I used to work in this building after the World Trade Center 9/11 attack when my company lost their data center and had to rent a co-location space in one of the data centers there. This is a monstrous building that is the size of an entire New York City block. It is build like an ancient Babylonia pyramid with vertical walls and a pyramidal structure on the top floors. It is across the street from the Chelsea Market and one block north of Homestead Steakhouse. The actual entrance for IT geeks to the data center space of this building is in the back on 9th avenue, the office entrance is in the front and I never used that one.
I was bored one day I took a walk down the hallways of some of the floors and saw data center spaces for _all_ of the major telecom and Internet providers that I knew of and many that I didn't know even existed. Strangely some of the doors to these data centers were left open, I'm guessing because work was being performed there and I got a tour of some of these places. Miles and miles of conduits, cables, server cages, telecom equipment racks, server racks, backup units, power distribution units, massive uninterruptable power supplies, glycol-based water cooling pipes, and tons of galvanized steel green field conduits for power lines. This was also the first place where I saw companies replacing the problematic fingerprint based scanners for vain-pattern hand scanners to beef up security. I wish I had more time to check out this amazing building but I was so busy rebuilding our company's servers after WTC that I lived within 4-rows of racks for a few months.
I spent my Christmas and New Years that year rebuilding 250 Compaq ProLiant and ~100 IBM xSeries for my old company to get their infrastructure and application servers back up. I pretty much lived in that building for 3-months and I was lucky to be able to easily walk over to the 14th St & 8th Ave L-train stop to go home late at night or in the morning. It was an interesting experience and I wished that I spent more time there to learn about that goes on in this building.
If there was one place that I know of that is the hidden center of the Internet and Information in New York City I would think that this would be the building. Luckily it was build very solid and it is very nondescript so I think that it is pretty safe. There was a rumor that the FBI had their surveillance office across the street and they had floor space with network taps in that building to be connected to all the important information pathways in NYC.
Data Center Power Off Button Incident
This was also the place where the delivery guy who just finish dropping off more parts was walking out of the data center room and hit the red button on the wall, the door opened, and he walked out. Meanwhile all we heard was a very long and deep "ooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" sound as every single piece of equipment turned off immedietelly after the Emergency Power Off button was pressed, including the magnetic locks on the door that the guy just walked out of. Surveilence tapes showed us what happened as we stood there in deafening silence and awe unable to comprehend what just happened. The next day there was a plastic box cover over that button.
Who ever though it was a good idea to put the silver door open button next to the red power off button should have been flogged on the spot.
US Postal Service - Great Domestic & International Service for Me
For selling all my stuff on eBay and shipping sold items to Europe I've been using USPS for the last few years since they offered their online service and I've never had a problem. I must have shipped around 100-packages of weights between 1-40 lbs to many states and also to Brazil, UK, Hungary, Germany, Romania, and other countries without any issues or damaged parts. Their tracking is a bit slow, maybe a day behind the actual package, but it is good enough for me. Their shipping rates undermine UPS and FedEx every single time, sometimes by 50-100% of the rate. I package my stuff very well reusing the packaging materials from Newegg and Amazon packages that I use, including peanuts, air padded bags, the little and big plastic bubble wrap, and even newspapers. I usually use Priority but I've used Express occasionally when required. I'm happy with their service and the folks who bought my various eBay things were all happy with the shipping prices and delivery times. The online label printing and filling out of the customs forms makes my shipping very easy and my interaction at the post office is very short when I just hand the people the packages at the counter after I tell them it's already pre-paid. Sometimes I get the skip the waiting line. I've requested refunds from USPS for the shipping labels on packages that couldn't make the weight or size restrictions for international packages and I've always received the refund on my postage after about a 7-day waiting period. So I highly recommend them.
UPS Story #1 - Dropped Server & Refused Insurance Coverage My one single shipping story with UPS was when I sold a 80 lb Compaq ProLiant 5500 Dual Pentium Pro server to a buyer in California. He received it damaged after it was dropped on it's corner so hard that the entire frame of the server was scewed and many of the parts inside were cracked or popped and broke out of their sockets. The server was DOA. UPS inspected the server and the package at his location and determined that the package was improperly packed and the refused the insurance coverage on it. I went back to the professional shipping center which packaged the server and they apologized to me, told me that UPS has screwed them before like that by refusing insurance coverage, and they refunded my shipping costs and the cost of the old server from the eBay sale. I refunded all the money back to the buyer. That's my personal story with UPS.
UPS Story #2 - Friends Working As UPS Inspectors And Their Anecdotes
My friend was hired by a third-party company to inspect UPS packages for size and weight mislabeling and then charging the shippers additional costs. He worked their for a year or more and told me the stories that took place on the unloading floor. When the conveyors would jam up or stop working the packages would be pushed as hard as possible and kicked through the bottlenecks. Some conveyors ran high and some low to meet up and a bunch of packages would fall off the high conveyors from a good 10-foot height just to be thrown back onto the low conveyors. If any package on the floor broke open it would be looked through for valuable goods and ransacked. Around the holiday seasons when the package volume would increase and a lot of temporary workers were hired any packages from known popular company brands like Oakley or Rayban sunglasses would be routinely opened and ransacked, any electronic packages were also likely to be opened. The metal detectors used for employee entrance and exists for the shippers would be easily bypassed by a reach-around to friends, or by stashing the stuff and hiding it just to pick it up later or have one of the regular works with a truck pick them up. When heavy boxes with ammunition were dropped on the floor and bullets would spill out they would just tape them up and ship them off,
I think that hardly anyone is surprised that China's Politburo (a group of 24 people who oversee the Communist Party of China) was behind the hacking of the Chinese Google office computers. You can see the seriousness of the issue after reading Google's response to the hacking and their threat to pull out of China all together and also after reading the Department of the State's involvement in this issue. The Department of the State, and someone as high up as Hillary Clinton, getting involved in this issue shows how important this single hacking event was, and not just because Google is everyone's the current favorite company.
Bobbie Johnson in San Francisco guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 January 2010 08.19 GMT
Hillary Clinton calls on Beijing to answer 'serious concerns' over internet security Google pulls out of China: what the bloggers are saying
The US government is investigating allegations of a Chinese hacking attack on Google amid what Washington called "serious concerns" over internet security.
The strike, which the company said was aimed at uncovering information linked to political dissidents in the country, led Google to announce last night that it would no longer censor its search engine in China.
The move could result in Google being forced to pull out of China four years after it controversially announced its intention to launch a censored version of google.cn, the local version of its search engine.
Faced with a conflict between one of America's most powerful companies and the Chinese government, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, called on Beijing to discuss the situation.
A friend of mine here just outside of Houston, Texas is an in-sourced rural (country side) developer and he loves the freedom of being to work from his house on development projects or travel to the clients in case they need something in person. He drives in to Houston whenever he needs to do something in the city. He's a fully educated and experienced American guy and his job is here in America. He produces code here for any companies that need his skills.
I really hope that this becomes the norm to in-source jobs towards Rural areas of the country where the cost of living and the expense of hiring people is much lower than large cities. I'd personnally would love to move away from server administration and into development as I get a little older to get away from on-call issues and because I enjoy producing work like complex scripts.
Off-shore rates for developers are dirt cheap but there is extra unidentified costs with communications, quality of personnel, quality of work performed and code produced, and also timeliness of work. From what I saw in the Finance sector in New York City a lot of out-sourced and off-shored jobs and contracts to India and Singapore are very problematic with a lot of personnel issues and failure to produce usable work.
So we have a few people in our company, 140 out of ~20K or 0.7%, to be exact who found the vague e-mail enticing enough to open.
Now, the outcome of this was more of a surprise to us than anything else. It cost us a bit of work here and there but nothing major. The multiple failures by our security products still have us a little puzzled. This was almost like the perfect storm of fail!
We have a web filtering gateway made by the #1 vendor in that industry that does a great job at classifying, blocking, and catching nefarious things but for some reason it did not catch and block the main.scr file nor the.iq payload files. We thought that by now the product and vendor would block.com, exe, scr, cpl, etc. or any directly executable file extension from being downloaded directly. Fail!
We are running the number #1 e-mail analysis and filtering plug-in set with heuristic detection = high on our #1 most popular corporate e-mail system but for some unknown reason the filter did not realize that all those people mass e-mailing the distribution lists in alphabetical order with the same e-mail that contains a fake link might be something out of the ordinary to block and filter. Fail!
We also have the #1 most popular anti-virus product with the latest signatures applied to all the workstation computers automatically but for some reason this quite popular variant of a previously known worm was not detected in signature based detection or heuristic detection even thought it starts downloading files from the internet, renaming them to exes, and then copies them all over the root drive, the operating system hierarchy, and all the local attached disks, while it is messing around with policy settings for the most popular e-mail client, enumerates and stops services, and tries to kill processes. Fail!
Overall we are still surprised at the outcome of all of this and the complete and utter surprise and lack of help from the vendors we use for our security products. Epic fail!
This is the equivalent of buying a game or a program that requires a media check (e.g. "Insert DVD/CD-ROM to start the game") and then downloading a modified executable from GameCopyWorld.com to play your own game without the media check. Many people have been doing this for a long time and this ruling sets a precedent that effectively legitimizes the usage of these helpful executable.
The problems with GCW is that a lot of times they include a full copy of the modified executable instead of just a small patcher or cracker program so they are still violating the copyright on the original executable code by distributing it without a license from the authors. The quick solution would be to download the patchers or crackers but since many of those are built using pre-made small assembly or C modular code (not shared libraries or DLLs) that has also be used by virus makers many of these legitimate pieces of modular code have been flagged by anti-virus companies as viruses just because they were used to make them. This is why your keygen, patcher, cracker executable will end up flagging anti-virus warnings immediately on download or usage or even months or years after you've successfully used them without getting an infection since their modules were flagged later. So GCW has a hard time with false-positive virus warnings and that's why they show that web page on download about their code being 100% clean and still allow download of full executables instead of just the patchers.
"The company neither admitted nor denied guilt as part of the settlement--a common phraseology in such deals."
How about a big FUCK YOU to Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Department of Justice! How about you dig a little deeper, get the dirt on the direct involvement by Michael Dell and the other board members during the 4-year period and put these schmucks in San Quentin Federal Penitentiary. If you can't find the evidence, just use your powers of Extraordinary Rendition to send a few of these folks over to the Middle East or Africa, a little water boarding, pull of some fingernails and you could get just enough information to find hard evidence to try and convict these people.
I could name a dozen good computer companies who disappeared during this time frame due to Dell's stellar rise in the computer market though shenanigans like this. Good computer companies that produced better products when under because they didn't cook their books like Dell did and didn't take bribes from Intel.
Like another poster said, the pure computer companies that did survive like HP (previously Compaq), Acer, etc. might have been involved in this also.
Intel did just settle the record breaking $1.4 Billion USD to the European Union's commission for violating anti-trust regulations or having to pay $1.2 Billion USD to AMD previously in a similar settlement.
I'm still glad to see that the NY State case against Intel is still on-going and it would be great if other states and companies jump on this bandwagon for lynching Intel since these guys have been playing some dirty games for a long time. Time to hold Execute Officers directly responsible for criminal and immoral decisions directly liable for their actions and orders. Too bad that our government is in the pocket of big corporations and that no real sanctions will be taken against these business scumbags.
Dell's success is now forever clouded by this and I think that looking at their shady little deal with Intel, I wouldn't put it past them if there was one going on right now with Microsoft for operating systems. Dell just did pull Ubuntu Linux OSes computers from their web site just as Linux is getting more acceptance by people due to Google's Android mobile OS success in the mobile market and also the upcoming tablet computer revolution. Microsoft isn't playing in this field and they are scared since they cannot compete.
Serious, WTF! Why are we still having to dick around with these issues of closed systems that you are prevented from reviewing, especially since they affect people's health directly! This should not require any kind of debate and if these medical devices that are certified by a government entity such as the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) then the manufacturers must be required to publicly disclose the design and software source code to the FDA for their review and additionally for public review since the FDA works on behalf of the people. This is braindead simple but we still have to argue for every little bit of disclosure for government certified devices.
This is the same crap that happened with the speed radar guns and it took many law suits to finally force the manufacturers of these devices behind sold to the local police departments acting on behalf of the government and thus the people to finally release the source code for these devices. Some of the devices were found to have faulty programming in them and their results were proven to be uncertain within the degree that would affect their accuracy enough to be difficult to certify if a person was speeding or the radar gun was acting up.
There's that part in the US Constitution about the government being unable to copyright anything that is produced by it This should be extended to mean that anything that is used by the government or certified for usage by the government should at the very least be officially copyrighted by the authors and though this process should be made available for review by the public, similar to what the patent system does. You submit a patent, and you get government protection for your invention, at the cost of exposing your design to the public and then allowing the public to use and benefit from your invention after the protection period expires.
Same thing should apply here to the software of these medical devices. You submit it for certification you copyright your code officially and you get copyright protection for it so that another company can't just cut-and-paste it into their own system. This makes the code available for public review and people can independently verify that the code won't accidentally kill you if you happen to trigger an unusual set of events that is not going to be dealt with and avoid the problems with "edge cases".
Yeah, if you think that making a phone call, an e-mail, or a letter is going to have any effect on your political representatives then you should go to peace rallies and protests more often. This type of behavior has no effect except to make the callee feel a little bit better about themselves for pretending to give a shit and "do" something but ultimately it's pointless an just just a self-masturbating ego boosting.
Your elected representative will vote along his party lines as he is told by his higher-ups, do whatever continues to make the lobbist's money flowing towards his campaigns, make the best choice for his personal business investments or friend's business investments that are going to give him a job after he leaves the office, or he will trade this vote for another one that he wants on more important issues that bring him more of the former.
Money is the only thing that can make a difference in US politics at this point since the majority of the population is beyond the tipping-point of "Who gives a shit! Give me a beer, a burger, a car and leave me the hell alone in my house!"
You want to make a difference in US politics, focus on becoming rich, then make enough money that your donations to candidates are heavy enough to sway their votes in your favor. This is the way that this country's political system has been run in the recent past and this is the way that the tide is turning judging by the current political outlook on the future and the way that bills are being passed. The corporations are now becoming more politically active and are starting to donate larger and larger sums toward politics, and this behavior is now enhanced by the recent US Supreme Court ruling removing limits from campaign contributions by corporations.
We are heading towards United States of America, Inc. or LLC if we're lucky!
I've been using this so-called OS for a while and I am quite positive that when Microsoft made the move from the unstable, bluescreening, freezing, and crashing Windows 95/98/ME 16-bit kernel to the stable Windows NT 3.51/4.0/XP/2000 32-bit kernel they had to do something with the 16-bit operating system developers so they made them all work on Windows Mobile! This is the only logical explanation as to why Windows Mobile sucks so bad, freezes so often, crashes every week, and manages to screw up my phone ever few months on its own corrupting all data... for the last three Windows Mobile phones that I owned. All builds of Windows Mobile 6.5.5 are so horrible from one to another with major changes to the GUI and lack of stability that I have had to downgrade my phone back to 6.5.0 to get some stability and usefulness out of the phone.
Windows Mobile 7 is now made incompatible with 6.5 and earlier versions just sounds like Microsoft is trying to push OS/2 on people by calling it better than Windows 3.11 without the compatibility shims.
I'm just looking for a new Google Android based phone to come out on a CDMA (US - Sprint, Verizon) network that has GSM capabilities with a SIM card and a full-size keyboard, such as the HTC Touch Pro 2 that I currently have to use and endure the Windows Mobile crap. Once that is out I'm ditching Windows Mobile forever!
I'm reading this article and this sounds a lot like the mountain climbing movie the North Face (2008) aka Nordwand (German) that I would highly recommend watching because the real-life story of the climbers parallels the events in this article.
This whole extreme climbing thing is very dangerous whether it is going up mountains or going down caves because any little incident and not even an accident usually turns out fatal later on, even when it is something out of your control such as unexpected critical equipment failure.
I grew up in a very polluted coal mining and burning part of eastern Europe and all of us kids spend their entire time outside, except for a few hours of sleeping, parents calling us to come in for dinner, which we would promptly eat and then leave again to play with friends, and the few hours a day that we would be required to be in school, but even then we would have two breaks and lunch which we would spend outside playing. Even during cold and rainy days we would be outside doing stuff with out friends, meeting up under various try spots that we knew outside. There was no air conditioning and I didn't see anyone suffering from any type of allergies or asthma that I remember but I do remember a few sickly kids that would spend their time indoors.
Our apartment complex in the big city was covered with busy roads and tons cars and commercial traffic, we even had an actual a coal burning plant which would create the hot water for the entire housing compound right in the middle of the apartment complex and we even occasionally venture next to it to play war around there among the dumped burned off toxic leftover coke byproduct of coal burning. However, at the same time our apartment complex was next to a huge park, a farm, and with tons of trees littering the paths between the apartment buildings and throughout the city between every single street. You could walk large parts of the city during light rain and hardly get any wet just by walking under the trees!
During each 2-month Summer vacation and 3-week or longer Winter vacation my mother would always arrange for me to go on the company sponsored camping and I would then spend weeks at a time away in the mountain and forest areas playing outdoors even more with kids and then go on hikes and outdoor tent camping events on top of being outside. We never did any indoor activities unless it was raining and even then we would find excuses to run outside and get soaking we just for fun. I spend more time getting dirty among nature as a kid then I care to remember.
United States - Sedentary Indoor Lifestyle
When I came to the United States later I found that most kids stayed in-doors most of the time and hardly went outside. Being an immigrant child I kept to my roots and hung out with my own kid friends spending our entire summers outside in the parks and going away on lake and camping trips on the weekends with family. The Summer and Winter camps here turned out to cost a lot more money and since they were not sponsored by my mother's work I couldn't afford to go. I tried to spend a much time as possible outside in the summer playing basketball and football with whatever friends were left in the city but since many of them went away I became sedentary and gained weight, then started spending a lot more time at the computer than I should have which in turn decreased my ability to go outside and enjoy myself.
Now that I move out to another part of the country where there is a lot more outdoor activities I am getting myself involved in outdoor type events so that I can get back to being in nature. Airsoft has become my newest outdoor hobby and I just love the idea of literally crawling through thick woods with a replica gun just to shoot at people and have fun outside while hugging and blending in with the nature. I came out filthy as a dog from that weekend excursion but I was hooked!
When I have kids I will guarantee that they spend their entire time outside doing activities and go away every Summer and Winter vacation to camps, no matter what I have to sacrifice for myself to afford the cost. I want my kids to be familiar with nature and be comfortable being in the woods like I was.
Here's a real tip, disable Interrupt Moderation on your Network Adapter Cards to achieve greater bandwidth, as much as 100%+, and lower latency (the two measures of network performance) at the expense of processor utilization due to more hardware interrupts that have to be handled.
Instructions: In Windows open up Control Panel, Network and Sharing Center, click on Change Adapter Settings, open Properties on your Local Area Connection (sometimes #2, #3, or something if you have more network cards), click on the Configure button, then the Advanced tab, select Interrupt Moderation, change the value to Disabled, while there look for any settings with the word Offload and enable them all, and then click the OK button to make the changes. This will restart your network card driver and make the settings effective.
Most network cards from popular manufacturers such as Intel, Broadcom, Realtek, etc. hold network packets in a buffer until enough time goes by before raising a hardware interrupt and telling the processor, operating system, and network driver that there are packets waiting to be serviced. By disabling Interrupt Moderation you instruct the network driver and card to raise the interrupt every single time a packet comes in, thus making your processor service the network card much faster thus decreasing latency on the packets held in the buffer and also increasing bandwidth by allowing more packets to flow through faster. This increases your processor utilization by a significant amount 10-30% but if you have a recent dual, quad, hex, octo-core processor and recent network drivers that are multi-threaded with multi-core support and have Receive Side Scaling support then the increased processor utilization is negligible to your computer and if you are running a network server then network performance should be a priority anyway.
I have personally seen and tested corporate and home LAN environments using Fast Ethernet 100 Mbit/s (~11 MByte/s) go from slow 6-7 MByte/s to 10-11 MByte/s throughput, and Gigabit 1,000 Mbit/s (~100 MByte/s) go from ~30 MByte/s to 95-98 MByte/s speeds due to these changes. No other network driver setting had as much performance impact as Interrupt Moderation.
IEEE 802.1AX (aka 802.3ad, Cisco EtherChannel)
For advanced network performance improvement look at link aggregation (channel trunking, link bonding, etc.) using the IEEE 802.1AX (aka 802.3ad, Cisco EtherChannel) protocol support in your Intel and Broadcom network adapters using their Advanced Configuration Utilities on your servers to bundle from 2-8 Ethernet network adapters into one trunk to increase your performance. Just tell your network administrators to enable those features on your ports and find out if they are able to do it if your links are going to the same switch or if they have virtual switching enabled in case your links span switches. Just think about 4 x Gigabit performance if you bundle all 4 NICs on most servers.
NetCPS
You can test your own network performance with this simple but great utility called NetCPS. Just be sure to disable Interrupt Moderation on both of the computers on your LAN that you will be using for the performance testing otherwise you won't be able to achieve these numbers if one of the computers can't handle the data as fast as the other one. Try it with your laptop and desktop for example.
NetCPS - is a handy utility to measure the effective performance on a TCP/IP network.
Just execute "netcps.exe -s" on the listening system and then do "netcps.exe computername" on the other computer to use the utility to test the throughput bandwidth. For Gigabit you can use the "-m1000" switch to increase the transferred amount to 1,000 MBytes instead of the default 100. Below is an example.
I have known about ink refilling for over 10 or 11-years ever since my friend introduce me to his syringe and his tiny Epson ink cartridges. Him and his father would go out of their way to buy ink in bulk from specialty printing stores before ink refilling was even known to be possible by common people. He showed me how it was and as long as you get the knack for it and hit the syringe in the right spot on the cartridge this becomes a routine and clean situation. He later experimented with flexible plastic pipes going directly to his cartridges and large ink tanks on top. I thought it was pretty geeky and cool watching them printing every little picture they could.
I personally am a digital guy and I never had a need for printing. I lived without a printer for almost 5-years because if I ever needed anything printed I would just do it at work or at worst a friend's house every 6-months or so. Then one day a few years back I had enough money and wanted to buy a printer with specific features, an inkjet for occasional color prints, and network connectivity so that multiple computers in my house could print without having to have the main computer on all the time, large ink cartridges for lower ink price and more volume, and with duplex printing so that I could save paper when I do need to print something like tax forms, movie ticket passes, etc. I look around for two years and couldn't find any model that would quality so I stopped my search until one year I came across this printer.
Since I do not print very much at all, maybe 1-page every 2-weeks when I go to the movies, a 4x6 picture here and there, and some forms every few months I don't use very much ink at all. I also buy the HP 78XL size tri-color cartridges on eBay for ~$20 and HP 45 black for ~$16 from photo stores that seems to sell them at a loss and I get them for a third of the retail HP price.
Ink Price Collusion
I still think that $20 that price is fair for a large cartridge with XL capacity and $15 is a reasonable price to pay for a large size black cartridge. I believe that there is a lot of technology that goes into producing a uniform and consistent liquid that is color matched against industry color standards with UV treated dye type inks to retain the printed image for a long period of time. However, the retail prices that HP charges for ink are astronomical and their chipped cartridges with forced expiration dates just show the company's dishonesty when it comes to selling this refillable product to force the consumer to keep on paying and paying whether they use up all the ink or not. Since they do produce high-quality dye based inks they could easily replace those expiration date chips with a simple note of "please shake vigorously after this date and wipe printer head with a moist tissue to remove any hardened ink" on the cartridge to get it working again. Other manufacturers like Lexmark have also followed suit and I do believe that there is collusion in the printing ink market but the government hasn't stepped in to resolve the issue because none of the small law suits throughout the years have showed enough evidence to really make this stick to these companies.
Forced Obsolescence Through No Driver Updates
Another issue is the planned obsolescence of printers through lack of drive updates for new operating systems that HP has taken up as a company goal
After watching endless previews of this show all over the TV networks, media, and everywhere else I finally decided to reward the show's producers and watch it. I sat down down and started watching the show from the beginning and continued on through till almost the end of season 4. Watching the 3rd season was painful because I just stopped caring about the show's characters due to all the personality flips that they underwent and their illogical choices. By the 4th season I was so bored and uninterested in the characters, the mysteries, the objects that I just wanted someone to trigger the hatch device again and kill everyone on the island to be done with once and for all.
The single scene that broke my interest in the show is when Charlie (short, skinny British musician with a brother) was killed in the underwater laboratory when he could have easily opened the door and walked outside before the flood water got him or floated up to the top of the room where there would be an air bubble, wait for the pressure to equalize and then slowly swam up through the large porthole window (where his small shoulders would fit) and left the station. He had two chances to save himself and the writers made him take none and instead dumbly sacrificed him because they couldn't think of a way to continue his plot line.
It's getting closer to a time when the entire world economy collapses due to a chained event in the stock markets that wipes out all this virtual equity and maybe then people will start considering a ban on this legalized form of gambling that is today's stock market. Stocks change positions these days based on rumors and lose equity due to glitches and nobody really understands what real equity exists in these companies that are being traded because it so convoluted and vaporous.
We need a Butlerian Jihad against Stock Markets! - (Dune)
What a cash cow this ideas is! Nothing like billing the customer for an infinite resource such as bandwidth that costs nothing to produce. TimeWarner is trying this in the Southern US markets and Comcast is likely to jump on the bandwagon soon.
How much do you want to bet that slowly Bell's default home page and customer portal and web sites start becoming bandwidth heavy with auto-play videos and animated content all over. This will be the same idea as billing mobile phone customers per-minute charges for accessing their own voicemail system even on the company's own network (Sprint does this in the US.)
Canada is already being slowly pushed down the slippery slope of bullshit Intellectual Property protection with their last copyright bill and the large companies there are starting to get the whiff of what is happening and are pushing schemes like these against their customers. With a near-monopoly size that Canada's Bell is they are able to make this happen without fears of reprecautions since the chance that their plans sticks and stays around to create a metered Internet billing system is a lot lower than the risk of a combined lash back by the Canadian consumers.
If this plan succeeds and metered bandwidth start becoming the norm in Canada and the US we are going to see a slow decline in the advancements that the Internet is starting to bring us such as HD quality live-streamed movies, TV, and series content that is now becoming the mainstream here.
The reports from the past few weeks are showing that many people are canceling their Cable TV service since they are starting to get their entertainment content from the TV network's web sites, NetFlix, Hulu, YouTube, etc. Once the people get switched to metered content and realize the sheer size of video content and watching it on the Internet causing their bandwidth to get used up in a matter of hours they'll either start getting pissed and switch to non-metered providers or if it's too late they'll be pissed that they are now left without a choice.
There are entire 10k+ machine datacenters in France that use only liquid cooling circuits, right up to the servers.
That's exactly what the server designers should be doing to the rack series servers at this point. Stop with the loud and inefficient air fans and replace them with built-in thermal conduction pipes inside the servers. Every rack should start coming with a master hose and a coupler system that we would connect to the server, prime the server before turning on for the first time, and let the server be cooled with liquid and have the cooling capability go directly to server parts that need the most cooling. The flexible but reinforced pipe system to each server would use self sealing ball-bearing couplers to avoid spillage on connect. The thermal substance could be your ordinary Ethylene Glycol or something better.
This is already being done in specialized circumstances and we have been doing water based cooling on our overclocked rigs at home for quite some time, it's only logical that the servers start moving down this path and we get liquid cooling into systems that can absorb a little bit of a price increase in exchange for lower overall energy costs.
Many of the data centers in NYC where I've worked already use a Ethylene Glycol based Chilled Water cooling system so this technology already exists in these locations. It's only logical to make some servers with liquid cooling components for the hard drives, power supplies, memory, processor, chipset, or just borrow these pre-made parts from liquid cooler overclocking manufacturers. Set up some pipes, put in some safety low-pressure valves, self-sealing couplers, and run them to all the racks over the top like network wires.
There are more than enough engineers smart enough to get this designed and organized and this is the right time to do it with Green Computing being such a fad at this point. Someone wake some people up at HP & Dell.
Yep, I remember exactly those days when OSI was trying to figure out how to deal with PKing and their solution was the notoriety system. I even remember an overflow bug in the notoriety system where Dread Lords could flip to a Great Lord if they did enough PKing. I remember the just as bad bastard NotoPK Great Lords jacking up their titles so high by killing random reds or more often their own alternate characters or red friends that they would go on spurts of PKing as blue's until they go low enough in notoriety to rebuild it again by red killing.
Much later OSI implemented a time-wait solution that required in-game login-time for their toons to work off the killings. They did the same thing for the skill system, Rate Over Time of limited skill gain progression per day. This just made the PKers leave their toons logged in over night for day at a time to ride out the timers and get back to PKing on that character while they used the other half dozen accounts in the mean time to do the same and still PK. Then there was the whole Notoriety system revamp that put in limits on how many reds you could have per account and then per shard (server instance) to try to whittle down the PKing community.
Item Insurance, No-Loot Rules = Newb (Baby) Safe Game
All of this newb-proofing of the Ultima Online game experience slowly started ruining it for the hardcore PvP crowd by driving away the red PKer's who were suffering undue amounts of pressure from OSI to stop PKing. They succeeded with the server split of PvE = Trammel and PvP = Felucca mirroring and then drove the nail further into the PK coffin when they introduced item insurance making PKing completely worthless for the PKers and risk-free for the newbs. Then we had automatic no-loot rules introduced for dropped bodies on top of item insurance and automatic-keep items that would never drop on the body, including that special gift you got to make any item non-drop.
Item Hoarding = No PKing
These two things were the beginning of the first steps of the game turning into an item hoarding endeavor where it wasn't only about skills like in the beginning of UO since all items were fairly equivalent with the NPC bought stuff. Since the PKers couldn't effectively loot anything of value anymore their lost interest because of this, except for an occasional fun-gank. This item protection scheme is what started driving PKers away from the game because now the game was worthless for them since there was no risk for the newbs at all, or hardly any.
I don't quite remember the item protection rules in Felucca though but I just remember that mirror to be practically deserted except for a few juicy dungeons which always had folks in them due to the good drops and monsters.
Rate Over Time
I actually thought that all this *-Over-Time for the PK-timer and Skill system was damn useless and annoying because it punished the hardcore players for being hardcore. They tried to balance out the game inefficiently through artificial timers thinking that your regular newb Joe Schmoe will be somehow protected and put on equal footing with the macroing hardcore player but it just penalized hard workers, wheter legitimate players who liked to play a long time, or hardcore macroer's and botters.
I would say that OSI then EA (Electronic Arts) slowly started killing Ultima Online right after the PvP shard split to Felucca (PvE) and Trammel (PvE) shard mirrors. After that the game became segregated into two different cultures and future patches started driving the game more towards a PvE environment that was newb friendly. After that the game started moving away from a skill based system to an item oriented one further devolving the game into a grind fest for goods which ultimately lead to free rate item awards for players based purely on the age of the characters regardless of skills. Not to mention increased stat caps based on age also that put all new players at a disadvantage that could never be overcome due to the younger status of their new characters. The Champion Spawn and Power Scroll drove the game insane with quests for rate +20 skill increase scrolls and +25 stat (int, str, dex) scrolls along with custom smith crafting hammers. Item insurance, no-body loot rules, item lockdown, and bags of teleportation just added into the item hoarding aspect of the game that slowly turned it into a grind for stuff.
I played mostly as I lawful good character in the game, not a NotoPK, just a real good and honest player from the 1997-8 release until a few years later, with multiple periods of not playing in-between. I build my characters through normal playing and progression of skills fighting in dungeons with other blue's and ad-hoc formed groups of people just crawling through dungeons for loot and skills. The constant danger of random PKers was there and always the fear of a PK raid would exist but they made the game more exciting and interesting because they created real risks. The PK and NotoPK wars were the most interesting in pre-Trammel days since those were the early frontier times where you were only marginally safe in the cities since there auto-kill guards were not very effective to being completely on your own with ability to lose all of your loot, time, and sometimes skills for anyone turned red when you died.
An accidental venture too deep into the forests north Britain could have you run into a lonely gazer who'd combo you with explosion, energy bolt, and lighting to turn you into a corpse as you're trying to run away, only to end up having to run on foot to the closest shrine for resurrection and hope that you can get to your body with no health without getting killed by a passing by red, a lowly monster, or bad luck on the way before you body expires along with all of your gear and loot inside requiring you to reequip everything. Those were the most memorable moments for me playing that game, the risk heightened the whole experience and the adrenaline dumps you would experience from the things that happened in the game since you knew the risk and the loss you could really sustain.
Honestly, never being a PKer or griefer I preferred the original risky UO experience than the softened up consensual PvP that exists in games today, there is no risk to your game and the whole thing just devolves into skill grinding, item gathering, or a huge boring chatroom.
Bugs were an important part of the UO experience since if you were in anyway in tune with the information out there in the forums, chat rooms, guilds you were always hunting for information about any bugs that were found in the game so that you could protect yourself from them or at least be aware of their function. There were way too many gold dupe bugs that required server restore and rollbacks, house looting bugs making non-locked down chests and furniture next to the walls easy targets for people, or character bugs messing up your character skills or items disappearing in your backpack or even bank box requiring GM assistance. Not to mention a whole slew of bugs dealing with combat, magical and not, and combination of items, spells, and equipment used that would expose bugs in the design of the game. All of the different systems in the game, magic, combat, notoriety, housing, items, crafting, skills, transportation, monsters, cities, shop keepers, NPC contained dozens of critical bugs.
New bug information spread like wildfire on internal guild forums since this was prized information and there were even Xploit websites that you could subscribe to with a monthly payment to get information about how to create bugs and be kept up to date about bugs. Not to mention illegal and against ToS (Terms of Service) applications that would hack the data stream for the game client and screw with objects in the game or expose information that was not publicly available. Then the automation applications came that let you automate mundane tasks such as dressing and undressing or weapon equipping until the fully scripting applications came that let you write fully featured scripts to automate movement, item creation, harvesting, and even depositing and selling. Bots were created through simple keyboard-macro programs to automate skill grinding up to the time where real scripting programs showed up practically train your characters automatically in almost any skill you wanted with no or minimal intervention.
There was a second dark underside-game to UO that some people never knew unless they were in a PK guild or a Noto (Blue Notoriety) guild. Unfortunately, I only got a glimpse into the real underworld of UO but what I saw was more interesting than the public face of the game. I got into writing automation scripts for UO since at that point in the game playing it was old and boring and developing for it was more interesting.
Yep I saw the period when folks with non-dial-up connections from college, work, or lucky enough to have ISDN would run at twice or thrice your speed and they would be impossible to target or even hit. On Cheapeake server we had a few hardcore PKers who were unstoppable because of this huge speed advantage coupled with experience in PKing and developed characters to boot. Even when I went out of my way to get ISDN to drop my latency from 130ms to 50-60ms I was glad to get away from many dial-up wanna-be PKers but would every so often encounter someone who'd take me out with a better connection, surprise, or just better game skills.
This difference in performance is just like the old days of Doom where you CPU speed would increase your frame rate making you run faster, or Quake 1 where your faster computer would make you shoot lightning or nails faster and do more damage per second.
Odds are, UO was actually just a pretty bad game. The reason he goes on about it is because his brain is infected with the nostalgia disease, which makes everything old look good even if it wasn't.
Absolutely correct! Ultima Online was a pretty bad game overall, the implementation was buggy as hell not from a crashing application point of view (that did happen sometimes) but from a poorly thought out design and logic aspect coupled with inconsistently implementation of that bad design in software on the server side. The sheer number of changes that happened to the game during closed beta and open beta in 1997 to the launch and major world design changes in 1998-1999 were just staggering. Anytime there was a major patch release huge swaths of the game would just be dramatically altered and changed and this rippled throughout the game world every 3-6 or so months until the economy, the skill and player design settled, and then the talk of the next major patch would arrive.
The thing that kept UO interesting was that it was the only real graphical MMORPG game available at the time in the US that was easy enough for people to get into, buy the game, install, run update patches for an hour or more, and try to create an account without losing connection, and hope to jump on a server without lagging into black. If you did finally make it into the game world be amazed and confused completely at everything around you since none of the instructions you had explained anything at all and all were worthless because of the last few years of major patches that changed the world. You literally had to learn like a baby through game experience and mistakes. Sometimes you would glimpse some wisdom online from some tutorials or forum posts but those would get obsolete with the next patch release and wouldn't be updated.
Everyone just remembers UO through Rose Colored glasses of Nostalgia (+1) because it was most likely one of their very first MMORPG experiences of the time. It was mine and it shaped my adulthood in a negative way and but it also immunized me against future grindfest MMORPGS like EverQuest 1 & 2, World of Worldcraft, etc. I never played any other online RPG games because I put in my time grinding away my time at UO and I never wanted to repeat that ever again.
I look at my friend who pushed me into got me into UO and who stayed with MMORPGs, played Shadowbane hardcore and who got addicted to WoW spending the last 10-years doing the same shit again over and over and over again. He's nowhere now, still living with his parents without any prospects for a normal life or job in the future.
I look at my time in UO as interesting but ultimately bad.
I've been a contractor and consultant for many years and I've had to provide my own insurance for many years.
COBRA = Up to 18-months at Full Corporate & Personal Payment + ~2% Administrative Fees
Just to let you know that coverage under COBRA is not always good since you have to pay your part of the premium, the company's part of the premium, and also an added administrative fee so you're paying an additional premium for coverage that is now costing you twice or much more.
Independent Coverage from Major US HMO (Aetna, Oxford, Blue Cross/Shield, etc.) = $1,400 - $1,800 per Month
For shits and giggles I decided to call and research the major insurance companies in New York state in the US and ask them about what it would cost to cover me individually and I got quote from $1,400 to $1,800 for the lowest priced HMO prices for a fully healthy 25-30 year old male, non-smoking, non-drinking, no-preconditions. These prices were direct from the provider themselves and I was surprised that they quoted me so much above what the New York State Insurance Department for Health Care Plans had listed on their web site.
Freelancers Union or Local Chamber of Commerce
Be aware that the health plans offered at least in New York State around the mid 2005's by the FreelancersUnion.org were not exactly cheap nor good, they offered HIP HMO which was the lowest rated HMO with the higher complaint count according to the NYS Insurance Department for Health Care Plans and they wanted $700 for individual only and over $1,000 for family. HIP had a series of corruption and accounting issues that were public and incompetence that wasn't but was know by folks that worked there, some were friends.
They did offer a pretty good "discount" plan for Dental by Guardian for ~$50 per month that did have pretty good rates for procedures, such as %50 off for a root canal and crown, and really low costs of $12 for composite molar fillings with multiple faces being done.
Now Freelancer's Union has expanded and they offer PPO 1,2,3 (Preferred Provider Organization = You pick your own doctor not from an HMO network) that are damn expensive at $300-500 for individual or $800-1,400 for family and HD $5K and $10K (High Deductible ~= Catastrophic Health Problem) plans that are still quite expensive at $200-300 for individual or $550-900 for a family.
I've been with and have used Freelancer's Unions dental plan but not the health plan and I did think that they offered such a great deal and savings. Their plans are expensive and they are not really a union they are a for-profit company that is just reselling you insurance! They do not run their business very efficiently or very well with multiple cases of screw ups every year when it comes time to renew the plans and select your new plans, such as two years ago when they didn't do re-enrollment for a whole month after the deadline since they screwed up. They run a fully paperless frontend for you but from the back office work they must deal with reams of it. Just be careful and weary of this so called "union" since they are not one!
Uninsured Option!
I decided to give up on HMO or PPO health insurance because it's just too insanely expensive at $900-$1,400 for coverage. That is more money that my biggest expense that is rent. It is an insane amount of money for a self-employed individual making due with a few clients and non-steady income.
The United States is a horrible place to live without be subservient to a corporation who holds their benefits and insurance plans over you like an indentured servant since if you start and family and decide to leave their good graces or are no longer desired you're in the path of bankruptcy for even non-lethal health problems or accidents.
Letters that only the mail room sees then some low level employee in the marketing department taking your address info down so they can spam you with their offers, and then the trash can. There goes your $0.44 USD postage + envelope + paper + time + effort.
Letter writing campaigns? Really, in this day and age of e-mail, web, twitter, forums, wikis, sms with widespread corporate ignorance, fraud, and outright crime.
Yeah, go ahead and write a letter, waste your money.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work in this building after the World Trade Center 9/11 attack when my company lost their data center and had to rent a co-location space in one of the data centers there. This is a monstrous building that is the size of an entire New York City block. It is build like an ancient Babylonia pyramid with vertical walls and a pyramidal structure on the top floors. It is across the street from the Chelsea Market and one block north of Homestead Steakhouse. The actual entrance for IT geeks to the data center space of this building is in the back on 9th avenue, the office entrance is in the front and I never used that one.
I was bored one day I took a walk down the hallways of some of the floors and saw data center spaces for _all_ of the major telecom and Internet providers that I knew of and many that I didn't know even existed. Strangely some of the doors to these data centers were left open, I'm guessing because work was being performed there and I got a tour of some of these places. Miles and miles of conduits, cables, server cages, telecom equipment racks, server racks, backup units, power distribution units, massive uninterruptable power supplies, glycol-based water cooling pipes, and tons of galvanized steel green field conduits for power lines. This was also the first place where I saw companies replacing the problematic fingerprint based scanners for vain-pattern hand scanners to beef up security. I wish I had more time to check out this amazing building but I was so busy rebuilding our company's servers after WTC that I lived within 4-rows of racks for a few months.
I spent my Christmas and New Years that year rebuilding 250 Compaq ProLiant and ~100 IBM xSeries for my old company to get their infrastructure and application servers back up. I pretty much lived in that building for 3-months and I was lucky to be able to easily walk over to the 14th St & 8th Ave L-train stop to go home late at night or in the morning. It was an interesting experience and I wished that I spent more time there to learn about that goes on in this building.
If there was one place that I know of that is the hidden center of the Internet and Information in New York City I would think that this would be the building. Luckily it was build very solid and it is very nondescript so I think that it is pretty safe. There was a rumor that the FBI had their surveillance office across the street and they had floor space with network taps in that building to be connected to all the important information pathways in NYC.
Data Center Power Off Button Incident
This was also the place where the delivery guy who just finish dropping off more parts was walking out of the data center room and hit the red button on the wall, the door opened, and he walked out. Meanwhile all we heard was a very long and deep "ooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" sound as every single piece of equipment turned off immedietelly after the Emergency Power Off button was pressed, including the magnetic locks on the door that the guy just walked out of. Surveilence tapes showed us what happened as we stood there in deafening silence and awe unable to comprehend what just happened. The next day there was a plastic box cover over that button.
Who ever though it was a good idea to put the silver door open button next to the red power off button should have been flogged on the spot.
US Postal Service - Great Domestic & International Service for Me
For selling all my stuff on eBay and shipping sold items to Europe I've been using USPS for the last few years since they offered their online service and I've never had a problem. I must have shipped around 100-packages of weights between 1-40 lbs to many states and also to Brazil, UK, Hungary, Germany, Romania, and other countries without any issues or damaged parts. Their tracking is a bit slow, maybe a day behind the actual package, but it is good enough for me. Their shipping rates undermine UPS and FedEx every single time, sometimes by 50-100% of the rate. I package my stuff very well reusing the packaging materials from Newegg and Amazon packages that I use, including peanuts, air padded bags, the little and big plastic bubble wrap, and even newspapers. I usually use Priority but I've used Express occasionally when required. I'm happy with their service and the folks who bought my various eBay things were all happy with the shipping prices and delivery times. The online label printing and filling out of the customs forms makes my shipping very easy and my interaction at the post office is very short when I just hand the people the packages at the counter after I tell them it's already pre-paid. Sometimes I get the skip the waiting line. I've requested refunds from USPS for the shipping labels on packages that couldn't make the weight or size restrictions for international packages and I've always received the refund on my postage after about a 7-day waiting period. So I highly recommend them.
US Postal Service - Print Shipping Labels
UPS Story #1 - Dropped Server & Refused Insurance Coverage
My one single shipping story with UPS was when I sold a 80 lb Compaq ProLiant 5500 Dual Pentium Pro server to a buyer in California. He received it damaged after it was dropped on it's corner so hard that the entire frame of the server was scewed and many of the parts inside were cracked or popped and broke out of their sockets. The server was DOA. UPS inspected the server and the package at his location and determined that the package was improperly packed and the refused the insurance coverage on it. I went back to the professional shipping center which packaged the server and they apologized to me, told me that UPS has screwed them before like that by refusing insurance coverage, and they refunded my shipping costs and the cost of the old server from the eBay sale. I refunded all the money back to the buyer. That's my personal story with UPS.
UPS Story #2 - Friends Working As UPS Inspectors And Their Anecdotes
My friend was hired by a third-party company to inspect UPS packages for size and weight mislabeling and then charging the shippers additional costs. He worked their for a year or more and told me the stories that took place on the unloading floor. When the conveyors would jam up or stop working the packages would be pushed as hard as possible and kicked through the bottlenecks. Some conveyors ran high and some low to meet up and a bunch of packages would fall off the high conveyors from a good 10-foot height just to be thrown back onto the low conveyors. If any package on the floor broke open it would be looked through for valuable goods and ransacked. Around the holiday seasons when the package volume would increase and a lot of temporary workers were hired any packages from known popular company brands like Oakley or Rayban sunglasses would be routinely opened and ransacked, any electronic packages were also likely to be opened. The metal detectors used for employee entrance and exists for the shippers would be easily bypassed by a reach-around to friends, or by stashing the stuff and hiding it just to pick it up later or have one of the regular works with a truck pick them up. When heavy boxes with ammunition were dropped on the floor and bullets would spill out they would just tape them up and ship them off,
I think that hardly anyone is surprised that China's Politburo (a group of 24 people who oversee the Communist Party of China) was behind the hacking of the Chinese Google office computers. You can see the seriousness of the issue after reading Google's response to the hacking and their threat to pull out of China all together and also after reading the Department of the State's involvement in this issue. The Department of the State, and someone as high up as Hillary Clinton, getting involved in this issue shows how important this single hacking event was, and not just because Google is everyone's the current favorite company.
US asks China to explain Google hacking claims
A friend of mine here just outside of Houston, Texas is an in-sourced rural (country side) developer and he loves the freedom of being to work from his house on development projects or travel to the clients in case they need something in person. He drives in to Houston whenever he needs to do something in the city. He's a fully educated and experienced American guy and his job is here in America. He produces code here for any companies that need his skills.
I really hope that this becomes the norm to in-source jobs towards Rural areas of the country where the cost of living and the expense of hiring people is much lower than large cities. I'd personnally would love to move away from server administration and into development as I get a little older to get away from on-call issues and because I enjoy producing work like complex scripts.
Off-shore rates for developers are dirt cheap but there is extra unidentified costs with communications, quality of personnel, quality of work performed and code produced, and also timeliness of work. From what I saw in the Finance sector in New York City a lot of out-sourced and off-shored jobs and contracts to India and Singapore are very problematic with a lot of personnel issues and failure to produce usable work.
So we have a few people in our company, 140 out of ~20K or 0.7%, to be exact who found the vague e-mail enticing enough to open.
Now, the outcome of this was more of a surprise to us than anything else. It cost us a bit of work here and there but nothing major. The multiple failures by our security products still have us a little puzzled. This was almost like the perfect storm of fail!
We have a web filtering gateway made by the #1 vendor in that industry that does a great job at classifying, blocking, and catching nefarious things but for some reason it did not catch and block the main .scr file nor the .iq payload files. We thought that by now the product and vendor would block .com, exe, scr, cpl, etc. or any directly executable file extension from being downloaded directly. Fail!
We are running the number #1 e-mail analysis and filtering plug-in set with heuristic detection = high on our #1 most popular corporate e-mail system but for some unknown reason the filter did not realize that all those people mass e-mailing the distribution lists in alphabetical order with the same e-mail that contains a fake link might be something out of the ordinary to block and filter. Fail!
We also have the #1 most popular anti-virus product with the latest signatures applied to all the workstation computers automatically but for some reason this quite popular variant of a previously known worm was not detected in signature based detection or heuristic detection even thought it starts downloading files from the internet, renaming them to exes, and then copies them all over the root drive, the operating system hierarchy, and all the local attached disks, while it is messing around with policy settings for the most popular e-mail client, enumerates and stops services, and tries to kill processes. Fail!
Overall we are still surprised at the outcome of all of this and the complete and utter surprise and lack of help from the vendors we use for our security products. Epic fail!
This is the equivalent of buying a game or a program that requires a media check (e.g. "Insert DVD/CD-ROM to start the game") and then downloading a modified executable from GameCopyWorld.com to play your own game without the media check. Many people have been doing this for a long time and this ruling sets a precedent that effectively legitimizes the usage of these helpful executable.
The problems with GCW is that a lot of times they include a full copy of the modified executable instead of just a small patcher or cracker program so they are still violating the copyright on the original executable code by distributing it without a license from the authors. The quick solution would be to download the patchers or crackers but since many of those are built using pre-made small assembly or C modular code (not shared libraries or DLLs) that has also be used by virus makers many of these legitimate pieces of modular code have been flagged by anti-virus companies as viruses just because they were used to make them. This is why your keygen, patcher, cracker executable will end up flagging anti-virus warnings immediately on download or usage or even months or years after you've successfully used them without getting an infection since their modules were flagged later. So GCW has a hard time with false-positive virus warnings and that's why they show that web page on download about their code being 100% clean and still allow download of full executables instead of just the patchers.
"The company neither admitted nor denied guilt as part of the settlement--a common phraseology in such deals."
How about a big FUCK YOU to Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Department of Justice! How about you dig a little deeper, get the dirt on the direct involvement by Michael Dell and the other board members during the 4-year period and put these schmucks in San Quentin Federal Penitentiary. If you can't find the evidence, just use your powers of Extraordinary Rendition to send a few of these folks over to the Middle East or Africa, a little water boarding, pull of some fingernails and you could get just enough information to find hard evidence to try and convict these people.
I could name a dozen good computer companies who disappeared during this time frame due to Dell's stellar rise in the computer market though shenanigans like this. Good computer companies that produced better products when under because they didn't cook their books like Dell did and didn't take bribes from Intel.
Like another poster said, the pure computer companies that did survive like HP (previously Compaq), Acer, etc. might have been involved in this also.
Intel did just settle the record breaking $1.4 Billion USD to the European Union's commission for violating anti-trust regulations or having to pay $1.2 Billion USD to AMD previously in a similar settlement.
I'm still glad to see that the NY State case against Intel is still on-going and it would be great if other states and companies jump on this bandwagon for lynching Intel since these guys have been playing some dirty games for a long time. Time to hold Execute Officers directly responsible for criminal and immoral decisions directly liable for their actions and orders. Too bad that our government is in the pocket of big corporations and that no real sanctions will be taken against these business scumbags.
Dell's success is now forever clouded by this and I think that looking at their shady little deal with Intel, I wouldn't put it past them if there was one going on right now with Microsoft for operating systems. Dell just did pull Ubuntu Linux OSes computers from their web site just as Linux is getting more acceptance by people due to Google's Android mobile OS success in the mobile market and also the upcoming tablet computer revolution. Microsoft isn't playing in this field and they are scared since they cannot compete.
Serious, WTF! Why are we still having to dick around with these issues of closed systems that you are prevented from reviewing, especially since they affect people's health directly! This should not require any kind of debate and if these medical devices that are certified by a government entity such as the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) then the manufacturers must be required to publicly disclose the design and software source code to the FDA for their review and additionally for public review since the FDA works on behalf of the people. This is braindead simple but we still have to argue for every little bit of disclosure for government certified devices.
This is the same crap that happened with the speed radar guns and it took many law suits to finally force the manufacturers of these devices behind sold to the local police departments acting on behalf of the government and thus the people to finally release the source code for these devices. Some of the devices were found to have faulty programming in them and their results were proven to be uncertain within the degree that would affect their accuracy enough to be difficult to certify if a person was speeding or the radar gun was acting up.
There's that part in the US Constitution about the government being unable to copyright anything that is produced by it This should be extended to mean that anything that is used by the government or certified for usage by the government should at the very least be officially copyrighted by the authors and though this process should be made available for review by the public, similar to what the patent system does. You submit a patent, and you get government protection for your invention, at the cost of exposing your design to the public and then allowing the public to use and benefit from your invention after the protection period expires.
Same thing should apply here to the software of these medical devices. You submit it for certification you copyright your code officially and you get copyright protection for it so that another company can't just cut-and-paste it into their own system. This makes the code available for public review and people can independently verify that the code won't accidentally kill you if you happen to trigger an unusual set of events that is not going to be dealt with and avoid the problems with "edge cases".
Yeah, if you think that making a phone call, an e-mail, or a letter is going to have any effect on your political representatives then you should go to peace rallies and protests more often. This type of behavior has no effect except to make the callee feel a little bit better about themselves for pretending to give a shit and "do" something but ultimately it's pointless an just just a self-masturbating ego boosting.
Your elected representative will vote along his party lines as he is told by his higher-ups, do whatever continues to make the lobbist's money flowing towards his campaigns, make the best choice for his personal business investments or friend's business investments that are going to give him a job after he leaves the office, or he will trade this vote for another one that he wants on more important issues that bring him more of the former.
Money is the only thing that can make a difference in US politics at this point since the majority of the population is beyond the tipping-point of "Who gives a shit! Give me a beer, a burger, a car and leave me the hell alone in my house!"
You want to make a difference in US politics, focus on becoming rich, then make enough money that your donations to candidates are heavy enough to sway their votes in your favor. This is the way that this country's political system has been run in the recent past and this is the way that the tide is turning judging by the current political outlook on the future and the way that bills are being passed. The corporations are now becoming more politically active and are starting to donate larger and larger sums toward politics, and this behavior is now enhanced by the recent US Supreme Court ruling removing limits from campaign contributions by corporations.
We are heading towards United States of America, Inc. or LLC if we're lucky!
I've been using this so-called OS for a while and I am quite positive that when Microsoft made the move from the unstable, bluescreening, freezing, and crashing Windows 95/98/ME 16-bit kernel to the stable Windows NT 3.51/4.0/XP/2000 32-bit kernel they had to do something with the 16-bit operating system developers so they made them all work on Windows Mobile! This is the only logical explanation as to why Windows Mobile sucks so bad, freezes so often, crashes every week, and manages to screw up my phone ever few months on its own corrupting all data... for the last three Windows Mobile phones that I owned. All builds of Windows Mobile 6.5.5 are so horrible from one to another with major changes to the GUI and lack of stability that I have had to downgrade my phone back to 6.5.0 to get some stability and usefulness out of the phone.
Windows Mobile 7 is now made incompatible with 6.5 and earlier versions just sounds like Microsoft is trying to push OS/2 on people by calling it better than Windows 3.11 without the compatibility shims.
I'm just looking for a new Google Android based phone to come out on a CDMA (US - Sprint, Verizon) network that has GSM capabilities with a SIM card and a full-size keyboard, such as the HTC Touch Pro 2 that I currently have to use and endure the Windows Mobile crap. Once that is out I'm ditching Windows Mobile forever!
I'm reading this article and this sounds a lot like the mountain climbing movie the North Face (2008) aka Nordwand (German) that I would highly recommend watching because the real-life story of the climbers parallels the events in this article.
This whole extreme climbing thing is very dangerous whether it is going up mountains or going down caves because any little incident and not even an accident usually turns out fatal later on, even when it is something out of your control such as unexpected critical equipment failure.
Eastern Europe - Outdoor Active Lifestyle
I grew up in a very polluted coal mining and burning part of eastern Europe and all of us kids spend their entire time outside, except for a few hours of sleeping, parents calling us to come in for dinner, which we would promptly eat and then leave again to play with friends, and the few hours a day that we would be required to be in school, but even then we would have two breaks and lunch which we would spend outside playing. Even during cold and rainy days we would be outside doing stuff with out friends, meeting up under various try spots that we knew outside. There was no air conditioning and I didn't see anyone suffering from any type of allergies or asthma that I remember but I do remember a few sickly kids that would spend their time indoors.
Our apartment complex in the big city was covered with busy roads and tons cars and commercial traffic, we even had an actual a coal burning plant which would create the hot water for the entire housing compound right in the middle of the apartment complex and we even occasionally venture next to it to play war around there among the dumped burned off toxic leftover coke byproduct of coal burning. However, at the same time our apartment complex was next to a huge park, a farm, and with tons of trees littering the paths between the apartment buildings and throughout the city between every single street. You could walk large parts of the city during light rain and hardly get any wet just by walking under the trees!
During each 2-month Summer vacation and 3-week or longer Winter vacation my mother would always arrange for me to go on the company sponsored camping and I would then spend weeks at a time away in the mountain and forest areas playing outdoors even more with kids and then go on hikes and outdoor tent camping events on top of being outside. We never did any indoor activities unless it was raining and even then we would find excuses to run outside and get soaking we just for fun. I spend more time getting dirty among nature as a kid then I care to remember.
United States - Sedentary Indoor Lifestyle
When I came to the United States later I found that most kids stayed in-doors most of the time and hardly went outside. Being an immigrant child I kept to my roots and hung out with my own kid friends spending our entire summers outside in the parks and going away on lake and camping trips on the weekends with family. The Summer and Winter camps here turned out to cost a lot more money and since they were not sponsored by my mother's work I couldn't afford to go. I tried to spend a much time as possible outside in the summer playing basketball and football with whatever friends were left in the city but since many of them went away I became sedentary and gained weight, then started spending a lot more time at the computer than I should have which in turn decreased my ability to go outside and enjoy myself.
Now that I move out to another part of the country where there is a lot more outdoor activities I am getting myself involved in outdoor type events so that I can get back to being in nature. Airsoft has become my newest outdoor hobby and I just love the idea of literally crawling through thick woods with a replica gun just to shoot at people and have fun outside while hugging and blending in with the nature. I came out filthy as a dog from that weekend excursion but I was hooked!
When I have kids I will guarantee that they spend their entire time outside doing activities and go away every Summer and Winter vacation to camps, no matter what I have to sacrifice for myself to afford the cost. I want my kids to be familiar with nature and be comfortable being in the woods like I was.
Interrupt Moderation = Disable
Here's a real tip, disable Interrupt Moderation on your Network Adapter Cards to achieve greater bandwidth, as much as 100%+, and lower latency (the two measures of network performance) at the expense of processor utilization due to more hardware interrupts that have to be handled.
Instructions: In Windows open up Control Panel, Network and Sharing Center, click on Change Adapter Settings, open Properties on your Local Area Connection (sometimes #2, #3, or something if you have more network cards), click on the Configure button, then the Advanced tab, select Interrupt Moderation, change the value to Disabled, while there look for any settings with the word Offload and enable them all, and then click the OK button to make the changes. This will restart your network card driver and make the settings effective.
Most network cards from popular manufacturers such as Intel, Broadcom, Realtek, etc. hold network packets in a buffer until enough time goes by before raising a hardware interrupt and telling the processor, operating system, and network driver that there are packets waiting to be serviced. By disabling Interrupt Moderation you instruct the network driver and card to raise the interrupt every single time a packet comes in, thus making your processor service the network card much faster thus decreasing latency on the packets held in the buffer and also increasing bandwidth by allowing more packets to flow through faster. This increases your processor utilization by a significant amount 10-30% but if you have a recent dual, quad, hex, octo-core processor and recent network drivers that are multi-threaded with multi-core support and have Receive Side Scaling support then the increased processor utilization is negligible to your computer and if you are running a network server then network performance should be a priority anyway.
I have personally seen and tested corporate and home LAN environments using Fast Ethernet 100 Mbit/s (~11 MByte/s) go from slow 6-7 MByte/s to 10-11 MByte/s throughput, and Gigabit 1,000 Mbit/s (~100 MByte/s) go from ~30 MByte/s to 95-98 MByte/s speeds due to these changes. No other network driver setting had as much performance impact as Interrupt Moderation.
IEEE 802.1AX (aka 802.3ad, Cisco EtherChannel)
For advanced network performance improvement look at link aggregation (channel trunking, link bonding, etc.) using the IEEE 802.1AX (aka 802.3ad, Cisco EtherChannel) protocol support in your Intel and Broadcom network adapters using their Advanced Configuration Utilities on your servers to bundle from 2-8 Ethernet network adapters into one trunk to increase your performance. Just tell your network administrators to enable those features on your ports and find out if they are able to do it if your links are going to the same switch or if they have virtual switching enabled in case your links span switches. Just think about 4 x Gigabit performance if you bundle all 4 NICs on most servers.
NetCPS
You can test your own network performance with this simple but great utility called NetCPS. Just be sure to disable Interrupt Moderation on both of the computers on your LAN that you will be using for the performance testing otherwise you won't be able to achieve these numbers if one of the computers can't handle the data as fast as the other one. Try it with your laptop and desktop for example.
NetCPS - is a handy utility to measure the effective performance on a TCP/IP network.
Just execute "netcps.exe -s" on the listening system and then do "netcps.exe computername " on the other computer to use the utility to test the throughput bandwidth. For Gigabit you can use the "-m1000" switch to increase the transferred amount to 1,000 MBytes instead of the default 100. Below is an example.
I have known about ink refilling for over 10 or 11-years ever since my friend introduce me to his syringe and his tiny Epson ink cartridges. Him and his father would go out of their way to buy ink in bulk from specialty printing stores before ink refilling was even known to be possible by common people. He showed me how it was and as long as you get the knack for it and hit the syringe in the right spot on the cartridge this becomes a routine and clean situation. He later experimented with flexible plastic pipes going directly to his cartridges and large ink tanks on top. I thought it was pretty geeky and cool watching them printing every little picture they could.
I personally am a digital guy and I never had a need for printing. I lived without a printer for almost 5-years because if I ever needed anything printed I would just do it at work or at worst a friend's house every 6-months or so. Then one day a few years back I had enough money and wanted to buy a printer with specific features, an inkjet for occasional color prints, and network connectivity so that multiple computers in my house could print without having to have the main computer on all the time, large ink cartridges for lower ink price and more volume, and with duplex printing so that I could save paper when I do need to print something like tax forms, movie ticket passes, etc. I look around for two years and couldn't find any model that would quality so I stopped my search until one year I came across this printer.
HP DeskJet 6127 Color Inkjet Printer (C8959B) - Network, Duplex, Large Cartriges
HP 78 Inkjet Print Cartridges - (C6578DN) $39.99 (~$18 on eBay), XL (C6578AN) $60.99 (~$20 on eBay)
HP 45 Inkjet Print Cartridges - (51645A) $35.99 (~$16 on eBay), Double (C6650FN) $63.99 (~$24 on eBay)
Since I do not print very much at all, maybe 1-page every 2-weeks when I go to the movies, a 4x6 picture here and there, and some forms every few months I don't use very much ink at all. I also buy the HP 78XL size tri-color cartridges on eBay for ~$20 and HP 45 black for ~$16 from photo stores that seems to sell them at a loss and I get them for a third of the retail HP price.
Ink Price Collusion
I still think that $20 that price is fair for a large cartridge with XL capacity and $15 is a reasonable price to pay for a large size black cartridge. I believe that there is a lot of technology that goes into producing a uniform and consistent liquid that is color matched against industry color standards with UV treated dye type inks to retain the printed image for a long period of time. However, the retail prices that HP charges for ink are astronomical and their chipped cartridges with forced expiration dates just show the company's dishonesty when it comes to selling this refillable product to force the consumer to keep on paying and paying whether they use up all the ink or not. Since they do produce high-quality dye based inks they could easily replace those expiration date chips with a simple note of "please shake vigorously after this date and wipe printer head with a moist tissue to remove any hardened ink" on the cartridge to get it working again. Other manufacturers like Lexmark have also followed suit and I do believe that there is collusion in the printing ink market but the government hasn't stepped in to resolve the issue because none of the small law suits throughout the years have showed enough evidence to really make this stick to these companies.
Forced Obsolescence Through No Driver Updates
Another issue is the planned obsolescence of printers through lack of drive updates for new operating systems that HP has taken up as a company goal
After watching endless previews of this show all over the TV networks, media, and everywhere else I finally decided to reward the show's producers and watch it. I sat down down and started watching the show from the beginning and continued on through till almost the end of season 4. Watching the 3rd season was painful because I just stopped caring about the show's characters due to all the personality flips that they underwent and their illogical choices. By the 4th season I was so bored and uninterested in the characters, the mysteries, the objects that I just wanted someone to trigger the hatch device again and kill everyone on the island to be done with once and for all.
The single scene that broke my interest in the show is when Charlie (short, skinny British musician with a brother) was killed in the underwater laboratory when he could have easily opened the door and walked outside before the flood water got him or floated up to the top of the room where there would be an air bubble, wait for the pressure to equalize and then slowly swam up through the large porthole window (where his small shoulders would fit) and left the station. He had two chances to save himself and the writers made him take none and instead dumbly sacrificed him because they couldn't think of a way to continue his plot line.
It's getting closer to a time when the entire world economy collapses due to a chained event in the stock markets that wipes out all this virtual equity and maybe then people will start considering a ban on this legalized form of gambling that is today's stock market. Stocks change positions these days based on rumors and lose equity due to glitches and nobody really understands what real equity exists in these companies that are being traded because it so convoluted and vaporous.
We need a Butlerian Jihad against Stock Markets! - (Dune)
What a cash cow this ideas is! Nothing like billing the customer for an infinite resource such as bandwidth that costs nothing to produce. TimeWarner is trying this in the Southern US markets and Comcast is likely to jump on the bandwagon soon.
How much do you want to bet that slowly Bell's default home page and customer portal and web sites start becoming bandwidth heavy with auto-play videos and animated content all over. This will be the same idea as billing mobile phone customers per-minute charges for accessing their own voicemail system even on the company's own network (Sprint does this in the US.)
Canada is already being slowly pushed down the slippery slope of bullshit Intellectual Property protection with their last copyright bill and the large companies there are starting to get the whiff of what is happening and are pushing schemes like these against their customers. With a near-monopoly size that Canada's Bell is they are able to make this happen without fears of reprecautions since the chance that their plans sticks and stays around to create a metered Internet billing system is a lot lower than the risk of a combined lash back by the Canadian consumers.
If this plan succeeds and metered bandwidth start becoming the norm in Canada and the US we are going to see a slow decline in the advancements that the Internet is starting to bring us such as HD quality live-streamed movies, TV, and series content that is now becoming the mainstream here.
The reports from the past few weeks are showing that many people are canceling their Cable TV service since they are starting to get their entertainment content from the TV network's web sites, NetFlix, Hulu, YouTube, etc. Once the people get switched to metered content and realize the sheer size of video content and watching it on the Internet causing their bandwidth to get used up in a matter of hours they'll either start getting pissed and switch to non-metered providers or if it's too late they'll be pissed that they are now left without a choice.
That's exactly what the server designers should be doing to the rack series servers at this point. Stop with the loud and inefficient air fans and replace them with built-in thermal conduction pipes inside the servers. Every rack should start coming with a master hose and a coupler system that we would connect to the server, prime the server before turning on for the first time, and let the server be cooled with liquid and have the cooling capability go directly to server parts that need the most cooling. The flexible but reinforced pipe system to each server would use self sealing ball-bearing couplers to avoid spillage on connect. The thermal substance could be your ordinary Ethylene Glycol or something better.
This is already being done in specialized circumstances and we have been doing water based cooling on our overclocked rigs at home for quite some time, it's only logical that the servers start moving down this path and we get liquid cooling into systems that can absorb a little bit of a price increase in exchange for lower overall energy costs.
Many of the data centers in NYC where I've worked already use a Ethylene Glycol based Chilled Water cooling system so this technology already exists in these locations. It's only logical to make some servers with liquid cooling components for the hard drives, power supplies, memory, processor, chipset, or just borrow these pre-made parts from liquid cooler overclocking manufacturers. Set up some pipes, put in some safety low-pressure valves, self-sealing couplers, and run them to all the racks over the top like network wires.
There are more than enough engineers smart enough to get this designed and organized and this is the right time to do it with Green Computing being such a fad at this point. Someone wake some people up at HP & Dell.
Yep, I remember exactly those days when OSI was trying to figure out how to deal with PKing and their solution was the notoriety system. I even remember an overflow bug in the notoriety system where Dread Lords could flip to a Great Lord if they did enough PKing. I remember the just as bad bastard NotoPK Great Lords jacking up their titles so high by killing random reds or more often their own alternate characters or red friends that they would go on spurts of PKing as blue's until they go low enough in notoriety to rebuild it again by red killing.
Much later OSI implemented a time-wait solution that required in-game login-time for their toons to work off the killings. They did the same thing for the skill system, Rate Over Time of limited skill gain progression per day. This just made the PKers leave their toons logged in over night for day at a time to ride out the timers and get back to PKing on that character while they used the other half dozen accounts in the mean time to do the same and still PK. Then there was the whole Notoriety system revamp that put in limits on how many reds you could have per account and then per shard (server instance) to try to whittle down the PKing community.
Item Insurance, No-Loot Rules = Newb (Baby) Safe Game
All of this newb-proofing of the Ultima Online game experience slowly started ruining it for the hardcore PvP crowd by driving away the red PKer's who were suffering undue amounts of pressure from OSI to stop PKing. They succeeded with the server split of PvE = Trammel and PvP = Felucca mirroring and then drove the nail further into the PK coffin when they introduced item insurance making PKing completely worthless for the PKers and risk-free for the newbs. Then we had automatic no-loot rules introduced for dropped bodies on top of item insurance and automatic-keep items that would never drop on the body, including that special gift you got to make any item non-drop.
Item Hoarding = No PKing
These two things were the beginning of the first steps of the game turning into an item hoarding endeavor where it wasn't only about skills like in the beginning of UO since all items were fairly equivalent with the NPC bought stuff. Since the PKers couldn't effectively loot anything of value anymore their lost interest because of this, except for an occasional fun-gank. This item protection scheme is what started driving PKers away from the game because now the game was worthless for them since there was no risk for the newbs at all, or hardly any.
I don't quite remember the item protection rules in Felucca though but I just remember that mirror to be practically deserted except for a few juicy dungeons which always had folks in them due to the good drops and monsters.
Rate Over Time
I actually thought that all this *-Over-Time for the PK-timer and Skill system was damn useless and annoying because it punished the hardcore players for being hardcore. They tried to balance out the game inefficiently through artificial timers thinking that your regular newb Joe Schmoe will be somehow protected and put on equal footing with the macroing hardcore player but it just penalized hard workers, wheter legitimate players who liked to play a long time, or hardcore macroer's and botters.
I would say that OSI then EA (Electronic Arts) slowly started killing Ultima Online right after the PvP shard split to Felucca (PvE) and Trammel (PvE) shard mirrors. After that the game became segregated into two different cultures and future patches started driving the game more towards a PvE environment that was newb friendly. After that the game started moving away from a skill based system to an item oriented one further devolving the game into a grind fest for goods which ultimately lead to free rate item awards for players based purely on the age of the characters regardless of skills. Not to mention increased stat caps based on age also that put all new players at a disadvantage that could never be overcome due to the younger status of their new characters. The Champion Spawn and Power Scroll drove the game insane with quests for rate +20 skill increase scrolls and +25 stat (int, str, dex) scrolls along with custom smith crafting hammers. Item insurance, no-body loot rules, item lockdown, and bags of teleportation just added into the item hoarding aspect of the game that slowly turned it into a grind for stuff.
I played mostly as I lawful good character in the game, not a NotoPK, just a real good and honest player from the 1997-8 release until a few years later, with multiple periods of not playing in-between. I build my characters through normal playing and progression of skills fighting in dungeons with other blue's and ad-hoc formed groups of people just crawling through dungeons for loot and skills. The constant danger of random PKers was there and always the fear of a PK raid would exist but they made the game more exciting and interesting because they created real risks. The PK and NotoPK wars were the most interesting in pre-Trammel days since those were the early frontier times where you were only marginally safe in the cities since there auto-kill guards were not very effective to being completely on your own with ability to lose all of your loot, time, and sometimes skills for anyone turned red when you died.
An accidental venture too deep into the forests north Britain could have you run into a lonely gazer who'd combo you with explosion, energy bolt, and lighting to turn you into a corpse as you're trying to run away, only to end up having to run on foot to the closest shrine for resurrection and hope that you can get to your body with no health without getting killed by a passing by red, a lowly monster, or bad luck on the way before you body expires along with all of your gear and loot inside requiring you to reequip everything. Those were the most memorable moments for me playing that game, the risk heightened the whole experience and the adrenaline dumps you would experience from the things that happened in the game since you knew the risk and the loss you could really sustain.
Honestly, never being a PKer or griefer I preferred the original risky UO experience than the softened up consensual PvP that exists in games today, there is no risk to your game and the whole thing just devolves into skill grinding, item gathering, or a huge boring chatroom.
Bugs were an important part of the UO experience since if you were in anyway in tune with the information out there in the forums, chat rooms, guilds you were always hunting for information about any bugs that were found in the game so that you could protect yourself from them or at least be aware of their function. There were way too many gold dupe bugs that required server restore and rollbacks, house looting bugs making non-locked down chests and furniture next to the walls easy targets for people, or character bugs messing up your character skills or items disappearing in your backpack or even bank box requiring GM assistance. Not to mention a whole slew of bugs dealing with combat, magical and not, and combination of items, spells, and equipment used that would expose bugs in the design of the game. All of the different systems in the game, magic, combat, notoriety, housing, items, crafting, skills, transportation, monsters, cities, shop keepers, NPC contained dozens of critical bugs.
New bug information spread like wildfire on internal guild forums since this was prized information and there were even Xploit websites that you could subscribe to with a monthly payment to get information about how to create bugs and be kept up to date about bugs. Not to mention illegal and against ToS (Terms of Service) applications that would hack the data stream for the game client and screw with objects in the game or expose information that was not publicly available. Then the automation applications came that let you automate mundane tasks such as dressing and undressing or weapon equipping until the fully scripting applications came that let you write fully featured scripts to automate movement, item creation, harvesting, and even depositing and selling. Bots were created through simple keyboard-macro programs to automate skill grinding up to the time where real scripting programs showed up practically train your characters automatically in almost any skill you wanted with no or minimal intervention.
There was a second dark underside-game to UO that some people never knew unless they were in a PK guild or a Noto (Blue Notoriety) guild. Unfortunately, I only got a glimpse into the real underworld of UO but what I saw was more interesting than the public face of the game. I got into writing automation scripts for UO since at that point in the game playing it was old and boring and developing for it was more interesting.
Yep I saw the period when folks with non-dial-up connections from college, work, or lucky enough to have ISDN would run at twice or thrice your speed and they would be impossible to target or even hit. On Cheapeake server we had a few hardcore PKers who were unstoppable because of this huge speed advantage coupled with experience in PKing and developed characters to boot. Even when I went out of my way to get ISDN to drop my latency from 130ms to 50-60ms I was glad to get away from many dial-up wanna-be PKers but would every so often encounter someone who'd take me out with a better connection, surprise, or just better game skills.
This difference in performance is just like the old days of Doom where you CPU speed would increase your frame rate making you run faster, or Quake 1 where your faster computer would make you shoot lightning or nails faster and do more damage per second.
Absolutely correct! Ultima Online was a pretty bad game overall, the implementation was buggy as hell not from a crashing application point of view (that did happen sometimes) but from a poorly thought out design and logic aspect coupled with inconsistently implementation of that bad design in software on the server side. The sheer number of changes that happened to the game during closed beta and open beta in 1997 to the launch and major world design changes in 1998-1999 were just staggering. Anytime there was a major patch release huge swaths of the game would just be dramatically altered and changed and this rippled throughout the game world every 3-6 or so months until the economy, the skill and player design settled, and then the talk of the next major patch would arrive.
The thing that kept UO interesting was that it was the only real graphical MMORPG game available at the time in the US that was easy enough for people to get into, buy the game, install, run update patches for an hour or more, and try to create an account without losing connection, and hope to jump on a server without lagging into black. If you did finally make it into the game world be amazed and confused completely at everything around you since none of the instructions you had explained anything at all and all were worthless because of the last few years of major patches that changed the world. You literally had to learn like a baby through game experience and mistakes. Sometimes you would glimpse some wisdom online from some tutorials or forum posts but those would get obsolete with the next patch release and wouldn't be updated.
Everyone just remembers UO through Rose Colored glasses of Nostalgia (+1) because it was most likely one of their very first MMORPG experiences of the time. It was mine and it shaped my adulthood in a negative way and but it also immunized me against future grindfest MMORPGS like EverQuest 1 & 2, World of Worldcraft, etc. I never played any other online RPG games because I put in my time grinding away my time at UO and I never wanted to repeat that ever again.
I look at my friend who pushed me into got me into UO and who stayed with MMORPGs, played Shadowbane hardcore and who got addicted to WoW spending the last 10-years doing the same shit again over and over and over again. He's nowhere now, still living with his parents without any prospects for a normal life or job in the future.
I look at my time in UO as interesting but ultimately bad.
I've been a contractor and consultant for many years and I've had to provide my own insurance for many years.
COBRA = Up to 18-months at Full Corporate & Personal Payment + ~2% Administrative Fees
Just to let you know that coverage under COBRA is not always good since you have to pay your part of the premium, the company's part of the premium, and also an added administrative fee so you're paying an additional premium for coverage that is now costing you twice or much more.
Independent Coverage from Major US HMO (Aetna, Oxford, Blue Cross/Shield, etc.) = $1,400 - $1,800 per Month
For shits and giggles I decided to call and research the major insurance companies in New York state in the US and ask them about what it would cost to cover me individually and I got quote from $1,400 to $1,800 for the lowest priced HMO prices for a fully healthy 25-30 year old male, non-smoking, non-drinking, no-preconditions. These prices were direct from the provider themselves and I was surprised that they quoted me so much above what the New York State Insurance Department for Health Care Plans had listed on their web site.
Freelancers Union or Local Chamber of Commerce
Be aware that the health plans offered at least in New York State around the mid 2005's by the FreelancersUnion.org were not exactly cheap nor good, they offered HIP HMO which was the lowest rated HMO with the higher complaint count according to the NYS Insurance Department for Health Care Plans and they wanted $700 for individual only and over $1,000 for family. HIP had a series of corruption and accounting issues that were public and incompetence that wasn't but was know by folks that worked there, some were friends.
They did offer a pretty good "discount" plan for Dental by Guardian for ~$50 per month that did have pretty good rates for procedures, such as %50 off for a root canal and crown, and really low costs of $12 for composite molar fillings with multiple faces being done.
Now Freelancer's Union has expanded and they offer PPO 1,2,3 (Preferred Provider Organization = You pick your own doctor not from an HMO network) that are damn expensive at $300-500 for individual or $800-1,400 for family and HD $5K and $10K (High Deductible ~= Catastrophic Health Problem) plans that are still quite expensive at $200-300 for individual or $550-900 for a family.
I've been with and have used Freelancer's Unions dental plan but not the health plan and I did think that they offered such a great deal and savings. Their plans are expensive and they are not really a union they are a for-profit company that is just reselling you insurance! They do not run their business very efficiently or very well with multiple cases of screw ups every year when it comes time to renew the plans and select your new plans, such as two years ago when they didn't do re-enrollment for a whole month after the deadline since they screwed up. They run a fully paperless frontend for you but from the back office work they must deal with reams of it. Just be careful and weary of this so called "union" since they are not one!
Uninsured Option!
I decided to give up on HMO or PPO health insurance because it's just too insanely expensive at $900-$1,400 for coverage. That is more money that my biggest expense that is rent. It is an insane amount of money for a self-employed individual making due with a few clients and non-steady income.
The United States is a horrible place to live without be subservient to a corporation who holds their benefits and insurance plans over you like an indentured servant since if you start and family and decide to leave their good graces or are no longer desired you're in the path of bankruptcy for even non-lethal health problems or accidents.
Letters that only the mail room sees then some low level employee in the marketing department taking your address info down so they can spam you with their offers, and then the trash can. There goes your $0.44 USD postage + envelope + paper + time + effort.
Letter writing campaigns? Really, in this day and age of e-mail, web, twitter, forums, wikis, sms with widespread corporate ignorance, fraud, and outright crime.
Yeah, go ahead and write a letter, waste your money.