I've already explained innumerable times when speed becomes dangerous, so I can only conclude that you want to argue for the sake of the arguement. That's too bad.
By your own admission cars roll at 20 should we limit speed to 19?
Only someone wishing to be deliberatly ignorant could have gotten that from what I was saying. In fact, I was pointing out how much safer 20 was than 80, whereas you seem to want everyone to believe it's all the same.
A rational person could draw my post that I believe a safe speed to be somewhere between 20 and below 80, depending on the roadway. Of course, that's what it *is* nationwide - the highest speed limit I've seen is 70, in parts of Michigan. (By the way - don't bother trying to bring up Wyoming - they have state speed limits there now, and there was always a law against, get this, 'unsafe speed', which they ticketed for frequently.) I'm sure you'd like to believe that's a strange trick of random numbers, but hey, think what you want. Accidents aren't very survivable at 80.
There is no such thing as safe when driving, it's an illusion.
Of course not, but that's a useless point. You might as well tell me that the sun is bright, or water is wet. There is a clear thing as safer. And there's a difference between a 1 and 50,000 chance to get injured in a year, and near certain death. I know you realize this, but again, you wish me to believe you don't. Of course, since crossing the street isn't perfectly safe, and neither is shooting yourself in the head, I suppose you'd point out that they are then both unsafe, and therefore the same. I can only imagine that you would do both with equal frequency.
Speed contributes but is not sole reason for any accident.
Incorrect again. At least you're consistant, I guess. I gave you an example of accidents where speed was the sole cause. The only reason why you're out on the salt flats is to achieve speed. The only reason you crash is because of the speed. Do you believe that the ground is at fault because you hit it when you roll the car? Maybe your parents are at fault, if you hadn't been concieved, the accident wouldn't have taken place? Of course not, but you'd like me to think so. So there are cases (such as the above) where speed is the sole cause, and plenty of other cases where speed is the prime cause.
Why do you repeatedly attack me rather than the points I make?
I repeatedly attack you because you're passing yourself off as more ignorant than you actually are. Really, you're just a stuborn jackass with a warped sense of fun, but I can't hold that against you. Of course, in each post, I attacked all of your points rather thoroughly, but you'd like to pretend that didn't happen. Ignorance is one thing, willful ignorance is another.
I was sorta hoping you could explain when speed became dangerous.
Of course, I've done that, and really, too often for my taste, but what's once more? Speed becomes dangerous when an accident (which is inevitable, given enough driving - and I'm sure you're a fantastic driver, NASCAR quality, but tell that to the deer in the road, or the drunk in the car in front of you) becomes a likely killer. Is that too complicated? The human body is a fragile thing. You can only decelerate to 0 in about three feet from so fast without being made quite dead.
Anyway, to save you the trouble: I'm done with you. I've trounced you on every logical point you've made, and now you're really acting quite irrational by stating obvious falsehoods and logical inconsitancies. I really enjoyed the opportunity to strech some logical and rhetorical muscles, though.
Thank you for explaining dangerous I was under some totally different illusion as to what dangerous meant.
Hey, you're the one who kept asking for a definition like it would help anything. Here's an idea - if you don't want one, you probably shouldn't ask for it, multiple times. I love how you can sound all pissy about it, too.
Speed is involved in every accident, stationery cars don't crash. But speed alone? THINK.
About what? If you take the same situation, and reduce speed, you don't crash. If you take speed to excess, it's always dangerous. You think going 200+ on the salt flats is *safe*? Sure, it's designed for it, and sure, it's safeer than doing it in a parking lot, but cars roll there all the time for no other reason than they were going really, really fast.
If you're going too fast, and hit a tree, I'll assume you believe it's the fault of the tree, rather than speed. Okay, if you want to be that completely, willfully ignorant, sure, you're right. Keep on truckin'.
Maybe it does blow donkeys, but I've got it as an http proxy for 1,000 simultaneous users right now - I think that's pretty darn good. And it used to crash a whole lot, but it was a hardware problem - 45 days up, and climbing fast. So sad that so many of those users are looking at pictures of...
People... blowing... donkeys?
Christ, these internet logs scare me. Over 130 MB/day, too.
To argue that speed alone is a problem is to be blind to reason.
That's bordering on the silliest single statement I've ever heard. Not only that, but all your examples are absurd.
Going Mach II in a concord? Sure, it's safe. Try going Mach V, and let me know what happens. It's the same for cars. There are safe speeds, and there are unsafe speeds.
I rolled my Jeep once, in a hailstorm, doing twenty miles per hour. I had to fix a dent in the fender, and get it off its side, but I wasn't even sore. I knew someone who rolled their car probably doing 80mph+. Please note the past tense of the verb, there.
Speed alone is a problem, period. At night, especially - if you're going fast enough that your speed will allow you to travel the illumination distance of your headlights during your reaction time, you're a pancake waiting to happen. Nothing in the world but blind luck can save you. During the day, it's the same around every bend, and over every rise. If you've done it this long, it's because you're lucky, not super-slick.
Do you not consider it dangerous to be alive through luck alone? A deer in the road, a truck stopped around a bend, and maybe, if you're very lucky, you'll be living long enough to spend the rest of your life drinking dinner through a straw. Me personally, *I* consider that dangerous. As for the rest of the world?
Actually, Novell used to put out WordPerfect, before they sold it to Corel. You can even buy yourself a copy on ebay of good old Novell WordPerfect 6.1.
G) Massive technical difficulties, including its tendancy to drive away while plugged in if it's raining. Oh, and lawsuits.
I mean, reading the article, it sounds like the car just *didn't* work, and tipped over more than a few times. Normally I'd be sad a company like this folded, but it doesn't sound like they were doing a very good job.
I hope you see that book for what it is- sensationalist FUD to try to make a quick buck.
What I think is great is that I know by reading your comment that you *didn't* read the book.
And the comments of the other people bashing it. This book spends breathtakingly little time talking about the nutrition of the food, which is all the people who bash it say it talks about. Funny, isn't it?
Well, one day you'll figure it out, but it seems you're the type who won't believe it until it happens directly to you. Oh well.
Believe me, I won't lose any sleep over it. Especially since you think putting something in a different column of a spreadsheet means it doesn't cost anything.
Do you think working in IT for 9 years means anything? Do you think starting at 16 means anything? Maybe you'll have to wait a very long time to get clued in, but when you're laid off two weeks before you can collect on your pension, I bet you'll understand then.
In this world, no one takes care of you but you. Especially not me. So no more free advice, besides this - make certain you have your own damn retirement fund. If you're too dumb to do that, you deserve whatever you get.
Because people that don't work FOR YOUR COMPANY don't have a VESTED interest in your success
So what? The company doesn't have a VESTED interest in your success, either. If you work for a company that has more than 100 employees, in this day and age I nearly guarantee you that you will be laid off as soon as it makes economic sense to do so, and not a moment later. Do companies have pension plans anymore? Do they take care of you if you get sick, above and beyond what the law requires? No. Why would they? All a company has VESTED interest in is its shareholders - not you, not the country, not the environment, nothing. If you think they more than marginally care that you're dedicated, you're wrong.
If you're an employee in a large corporation today, that's all you are - essentially a contract laborer - a cog in a machine. Your thinking is completely wrong, and one day it will bite you in the ass. Loyalty is dead.
On the other hand, intentionally writing what I would call 'broken' code, i.e. something so undocumented as to be unusable is also wrong - you're not holding up your end of the contract. Practically, you're a thief.
Either way, call back when you're over 30. Right now, you're 25, and as far as the real world, you don't know shit about shit.
By the way - I can lower my labor costs be 100%... fire everyone and outsource every department. Seriously, what does that mean? You can lower your labor costs be 100%? Even if the words were right, is outsourcing free now? If so, who do I call to find that bargain?
Well, in games like RTCW, being much harder to hit can be a great advantage - like on MP_Beach, if you have the documents, and happen to lag, it's nearly a sure bet you can make it to the radio room to transmit them just by zipping right by everyone who's shooting at spots you're not actually in, as you herk and jerk by them. Since you don't have to shoot anyone to win...
It sucks, but it nearly made playing on a modem worth it. =p
Look, this is very simple - your computer is *NOT* your home. It's certainly not a residence. Is it more like a store? If the police want a frigging sandwich, should they knock on the door of the deli until someone lets them in, or should they open the door? And then if you're stupid enough to have your fired up bong going there on the counter, guess what will happen?
Or you could quit with the bad analogies that are so flawed as to be meaningless.
Here's a clue - if you don't want *anyone and everyone in the world* on your server, put a password on it. If you think you have a right to privacy on an open server meant for anonymous connections, you're pretty delusional.
Oxdung. A burglar won't get away with "but, your honour, his unlocked screen door was flapping in the wind, so I was able to go in his house without any effort".
Well, no. But that's because they're a burglar - they'd get charged with *theft*, but not breaking and entering. Which is why it's called breaking and entering, and not just uh... entering. =p
Well, it's not *impossible*... just really not likely. If you have electronic fuel injection, I guess if it decided to pump as much fuel as possible while your engine was idling, there might be so much fuel in the cylinders that the normal travel of the piston would cause enough pressure to burst a seal or two. Does that qualify? =p
Dumb terminals would be cheapest, connected to a single *nix/bsd box per ten or fifteen users.
Windows, licence fee and all is total overkill for data entry.
It's not like *all* the databases can run on a terminal. Can a terminal conected to a BSD box run Access well? What about FoxPro? How about Q&A? Or, god help me, my personal favorite, My Mail List? These are programs that are old, going on ancient, and they don't exactly have SQL back ends.
Besides, honestly, how much do you think we paid per seat of Windows 98? Fifty bucks? Mayyyybe? Ten bucks a year! Overkill! Crikey, you people.
I realized, you could reply to my post, "But the city spends 750 million on IT each year! There's got to be something to cut somewhere!"
Well, There's about 300,000 city workers. Though that number is a'dropping, and maybe that is too many, but that's a discussion for another time.
750 million/300,000 = $2,500. But that's all of IT. It's not just workstations, it's IT people, software, development, servers, *wiring*, paying for internet access... you get the idea. My agency has about 1500 users, and all of them get internet access (intended to be used for job posting/research) through a single T1 line. At maybe $900/month, that means people in our agency get internet access for...
Sixty cents a month.
Seriously, *most* of city government isn't out to screw you. On average, we're a hard working bunch of people who have to follow a lot of rules to try to save *your* money. Everythings bid out, justified, gone over with a fine tooth comb, and then sometimes turned down anyway. Leave government waste to the feds. =)
I happen to work for NYC government, and this post makes me want to cry.
Something people need to understand - city/federal government isn't anything similar to amazon or google. They can save money using open source - but we're the government - we're not running a search engine here, or selling books on the web. Most of what any city government IT department does is desktop support for people who use computers to do their jobs, usually entering some kind of information into one database or another.
Something else to keep in mind - we're not exactly paying the big bucks on salary either, especially for NYC. The kind of people who use these computers are very frequently people on a welfare assistance program that requires you to work to get your welfare check. Most of the time, these are some pretty great people, but they didn't exactly grow up with a computer in the house... ease of use is a big issue, and I think that it's still safe to say that crown belongs to Microsoft.
The only other big thing is communication. E-mail and the like. We use Groupwise in my agency, which is much lower cost than exchange, since Novell cuts us some pretty good deals on state contract. But we need to communicate to other people - the central IT agency for the city currently mandates that we maintain an exchange gateway, since there is no anti-virus product I can find that can scan attachments in groupwise. Even if that wasn't an issue, these are fairly important political figures, and so they demand blackberries - Mayor Bloomberg is *huge* on these things, and insists that people have them, and be able to respond to any e-mail within 10 minutes. If you can tell me how to get the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) running on Linux, I'll give you a great big cookie. There's countless things like this.
And back to those databases? Honestly, many of them still pop open a DOS window, for crying out loud. Even more require a *terminal emulator* to connect to an IBM mainframe. I think it's safe to say that we've been keeping the software budget on the cheap. Our standard workstation runs Windows 98, with Office 97. And keep in mind, they *come with the PC's*... so we're not exactly hosing money around here.
Sorry. A little bitterness slipped through there. =)
I'll sum up. Open source is good, and we use it when we can. We have a few Linux servers in production, and have used it for DNS, DHCP, Jabber, and firewalling. But mandating open source is just a *bad* thing.
I have time warner cable, and this is pretty much what they do, but without traffic shaping, just plain old download speed caps.
When I first start a download, I'm capable of seeing 500-600 KB/sec. After 10-15 seconds, that'll fall to what is pretty much my max speed of 230-250 KB/sec. It's not the fact that IE starts the download when I'm choosing the save location, since I've seen this happen in WS_FTP sessions, and other situations without cache.
So, what you have when you're doing an interactive session is a pipe three times bigger than what they'll let you keep. This makes web browsing fast as *all* heck. Not that I think 230 KB/sec is really slow, since the best I could pull of Verizon DSL before I switched was 170 KB/sec.
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I've already explained innumerable times when speed becomes dangerous, so I can only conclude that you want to argue for the sake of the arguement. That's too bad.
By your own admission cars roll at 20 should we limit speed to 19?
Only someone wishing to be deliberatly ignorant could have gotten that from what I was saying. In fact, I was pointing out how much safer 20 was than 80, whereas you seem to want everyone to believe it's all the same.
A rational person could draw my post that I believe a safe speed to be somewhere between 20 and below 80, depending on the roadway. Of course, that's what it *is* nationwide - the highest speed limit I've seen is 70, in parts of Michigan. (By the way - don't bother trying to bring up Wyoming - they have state speed limits there now, and there was always a law against, get this, 'unsafe speed', which they ticketed for frequently.) I'm sure you'd like to believe that's a strange trick of random numbers, but hey, think what you want. Accidents aren't very survivable at 80.
There is no such thing as safe when driving, it's an illusion.
Of course not, but that's a useless point. You might as well tell me that the sun is bright, or water is wet. There is a clear thing as safer. And there's a difference between a 1 and 50,000 chance to get injured in a year, and near certain death. I know you realize this, but again, you wish me to believe you don't. Of course, since crossing the street isn't perfectly safe, and neither is shooting yourself in the head, I suppose you'd point out that they are then both unsafe, and therefore the same. I can only imagine that you would do both with equal frequency.
Speed contributes but is not sole reason for any accident.
Incorrect again. At least you're consistant, I guess. I gave you an example of accidents where speed was the sole cause. The only reason why you're out on the salt flats is to achieve speed. The only reason you crash is because of the speed. Do you believe that the ground is at fault because you hit it when you roll the car? Maybe your parents are at fault, if you hadn't been concieved, the accident wouldn't have taken place? Of course not, but you'd like me to think so. So there are cases (such as the above) where speed is the sole cause, and plenty of other cases where speed is the prime cause.
Why do you repeatedly attack me rather than the points I make?
I repeatedly attack you because you're passing yourself off as more ignorant than you actually are. Really, you're just a stuborn jackass with a warped sense of fun, but I can't hold that against you. Of course, in each post, I attacked all of your points rather thoroughly, but you'd like to pretend that didn't happen. Ignorance is one thing, willful ignorance is another.
I was sorta hoping you could explain when speed became dangerous.
Of course, I've done that, and really, too often for my taste, but what's once more? Speed becomes dangerous when an accident (which is inevitable, given enough driving - and I'm sure you're a fantastic driver, NASCAR quality, but tell that to the deer in the road, or the drunk in the car in front of you) becomes a likely killer. Is that too complicated? The human body is a fragile thing. You can only decelerate to 0 in about three feet from so fast without being made quite dead.
Anyway, to save you the trouble: I'm done with you. I've trounced you on every logical point you've made, and now you're really acting quite irrational by stating obvious falsehoods and logical inconsitancies. I really enjoyed the opportunity to strech some logical and rhetorical muscles, though.
Short version: Fun's over, sorry.
Thank you for explaining dangerous I was under some totally different illusion as to what dangerous meant.
Hey, you're the one who kept asking for a definition like it would help anything. Here's an idea - if you don't want one, you probably shouldn't ask for it, multiple times. I love how you can sound all pissy about it, too.
Speed is involved in every accident, stationery cars don't crash. But speed alone? THINK.
About what? If you take the same situation, and reduce speed, you don't crash. If you take speed to excess, it's always dangerous. You think going 200+ on the salt flats is *safe*? Sure, it's designed for it, and sure, it's safeer than doing it in a parking lot, but cars roll there all the time for no other reason than they were going really, really fast.
If you're going too fast, and hit a tree, I'll assume you believe it's the fault of the tree, rather than speed. Okay, if you want to be that completely, willfully ignorant, sure, you're right. Keep on truckin'.
Except Bordermanager, which blows donkeys IMO.
Maybe it does blow donkeys, but I've got it as an http proxy for 1,000 simultaneous users right now - I think that's pretty darn good. And it used to crash a whole lot, but it was a hardware problem - 45 days up, and climbing fast. So sad that so many of those users are looking at pictures of...
People... blowing... donkeys?
Christ, these internet logs scare me. Over 130 MB/day, too.
To argue that speed alone is a problem is to be blind to reason.
That's bordering on the silliest single statement I've ever heard. Not only that, but all your examples are absurd.
Going Mach II in a concord? Sure, it's safe. Try going Mach V, and let me know what happens. It's the same for cars. There are safe speeds, and there are unsafe speeds.
I rolled my Jeep once, in a hailstorm, doing twenty miles per hour. I had to fix a dent in the fender, and get it off its side, but I wasn't even sore. I knew someone who rolled their car probably doing 80mph+. Please note the past tense of the verb, there.
Speed alone is a problem, period. At night, especially - if you're going fast enough that your speed will allow you to travel the illumination distance of your headlights during your reaction time, you're a pancake waiting to happen. Nothing in the world but blind luck can save you. During the day, it's the same around every bend, and over every rise. If you've done it this long, it's because you're lucky, not super-slick.
Do you not consider it dangerous to be alive through luck alone? A deer in the road, a truck stopped around a bend, and maybe, if you're very lucky, you'll be living long enough to spend the rest of your life drinking dinner through a straw. Me personally, *I* consider that dangerous. As for the rest of the world?
Dangerous:
1) Involving or filled with danger; perilous.
2) Being able or likely to do harm.
Anything else?
Actually, Novell used to put out WordPerfect, before they sold it to Corel. You can even buy yourself a copy on ebay of good old Novell WordPerfect 6.1.
I guess everyone's not as old (school) as me. =p
The one thing that Microsoft Windows beats back Linux in every time is compatability... With Windows, it's DirectX all the way.
Well, or OpenGL for those little indie games like Quake III or Doom III.
Well, of course. Most DJ's still use vinyl...
Well, I've met one or two who really love the final scratch. So much so, it's a little freaky, actually.
Um... I was referring to his link constantly getting chunked by the lameness filter. What are you talking about?
Give up yet? =p
Sadly, the answer is:
G) Massive technical difficulties, including its tendancy to drive away while plugged in if it's raining. Oh, and lawsuits.
I mean, reading the article, it sounds like the car just *didn't* work, and tipped over more than a few times. Normally I'd be sad a company like this folded, but it doesn't sound like they were doing a very good job.
I hope you see that book for what it is- sensationalist FUD to try to make a quick buck.
What I think is great is that I know by reading your comment that you *didn't* read the book.
And the comments of the other people bashing it. This book spends breathtakingly little time talking about the nutrition of the food, which is all the people who bash it say it talks about. Funny, isn't it?
Well, one day you'll figure it out, but it seems you're the type who won't believe it until it happens directly to you. Oh well.
Believe me, I won't lose any sleep over it. Especially since you think putting something in a different column of a spreadsheet means it doesn't cost anything.
Do you think working in IT for 9 years means anything? Do you think starting at 16 means anything? Maybe you'll have to wait a very long time to get clued in, but when you're laid off two weeks before you can collect on your pension, I bet you'll understand then.
In this world, no one takes care of you but you. Especially not me. So no more free advice, besides this - make certain you have your own damn retirement fund. If you're too dumb to do that, you deserve whatever you get.
Because people that don't work FOR YOUR COMPANY don't have a VESTED interest in your success
So what? The company doesn't have a VESTED interest in your success, either. If you work for a company that has more than 100 employees, in this day and age I nearly guarantee you that you will be laid off as soon as it makes economic sense to do so, and not a moment later. Do companies have pension plans anymore? Do they take care of you if you get sick, above and beyond what the law requires? No. Why would they? All a company has VESTED interest in is its shareholders - not you, not the country, not the environment, nothing. If you think they more than marginally care that you're dedicated, you're wrong.
If you're an employee in a large corporation today, that's all you are - essentially a contract laborer - a cog in a machine. Your thinking is completely wrong, and one day it will bite you in the ass. Loyalty is dead.
On the other hand, intentionally writing what I would call 'broken' code, i.e. something so undocumented as to be unusable is also wrong - you're not holding up your end of the contract. Practically, you're a thief.
Either way, call back when you're over 30. Right now, you're 25, and as far as the real world, you don't know shit about shit.
By the way - I can lower my labor costs be 100%... fire everyone and outsource every department. Seriously, what does that mean? You can lower your labor costs be 100%? Even if the words were right, is outsourcing free now? If so, who do I call to find that bargain?
This kind of work ethic (or lack thereof) is why companies are outsourcing programming and support to India.
Yeah, or it could be because they work for less. Just an idea.
Well, in games like RTCW, being much harder to hit can be a great advantage - like on MP_Beach, if you have the documents, and happen to lag, it's nearly a sure bet you can make it to the radio room to transmit them just by zipping right by everyone who's shooting at spots you're not actually in, as you herk and jerk by them. Since you don't have to shoot anyone to win...
It sucks, but it nearly made playing on a modem worth it. =p
You expect privacy while out in public? Are you serious?
Unless the police car is located in your living room (at which point, you have bigger problems) it has nothing to do with privacy.
Look, this is very simple - your computer is *NOT* your home. It's certainly not a residence. Is it more like a store? If the police want a frigging sandwich, should they knock on the door of the deli until someone lets them in, or should they open the door? And then if you're stupid enough to have your fired up bong going there on the counter, guess what will happen?
Or you could quit with the bad analogies that are so flawed as to be meaningless.
Here's a clue - if you don't want *anyone and everyone in the world* on your server, put a password on it. If you think you have a right to privacy on an open server meant for anonymous connections, you're pretty delusional.
Oxdung. A burglar won't get away with "but, your honour, his unlocked screen door was flapping in the wind, so I was able to go in his house without any effort".
Well, no. But that's because they're a burglar - they'd get charged with *theft*, but not breaking and entering. Which is why it's called breaking and entering, and not just uh... entering. =p
Well, it's not *impossible*... just really not likely. If you have electronic fuel injection, I guess if it decided to pump as much fuel as possible while your engine was idling, there might be so much fuel in the cylinders that the normal travel of the piston would cause enough pressure to burst a seal or two. Does that qualify? =p
Dumb terminals would be cheapest, connected to a single *nix/bsd box per ten or fifteen users.
Windows, licence fee and all is total overkill for data entry.
It's not like *all* the databases can run on a terminal. Can a terminal conected to a BSD box run Access well? What about FoxPro? How about Q&A? Or, god help me, my personal favorite, My Mail List? These are programs that are old, going on ancient, and they don't exactly have SQL back ends.
Besides, honestly, how much do you think we paid per seat of Windows 98? Fifty bucks? Mayyyybe? Ten bucks a year! Overkill! Crikey, you people.
A small follow up:
I realized, you could reply to my post, "But the city spends 750 million on IT each year! There's got to be something to cut somewhere!"
Well, There's about 300,000 city workers. Though that number is a'dropping, and maybe that is too many, but that's a discussion for another time.
750 million/300,000 = $2,500. But that's all of IT. It's not just workstations, it's IT people, software, development, servers, *wiring*, paying for internet access... you get the idea. My agency has about 1500 users, and all of them get internet access (intended to be used for job posting/research) through a single T1 line. At maybe $900/month, that means people in our agency get internet access for...
Sixty cents a month.
Seriously, *most* of city government isn't out to screw you. On average, we're a hard working bunch of people who have to follow a lot of rules to try to save *your* money. Everythings bid out, justified, gone over with a fine tooth comb, and then sometimes turned down anyway. Leave government waste to the feds. =)
Funny trivia:
City's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications
That's right. They're called DoITT. Pronounced (seriously here) "Do it."
Which, when they send memos mandating something, that's really all they say. Not really why, but just do it!
Though, they are usually right, believe it or not.
I happen to work for NYC government, and this post makes me want to cry.
Something people need to understand - city/federal government isn't anything similar to amazon or google. They can save money using open source - but we're the government - we're not running a search engine here, or selling books on the web. Most of what any city government IT department does is desktop support for people who use computers to do their jobs, usually entering some kind of information into one database or another.
Something else to keep in mind - we're not exactly paying the big bucks on salary either, especially for NYC. The kind of people who use these computers are very frequently people on a welfare assistance program that requires you to work to get your welfare check. Most of the time, these are some pretty great people, but they didn't exactly grow up with a computer in the house... ease of use is a big issue, and I think that it's still safe to say that crown belongs to Microsoft.
The only other big thing is communication. E-mail and the like. We use Groupwise in my agency, which is much lower cost than exchange, since Novell cuts us some pretty good deals on state contract. But we need to communicate to other people - the central IT agency for the city currently mandates that we maintain an exchange gateway, since there is no anti-virus product I can find that can scan attachments in groupwise. Even if that wasn't an issue, these are fairly important political figures, and so they demand blackberries - Mayor Bloomberg is *huge* on these things, and insists that people have them, and be able to respond to any e-mail within 10 minutes. If you can tell me how to get the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) running on Linux, I'll give you a great big cookie. There's countless things like this.
And back to those databases? Honestly, many of them still pop open a DOS window, for crying out loud. Even more require a *terminal emulator* to connect to an IBM mainframe. I think it's safe to say that we've been keeping the software budget on the cheap. Our standard workstation runs Windows 98, with Office 97. And keep in mind, they *come with the PC's*... so we're not exactly hosing money around here.
Sorry. A little bitterness slipped through there. =)
I'll sum up. Open source is good, and we use it when we can. We have a few Linux servers in production, and have used it for DNS, DHCP, Jabber, and firewalling. But mandating open source is just a *bad* thing.
How is it clearly a parody of American Greetings' trademarks?
Uh... That'd be Strawberry Shortcake.
I have time warner cable, and this is pretty much what they do, but without traffic shaping, just plain old download speed caps.
When I first start a download, I'm capable of seeing 500-600 KB/sec. After 10-15 seconds, that'll fall to what is pretty much my max speed of 230-250 KB/sec. It's not the fact that IE starts the download when I'm choosing the save location, since I've seen this happen in WS_FTP sessions, and other situations without cache.
So, what you have when you're doing an interactive session is a pipe three times bigger than what they'll let you keep. This makes web browsing fast as *all* heck. Not that I think 230 KB/sec is really slow, since the best I could pull of Verizon DSL before I switched was 170 KB/sec.