Unfortunately, UPS seems to be the courier of choice because FedEx is so expensive, and people in the US don't seem to realize what a colossally bad idea it is to ship internationally with UPS, because they can't destroy stuff sent domestically. As a result, if you want something ordered from a US website (with notable exceptions like Crucial), you either get it via UPS (but not intact) or you get it sent USPS, which most people won't even do.
UPS isn't really a good option for shipping domesticly in the US. They mangle stuff on a regular basis. This includes tire tracks on the box of one server and a forklift blade hole though the middle of one tape library. The one time I had to deal with a package FedEx damaged they took care of it quickly and without a lot of hassle. Other than that one incident I've never heard of either FedEx or DHL ever mangling anything. I've even had better luck with the USPS than with UPS. The biggest problems with USPS are speed and the weight limits.
One thing to keep in mind is that the governments of some countries are quite anal about declared value, shipping documents, etc. Unreasonable VAT can also be a major hurdle for those in non-US countries trying to import goods, especially expensive electronics. I wish I had a penny for every time one of our customers requested that we place a much lower value on a Commercial Invoice so their VAT would be lower. VAT also made the return/repair process a nightmare (which we did regularly)
I've been the RMA co-ordinator at a small company that sold internationally. We always told our customers that the actual sale price would be decared on the initial shipment. For warranty returns we would always mark it as a repair/return and rarely had a problem. The only real problem we had was German customs liked to sit on things for several weeks before they would release them to our customers. The higher the shipping priority the longer it seemed they would sit on the shipment.
At the last place I worked we used to ship laptops to our international sales people. Most of the time there was no problem except with some EU countries. The Germans were just slow, the Italians kept trying to charge us import duties. Finally we resorted to shipping everything for our European sales people to our office in the UK (where we never had a problem shipping to) and having the UK office ship to the salesperson's location in Europe.
Oddly enough companies outside the US are almost always willing to sell to US customers. I've ordered things from Canadian, UK, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Austrailian web sites and companies. I've rarely had a problem and in the few cases where I did it was mostly communication problems due to language difficulties.
No actually your wrong, joe-blow CAN'T use a mapping program and do this. Unless of course they happen to be experts in map making, analysis AND mathmathics and are able to come up with sopisticated formulas in order to make sense of the data.
Knowing where the stuff is, is NOT the same thing as using formulas to figure out the exact relationship between critical points.
Well yes and no. A little common sense and a Mk 1 eyeball can tell you a lot. For instance several major power transmission lines in California that converge at a switchyard near the San Louis Reservior. Its fairly obvious from any map showing power lines that this would be a vulnerable choke point.
In my neck of the woods I can tell you which building has POPs for most of the major telecommunicantions and internet providers, where the utility tunnel with most of the fiber running north out of the city is, and where there is a bridge with several major fiber lines, a gas pipeline, a large water main, and a major highway running across it.
While I know about most of these spots from "on the ground" experience, The info necessary to highlight them as potential choke points is all publicly availible. Its just that without fancy software you're going to have to do a bit more digging to find the information and are probably going to have to visit canidate sites in person sooner.
I figure the idiots with the car audio systems that can be heard from 3 or more blocks away will get theirs. Most of them will probably be stone deaf by the time they are 30.
While that's small consolation when some fucktard's audio system is shaking your house from a block away at 3am, it still is enough to keep me from going postal on them.
Re:Check out my new weapon of choice
on
dB Drag Racing
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· Score: 1
Oh, and a hint to anyone about to move to college, especially a larger one: Every dorm administrator thinks their facilities are quiet, and will say so if you ask. This is because they live in air-conditioned offices as far away from the students as possible (possibly in another building), come in at 9am (when the students are all sleeping), and go home at 5pm (about two hours before the party really starts). They also have absolutely no interest in actually working to make the facilities quieter, even if they explicitly advertise it as a feature. If you are as bothered by this as I am (perhaps 1 or 2%), seriously consider moving *way* off campus. I now work at the University I went to, and a 20 minute drive was far enough away. (Note Michigan State University is huge; you can probably live closer to smaller ones.)
Not all colleges are that way. The University of Washington has RA's on every floor. They will enforce the noise rules on quiet floors and in the quiet dorms. Addmittedly this doesn't help for noise coming from another floor, another dorm, the frats, or out in the street.
Due to the UW's location in the middle of Seattle some of the dorms are actually quieter than the surrounding neighborhood because there aren't sirens and other urban noises out in the street at all hours of the night.
Those "good old days" never existed, and I never saw a situation like the one you describe.
You obviously weren't in Seattle, the Bay Area, or New York during the.bomb boom were you?
You saw entire companies where everyone from the CEO on down had hair died unnatural colors, facial piercings, and multiple tattos.
Even with the much tighter job market, in Seattle you'd best not be too picky about hair color, piercings, tatoos, or even dress code for most jobs if you want to find anyone to hire.
Blame it on Microsoft, it seems like everyone who works at the Redmond campus is conformingly non-conformist.
Most of the Interstate highways and other roads that see high levels of traffic seem to be either surfaced with concrete or concrete with asphalt paving on top.
From what I've seen concrete tends to last longer than asphalt. There are concrete paved streets in my city that are over 70 years old and I've driven on interstate highways that probably haven't been resurfaced since they were built over 30 years ago.
According to the state highway department they expect concrete to last 10 years and asphalt 5 years on major highways.
Ok, maybe some assembly line workers are going to have a real hard time finding any other work.
There are options, in many cases the state unemployment office will offer retraining.
You can move to an area where they are looking for workers with your skills. (ie leave the "company town")
You can also start your own business or go do what you really want with your life.
A family friend of ours used to work as a machinist at Boeing. He was layed off about 12 years ago. These days he owns a custom cabinet shop. He's actually doing better now than he was at Boeing and enjoys his work more.
Did you know that at one time more than 50% of the workers in the US were employed in agriculture? Today it is a mere 2%. At one time industry employed more than 50% of the workers, today it is only 18%. Currently 80% of the US workforce is employed in service industries.
In general new and different jobs are created to replace old jobs that are automated or moved overseas. Our friend with the cabinet shop wouldn't have made it and wouldn't employ several other workers if many more people wern't able to afford custom cabinets than 30 years ago.
There are a whole bunch of careers that didn't used to exsist or didn't employ nearly as many people as they do today. Personal trainers, personal assistants, personal chefs, personal shoppers, or for something more like old assembly line work the vast numbers of call-center type jobs.
I'm sorry but if the worst of the industrial union types would have had their way we would all be forced to buy overpriced crap that hadn't changed one bit since 1953.
Frankly I don't want to spend 50 years of my life working on an assembly line making shoes.
Economics and trade are not zero-sum games, I really wish the socialist zelots would stop treating them that way.
Ahhh, you could always tell who the Easterners were. "Defrost the turkey? Yah, just leave it in the sink with the water running..."
This won't defrost it any faster than leaving it in the fridge or a sink full of standing water. Besides leaving it under running water runs the risk of salmonela or other food borne illness.
Of course, there are still a lot of people out West who still don't get it. Watering lawns with what amounts to drinking water? And they wonder why their water bills are so high
Depends on where out West. There are parts like Western Washington and NW Oregon that are quite wet.
I suspect that a machine like this could even be used in CO. It's only like 20gpm. Hell I've seen thousands of gallons of water get dumped on a road in Arizona simply to keep the dust down.
I have Speakeasy DSL over Qwest lines and I've never had to speak with Qwest about the instal at all.
Qwest does own the loop between my house and the CO but the DSLAM and everything else is run and owned by either Covad or Speakeasy.
Presumably if there is some issue that comes up during installation Covad or Speakeasy deal with contacts inside Qwest who have a clue. On the other hand given the cluelessness of Qwest and the comedy of errors I repeatedly witnessed while I was managing a corprate WAN this may not be the case. It's pretty absurd when the field repair guys have to deal with the same billing office morons the customers do in order to fix a problem on a line due to an improper entry on the customer order. At least going through a CLEC makes dealing with the bellheads somebody elses problem.
Depends, there are LD carriers out there that will give you ulimited long distance for $20/month or less. My housemate has some service as her "dial 1" carrier that offers flat-rate LD for $18/month or so.
For me it's not really a good deal as I only have to pay for airtime for LD calls to the US or Canada on my cell phone.
So if your life depends on the line working, stick with a tradiotional land line???
I was damned near burned out of home just because I did not have a passively powered phone(Main breaker blew when centeral air/heater fused its main buss). I would hate to have to rely on a powered up PC and working net connection for my life.
Or more to the point, stick with a traditional land line with a traditional phone.
I've got a couple a couple of old Western Electric phones plugged into the line here because they will work as long as the phone line is working. The mechanical ringer with real bells is nice too.
I always wonder about people who have as their only phone a cordless that requires AC power to the base station in order to work. They are going to be screwed when the power goes out It sort of reminds me of people who only have an electric can opener. As an area that is subject to windstorms and earthquakes this is stupid. Most of the suburban areas around here have experienced a power outage of more than 24 hours in the last 12 years.
The DSL costs $120/month and comes with 5 IP addresses, at a whopping 144k *bits* per second. I live about 2000 feet too far away from the CO for real DSL, and could originally only get iDSL. I'm told I can finally get real DSL now, and it would only cost me $400/month for 1.5 megabit (about 190k bytes per second). If I want to give up having fixed IP addresses, I'd only have to pay $90/month for 1.5 megabit. What a deal! Twice as expensive as cable with no fixed IP addresses or 10 times as expensive with fixed IP.
Ouch. Just to make you wince in Seattle I can get 1.5M/128k DSL for $60/mo, 1.5M/384k for $80/mo, 1.5M/784k for $90/mo, and 3M/784k for $200/mo. The 3M service comes with 4 static IPs and its $10/mo extra for 2 static IPs with the other service levels. No restrictions on running servers on any of the tiers and there is a minimum SLA.
For what its worth, except for gamers and people with servers, most home users don't really need anything more than about 384k/384k service and most will do fine with only 128k upstream. Many small and midsize technology companies don't have more than a fractional T1 (384k or 768k) shared between a couple hundred users for their offices.
Your mistake was calling the locla Bell for your DSL.
You have the option of either using an ISP that goes through a CLEC or using an ISP other than Qwest with Qwest's DSL.
For example Speakeasy uses Covad or Worldcom for DSL service and the actual ISP parts are provided by Speakeasy. The only part Qwest would provide is the copper pair to your house and co-lo space in your local exchange for the DSLAM.
I don't care how bloody cheap cable is I refuse to get cable unless there really is no other broadband option at my location. At least with DSL there is always some amount of choice even if a CLEC doesn't serve that exchange.
Cable companies and telecommunications companies are both near the top of my shit list, but cable companies are still far worse in my book.
Apparantly, they insinuated that even Microsoft and Apple are not immune to being sued, though they have not taken action yet. Perhaps if they get money from IBM, they'll snowball down the chain of OS's, using the previous court cases, gaining billions as they go to fund the lawyers?
There ain't gonna be much left of SCO once IBM is through with them. SCO is going to be a bloody stain on the floor of the Utah Federal District Court.
Re:Does anyone else think this plausible?
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 1
Um, dude, you need to seek professional help.
Remember this is IBM we are talking about, they have their tentacles inside almost every National Government, US Federal Agency, US State Government, global 1000 company, and financial exchange. IBM was selling computers to the Government when Bill Gates was nothing more than a gleam in his mother's eye. IBM was able to stare down the DOJ for 17 years in their anti-trust case. They won because the DOJ blinked. IBM is one of the 5 largest companies in the world. Their yearly revenue exceeds that of most governments and even the GDP of many countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, UPS seems to be the courier of choice because FedEx is so expensive, and people in the US don't seem to realize what a colossally bad idea it is to ship internationally with UPS, because they can't destroy stuff sent domestically. As a result, if you want something ordered from a US website (with notable exceptions like Crucial), you either get it via UPS (but not intact) or you get it sent USPS, which most people won't even do.
UPS isn't really a good option for shipping domesticly in the US. They mangle stuff on a regular basis. This includes tire tracks on the box of one server and a forklift blade hole though the middle of one tape library. The one time I had to deal with a package FedEx damaged they took care of it quickly and without a lot of hassle. Other than that one incident I've never heard of either FedEx or DHL ever mangling anything. I've even had better luck with the USPS than with UPS. The biggest problems with USPS are speed and the weight limits.
One thing to keep in mind is that the governments of some countries are quite anal about declared value, shipping documents, etc. Unreasonable VAT can also be a major hurdle for those in non-US countries trying to import goods, especially expensive electronics. I wish I had a penny for every time one of our customers requested that we place a much lower value on a Commercial Invoice so their VAT would be lower. VAT also made the return/repair process a nightmare (which we did regularly)
I've been the RMA co-ordinator at a small company that sold internationally. We always told our customers that the actual sale price would be decared on the initial shipment. For warranty returns we would always mark it as a repair/return and rarely had a problem. The only real problem we had was German customs liked to sit on things for several weeks before they would release them to our customers. The higher the shipping priority the longer it seemed they would sit on the shipment.
At the last place I worked we used to ship laptops to our international sales people. Most of the time there was no problem except with some EU countries. The Germans were just slow, the Italians kept trying to charge us import duties. Finally we resorted to shipping everything for our European sales people to our office in the UK (where we never had a problem shipping to) and having the UK office ship to the salesperson's location in Europe.
Oddly enough companies outside the US are almost always willing to sell to US customers. I've ordered things from Canadian, UK, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Austrailian web sites and companies. I've rarely had a problem and in the few cases where I did it was mostly communication problems due to language difficulties.
No actually your wrong, joe-blow CAN'T use a mapping program and do this. Unless of course they happen to be experts in map making, analysis AND mathmathics and are able to come up with sopisticated formulas in order to make sense of the data.
Knowing where the stuff is, is NOT the same thing as using formulas to figure out the exact relationship between critical points.
Well yes and no. A little common sense and a Mk 1 eyeball can tell you a lot. For instance several major power transmission lines in California that converge at a switchyard near the San Louis Reservior. Its fairly obvious from any map showing power lines that this would be a vulnerable choke point.
In my neck of the woods I can tell you which building has POPs for most of the major telecommunicantions and internet providers, where the utility tunnel with most of the fiber running north out of the city is, and where there is a bridge with several major fiber lines, a gas pipeline, a large water main, and a major highway running across it.
While I know about most of these spots from "on the ground" experience, The info necessary to highlight them as potential choke points is all publicly availible. Its just that without fancy software you're going to have to do a bit more digging to find the information and are probably going to have to visit canidate sites in person sooner.
Do not stare into laser with remaining good eye.
Survival Research Labs has made whistles out of old rocket motors and cast concrete.
Not quite the same thing, but a similar idea.
I figure the idiots with the car audio systems that can be heard from 3 or more blocks away will get theirs. Most of them will probably be stone deaf by the time they are 30.
While that's small consolation when some fucktard's audio system is shaking your house from a block away at 3am, it still is enough to keep me from going postal on them.
Oh, and a hint to anyone about to move to college, especially a larger one: Every dorm administrator thinks their facilities are quiet, and will say so if you ask. This is because they live in air-conditioned offices as far away from the students as possible (possibly in another building), come in at 9am (when the students are all sleeping), and go home at 5pm (about two hours before the party really starts). They also have absolutely no interest in actually working to make the facilities quieter, even if they explicitly advertise it as a feature. If you are as bothered by this as I am (perhaps 1 or 2%), seriously consider moving *way* off campus. I now work at the University I went to, and a 20 minute drive was far enough away. (Note Michigan State University is huge; you can probably live closer to smaller ones.)
Not all colleges are that way. The University of Washington has RA's on every floor. They will enforce the noise rules on quiet floors and in the quiet dorms. Addmittedly this doesn't help for noise coming from another floor, another dorm, the frats, or out in the street.
Due to the UW's location in the middle of Seattle some of the dorms are actually quieter than the surrounding neighborhood because there aren't sirens and other urban noises out in the street at all hours of the night.
Those "good old days" never existed, and I never saw a situation like the one you describe.
.bomb boom were you?
You obviously weren't in Seattle, the Bay Area, or New York during the
You saw entire companies where everyone from the CEO on down had hair died unnatural colors, facial piercings, and multiple tattos.
Even with the much tighter job market, in Seattle you'd best not be too picky about hair color, piercings, tatoos, or even dress code for most jobs if you want to find anyone to hire.
Blame it on Microsoft, it seems like everyone who works at the Redmond campus is conformingly non-conformist.
Oh my. I never realized that is what the Federal Exise Tax on long distance was about.
Yes, I agree that its time w stopped paying for the Spanish-American war.
Most of the Interstate highways and other roads that see high levels of traffic seem to be either surfaced with concrete or concrete with asphalt paving on top.
From what I've seen concrete tends to last longer than asphalt. There are concrete paved streets in my city that are over 70 years old and I've driven on interstate highways that probably haven't been resurfaced since they were built over 30 years ago.
According to the state highway department they expect concrete to last 10 years and asphalt 5 years on major highways.
Ok, maybe some assembly line workers are going to have a real hard time finding any other work.
There are options, in many cases the state unemployment office will offer retraining.
You can move to an area where they are looking for workers with your skills. (ie leave the "company town")
You can also start your own business or go do what you really want with your life.
A family friend of ours used to work as a machinist at Boeing. He was layed off about 12 years ago. These days he owns a custom cabinet shop. He's actually doing better now than he was at Boeing and enjoys his work more.
Did you know that at one time more than 50% of the workers in the US were employed in agriculture? Today it is a mere 2%. At one time industry employed more than 50% of the workers, today it is only 18%. Currently 80% of the US workforce is employed in service industries.
In general new and different jobs are created to replace old jobs that are automated or moved overseas. Our friend with the cabinet shop wouldn't have made it and wouldn't employ several other workers if many more people wern't able to afford custom cabinets than 30 years ago.
There are a whole bunch of careers that didn't used to exsist or didn't employ nearly as many people as they do today. Personal trainers, personal assistants, personal chefs, personal shoppers, or for something more like old assembly line work the vast numbers of call-center type jobs.
I'm sorry but if the worst of the industrial union types would have had their way we would all be forced to buy overpriced crap that hadn't changed one bit since 1953.
Frankly I don't want to spend 50 years of my life working on an assembly line making shoes.
Economics and trade are not zero-sum games, I really wish the socialist zelots would stop treating them that way.
Ahhh, you could always tell who the Easterners were. "Defrost the turkey? Yah, just leave it in the sink with the water running..."
This won't defrost it any faster than leaving it in the fridge or a sink full of standing water. Besides leaving it under running water runs the risk of salmonela or other food borne illness.
Of course, there are still a lot of people out West who still don't get it. Watering lawns with what amounts to drinking water? And they wonder why their water bills are so high
Depends on where out West. There are parts like Western Washington and NW Oregon that are quite wet.
I suspect that a machine like this could even be used in CO. It's only like 20gpm. Hell I've seen thousands of gallons of water get dumped on a road in Arizona simply to keep the dust down.
I have Speakeasy DSL over Qwest lines and I've never had to speak with Qwest about the instal at all.
Qwest does own the loop between my house and the CO but the DSLAM and everything else is run and owned by either Covad or Speakeasy.
Presumably if there is some issue that comes up during installation Covad or Speakeasy deal with contacts inside Qwest who have a clue. On the other hand given the cluelessness of Qwest and the comedy of errors I repeatedly witnessed while I was managing a corprate WAN this may not be the case. It's pretty absurd when the field repair guys have to deal with the same billing office morons the customers do in order to fix a problem on a line due to an improper entry on the customer order. At least going through a CLEC makes dealing with the bellheads somebody elses problem.
I would hardly call $35 a month CHEAP.... granted I pay $8 for Call ID... The only cheap part is the $5.95 i pay for unlimited dialup.
Yell at your PUC. I only pay $20/mo for a basic landline. and Caller ID is only $5/mo.
AND WHEN THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO STOP PAYING FOR THE SPANISH AMERICAN WAR!!!?!?!?!??!
Huh? what are you talking about?
Depends, there are LD carriers out there that will give you ulimited long distance for $20/month or less. My housemate has some service as her "dial 1" carrier that offers flat-rate LD for $18/month or so.
For me it's not really a good deal as I only have to pay for airtime for LD calls to the US or Canada on my cell phone.
Not so, phone companies are required to accept 911 calls on lines that are disconnected, at least in this state.
So if your life depends on the line working, stick with a tradiotional land line???
I was damned near burned out of home just because I did not have a passively powered phone(Main breaker blew when centeral air/heater fused its main buss). I would hate to have to rely on a powered up PC and working net connection for my life.
Or more to the point, stick with a traditional land line with a traditional phone.
I've got a couple a couple of old Western Electric phones plugged into the line here because they will work as long as the phone line is working. The mechanical ringer with real bells is nice too.
I always wonder about people who have as their only phone a cordless that requires AC power to the base station in order to work. They are going to be screwed when the power goes out It sort of reminds me of people who only have an electric can opener. As an area that is subject to windstorms and earthquakes this is stupid. Most of the suburban areas around here have experienced a power outage of more than 24 hours in the last 12 years.
Also dumping your local bell might be one of the best feelings you ever have.
I don't know, telling Comcast to get lost after I got DirectTV felt pretty good.
Around here Qworst and Verizon both suck but Comcast and Millenium suck more.
As it stands I only have the cheapest POTS as my CLEC for DSL wants to do line-sharing. Its also useful as a backup for my cell.
The DSL costs $120/month and comes with 5 IP addresses, at a whopping 144k *bits* per second. I live about 2000 feet too far away from the CO for real DSL, and could originally only get iDSL. I'm told I can finally get real DSL now, and it would only cost me $400/month for 1.5 megabit (about 190k bytes per second). If I want to give up having fixed IP addresses, I'd only have to pay $90/month for 1.5 megabit. What a deal! Twice as expensive as cable with no fixed IP addresses or 10 times as expensive with fixed IP.
Ouch. Just to make you wince in Seattle I can get 1.5M/128k DSL for $60/mo, 1.5M/384k for $80/mo, 1.5M/784k for $90/mo, and 3M/784k for $200/mo. The 3M service comes with 4 static IPs and its $10/mo extra for 2 static IPs with the other service levels. No restrictions on running servers on any of the tiers and there is a minimum SLA.
For what its worth, except for gamers and people with servers, most home users don't really need anything more than about 384k/384k service and most will do fine with only 128k upstream. Many small and midsize technology companies don't have more than a fractional T1 (384k or 768k) shared between a couple hundred users for their offices.
Your mistake was calling the locla Bell for your DSL.
You have the option of either using an ISP that goes through a CLEC or using an ISP other than Qwest with Qwest's DSL.
For example Speakeasy uses Covad or Worldcom for DSL service and the actual ISP parts are provided by Speakeasy. The only part Qwest would provide is the copper pair to your house and co-lo space in your local exchange for the DSLAM.
I don't care how bloody cheap cable is I refuse to get cable unless there really is no other broadband option at my location. At least with DSL there is always some amount of choice even if a CLEC doesn't serve that exchange.
Cable companies and telecommunications companies are both near the top of my shit list, but cable companies are still far worse in my book.
Apparantly, they insinuated that even Microsoft and Apple are not immune to being sued, though they have not taken action yet. Perhaps if they get money from IBM, they'll snowball down the chain of OS's, using the previous court cases, gaining billions as they go to fund the lawyers?
There ain't gonna be much left of SCO once IBM is through with them. SCO is going to be a bloody stain on the floor of the Utah Federal District Court.
Um, dude, you need to seek professional help.
Remember this is IBM we are talking about, they have their tentacles inside almost every National Government, US Federal Agency, US State Government, global 1000 company, and financial exchange. IBM was selling computers to the Government when Bill Gates was nothing more than a gleam in his mother's eye. IBM was able to stare down the DOJ for 17 years in their anti-trust case. They won because the DOJ blinked. IBM is one of the 5 largest companies in the world. Their yearly revenue exceeds that of most governments and even the GDP of many countries.
At the point that the lawsuit costs more than SCO's buyout price, IBM will buy them.
Nope, because if that was the case IBM would have already bought out SCO or settled with them.
Its pretty clear IBM wants to send a message that they won't be blackmailed into aquiring failing companies.