As far as hokey extensions go - there's already too many different DVD formats. Compatibility sucks. Just like I wouldn't adopt this new CD format, I won't be buying a DVD burner until it's all settled - and by then there'll probably be something else anyway.
Heh, you can file this one under "Why extend existing adopted formats at all?"
DVD compatibility is actually pretty good in my experience if you stick with the -R format and avoid -RW/+RW/+R. My testing was 100% readability on -R media with all the DVD players and DVD reader only drives I could find. The +R format was about 50%, and the RW formats were pretty much worthless, but I never got into CD-RW, either.
Re:Nice idea, but...
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No one advocates that CDR isn't a useful and currently cheap technology.
The quesiton I had was why bother 'extending' CDR? Most existing CDRs won't be able to even read the new format (firmware update? Yah, for my 18 month old brand x drive? I doubt it), writing will require a new drive.
Instead, extend DVD-R. DVD-R penetration is low enough that the newer, faster drives that would support an extended format at a cheap price point come out, it will dovetail nicely with a high adoption rate of DVD-R enabling existing DVD-R users to upgrade to the extended format *and* enabling general uptake of the extended format.
Instead, extending the CDR format will leave most people unable to read the media, very low adoption since CDR is already big enough for some people, and those who want more room have already moved to DVD-R, which, BTW, is quite cheap -- IDE drives are $200 and blanks are $0.89 in quantity.
Re:Nice idea, but...
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What I want to know is, why waste time and energy developing an incompatible extension to a medium that essentially run its course? I'm not interested in buying any more CD-R drives, at any price. I'm interested in DVD writers, which are where CD-Rs were 2 years ago in price.
Why not put that effort into DVD media, which still has really low penetration, where the ideas and extensions might catch on enough to make it actually supported in future rollouts? I've found 4.7 GB a useful storage amount and would be think an extension to 9.4 GB would be useful as well.
They had something like this at Epcot when I was there in the 1980s. A number of the country exhibits had these short movies that were filmed with a camera rig that had several cameras built around a common axis. It was pretty amusing, and the films generally took advantage of it (helicopter-borne shots, lots of movement). You got a real sense of vertigo on some shots and action.
It would make for an interesting movie, especially an action one with a lot of movement and angles. Although too much swivelling in your chair would be distracting.
That's why the crazy concept of "plays" never caught on. What were those Greeks thinking, trying to tell a story without camera angles?
No, stage dramas take full advantage of "camera angles". Instead of moving a camera to change the viewers angle, they change the scenery and staging of the action to change the camera angle.
Just about every city with a decent sized theater community has a "theater in the round" where the audience sits completely or nearly completely around the stage, which in some cases eliminates the concept of camera angle. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these stages were able to rotate as well.
I have a couple of the firmware.ISO images floating around. I never bothered with it because (A) it meant disassembly of the unit to figure out which chip it used, and (B) I haven't had an urge/desire/need to play other region discs or disable Macrovision, and (C) I'm scared that if it fubars I'm out a DVD player.
I think I'll ultimately look for a whole new player here in the next year or so. The APEX MP3 playback is kind of braindead -- there's no shuffle, it often cuts off the beginning if you skip tracks, only 8.3 naming, no remote-based soft power, I think the changer mechanism is slow as hell, audio CD won't shuffle around the CDs, etc.
I bought it 2+ years ago, and at that time it was a miracle product under $200. At that time most players wouldn't play an audio CD-R let alone a CDRW with MP3s on it.
Nice guess on the Apex, yes, it is the AD-700 3-disc changer.
But strangely that's the only software problem I've had with it. Plays VCD and SVCD really well (from a whole shitpile of encodings) and I've yet to have a crash during playing of a DVD.
Maybe there's a bad sensor or something that jams it up?
Re:A nuisance in corporate LANs
on
802.11 Security
·
· Score: 1
I deal with this argument practically every day.
Work in advertising, too?:)
One of the compromise solutions we thought of was putting in base stations with adjustable radio power and turning the power so far down that the base station wasn't usable outside the conference room. We're high in an office building and the rooms that would get it are in the middle of the stack with numerous metallic surfaces between us and "them", so this might actually work.
Except that it reduces the functionality to not needing a drop cable in the conference room, making it kind of a waste of money.
I think we've already let the cat out of the bag in terms of accepting poorly designed protocols and buggy software.
This came to me as I power cycling my cable box (which had crashed) not long after power-cycling my DVD player because it "crashes" during certain disc-change cycles (eg, don't hit OPEN when its inventorying the changer -- it will crash every time).
I think so many people have already been so exposed to software bugs and things that don't work right, we've come to expect it instead of expecting software products that are fully debugged.
Now products that are traditionally hardwired logic appliances are becoming more and more software-based and I think the makers already assume they're off the hook and people will accept a certain amount of software screwups to their devices.
Your complaint is more of a design issue than bad software, but it seems to underscore people's acceptance of bugs and bad design as just part of what happens.
A nuisance in corporate LANs
on
802.11 Security
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
We haven't done any 802.11 here for a garden variety of reasons, but security coupled with usability is one of them. Everything I've read seems to emphasize putting your 802.11 infrastructure on a DMZ-type segment and requiring some kind of VPN connection to gain access to the Internet and internal network.
The simple implementation of this just puts the 802.11 network on the outside of the firewall, using whatever existing VPN infrastructure you have to gain internal access. The downside to this is the set of people with "anywhere" VPN access is a minimally overlapping subset of the people who should have 802.11 VPN access...which always leads me to the seperate VPN infrastructure for 802.11 solution, which is more expensive and complicated to setup and maintain.
And then I'm left with the usability/training issue, explaining to people (lusers, help desk, etc) why the VPN connection is necessary and other sundry details of usage.
And then there's equipment. It makes no sense to equip all ~100 laptops that don't have 802.11 with 802.11 cards for the few conference rooms that would get it.
It looks fun, but there's so much baggage associated with it I can't see it happening in these economic times..
Who are you trying to kid? When was the last time the government passed any restriction law that was narrow and stayed narrow? Invariably someone will find a reason to broaden the scope. It's a slippery slope to being forced to get an SMTP license.
The best way to fight spam is to enforce the existing criminal laws. Spam is almost universally fraudulent at best, if not outright criminal behavior.
It's also the easit to pursue, since the money trail *will* lead to people responsible for the spam being sent and its the easiest trail to follow. I don't believe that SPAM is necessarily trackable, especially if it involves hijacked or cracked mail systems.
Stop putting words into my mouth. I didn't say *I* support Crime Warner or Crapcast to lockout anything.
All I'm saying is that listening to Disney/MS/Amazon complain about innovation is more sour grapes than anything else. They wouldn't be complaining if they had the tools that they now feel threatened by. These companies are against innovation and freedom when it benefits them.
For example, how many court fights did it take to get MS to even *accept* AOL or Compuserve installers on Windows CDs? To this day MS does nothing but steer, steer, steer to MSN.Com, both as a web site and as an ISP.
In this battle, they are on the right side.
If you lay down with dogs, don't be suprised when you wake up with fleas.
These companies are just taking the high road because they can't take the low road because they don't have the resources monopolies.
Does anyone think for a minute that if MS owned a major cable network that they would care about innovation? The only thing they'd care about is first expanding subscribers and then slowly cranking down the subscriptions to limit them to MS Home Terminal Software users only.
Disney hate the cable companies from a TV perspective because they keep getting sodomozed on access fees to get their channels onto cable systems.
Amazon may actually care about innovation, but only because if everyone gets steered to another shopping site Amazon's "one click" "innovation" won't mean anything.
Move along. There's nothing to see here but a bunch of companies crowing because someone *else* has the ability to steer and lockout, not because they actually give a shit about a free, open and innovative internet.
I could swear I've read either here or elsewhere that better gyros and CPU assisted flight controls have radically improved the flight characteristics of helicopters.
It doesn't allow them to defy the laws of physics, but does allow them to be controlled far more easily as the pilot can focus more on the big picture aviation instead of the constant microadjustments.
They need to stop negotiating as a lone country and form a consortium that buys transit from the US as a group and then subdivide the savings among the member countries.
I'm not advocating that children be exposed to adults performing sexual intercourse. I am advocating that there is a lot of adult behavior that many adults work too hard to "shield" from them.
There was a time in the not-very-distant past (like in the past 75 years easily) where several generations lived, work, ate, slept, procreated and died all in one room. Children were fully exposed to almost the full spectrum of adult behaviors without any particular problem for the children.
If most parents who want to "ditch the kids" were able to not worry so much about whether junior sees them drink booze, kiss their wife or use swear words they wouldn't have to ditch their kids.
I've been told when I've made MS support calls on Win2k server that they will generate customer-specific patches if you can demonstrate a bug.
I had a senior Cisco sales guy offer me a custom IOS load with some features unavailable to the unwashed masses. I turned that one down because it would be impossible to update.
Although I think no vendor will do feature changes or enhancements unless you're huge or its part of your support contract.
1. How do we ditch the kids?
Give them something interesting to do, hire a babysitter. Many things can be fun with kids along too.
This is more along the lines of "How can we have an adult experience" without the presence of children reducing everything to a G-rating. Adults need to engage in adult behavior.. Men underfocus on children's development needs, and women often overfocus on them. Both need to compromise, and one of the compromises is understanding that adults engage in adult behavior (drinking, language, sexuality [but not intercourse]) that children don't always need to be "shielded" from.
2. Why do you pay more attention to your buddies than me?
Don't pay more attention to them, you need "quality time" with your wife & family. You should have some compatible interests.
Recognize that man and wife are individuals who will always have some unique, non-shared interests, friends and activities. This diversity is healthy as it provides both new stimuli to the relationship ("hey my new friend Bob's wife you'd really like") as well as providing emotional and intellectual outlets outside the relationship.
3. Why do you pay more attention to that computer than me?
see #2
I'm harsh. Get a hobby. This is insecurity and boredom, not the fault of the husband for most "normal" computer use. If the computer is *all* you do, well, then you're escaping something in your married life that makes you unhappy.
4. Do you think that woman's attractive?
Yes, I do. What's with a bit of honesty, just because the 19yr old girl is hot doesn't mean your wife is a fat slob. Ask her what she thinks. Also sometimes you can be critical, pick on something dumb like the wrong coloured socks.
Constructive but wrong. This is almost exclusively "I'm really insecure about my appearance and afraid that I will lose your loyalty." He needs to promote her self esteem, but she needs to FIX her self-esteem.
5. I can pay $100 for a new purse, but you can't pay $49.95 for a new game (see #3)
Create a system of personal disposable income to spend, this allowance works quite well for me. (But I ran out of money a LOOONG time ago)
Good advice, but money fights are often a lot more about something else and spending/not spending is about establishing control in the relationship. Figure out the power relationships and you can dramatically improve the spending decisions.
6. You don't care about my feelings.
Ask what makes her feel that way. It's probaly something you didn't notice, guys are notoriously emotionally dumb.
She owns her feelings, they're not someone else's responsibility. She needs to figure out how to engage her husband in a way that gets his attention. Just sitting there waiting for him to pay attention and then complaning when he doesn't (causing 2, 3, 4, and 5 often) is classic passive-aggressive behavior and I personally have no time for it.
I think number 8 is about control -- having him do things she wants him to do.
Number 10 is definitely about control primarily and lack of good intimacy skills secondarily. She will probably withhold sex as a punishment for other transgressions. He probably doesn't know how to express intimacy non-sexually. She may also have a lot of negative moral associations with sexuality that cause her to view it negatively.
Phone company billing is just awful no matter how you slice it. I manage the phone system here, and unless you're an (ex-) Qwest employee there's no way you can understand the detailed billing associated with your phone service. The actual monthly phone bill I get from Qwest (or bills, some things they insist on billing seperately -- a RAS PRI has its primary trunk number billed on a seperate bill) looks like my home phone bill, with two extra digits. No service detail, nothing.
When I took over the phone guy's responsibility when he quit, I asked the telco for a detailed customer record, and I got ~175 page report that detailed our services in a totally unintelligible report. Each DS0 from our four D1s took up about a page on the report, detailing every 10 cent tarrif that made up the price of each DS0, along with the other tarrifs associated with the DS1 itself. After looking at it I pretty much gave up and handed it over to our phone maintenance vendor who audited for me -- they employee two ex Qwest employees specifically for this purpose, since the codings and info aren't explained anywhere but in some Qwest internal documents.
We ended up dropping a bunch of 1FB (telco slang for analog copper) circuits, CENTREX circuits and other stuff we weren't using. They were live on our demarc block, but not punched to anything.
This isn't unusual, either -- the vague monthly invoicing and byzantine customer records lead to so many overbilled or unused service that there's an entire industry that does nothing but audit phone bills in exchange for a percentage of the savings.
My experience with telcos leads me to believe that half of this is a monopolistic lack of desire for reform, government bureaucracy and overregulation, and excessive merger activity that's left them with dozens of computer systems that don't communicate without human intervention. I've been told by both Sprint and Qwest that they have systems so complex that there are few people there who can even *use* both of them, but data is required to be pulled/entered from both of them to get anything done.
Unfortunately I don't see any hope for reform. You pretty much have to do business with them, and when business is good they give you what they want and waste the money on mergers and exec perks (Nacchio sucks!), and when business is bad (like now), they plead poverty and can't afford to fix this.
I guess the only hope is that some of the CLECs can do better without becoming just like the ILECs, although I'd imagine the temptation is to become the ILECs, not improve on them.
We had some HP Compaq Proliant* guy tell us today that Compaq in 04 will be releasing a raid controller that will be serial SCSI *or* serial ATA on the same card.
Trouble is, all this "serial ATA will soon" doesn't cut it, I'd like it now, not in six months or a year or whenever.
* How long is HP going to continue to label their products under the compaq brand name? HP Compaq is about as dumb as Daimer Chrysler.
I've been looking into backup to disk lately. We do about 600 Gig a week onto LTO tapes, 500 Gig of full and 100 of incrementals across all systems.
My preference would be two sets of 4x160 in a RAID 5, using two Adaptec 2400 ATA RAID cards. That'd give me a formatted capacity of 2x 409 gigs. I'd want two of those systems available so I could have two fulls and two sets of incrementals on hand at any one time.
The only stumbling blocks I've found are: finding a 2 or 3U box that will accept two of the 2400 cards and that will also provide space, cooling and power for 8 or 9 ATA160 drives. Some of the systems designed to be RAID cabinets or the bigger 4U systems might work, but short ATA cables are tough to work with and some of the front bay mounts may not provide the cabling length.
I'd probably back up the backed-up store onto tape to meet offsite backup requirements, although I'm not entirely sure how well that would work.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought they weren't able to record due to inadequate CPU power or something.
It'd be excellent for bootlegging live shows if they made a model that could record, although isn't it impossible to copy MP3s off an iPod?
...still cost as much or more than they ever did.
Cheap audio production is just *slowing* the increase, not a source of cost reduction.
As far as hokey extensions go - there's already too many different DVD formats. Compatibility sucks. Just like I wouldn't adopt this new CD format, I won't be buying a DVD burner until it's all settled - and by then there'll probably be something else anyway.
Heh, you can file this one under "Why extend existing adopted formats at all?"
DVD compatibility is actually pretty good in my experience if you stick with the -R format and avoid -RW/+RW/+R. My testing was 100% readability on -R media with all the DVD players and DVD reader only drives I could find. The +R format was about 50%, and the RW formats were pretty much worthless, but I never got into CD-RW, either.
No one advocates that CDR isn't a useful and currently cheap technology.
The quesiton I had was why bother 'extending' CDR? Most existing CDRs won't be able to even read the new format (firmware update? Yah, for my 18 month old brand x drive? I doubt it), writing will require a new drive.
Instead, extend DVD-R. DVD-R penetration is low enough that the newer, faster drives that would support an extended format at a cheap price point come out, it will dovetail nicely with a high adoption rate of DVD-R enabling existing DVD-R users to upgrade to the extended format *and* enabling general uptake of the extended format.
Instead, extending the CDR format will leave most people unable to read the media, very low adoption since CDR is already big enough for some people, and those who want more room have already moved to DVD-R, which, BTW, is quite cheap -- IDE drives are $200 and blanks are $0.89 in quantity.
What I want to know is, why waste time and energy developing an incompatible extension to a medium that essentially run its course? I'm not interested in buying any more CD-R drives, at any price. I'm interested in DVD writers, which are where CD-Rs were 2 years ago in price.
Why not put that effort into DVD media, which still has really low penetration, where the ideas and extensions might catch on enough to make it actually supported in future rollouts? I've found 4.7 GB a useful storage amount and would be think an extension to 9.4 GB would be useful as well.
They had something like this at Epcot when I was there in the 1980s. A number of the country exhibits had these short movies that were filmed with a camera rig that had several cameras built around a common axis. It was pretty amusing, and the films generally took advantage of it (helicopter-borne shots, lots of movement). You got a real sense of vertigo on some shots and action.
It would make for an interesting movie, especially an action one with a lot of movement and angles. Although too much swivelling in your chair would be distracting.
That's why the crazy concept of "plays" never caught on. What were those Greeks thinking, trying to tell a story without camera angles?
No, stage dramas take full advantage of "camera angles". Instead of moving a camera to change the viewers angle, they change the scenery and staging of the action to change the camera angle.
Just about every city with a decent sized theater community has a "theater in the round" where the audience sits completely or nearly completely around the stage, which in some cases eliminates the concept of camera angle. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these stages were able to rotate as well.
I have a couple of the firmware .ISO images floating around. I never bothered with it because (A) it meant disassembly of the unit to figure out which chip it used, and (B) I haven't had an urge/desire/need to play other region discs or disable Macrovision, and (C) I'm scared that if it fubars I'm out a DVD player.
I think I'll ultimately look for a whole new player here in the next year or so. The APEX MP3 playback is kind of braindead -- there's no shuffle, it often cuts off the beginning if you skip tracks, only 8.3 naming, no remote-based soft power, I think the changer mechanism is slow as hell, audio CD won't shuffle around the CDs, etc.
I bought it 2+ years ago, and at that time it was a miracle product under $200. At that time most players wouldn't play an audio CD-R let alone a CDRW with MP3s on it.
Nice guess on the Apex, yes, it is the AD-700 3-disc changer.
But strangely that's the only software problem I've had with it. Plays VCD and SVCD really well (from a whole shitpile of encodings) and I've yet to have a crash during playing of a DVD.
Maybe there's a bad sensor or something that jams it up?
I deal with this argument practically every day.
:)
Work in advertising, too?
One of the compromise solutions we thought of was putting in base stations with adjustable radio power and turning the power so far down that the base station wasn't usable outside the conference room. We're high in an office building and the rooms that would get it are in the middle of the stack with numerous metallic surfaces between us and "them", so this might actually work.
Except that it reduces the functionality to not needing a drop cable in the conference room, making it kind of a waste of money.
I think we've already let the cat out of the bag in terms of accepting poorly designed protocols and buggy software.
This came to me as I power cycling my cable box (which had crashed) not long after power-cycling my DVD player because it "crashes" during certain disc-change cycles (eg, don't hit OPEN when its inventorying the changer -- it will crash every time).
I think so many people have already been so exposed to software bugs and things that don't work right, we've come to expect it instead of expecting software products that are fully debugged.
Now products that are traditionally hardwired logic appliances are becoming more and more software-based and I think the makers already assume they're off the hook and people will accept a certain amount of software screwups to their devices.
Your complaint is more of a design issue than bad software, but it seems to underscore people's acceptance of bugs and bad design as just part of what happens.
We haven't done any 802.11 here for a garden variety of reasons, but security coupled with usability is one of them. Everything I've read seems to emphasize putting your 802.11 infrastructure on a DMZ-type segment and requiring some kind of VPN connection to gain access to the Internet and internal network.
..which always leads me to the seperate VPN infrastructure for 802.11 solution, which is more expensive and complicated to setup and maintain.
The simple implementation of this just puts the 802.11 network on the outside of the firewall, using whatever existing VPN infrastructure you have to gain internal access. The downside to this is the set of people with "anywhere" VPN access is a minimally overlapping subset of the people who should have 802.11 VPN access.
And then I'm left with the usability/training issue, explaining to people (lusers, help desk, etc) why the VPN connection is necessary and other sundry details of usage.
And then there's equipment. It makes no sense to equip all ~100 laptops that don't have 802.11 with 802.11 cards for the few conference rooms that would get it.
It looks fun, but there's so much baggage associated with it I can't see it happening in these economic times..
Who are you trying to kid? When was the last time the government passed any restriction law that was narrow and stayed narrow? Invariably someone will find a reason to broaden the scope. It's a slippery slope to being forced to get an SMTP license.
The best way to fight spam is to enforce the existing criminal laws. Spam is almost universally fraudulent at best, if not outright criminal behavior.
It's also the easit to pursue, since the money trail *will* lead to people responsible for the spam being sent and its the easiest trail to follow. I don't believe that SPAM is necessarily trackable, especially if it involves hijacked or cracked mail systems.
Stop putting words into my mouth. I didn't say *I* support Crime Warner or Crapcast to lockout anything.
All I'm saying is that listening to Disney/MS/Amazon complain about innovation is more sour grapes than anything else. They wouldn't be complaining if they had the tools that they now feel threatened by. These companies are against innovation and freedom when it benefits them.
For example, how many court fights did it take to get MS to even *accept* AOL or Compuserve installers on Windows CDs? To this day MS does nothing but steer, steer, steer to MSN.Com, both as a web site and as an ISP.
In this battle, they are on the right side.
If you lay down with dogs, don't be suprised when you wake up with fleas.
These companies are just taking the high road because they can't take the low road because they don't have the resources monopolies.
Does anyone think for a minute that if MS owned a major cable network that they would care about innovation? The only thing they'd care about is first expanding subscribers and then slowly cranking down the subscriptions to limit them to MS Home Terminal Software users only.
Disney hate the cable companies from a TV perspective because they keep getting sodomozed on access fees to get their channels onto cable systems.
Amazon may actually care about innovation, but only because if everyone gets steered to another shopping site Amazon's "one click" "innovation" won't mean anything.
Move along. There's nothing to see here but a bunch of companies crowing because someone *else* has the ability to steer and lockout, not because they actually give a shit about a free, open and innovative internet.
I could swear I've read either here or elsewhere that better gyros and CPU assisted flight controls have radically improved the flight characteristics of helicopters.
It doesn't allow them to defy the laws of physics, but does allow them to be controlled far more easily as the pilot can focus more on the big picture aviation instead of the constant microadjustments.
They need to stop negotiating as a lone country and form a consortium that buys transit from the US as a group and then subdivide the savings among the member countries.
Shit, they'll appeal to their lackeys in Congress who will overrule this with legislation.
The number one reason for overbilling...there is no risk at all to the billing company.
Except the risk of getting sued for refunds, interest and other monetary damages.
I'm not advocating that children be exposed to adults performing sexual intercourse. I am advocating that there is a lot of adult behavior that many adults work too hard to "shield" from them.
There was a time in the not-very-distant past (like in the past 75 years easily) where several generations lived, work, ate, slept, procreated and died all in one room. Children were fully exposed to almost the full spectrum of adult behaviors without any particular problem for the children.
If most parents who want to "ditch the kids" were able to not worry so much about whether junior sees them drink booze, kiss their wife or use swear words they wouldn't have to ditch their kids.
I've been told when I've made MS support calls on Win2k server that they will generate customer-specific patches if you can demonstrate a bug.
I had a senior Cisco sales guy offer me a custom IOS load with some features unavailable to the unwashed masses. I turned that one down because it would be impossible to update.
Although I think no vendor will do feature changes or enhancements unless you're huge or its part of your support contract.
Recognize that man and wife are individuals who will always have some unique, non-shared interests, friends and activities. This diversity is healthy as it provides both new stimuli to the relationship ("hey my new friend Bob's wife you'd really like") as well as providing emotional and intellectual outlets outside the relationship.
I'm harsh. Get a hobby. This is insecurity and boredom, not the fault of the husband for most "normal" computer use. If the computer is *all* you do, well, then you're escaping something in your married life that makes you unhappy.
Constructive but wrong. This is almost exclusively "I'm really insecure about my appearance and afraid that I will lose your loyalty." He needs to promote her self esteem, but she needs to FIX her self-esteem.
Good advice, but money fights are often a lot more about something else and spending/not spending is about establishing control in the relationship. Figure out the power relationships and you can dramatically improve the spending decisions.
She owns her feelings, they're not someone else's responsibility. She needs to figure out how to engage her husband in a way that gets his attention. Just sitting there waiting for him to pay attention and then complaning when he doesn't (causing 2, 3, 4, and 5 often) is classic passive-aggressive behavior and I personally have no time for it.
I think number 8 is about control -- having him do things she wants him to do.
Number 10 is definitely about control primarily and lack of good intimacy skills secondarily. She will probably withhold sex as a punishment for other transgressions. He probably doesn't know how to express intimacy non-sexually. She may also have a lot of negative moral associations with sexuality that cause her to view it negatively.
Phone company billing is just awful no matter how you slice it. I manage the phone system here, and unless you're an (ex-) Qwest employee there's no way you can understand the detailed billing associated with your phone service. The actual monthly phone bill I get from Qwest (or bills, some things they insist on billing seperately -- a RAS PRI has its primary trunk number billed on a seperate bill) looks like my home phone bill, with two extra digits. No service detail, nothing.
When I took over the phone guy's responsibility when he quit, I asked the telco for a detailed customer record, and I got ~175 page report that detailed our services in a totally unintelligible report. Each DS0 from our four D1s took up about a page on the report, detailing every 10 cent tarrif that made up the price of each DS0, along with the other tarrifs associated with the DS1 itself. After looking at it I pretty much gave up and handed it over to our phone maintenance vendor who audited for me -- they employee two ex Qwest employees specifically for this purpose, since the codings and info aren't explained anywhere but in some Qwest internal documents.
We ended up dropping a bunch of 1FB (telco slang for analog copper) circuits, CENTREX circuits and other stuff we weren't using. They were live on our demarc block, but not punched to anything.
This isn't unusual, either -- the vague monthly invoicing and byzantine customer records lead to so many overbilled or unused service that there's an entire industry that does nothing but audit phone bills in exchange for a percentage of the savings.
My experience with telcos leads me to believe that half of this is a monopolistic lack of desire for reform, government bureaucracy and overregulation, and excessive merger activity that's left them with dozens of computer systems that don't communicate without human intervention. I've been told by both Sprint and Qwest that they have systems so complex that there are few people there who can even *use* both of them, but data is required to be pulled/entered from both of them to get anything done.
Unfortunately I don't see any hope for reform. You pretty much have to do business with them, and when business is good they give you what they want and waste the money on mergers and exec perks (Nacchio sucks!), and when business is bad (like now), they plead poverty and can't afford to fix this.
I guess the only hope is that some of the CLECs can do better without becoming just like the ILECs, although I'd imagine the temptation is to become the ILECs, not improve on them.
We had some HP Compaq Proliant* guy tell us today that Compaq in 04 will be releasing a raid controller that will be serial SCSI *or* serial ATA on the same card.
Trouble is, all this "serial ATA will soon" doesn't cut it, I'd like it now, not in six months or a year or whenever.
* How long is HP going to continue to label their products under the compaq brand name? HP Compaq is about as dumb as Daimer Chrysler.
I've been looking into backup to disk lately. We do about 600 Gig a week onto LTO tapes, 500 Gig of full and 100 of incrementals across all systems.
My preference would be two sets of 4x160 in a RAID 5, using two Adaptec 2400 ATA RAID cards. That'd give me a formatted capacity of 2x 409 gigs. I'd want two of those systems available so I could have two fulls and two sets of incrementals on hand at any one time.
The only stumbling blocks I've found are: finding a 2 or 3U box that will accept two of the 2400 cards and that will also provide space, cooling and power for 8 or 9 ATA160 drives. Some of the systems designed to be RAID cabinets or the bigger 4U systems might work, but short ATA cables are tough to work with and some of the front bay mounts may not provide the cabling length.
I'd probably back up the backed-up store onto tape to meet offsite backup requirements, although I'm not entirely sure how well that would work.