> and I've never even heard of compiling your own Perl.
I've been doing this for a very long time, in addition to compiling my own php, apache etc.
If it's exposed, I compile it. If a 0day hits, I don't have the luxury of leaving the fate of my production security in some vendor's hands.
At the negligence trial, where I'm being prosecuted because my box got pwned, the plaintiff's attorney is going to ask why I didn't fix it if I could. I can, so I do.
If you are moving from packages to compiled stuff, it takes a lot longer than it does if you already operate this way.
The last SSL worm beat me over the head with the importance of this.
While compiling doesn't make you more secure, it sure as hell allows you to become secure faster *when* something happens and the vendors drag their feet. It beats unplugging your servers until a fix is available, which was my other option when this happened.
> You are lucky to have some genuine competition in the form of FIOS.
ROFL, or cap fixing. I'd be willing to bet that all of them follow suit.
--customer gets bandwidth cap notice from verizon and calls them to give them a piece of his mind--
Customer: Verizon you can't do this! I signed up for unlimited FIOS! Verizon: What are you going to do about it? Go to comcast? -LOL- Be my guest. We do offer unlimited bandwidth for an additional $50 a month 8) Want me to sign you up? Customer: We have a contract!!! Verizon: Read it closer, we can change the service any time we want and are only required to provide half of what we sell you anyway. The notice we gave was a courtesy. It's not against the law, we own the lawmakers.
Beyond that, I wonder what happens if your phone service is Skype or Vonage whatever, and you hit your cap, then your house catches fire and you try to call the fire department. Hmmmm...
Aren't most hookers great actors? Since both agree to have sex isn't it consensual? Can't you pay the hooker for her acting skill when performing the act and not the act itself?/confused
>After all, why should *I* pay for the fact that some bank lends money to someone who says it's me ?
You don't. You will get a collection call. At that point, you can ask them to fax you a copy of the signature they have, where you agreed to the credit contract.
They won't have it. Then you call the bureaus, and request your free copy of the report. When you get it, call back and talk to someone on the phone. They'll take it right off your report.
It took me less than an hour each of the 3x that Household Bank got ripped off by someone using my info. Never paid a single penny...
>"It is difficult to imagine a more archetypal instance of the press informing the public of government operations through government records than Ostergren's posting of public records to demonstrate the lack of care being taken by government to protect the private information of individuals."
A ****ing men. This is a judge that knows what's up.
I love what Betty Ostergren is doing. I've been a fan of hers since a few years ago when she was on 20/20 (I think) and they went over what she is doing. Arizona and Florida immediately started programs to black out people's SSN's on their public records when they saw her site. I guess Virginia would rather expose it's citizens to ID theft and try to squelch Betty than fix the problem.
This is probably the biggest source of SSN's used for ID theft, and Betty is doing something about it.
They're getting out because their chipsets suck and they are focusing on their core business, which is GPUs. Your Mobo had a MCP55 southbridge with a broken interrupt timer. I have the same chipset (on a DFI board) It won't rear it's ugly head unless you use a dual core CPU and game or use linux.
Without a BIOS patch you'll kernel panic on linux unless you use a switch that tells the kernel to use it's software timer (coded just for this issue) A while back Microsoft put in a patch that detects this issue and adds a/nofbtimer (or something like that) switch to boot.ini to use the Windows kernel soft timer.
Some vendors provided fixes (BIOS updates), some didn't. Subsequent problems in their chipset line include memory frying voltage mis-detection (790i) and several other serious issues.
I had one that was out of warranty (with no BIOS upgrade available) when I upgraded to a dual core cpu and found the problem.
"In these cases an advisor can read the full password."
WTF!
That's a pretty serious problem right there. Any bank I've worked at would be feverishly changing how this worked as soon as they found out what the idiot developer did. We had to use AES encrypted hashes. While I could change your password to do something, there's NFW I would ever be able to decode your password, at least not without a supercomputer.
What's worse is it's Lloyds TSB!!! I'd be changing banks if I found out my bank stored passwords this way.
This took the cake: "it had to be no more than six letters long."
What kind of bank is this? Their development crew sounds pretty fly-by-night.
They wouldn't last very long here. I sure as hell wouldn't keep my money there.
>At some point the software industry is going to need to establish itself as a rigorous practice with rigorous standards.
It's called ISO 9000 and is a standard. It's been around for quite a while now and there are specific implementations of this standard for software development. Few use it outside of Fortune 500. Indeed few use it inside the Fortune 500.
Unfortunately it dictates that software development, like anything else, go through a waterfall process. The end result is the users are forced into the other extreme. That is there's so much time spent on formal process (writing and re-writing technical docs, formal QA etc etc etc.) that very little real work gets done, and then people complain that stuff takes too long.
I was in a large Fortune 500 bank (top 5) and we switched to this. The people in the standards driven organization, had scheduled times when they did things. EG, change management meetings were done twice a week. You had to do two of them, and they had to be at least 2 weeks apart for a change. The first meeting was proposal. The second was when you presented qa results and got approval for production implementation. The net result was it took at least 3 weeks to change a phone number on a web site.
Because of the time it took to get anything done, the business units started going to outside contractors in the interest of productivity. The contractors ended up producing software that was *more* broken (feature wise as well as defects... we knew the business better than the contractors) than the stuff we were producing before the processes came into the company. The business managers didn't like the bugs, but they were happy to get something (anything) in the amount of turnaround time. They kept using the contractors and our department slowly got squeezed out of the company, culminating in "layoff by relocation".
Ironically the people running the process organizations got to keep their jobs despite a dwindling workload. They became more important than the people that did actual work.
Software developers *cannot* win. If we use the kind of discipline everyone wants us to, then everyone feels that we aren't productive enough. Investors pull their funding and users go with something else that's done *right now*. If we take the other approach, and get the job done in a reasonable amount of time the way the owner wants, hawkish people complain about the resulting bugs and start talking about process.
At the end of the day, productivity wins every time because you still end up with bugs, even with all the quality process, requirements gathering, technical spec writing (and rewriting) in the world. You also end up with a better product using a more iterative approach because the end result is what users actually want, not what they thought they wanted. In waterfall, they need to decide that up front and they tend to leave out very important details.
On production day, you end up in a pissing match where the docs people pull out the docs that the business owner signed and point out to them that they never asked for the features which are "missing" or show them how they wanted it one way, we delivered it, and now they want something else.
Waterfall sucks and is required by most "standards" processes. It's not good for anyone but people that write documentation. It's definitely not very good for users or developers. They are just another type of middleman that suck time and money. The end result is no better with them. In many cases it's worse.
The moral is: Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.
The PC I bought my wife to do her work on, paid for itself in 30 days. We laid out money for a new PC for her work, with the expectation that she would use it to make money.
It was a good investment since she successfully used it to find and sell homes to buyers, and recouped the cost in less time than it took to depreciate. Now that it's paid for it's proving to be an excellent investment, since her old one was slow and she spilled soup into the keyboard (it was a laptop from 2000) which started causing problems and impacted her productivity.
Same deal for a car you use to drive to work. You profit from your salary so when you buy a car for commuting, it's an investment, even if it's a Mustang GT, though these days a smarter investment would be a Prius. However the prius offers less emotional return on investment so whether or not a hotrod is a good investment is subjective.
If blowing off steam by testing the reported 0-60MPH acceleration times causes a stress relief that helps you live longer, the Mustang is a damn good investment, despite the fuel cost. This value is immeasurable.
You can't take it with you and it pays to be giddy a few times a day, as irrational as that might be, it's simply good for you;) Sometimes investing in your happiness is a good thing. You can see increased salary as well as work productivity when you are happy which is an indirect monetary gain, though the profit doesn't need to be monetary.
Merriam-Webster's defines profit as: 1: a valuable return : gain 2: the excess of returns over expenditure in a transaction or series of transactions; especially : the excess of the selling price of goods over their cost 3: net income usually for a given period of time 4: the ratio of profit for a given year to the amount of capital invested or to the value of sales 5: the compensation accruing to entrepreneurs for the assumption of risk in business enterprise as distinguished from wages or rent
I think happiness fits definition 1 (as long as you consider happiness valuable) and can be had with a 1337 gaming rig or car whether or not you use it to make money directly.
>Thomas Jefferson explicitly worries about the ability of our system to have legitimate control over future generations
"Legitimate control" is thrown out the window as soon as you start willfully and knowingly disregarding votes of citizens. If this happens the elected government is no longer legitimate, it's unconstitutional. If the machines are known to do this, and the government insists on using them, the government is de-legitimizing the elections which de-legitimizes the government in turn.
How do we know the machines are not trained to disregard some votes and not others? Prove they aren't.
Without a proper audit trail, these machines threaten the very existence of our democracy since for all we know, the elections are rigged and nobody can prove they aren't. This is something you really don't want to mess with because it is how revolutions happen. Trust me, good solid provable election results are far better for everyone than a revolution would be.
ATI, while it does have a faster GPU, still has a slower card in the 4870. Why? 256 bit memory interface. They need at least 384 (ideally 512) to compete with a nVidia 280. This is why the 280 still spanks a 4870 despite having a slower processor. It's all about the memory storage and throughput.
Memory starvation causes "hitching" (brief pausing while textures load) and client side lag with a lot of "bots" in the field resulting in dropped frames. Whether or not they can fit a bus this wide on a 4870 die remains to be seen and is surely a tough engineering problem. I'm holding out til november. If they haven't done it, I'll just have to get 2 cards, crossfire them and hope for the best.
Intel while they have a long way to go, may do it one day, but it's not going to be for at least 2 years. They have a lot of R&D to do.
It would never work. What would work is distributed caching whereby a local area (everyone on the same segment) has a cache server and the users hit that thing directly off the core switch for their segment. Users using VOD would be completely not affected by p2p since the only place the traffic would compete is in the fabric, which is more than capable of handling the traffic.
While the implementation would be prohibitively expensive, it would solve the problem once and for all. They could start with the segments that had the most p2p traffic.
Recently (5 years ago) I went to IBM class in Bethesda, MD. We did exactly this. It was a bootcamp for setting up LPARs and installing linux VMs on them in preparation for putting websphere on them. Cool stuff. I wouldn't try it without first building the procedure and mapping out the whole job. It's not exactly intuitive and you really need to do a detailed accounting of what you do.
If you could set up a web farm this way (minus websphere of course) it would be pretty deluxe. The only PITA about it was the hypervisor had it's set of ports, and the ports cannot be duplicated on any vms, so you literally had to do something like: VM1: 80 VM2: 81 VM3: 83 to use http as an example.
It'd still be worth it. The IO capability on mainframes is second to none. Compared to little servers, to use a hose analogy, it's the difference between the air tubing you might find in an aquarium, and a firehose. x86 is a joke for applications that need to *really* scale.
Ahhh to run a web farm powered by DB2 on mainframe. You'd never see a busy message ROFL. That's all I got to say.
Yes, you end up with an average dynamic range of 4db (maybe 3db by now?) with most popular music. The medium is capable of 90db(usable) at 16 bit. The dynamic range is there when it leaves the studio for the mastering desk; that's where people who care nothing about sound quality, but have all the money, pencil whip the mastering engineers into ruining it with extreme overcompression in the name of being "competitively loud". The mastering engineers have to make a living so the grudgingly comply, despite knowing it's pure stupidity. They have to pay their mortgage right?
Hopefully with the downfall of the recording "industry" and the rise of independent studio work this trend gets reversed.
>they'd just compress the audio to make it sound loud and we'd be in the same boat that we are with CDs. yup...
Sad. We have the capability to sound *better* than a 1 inch tape deck and we toss that 20db advantage out with the garbage.
The worst part is a properly mastered recording sounds just as loud as an overcompressed one on the radio, only it has dynamics and sounds better. The radio stations apply their own compression to even things out. This works with the overcompression on the CD to completely ruin it.
It boggles the mind... The result: music radio stations are switching to talk radio format in droves, because nobody will listen to music on the radio. I wonder why...
> is that Javascript is a very powerful LISP-like langauge Which LISP? I know it's radically different from Common LISP. Don't know about the other flavors.
This pisses me off when I'm getting paid to wait, especially when the person you are waiting for has 30 hours of work to do, shows up at 10:30, takes a 3hr lunch break and leaves at 3 PM and tells you to "Get the fuck out of my cube" when you politely ask for a status and management doesn't do anything about it.
I'm not sure that working from home would be any worse for productivity, but getting paid for piecework would be the worst way to be paid in some offices. There'd be killings over it because now these people are impacting whether or not you can pay your mortgage.
There are people who would kill you over losing their house because you are a slacker.
Barring civil rights legislation, just about every law enacted, and program started in the 20th century was a big giant mistake. We're on track to do even worse this century.
People were better off when they looked out for themselves. Those that wanted to make a better life for themselves could because they got to keep their money and weren't strangled with taxes.
Those that don't, well, this is America. You can become anything you want. If you don't want to try, you deserve what you get. Social programs have the opposite effect that they were intended to have. Social security is a fiasco.
I want my money. Not one social program benefits me, yet I pay close to half my paycheck for them.
Our entire "debt" is due to this crap. I'll stop now.
The truth shall set you free: "The United States leads the industrialized world in incarceration. In fact, the U.S. rate of incarceration (762 per 100,000) is five to eight times that of other highly developed countries, according to The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice think tank. "
We have mandatory minimum sentences of 5 years or more for crimes that other countries consider misdemeanors.
I reiterate, the US Government, as it stands today, is an epic failure because it's run by self serving morons who only care about how much they'll get paid by the lobbyists pass whatever will help the big corporation that's paying both of them.
More people die in our cities in one year, to criminals, than U.S. active duty Soldiers in 4 years of combat in Iraq.
Everyone gets all pissed off about soldiers dying in Iraq. There's more people dying right in your back yard. The soldiers are tragic, I agree, and I have great respect for them, but this country is going to shit. The sooner you take off the blinders the better off you'll be.
I was born and raised here. This country's government, the jackass, and the elephant, is steering the country I love, into ruin.
I stand by my "flamebait" because it's true. If you want to see the facts behind my assertions, I'll happily dig them up for you and post more links. Just tell me what you want.
I'm oldschool too (by 2008's definition). I used to do assembler on my Commodore 64 back in '83 (back when I was 13). Of course that was before college. I'm too young to have done much with VAX or big iron (finished college in '93). By the time I was a professional everyone was moving to the little servers like lemmings, for better or worse, mostly worse.
I don't see how Silverlight 2 can succeed, outside of the cozy world of Microsoft fanbois.
Their support for FOSS OS's, while decidedly convenient, is just a bullet point for the sales brochure; I can see this support getting as bad as Adobe's for non MS platforms, once Flex is dead and MS can flex their dominance.
Of course this won't happen because Flex isn't going to die ROFL. I've done some interfaces in it, integrated with existing stuff.
Flex is the shit. It's easy to program and manipulate, and has a much smaller attack surface than Silverlight (with.Net and c# integration)
I think you are basing your statements about Flash being hard to program in 1998's version of actionscript. That's not how it's done any more;)
Indeed, with the distrust of MS technologies, I don't see how Silverlight 2 will do any better than Silverlight 1, outside of obvious MS showcasing like the olympics. "Real" people aren't buying into Silverlight outside of the narrow set of professionals that are married to Microsoft.
Don't forget, NBC is in the same family of companies as MSNBC. Just because it was used for the olympics only means that MS has a controlling interest in NBC.
In posturing NBC's olympic coverage as a Silverlight showcase, it's almost laughable that this coverage went to nbc.com, as though people will forget about msnbc and Microsoft's affiliation with NBC./yawn
The U.S. has the biggest prison population in the world and outside of the various war zones, the most homicides and violent crime per capita of any country who has a government. You call that freedom?
The United States Government is an epic failure because it's rotten from the inside and run by self serving morons.
Yea there's a thing they hook your car up to to measure your pollution emissions every so often (2 years in MD, every year in PA) and it can detect that you don't have a cat because the emissions are higher without it.
You'll fail the test and get fined for removing federally mandated pollution controls.
As well catalytic converters are definitely expensive. There's been a rash of cat thefts from SUV's. People steal them and sell them to metal recyclers for the precious metals they have in them.
They target SUV's because you don't need to jack them up to get under there and cut the cat out of the exhaust system, and they are bigger than car cats are. Someone doing this is pretty hard to see to a casual observer. You need to walk up and look under the truck to see them.
The owner finds out when they leave work to go home, and start the truck up. It's pretty loud. That's the sound of ~$1100 or so leaving your wallet (for an average SUV). The worst part? They only get $40-50 for them at the junk dealer.
I've done it. The guy just calls the credit bureau and removes it. He has the necessary info to do so. The last time, it was re-unfrozen in less than 3 months.
My identity is a tug of war with this guy. I get the feeling from the people at the bureaus that they have no way to know whether or not *I'm* the ID thief.
I appreciate the effort of you trying to help me though.
Calls to Chicago PD are usually met with "What is it you want us to do again?". Nobody gives a shit. Even if they did, I'd have to go to Chicago, be a witness, then he'd probably get probation and do it again. Long term, as long as it doesn't go on my record and I'm not charged, I really could care less.
Yea banks have a lot to deal with, but they really create their own problems by allowing people to do their banking and finance work "online" without ever seeing a photo id or getting a signature. Not that it matters since you can easily just get a fake ID.
Without any enforcement, ID theft is a reality and criminals are brazen. Nobody cares. The authorities act like they care, pass some "tough legislation" during election years, but the bottom line is, nobody is doing squat about it unless it involves over $100k. The FBI high fives each other when they get a big one, smoke a cigar, have a happy hour and sleep well that night as millions of people steal from banks.
The employees at banks don't give a shit because they are getting paid peanuts to do thankless jobs steeped in red tape.
The funniest thing is if this guy walked into a bank and held it up for $4900, the police would be all over him.
It really makes me wonder why I bother to bust my ass to make money when I could just steal it and get away with it as long as I was smart about it. Oh that's right, I'm crippled by morals and values so I'm destined to be used and abused like the loser that I am. To be a winner you need to play the system to win and it doesn't involve working for a salary.
I own a house, have my car etc. If I need to make a big purchase I know it will take a couple of weeks. I just clean up my CR ahead of time and usually have no trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
> and I've never even heard of compiling your own Perl.
I've been doing this for a very long time, in addition to compiling my own php, apache etc.
If it's exposed, I compile it. If a 0day hits, I don't have the luxury of leaving the fate of my production security in some vendor's hands.
At the negligence trial, where I'm being prosecuted because my box got pwned, the plaintiff's attorney is going to ask why I didn't fix it if I could. I can, so I do.
If you are moving from packages to compiled stuff, it takes a lot longer than it does if you already operate this way.
The last SSL worm beat me over the head with the importance of this.
While compiling doesn't make you more secure, it sure as hell allows you to become secure faster *when* something happens and the vendors drag their feet. It beats unplugging your servers until a fix is available, which was my other option when this happened.
-Viz
> You are lucky to have some genuine competition in the form of FIOS.
ROFL, or cap fixing. I'd be willing to bet that all of them follow suit.
--customer gets bandwidth cap notice from verizon and calls them to give them a piece of his mind--
Customer: Verizon you can't do this! I signed up for unlimited FIOS!
Verizon: What are you going to do about it? Go to comcast? -LOL- Be my guest. We do offer unlimited bandwidth for an additional $50 a month 8) Want me to sign you up?
Customer: We have a contract!!!
Verizon: Read it closer, we can change the service any time we want and are only required to provide half of what we sell you anyway. The notice we gave was a courtesy. It's not against the law, we own the lawmakers.
Beyond that, I wonder what happens if your phone service is Skype or Vonage whatever, and you hit your cap, then your house catches fire and you try to call the fire department. Hmmmm...
-Viz
Aren't most hookers great actors? Since both agree to have sex isn't it consensual? /confused
Can't you pay the hooker for her acting skill when performing the act and not the act itself?
>After all, why should *I* pay for the fact that some bank lends money to someone who says it's me ?
You don't.
You will get a collection call.
At that point, you can ask them to fax you a copy of the signature they have, where you agreed to the credit contract.
They won't have it. Then you call the bureaus, and request your free copy of the report. When you get it, call back and talk to someone on the phone. They'll take it right off your report.
It took me less than an hour each of the 3x that Household Bank got ripped off by someone using my info. Never paid a single penny...
-Viz
>"It is difficult to imagine a more archetypal instance of the press informing the public of government operations through government records than Ostergren's posting of public records to demonstrate the lack of care being taken by government to protect the private information of individuals."
A ****ing men. This is a judge that knows what's up.
I love what Betty Ostergren is doing. I've been a fan of hers since a few years ago when she was on 20/20 (I think) and they went over what she is doing. Arizona and Florida immediately started programs to black out people's SSN's on their public records when they saw her site. I guess Virginia would rather expose it's citizens to ID theft and try to squelch Betty than fix the problem.
This is probably the biggest source of SSN's used for ID theft, and Betty is doing something about it.
BRAVO!!!! I'm glad nobody has shut her down yet.
-Viz
They're getting out because their chipsets suck and they are focusing on their core business, which is GPUs. Your Mobo had a MCP55 southbridge with a broken interrupt timer. I have the same chipset (on a DFI board) It won't rear it's ugly head unless you use a dual core CPU and game or use linux.
Without a BIOS patch you'll kernel panic on linux unless you use a switch that tells the kernel to use it's software timer (coded just for this issue) A while back Microsoft put in a patch that detects this issue and adds a /nofbtimer (or something like that) switch to boot.ini to use the Windows kernel soft timer.
Some vendors provided fixes (BIOS updates), some didn't. Subsequent problems in their chipset line include memory frying voltage mis-detection (790i) and several other serious issues.
I had one that was out of warranty (with no BIOS upgrade available) when I upgraded to a dual core cpu and found the problem.
Good riddance...
-Viz
/signed
"In these cases an advisor can read the full password."
WTF!
That's a pretty serious problem right there. Any bank I've worked at would be feverishly changing how this worked as soon as they found out what the idiot developer did. We had to use AES encrypted hashes. While I could change your password to do something, there's NFW I would ever be able to decode your password, at least not without a supercomputer.
What's worse is it's Lloyds TSB!!! I'd be changing banks if I found out my bank stored passwords this way.
This took the cake:
"it had to be no more than six letters long."
What kind of bank is this? Their development crew sounds pretty fly-by-night.
They wouldn't last very long here. I sure as hell wouldn't keep my money there.
-Viz
Maybe they face north to keep the sun out of their eyes?
Maybe they do it when the sky is cloudy because of habit?
-Viz
>At some point the software industry is going to need to establish itself as a rigorous practice with rigorous standards.
It's called ISO 9000 and is a standard. It's been around for quite a while now and there are specific implementations of this standard for software development. Few use it outside of Fortune 500. Indeed few use it inside the Fortune 500.
Unfortunately it dictates that software development, like anything else, go through a waterfall process. The end result is the users are forced into the other extreme. That is there's so much time spent on formal process (writing and re-writing technical docs, formal QA etc etc etc.) that very little real work gets done, and then people complain that stuff takes too long.
I was in a large Fortune 500 bank (top 5) and we switched to this. The people in the standards driven organization, had scheduled times when they did things. EG, change management meetings were done twice a week. You had to do two of them, and they had to be at least 2 weeks apart for a change. The first meeting was proposal. The second was when you presented qa results and got approval for production implementation. The net result was it took at least 3 weeks to change a phone number on a web site.
Because of the time it took to get anything done, the business units started going to outside contractors in the interest of productivity. The contractors ended up producing software that was *more* broken (feature wise as well as defects... we knew the business better than the contractors) than the stuff we were producing before the processes came into the company. The business managers didn't like the bugs, but they were happy to get something (anything) in the amount of turnaround time. They kept using the contractors and our department slowly got squeezed out of the company, culminating in "layoff by relocation".
Ironically the people running the process organizations got to keep their jobs despite a dwindling workload. They became more important than the people that did actual work.
Software developers *cannot* win. If we use the kind of discipline everyone wants us to, then everyone feels that we aren't productive enough. Investors pull their funding and users go with something else that's done *right now*. If we take the other approach, and get the job done in a reasonable amount of time the way the owner wants, hawkish people complain about the resulting bugs and start talking about process.
At the end of the day, productivity wins every time because you still end up with bugs, even with all the quality process, requirements gathering, technical spec writing (and rewriting) in the world. You also end up with a better product using a more iterative approach because the end result is what users actually want, not what they thought they wanted. In waterfall, they need to decide that up front and they tend to leave out very important details.
On production day, you end up in a pissing match where the docs people pull out the docs that the business owner signed and point out to them that they never asked for the features which are "missing" or show them how they wanted it one way, we delivered it, and now they want something else.
Waterfall sucks and is required by most "standards" processes. It's not good for anyone but people that write documentation. It's definitely not very good for users or developers. They are just another type of middleman that suck time and money. The end result is no better with them. In many cases it's worse.
The moral is: Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.
-Viz
The PC I bought my wife to do her work on, paid for itself in 30 days. We laid out money for a new PC for her work, with the expectation that she would use it to make money.
It was a good investment since she successfully used it to find and sell homes to buyers, and recouped the cost in less time than it took to depreciate. Now that it's paid for it's proving to be an excellent investment, since her old one was slow and she spilled soup into the keyboard (it was a laptop from 2000) which started causing problems and impacted her productivity.
Same deal for a car you use to drive to work. You profit from your salary so when you buy a car for commuting, it's an investment, even if it's a Mustang GT, though these days a smarter investment would be a Prius. However the prius offers less emotional return on investment so whether or not a hotrod is a good investment is subjective.
If blowing off steam by testing the reported 0-60MPH acceleration times causes a stress relief that helps you live longer, the Mustang is a damn good investment, despite the fuel cost. This value is immeasurable.
You can't take it with you and it pays to be giddy a few times a day, as irrational as that might be, it's simply good for you ;) Sometimes investing in your happiness is a good thing. You can see increased salary as well as work productivity when you are happy which is an indirect monetary gain, though the profit doesn't need to be monetary.
Merriam-Webster's defines profit as:
1: a valuable return : gain
2: the excess of returns over expenditure in a transaction or series of transactions; especially : the excess of the selling price of goods over their cost
3: net income usually for a given period of time
4: the ratio of profit for a given year to the amount of capital invested or to the value of sales
5: the compensation accruing to entrepreneurs for the assumption of risk in business enterprise as distinguished from wages or rent
I think happiness fits definition 1 (as long as you consider happiness valuable) and can be had with a 1337 gaming rig or car whether or not you use it to make money directly.
-Viz
>Thomas Jefferson explicitly worries about the ability of our system to have legitimate control over future generations
"Legitimate control" is thrown out the window as soon as you start willfully and knowingly disregarding votes of citizens. If this happens the elected government is no longer legitimate, it's unconstitutional. If the machines are known to do this, and the government insists on using them, the government is de-legitimizing the elections which de-legitimizes the government in turn.
How do we know the machines are not trained to disregard some votes and not others? Prove they aren't.
Without a proper audit trail, these machines threaten the very existence of our democracy since for all we know, the elections are rigged and nobody can prove they aren't. This is something you really don't want to mess with because it is how revolutions happen. Trust me, good solid provable election results are far better for everyone than a revolution would be.
Good points spiffyman...
-Viz
Thank you!
I've been saying this for a long time.
ATI, while it does have a faster GPU, still has a slower card in the 4870. Why? 256 bit memory interface. They need at least 384 (ideally 512) to compete with a nVidia 280. This is why the 280 still spanks a 4870 despite having a slower processor. It's all about the memory storage and throughput.
Memory starvation causes "hitching" (brief pausing while textures load) and client side lag with a lot of "bots" in the field resulting in dropped frames. Whether or not they can fit a bus this wide on a 4870 die remains to be seen and is surely a tough engineering problem. I'm holding out til november. If they haven't done it, I'll just have to get 2 cards, crossfire them and hope for the best.
Intel while they have a long way to go, may do it one day, but it's not going to be for at least 2 years. They have a lot of R&D to do.
-Viz
I was about to say the same thing.
It would never work. What would work is distributed caching whereby a local area (everyone on the same segment) has a cache server and the users hit that thing directly off the core switch for their segment. Users using VOD would be completely not affected by p2p since the only place the traffic would compete is in the fabric, which is more than capable of handling the traffic.
While the implementation would be prohibitively expensive, it would solve the problem once and for all. They could start with the segments that had the most p2p traffic.
btw, I'm under 40 ;)
Recently (5 years ago) I went to IBM class in Bethesda, MD. We did exactly this. It was a bootcamp for setting up LPARs and installing linux VMs on them in preparation for putting websphere on them. Cool stuff. I wouldn't try it without first building the procedure and mapping out the whole job. It's not exactly intuitive and you really need to do a detailed accounting of what you do.
If you could set up a web farm this way (minus websphere of course) it would be pretty deluxe. The only PITA about it was the hypervisor had it's set of ports, and the ports cannot be duplicated on any vms, so you literally had to do something like:
VM1: 80
VM2: 81
VM3: 83
to use http as an example.
It'd still be worth it. The IO capability on mainframes is second to none. Compared to little servers, to use a hose analogy, it's the difference between the air tubing you might find in an aquarium, and a firehose. x86 is a joke for applications that need to *really* scale.
Ahhh to run a web farm powered by DB2 on mainframe. You'd never see a busy message ROFL. That's all I got to say.
-Viz
Yes, you end up with an average dynamic range of 4db (maybe 3db by now?) with most popular music. The medium is capable of 90db(usable) at 16 bit. The dynamic range is there when it leaves the studio for the mastering desk; that's where people who care nothing about sound quality, but have all the money, pencil whip the mastering engineers into ruining it with extreme overcompression in the name of being "competitively loud". The mastering engineers have to make a living so the grudgingly comply, despite knowing it's pure stupidity. They have to pay their mortgage right?
Hopefully with the downfall of the recording "industry" and the rise of independent studio work this trend gets reversed.
>they'd just compress the audio to make it sound loud and we'd be in the same boat that we are with CDs.
yup...
Sad. We have the capability to sound *better* than a 1 inch tape deck and we toss that 20db advantage out with the garbage.
The worst part is a properly mastered recording sounds just as loud as an overcompressed one on the radio, only it has dynamics and sounds better. The radio stations apply their own compression to even things out. This works with the overcompression on the CD to completely ruin it.
It boggles the mind... The result: music radio stations are switching to talk radio format in droves, because nobody will listen to music on the radio. I wonder why...
-Viz
> is that Javascript is a very powerful LISP-like langauge
Which LISP?
I know it's radically different from Common LISP. Don't know about the other flavors.
-Viz
> She wanted to give the @2 billion people around the world who dont have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy.
Screw that, I'm building a new set of roof tiles and giving myself the gift of light and cheap energy :D
This pisses me off when I'm getting paid to wait, especially when the person you are waiting for has 30 hours of work to do, shows up at 10:30, takes a 3hr lunch break and leaves at 3 PM and tells you to "Get the fuck out of my cube" when you politely ask for a status and management doesn't do anything about it.
I'm not sure that working from home would be any worse for productivity, but getting paid for piecework would be the worst way to be paid in some offices. There'd be killings over it because now these people are impacting whether or not you can pay your mortgage.
There are people who would kill you over losing their house because you are a slacker.
-Viz
Barring civil rights legislation, just about every law enacted, and program started in the 20th century was a big giant mistake. We're on track to do even worse this century.
People were better off when they looked out for themselves. Those that wanted to make a better life for themselves could because they got to keep their money and weren't strangled with taxes.
Those that don't, well, this is America. You can become anything you want. If you don't want to try, you deserve what you get. Social programs have the opposite effect that they were intended to have. Social security is a fiasco.
I want my money. Not one social program benefits me, yet I pay close to half my paycheck for them.
Our entire "debt" is due to this crap. I'll stop now.
-Viz
Flamebait?
The truth shall set you free:
"The United States leads the industrialized world in incarceration. In fact, the U.S. rate of incarceration (762 per 100,000) is five to eight times that of other highly developed countries, according to The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice think tank. "
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=5009270
We have mandatory minimum sentences of 5 years or more for crimes that other countries consider misdemeanors.
I reiterate, the US Government, as it stands today, is an epic failure because it's run by self serving morons who only care about how much they'll get paid by the lobbyists pass whatever will help the big corporation that's paying both of them.
More people die in our cities in one year, to criminals, than U.S. active duty Soldiers in 4 years of combat in Iraq.
Everyone gets all pissed off about soldiers dying in Iraq. There's more people dying right in your back yard. The soldiers are tragic, I agree, and I have great respect for them, but this country is going to shit. The sooner you take off the blinders the better off you'll be.
I was born and raised here. This country's government, the jackass, and the elephant, is steering the country I love, into ruin.
I stand by my "flamebait" because it's true. If you want to see the facts behind my assertions, I'll happily dig them up for you and post more links. Just tell me what you want.
-Viz
I'm oldschool too (by 2008's definition). I used to do assembler on my Commodore 64 back in '83 (back when I was 13). Of course that was before college. I'm too young to have done much with VAX or big iron (finished college in '93). By the time I was a professional everyone was moving to the little servers like lemmings, for better or worse, mostly worse.
I don't see how Silverlight 2 can succeed, outside of the cozy world of Microsoft fanbois.
Their support for FOSS OS's, while decidedly convenient, is just a bullet point for the sales brochure; I can see this support getting as bad as Adobe's for non MS platforms, once Flex is dead and MS can flex their dominance.
Of course this won't happen because Flex isn't going to die ROFL. I've done some interfaces in it, integrated with existing stuff.
Flex is the shit. It's easy to program and manipulate, and has a much smaller attack surface than Silverlight (with .Net and c# integration)
I think you are basing your statements about Flash being hard to program in 1998's version of actionscript. That's not how it's done any more ;)
Indeed, with the distrust of MS technologies, I don't see how Silverlight 2 will do any better than Silverlight 1, outside of obvious MS showcasing like the olympics. "Real" people aren't buying into Silverlight outside of the narrow set of professionals that are married to Microsoft.
Don't forget, NBC is in the same family of companies as MSNBC. Just because it was used for the olympics only means that MS has a controlling interest in NBC.
In posturing NBC's olympic coverage as a Silverlight showcase, it's almost laughable that this coverage went to nbc.com, as though people will forget about msnbc and Microsoft's affiliation with NBC. /yawn
-Viz
Define "safe".
The U.S. has the biggest prison population in the world and outside of the various war zones, the most homicides and violent crime per capita of any country who has a government. You call that freedom?
The United States Government is an epic failure because it's rotten from the inside and run by self serving morons.
-Viz
Yea there's a thing they hook your car up to to measure your pollution emissions every so often (2 years in MD, every year in PA) and it can detect that you don't have a cat because the emissions are higher without it.
You'll fail the test and get fined for removing federally mandated pollution controls.
As well catalytic converters are definitely expensive. There's been a rash of cat thefts from SUV's. People steal them and sell them to metal recyclers for the precious metals they have in them.
They target SUV's because you don't need to jack them up to get under there and cut the cat out of the exhaust system, and they are bigger than car cats are. Someone doing this is pretty hard to see to a casual observer. You need to walk up and look under the truck to see them.
The owner finds out when they leave work to go home, and start the truck up. It's pretty loud. That's the sound of ~$1100 or so leaving your wallet (for an average SUV). The worst part? They only get $40-50 for them at the junk dealer.
-Viz
I've done it. The guy just calls the credit bureau and removes it. He has the necessary info to do so. The last time, it was re-unfrozen in less than 3 months.
My identity is a tug of war with this guy. I get the feeling from the people at the bureaus that they have no way to know whether or not *I'm* the ID thief.
I appreciate the effort of you trying to help me though.
Calls to Chicago PD are usually met with "What is it you want us to do again?". Nobody gives a shit. Even if they did, I'd have to go to Chicago, be a witness, then he'd probably get probation and do it again. Long term, as long as it doesn't go on my record and I'm not charged, I really could care less.
Yea banks have a lot to deal with, but they really create their own problems by allowing people to do their banking and finance work "online" without ever seeing a photo id or getting a signature. Not that it matters since you can easily just get a fake ID.
Without any enforcement, ID theft is a reality and criminals are brazen. Nobody cares. The authorities act like they care, pass some "tough legislation" during election years, but the bottom line is, nobody is doing squat about it unless it involves over $100k. The FBI high fives each other when they get a big one, smoke a cigar, have a happy hour and sleep well that night as millions of people steal from banks.
The employees at banks don't give a shit because they are getting paid peanuts to do thankless jobs steeped in red tape.
The funniest thing is if this guy walked into a bank and held it up for $4900, the police would be all over him.
It really makes me wonder why I bother to bust my ass to make money when I could just steal it and get away with it as long as I was smart about it. Oh that's right, I'm crippled by morals and values so I'm destined to be used and abused like the loser that I am. To be a winner you need to play the system to win and it doesn't involve working for a salary.
I own a house, have my car etc. If I need to make a big purchase I know it will take a couple of weeks. I just clean up my CR ahead of time and usually have no trouble.
-Viz