The story I read earlier this morning quoted someone or other as saying that customers currently in a contract won't see a change until the contract is up. If they renew, it will be at the new price.
That's wrong, because nobody with an unlimited plan has a contract any more...they are all month-to-month, as their contracts have expired.
If you had an unlimited plan and wanted to do something that forced you into a contract (subsidized phone, etc.), then you were told that you had to sign up for a new plan. For a while now, Verizon doesn't have an phone subsidies, so people with unlimited who stuck it out this long now had no incentive to switch off the plan...they would pay full price for any new device. So, Verizon is raising their rates to try to convince them to switch. It's not very nice, but it is unfortunately legal.
I have an Onyx M92 and it supports a nice number of formats (EPUB, PDF, cbz, even Excel and Word) but that's old and I'm sure there're much better models by now.
Nope, there's nothing better in the 9-10" e-ink category.
I have the same reader and have been looking for something new because the poor HTML support on the reader app means I have to manually edit every book so it looks correct, because they all use the features (drop caps, embedded fonts, etc.) available on the Kindle.
USB isn't built for juggling machines. Every time you switch from Machine #1 to Machine #2, the USB devices all magically vanish and disconnect from Machine #1 (prompting drivers to be disabled), and magically reappear on Machine #2 (drivers now have to be loaded and initialized).
Good KVMs show up as a composite HID device and always present that to the OS, even if a different computer is now active. One of the things this means is that most gaming mice and some keyboard keys aren't passed through.
Really good KVMs have an option to disable this feature and allow straight pass through of the devices to allow all functionality.
Much like the movie, it's all about the energy source, the mechanics are a solved problem already.
The mechanics of how to keep a man from being turned to jelly when the suit gets tossed into a nearby building by the Hulk have been solved?
Seriously, though, there will never be an exoskeleton as maneuverable and fast as the Iron Man suit, since there is no way to protect the occupant from mistakes that cause sudden deceleration. Even a fast turn could be deadly.
I have nothing against the modern-day Volkswagen Group, but to deny its corporate history (and that of Mitsubishi, Daimler-Benz, Fujitsu, etc.) is no better than a Nazi tactic.
I always thought that Mitsubishi should start using the tagline "From the company that brought you Pearl Harbor".
Because a business that wants to get guaranteed 50Mbps will easily pay $1000/month or more.
Consumer broadband works by splitting that among several people, so they pay for a share and as long as no one hogs it all, they can also share it.
I pay about $120/month for 35/35 business service...it would be about $150 for 50/50, with as much "guarantee" as any provider will give you. As with all things broadband, it's all about competition. If there's a lot, it's priced as it should be...otherwise, $1000/month for 50Mbps is what you get.
Like the THEMIS Day IR 100m Global Mosaic torrent, at 42GB is streamed? Or the Internet Census 2012 at 569.43GB? Torrents are not just movies - there are some really interesting public domain datasets out there.
But, that's nowhere near normal use case. I download torrents like that for my work, and 500GB is just a starting point. My current project has 245 files larger than 500GB, going up to 917GB (total data about 2.6PB).
I wouldn't expect anybody to download this stuff to their home connection...I use about 2-3Gbps for the download, and we only had a 10Gbps connection total for over 4000 users...luckily that's now 100Gbps.
I tend to get frustrated with the speed gets below 100. This is particularly the case when downloading a Playstation game and you stare at that progress indicator waiting to play.:-) If I want to play, I want to play now, not in 30 minutes (games are big these days).
I only allocate 10Mbps to my Steam downloads, and it's not unusual for a game to take 10 hours to download (40GB games aren't unusual, as you say). Even with 100Mbps, it would take an hour and saturate the link.
If you want to play now, you're going to need at least 1Gbps...that 100Mbps isn't going to cut it.
I have 100Mbps (down). I don't run a porn server, however I do work from home frequently. All wired 1 GBps in the house, yes I really run a SAN. Being your judgmental and unhappy self, how would you rate my usage?
First, I run a 10Gbps backbone that my SAN and ESX hosts are connected to, and 1Gbps to all other locations. So, you're nothing special.
I have FiOS up to 500/500 available where I live, but only pay for 35/35 because other than the occasional game download, nothing takes so long that I even notice. I can play games, stream movies, remote desktop, etc., and it's hard to tell which sessions are local and which go out over the Internet.
Only with many, many popular torrents, and then you run into the problem that you need very fast disks to keep up with the 600MB/sec read+write. I work with a lot of systems that transfer a lot of data, and the trick is balancing all the hardware so it can all keep up with the speeds.
At my work, we're just installing a 100Gbps connection to the Internet, and all that means is that we now have to upgrade everything else to be able to take advantage of it.
If you're keeping your connection near 100% utilized in both directions 24x7, frankly, you're not that kind of customer they want anyway, they'd just as soon you go bog down someone else's network (unless you're willing to actually pay more to offset it).
300 GB per month is 1 megabit per second average. So, even hitting 1200GB/month, you're not getting anywhere near "100% utilized" on a 10Mbps line.
I strongly suspect this very low number was picked because there will be quite a few people who will just bite the bullet and pay the extra $30/month, regardless of their actual usage.
In this fictitious example, DoD is paying Gmail for a proven email system and the personnel to keep it running, up to date, and secure.
The other huge difference in your example is that DoD would merely be paying for something already built and functional.
TFA is about three companies building a system from scratch. Even if they use something that mostly already exists, it will be highly customized for DoD, to the point that it will be different from anything they have already done, and nowhere near "proven" or "tested". Since the history of those three companies shows they want nothing more than keeping their clients locked in as long as possible, it's not a recipe for long-term success.
The Feds always look for the most expensive option. They'll end up with pricey battery powered hardware tokens when they could look at cheap Yubikeys.
Every employee of the US government already has two-factor authentication in the form of a smart card. The problem is that there are many programs that don't have the hooks for two-factor authentication built in.
For example, a web app that queries Active Directory almost always asks for username and password, when Windows Authentication can use either username/password or smart card/PIN. This is because smart card/PIN requires trusted code to run on the client computer, and we all know that isn't really possible.
Throw that same programmer into a FORTRAN, LISP, or eris forbid Prologue, and there will be a larger learning curve than just the syntax and limitations.
Modern FORTRAN won't be that big a deal for anyone familiar with C and bash. Same looping structures, free-form code (indent however you want), etc., but just no braces to mark blocks.
A publisher can donate 10,000 eBooks to a library with a few thousand square feet of floor space, but couldn't do that if the books were physical, as there would be no room.
Systemd has mount unit files that can specify before and after dependencies so I can tell it I want it to load after the network and daemons they depend on but before things like ftp, apache etc.
When this works, it's great, but when even mounting NFS (what used to be quite a simple thing) can cause the system to hang because of errors, it's not really a step forward.
On previous init systems, if your NFS mount wasn't available before the subsystem that needed it, then that subsystem might not start up correctly, but the system would finish booting and give you a login prompt A little tweak to a startup script to add a check and the problem is solved for the next boot, with only a little time when the service isn't available (after a manual start). But, I've seen systemd just stop the boot process when it can't fulfill a dependency like this, and the only solution was to reboot into single user mode, tweak config files, and try the boot again.
Yes, I believe I am a reasonably savvy consumer when it comes to SSD drives. I am a Business Intelligence specialist and I am quite confident in my ability to understand and evaluate disk read performance. It is part of my job. When analyzing large amounts of data or operating virtual servers (booting or resuming), sustained data transfer is very important.
In which case, you shouldn't have picked the 840 EVO to start with, but rather the 840 Pro (or 850 Pro now).
If you want true performance, you have to pay for it. I have a pair of 840 EVOs myself because I don't need the extra speed from faster drives, and the price was right.
i'm terrible at negotiations (coz i'm not an extroverted sales-arsehole) but even i know to reflect that question back by asking what's being offered.
The right thing to do is go in with "best world" and "worst world" numbers, and when asked what you want, give your "best world" number.
That number shouldn't be a pie-in-the-sky, set you for life number, but instead a real idea of what it would take for you to live at your standards in that part of the country. This means you have to think about what commute you are willing to put up with and what that means for housing prices, and what the overall cost just to keep alive (electricity, transportation, food, etc.) will be. Add enough that you can save about 15-25% per year, and then add on enough to be able to relax when you want to. That means you have to define what "relax" means (go skiing, play video games, travel the world, etc.). That'll be close to your "best world".
You're "worst world" depends on your current situation. If you already have a job that is OK, maybe you only drop about 10% from the best to get your worst. If you've been unemployed for a while and bill collectors are camping on your door, maybe you'll take less.
With those numbers firmly set in place, you don't have to let them make the first move, as you know your upper and lower limit. It's just up to you to decide what happens if they counter and are still above your worst. Then, it's a matter of how much the quality of the job fits with what you want.
When is the last time you negotiated prices at the grocery store?
I don't generally negotiate at grocery stores because it's just not a good ROI. Sure, getting an extra $0.25 off a 2-liter bottle of soda might be a 12% savings, but it's only a quarter. On the other hand, if I wanted 50 pounds of meat for a party, I might ask them for their normal "sale" price even if it wasn't on sale right now, because that could save me $100.
I already do this with items like appliances, where I ask for the best sale price. I'm likely to get that price, because whatever store I'm in knows that some other store either currently has a price close to what I want, or will soon. And, no store sells those kind of things at a loss even on sale, so it's not really a problem for them.
It would be a lot less exciting if the CSI's job were more realistic. They go to a scene, spend a few hours poking around, then write up a report and hand it over to the detective? Who wants to watch that?
Strangely enough, The Flash gets this right. Barry Allen is a CS tech, and he goes to the scene, gathers evidence, and writes up the report for the cops. Sure, he's now a superhero and does other stuff, but when doing his normal job, he is much closer to what a CS tech does in real life than any other show has given us.
Here's a test: uninstall all those other "optional" processes and see what happens. Is systemd still installed, or does it get uninstalled because of dependency resolution? Does your system still boot? Can you log in?
Report your results back here, so we can all see how "optional" those extra processes are.
Assuming that I took more than just myself, I don't think burning on a large stake would be a risk, we have automatic weapons.:)
That being said, your example proves my point, it would look like magic to those people who have no frame of reference.
BTW, firearms are a bad example of "looks like magic" to somebody 500 years ago. Those automatic weapons haven't changed much in 100 years, and single-shot firearms very similar to what we have today have existed for over 400, with gunpowder-fired projectiles around 800 years old.
The only significant firearm-specific advancement from 1600 to the late 1800s was the cartridge (which also made clips possible). Better metalworking techniques, etc., also helped, but those were general-purpose. At that point, the first self-loading firearm that didn't use human power to load the next cartridge (i.e., a semi-automatic) came along in the early 1900s. Since then, the change in firearms is almost identical to the change in rocket technology...scale is larger, and materials are stronger, but the design really hasn't changed much.
Even once we had airplanes, you have only a lifetime from 1903 to 1969, yet people in 1903 couldn't have dreamed of what the Saturn V would look like or how it would work.
There were rockets in 1903. They weren't as powerful, but the physics of rocket flight was pretty well known at the time.
The only difference between fireworks and the Saturn V is scale...more powerful fuel, stronger materials, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The story I read earlier this morning quoted someone or other as saying that customers currently in a contract won't see a change until the contract is up. If they renew, it will be at the new price.
That's wrong, because nobody with an unlimited plan has a contract any more...they are all month-to-month, as their contracts have expired.
If you had an unlimited plan and wanted to do something that forced you into a contract (subsidized phone, etc.), then you were told that you had to sign up for a new plan. For a while now, Verizon doesn't have an phone subsidies, so people with unlimited who stuck it out this long now had no incentive to switch off the plan...they would pay full price for any new device. So, Verizon is raising their rates to try to convince them to switch. It's not very nice, but it is unfortunately legal.
I have an Onyx M92 and it supports a nice number of formats (EPUB, PDF, cbz, even Excel and Word) but that's old and I'm sure there're much better models by now.
Nope, there's nothing better in the 9-10" e-ink category.
I have the same reader and have been looking for something new because the poor HTML support on the reader app means I have to manually edit every book so it looks correct, because they all use the features (drop caps, embedded fonts, etc.) available on the Kindle.
USB isn't built for juggling machines. Every time you switch from Machine #1 to Machine #2, the USB devices all magically vanish and disconnect from Machine #1 (prompting drivers to be disabled), and magically reappear on Machine #2 (drivers now have to be loaded and initialized).
Good KVMs show up as a composite HID device and always present that to the OS, even if a different computer is now active. One of the things this means is that most gaming mice and some keyboard keys aren't passed through.
Really good KVMs have an option to disable this feature and allow straight pass through of the devices to allow all functionality.
Much like the movie, it's all about the energy source, the mechanics are a solved problem already.
The mechanics of how to keep a man from being turned to jelly when the suit gets tossed into a nearby building by the Hulk have been solved?
Seriously, though, there will never be an exoskeleton as maneuverable and fast as the Iron Man suit, since there is no way to protect the occupant from mistakes that cause sudden deceleration. Even a fast turn could be deadly.
I have nothing against the modern-day Volkswagen Group, but to deny its corporate history (and that of Mitsubishi, Daimler-Benz, Fujitsu, etc.) is no better than a Nazi tactic.
I always thought that Mitsubishi should start using the tagline "From the company that brought you Pearl Harbor".
Because a business that wants to get guaranteed 50Mbps will easily pay $1000/month or more.
Consumer broadband works by splitting that among several people, so they pay for a share and as long as no one hogs it all, they can also share it.
I pay about $120/month for 35/35 business service...it would be about $150 for 50/50, with as much "guarantee" as any provider will give you. As with all things broadband, it's all about competition. If there's a lot, it's priced as it should be...otherwise, $1000/month for 50Mbps is what you get.
Like the THEMIS Day IR 100m Global Mosaic torrent, at 42GB is streamed? Or the Internet Census 2012 at 569.43GB? Torrents are not just movies - there are some really interesting public domain datasets out there.
But, that's nowhere near normal use case. I download torrents like that for my work, and 500GB is just a starting point. My current project has 245 files larger than 500GB, going up to 917GB (total data about 2.6PB).
I wouldn't expect anybody to download this stuff to their home connection...I use about 2-3Gbps for the download, and we only had a 10Gbps connection total for over 4000 users...luckily that's now 100Gbps.
I tend to get frustrated with the speed gets below 100. This is particularly the case when downloading a Playstation game and you stare at that progress indicator waiting to play. :-) If I want to play, I want to play now, not in 30 minutes (games are big these days).
I only allocate 10Mbps to my Steam downloads, and it's not unusual for a game to take 10 hours to download (40GB games aren't unusual, as you say). Even with 100Mbps, it would take an hour and saturate the link.
If you want to play now, you're going to need at least 1Gbps...that 100Mbps isn't going to cut it.
I have 100Mbps (down). I don't run a porn server, however I do work from home frequently. All wired 1 GBps in the house, yes I really run a SAN. Being your judgmental and unhappy self, how would you rate my usage?
First, I run a 10Gbps backbone that my SAN and ESX hosts are connected to, and 1Gbps to all other locations. So, you're nothing special.
I have FiOS up to 500/500 available where I live, but only pay for 35/35 because other than the occasional game download, nothing takes so long that I even notice. I can play games, stream movies, remote desktop, etc., and it's hard to tell which sessions are local and which go out over the Internet.
Bittorrent.
Only with many, many popular torrents, and then you run into the problem that you need very fast disks to keep up with the 600MB/sec read+write. I work with a lot of systems that transfer a lot of data, and the trick is balancing all the hardware so it can all keep up with the speeds.
At my work, we're just installing a 100Gbps connection to the Internet, and all that means is that we now have to upgrade everything else to be able to take advantage of it.
If you're keeping your connection near 100% utilized in both directions 24x7, frankly, you're not that kind of customer they want anyway, they'd just as soon you go bog down someone else's network (unless you're willing to actually pay more to offset it).
300 GB per month is 1 megabit per second average. So, even hitting 1200GB/month, you're not getting anywhere near "100% utilized" on a 10Mbps line.
I strongly suspect this very low number was picked because there will be quite a few people who will just bite the bullet and pay the extra $30/month, regardless of their actual usage.
In this fictitious example, DoD is paying Gmail for a proven email system and the personnel to keep it running, up to date, and secure.
The other huge difference in your example is that DoD would merely be paying for something already built and functional.
TFA is about three companies building a system from scratch. Even if they use something that mostly already exists, it will be highly customized for DoD, to the point that it will be different from anything they have already done, and nowhere near "proven" or "tested". Since the history of those three companies shows they want nothing more than keeping their clients locked in as long as possible, it's not a recipe for long-term success.
The Feds always look for the most expensive option. They'll end up with pricey battery powered hardware tokens when they could look at cheap Yubikeys.
Every employee of the US government already has two-factor authentication in the form of a smart card. The problem is that there are many programs that don't have the hooks for two-factor authentication built in.
For example, a web app that queries Active Directory almost always asks for username and password, when Windows Authentication can use either username/password or smart card/PIN. This is because smart card/PIN requires trusted code to run on the client computer, and we all know that isn't really possible.
Throw that same programmer into a FORTRAN, LISP, or eris forbid Prologue, and there will be a larger learning curve than just the syntax and limitations.
Modern FORTRAN won't be that big a deal for anyone familiar with C and bash. Same looping structures, free-form code (indent however you want), etc., but just no braces to mark blocks.
What specific problem are ebooks going to solve?
A publisher can donate 10,000 eBooks to a library with a few thousand square feet of floor space, but couldn't do that if the books were physical, as there would be no room.
Systemd has mount unit files that can specify before and after dependencies so I can tell it I want it to load after the network and daemons they depend on but before things like ftp, apache etc.
When this works, it's great, but when even mounting NFS (what used to be quite a simple thing) can cause the system to hang because of errors, it's not really a step forward.
On previous init systems, if your NFS mount wasn't available before the subsystem that needed it, then that subsystem might not start up correctly, but the system would finish booting and give you a login prompt A little tweak to a startup script to add a check and the problem is solved for the next boot, with only a little time when the service isn't available (after a manual start). But, I've seen systemd just stop the boot process when it can't fulfill a dependency like this, and the only solution was to reboot into single user mode, tweak config files, and try the boot again.
And the RedHat decision was motivated by...?
Money
The more opaque and difficult you make the system, the more likely people will pay for support.
Yes, I believe I am a reasonably savvy consumer when it comes to SSD drives. I am a Business Intelligence specialist and I am quite confident in my ability to understand and evaluate disk read performance. It is part of my job. When analyzing large amounts of data or operating virtual servers (booting or resuming), sustained data transfer is very important.
In which case, you shouldn't have picked the 840 EVO to start with, but rather the 840 Pro (or 850 Pro now).
If you want true performance, you have to pay for it. I have a pair of 840 EVOs myself because I don't need the extra speed from faster drives, and the price was right.
i'm terrible at negotiations (coz i'm not an extroverted sales-arsehole) but even i know to reflect that question back by asking what's being offered.
The right thing to do is go in with "best world" and "worst world" numbers, and when asked what you want, give your "best world" number.
That number shouldn't be a pie-in-the-sky, set you for life number, but instead a real idea of what it would take for you to live at your standards in that part of the country. This means you have to think about what commute you are willing to put up with and what that means for housing prices, and what the overall cost just to keep alive (electricity, transportation, food, etc.) will be. Add enough that you can save about 15-25% per year, and then add on enough to be able to relax when you want to. That means you have to define what "relax" means (go skiing, play video games, travel the world, etc.). That'll be close to your "best world".
You're "worst world" depends on your current situation. If you already have a job that is OK, maybe you only drop about 10% from the best to get your worst. If you've been unemployed for a while and bill collectors are camping on your door, maybe you'll take less.
With those numbers firmly set in place, you don't have to let them make the first move, as you know your upper and lower limit. It's just up to you to decide what happens if they counter and are still above your worst. Then, it's a matter of how much the quality of the job fits with what you want.
When is the last time you negotiated prices at the grocery store?
I don't generally negotiate at grocery stores because it's just not a good ROI. Sure, getting an extra $0.25 off a 2-liter bottle of soda might be a 12% savings, but it's only a quarter. On the other hand, if I wanted 50 pounds of meat for a party, I might ask them for their normal "sale" price even if it wasn't on sale right now, because that could save me $100.
I already do this with items like appliances, where I ask for the best sale price. I'm likely to get that price, because whatever store I'm in knows that some other store either currently has a price close to what I want, or will soon. And, no store sells those kind of things at a loss even on sale, so it's not really a problem for them.
It would be a lot less exciting if the CSI's job were more realistic. They go to a scene, spend a few hours poking around, then write up a report and hand it over to the detective? Who wants to watch that?
Strangely enough, The Flash gets this right. Barry Allen is a CS tech, and he goes to the scene, gathers evidence, and writes up the report for the cops. Sure, he's now a superhero and does other stuff, but when doing his normal job, he is much closer to what a CS tech does in real life than any other show has given us.
wrong, all the other processes are optional.
Here's a test: uninstall all those other "optional" processes and see what happens. Is systemd still installed, or does it get uninstalled because of dependency resolution? Does your system still boot? Can you log in?
Report your results back here, so we can all see how "optional" those extra processes are.
I personally know a handful of people able to do that on various architectures (yours truly included).
Really, you can glance at one screen of hex dump (typically 1-2KB) and know exactly what all parts of a 10MB program are doing?
Assuming that I took more than just myself, I don't think burning on a large stake would be a risk, we have automatic weapons. :)
That being said, your example proves my point, it would look like magic to those people who have no frame of reference.
BTW, firearms are a bad example of "looks like magic" to somebody 500 years ago. Those automatic weapons haven't changed much in 100 years, and single-shot firearms very similar to what we have today have existed for over 400, with gunpowder-fired projectiles around 800 years old.
The only significant firearm-specific advancement from 1600 to the late 1800s was the cartridge (which also made clips possible). Better metalworking techniques, etc., also helped, but those were general-purpose. At that point, the first self-loading firearm that didn't use human power to load the next cartridge (i.e., a semi-automatic) came along in the early 1900s. Since then, the change in firearms is almost identical to the change in rocket technology...scale is larger, and materials are stronger, but the design really hasn't changed much.
Even once we had airplanes, you have only a lifetime from 1903 to 1969, yet people in 1903 couldn't have dreamed of what the Saturn V would look like or how it would work.
There were rockets in 1903. They weren't as powerful, but the physics of rocket flight was pretty well known at the time.
The only difference between fireworks and the Saturn V is scale...more powerful fuel, stronger materials, etc.