Where I am you can add a step before (1) -
0.1) Buy it from a HUB (Historically Underutilized Business - minority or woman owned business) - even more insane prices than state list
Recently we were also told we can't use the HUBs we have been using (though costly were quite capable and providing a good service to us) and must use another HUB because now we aren't buying enough from specific minority/gender combination groups.
Only at that point are we allowed to proceed the aforementioned idiocy.
My wife gets pissed when I do that. She also gets mighty perturbed when I respond with "No" when clerks ask for a phone number, zip code, SSN (at doctor offices and schools), or other unnecessary information.
But they do make kid friendly 'comic-like' books. I found these ~8"x8" books in the kids section that are about Marvel and Star Wars and several other subjects (girl friendly too) that my kids loved. Here is a link to one of the books at B&N.
I loved these books, most of them are less than $4 and they are quick and easy for kids to start reading on their own as they get a little older.
From bn.com:
ISBN-13: 9780061626128
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 12/22/2009
Pages: 24
Age range: 4 - 10 Years
Then it's a good thing I'm not a Mason, though from what I've seen they seem to be a good group of people. I found most of my father's family was involved and I enjoyed reading about and meeting a number of Masons locally.
In any event, reading about the decryption process was really interesting.
From the parts of the document I read I assumed it was about the Free Masons and only after reading some of the other pages did I see the assertions about ophthalmology.
I didn't continue reading to see if they had eliminated the Masons as the responsible party, but if they did there are quite a lot of similarities to the Masons (even loosely to the symbols used) and maybe the people involved with this society were also associated with the Masons as well.
Between getting AGP video cards running in whatever *nix happened to be on my box at the time along with the time I spent on the phones at Dell/. was one of the best diversions I had. Thirteen years and numerous geek related jobs later I'm still here almost every day.
Use the dgmgrl to convert the standby database to 'Snapshot Standby'. Once it is in that mode you can make any changes you want to the system and then convert the standby back to 'Physical Standby'.
During the conversion back to Physical Standby it brings the database back to the point in time that it was converted to snapshot and applies all the logs that have shipped while in snapshot mode. Just make absolutely sure that you've got enugh space in the FRA to hold the initial snapshot and any changes before the database is reverted.
All the while the DG brokers are still running and you never 'stop' DG, just change the standby to something more usable for those instances where devs need current production data.
We use DataGaurd and part of the process for opening the standby for use sanitizes any sensitive data and resets all the passwords to the development passwords. This has been an excellent resource since devs can see exactly what is on production at any point in time.
Then you just close it up and it reapplies all shipped logs for DR and you're good to go.
Reading this story and many of the responses I'm surprised that there aren't more akin to this. While some of the MMOs have been addictive to me (no more, children are much more fun) every game I've played that has given me the most enjoyment has been for reasons that you describe.
MUDs, Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Unreal, gobs of RPG type games and, lastly, MMOs provided me ample opportunity tweak and see what I could make them do. In some cases it was directly and easily modified. Other cases required external tools, but in every case I was interested in seeing how far I could push the mechanics.
Playing the games are fun. Pushing them to their limits are what I enjoy. This is pretty much true for me in most aspects of my life, though.
Oddly enough the online only option is largely why I quit playing games. The DRM was also getting simply unacceptable and I enjoy playing through games in single player/offline modes as well. Don't get me wrong, I love the interaction and experience that online games can provide, but dealing with people all day means that sometimes I just want to sit down and play and see the AI or game rules or whatever behave exactly as expected.
I guess in that regard it's a bit more like passive entertainment through TV and such, but I still like the puzzles and at least learning to understand how the developer designed the game play experience.
Other than that some of the most fun I've had in 20 some-odd years of gaming has been building and designing modifcations and levels and hacking games to see just how far you could push the engines and yourself with private servers and game connections among friends. So many games lack any ability to do that kind of thing and between that and the above mentioned problems I rarely (if ever) find myself buying games anymore.
The only reason that I bought the original Xbox was for all the media center functionality. I like playing games and such, but that was not my primary interest.
I know there are and were plenty of media center PCs, but I never found one that I liked the look of and wouldn't require me to do all kinds of work. With the xbox I installed a mod-chip in about 15 minutes, loaded XBMC and was streaming music and movies inside an hour start to finish. I can even still watch Hulu from it.
Plus I got the xbox used with a couple controllers and games for less than I could even buy one of the little Nvidia pc boards. Best $100 I ever spent on a piece of electronics.
Offtopic, there is a great parody to the FBI warnings on the intro of "Moss and the German" on season 2 of The IT Crowd. If you haven't already seen it then I'll say that it gave me a good laugh about it.
Don't get me wrong. We are primarily an Oracle shop, but we've got several instances on MySQL running (mostly LAMPs and WAMPs) and even an MSSQL Server (much to the chagrin of our "Oracle is great" boss.)
I believe that there is a good tool for a job and will use whatever is the most suitable within a given set of parameters.
My greatest hope would be to make MySQL and Oracle more interoperable so that we could reduce our adminsitrative overheard. At this point I've got MSSQL instances that replicate application data to our Oracle warehouse and it would be nice to have a consistent back-end for our wikis and other 'forward-facing' apps.
Along the same line as the high-end/low-end thing Oracle does have a 'low-end' Oracle database (Oracle XE) but it's never really gotten any kind of following or use that I have seen. So I could definitely understand their interest in providing an entry-level system with their name attached.
I've not understood the complaints about sharing the market space. Anyone running full-blown Oracle database systems will be well and truly beyond MySQL. Aside from that, try and get some PHB to understand that MySQL is in any way comparable to Oracle.
On the plus side- if Oracle can actually provide an easy to use path to migrate from MySQL to Oracle or to provide some kind of abstraction layer that would let you use MySQL-backed applications with Oracle I would cheer them to no end.
And as for the founder's (and the founder's buddy referenced in the article) concerns about the future of the product then he shouldn't have sold the damn thing. So sorry, you sold your rights to it. Fork it and start over if you really care that much.
I'd believe they are unable to find parts. I worked on phone systems and one of our clients had a nearly 30 year old Rolm CBX system that had gone from Rolm to IBM to Siemens. The model they had *ONLY* had parts for both it and its voicemail add-on available from some guy that literally bought up a bunch of units being replaced and sold the spare parts out of his garage.
And keep in mind that for quite some time ROLM systems were nearly as popular as the Nortel systems.
Change? Not from what we can see over this side of the Atlantic, the only difference here in Europe is instead of a US president having his leg humped by Tony Blair, we've now got a US president having his leg humped by Sarkozy and Berlusconi instead.
I suppose if I had to pick, I'd prefer to only get one leg humped...but really does it have to come to that? Send over some better (looking) 'ambassadors' and I'll be happy to make a more informed decision.
I started reading the series as a freshman in high school shortly after the third book came out. I was so impressed that I took the time to write Jordan and managed to carry on a good bit of letter writing back and forth for about a year.
Oddly enough (and I think it REALLY shows) at the time Jordan himself said he expected that he had enough 'story' for about seven books all told. I don't know what changed, or if he just lost his way, but I can say I was irritated that most of the books around 4 and later had at best half a book's worth of material in it.
I'll finish the series as I am usually running out of things to read anyhow but I didn't even realize that this latest book had come out.
We used the Sensatronics EM1 which is connected to the network and monitor it with several things. The EM1 interface is very simple and one of the monitors is just a cron job that scrapes the output from the web interface and will shutdown some of our more sensative equipment if it gets too hot.
They also have a bevy of interfaces from commercial products and the couple of monitoring/notification systems we tested were all able to communicate with the EM1 without any problems.
The total cost for the EM1 and several temp and temp+humidity probes was less than 700$ USD. If you don't care about multiple probes you could probably get it for under 500$ USD.
I've worked a number of places over the years and none less than 4-5 years. In each of the places where my direct boss was a woman each of them were like that with only one exception.
After the last one asked me to deploy VOIP in 14 buildings across 7 counties in late 2000(!?!) within two weeks so it could be ready for a conference I swore I'd never work for a woman again. I also submitted my time for that week, erased my system, deleted all my accounts and walked out of the office that evening.
I can certainly agree with you, but from the other side of the equation. I much enjoy the sniping side of things in games; however, I believe some games can go too far in favor of one side or the other. I don't want to sit somewhere and pick off people infinitely, but at the same time other games limit game play types to people with jump macros and the only useful weapon for everyone is a damned rocket launcher.
I really enjoy it when I have to work to get set and still have to make excursions for resupply, etc.
It's also very fun when there are a plethora of legitimate options for weapons/play/power but in a balanced (haha, I know...wish in one hand) fashion.
From what I recall of genetics, the cellular aging is (partially) what leads to shorter life spans and increased age related problems in clones. If you are cloning an animal it is kind of like making a copy of a copy since the telomeres are actually a part of the chromosomes they are transferred into the new host.
This leads to the telomeres being extended far beyond their 'normal' lifespan and you end up with all kinds of abnormalities that usually wouldn't be present until the subject is much older even though they still look young.
If nothing else, this discovery should help in the research of cloned animals and livestock, etc. But take all this with a grain of salt...I've not been involved with genetics for the better part of 12 years.
If I'm paying for bytes, I'd like guaranteed rates to start with. I'd also like to speak with at least marginally competent staff when a problem occurs.
I would also assume that my lower bound on my bill is not going to be less than I'm paying right now since these are only going to be options if it will make them more money than any additional billing/administrative overhead will cost. Assuming I'm paying at least as much as I am now, then where is the added benefit for this 'service'?
That's much my point. And there are a number of fairly interesting shows on some of the science channels that at least introduce people to new concepts.
Slashdot Mirror
Where I am you can add a step before (1) -
0.1) Buy it from a HUB (Historically Underutilized Business - minority or woman owned business) - even more insane prices than state list
Recently we were also told we can't use the HUBs we have been using (though costly were quite capable and providing a good service to us) and must use another HUB because now we aren't buying enough from specific minority/gender combination groups.
Only at that point are we allowed to proceed the aforementioned idiocy.
My wife gets pissed when I do that. She also gets mighty perturbed when I respond with "No" when clerks ask for a phone number, zip code, SSN (at doctor offices and schools), or other unnecessary information.
I loved these books, most of them are less than $4 and they are quick and easy for kids to start reading on their own as they get a little older.
From bn.com:
ISBN-13: 9780061626128
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 12/22/2009
Pages: 24
Age range: 4 - 10 Years
Then it's a good thing I'm not a Mason, though from what I've seen they seem to be a good group of people. I found most of my father's family was involved and I enjoyed reading about and meeting a number of Masons locally.
In any event, reading about the decryption process was really interesting.
From the parts of the document I read I assumed it was about the Free Masons and only after reading some of the other pages did I see the assertions about ophthalmology.
I didn't continue reading to see if they had eliminated the Masons as the responsible party, but if they did there are quite a lot of similarities to the Masons (even loosely to the symbols used) and maybe the people involved with this society were also associated with the Masons as well.
Between getting AGP video cards running in whatever *nix happened to be on my box at the time along with the time I spent on the phones at Dell /. was one of the best diversions I had. Thirteen years and numerous geek related jobs later I'm still here almost every day.
You built something special, thank you.
Use the dgmgrl to convert the standby database to 'Snapshot Standby'. Once it is in that mode you can make any changes you want to the system and then convert the standby back to 'Physical Standby'.
During the conversion back to Physical Standby it brings the database back to the point in time that it was converted to snapshot and applies all the logs that have shipped while in snapshot mode. Just make absolutely sure that you've got enugh space in the FRA to hold the initial snapshot and any changes before the database is reverted.
All the while the DG brokers are still running and you never 'stop' DG, just change the standby to something more usable for those instances where devs need current production data.
We use DataGaurd and part of the process for opening the standby for use sanitizes any sensitive data and resets all the passwords to the development passwords. This has been an excellent resource since devs can see exactly what is on production at any point in time.
Then you just close it up and it reapplies all shipped logs for DR and you're good to go.
Love it.
That's a new one on me. I'll have to tell it to the rest of my Aggie family.
Reading this story and many of the responses I'm surprised that there aren't more akin to this. While some of the MMOs have been addictive to me (no more, children are much more fun) every game I've played that has given me the most enjoyment has been for reasons that you describe.
MUDs, Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Unreal, gobs of RPG type games and, lastly, MMOs provided me ample opportunity tweak and see what I could make them do. In some cases it was directly and easily modified. Other cases required external tools, but in every case I was interested in seeing how far I could push the mechanics.
Playing the games are fun. Pushing them to their limits are what I enjoy. This is pretty much true for me in most aspects of my life, though.
Oddly enough the online only option is largely why I quit playing games. The DRM was also getting simply unacceptable and I enjoy playing through games in single player/offline modes as well. Don't get me wrong, I love the interaction and experience that online games can provide, but dealing with people all day means that sometimes I just want to sit down and play and see the AI or game rules or whatever behave exactly as expected.
I guess in that regard it's a bit more like passive entertainment through TV and such, but I still like the puzzles and at least learning to understand how the developer designed the game play experience.
Other than that some of the most fun I've had in 20 some-odd years of gaming has been building and designing modifcations and levels and hacking games to see just how far you could push the engines and yourself with private servers and game connections among friends. So many games lack any ability to do that kind of thing and between that and the above mentioned problems I rarely (if ever) find myself buying games anymore.
That was how it is managed for me and the functionality is suitable for my uses. Sorry, I didn't intend to mislead anybody in this regard.
The only reason that I bought the original Xbox was for all the media center functionality. I like playing games and such, but that was not my primary interest.
I know there are and were plenty of media center PCs, but I never found one that I liked the look of and wouldn't require me to do all kinds of work. With the xbox I installed a mod-chip in about 15 minutes, loaded XBMC and was streaming music and movies inside an hour start to finish. I can even still watch Hulu from it.
Plus I got the xbox used with a couple controllers and games for less than I could even buy one of the little Nvidia pc boards. Best $100 I ever spent on a piece of electronics.
Offtopic, there is a great parody to the FBI warnings on the intro of "Moss and the German" on season 2 of The IT Crowd. If you haven't already seen it then I'll say that it gave me a good laugh about it.
Don't get me wrong. We are primarily an Oracle shop, but we've got several instances on MySQL running (mostly LAMPs and WAMPs) and even an MSSQL Server (much to the chagrin of our "Oracle is great" boss.)
I believe that there is a good tool for a job and will use whatever is the most suitable within a given set of parameters.
My greatest hope would be to make MySQL and Oracle more interoperable so that we could reduce our adminsitrative overheard. At this point I've got MSSQL instances that replicate application data to our Oracle warehouse and it would be nice to have a consistent back-end for our wikis and other 'forward-facing' apps.
Along the same line as the high-end/low-end thing Oracle does have a 'low-end' Oracle database (Oracle XE) but it's never really gotten any kind of following or use that I have seen. So I could definitely understand their interest in providing an entry-level system with their name attached.
I've not understood the complaints about sharing the market space. Anyone running full-blown Oracle database systems will be well and truly beyond MySQL. Aside from that, try and get some PHB to understand that MySQL is in any way comparable to Oracle.
On the plus side- if Oracle can actually provide an easy to use path to migrate from MySQL to Oracle or to provide some kind of abstraction layer that would let you use MySQL-backed applications with Oracle I would cheer them to no end.
And as for the founder's (and the founder's buddy referenced in the article) concerns about the future of the product then he shouldn't have sold the damn thing. So sorry, you sold your rights to it. Fork it and start over if you really care that much.
I'd believe they are unable to find parts. I worked on phone systems and one of our clients had a nearly 30 year old Rolm CBX system that had gone from Rolm to IBM to Siemens. The model they had *ONLY* had parts for both it and its voicemail add-on available from some guy that literally bought up a bunch of units being replaced and sold the spare parts out of his garage.
And keep in mind that for quite some time ROLM systems were nearly as popular as the Nortel systems.
Change? Not from what we can see over this side of the Atlantic, the only difference here in Europe is instead of a US president having his leg humped by Tony Blair, we've now got a US president having his leg humped by Sarkozy and Berlusconi instead.
I suppose if I had to pick, I'd prefer to only get one leg humped...but really does it have to come to that? Send over some better (looking) 'ambassadors' and I'll be happy to make a more informed decision.
I started reading the series as a freshman in high school shortly after the third book came out. I was so impressed that I took the time to write Jordan and managed to carry on a good bit of letter writing back and forth for about a year.
Oddly enough (and I think it REALLY shows) at the time Jordan himself said he expected that he had enough 'story' for about seven books all told. I don't know what changed, or if he just lost his way, but I can say I was irritated that most of the books around 4 and later had at best half a book's worth of material in it.
I'll finish the series as I am usually running out of things to read anyhow but I didn't even realize that this latest book had come out.
We used the Sensatronics EM1 which is connected to the network and monitor it with several things. The EM1 interface is very simple and one of the monitors is just a cron job that scrapes the output from the web interface and will shutdown some of our more sensative equipment if it gets too hot.
They also have a bevy of interfaces from commercial products and the couple of monitoring/notification systems we tested were all able to communicate with the EM1 without any problems.
The total cost for the EM1 and several temp and temp+humidity probes was less than 700$ USD. If you don't care about multiple probes you could probably get it for under 500$ USD.
http://www.sensatronics.com/
I've worked a number of places over the years and none less than 4-5 years. In each of the places where my direct boss was a woman each of them were like that with only one exception.
After the last one asked me to deploy VOIP in 14 buildings across 7 counties in late 2000(!?!) within two weeks so it could be ready for a conference I swore I'd never work for a woman again. I also submitted my time for that week, erased my system, deleted all my accounts and walked out of the office that evening.
I can certainly agree with you, but from the other side of the equation. I much enjoy the sniping side of things in games; however, I believe some games can go too far in favor of one side or the other. I don't want to sit somewhere and pick off people infinitely, but at the same time other games limit game play types to people with jump macros and the only useful weapon for everyone is a damned rocket launcher.
I really enjoy it when I have to work to get set and still have to make excursions for resupply, etc.
It's also very fun when there are a plethora of legitimate options for weapons/play/power but in a balanced (haha, I know...wish in one hand) fashion.
From what I recall of genetics, the cellular aging is (partially) what leads to shorter life spans and increased age related problems in clones. If you are cloning an animal it is kind of like making a copy of a copy since the telomeres are actually a part of the chromosomes they are transferred into the new host.
This leads to the telomeres being extended far beyond their 'normal' lifespan and you end up with all kinds of abnormalities that usually wouldn't be present until the subject is much older even though they still look young.
If nothing else, this discovery should help in the research of cloned animals and livestock, etc. But take all this with a grain of salt...I've not been involved with genetics for the better part of 12 years.
If I'm paying for bytes, I'd like guaranteed rates to start with. I'd also like to speak with at least marginally competent staff when a problem occurs.
I would also assume that my lower bound on my bill is not going to be less than I'm paying right now since these are only going to be options if it will make them more money than any additional billing/administrative overhead will cost. Assuming I'm paying at least as much as I am now, then where is the added benefit for this 'service'?
That's much my point. And there are a number of fairly interesting shows on some of the science channels that at least introduce people to new concepts.