You're utterly and totally wrong. That my higher taxes are costing me more money than my increased cost-of-living, and that the two together are almost completely eliminating what appears to be a very large pay increase, is a very simple fact, a couple line items I can point to on my paycheck and bank statement. It is not open to debate or opinion, and your saying "Nuh uh" like a child is massively idiotic.
What's worse than that, though, is that in the process you admit you really don't know WTF you're talking about, with statements like: "I don't know the tax brackets," and " These are all examples, and real world taxes are much harsher," yet you prattle on and assert how wrong I am, with my piddly little facts...
f your specialty is something that isn't too obscure and is in demand, and you move to an area where there's a lot of jobs in that specialty, you should be fine.
Maybe that's true if we're talking about low and medium-paying jobs. When you're talking about the really good-paying jobs, recruiters aren't looking for just anyone. They want someone that basically been doing almost the exact same job for the past 5 years straight. Just because what you do is generally in-demand doesn't mean you're a candidate for even a fraction of the companies trying to hire someone that perfectly fits their environment.
Being in a big city isn't really a solution. Just commuting from one end of Los Angeles to the other (for a new job) can be a much longer drive than commuting from one suburban city to the next. And make no mistake, when you're living in LA and looking at jobs for a year or so, all the good jobs will be in San Diego. And living in San Diego, you'll likely find all the good jobs are in LA, or OC, or San Jose.
I've worked with plenty of top-rate people, and I don't know a one who has worked for more than two companies without having to move, or otherwise commute over an hour each way for a few diehards.
you'll do better switching companies every 3-4 years.
That's probably so, but what are the odds that you're going to find multiple companies in your area needing the exact skills you possess, and happen to be hiring right when you are looking?
I may be making good money, but I've also done large moves, 3 times in the past 4 years following different jobs. How much of a pay cut is it worth to live in the city/county/state you like, and being able to stay in one home for several years at a time?
How many years can you keep it up?...and then what? Will you have enough money to retire then? If not, you've got the same problem.
I changed jobs twice during the crisis. Good people are always in demand. If you want more than sub-inflation raises (or no raises at all), get off your butt and see if you can find something better.
I agree with this part. I've drastically increased my pay by switching jobs in the past few years.
With luck, you will. If you don't try, you definitely won't. As simple as that.
Big word of warning... If you post a resume to job sites, expect an absolute FLOOD of horrendous and useless calls from Indian "recruiters". If a single word in your resume matches any keywords for a job, expect a couple calls about it. Doesn't matter what job you say you're looking for, doesn't matter if you checked that you aren't willing to relocate.
I averaged a dozen calls every day for over a month after updating my resume on a couple job sites. I've gotten hundreds and hundreds of e-mails, and all of a handful have even been possibilities (right job title, not two states over). Large states are the worst (California), because these useless foreign idiots that call themselves recruiters don't check a map, and just assume if it's in the same state, it's a reasonable driving distance, and that's even the ones who are (barely) trying... I get spammed about jobs all over the country.
This is a new phenomenon to me, and seriously risks making posting your resume a fool's errand, or worse. It's so bad that just posting your resume with a cell phone number runs the real risk of causing you to lose your current job as you are inundated with calls.
Worse, employers are getting flooded by insane numbers of resumes from completely unqualified applicants. The weapon of choice seem to be requiring a recruiter to meet candidates in person before submitting them for consideration, which is quite the nightmare when your recruiter could be located 200 miles away... suddenly you need to take a day off work just to be allowed to SUBMIT a resume for consideration, which is the case with a number of companies. And just watching job sites doesn't work, as a huge number of jobs aren't ever listed on such job sites.
"but we discovered that the process had already been patented, so we had to cancel the project."
Bull. We got modern aircraft from companies trying to work their way around the Wright brothers' patents. Did you notice 747s don't have "wing warping"?
WebM/VP8 only exists because working around MPEG patents was profitable enough to sustain On2's codec development efforts. Hell, MPEG only exists because of Intel buying control of Cinepak and people wanting an alternative.
Patents have been a very large motivator for research and development. Their tarnished status today is due to an increasingly fucked-up legal system, not anything actually wrong with patents.
So point me to these patents that are impossible to workaround and also not worth the license fee.
And spare me the "Gimme Gimme" crowd who just want to use the tech developed at great expense by everyone else, without having to pay for it (the short-sighted version of the prisioner's dilemma)...
Your car must suck. 100 mph is not very extreme speed unless you car is from the 70s...
His comment is true of most econo-boxes. In most, the engine vibrations start getting unpleasant around 90MPH. This may be significantly affected in either direction by whether you're on an inclining or declining highway... I certainly don't have any place here out west where I could get my car up to 100MPH without having to climb over a mountain in pretty short order.
Tax brackets are NEVER a reason to have problems with a higher salary.
Tax brackets cause a salary figure to be highly misleading. And this thread is all about someone reacting to a salary figure that only looks/sounds impressive. Of course it's not a reason to eg. refuse a raise. However, in the real world, a higher salary doesn't come along in a complete vacuum.
In my case, which I laid out, the COMBINATION of higher tax bracket PLUS higher cost of living, and higher demands of a supposedly higher paying job, conspire together to fully negate what would otherwise appear to be a dramatically higher salary. The higher tax bracket is quite significant... more significant than the higher cost of living. Eliminating (or ignoring) the tax bracket would completely change the equation.
I made $85k in 2001, before 9/11 and before my layoff (after 10 years in IT) Ever hear the saying, "If you're out 6 months, you're back at square one?" It's true.
You seem to be completely missing the context here.
First, 2001 was still during the hey-day of the dot.com bubble. You're upset that you aren't earning as much as you think you should be, but here I missed out on the bubble entirely, as really Jr. level people I worked with were getting $150,000 job offers as soon as they got some certification or other...
I know it sounds harsh, but you need to consider the possibility that you weren't ever worth $85k, and you were lucky enough to have been getting an insanely inflated salary for a few years. It's "found money" to you.
And the 6-month rule? Did you happen to notice that the dot.com bubble burst around that 6-mo period? I very, very seriously doubt that was anything but a coincidence. It's really not like your skills are out of date in 6-mo, as I'm still impressing some very higly paid pros with lots of stuff I was doing a decade ago. I wouldn't even note the gap on my resume, and I've yet to find a company that cares enough about about minutae to track down exact employment dates, rather than just confirming rough details, and making sure your references aren't giving an unenthusiastic endorsement.
3) Higher salary puts you in higher tax bracket as well... I'm actually comtemplating going back to a job that paid half as much as I'm making now, because after increased taxes and higher cost of living, I have very little extra take-home to show for the miserable working conditions.
It's amazing how housing prices can increase/decrease by more than an order of magnitude within a 30 minute drive.
FreeDOS gives a place to land and edit the menu.lst without invoking other operation systems, and do thin client bios updates and flashes.
I fail to see how editing grub's config in a minimal environment where you can't access what it's booting is useful in any way, as grub has it's own full command-line editing.
And if you need to boot-up to DOS for firmware, I'm not seeing how your method is any better than memdisk or similar methods.
I was wrong in assuming you were using grub4dos, but now it really sounds like I might have been giving you too much credit, and what you are doing sounds like it's based on ignorance of better methods, rather than necessity or some really clever design or even a hack. Not that I want to be judgemental, your menthod obviously works, and will up until you hit file system limits or start chafing against some of the other restrictions, but clearly freedos still isn't actually ncessary in your example, except for the firmware updates part, which thousands of others already mentioned as pretty much it's sole remaining niche (and I say this as a long time DOS devotee who has a 286 in good working order that was getting use until about 5 years ago).
BackupPC is a free disk-based backup system for Linux. It's based on rsync, but written in perl. It supports file-level dedupe, which is most of what you want for backups, and installation on RHEL5 is just a yum install (if you have RPMForge/EPEL configured) and a couple service starts.
It handles scheduling backups of multiple systems concurrently, up to the number you decide, within a timeframe you decide. Will send emails and alert on the web interface if any systems failed, or are over-due and haven't been backed-up. You can assign a (non-admin) user to a given system, so they can login to the web interface and manually launch backups and view and restore deleted or old revisions of files to the live system at-will, as well as getting email notiifications for their systems.
It supports backups over ssh, rsh, smb, nfs, native rsyncd, and probably others. It has a very polished web interface to configure absolutely everything about the backup process (except the initial ssh key setup), and even allows you to coonfigure pre commands to have it tell the OS to make a snapshot (typically LVM on Linux, and VSS on Windows) and backup from the snapshot.
Above and beyond rsync (or rsnapshot for people that can't write a 2-line shell script with rsync) BackupPC has a few features like doing a full checksum on X% of unchanged files which makes for a very good sanity check. It also runs as non-root users, while still preserving devices, permissions, etc. The downsides versus scripting rsync are that BackupPC is still locked into the full/incremental model, and after dozens of incrementals, performance really suffers until a "full" backup is performed. It doesn't properly handle the copyright banners some systems will print, when native rsync will behave properly. And it has it's own filesystem format that mangles filenames and such, but there's a FUSE driver (also in perl) that allows you to virtually mount it, which is very important... when I last looked, said FUSE script needed a one-line fix for either raw or block device nodes, I forget which.
In general, BackupPC is the way to go. It's pretty flexible, polished, capable, and provides the reliability you want in a backup system more than anywhere else. The issues could be fixed by an interested halfway decent perl programmer with some time. It's really very, very close to being the ideal backup solution and surpassing the propietary solutions, with the above issues being the big stumbling blocks.
Everyone else is busy marveling over their iPad and iPhone (oooh, round corners....) and other walled gardens. Like you, I miss being able to actually communicate directly to the hardware
1) Why do you "miss" it, when it hasn't gone away... Just start dicking around with odd storage controllers in your system, and you'll find youself learning the intricate details of initrd right away, in a panic probably.
2) Funny you'd mention iPhones, since Android firmware is probably the place the most people are working very closely with hardware... closer than the dos days, with no BIOS or standard IO/mem addresses for components. Tougher in a lot of ways.
3) 16-bit real mode isn't exactly "hardware". You've got a friendly BIOS layer wrapping up the details for you. You might as well play with (u)EFI or such firmware to get your low-level detail fix. Oh yeah, and server OoBM (BMCs).
Are we talking GRUB4DOS, like syslinux, which only needs a tiny FAT partition, which could be created with anything (including Linux) and doesn't need anything else from FreeDOS at all? Not exactly a shining example, particularly since other DOS clones are free, just not GPLd.
I remember the early days of Slashdot where this would have everyone talking.
Yes, back in the early days of/. was when it could have had some relevance, too. It was sadly a decade late to even pick up the last few places DOS had an important niche.
I know, because I was one of the people here on/. initially interested, but it took a long time to materialize, and once it was usable, it still was unreliable for the simplest use cases like FAT partitioning/formatting that could be read by most OSes.
People are buying Android but they're simply just not using Android devices like iOS users are.
Read and replying to your comment on an Android phone...
With the slide-out keyboard and SSH software, RSS reader, etc., I probably use my Android phone more than the heaviest iPhone users. My iPhone toting coworkers carry arounds laptops/netbooks/iPads all day... I use my droid for EVERYTHING, though thumb-typing is a bit slower.
Really? All you've got are non-sequitors about media outlets not being absolutely perfect?
Hey, clearly there's no difference between anyone with a license and a professional driver, because pro drivers have accidents, too. Wonderful logic there.
If you don't want to force every independent author into the public domain, copyright extension has to be extremely cheap
Rather dense, aren't you? This is incredibly obvious, and furthermore, I specifically mentioned it in my previous post. It's a simple matter of having a graded system. Sure, we'll start with a free first 5 years of copyright just to be safe. Then after 5 years you either pay or lose it. Then in another 5 years, the fee doubles. 5 more years it doubles again... and again, and again. Independent authors get their automatic 5 years, and a nice cheap extension to 10. At the 15 or 20 year mark, if your work is a smash hit and still selling well, then you can afford to pay the increasing fee... if it isn't, then you let it lapse, and hope it won't become a valuable property later on.
And that's just one option. Others have suggested requiring appraisals for any copyrights a company is holding, and taxing them on the estimated value. This would also make sure independent publishers wouldn't be unduly burdened, while companies kept paying to maintain exclsuivity on their higly valuable properties.
I really don't like the idea in the long run, as it would mean that all the big cooperations simply let their lawyers handle things and get copyright protection for as long as the law allows, while the stuff of the little guy will slip into public domain against their will.
You've misunderstood. Yes, Mickey Mouse will be copyrighted forever under a pay-to-play scheme, but currently, they're gaming congress to pass unconstiutional retroactive copyright extensions to make sure that happens, anyhow. Their desire to hang on to Mickey is what has caused our unnecessary problem with abandoned works being lost.
So this is the compromise... if they want longer protection for a given work, they have to pay for it. The fee needs to be substantial, and increasing every year longer they want exclusivity. Big companies won't have to be subject to public domain right away, but they'll have to pay a hell of a lot of money for the privlidge. And if that means Disney, Universal, Sony, WB, and others are paying so much in copyright extension fees that our income taxes can be redcued, then we all win, including the independent author.
Like it or not, it's a clever hack to give everyone what they want. It's fine to say you'd prefer a fixed term of X, but it will absolutely, positively never ever ever happen. Entertainment companies have far too much money riding on it, and will use all their political capital to squash any such thing becoming law, so you might as well be talking about building codes for fairie apartment complexes.
GMs marketshare in China is dismal. And on and on.
WTH are you talking about? GM is perhaps the biggest of the China success stories.
"GM sold about 1.83 million vehicles in China last year [versus] 2.07 million cars and trucks in the U.S. But GM, already the leader in China with 13.4% of the market, is still gaining share. GM's market share was 11.3% in 2008."
Once I've got the next higher up support personnel on the phone I can usually say things like: "I need the IP list for my name servers, my IP is: xx.xx.xx.xx", or "Your cable-tech guy forgot to give me the admin password for the modem, what's the standard PW or reset procedure & web-based config?" and I'm off the phone in mere moments.
Call center reps have developed a strategy of dealing with such requests. Often, you'll be transferred to some other random rep who merely sees the note and claims to be a supervisor.
I knew someone who was having issues and asked to speak with each successive rep's supervisor 8 times before getting someone who actually had access to some basic technically information. He thought he had gone 8 levels up the chain of command; I didn't have the heart to tell him he probably spoke with 7 different first-level tech support reps, before finally speaking to a single actual supervisor.
$53k is peanuts on the coasts, but is a decent salary elsewhere in the US.
Yes, but the "coasts" make up the majority of the population in the US, so that's probably driving the high "median" income. "elsewhere in the US" I'd bet they're earning a similarly barely-livable salary.
Haha. I once had to deal with a new building wired with CAT5. All the little lights on the tester worked, but no data went through. It turned out that the installer had kept the same wires to the same pins at both ends, but had split up all the twisted pairs, which of course broke the isolation from interference.
That's not a CAT-5 "tester" it's just a basic $5 continuity check. Any installer worth their salt has a "certification" tester, and before they get paid will sign-off on the fact that every cable they ran fully checks out to CAT-5 specifications, per their (moderately-) expensive certification tester. Even small issues like the pairs being untwisted just a bit too far when the ends were installed, will be flagged by any halfway decent tester.
Nobody should be running a non-trivial sized network without a decent tester. A Fluke CableIQ is well worth the money (about $1,000). But even a much older 100BaseTx Fluke tester (about $250 on ebay last I looked) will be pretty strict and catch almost all cable installer mistakes.
I'm hesitant to recommend it, but you can also look into the Byte Brothers RWC1000 for about $300. It makes a very good probe, has an interesting work-flow for cable-testing that can save time in a number of cases if your usage happens to line up with it's design, and it's a good enough tester that it'll at least flag more serious wiring mistakes, but it's clearly not even as hypercritical of cabling as older 100BaseT Fluke testers I've used...
So you've got to pick your priorities. You get some more useful features with a RWC that you'd want if your company is small and doesn't already have them in discrete units, but it's not as good at cable testing... it's main function. And it's slower and less amenable to one-man operation than better tools (the market dominated by Fluke).
AND he had run all the wiring down through the same hole in the floor from the wiring closet as the main power line coming into the building.
Besides being an issue in itself, that's clearly a very basic building code violation in most if not all jurisdictions. I have a hard time believing any bonded contractor would be so stupid. Did your company hire some unlicensed teenager with no professional experience, at slave wages?
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You're utterly and totally wrong. That my higher taxes are costing me more money than my increased cost-of-living, and that the two together are almost completely eliminating what appears to be a very large pay increase, is a very simple fact, a couple line items I can point to on my paycheck and bank statement. It is not open to debate or opinion, and your saying "Nuh uh" like a child is massively idiotic.
What's worse than that, though, is that in the process you admit you really don't know WTF you're talking about, with statements like: "I don't know the tax brackets," and " These are all examples, and real world taxes are much harsher," yet you prattle on and assert how wrong I am, with my piddly little facts...
Try to be less of a moron in the future.
Maybe that's true if we're talking about low and medium-paying jobs. When you're talking about the really good-paying jobs, recruiters aren't looking for just anyone. They want someone that basically been doing almost the exact same job for the past 5 years straight. Just because what you do is generally in-demand doesn't mean you're a candidate for even a fraction of the companies trying to hire someone that perfectly fits their environment.
Being in a big city isn't really a solution. Just commuting from one end of Los Angeles to the other (for a new job) can be a much longer drive than commuting from one suburban city to the next. And make no mistake, when you're living in LA and looking at jobs for a year or so, all the good jobs will be in San Diego. And living in San Diego, you'll likely find all the good jobs are in LA, or OC, or San Jose.
I've worked with plenty of top-rate people, and I don't know a one who has worked for more than two companies without having to move, or otherwise commute over an hour each way for a few diehards.
That's probably so, but what are the odds that you're going to find multiple companies in your area needing the exact skills you possess, and happen to be hiring right when you are looking?
I may be making good money, but I've also done large moves, 3 times in the past 4 years following different jobs. How much of a pay cut is it worth to live in the city/county/state you like, and being able to stay in one home for several years at a time?
How many years can you keep it up? ...and then what? Will you have enough money to retire then? If not, you've got the same problem.
I agree with this part. I've drastically increased my pay by switching jobs in the past few years.
Big word of warning... If you post a resume to job sites, expect an absolute FLOOD of horrendous and useless calls from Indian "recruiters". If a single word in your resume matches any keywords for a job, expect a couple calls about it. Doesn't matter what job you say you're looking for, doesn't matter if you checked that you aren't willing to relocate.
I averaged a dozen calls every day for over a month after updating my resume on a couple job sites. I've gotten hundreds and hundreds of e-mails, and all of a handful have even been possibilities (right job title, not two states over). Large states are the worst (California), because these useless foreign idiots that call themselves recruiters don't check a map, and just assume if it's in the same state, it's a reasonable driving distance, and that's even the ones who are (barely) trying... I get spammed about jobs all over the country.
This is a new phenomenon to me, and seriously risks making posting your resume a fool's errand, or worse. It's so bad that just posting your resume with a cell phone number runs the real risk of causing you to lose your current job as you are inundated with calls.
Worse, employers are getting flooded by insane numbers of resumes from completely unqualified applicants. The weapon of choice seem to be requiring a recruiter to meet candidates in person before submitting them for consideration, which is quite the nightmare when your recruiter could be located 200 miles away... suddenly you need to take a day off work just to be allowed to SUBMIT a resume for consideration, which is the case with a number of companies. And just watching job sites doesn't work, as a huge number of jobs aren't ever listed on such job sites.
Here you go:
http://elks.sourceforge.net/
It hasn't seen any development in the past ~5 years, but it always worked, and it'll run on an 8086 just fine.
Bull. We got modern aircraft from companies trying to work their way around the Wright brothers' patents. Did you notice 747s don't have "wing warping"?
WebM/VP8 only exists because working around MPEG patents was profitable enough to sustain On2's codec development efforts. Hell, MPEG only exists because of Intel buying control of Cinepak and people wanting an alternative.
Patents have been a very large motivator for research and development. Their tarnished status today is due to an increasingly fucked-up legal system, not anything actually wrong with patents.
So point me to these patents that are impossible to workaround and also not worth the license fee.
And spare me the "Gimme Gimme" crowd who just want to use the tech developed at great expense by everyone else, without having to pay for it (the short-sighted version of the prisioner's dilemma)...
His comment is true of most econo-boxes. In most, the engine vibrations start getting unpleasant around 90MPH. This may be significantly affected in either direction by whether you're on an inclining or declining highway... I certainly don't have any place here out west where I could get my car up to 100MPH without having to climb over a mountain in pretty short order.
Tax brackets cause a salary figure to be highly misleading. And this thread is all about someone reacting to a salary figure that only looks/sounds impressive. Of course it's not a reason to eg. refuse a raise. However, in the real world, a higher salary doesn't come along in a complete vacuum.
In my case, which I laid out, the COMBINATION of higher tax bracket PLUS higher cost of living, and higher demands of a supposedly higher paying job, conspire together to fully negate what would otherwise appear to be a dramatically higher salary. The higher tax bracket is quite significant... more significant than the higher cost of living. Eliminating (or ignoring) the tax bracket would completely change the equation.
You seem to be completely missing the context here.
First, 2001 was still during the hey-day of the dot.com bubble. You're upset that you aren't earning as much as you think you should be, but here I missed out on the bubble entirely, as really Jr. level people I worked with were getting $150,000 job offers as soon as they got some certification or other...
I know it sounds harsh, but you need to consider the possibility that you weren't ever worth $85k, and you were lucky enough to have been getting an insanely inflated salary for a few years. It's "found money" to you.
And the 6-month rule? Did you happen to notice that the dot.com bubble burst around that 6-mo period? I very, very seriously doubt that was anything but a coincidence. It's really not like your skills are out of date in 6-mo, as I'm still impressing some very higly paid pros with lots of stuff I was doing a decade ago. I wouldn't even note the gap on my resume, and I've yet to find a company that cares enough about about minutae to track down exact employment dates, rather than just confirming rough details, and making sure your references aren't giving an unenthusiastic endorsement.
Only 2?
3) Higher salary puts you in higher tax bracket as well... I'm actually comtemplating going back to a job that paid half as much as I'm making now, because after increased taxes and higher cost of living, I have very little extra take-home to show for the miserable working conditions.
It's amazing how housing prices can increase/decrease by more than an order of magnitude within a 30 minute drive.
I fail to see how editing grub's config in a minimal environment where you can't access what it's booting is useful in any way, as grub has it's own full command-line editing.
And if you need to boot-up to DOS for firmware, I'm not seeing how your method is any better than memdisk or similar methods.
I was wrong in assuming you were using grub4dos, but now it really sounds like I might have been giving you too much credit, and what you are doing sounds like it's based on ignorance of better methods, rather than necessity or some really clever design or even a hack. Not that I want to be judgemental, your menthod obviously works, and will up until you hit file system limits or start chafing against some of the other restrictions, but clearly freedos still isn't actually ncessary in your example, except for the firmware updates part, which thousands of others already mentioned as pretty much it's sole remaining niche (and I say this as a long time DOS devotee who has a 286 in good working order that was getting use until about 5 years ago).
BackupPC is a free disk-based backup system for Linux. It's based on rsync, but written in perl. It supports file-level dedupe, which is most of what you want for backups, and installation on RHEL5 is just a yum install (if you have RPMForge/EPEL configured) and a couple service starts.
It handles scheduling backups of multiple systems concurrently, up to the number you decide, within a timeframe you decide. Will send emails and alert on the web interface if any systems failed, or are over-due and haven't been backed-up. You can assign a (non-admin) user to a given system, so they can login to the web interface and manually launch backups and view and restore deleted or old revisions of files to the live system at-will, as well as getting email notiifications for their systems.
It supports backups over ssh, rsh, smb, nfs, native rsyncd, and probably others. It has a very polished web interface to configure absolutely everything about the backup process (except the initial ssh key setup), and even allows you to coonfigure pre commands to have it tell the OS to make a snapshot (typically LVM on Linux, and VSS on Windows) and backup from the snapshot.
Above and beyond rsync (or rsnapshot for people that can't write a 2-line shell script with rsync) BackupPC has a few features like doing a full checksum on X% of unchanged files which makes for a very good sanity check. It also runs as non-root users, while still preserving devices, permissions, etc. The downsides versus scripting rsync are that BackupPC is still locked into the full/incremental model, and after dozens of incrementals, performance really suffers until a "full" backup is performed. It doesn't properly handle the copyright banners some systems will print, when native rsync will behave properly. And it has it's own filesystem format that mangles filenames and such, but there's a FUSE driver (also in perl) that allows you to virtually mount it, which is very important... when I last looked, said FUSE script needed a one-line fix for either raw or block device nodes, I forget which.
In general, BackupPC is the way to go. It's pretty flexible, polished, capable, and provides the reliability you want in a backup system more than anywhere else. The issues could be fixed by an interested halfway decent perl programmer with some time. It's really very, very close to being the ideal backup solution and surpassing the propietary solutions, with the above issues being the big stumbling blocks.
1) Why do you "miss" it, when it hasn't gone away... Just start dicking around with odd storage controllers in your system, and you'll find youself learning the intricate details of initrd right away, in a panic probably.
2) Funny you'd mention iPhones, since Android firmware is probably the place the most people are working very closely with hardware... closer than the dos days, with no BIOS or standard IO/mem addresses for components. Tougher in a lot of ways.
3) 16-bit real mode isn't exactly "hardware". You've got a friendly BIOS layer wrapping up the details for you. You might as well play with (u)EFI or such firmware to get your low-level detail fix. Oh yeah, and server OoBM (BMCs).
Are we talking GRUB4DOS, like syslinux, which only needs a tiny FAT partition, which could be created with anything (including Linux) and doesn't need anything else from FreeDOS at all? Not exactly a shining example, particularly since other DOS clones are free, just not GPLd.
Yes, back in the early days of /. was when it could have had some relevance, too. It was sadly a decade late to even pick up the last few places DOS had an important niche.
I know, because I was one of the people here on /. initially interested, but it took a long time to materialize, and once it was usable, it still was unreliable for the simplest use cases like FAT partitioning/formatting that could be read by most OSes.
Read and replying to your comment on an Android phone...
With the slide-out keyboard and SSH software, RSS reader, etc., I probably use my Android phone more than the heaviest iPhone users. My iPhone toting coworkers carry arounds laptops/netbooks/iPads all day... I use my droid for EVERYTHING, though thumb-typing is a bit slower.
Makes perfect sense. Libertarians want the government to focus on destroying liberties & property rights.
Really? All you've got are non-sequitors about media outlets not being absolutely perfect?
Hey, clearly there's no difference between anyone with a license and a professional driver, because pro drivers have accidents, too. Wonderful logic there.
Rather dense, aren't you? This is incredibly obvious, and furthermore, I specifically mentioned it in my previous post. It's a simple matter of having a graded system. Sure, we'll start with a free first 5 years of copyright just to be safe. Then after 5 years you either pay or lose it. Then in another 5 years, the fee doubles. 5 more years it doubles again... and again, and again. Independent authors get their automatic 5 years, and a nice cheap extension to 10. At the 15 or 20 year mark, if your work is a smash hit and still selling well, then you can afford to pay the increasing fee... if it isn't, then you let it lapse, and hope it won't become a valuable property later on.
And that's just one option. Others have suggested requiring appraisals for any copyrights a company is holding, and taxing them on the estimated value. This would also make sure independent publishers wouldn't be unduly burdened, while companies kept paying to maintain exclsuivity on their higly valuable properties.
You've misunderstood. Yes, Mickey Mouse will be copyrighted forever under a pay-to-play scheme, but currently, they're gaming congress to pass unconstiutional retroactive copyright extensions to make sure that happens, anyhow. Their desire to hang on to Mickey is what has caused our unnecessary problem with abandoned works being lost.
So this is the compromise... if they want longer protection for a given work, they have to pay for it. The fee needs to be substantial, and increasing every year longer they want exclusivity. Big companies won't have to be subject to public domain right away, but they'll have to pay a hell of a lot of money for the privlidge. And if that means Disney, Universal, Sony, WB, and others are paying so much in copyright extension fees that our income taxes can be redcued, then we all win, including the independent author.
Like it or not, it's a clever hack to give everyone what they want. It's fine to say you'd prefer a fixed term of X, but it will absolutely, positively never ever ever happen. Entertainment companies have far too much money riding on it, and will use all their political capital to squash any such thing becoming law, so you might as well be talking about building codes for fairie apartment complexes.
WTH are you talking about? GM is perhaps the biggest of the China success stories.
"GM sold about 1.83 million vehicles in China last year [versus] 2.07 million cars and trucks in the U.S. But GM, already the leader in China with 13.4% of the market, is still gaining share. GM's market share was 11.3% in 2008."
http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/12/news/companies/gm_us_china_salesrace/index.htm
Call center reps have developed a strategy of dealing with such requests. Often, you'll be transferred to some other random rep who merely sees the note and claims to be a supervisor.
I knew someone who was having issues and asked to speak with each successive rep's supervisor 8 times before getting someone who actually had access to some basic technically information. He thought he had gone 8 levels up the chain of command; I didn't have the heart to tell him he probably spoke with 7 different first-level tech support reps, before finally speaking to a single actual supervisor.
Yes, but the "coasts" make up the majority of the population in the US, so that's probably driving the high "median" income. "elsewhere in the US" I'd bet they're earning a similarly barely-livable salary.
No, actually they're a professional blogger if they're making money off of it. "Journalist" has more serious connotations associated with it.
That's not a CAT-5 "tester" it's just a basic $5 continuity check. Any installer worth their salt has a "certification" tester, and before they get paid will sign-off on the fact that every cable they ran fully checks out to CAT-5 specifications, per their (moderately-) expensive certification tester. Even small issues like the pairs being untwisted just a bit too far when the ends were installed, will be flagged by any halfway decent tester.
Nobody should be running a non-trivial sized network without a decent tester. A Fluke CableIQ is well worth the money (about $1,000). But even a much older 100BaseTx Fluke tester (about $250 on ebay last I looked) will be pretty strict and catch almost all cable installer mistakes.
I'm hesitant to recommend it, but you can also look into the Byte Brothers RWC1000 for about $300. It makes a very good probe, has an interesting work-flow for cable-testing that can save time in a number of cases if your usage happens to line up with it's design, and it's a good enough tester that it'll at least flag more serious wiring mistakes, but it's clearly not even as hypercritical of cabling as older 100BaseT Fluke testers I've used...
So you've got to pick your priorities. You get some more useful features with a RWC that you'd want if your company is small and doesn't already have them in discrete units, but it's not as good at cable testing... it's main function. And it's slower and less amenable to one-man operation than better tools (the market dominated by Fluke).
Besides being an issue in itself, that's clearly a very basic building code violation in most if not all jurisdictions. I have a hard time believing any bonded contractor would be so stupid. Did your company hire some unlicensed teenager with no professional experience, at slave wages?