seriously, there are a whole bunch of people posting "i did 100 interviews and got nothing" VS "i got headhunted" ('scuse the exaggeration, but it was getting boring)
this is not very useful information without knowing the positions applied for and applicant's experience and qualifications.
a friend "interviewed" for a a news agency recently - 1st interview came across like a Herbalife recruitment circus. Second is scheduled but not happened already.
i have a good friend in the UK who's an employment attorney. with the sheer overload of tribunal cases for unfair dismissal claims, discrimination claims and the like, it's no wonder the interview process for raw fresh young hires is tortuous.
but that doesn't mean the process is perforce of any use to anyone - i have the strong impression much of the belaboured trials are invented to protect management liability. and sometimes, with some companies, long intetrview processes are a sign of unfocussed and ill-prepared management.
also, with new and fast growing companies with lots of bright staff, all fairly equallty qualified, i've noticed a tendency towards spreading responsibility of all kinds. that's just IME, but when you hire tons of execs in a go, internal hierarchies are not settled, even if roles are allocated, and few step up to act outside the behavioral mold - often because there isn't such a mold yet.
== Idle Random Thoughts. Usual Disclaimers Apply ==
Martha Stewart has gone to Federal Prison for a stupid bad stock transaction. Whether she deserved it or not, well, look at Kenneth Lay, Jeff Skilling, and all the other corporate maledictors who are, for the most part, still enjoying their lavish lifestyles with little or no limits on their activities or future prospects, because too many people still will see them, and believe their Heidrick and Struggles (ok, let's be fair, and throw in Korn+Ferry too) promotional materials in a couple of years that this lot as, just a bunch of misunderstood business geniuses unfairly tarred and feathered in the press for things that were out of their control.
. ..
Just on one point i'd pick there: IIRC, Skilling was appointed CEO of Enron way into the process which governed the suspect accounting processes challenged in court as fraudulent.
Skilling's main fault was being the intellectually arrogant driver of the idea that anything and everything could be traded forward, from bandwidth to advertising media, but with little knowledge of the underlying and way too much faith in federated internet trading platforms.
Lay was in direct report at the time of the key sucpicious transactions, but then again he also made some pretty hefty political donations . ..
And didn't their CFO actually shoot himself in his car one morning rather than go to court? The CFO and Lay were a direct line management fixture throughout the suspicious trades, not Skilling. Though Skilling should have taken more of a rap since as CEO he was in a position where he was paid to be morally as well as practically responsible.
Sorry to gloss lots of historical detail there, but i meant only a quick comment not to tar everyone with the same brush. Or infer from my post that i consider any of their behaviour conscionable. No, for the record i don't see any business geniuses there too. But personal delusion whilst condemned to a state of public ignomony is a peculiarly painful psychological punishment, and as such, if they think that, their private punishment fits the crime.
Bouncing trades back to back between close companies to increase apparent cflow and revenues is the oldest trick in the book. But then again, since the "Big 6" (now 5) auditors all are party to a "no sue" agreement, there's little hope they would have cared or acted if second opinions were taken. Such transcations as were clearly fraudulent required considerable complicity with third parties.
Skilling, by comparison should have been villified for pursuing one of the most crackpot business strategies in recent times. But then again, after the dot bomb, how could you blame just him?
"CADC spent 20 years in top-secret, cold-war-era mothballs until finally being declassified in 1998. Thus, even if it was the first, it has remained under most people's radar even today, and did not have a chance to influence other early microprocessor design."
at first hearing that name i imagined a central air defence computer, but if you're interested in systems redundancy, this is way more interesting.
it may have gone almost unheard of, but fortunately a few papers and descriptions are available linked below. Was news to me too. OMG I learned something on/. !:-)
Yeah, but based on what i read about the original, i bet BillG wishes he could port NT to it:
"Shortly after liftoff of Apollo 12, two lightening bolts struck the aircraft. The current passed through the command module and induced temporary power failure in the fuel cells supplying power to the AGC. During the incident the voltage fail circuits in the computer detected a series of power trenches and triggere several restarts. The computer withstood these without interruption of the mission programs or loss of data.
now i wonder could the guy in the story have afforded to deal with this as well:
"In the early orbital missions before Apollo, NASA learned that the human animal, confined in a spacecraft for a week or so, was not as clean as might be expected from observations on Earth. This additional constraint had . . far-reaching impact . . All electrical connections and other surfaces had to be corrosive resistant . . . everything had to be hermetically sealed."
Hmm, the screen reviewed is quite reasonably priced, IMO. Below is a edited and amended copy of a posting i wrote elsewhere.
CRTs require lots more calibration. Geometry just complicates things. Guns get out of alignment quickly. They lack luminance, which means that even a *poor* LCD _can appear_ to out-perform a top CRT. Apple wag on about this for their "cinema" displays, which honestly aren't in the same ballpark as a Eizo CG21. So _any_ LCD will *appear* to show a wider gamut than a CRT. But you *just don't* get to replicate that luminance on a print.
CRT is EOL everywhere (save for the Mitsubishi WG CRT), so over a few years, expect problems with support, parts and gun alignment. Yeah, sure, serious CRTs allow you to align the guns and all sorts through firmware, but they're comparably priced to the CG21 I currently use.
The article references Wide Gamut LCD's...
OK, I have been in contact with all the relevant product managers over the past six months regards ordering these for my company. Some pretty solid facts I have learned:
1. Expect NO availability of WG monitors until H2/05. Both Eizo with the CG210 and Mitsu' are sorting out pre- production and *will not* release a half- assed product to beat time - to - market.
2. Forget the WG Mitsu' CRT. Same price almost as LCDs in pre-production now, and is supported in Asia - Pacific only. Correct that, Mitsu' will support you, but it won't be convenient.
3. WG LCDs almost require 10bpp DVI-D input. I am not aware of a graphics card which supports this right now. I sense that Matrox will support this with a new PCI-E Parhelia next year.
4. Cost. Cost. Cost. You need a real justification for the Wide Gamut monitors. Intro prices will be quite a bit >5K$.
5. Barco appear to have chickened out on this market. So says the grapevine anyway.
6. Mitsu' appear to me at least to have some better technology for WG monitors. Possibly also for normal calibrated LCDs, but I am very happy meanwhile using a Eizo CG21 ..
7. You probably don't need one of these unless you are planning to One Time Only scan - to - archive - digital of loads of Kodachromes,, or need to soft proof for Aniva or 4+ ink presses.
8. LaCie is not IMO in the same game. LaCie filled the Radius gap in Mac pre-press environments. They DO NOT manufacture their own components, as do Eizo, Mitsu'. I've not been impressed at all by any of their products. For that matter, for my uses, I wasn't impressed by Apple's cinema displays ..
9. Whatever you do, if you're editing photos or critical color ; Get a monitor hood. Think like lens shades. Control flare. It's much worse on a LCD, IME.
10. Viewing a CRT properly requires a darkened environment. See above.
Component burnout is a fact of life. All the new calibrated Mitsu' / Eizo LCDs are very thouroughly tested and heavily guaranteed / supported. But they will likely wear out in a few years or so. To combat this both Mitsu' and Eizo run luminance below max levels.
Also, if I get my facts right, the only reason Mistu' released the WG CRT is because Japanese printers actually do use the current abilities of their presses properly. Just like DOF scales, SWOP and EuroScale are so outdated people just waste the capabilities of their output media.
Some annoyances with the article:
"as a rule, a DeltaE value of one is considered a perfect calibration i.e. there is no difference between the CIE L*a*b* colour space and the colours reproduced by the monitor."
No, not a perfect calibration, just delta 1.0 is about the threshold of your capacity to distinguish tones.
There will definitely be a variation between what you see and the L*A*B co-ordinates, notwithstanding the delta value as the L*A*B space is theoretical.
Re the yadda yadda-yadda to actually get a rebate, does anyone have any statistics on how many productive hours this wastes? My gut feeling is that most people waste more eraning time to get any rebate than it's worth. Add in the administrative cost, marketing cost and so forth, and isn't this a huge drain on the economy?
Failing that, are rebate vouchers tax deductable for the vendor in some way that I'm missing?
Hypothetical (and probably bogus) idea:
1. Vendor advertises $400 video card with $100 mail - in rebate. 2. Rebate - inclusive price applied at 100% reclaim makes item a loss - leader. 3. Vendor claims tax credit against "booked" losses. 4. To make sure, vendor issues short term mail - in rebates that time out just after a tax quarter. 5. Only 60% of purchasors get rebate either through disinterest or artificial (induced, burocratic, hasslesome or time-out based) disinterest. 6. Vendor eventually books the _real_ cash flow it allways expected, butu has just lived a little on the IRR cost improvement caused by the "tax - float".
If you think it might be happening - I know very little about retail goods taxation bear in mind - please vote as to whether I should patent my new "Method For Sale Of Goods Whilst Screwing Custommer And Government"
Incidentally, disguising the true cost of goods was ILLEGAL in Germany, until recently. For good reason IMO. Some lobbyist is surely grinning all the way to the bank for their good work, ahem.
a real raid controller for me is a HP/Compaq smartarray, IBM server raid, Intel RAID, some megaraid controller..
Please tell that to Dell UK. Just spent 4 wasted days speccing new workstations, and the time waster was waiting for their manufacturing to confirm that "PERCs" are now supplied by Adaptec. So for a U320 SCSI dual channel, you get 3rd rate hardware instead of robust LSI MegaRAID models they used to carry.
I have it on reasonable authority that this does not currently affect the USA, and may not apply to servers, but it still put a hole in my planning. How did I smell the rat? Well, the quote came in way too low, even for Dell being agressive against my comparative quote process. The only thing I advise anyone to be wary of regarding Dell is their sales process - it always seems too hurried, too thin on real specs and heavy on generic terms. That said, I made good friends with a rep who turned out (in the end) to be quite pleased he'd just learnt (as a function of my pleading corrections) a bunch about RAID which is 1. helping him get bigger sales now 2. got me a better discount. Hmm, strange that education can have immediate cash benefits, but it worked for me. In the end.
Actually, a big disadvantage to hardware RAID is what happens if your controller fails.
I'll bite:
1. In any MegaRAID device, I'll just swap the battery backed cache unit to another controller. Downtime hardly worth bothering about.
2. Isn't it commercial suicide - generally accepted idiomatically, anyhow - failing to support any "professional" level hardware long after RTM?
3. If you're interested in performance as well as redundancy, surely you'll want to offload all that work to a dedicated controller?
4. Isn't the "I" in RAID part of a compound noun : "inexpensivedisks" rather than globally reflexive?
5. Being conservative myself, forgive my bias, but would you actually specify your storage ot run on a Johnny - come - lately manufacturer's latest product rather than a company you've known to go the distance?
6. After my skepticism, you raise an interesting point - how many OTS RAID controllers support hardware redundancy?
7. That said, I have some controllers just chugging away year after year. I expect they are better built, and were more expensive originally than most enthusiast machines with an ad - hoc ATA RAID.
8. If you think good harware RAID is prohibitively expensive, tell yourself otherwise at www.scsi4me.com. That's a shameless plug, but i have no connection with them other than being a happy long standing customer.
== Idle Random Thoughts, Usual Disclaimers Apply ==
Not everyone wants to give Winternals $300. Especially since the capability should be supplied with Windows XP, without having to pay more.
That may be so, but equally it's interesting that MSFT has not absorbed such fuctionality, and has not killed off the market for what is an excellent 3rd party app with a half assed bundled replacement.
If you really need ERD, you can feel pretty good about paying them their license dollars (which IIRC are a fair bit more than $300).
These are non-trivial tools, and payback for a client is awesome, considering the popular culture of Crash > Format > Reinstall that is ingrained in everyone who ever talked to "support" about a crashing Windows system. (My personal advice is usually to get better hardware with better tested drivers, but that's a long term help, not a quick fix)
Now, if *everyone* who licensed Windows needed the functionality of ERD, this might be different. Embrace, "extend" away ..
Meanwhile, at a pinch, as just posted on/. there's a workable alternative to toting far lighter wallets. Incidentally the Winternals guys were on the 'phone to me at an unholy hour of the night to help me when I was unfamiliar with their tools. YMMV.
I only agree with you - partly - in that If I license 2003 Enterprise for all the totemic expense that is, I ought to get something like this. But not for a desktop. Rightly (or even aprocrafully) (sp?) it is better to just make the system more stable overall.
Just idle randoom thoughts. Usual disclaimers apply.
I knew if I'd wait enough, this 60's technology would come around again.
Now I'm waiting for the release of "Acid" DRM to compliment it:
"hey Man, dig this band. the're totally trippin"
"Yeah, I mean, like, awesome, who the F&^$ are these guYs anyway?"
"Whoooo! Did you see that cloud!"
Can you imagine what the RIAA would give for us actually forgetting what we'd just listened to? I mean, they'd be able to release the same crappy boy/girl - band jingles year after year and we'd *love it*.
Oh, crap, how did they manage to do that already???
== I was there, but there's no proof anyone else remembers being there to see me . . . ==
Works fine for me so far. You can sign up for a limited mailbox/bandwidth account for free. Also provides IMAP, and most of what one might want.
Very fast page delivery, HTTPS for all page displays. Not found any real gripes yet, but hey, you can sign up for free. That depends on whether you can redirect your 'mail or are happy collecting POP3 email. If you want them to be MX for your domain, that costs. Still, it's an option that pleasantly surprised me very recently. YMMV
OK, I use these guys. I'm happy with them but obviously biased.
Check their NG archive : here and see what you can find.
In summary, not only will AAISP happily set you up with a v6 alloc (being a RIR) but they and their users are getting quite clued up on IPv6. AAISP's bias is towards Linux, so you may be happy in their company.
Their v6 is tunneled to your site, because of limitations in the BT backhaul (a ATM cloud owned by our local monopoly) but this may change with SDSL + local exchange unbundling within the next 12 months.
Of course, one's often quite limited in delivering v6 direct to hosts on your own net' party due to IOS inconsistencies (and I'm not certain Cisco or anyone else has complete v6 across their products) - but these NEC v4+v6 router - switches look very attractive IMO.
Just some idle random thoughts, but I'd rate Andrews and Arnold as a "IPv6 Friendly" ISP. There are many other was to get yourself an allocation and tunnelling to peers or the 6bone however.
At this point, the HP name has lost most of its value
That sadly may be true for a long long time. Whatever the merits, corporate in - fights always smell bad. I personally think the opaque manoeuvering of product lines is in no small part a consequence of the scraps of last year, as an organsation which has seen too much turmoil finds itself again. Sure that's hardly an iota of the true story, but IMO for anyone with any feeling, the name *Hewlett - Packard* , as opposed to the two lettered logo, hasn't lost an ounce of respect. At least by dropping their full original name, The New HP isn't tarnishing fonder memories.
Not entirely true, I think. this press release gives the following quotage:
"The effect of this announcement on the implementation of MHP is enormous (for MHP) as EchoStar is the largest DVB-S provider in the US with over 5 million customers and a footprint to cover all US households."
I've come across occasional mentions of DVB standard free - to - air broadcasts accessible in the USA - someone else will have to find and post these - but I guess you could anyway just buy a _much_ bigger dish and point it at the horizon:->
Happy Hacker keyboards, or something so dang close I didn't notice (I was assured they were the same by the store) are now made by Cherry. Model number G84-4100
When did you last meet a CFO who ran a Sparc workstation?
Try a CFO or other management financial officer at a trading house, broker - dealer, investment bank . . . . . plenty of trading floors are peppered with, if not standardised on apps which run on and are customised for, or developed in house for Solaris. Can't be f&*&^d to go dig out a list right now of deidcated apps like order flow processing, risk management progs . . . but how about this one for a start : Mathematica plus their financials add - ins plus really dang big set of market data, say your position close end of day. Now that's what a CFO might want to muse over on a laptop every now and then. OK, what I suggested won't be much good for those who run 24/7 books, and I'm only picking on one market sector (but you didn't specify) but i hope you get my drift.
It's simple: the people who make the decisions use Windows and MS Office. - Yes I often feel that's about all the decision - making tools some banks have been using in recent years:-) but your statement is clearly untrue in such a generality.
Nope, I've not met a CFO who did run a SPARC laptop. Maybe that's because Tadpole have been a lame duck of a useless company doing nothing and developing no new products for years. They seemed to focus more on selling whimsical stories to the London Stock Exchange. This new announcement is undoubtedly only happening because the SPARCBook team recently did an MBO (not really an MBO because so much of their financing came from the parent) to try to get free of the rest of the increasingly farcical company.
. .. == Idle Random Thoughts - Usual Disclaimers Apply==
Slashdot Mirror
. . .
seriously, there are a whole bunch of people posting "i did 100 interviews and got nothing" VS "i got headhunted" ('scuse the exaggeration, but it was getting boring)
this is not very useful information without knowing the positions applied for and applicant's experience and qualifications.
a friend "interviewed" for a a news agency recently - 1st interview came across like a Herbalife recruitment circus. Second is scheduled but not happened already.
i have a good friend in the UK who's an employment attorney. with the sheer overload of tribunal cases for unfair dismissal claims, discrimination claims and the like, it's no wonder the interview process for raw fresh young hires is tortuous.
but that doesn't mean the process is perforce of any use to anyone - i have the strong impression much of the belaboured trials are invented to protect management liability. and sometimes, with some companies, long intetrview processes are a sign of unfocussed and ill-prepared management.
also, with new and fast growing companies with lots of bright staff, all fairly equallty qualified, i've noticed a tendency towards spreading responsibility of all kinds. that's just IME, but when you hire tons of execs in a go, internal hierarchies are not settled, even if roles are allocated, and few step up to act outside the behavioral mold - often because there isn't such a mold yet.
== Idle Random Thoughts. Usual Disclaimers Apply ==
. . .
.
.
:) ==
Martha Stewart has gone to Federal Prison for a stupid bad stock transaction. Whether she deserved it or not, well, look at Kenneth Lay, Jeff Skilling, and all the other corporate maledictors who are, for the most part, still enjoying their lavish lifestyles with little or no limits on their activities or future prospects, because too many people still will see them, and believe their Heidrick and Struggles (ok, let's be fair, and throw in Korn+Ferry too) promotional materials in a couple of years that this lot as, just a bunch of misunderstood business geniuses unfairly tarred and feathered in the press for things that were out of their control.
. .
Just on one point i'd pick there: IIRC, Skilling was appointed CEO of Enron way into the process which governed the suspect accounting processes challenged in court as fraudulent.
Skilling's main fault was being the intellectually arrogant driver of the idea that anything and everything could be traded forward, from bandwidth to advertising media, but with little knowledge of the underlying and way too much faith in federated internet trading platforms.
Lay was in direct report at the time of the key sucpicious transactions, but then again he also made some pretty hefty political donations . .
And didn't their CFO actually shoot himself in his car one morning rather than go to court? The CFO and Lay were a direct line management fixture throughout the suspicious trades, not Skilling. Though Skilling should have taken more of a rap since as CEO he was in a position where he was paid to be morally as well as practically responsible.
Sorry to gloss lots of historical detail there, but i meant only a quick comment not to tar everyone with the same brush. Or infer from my post that i consider any of their behaviour conscionable. No, for the record i don't see any business geniuses there too. But personal delusion whilst condemned to a state of public ignomony is a peculiarly painful psychological punishment, and as such, if they think that, their private punishment fits the crime.
Bouncing trades back to back between close companies to increase apparent cflow and revenues is the oldest trick in the book. But then again, since the "Big 6" (now 5) auditors all are party to a "no sue" agreement, there's little hope they would have cared or acted if second opinions were taken. Such transcations as were clearly fraudulent required considerable complicity with third parties.
Skilling, by comparison should have been villified for pursuing one of the most crackpot business strategies in recent times. But then again, after the dot bomb, how could you blame just him?
== Just a few idle thoughts. E&EO.
. . .
/. ! :-)
.
"CADC spent 20 years in top-secret, cold-war-era mothballs until finally being declassified in 1998. Thus, even if it was the first, it has remained under most people's radar even today, and did not have a chance to influence other early microprocessor design."
at first hearing that name i imagined a central air defence computer, but if you're interested in systems redundancy, this is way more interesting.
it may have gone almost unheard of, but fortunately a few papers and descriptions are available linked below. Was news to me too. OMG I learned something on
http://www.microcomputerhistory.com/f14paper.htm
hmm, this all fits nicely with the recent article on the Apollo Guidance Computer . .
will it run Linux? ... or at least NetBSD?
:
0 7.pdf
:)
Yeah, but based on what i read about the original, i bet BillG wishes he could port NT to it
"Shortly after liftoff of Apollo 12, two lightening bolts struck the aircraft. The current passed through the command module and induced temporary power failure in the fuel cells supplying power to the AGC. During the incident the voltage fail circuits in the computer detected a series of power trenches and triggere several restarts. The computer withstood these without interruption of the mission programs or loss of data.
quote from http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/17
Which kinda redefines "Uptime" for me
. . .
g 1007_hall_s.ppt
:
0 7.pdf pages 4-5.
This is a link to a a partial tear-down of a Apollo Guidance Computer Logic Unit.
http://klabs.org/mapld04/presentations/session_g/
on slide three, N.B. the cost : $275,800.00.
now i wonder could the guy in the story have afforded to deal with this as well
"In the early orbital missions before Apollo, NASA learned that the human animal, confined in a spacecraft for a week or so, was not as clean as might be expected from observations on Earth. This additional constraint had . . far-reaching impact . . All electrical connections and other surfaces had to be corrosive resistant . . . everything had to be hermetically sealed."
eww!
quote from http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/17
. . . .
.. .
:
.
.
:
Hmm, the screen reviewed is quite reasonably priced, IMO. Below is a edited and amended copy of a posting i wrote elsewhere.
CRTs require lots more calibration. Geometry just complicates things. Guns get out of alignment quickly. They lack luminance, which means that even a *poor* LCD _can appear_ to out-perform a top CRT. Apple wag on about this for their "cinema" displays, which honestly aren't in the same ballpark as a Eizo CG21. So _any_ LCD will *appear* to show a wider gamut than a CRT. But you *just don't* get to replicate that luminance on a print.
CRT is EOL everywhere (save for the Mitsubishi WG CRT), so over a few years, expect problems with support, parts and gun alignment. Yeah, sure, serious CRTs allow you to align the guns and all sorts through firmware, but they're comparably priced to the CG21 I currently use.
The article references Wide Gamut LCD's
OK, I have been in contact with all the relevant product managers over the past six months regards ordering these for my company.
Some pretty solid facts I have learned
1. Expect NO availability of WG monitors until H2/05. Both Eizo with the CG210 and Mitsu' are sorting out pre- production and *will not* release a half- assed product to beat time - to - market.
2. Forget the WG Mitsu' CRT. Same price almost as LCDs in pre-production now, and is supported in Asia - Pacific only. Correct that, Mitsu' will support you, but it won't be convenient.
3. WG LCDs almost require 10bpp DVI-D input. I am not aware of a graphics card which supports this right now. I sense that Matrox will support this with a new PCI-E Parhelia next year.
4. Cost. Cost. Cost. You need a real justification for the Wide Gamut monitors. Intro prices will be quite a bit >5K$.
5. Barco appear to have chickened out on this market. So says the grapevine anyway.
6. Mitsu' appear to me at least to have some better technology for WG monitors. Possibly also for normal calibrated LCDs, but I am very happy meanwhile using a Eizo CG21 .
7. You probably don't need one of these unless you are planning to One Time Only scan - to - archive - digital of loads of Kodachromes,, or need to soft proof for Aniva or 4+ ink presses.
8. LaCie is not IMO in the same game. LaCie filled the Radius gap in Mac pre-press environments. They DO NOT manufacture their own components, as do Eizo, Mitsu'. I've not been impressed at all by any of their products. For that matter, for my uses, I wasn't impressed by Apple's cinema displays .
9. Whatever you do, if you're editing photos or critical color ; Get a monitor hood. Think like lens shades. Control flare. It's much worse on a LCD, IME.
10. Viewing a CRT properly requires a darkened environment. See above.
Component burnout is a fact of life. All the new calibrated Mitsu' / Eizo LCDs are very thouroughly tested and heavily guaranteed / supported. But they will likely wear out in a few years or so. To combat this both Mitsu' and Eizo run luminance below max levels.
Also, if I get my facts right, the only reason Mistu' released the WG CRT is because Japanese printers actually do use the current abilities of their presses properly. Just like DOF scales, SWOP and EuroScale are so outdated people just waste the capabilities of their output media.
Some annoyances with the article
"as a rule, a DeltaE value of one is considered a perfect calibration i.e. there is no difference between the CIE L*a*b* colour space and the colours reproduced by the monitor."
No, not a perfect calibration, just delta 1.0 is about the threshold of your capacity to distinguish tones.
There will definitely be a variation between what you see and the L*A*B co-ordinates, notwithstanding the delta value as the L*A*B space is theoretical.
"In addition, it's worth noting th
Don't her patients have any sphincter control?
:
:
That just grossed me out for a connected reason
World's Worst Job
Anal Wart tester at the Goat website man's clinic.
. . .
:
then not bother to go thru all the yadda-yadda
Re the yadda yadda-yadda to actually get a rebate, does anyone have any statistics on how many productive hours this wastes? My gut feeling is that most people waste more eraning time to get any rebate than it's worth. Add in the administrative cost, marketing cost and so forth, and isn't this a huge drain on the economy?
Failing that, are rebate vouchers tax deductable for the vendor in some way that I'm missing?
Hypothetical (and probably bogus) idea
1. Vendor advertises $400 video card with $100 mail - in rebate.
2. Rebate - inclusive price applied at 100% reclaim makes item a loss - leader.
3. Vendor claims tax credit against "booked" losses.
4. To make sure, vendor issues short term mail - in rebates that time out just after a tax quarter.
5. Only 60% of purchasors get rebate either through disinterest or artificial (induced, burocratic, hasslesome or time-out based) disinterest.
6. Vendor eventually books the _real_ cash flow it allways expected, butu has just lived a little on the IRR cost improvement caused by the "tax - float".
If you think it might be happening - I know very little about retail goods taxation bear in mind - please vote as to whether I should patent my new "Method For Sale Of Goods Whilst Screwing Custommer And Government"
Incidentally, disguising the true cost of goods was ILLEGAL in Germany, until recently. For good reason IMO. Some lobbyist is surely grinning all the way to the bank for their good work, ahem.
Disclaimer == I might be serious. You never know.
I beg to differ, based on the anecdotalism that specialised hardware tends IME to ourperform generic hardware, and also this
http://www.intel.com/design/iio/80321.htm
which is the controller embedded in the latest LSI boards.
Specs are as follows, which don't seem lazy to me
a real raid controller for me is a HP/Compaq smartarray, IBM server raid, Intel RAID, some megaraid controller..
Please tell that to Dell UK. Just spent 4 wasted days speccing new workstations, and the time waster was waiting for their manufacturing to confirm that "PERCs" are now supplied by Adaptec. So for a U320 SCSI dual channel, you get 3rd rate hardware instead of robust LSI MegaRAID models they used to carry.
I have it on reasonable authority that this does not currently affect the USA, and may not apply to servers, but it still put a hole in my planning. How did I smell the rat? Well, the quote came in way too low, even for Dell being agressive against my comparative quote process. The only thing I advise anyone to be wary of regarding Dell is their sales process - it always seems too hurried, too thin on real specs and heavy on generic terms. That said, I made good friends with a rep who turned out (in the end) to be quite pleased he'd just learnt (as a function of my pleading corrections) a bunch about RAID which is 1. helping him get bigger sales now 2. got me a better discount. Hmm, strange that education can have immediate cash benefits, but it worked for me. In the end.
. . .
:
Actually, a big disadvantage to hardware RAID is what happens if your controller fails.
I'll bite
1. In any MegaRAID device, I'll just swap the battery backed cache unit to another controller. Downtime hardly worth bothering about.
2. Isn't it commercial suicide - generally accepted idiomatically, anyhow - failing to support any "professional" level hardware long after RTM?
3. If you're interested in performance as well as redundancy, surely you'll want to offload all that work to a dedicated controller?
4. Isn't the "I" in RAID part of a compound noun : "inexpensivedisks" rather than globally reflexive?
5. Being conservative myself, forgive my bias, but would you actually specify your storage ot run on a Johnny - come - lately manufacturer's latest product rather than a company you've known to go the distance?
6. After my skepticism, you raise an interesting point - how many OTS RAID controllers support hardware redundancy?
7. That said, I have some controllers just chugging away year after year. I expect they are better built, and were more expensive originally than most enthusiast machines with an ad - hoc ATA RAID.
8. If you think good harware RAID is prohibitively expensive, tell yourself otherwise at www.scsi4me.com. That's a shameless plug, but i have no connection with them other than being a happy long standing customer.
== Idle Random Thoughts, Usual Disclaimers Apply ==
Not everyone wants to give Winternals $300. Especially since the capability should be supplied with Windows XP, without having to pay more.
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/. there's a workable alternative to toting far lighter wallets. Incidentally the Winternals guys were on the 'phone to me at an unholy hour of the night to help me when I was unfamiliar with their tools. YMMV.
That may be so, but equally it's interesting that MSFT has not absorbed such fuctionality, and has not killed off the market for what is an excellent 3rd party app with a half assed bundled replacement.
If you really need ERD, you can feel pretty good about paying them their license dollars (which IIRC are a fair bit more than $300).
These are non-trivial tools, and payback for a client is awesome, considering the popular culture of Crash > Format > Reinstall that is ingrained in everyone who ever talked to "support" about a crashing Windows system. (My personal advice is usually to get better hardware with better tested drivers, but that's a long term help, not a quick fix)
Now, if *everyone* who licensed Windows needed the functionality of ERD, this might be different. Embrace, "extend" away .
Meanwhile, at a pinch, as just posted on
I only agree with you - partly - in that If I license 2003 Enterprise for all the totemic expense that is, I ought to get something like this. But not for a desktop. Rightly (or even aprocrafully) (sp?) it is better to just make the system more stable overall.
Just idle randoom thoughts. Usual disclaimers apply.
I knew if I'd wait enough, this 60's technology would come around again.
Now I'm waiting for the release of "Acid" DRM to compliment it
Can you imagine what the RIAA would give for us actually forgetting what we'd just listened to? I mean, they'd be able to release the same crappy boy/girl - band jingles year after year and we'd *love it*.
Oh, crap, how did they manage to do that already???
== I was there, but there's no proof anyone else remembers being there to see me . . . ==
Does anyone offer a webmail services that will connect to your POP3 account?
try FastMail
Works fine for me so far. You can sign up for a limited mailbox/bandwidth account for free. Also provides IMAP, and most of what one might want.
Very fast page delivery, HTTPS for all page displays. Not found any real gripes yet, but hey, you can sign up for free. That depends on whether you can redirect your 'mail or are happy collecting POP3 email. If you want them to be MX for your domain, that costs. Still, it's an option that pleasantly surprised me very recently. YMMV
In Moz 1.4a I just reloaded the page to read comments at 0, instead of default 2. Reformatted very nicely for me.
This worked before on most browsers, most wide articles. YMMV.
So what gives? HTML or something wierd with slashcode?
Is this the new Slashdot effect?
:)
..
I'm rather hoping (particularly looking at the Panther preview) that this is the New [Old] Apple Effect at work . . .
== Idle Random Thoughts. Usual Disclaimers Apply ==
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OK, I use these guys. I'm happy with them but obviously biased.
Check their NG archive : here and see what you can find.
In summary, not only will AAISP happily set you up with a v6 alloc (being a RIR) but they and their users are getting quite clued up on IPv6. AAISP's bias is towards Linux, so you may be happy in their company.
Their v6 is tunneled to your site, because of limitations in the BT backhaul (a ATM cloud owned by our local monopoly) but this may change with SDSL + local exchange unbundling within the next 12 months.
Of course, one's often quite limited in delivering v6 direct to hosts on your own net' party due to IOS inconsistencies (and I'm not certain Cisco or anyone else has complete v6 across their products) - but these NEC v4+v6 router - switches look very attractive IMO.
Just some idle random thoughts, but I'd rate Andrews and Arnold as a "IPv6 Friendly" ISP. There are many other was to get yourself an allocation and tunnelling to peers or the 6bone however.
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:
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just something to take to a LAN party or something
probably redundant (sorry if so) but the Military seem to want such things as well
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2652079.stm halfway down the page .
and the relevant product link : http://www.eluminx.com/product.asp
and I think I'll probably pass on any "LAN party" the Army might be offering . . .
. . . .
At this point, the HP name has lost most of its value
That sadly may be true for a long long time. Whatever the merits, corporate in - fights always smell bad. I personally think the opaque manoeuvering of product lines is in no small part a consequence of the scraps of last year, as an organsation which has seen too much turmoil finds itself again. Sure that's hardly an iota of the true story, but IMO for anyone with any feeling, the name *Hewlett - Packard* , as opposed to the two lettered logo, hasn't lost an ounce of respect. At least by dropping their full original name, The New HP isn't tarnishing fonder memories.
Not entirely true, I think. this press release gives the following quotage
I've come across occasional mentions of DVB standard free - to - air broadcasts accessible in the USA - someone else will have to find and post these - but I guess you could anyway just buy a _much_ bigger dish and point it at the horizon
Here
p 4 for the still Goat conscious
that's http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/cat/pictures.ph
. . . .
Bankers who loan you $1B to build the network have a nasty habit of wanting to get their money back.
Awww, c'mon, don't give them such a hard time . . . It wasn't really their money . . I'm sure they'll be nice and play with you again soon.
"she changed her name to 'Services' when she married NT."
and we all know what kind you'd have to offer to get in bed with NT . .
. . .
Happy Hacker keyboards, or something so dang close I didn't notice (I was assured they were the same by the store) are now made by Cherry. Model number G84-4100
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When did you last meet a CFO who ran a Sparc workstation?
Try a CFO or other management financial officer at a trading house, broker - dealer, investment bank . . . . . plenty of trading floors are peppered with, if not standardised on apps which run on and are customised for, or developed in house for Solaris. Can't be f&*&^d to go dig out a list right now of deidcated apps like order flow processing, risk management progs . . . but how about this one for a start : Mathematica plus their financials add - ins plus really dang big set of market data, say your position close end of day. Now that's what a CFO might want to muse over on a laptop every now and then. OK, what I suggested won't be much good for those who run 24/7 books, and I'm only picking on one market sector (but you didn't specify) but i hope you get my drift.
It's simple: the people who make the decisions use Windows and MS Office. - Yes I often feel that's about all the decision - making tools some banks have been using in recent years :-) but your statement is clearly untrue in such a generality.
Nope, I've not met a CFO who did run a SPARC laptop. Maybe that's because Tadpole have been a lame duck of a useless company doing nothing and developing no new products for years. They seemed to focus more on selling whimsical stories to the London Stock Exchange. This new announcement is undoubtedly only happening because the SPARCBook team recently did an MBO (not really an MBO because so much of their financing came from the parent) to try to get free of the rest of the increasingly farcical company.
. . .
== Idle Random Thoughts - Usual Disclaimers Apply==