During the course of my job, I have to recreate customer environments to duplicate their problems. Often these environments involve firewalls, NAT, or simply multiple subnets that are difficult and time-consuming to get past our IT guys (and even once we convince them of the need, it may be a week before any real progress is made on their end to set things up).
However, using this, I can hopefully get a single box set up with several "systems" using internal virtual networks that will allow me to have something like...
1: Server / Client Gateway
2: Client
3: Firewall / NAT / Router
4: Client Gateway
5: Client
With 1 and 2 being "inside" the firewall and 4 and 5 being "outside".
This would allow me to eliminate TONS of bureaucratic red-tape paperwork BS, and give a self-contained environment for some of my other coworkers to educate themselves on (95% of which have never done any actual hands-on work with a firewall or even done any routing).
While all this could be easily accomplished using a multi-processor Sun box and their domain / partitioning scheme, those tend to be a little more pricey than the dual-P2 I've already got sitting idle in the corner of my office...
I had an entirely different problem. I picked up the Limited Edition ($59.99 US at CompUSA) yesterday at lunch, and decided to do a quickie install on my laptop (Thinkpad 600X, P3/500, 256 megs of RAM, several gigs free on the drive) to check it out.
No go. Page fault in ~DF394B.TMP, created by the game. Every time.
Ran through the usual suspects that cause game problems (video/sound drivers, free space, other programs running, yadd yadda), and no luck.
As an absolute last resort, I called Infogrames. After spending 10 minutes navigating their infuriating voice menus, I finally got a live entry-level droid on the phone that tried to walk me through the steps listed on their web page (the same web page you have to go to in order to get their phone number in the first place).
I realize it's his job to try to weed out the easy ones from Bubba McGillicutty that just jumps right to the live person, but please accept that some of us have been playing computer games for 20+ years and actually know how to troubleshoot these things...
30 minutes later, he announces that he'll send a message out to his other techs, and call me back with an update.
He hadn't called back by the time I left work, so the game got returned to CompUSA (getting cash back for software at CompUSA *can* be done, it's just not easy).
This morning I had a message on my voicemail that says the game is incompatible with the NeoMagic video chipsets used in many laptops, and he is unaware of plans for a patch to correct the issue.
I might pay $30 (US) for a game I can only play at my desk at home, but I'm not paying $60 for something I can't play while sitting in an airport or laying on the couch.
Sorry, Firaxis/Infogrames/Sid, maybe I'll buy it again in a few months when it's a LOT cheaper, but for now I'll stick with Civ 2 (the original, none of this CTP business).
-l
Re:You might want to do the same
on
Review: K-PAX
·
· Score: 2
?You're confusing mass with weight. Even in zero
>gravity, objects have mass. You can define mass
>independently of the local gravitational field
>using inertia. That is, the harder it is to get
>something moving (or to stop something that's
>moving), the more mass it has.
Well, except that around these here parts, we measure mass by weight, for convenience's sake.
>Time is simpe to define in a standard way that >isn't specific to the motions of the planets in
>our solar system. For example, you can
>define "one second" to be 9,192,631,770
>oscillations of a cesium-133 atom
I figured there was something like that. That's pretty cool. Thou art more chem-literate than I. Way more. But since I never got around to it in school, most people are. Still cool though.
>Heck, even your wristwatch uses a conceptually >similar oscillating quartz crystal to keep time
Actually I use my pager for a timepiece since the battery died in my watch and I never got around to fixing it, but your point is still taken. Heh.
I not only caught it, I mentioned it, quoted it, and then had to explain it to the good folks on the chat sstem I hang out on.
Sigh, and these people call themselves FANS.
-l
Re:You might want to do the same
on
Review: K-PAX
·
· Score: 2
>Come to think of it, all units of distance are ``completely artificial''
There's got to be a unit of [ distance / time / mass / volume ] we can devise that's not completely artificial in the sense that it can be used to meaningfully measure something across cultural (even planetary or galactic) boundaries.
Mass would be the trickiest, I would assume, since we base it on the effect local gravity has upon the object being measured.
Our time is based upon local planetary cycles, so becomes largely meaningles to someone with a longer or shorter orbit around their local star. However, on a non-physical communication medium (radio, microwave, laser) we can express a unit of time ("From this beep to this beep...").
Volume is also double-edge, since it relies on units of distance and a way to express them in three dimensions.
It seems distance is the easiest starting point, since on a probe or other physical object another culture might acquire we can illustrate one Foo, and use simple pictograms to express that there are ten Foos to a Bar (more during rush week, but I digress...).
It all comes from finding a common stating point. If we can start with time, we can come up with distance (distance being expressed as how far light travels in x time, back to the light-year concept). If we start with distance, we can express time (how long it takes light to travel x distance). From these we can express volume, then the trick comes down to expressing mass.
All of these constructs are still completely artificial and arbitrary, though.
I don't know enough chemistry or physics to know if we could somehow use expressions involving subatomic particles (which one would EXPECT to be relatively constant, right?) to express a starting point for mass, but then we're back to how to illustrate the other ideas.
I'm glad this isn't MY problem to solve...
-l
Re:You might want to do the same
on
Review: K-PAX
·
· Score: 2
Re:You might want to do the same
on
Review: K-PAX
·
· Score: 2
Well, you DID mention that we would be communicating in English. I'm unaware of any English dialect that uses "narr" and "theqq" for "light" and "year", but IANAL (linguist).
Hence, their narr-theqq would translate to light-year. Your and their would have to be used to designate which concept we're referring to.
Sure, if we use the native terms of narr-theqq and light-year distinctly from each other, the "your" and "their" would be unnecessary, but if we're translating into our own native languages, as you clearly stated, the "your" and "their" would be required.
Get it?
-l
...who still can't believe he got drawn into such a pedantic argument on/.
Re:You might want to do the same
on
Review: K-PAX
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
>Hey, if we are gonna speak english with the
>Poontangians, they are going to have something
>other than miles and years to deal with. There
>will be conversion tables, presumably, but if we
>have any intimacy with these people, they won't
>say "your miles" and "your light-years."
>The "your" is redundant.
Not necessarily.
While they may not measure distance in miles, or time in years, "light year" DOES mean "the distance light travels in the time it takes the Earth to make one orbit of the Sun".
Hence, their home planet WILL have an equivalent measurement, it may just not be one measured in a "year" or "miles".
But there WILL be a unit equal to the distance light travels in the time it takes THEIR planet (Poontangia? When's the next flight?) to make one orbit of THEIR sun.
Hence, "your light-year" is correct. "Their light-year" will be more or less (well, there's a CHANCE it's not, but let's be realistic...), but the unit DOES exist.
-l
...shaking his head because he said "let's be realistic" in this discussion...
While it's true that a certain amount of license is allowed for the sake of entertainment, the problem comes in the form of movies like Hackers, where the inaccuracies are so glaring that even the non-technical audience is shaking their head.
It's fine to take some liberties, just don't insult me (and my non-technical friends) while doing so, ok?
Two things, first one about Sneakers, or a real-life example of something like what they did:
At HoHoCon in Houston about 10 years ago, Erik Bloodaxe (formerly of LoD/H) talked about a deal ComSec (the company he and a couple of other former LoD guys started) did that involved breaking into a corporate network and printing themselves a check for $0.00 (and mailing it to themselves!), then presenting it to the company with a comment along the lines of "This could have been for 50 grand..."
I don't recall if they got the job.
Second, about Hackers:
I own Hackers on DVD for one reason only: The Hackers drinking game. Whenever you encounter something that trips the head-shake, drink.
I've never made it all the way through the movie on anything stronger than beer. Usually I'm done within 30-45 minutes. LOTS of "aw geez" in that one.
No, I seem to be applying the meaning of "billion" to "billion" and "gig" to "gig".
>When it comes to computer memory, Kilo- Mega- and Giga- have different meanings than they do in math or physics.
Yes, and a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. Always has been, always will be. I don't care what Connor or Seagate or WD or Maxtor or anyone else says. You'll note that it's 73,741,824 MORE than a billion, which is 1,000,000,000 REGARDLESS of math, physics, computers, the phase of the moon, who is president, or what Bill Gates says about anything.
>The computer industry had a long tradition of
>using these prefixes to indicate the storage of
>the closest power of 2.
Wow. Really? Do tell. I'm awfully new at all this "com-put-ar" stuff. We did things differently in '76...
>1KB = 1,024 B
>1MB = 1,024 * 1,024 B
>1GB = 1,024 * 1,024 * 1,024
Exactly. Spot on.
This does NOT, however, change that a thousand is 1,000, not 1,024. A million is STILL 1,000,000, not 1,048,576. And we've already covered that billion part.
So yeah, thanks for the condescending attitude and thinking you're oh-so-geeker-than-thou, but my response was to Hattig's original claim that:
>Actually, hard drive manufacturers for a long
>time have decided that 1 billion is
>1000x1000x1000, not 1024x1024x1024.
>I believe it's general to assume the average word is 4 characters
Thinking back to seventh grade typing class and the few typing tests I took at temp agencies before finding a real job, the "standard" for a "word" is five characters.
I was last clocked at 130wpm (after correcting for three errors over a five-minute sustained transcription of data) at a temp agency in Austin in the late '80's, and had the testers and assorted staff of the agency standing watching open mouthed. I've only met a handful of people consistently faster than me, and even those that are faster have been 10-20wpm faster, TOPS.
Now you wanna tell me that someone is typing consistently over 400 wpm without significant errors?
>If you go into the store claiming your CD
>doesn't work and the seal HAS been broken, the
>best they will do is provide you with a
>replacement of the same item.
So take your laptop to demonstrate.
Open the replacement at the counter. Put it into the drive. Try to play it.
Slashdot Mirror
During the course of my job, I have to recreate customer environments to duplicate their problems. Often these environments involve firewalls, NAT, or simply multiple subnets that are difficult and time-consuming to get past our IT guys (and even once we convince them of the need, it may be a week before any real progress is made on their end to set things up).
However, using this, I can hopefully get a single box set up with several "systems" using internal virtual networks that will allow me to have something like...
1: Server / Client Gateway
2: Client
3: Firewall / NAT / Router
4: Client Gateway
5: Client
With 1 and 2 being "inside" the firewall and 4 and 5 being "outside".
This would allow me to eliminate TONS of bureaucratic red-tape paperwork BS, and give a self-contained environment for some of my other coworkers to educate themselves on (95% of which have never done any actual hands-on work with a firewall or even done any routing).
While all this could be easily accomplished using a multi-processor Sun box and their domain / partitioning scheme, those tend to be a little more pricey than the dual-P2 I've already got sitting idle in the corner of my office...
Any comments on the feasibility of this scenario?
Would this package work for what I'd like to do?
Thanks...
-l
I had an entirely different problem. I picked up the Limited Edition ($59.99 US at CompUSA) yesterday at lunch, and decided to do a quickie install on my laptop (Thinkpad 600X, P3/500, 256 megs of RAM, several gigs free on the drive) to check it out.
No go. Page fault in ~DF394B.TMP, created by the game. Every time.
Ran through the usual suspects that cause game problems (video/sound drivers, free space, other programs running, yadd yadda), and no luck.
As an absolute last resort, I called Infogrames. After spending 10 minutes navigating their infuriating voice menus, I finally got a live entry-level droid on the phone that tried to walk me through the steps listed on their web page (the same web page you have to go to in order to get their phone number in the first place).
I realize it's his job to try to weed out the easy ones from Bubba McGillicutty that just jumps right to the live person, but please accept that some of us have been playing computer games for 20+ years and actually know how to troubleshoot these things...
30 minutes later, he announces that he'll send a message out to his other techs, and call me back with an update.
He hadn't called back by the time I left work, so the game got returned to CompUSA (getting cash back for software at CompUSA *can* be done, it's just not easy).
This morning I had a message on my voicemail that says the game is incompatible with the NeoMagic video chipsets used in many laptops, and he is unaware of plans for a patch to correct the issue.
I might pay $30 (US) for a game I can only play at my desk at home, but I'm not paying $60 for something I can't play while sitting in an airport or laying on the couch.
Sorry, Firaxis/Infogrames/Sid, maybe I'll buy it again in a few months when it's a LOT cheaper, but for now I'll stick with Civ 2 (the original, none of this CTP business).
-l
?You're confusing mass with weight. Even in zero
>gravity, objects have mass. You can define mass
>independently of the local gravitational field
>using inertia. That is, the harder it is to get
>something moving (or to stop something that's
>moving), the more mass it has.
Well, except that around these here parts, we measure mass by weight, for convenience's sake.
>Time is simpe to define in a standard way that >isn't specific to the motions of the planets in
>our solar system. For example, you can
>define "one second" to be 9,192,631,770
>oscillations of a cesium-133 atom
I figured there was something like that. That's pretty cool. Thou art more chem-literate than I. Way more. But since I never got around to it in school, most people are. Still cool though.
>Heck, even your wristwatch uses a conceptually >similar oscillating quartz crystal to keep time
Actually I use my pager for a timepiece since the battery died in my watch and I never got around to fixing it, but your point is still taken. Heh.
-l
I not only caught it, I mentioned it, quoted it, and then had to explain it to the good folks on the chat sstem I hang out on.
Sigh, and these people call themselves FANS.
-l
>Come to think of it, all units of distance are ``completely artificial''
There's got to be a unit of [ distance / time / mass / volume ] we can devise that's not completely artificial in the sense that it can be used to meaningfully measure something across cultural (even planetary or galactic) boundaries.
Mass would be the trickiest, I would assume, since we base it on the effect local gravity has upon the object being measured.
Our time is based upon local planetary cycles, so becomes largely meaningles to someone with a longer or shorter orbit around their local star. However, on a non-physical communication medium (radio, microwave, laser) we can express a unit of time ("From this beep to this beep...").
Volume is also double-edge, since it relies on units of distance and a way to express them in three dimensions.
It seems distance is the easiest starting point, since on a probe or other physical object another culture might acquire we can illustrate one Foo, and use simple pictograms to express that there are ten Foos to a Bar (more during rush week, but I digress...).
It all comes from finding a common stating point. If we can start with time, we can come up with distance (distance being expressed as how far light travels in x time, back to the light-year concept). If we start with distance, we can express time (how long it takes light to travel x distance). From these we can express volume, then the trick comes down to expressing mass.
All of these constructs are still completely artificial and arbitrary, though.
I don't know enough chemistry or physics to know if we could somehow use expressions involving subatomic particles (which one would EXPECT to be relatively constant, right?) to express a starting point for mass, but then we're back to how to illustrate the other ideas.
I'm glad this isn't MY problem to solve...
-l
>Or we could just stick to parsecs.
Wait, would those be our parsecs or..
Oh, nevermind.
[grin]
-l
Nodwick from a few days ago.
-l
Well, you DID mention that we would be communicating in English. I'm unaware of any English dialect that uses "narr" and "theqq" for "light" and "year", but IANAL (linguist).
Hence, their narr-theqq would translate to light-year. Your and their would have to be used to designate which concept we're referring to.
Sure, if we use the native terms of narr-theqq and light-year distinctly from each other, the "your" and "their" would be unnecessary, but if we're translating into our own native languages, as you clearly stated, the "your" and "their" would be required.
Get it?
-l
>Hey, if we are gonna speak english with the
...shaking his head because he said "let's be realistic" in this discussion...
>Poontangians, they are going to have something
>other than miles and years to deal with. There
>will be conversion tables, presumably, but if we
>have any intimacy with these people, they won't
>say "your miles" and "your light-years."
>The "your" is redundant.
Not necessarily.
While they may not measure distance in miles, or time in years, "light year" DOES mean "the distance light travels in the time it takes the Earth to make one orbit of the Sun".
Hence, their home planet WILL have an equivalent measurement, it may just not be one measured in a "year" or "miles".
But there WILL be a unit equal to the distance light travels in the time it takes THEIR planet (Poontangia? When's the next flight?) to make one orbit of THEIR sun.
Hence, "your light-year" is correct. "Their light-year" will be more or less (well, there's a CHANCE it's not, but let's be realistic...), but the unit DOES exist.
-l
While it's true that a certain amount of license is allowed for the sake of entertainment, the problem comes in the form of movies like Hackers, where the inaccuracies are so glaring that even the non-technical audience is shaking their head.
It's fine to take some liberties, just don't insult me (and my non-technical friends) while doing so, ok?
-l
Two things, first one about Sneakers, or a real-life example of something like what they did:
At HoHoCon in Houston about 10 years ago, Erik Bloodaxe (formerly of LoD/H) talked about a deal ComSec (the company he and a couple of other former LoD guys started) did that involved breaking into a corporate network and printing themselves a check for $0.00 (and mailing it to themselves!), then presenting it to the company with a comment along the lines of "This could have been for 50 grand..."
I don't recall if they got the job.
Second, about Hackers:
I own Hackers on DVD for one reason only: The Hackers drinking game. Whenever you encounter something that trips the head-shake, drink.
I've never made it all the way through the movie on anything stronger than beer. Usually I'm done within 30-45 minutes. LOTS of "aw geez" in that one.
-l
>Loligo, you seem to be confused.
No, I seem to be applying the meaning of "billion" to "billion" and "gig" to "gig".
>When it comes to computer memory, Kilo- Mega- and Giga- have different meanings than they do in math or physics.
Yes, and a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. Always has been, always will be. I don't care what Connor or Seagate or WD or Maxtor or anyone else says. You'll note that it's 73,741,824 MORE than a billion, which is 1,000,000,000 REGARDLESS of math, physics, computers, the phase of the moon, who is president, or what Bill Gates says about anything.
>The computer industry had a long tradition of
>using these prefixes to indicate the storage of
>the closest power of 2.
Wow. Really? Do tell. I'm awfully new at all this "com-put-ar" stuff. We did things differently in '76...
>1KB = 1,024 B
>1MB = 1,024 * 1,024 B
>1GB = 1,024 * 1,024 * 1,024
Exactly. Spot on.
This does NOT, however, change that a thousand is 1,000, not 1,024. A million is STILL 1,000,000, not 1,048,576. And we've already covered that billion part.
So yeah, thanks for the condescending attitude and thinking you're oh-so-geeker-than-thou, but my response was to Hattig's original claim that:
>Actually, hard drive manufacturers for a long
>time have decided that 1 billion is
>1000x1000x1000, not 1024x1024x1024.
...and I stand by my correction.
HTH. HAND.
-l
>Actually, hard drive manufacturers for a long
>time have decided that 1 billion is
>1000x1000x1000, not 1024x1024x1024.
Last time I checked, 1 billion IS 1000x1000x1000.
1024x1024x1024 is 1,073,741,824, a BIT more than a billion.
Or did you mean that the hard drive manufacturers decided a long time ago that a gigabyte is a billion, rather than 1,073,741,824?
-l
More like the stockholders of BMG, Warner, Arista, Sony...
-l
>I wonder if the arcade attendants will need to get MCSE certification...
Can you think of a better use for an MCSE?
-l
>Or perhaps you mean "voila!"
As long as they don't say "wah-lah".
That one makes my teeth itch.
-l
>I believe it's general to assume the average word is 4 characters
Thinking back to seventh grade typing class and the few typing tests I took at temp agencies before finding a real job, the "standard" for a "word" is five characters.
I was last clocked at 130wpm (after correcting for three errors over a five-minute sustained transcription of data) at a temp agency in Austin in the late '80's, and had the testers and assorted staff of the agency standing watching open mouthed. I've only met a handful of people consistently faster than me, and even those that are faster have been 10-20wpm faster, TOPS.
Now you wanna tell me that someone is typing consistently over 400 wpm without significant errors?
My next paycheck says they're full of shit.
-l
>The study could have been done with a lot more /. ...
>people if just one announcement had been made
>here on
Yeah, but they probably already HAD a thousand horny guys.
They needed more WOMEN for the study.
-l
>Ask your local MCSE
Most of the MSCE's I know seem to have already spent plenty of quality time with a pipe...
-l
>If you go into the store claiming your CD
>doesn't work and the seal HAS been broken, the
>best they will do is provide you with a
>replacement of the same item.
So take your laptop to demonstrate.
Open the replacement at the counter. Put it into the drive. Try to play it.
Repeat as necessary.
-l
Perl takes me back, though.
Every time I look at someone else's perl, I expect a line to end with "NO CARRIER"...
-l
>So _what_ car do you drive? Electric?
SARCASM, people.
Jesus fucking CHRIST.
Every time I think humanity has hope, I read slashdot.
-l
>Would people feel OK if they've got a highly
>flammable and explosive gas cannister in their
>home?
Come to Texas, where probably half the houses have a propane barbecue grill in the back yard.
Or visit your rural areas where you'll see farms and ranches with big butane tanks outside.
At least they're not putting these things in cars, I'd sure hate to have a 10-20 gallon tank of highly flammable material anywhere NEAR my car.
-l
>what the hell did you call good ole Seven-Of-Nine then?
I must have missed 2-of-38's shower scene...
-l
Yeah, like a bunch of geeks need something ELSE to beat off to.
Now they can get their Trek fix AND spank-o-matic. One stop shopping.
-l