on the US as a back-bone.
If you look at UUNET's map of thier pipes, you'll see that there are a pair of OC192's (10Gbps each) from London directly to Hong Kong, and many, many, many times that bandwidth between London and Hong Kong via the US->Japan or US->Austrailia. So, if the US got baked, UUNET would have a VERY busy pair of wires running through the Indian Ocean...
Of course, this is just UUNET, but it gives you an idea of the what the networks probably look like.
Slashdot Mirror
$600??? You're joking right? South bay is at over 99% capacity. No vacancy. Cheapest single-bed apartment I know of is mine, and my rent (controlled) is $200 under the asking price of $1250.
Rent has gone up 20-30% in the last 3-6 months. You're lucky to have found a place...
As someone living in California, I am somewhat up to date on this...
They are looking into around a dozen new power-plants in the (San Francisco) Bay Area. PG&E is pushing really hard to build the plants, but the tree-huggers are screaming for proper ecological impact reports.
I wish they hadn't shut down the nuke plant in Monterry Bay... LOTS of power. Too bad they were dumping the coolant water (non-contaminated) back into the ocean, which raised the temp enough to seriously screw up the (very) local ecology...
It's a big political mess here right now, for power, and everything else between the rather conservative/libertarian views of the "valley" and the "tree-hugging" hippies living in Golden Gate Park.
I prefer the term "Boofing"... I "boof" the box every 6-12 months... People where I used to work thought I was crazy, but then they always commented on how much faster my comptuer was...
What really amazes me is how installing software on windows bogs it down, without it even being loaded. Just having something like MS-Office eating a Gig of HD space isn't that bad, I've got just as many MP3s (legal, not being shared), and they don't cause problems. It's just the 5-10MB of data that was just thunked into the damn registry. Why do they need to register 200+ classes?
I like my Debian boxes. So nice to install, so fast, I set them up, they run, and since I don't worry about public attacks (firewalled heavily by other people), I can pretty much just let them sit and serve me files.
He said he's in law school now, so he obviously stopped putting up with it... Hmm. Geek with a law degree. Now that's usefull!
Excellently groomed hair.... Impeccable dresser. Too bad he doesn't know a damn thing about our company's technology any more. (He manages support).
They did, and the CPU worked, but the MB didn't.
Proof?
Good point. He really doesn't try to learn. But he's very typical of the people that don't want to learn.
They complain that things don't work, but they don't want to learn how to make them work. In a word, lazy.
They are the same people that amaze me when they don't know why you're supposed to change the oil every so often in your car...
I agree with him, for a simple reason.
I started with a commodore, using the command-prompt, and moved up to a PC with a prompt, and that's how I learned computers, in elementary school. Probably not uncommon for the people on this site.
Now, my little brother never used anything other than 95. Loves computers, mainly games, but couldn't use a command-prompt to save his life, and can't even setup Master/Salves correctly on an IDE chain. Called me to try and help over the phone...
He's a smart kid, too.
He's a Senior and high-school, and can get into any school in the nation, from his test-scores and grades.So why can't he figure out why the new game he installed whacked windows? Why can't he install a new HD? Because all he's ever used is point-click. He's never actually learned how things work.
One of my proffessors once made a statement about "experts", one I've also heard from a few now-retired computing columnists.
Essentially: A real expert does not know how to do 100 neat things (tweaks) with a piece of software (or other product). Instead, they understand fundamentally how it works. From that, they know how to do the same 100 "neat things", but they also know why those "neat things" do what they do.
Sorry, enough ranting on "kids these days...."
For me, it's the shells, shell-scripting, and the architecture that's used.
Command-line is probably the best (most flexible, and therefore most usable) interface. Now, that doesn't mean I want to spend all my time typing the command prompt. What I want is the ability to easily setup scripts that call these command-line apps to do things for me. Or maybe write a GUI interface for a command-line app.
By separating out the functionallity into Daemons or command-line apps, you can easily re-write one, without worrying about the other. IMHO it's much better than DLLs... Although using symlinks for libs is better than MS's ugly approach of just writing over the old version with the new version. Why can't I have both???
A generic operating system that allows me to configure it specifically for the purpose I need is the ultimate app.
The first three were definitely the best, but the total count for the series was 5 in-order books, plus two prequels. I've got all but the last in-series book now.
Damn it
Not only did I screw up my html, I was wrong.
But then so were you.
The plates are just sliding past each other. At some point, LA will be an island.
San Fran Bay Area
World map
Really?p>
Last I checked, the pacific plate was going under the North Am plate, along the San Andreus. Damn it, now I have to go do some research.
I'm really looking forward for Northern Cal. to lose most of the people in Souther Cal. That will be nice. Just keep the central valley, Silicon Valley, and the Sierras(Tahoe). But if LA/Holleywood were to dissappear, I wouldn't shed a tear.
Asimov, and two foundations, at "opposite" ends of the galaxy...
However, I'm not sure where you're getting the third from. The "Galaxia" decision? Or was it something in "Foundation and Earth", which is out of print, and I haven't gotten my hands on again yet. (own the entire rest of the Foundation Series).
I think it would be hard to run ethernet over USB... IP, on the other-hand could be done, but I think ethernet wouldn't work to well... :)
I asked this same question to one of our engineers. Problem is that different wires have different capacitances/inductances. Creates a condition called Skew. Bits don't all travel at the same speed from one device to the next, instead they arrive in a window. Granted, for Ultra160 SCSI, that's a pretty damn small window, but it's hard to control that window. One reason why my new UltraLVD SCSI box's internal SCSI cable is actually 34 twisted pairs for most of it's length, but the effect is still there.
I saw Princess Mononoke this last winter some-time. The English dubbing was excellently done. Better than most older movies that were voice-overs. I was very impressed with the face that the english made sense, and managed to unobstrusively synch with the screen.
Anime is one reason I would like to learn Japanese. That, and when I have a pair of japanese students in my training class, I can determine if they are trying to make fun of me or not... :)
If it was just an app crashing, why the hell would they have to tow the damn ship back to harbor to fix it?
What if that app was required to interface with the propulsions systems??? We don't actually know, this whole thread is pure speculation, but Sheldon and Phfreakazoid have good points.
And no, I'm not an MS lover. I dislike NT greatly for many reasons.
However, if you (as a user on the ship) cannot send any commands to the engine of the ship because the only method for doing so, a database application, has crashed then you aren't about to tell it to go "ahead, full" or anything else. If it can't hear you, it's not going to do anything.
At least the system was smart enough to go dead, and not suddenly attempt to take off at full throttle. :)
This isn't going to go anywhere. You know that, right? They aren't going to give up their stand...
Your point is excellent. The article did NOT state anything technical other than that the consoles stopped working. They probably got "A Domain Controller was not avail.... etc." and freaked out.
Now, I could see the DB server dying, and all the client's not being able to work. But, as you stated, that's a far cry from a dead LAN. Just a bunch of apps without a server to get data from.
Divide by 0 taking out the network? not likely. Dr. Watson will catch that... :)
Don't you just love the mix of NT, and clueless users?
network interface that requires its drivers to be downloaded from the internet as being the type of policy an intelligent company whould have?
Now, you're making the assumption that our network interfaces are ethernet. Nope. They are interfaces to control networks. Very different kinds of networks than an ethernet-like data network.
However, it is a valid assumption, and I should have clarified it.
Now, if we made people download the latest drivers via our own cards, shipped minus drivers, well, that is pure idiocy, I agree. :)
I work for a small company. I've worked for larger companies as well. I have NOT seen the above in a tech company. I DO get this when I call AT&T or Sprint, but they still tend to know thier system better than I do (internal system).
Currently, I'm suckered into support. But my company has 4 support ENGINEERS. We're it. We deal with, "Where are the drivers for this damn thing!", to "I'm trying to do this , and I get this wierd error. Any ideas?". The first guy didn't read the damn slip of paper that came in the interface card's box that said to download the latest drivers from the web. No reason to ship a disk. Out of date before they get it... Second guy is a Senior Progammer trying to eek every last processor tick while doing recursion in an 8-bit micro... Not much common sense, but a smart guy.
Not every place hires idiots for support. I wouldn't mind a trained monkey between me and the dumb calls, but someone well enough trained to send me the truly fucked ovwer, or the ones intelligent enough to be doing something intersting.
I personally feel that your rant is more flamebait than anything else. I'm sure a large number of people here actually work support, like the one whose post you replied to.
Yes, at my company, support is entry-level. But it requires a degree in engineering, and some experience in the real world. You don't take calls immediately, but after 2 weeks of training, you can handle 50% of the calls we get: "how do I download?", "why doesn't my card work?", etc., etc, etc. A little knowledge of resolving IRQ conflicts and your up to 75%. Those remaining 24% are usually programming intesive people using our communications layer, and not able to program "hello world". The 1% I left out, are interseting calls from people doing interesting things, and running into interesting problems... Not that it happens very often, but it does.
So why don't you lay off support people. Even if they are trained monkeys, it's better than being on hold...
the bottle design and the dread "dynamic ribbon device" are recognizably associated with Coke
Yes, but if you look at the new screenshots for Macromedia Flash 5, it looks just like an Adobe product.
The icons they use, the placement of things, all look very Adobe. There are differences, but they are minor. Minor enough for it to still be mistaken as Adobe.It seems that Macromedia's new user interface strategy is to simply copy Adobe.
Definitely. Follow the this link and then follow the link to the Basic features. They have really done their best to copy Adobe.
It's one thing to have tabbed toolbars, and be able to drag/drop them. But it's a whole other game when you do your best to follow Adobe's interface standard of the trashcan icon, visibility, and such for layers, etc. That screen-shot looks like it came from Photoshop.
I think Adobe is not completely in the right, as they are minipulating their patent rights some, and not directly suing over the use like this. But they are persuing someone who is really trying to look/feel like Adobe, and Adobe has some patents they can throw around, so they are.
"Our patent and other aspects of our user interface are key to the user experience and functionality of our products; they are essential to differentiate our products and brand from others."
They should have trademarked their UI, if they want to be able to sue for people not being able to differentiate our products and brand from others that's what trademarks are for.
Being from near Detroit... I've seen some really bad areas. I haven't seen anything other than downtown Philly.
That having been said, ever been to downtown Toronto?
They did an excellent job of buying up vacant/abandoned land, leveling it, and then reselling it later to developers. Made a lot of money doing it, too. THAT is how you clean up a city.
You missed this /. article about the Internet's dependancy on the US as a back-bone.
If you look at UUNET's map of thier pipes, you'll see that there are a pair of OC192's (10Gbps each) from London directly to Hong Kong, and many, many, many times that bandwidth between London and Hong Kong via the US->Japan or US->Austrailia. So, if the US got baked, UUNET would have a VERY busy pair of wires running through the Indian Ocean...
Of course, this is just UUNET, but it gives you an idea of the what the networks probably look like.