Denaturing alcohol is a common practice even today to prevent tax dodging, perhaps the best mass-scale denaturing occurring today is in Ethanol plants.
On the Amiga there were some real ways to improve performance - you could replace libraries with others in many cases and really enhance performance. I haven't seen a push like this on the PC but I remember spending days mucking with different libraries to find exactly the combination that yielded the best performance. I wasn't much of a game player but I was always interested in having more performance in my OS.
An example would be like a jpeg library - say there were three different authors who made their own libraries that were all compatible but were optimized in different ways. You could jump between them and see the difference in performance. The disadvantage of this being that not all libraries would run on all hardware because of specific optimizations so sometimes you just found the fastest way to guru meditation your machine.
Another thing on the Amiga that was nice is CPU optimized libraries so you could push out maximum performance based around your particular CPU/Mathco/etc..
That is one thing I like about linux, you can (most of the time) roll your own/recompile if you are unhappy with the optimizations someone else performed..
I drive a Subaru Outback VDC (6 Cylinder engine/3.0 liter) and it gets right in the advertised mileage according to my general calculations done since I bought it 7k miles ago. I would say that my driving style is moderate to aggressive depending on the situation and who I'm compared against. Sometimes I do scare coworkers:).
For my driving I commute to and from work on "average" terain and I do lots of road mileage driving out of town to hike/bike/etc.. So far it has been right in there.
I customized a Pelican Case for my laptop over two years ago. I ripped out the pick and pluck foam then coated it in duct-tape so the foam would stay in place. Under the laptop there are little picked out areas for all my cables, cdrom, mouse, wireless cards, an access point, etc. then to the right of the laptop there is room for the power adapter.
I've dropped this pelican case, had it stuck on pallets of gear and check it at the airport (I haven't carried my laptop onto a plane in years). It works great and is watertight!
For a should strap I put cable ties on the lock holes then use a shoulder strap from another bag on the pelican case. I have a cable tie snap about once every three or four months and after awhile learned to use two cable ties on each side to prevent issues. Right now I'm just carrying my laptop case by the handle but should straps also work well.
Pelican also sells specialized laptop cases but I haven't had a need to replace my current one and it works awesome.
Note that due to business travel this case complete with my laptop has been checked with my luggage onto planes over one hundred times and I've never experienced any issues or breakage.
I hate the GBA for the same reason you hate the SP. After using the old GBA for more than about 15 minutes my hands would cramp up. I don't have any of those problems with my SP plus I love the new form factor and size. Now I can carry my GB everywhere and not have to worry about dinging up the screen or having to tote around 500 accessories to make it so I could play Castlevania (one of the darkest GBA games).
I'll give up my headphone jack for the excellent light. Heck, I don't ever remember using the headphone jack on my old GBA anyway.
Our company imposed bandwidth (bit) caps when we first rolled out our Internet platform over three years ago. This has worked extremely effectively for our company.
Here in Alaska the cost of bandwidth is a bit higher than elsewhere in the U.S. (except for Hawaii) due to us having to maintain an undersea fiber and pay for facilities to transport the traffic to Seattle or Oregon (depending on which undersea fiber your traffic traverses). Our company found that the bit cap was the best way to cope with people who might abuse the services.
Most (like 95+%) users of our cable modem users use 1GB per month. Our basic plan starts at 5GB per month and with upgrades you can get up to 20GB per month with no additional charges in large population areas. This means that the average (and even most "heavy") users will never even have to think about their Internet traffic.
For all the complaining people do they also need to recognize the advantages we have by using the bit cap:
1. Because of our metering system we don't force users to install PPPOE clients or anything of the sort. Just plug-in to the Ethernet port on your cable modem and DHCP an IP Address (up to 8 devices can be plugged directly into our cable modem). It is that easy. If you desire more, put up a NAT box or a firewall and get all the IP's you would like.
2. We don't limit the number of users you put on your cable modem. Due to us using a bit cap vs. some other system we don't care if you have 1, 10 or 100 users hiding behind your cable/dsl router.
3. We don't limit people from putting servers on their cable modems. You can throw anything you would like on your cable modem. Just be aware that once you pass the bandwidth cap you will get charged for additional GB's.
So, what it comes down to is that when you aren't using E-Donkey, Gnutella, Bearshare or whatever the P2P client of the week is then all you need to do is shut it down; and don't setup a Warez site or share your MP3's and stick them into a search engine.
People act like it some sin to put a bit cap but after most people use our competitors products they are very happy to be on our cable modems. They may have to put up with a bit cap but they can do just about anything else they would like without any complaints from us.. and no PPPOE clients to deal with:^).
For those of our customers who want even more bandwidth they can always upgrade to our DSL product or some other un-metered service. We charge a bit more but then they can transfer all day long with no bit cap.
When people think about the good/bad of a bit cap vs. other user-control systems I think the bit cap is the way to go. It maybe lame only having to download 50 VCD's in a month rather than 200 but that type of thing is exactly what the bitcap prevents - people who abuse the system. For us it isn't a way to line our pockets, it is a way to make sure that EVERYONE (including the non-computer geeks) get good service all the time rather than 2% of the users screwing it up for the rest.
Many moons ago I was an onsite warranty PC Tech for several different vendors. One time I received a motherboard pre-shipped from Compaq for a Presario PC which had been troubleshot over the phone by Tech Support.
I headed out to the customers site and asked him what occurred.. He told me that he heard a loud pop then smoke started shooting out of the back of the power supply and the computer died.
After opening up the PC I found that the motherboad had shorted on the case and went up in flames. Everything had smoke damage but some parts still functioned (such as the Hard drive). Rather than ship the customer a new PC Compaq made the decision to ship him a motherboard only.
He wanted a full new PC but due to policy Compaq would not replace home computers - only repair them.
I called Compaq and mentioned that the computer had serious smoke damage and it appeared the motherboard had caught on fire and the guy on the other end of the line said "Oh, it must have been model xxxx". They still wouldn't replace the entire computer.
Talk about some garbage. PC Manufacturers should be held to the same standards that car and other manufacturers are. If a childrens toy has potential of catching on fire damn straight they are going to recall it but since the Computer industry is who it is they won't do it.
What I ended up doing was fully disassembling the PC and writing down the part numbers for every component in the PC. I then called Compaq Tech suport back and told them that I needed to replace the following parts - then I listed every part in the computer including the case parts.
A week or two later I received all the components to build a new PC for him in seperate boxes. I took them all out, assembled them, tested and helped him get the installation going. I then had to disassemble the old PC and ship it back in all the boxes.
There were several other incidents like that from other vendors but I never saw a situation where the motherboard had actually caught fire. I did build my fair share of new PC's from individual parts though in order to try to make the customer happy and work around crappy PC manufacturer policies.
Over time I've seen a fair number of powersupplies and at least one hard drive controller "let the smoke out" but I've never seen a situation like that again..
The slope is already fully armed with sysadmin, tech support staff and everything else needed to survive for the oil company purposes. It wouldn't take much to lure more techies up there especially for a hosting company of some sort.
Most permanent employees on the slope (aka north slope) work on shifts. Commonly a shift such as two weeks on, two weeks off. The average workday is officially 12 hours for most people but depending on your job/company/etc. it can be anywhere from 12-16. And yes, no weekends while you are up, you work 7 days a week.
The advantages of this system? Unless you are a smoker you don't have to spend a single dime while you are up north (at oil fields alcohol is banned). At least working for the oil companies they supply everything from food/soda/snacks to living facilities and exercise areas. Then when you come home you are off... no office, no nothing. you can sleep all day and stay up all night and travel at any point as long as you are back at the airport to catch the plane to head back up for work (oh ya, the planes are normally company covered too). For someone who is a roamer or likes having large chunks of time off this is great. 6 months a year off of work and with many companies you continue to accrue normal vacation time too which is an extra bonus.
Many like the wages, depending on the company its just like any other job, good, bad or otherwise but the thing that really pumps people up is the overtime since its 4 hours a day guaranteed and you are working 7 days a week so there is even more in there.
Anyway, its not that bad. For me I like sleeping in my own bed but my experiences with the slope as a whole have been good. Lots of rules to follow (usually with good reason) but its a pretty nifty way to live for many people.
With what I just said - its not a problem to lure people to the slope. Pay them well, tell them they will get all the soda and snack food you can stuff in their faces and that they will have 6 months off a year and they will come. Oh yes, they will come.
Our company used to have many varied policies depending on department/etc.. Two or three years ago they went through, reviewed all policies and came up with a system to impliment company wide (this was with much employee input).
Our on call policy looks something like this:
For each day you are on-call you receive one hour of additional regular-time pay.
For each holiday or weekend day you are on-call you receive two hours per day of regular-time compensation.
If you are called past the first 1/2 hour you receive overtime for phone calls, this first half hour is assumed to be within the regular on-call compensation amount. This helps to absorb the 2 minute phonecalls that people sometimes receive.
Call-Out (if you are dispatched) pay is paid at regular overtime rates with a 2 hour minimum.
At one time I was experiencing pretty severe wrist paint that would last for days or weeks at a time.
I tried wrist rests, had ergonomic keyboards (which I still use) etc. etc. but to no avail.
After experimenting for quite awhile I was talking to one of my coworkers who had had similar problems. She had went to her doctor who had suggested she try making sure she had a good chair and was sitting up straight rather than slouching.
Worked like a charm for her and for me. I normally don't experience computer related wrist pain at all anymore unless I let myself start slouching - then within hours I'll notice the pain start up again.
Just kind of figured I would throw it out there for everyone who slouches in their computer chair and experiences wrist pain..
I also thought it was strange when I first heard about it but after reading some of the documentation some systems had found ways around this.
Disk Imaging - software has been doing this for awhile but the image only streams to the workstations at the speed of the slowest machine accepting data.
File Distribution - I haven't actively used any of these in production environments but I have played with them.
From what I have read what these apps do is the workstations return verification of received data on a unicast path. That way there is verification not at a UDP/TCP level but at the application level. It is still quite a bit more efficient on a reliable transport medium than sending every ounce of data to every computer. You do get some overhead on the unicast path but you still do not have seperate data streams for every computer.
I could be completely wrong about this but the applications I have read about this is how they documented keeping data integrity while multicasting.
I've spent a little time setting up and using multicast networks. I can't necessary say where a cluster would fit into the mix. I'll outline a couple of the uses we have found/use multicasting for, maybe there is something in here that you can get ideas to use your cluster for:
1. Music/sound broadcast - using a MP3 streamer you can pump stations out on multicast addresses then using mp3 players that support multicast streams you can latch on and listen to the stream. For business purposes this might be to distribute recordings of company meetings or perhaps training information that does not need video.
2. Video - The setup of stations to re-run important videos of events, etc. can be useful. In most cases these are just like TV statations - you join a multicast stream then you see whatever is on that stream at the curren time. Good for just about anything that you would like to rebroadcast to a large number of users using minimal bandwidth.
3. Applications - Under windows there are a couple applications available that will distribute applications across a campus (or any multicast network) to remote users. Broadcast once, receive many. I haven't used this function much but for file distribution that happens on a schedule to the desktop or to multiple servers it could be useful. Not sure of what support is available under Linux for this currently.
4. Video Conferencing - This is one of the applications that we have been experimenting using multicasting for. Being able to broadcast one video conference to say, 80 different sites but in a network only having to distribute a small number of streams is great stuff. An example of this is we have customers who have say 50 sites, all of the sites are connected via sattelite, if we streamed to all 50 sites it would consume a massive amount of bandwidth (say 768k x 60) - using multicasting we can cut that to one transmission that every site receives (only 768k). There are some other rules - like the returning data must follow a unicast path, etc. but overall the bandwidth used is still around 1 T1 instead of the 25+ it would normally take to do this type of streaming.
Someone else stated that this is largely a router/switch thing. It really is, proper configuration of the multicast network at on the routers/switches in the network is crucial. If you are going to be distributing across a large network you need to choose the proper protocols for your needs (sparse or dense mode protocols) and setup the routing so everything flows across the links you desire. A misconfiguration of the equipment could mean that you end up distributing the same data across multiple links to the same site, not distributing the data at all or having it traverse the wrong link which could end up destroying network performance rather than enhancing it.
At one point a friend decided to write an essay for a class on pulling Donuts/brodies in cars. We searched far and wide and couldn't find anything on the Internet regarding them (this was about 4 years ago probably).
So, a year or so ago I started adding random things to Everything 2 and went ahead and added it. That was the first mention I had ever seen to pulling brodies in a car on the Internet.
I like most everything Sony makes other than their audio equipment. Why you ask do I not like sony audio equipment?
Lets start a list:
-My last Sony 5 disc CD changer died... and manged to munch some of my CD's in the process.
-Three of the people I know have had problems with their car stereo head units overheating (we installed a 3" fan in one friends dashboard blowing across the heatsink because it would overheat after an hour or two of play)
- My last Sony receiver snapped and crackled on a fairly regular basis while it was playing and also had a warm up time where it made odd whining sounds until it was completely warmed up. This also happened to another one of my friends.
So on and so forth.. I have had nothing but bad luck with Sony audio equipment. I like the rest of their stuff but the audio equipment is now off limits.
Suggested brands?
Pioneer - I've had alright luck with, some good, some bad experiences.
Yamaha - Always a good experience. I love Yamaha equipment.
Denon - Same as Yamaha and in many cases slightly cheaper.
Overall I would say to go out to local stores and listen to different systems and different speakers. Pick the ones that sound best to you. Last time I was shopping I relied a lot on peoples input on the Internet for different brands (I would take the model number, type it into a search engine and see what all came up and what people had to say about it).
I see that some people already mentioned the importance of speakers. Speakers are one of the most critical parts so make sure to get ones that sound good. Another suggestion to accent the low end is to get a subwoofer. I've owned Klipsch and Velodyne subwoofers and have been happy with both. The Klipsch being the more budget minded subwoofer. Bose is a brand which I have had friends love, I like them but they are to expensive in my opinion.
If you have $1500 to spend I would allocate at least 60% to speakers/subs.
If you really want to keep it cheap and don't care much about look then shop around for old 1970's floor speakers. I tried many brands but the only thing I use newer speakers for is surrounds etc.. My two main pairs are actually speakers found at garage sales that were made during the 1970's. They sound awesome and were very economical to purchase.
Just put "Don't buy Apogee Products - Click here to find out why" (a better variation in my opinion would be "Apogee Blows - Click here to find out why") at the end of random web pages on your sites. Someone should establish a central site with a Explanation (hell, a link to this post would work). Enough bad press over it and a couple well placed links on popular sites and they will probably turn around as any for-profit company who values their business should.
Hopefully the Constitution still works in our justice system. If it does then at least when someone actually sues over this hopefully freedom of speech will win out over corporate-money-grabbing-put-down-the-little-guy-- -oh-ya-don't-forget-to-charge-him-for-mi nor-upgrades people.
I registered my domain name through register.com and am very happy with their service.
No later than 10 hours after I submitted it my domain was active. They offer free DNS services (which they don't advertise heavily) for people who register and also sponsor granite canyon which is a free dns service for those who don't have dns provided. The web based interface for updating your DNS is excellent and overal I feel I've gotten good bang for the buck.
I've had some friends also register with them and they are also happy.
At one time I might have functioned in a similar context, now if this type of thing happens to me more than once a month or once every two its time to sit down, calculate how many hours the company owes me and goto the boss to work out time off to make up for it.
I figure I work 50hrs in an average week, before I was salaried the company tracked my time to the point where it became self regulating (after dishing out 50+hr's OT in one pay period they start realizing exactly how much they need an additional person).
But these days its a bit different (because I'm salary), I have learned when to say when and to tell my boss that I have to many clients or to much going on to be messing with additional work and with that I have also learned the value of my personal time.
Anyway, in my experience if you do a good job and make the customer happy (whether you are internal or have outside customers) companies will usually work with you in order to keep you on board. The big thing is that you need to be able to tell them when you are overloaded or make sure you are being treated fairly when it comes to making up for going someplace and putting in 35 hours in two days. If your company won't listen to you then maybe its time to start looking for a company who will.
Hmmm, well, should of figured it would happen sometime but hmm, this is just a little lame for my tastes. But hey, this shows what their target age audience is.
They also have a fine collection of movies that I'm not going to bother wasting my bandwidth to download..
Although the article was interesting I can't help but think that if we looked at the funding list kentucky fried chicken would have to be in there someplace.
I have to agree with several other people who posted, maybe Microsoft should stick to hardware. Between their mice (which take a beating) and the keyboards I really like their hardware, it has always been a good solid enduring investment for me.
Even though I don't use my desktop PC near as much as I used to my MS keyboard has been great. The only problem I've ever had with it is now they letters on a couple of my home row keys are starting to show wear -- which isn't bad for how much I've used it in the last couple years.
Hell, at the 40 hours I've got in my playlist currently on a normal basis I still don't hear a repeat for days on end (depending on how much I'm listening). That much HD room would make it so I would forget the song lyrics by the time I get back around to them..:^).
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Denaturing alcohol is a common practice even today to prevent tax dodging, perhaps the best mass-scale denaturing occurring today is in Ethanol plants.
On the Amiga there were some real ways to improve performance - you could replace libraries with others in many cases and really enhance performance. I haven't seen a push like this on the PC but I remember spending days mucking with different libraries to find exactly the combination that yielded the best performance. I wasn't much of a game player but I was always interested in having more performance in my OS.
An example would be like a jpeg library - say there were three different authors who made their own libraries that were all compatible but were optimized in different ways. You could jump between them and see the difference in performance. The disadvantage of this being that not all libraries would run on all hardware because of specific optimizations so sometimes you just found the fastest way to guru meditation your machine.
Another thing on the Amiga that was nice is CPU optimized libraries so you could push out maximum performance based around your particular CPU/Mathco/etc..
That is one thing I like about linux, you can (most of the time) roll your own/recompile if you are unhappy with the optimizations someone else performed..
I drive a Subaru Outback VDC (6 Cylinder engine/3.0 liter) and it gets right in the advertised mileage according to my general calculations done since I bought it 7k miles ago. I would say that my driving style is moderate to aggressive depending on the situation and who I'm compared against. Sometimes I do scare coworkers :).
For my driving I commute to and from work on "average" terain and I do lots of road mileage driving out of town to hike/bike/etc.. So far it has been right in there.
I customized a Pelican Case for my laptop over two years ago. I ripped out the pick and pluck foam then coated it in duct-tape so the foam would stay in place. Under the laptop there are little picked out areas for all my cables, cdrom, mouse, wireless cards, an access point, etc. then to the right of the laptop there is room for the power adapter.
I've dropped this pelican case, had it stuck on pallets of gear and check it at the airport (I haven't carried my laptop onto a plane in years). It works great and is watertight!
For a should strap I put cable ties on the lock holes then use a shoulder strap from another bag on the pelican case. I have a cable tie snap about once every three or four months and after awhile learned to use two cable ties on each side to prevent issues. Right now I'm just carrying my laptop case by the handle but should straps also work well.
Pelican also sells specialized laptop cases but I haven't had a need to replace my current one and it works awesome.
Here are some pictures of my pelican case with my laptop:
Alan's Pelican Laptop Case
Note that due to business travel this case complete with my laptop has been checked with my luggage onto planes over one hundred times and I've never experienced any issues or breakage.
I hate the GBA for the same reason you hate the SP. After using the old GBA for more than about 15 minutes my hands would cramp up. I don't have any of those problems with my SP plus I love the new form factor and size. Now I can carry my GB everywhere and not have to worry about dinging up the screen or having to tote around 500 accessories to make it so I could play Castlevania (one of the darkest GBA games).
I'll give up my headphone jack for the excellent light. Heck, I don't ever remember using the headphone jack on my old GBA anyway.
Our company imposed bandwidth (bit) caps when we first rolled out our Internet platform over three years ago. This has worked extremely effectively for our company.
:^).
Here in Alaska the cost of bandwidth is a bit higher than elsewhere in the U.S. (except for Hawaii) due to us having to maintain an undersea fiber and pay for facilities to transport the traffic to Seattle or Oregon (depending on which undersea fiber your traffic traverses). Our company found that the bit cap was the best way to cope with people who might abuse the services.
Most (like 95+%) users of our cable modem users use 1GB per month. Our basic plan starts at 5GB per month and with upgrades you can get up to 20GB per month with no additional charges in large population areas. This means that the average (and even most "heavy") users will never even have to think about their Internet traffic.
For all the complaining people do they also need to recognize the advantages we have by using the bit cap:
1. Because of our metering system we don't force users to install PPPOE clients or anything of the sort. Just plug-in to the Ethernet port on your cable modem and DHCP an IP Address (up to 8 devices can be plugged directly into our cable modem). It is that easy. If you desire more, put up a NAT box or a firewall and get all the IP's you would like.
2. We don't limit the number of users you put on your cable modem. Due to us using a bit cap vs. some other system we don't care if you have 1, 10 or 100 users hiding behind your cable/dsl router.
3. We don't limit people from putting servers on their cable modems. You can throw anything you would like on your cable modem. Just be aware that once you pass the bandwidth cap you will get charged for additional GB's.
So, what it comes down to is that when you aren't using E-Donkey, Gnutella, Bearshare or whatever the P2P client of the week is then all you need to do is shut it down; and don't setup a Warez site or share your MP3's and stick them into a search engine.
People act like it some sin to put a bit cap but after most people use our competitors products they are very happy to be on our cable modems. They may have to put up with a bit cap but they can do just about anything else they would like without any complaints from us.. and no PPPOE clients to deal with
For those of our customers who want even more bandwidth they can always upgrade to our DSL product or some other un-metered service. We charge a bit more but then they can transfer all day long with no bit cap.
When people think about the good/bad of a bit cap vs. other user-control systems I think the bit cap is the way to go. It maybe lame only having to download 50 VCD's in a month rather than 200 but that type of thing is exactly what the bitcap prevents - people who abuse the system. For us it isn't a way to line our pockets, it is a way to make sure that EVERYONE (including the non-computer geeks) get good service all the time rather than 2% of the users screwing it up for the rest.
Many moons ago I was an onsite warranty PC Tech for several different vendors. One time I received a motherboard pre-shipped from Compaq for a Presario PC which had been troubleshot over the phone by Tech Support.
I headed out to the customers site and asked him what occurred.. He told me that he heard a loud pop then smoke started shooting out of the back of the power supply and the computer died.
After opening up the PC I found that the motherboad had shorted on the case and went up in flames. Everything had smoke damage but some parts still functioned (such as the Hard drive). Rather than ship the customer a new PC Compaq made the decision to ship him a motherboard only.
He wanted a full new PC but due to policy Compaq would not replace home computers - only repair them.
I called Compaq and mentioned that the computer had serious smoke damage and it appeared the motherboard had caught on fire and the guy on the other end of the line said "Oh, it must have been model xxxx". They still wouldn't replace the entire computer.
Talk about some garbage. PC Manufacturers should be held to the same standards that car and other manufacturers are. If a childrens toy has potential of catching on fire damn straight they are going to recall it but since the Computer industry is who it is they won't do it.
What I ended up doing was fully disassembling the PC and writing down the part numbers for every component in the PC. I then called Compaq Tech suport back and told them that I needed to replace the following parts - then I listed every part in the computer including the case parts.
A week or two later I received all the components to build a new PC for him in seperate boxes. I took them all out, assembled them, tested and helped him get the installation going. I then had to disassemble the old PC and ship it back in all the boxes.
There were several other incidents like that from other vendors but I never saw a situation where the motherboard had actually caught fire. I did build my fair share of new PC's from individual parts though in order to try to make the customer happy and work around crappy PC manufacturer policies.
Over time I've seen a fair number of powersupplies and at least one hard drive controller "let the smoke out" but I've never seen a situation like that again..
The slope is already fully armed with sysadmin, tech support staff and everything else needed to survive for the oil company purposes. It wouldn't take much to lure more techies up there especially for a hosting company of some sort.
Most permanent employees on the slope (aka north slope) work on shifts. Commonly a shift such as two weeks on, two weeks off. The average workday is officially 12 hours for most people but depending on your job/company/etc. it can be anywhere from 12-16. And yes, no weekends while you are up, you work 7 days a week.
The advantages of this system? Unless you are a smoker you don't have to spend a single dime while you are up north (at oil fields alcohol is banned). At least working for the oil companies they supply everything from food/soda/snacks to living facilities and exercise areas. Then when you come home you are off... no office, no nothing. you can sleep all day and stay up all night and travel at any point as long as you are back at the airport to catch the plane to head back up for work (oh ya, the planes are normally company covered too). For someone who is a roamer or likes having large chunks of time off this is great. 6 months a year off of work and with many companies you continue to accrue normal vacation time too which is an extra bonus.
Many like the wages, depending on the company its just like any other job, good, bad or otherwise but the thing that really pumps people up is the overtime since its 4 hours a day guaranteed and you are working 7 days a week so there is even more in there.
Anyway, its not that bad. For me I like sleeping in my own bed but my experiences with the slope as a whole have been good. Lots of rules to follow (usually with good reason) but its a pretty nifty way to live for many people.
With what I just said - its not a problem to lure people to the slope. Pay them well, tell them they will get all the soda and snack food you can stuff in their faces and that they will have 6 months off a year and they will come. Oh yes, they will come.
-Alan
Our company used to have many varied policies depending on department/etc.. Two or three years ago they went through, reviewed all policies and came up with a system to impliment company wide (this was with much employee input).
Our on call policy looks something like this:
For each day you are on-call you receive one hour of additional regular-time pay.
For each holiday or weekend day you are on-call you receive two hours per day of regular-time compensation.
If you are called past the first 1/2 hour you receive overtime for phone calls, this first half hour is assumed to be within the regular on-call compensation amount. This helps to absorb the 2 minute phonecalls that people sometimes receive.
Call-Out (if you are dispatched) pay is paid at regular overtime rates with a 2 hour minimum.
So, anyway, thats our policy in short..
-Alan
At one time I was experiencing pretty severe wrist paint that would last for days or weeks at a time.
I tried wrist rests, had ergonomic keyboards (which I still use) etc. etc. but to no avail.
After experimenting for quite awhile I was talking to one of my coworkers who had had similar problems. She had went to her doctor who had suggested she try making sure she had a good chair and was sitting up straight rather than slouching.
Worked like a charm for her and for me. I normally don't experience computer related wrist pain at all anymore unless I let myself start slouching - then within hours I'll notice the pain start up again.
Just kind of figured I would throw it out there for everyone who slouches in their computer chair and experiences wrist pain..
-Alan
I also thought it was strange when I first heard about it but after reading some of the documentation some systems had found ways around this.
Disk Imaging - software has been doing this for awhile but the image only streams to the workstations at the speed of the slowest machine accepting data.
File Distribution - I haven't actively used any of these in production environments but I have played with them.
From what I have read what these apps do is the workstations return verification of received data on a unicast path. That way there is verification not at a UDP/TCP level but at the application level. It is still quite a bit more efficient on a reliable transport medium than sending every ounce of data to every computer. You do get some overhead on the unicast path but you still do not have seperate data streams for every computer.
I could be completely wrong about this but the applications I have read about this is how they documented keeping data integrity while multicasting.
Have a good one.
-Alan
I've spent a little time setting up and using multicast networks. I can't necessary say where a cluster would fit into the mix. I'll outline a couple of the uses we have found/use multicasting for, maybe there is something in here that you can get ideas to use your cluster for:
1. Music/sound broadcast - using a MP3 streamer you can pump stations out on multicast addresses then using mp3 players that support multicast streams you can latch on and listen to the stream. For business purposes this might be to distribute recordings of company meetings or perhaps training information that does not need video.
2. Video - The setup of stations to re-run important videos of events, etc. can be useful. In most cases these are just like TV statations - you join a multicast stream then you see whatever is on that stream at the curren time. Good for just about anything that you would like to rebroadcast to a large number of users using minimal bandwidth.
3. Applications - Under windows there are a couple applications available that will distribute applications across a campus (or any multicast network) to remote users. Broadcast once, receive many. I haven't used this function much but for file distribution that happens on a schedule to the desktop or to multiple servers it could be useful. Not sure of what support is available under Linux for this currently.
4. Video Conferencing - This is one of the applications that we have been experimenting using multicasting for. Being able to broadcast one video conference to say, 80 different sites but in a network only having to distribute a small number of streams is great stuff. An example of this is we have customers who have say 50 sites, all of the sites are connected via sattelite, if we streamed to all 50 sites it would consume a massive amount of bandwidth (say 768k x 60) - using multicasting we can cut that to one transmission that every site receives (only 768k). There are some other rules - like the returning data must follow a unicast path, etc. but overall the bandwidth used is still around 1 T1 instead of the 25+ it would normally take to do this type of streaming.
Someone else stated that this is largely a router/switch thing. It really is, proper configuration of the multicast network at on the routers/switches in the network is crucial. If you are going to be distributing across a large network you need to choose the proper protocols for your needs (sparse or dense mode protocols) and setup the routing so everything flows across the links you desire. A misconfiguration of the equipment could mean that you end up distributing the same data across multiple links to the same site, not distributing the data at all or having it traverse the wrong link which could end up destroying network performance rather than enhancing it.
-Alan
At one point a friend decided to write an essay for a class on pulling Donuts/brodies in cars. We searched far and wide and couldn't find anything on the Internet regarding them (this was about 4 years ago probably).
So, a year or so ago I started adding random things to Everything 2 and went ahead and added it. That was the first mention I had ever seen to pulling brodies in a car on the Internet.
-Saono
I like most everything Sony makes other than their audio equipment. Why you ask do I not like sony audio equipment?
Lets start a list:
-My last Sony 5 disc CD changer died... and manged to munch some of my CD's in the process.
-Three of the people I know have had problems with their car stereo head units overheating (we installed a 3" fan in one friends dashboard blowing across the heatsink because it would overheat after an hour or two of play)
- My last Sony receiver snapped and crackled on a fairly regular basis while it was playing and also had a warm up time where it made odd whining sounds until it was completely warmed up. This also happened to another one of my friends.
So on and so forth.. I have had nothing but bad luck with Sony audio equipment. I like the rest of their stuff but the audio equipment is now off limits.
Suggested brands?
Pioneer - I've had alright luck with, some good, some bad experiences.
Yamaha - Always a good experience. I love Yamaha equipment.
Denon - Same as Yamaha and in many cases slightly cheaper.
Overall I would say to go out to local stores and listen to different systems and different speakers. Pick the ones that sound best to you. Last time I was shopping I relied a lot on peoples input on the Internet for different brands (I would take the model number, type it into a search engine and see what all came up and what people had to say about it).
I see that some people already mentioned the importance of speakers. Speakers are one of the most critical parts so make sure to get ones that sound good. Another suggestion to accent the low end is to get a subwoofer. I've owned Klipsch and Velodyne subwoofers and have been happy with both. The Klipsch being the more budget minded subwoofer. Bose is a brand which I have had friends love, I like them but they are to expensive in my opinion.
If you have $1500 to spend I would allocate at least 60% to speakers/subs.
If you really want to keep it cheap and don't care much about look then shop around for old 1970's floor speakers. I tried many brands but the only thing I use newer speakers for is surrounds etc.. My two main pairs are actually speakers found at garage sales that were made during the 1970's. They sound awesome and were very economical to purchase.
No, I'm not talking about suing them.
- -oh-ya-don't-forget-to-charge-him-for-mi nor-upgrades people.
Just put "Don't buy Apogee Products - Click here to find out why" (a better variation in my opinion would be "Apogee Blows - Click here to find out why") at the end of random web pages on your sites. Someone should establish a central site with a Explanation (hell, a link to this post would work). Enough bad press over it and a couple well placed links on popular sites and they will probably turn around as any for-profit company who values their business should.
Hopefully the Constitution still works in our justice system. If it does then at least when someone actually sues over this hopefully freedom of speech will win out over corporate-money-grabbing-put-down-the-little-guy-
I registered my domain name through register.com and am very happy with their service.
No later than 10 hours after I submitted it my domain was active. They offer free DNS services (which they don't advertise heavily) for people who register and also sponsor granite canyon which is a free dns service for those who don't have dns provided. The web based interface for updating your DNS is excellent and overal I feel I've gotten good bang for the buck.
I've had some friends also register with them and they are also happy.
-Saono
www.artificiallives.com
At one time I might have functioned in a similar context, now if this type of thing happens to me more than once a month or once every two its time to sit down, calculate how many hours the company owes me and goto the boss to work out time off to make up for it.
I figure I work 50hrs in an average week, before I was salaried the company tracked my time to the point where it became self regulating (after dishing out 50+hr's OT in one pay period they start realizing exactly how much they need an additional person).
But these days its a bit different (because I'm salary), I have learned when to say when and to tell my boss that I have to many clients or to much going on to be messing with additional work and with that I have also learned the value of my personal time.
Anyway, in my experience if you do a good job and make the customer happy (whether you are internal or have outside customers) companies will usually work with you in order to keep you on board. The big thing is that you need to be able to tell them when you are overloaded or make sure you are being treated fairly when it comes to making up for going someplace and putting in 35 hours in two days. If your company won't listen to you then maybe its time to start looking for a company who will.
Hmmm, well, should of figured it would happen sometime but hmm, this is just a little lame for my tastes. But hey, this shows what their target age audience is.
They also have a fine collection of movies that I'm not going to bother wasting my bandwidth to download..
Oh well.
Although the article was interesting I can't help but think that if we looked at the funding list kentucky fried chicken would have to be in there someplace.
I have to agree with several other people who posted, maybe Microsoft should stick to hardware. Between their mice (which take a beating) and the keyboards I really like their hardware, it has always been a good solid enduring investment for me.
Even though I don't use my desktop PC near as much as I used to my MS keyboard has been great. The only problem I've ever had with it is now they letters on a couple of my home row keys are starting to show wear -- which isn't bad for how much I've used it in the last couple years.
Hell, at the 40 hours I've got in my playlist currently on a normal basis I still don't hear a repeat for days on end (depending on how much I'm listening). That much HD room would make it so I would forget the song lyrics by the time I get back around to them.. :^).