I worked in the administrative department of a University and moved out to corporate IT.
Crap aspects of the Univerisity:
I worked in the administrative area, so there was no academic politics but there was politics, often hostile and highly personal.
There was never enough money, we ran our systems until they broke, without software that would have made many jobs much easier. The lack of resources often made who got what resources *intensely* political.
The paychecks were small and the standard bennies lame, especially the manditory state employee pension plan and the group death, er, health plan made all the bad things I've heard about Britain's National Health sound good.
Good aspects of the University:
Lots of campus discounts and freebies. Classes could be taken for next to nothing, if they weren't out-and-out free. Deep discounts at the bookstore on software and computer bits (this meant something 15 years ago).
Awesome internet connectivity and network access. Our office's specific technology sucked goat nuts, but campuswide there was a shitpile of stuff that could be utilized and lots of smart people.
A really relaxed atmosphere -- from the bucolic surroundings, to pretty easy work and no slave hours.
I got laid A LOT. Time, place, people, general zeitgeist? Who knows, but it was sure easy.
I moved to the corporate world because I kept getting told by lifers that if I didn't soon I wouldn't be hirable in the private sector, as gummint employees were seen as having too much lead in their asses. I also moved to the corporate world because I just wasn't making enough money to live on. I was sick of working a second job, sick of having to share a hovel with others. Poverty motivates.
There I days I miss the easy aspects of the old job -- better hours, nicer people -- but then I remember that I drive a nice car, have a nice house, travel at will and don't worry about money like I used to and it seems worth it.
I think I meant the Rev 1 Blue and White models; its new information brought to my attention by a co-worker trying to figure out why a firewire CDR works flawlessly on several machines but dies on several others.
The PB520 was ages ago, but at the time it was a problem. The first bunch of our machines to get fixed (and many required service) all had their ribbon cables disintegrate, leaving the machines further out of comission until new parts could be had; it wasn't until later that the service guys just ordered many extra parts because they got sick of fixing the machine twice.
The point wasn't that Apples are necessarily bad, but that "Apples are superior" has really not been the case for us, based upon the machines we've had to deal with.
We have about 500 people in our company and roll all our desktops every 3 years. Since I've worked here 9 years, I've seen nearly three complete waves of desktops (and tail end of a previous one), or about 1500 machines. We bought a lot of Digital PCs, and when they became unavailable it was a carnival of Compaqs, HPs, Dells and then the last wave was all Dells. Macs are now all G3/G4.
Then again, it could be that Apple hardware tends to not be made from tinfoil and rubber bands.
Total rubbish from my experience. I found Macs to be overall more plasticky and less reliably manufactured than the PCs. We had countless problems with many series of Macs, including many people now working on rev 1 G3s who bitch about hardware bugs in the firewire ports. Then there was the recent powerbook powersupply problem and waves of problems with PB 520s (techs that would repair them would always bring extra parts because the ribbon cables would disintegrate). The G3/G4 lines have been an improvement, but look at the wasteland of problems with many Apples powerbooks that seem to continue to today.
Of course we've had DOA PCs, PCs that had problems, PCs with icky case designs (all of the classic Pentium DECs), but never the patterns of problems with specific vendors or models that we had with Macs. They were unsexy and boring, but they generally worked. I've seen but never worked with much (because we didn't buy them) some pretty bad low-end PCs, but that was really olden-days 386/486 stuff -- bad cases, mobos with brand X parallel and serial port cards, and poor assembly.
From a broad design and OS integration perspective, Apple has an advantage over PCs because of the single source nature of their products, but I don't think that this has meant a superior manufactured product in the field. Low unit numbers? Problems resulting from rapid design changes, parts source changes? Just bad QC? Who knows.
Look at the parallels in political alignment and the DVD region map, and ask yourself if limiting what people can watch wasn't also part of someone's marketing-meets-political-posturing plan, too.
I'm sure its my own paranoia, but given that a big chunk of the world still actively tries to censor and limit people's access to information why wouldn't this allow Hollywood to try to please politicians? Release a movie; popular in America, unpopular in a given region of the world; edit the movie to make it acceptable in the non-US region; release the region x version of the movie using this edit. You make money, dictators stay fat and happy, "everybody" wins.
The trouble is, I'd wager that most of the places you'd be likely to find censorship are also the places most likely to be selling bootleg region 1 DVDs and modded players that can play them, or totally bootleg players with region selection menus.
I'm sure that distribution structure argument is the "most" correct, but you can't tell me this hasn't crossed someone's mind in Hollywood before.
On most machines, the local buffer holds a scan of all the pages BEFORE the machine even dials. Your machine may differ.
There's lots of problems with the continuous black page attack, but this one is the most easy to mitigate. Most FAX machines that I've dealt with can disable the "memory send" feature, which results in a direct transmission of the FAX. I do this all the time, since my FAX machine is brain dead and waits 5-10 minutes before even starting a memory send.
The other problems others have mentioned: no actual printing machine on the other end, expensive toll calls, are hard to get around. I would imagine that "pro" faxsmappers use outbound-only trunks that cannot accept an incoming call, their computers are originate-only. And how do you get their number in the first place, providing they're dumb enough to call from a regular line with whatever machine they have set to accept?
Better to get their home address, some friends and a couple of fungo bats.
I wonder why competitors don't advertise they carry critically acclaimed films like Crash and Bad Lietenant uncut[?]
Because both of those movies were appallingly bad? I personally found BL to be halfway entertaining, but Crash was one of those arty experiments that went bad. Anybody read the Ballard book it was based on?
I would imagine that there's two kinds of spam operators:
Basically legitimate "entrepeneurs" who stretch the law as far as they can but actually try not to break it. Same class of person as you might find at Enron or WorldCom.
Scam artists. These guys have an "angle" on everything, work all in cash and have been involved in other fraudulent or criminal activity.
I'd expect the entrepeneurs to engage in petty tax games, like declaring stuff they're not supposed to and so on, but not engaging in out-and-out tax fraud.
The scam artists I'd imagine are largely working for themselves (promoting sham businesses, stocks or products) and are fully engaged in the all-cash underground economy, and don't even file taxes.
If I were an IRS auditor, I'd consider spammers as prime candidates for shakedown.
Report them to the IRS as suspected tax cheats. It's your duty under the government's new anti-terrorism programme..
1) Technology costs. Either spammers are burning through ISPs (less than a months usage before being dropped) or they're paying big bucks for a spam-friendly account. Printers, computers, etc.
2) Insurance (health, dental, etc etc).
3) Taxes - Presuming that tax fraud isn't part of the package; maybe that would be a better angle, reporting known spammers as tax frauds to the IRS.
4) Legal - Either to fight people who are pissed at them or to do a minimal amount of self-protection (incorporation, etc)
5) All the other costs of living -- car, housing, clothes, food, etc etc.
Even not including many of the business-expenses, $90k isn't getting rich in many parts of the country. After taxes, it's like what, $55k? Nothing to sneeze at, but add in another $10k or so for business expenses and it starts looking less appealing.
That "skip" that you have during movies (should only be once per side) is probably a layer switch.
It only happens on every 5th movie or less, but I would estimate that of the movies that do skip, they typically skip more than once. We had one movie that skipped easily 20 times, with pauses often up to.5 second.
I also wondered if maybe there wasn't some goofy branching going on and the buffer got exhausted as the player had to seek another part of the disc. Overall though I just assume its beat-on discs. The keepcases my video store uses often cause discs to fly from the case when the case works "right" or require you to grab the disc surface to get it out when it doesn't. This does not bode well for long term playability.
Overall I think I got a good deal. Mp3 is great for parties (two CDs in the changer plays longer than I can party), its played every movie I've put in it. I feel a lot better off than people who spent $$$ more and didn't even get CDR(W) or (S)VCD playback capabilities.
I won't describe myself as a an "avid" DVD viewer, but I rent 1-2 typically new release Hollywood type DVDs every week and have never had a problem playing them in my Apex 3Disc model.
The only thing that somewhat approaches a "problem" has been some discs will "skip" once or twice during playback; the scene will freeze for 250 ms or so and then continue on. I've always attributed this to dust/scratches on the medium and not to software problems in the player.
As far as picture and sound quality goes, I'm probably a neophyte. My Apex is connected via S-Video to a 10 year old Sony Trinitron and the picture is way better than either of my VCRs, so good in fact that my wife even preferred it. I'm not doing surround sound with it, but the sound is much better than VHS, too. I found rental VHS tapes had non-usable stereo tracks about 30% of the time and damaged ones another 20% of the time, even on new releases I was sure had fewer than 20 playings.
The MP3 playback is pretty much laughable, though, although it is functional. Navigation is bad and there's no shuffle feature. Shuffle is even lacking on regular CDs. Again, it does all work and has worked since I got it, though.
Altogether I'd say it was a reasonable $150 investment 18 months ago; nothing else was available with MP3 then, and I doubt the MP3 features of other players are all that great anyway.
We got a demo of an Avocent unit that did the same thing. It did have a centralized user database capability (unfortunately I think it was like Windows domain auth or something less flexible than RADIUS/LDAP/TACACS+).
It worked well, but REALLY expensive for a 16 port version. Expensive to the tune of around $10k for the box, the auth server module, and 2-3 client licenses. I was most turned off by the fact that the server and client software were $old $eperately, since the software is useless without the hardware.
I read a USENET post (circa 11/2001) that said the devices were buggy and the vendor was an asshole about other platform clients and future development/changes.
I think digitized video and IP KVM connectivity is probably not a fluke and represents the "future" of KVM, but vendors will need to seriously get their shit together in terms of client access and pricing otherwise computer makers are just going to crush this product with their own built-in remote management. All our HP servers have built-in serial management that can do power on/off/reboot, environment management, and text/keyboard redirection; HP and Compaq both have boards that can do it natively over IP, the *only* thing missing is the ability to do transparent video redirection. When they do that, KVM will be obsoleted by a laptop running a redirection client.
Mainly because it's convoluted, nonstandard way of doing something. I'll give you that its clever and probably functional, but in terms of understandability and maintainability by others it loses a lot of points.
I guess I'm just thinking of the number of "money saving", "clever" kludges/hacks I've had to detangle and re-assemble or integrate with other environments. It's goes from either more complex than usual (when the kludger is around to explain/understand it) to a total nightmare (no kludger, no docs, serious tear-apart required).
Maybe I'm just not clever or I'm lazy, but I find KISS to be a sound principal...
If I can buy an IP KVM and ditch a convoluted, impossible-to-maintain system like you propose, I'm saving myself thousands in future consulting fees when your house of cards system collapses.
WrightLine was selling Avocents for a while. They were expensive and required a server and client component in addition to the hardware, but were real slick -- total KVM over IP.
They even had software tools to re-sample a big display (eg, 1600x1200) down to a more managable size (eg, 1024x768) without losing usability.
They lost me due to (1) licensing costs for the management client based on per-machine, (2) it was real dodgy whether it was usable on a DSL-type broadband connection, (3) it was REAL expensive, even if you "waved" the extra client licensing costs (as the salesdude suggested I do).
I hope this kind of tech becomes more common and cheaper to do; it looked like a hardware-based video capture engine and a client application to decompress the video.
I wonder if we're really looking for Microsoft competitors, or just looking for Microsoft to act the benevolent part of being a benevolent dictator.
While everyone wishes there was a viable desktop alternative to Microsoft, there isn't one and NO set of DOJ terms (except, maybe, open-sourcing of Windows) is going to bring forward a desktop alternative.
I think most people would be happy if MS would just appreciate that they own the market for PC desktops and many corporate server installations and quit trying to own the *world*. If MS actually focused on producing quality, secure products, providing sane documentation (more sane than "see technet article xyz123 involving registry key additions and changes...") for products and APIs, and licensing terms that didn't feel like sodomy I think most people could live with it.
The computer biz largely thrives on standards; you don't have to guess or reinvent the wheel every day, and I think the MS desktop standard is certainly not that much worse than any other monopoly desktop standard would be other than the bloodthirsty, all-your-base-are-belong-to-us marketing philosophy.
I've often thought of doing this myself where I get paid to work, not so much to sniff passwords but to have a little back door should I decide to leave. It'd be trivial to stash a laptop or other device in a little-used ceiling space and run a drop directly to a patch panel.
More challenging would be setting up a way to get the machine to periodically reconfigure itself to get out of the office network and establish a tunnel to the outside that could be used to get back inside.
The way that occurs to me is to have it load a public web page periodically and parse out the destination IP and then have the "automaton" search for ways out of the network to a destination host set to listen for tunnel attempts from the automaton.
I'd imagine you'd have to come up with really clever ways to get out of heavily firewalled/proxied business networks, some really don't allow any random end nodes to get unfiltered/proxied packets out of the network. Best way would be to tap into a fax line and have the machine periodically dial out, leaving a more clever human to fix any dedicated network tunnel.
I'm not sure what I'd *do* with a host if I had one, though.
Very informative bit on transit relationships, although I think a more hardnosed analysis would suffice to explain why this won't work.
Loss of Indian eyeballs is worth probably zero to major western portals; 35% of the population lives below the poverty line and probably another 35% doesn't have the purchasing power to buy anything other than basic staples.
This may not be true for portals that have a local variant (Yahoo India or something), but you have to wonder if web economics don't work in the West, how can they possibly work in country with such a high rate of poverty?
It would be best to have an "appliance server" that is capable of handling the communications to the devices and generating interfaces from standard libraries created for appliance control.
Please make sure that the appliance server can get libraries from the appliances if it doesn't have them. I'm sure people will buy a new appliance that isn't in the current appliance server's standard libraries.
I'd imagine a mechanism similar to an SNMP management station querying a network device, finding out that it doesn't have the MIB and being able to get the MIB from the device so that it turn can then control the device.
Did you read any of my original posts?! The problem is that I CAN'T get a job, even ones I am perfectly qualified for (I just got 3 more rejections today). How the fuck am I supposed to get this training?
OF COURSE you have to get hired to get training in this scenerio! Not getting hired prevents you from getting the training (barring self-paid training), but the idea is that when you don't get hired it's NOT because you don't know the tool it's because there were others more suited for the job (aptitude, attitude, etc etc).
The idea is that a business looking to have someone perform an entry-level task with a specialized tool will provide the training on the job for the tool; ie, aptitude for the tool not direct experience with it becomes important. Business makes an investment in their personnel, guaranteeing themselves a person who really can use the tool. New employees then expend less energy learning the tool for real and more time learning work processes and the rest of the "job".
My original point, which seems to have been lost, is that entry-level employees CHEAT THEMSELVES by pirating applications. It only encourages businesses to hire only people with experience with expensive software tools and to NOT provide training or hire people with no or very limited experience.
This also cheats businesses because people who pirate expensive, complex packages often exaggerate their limited skills and experience, resulting in ineffective ad-hoc on the job training, high levels of employee churn and an unproductive workplace.
Even if desktop PC's migrate to 64 bit in the next couple of years, you still have all the other embedded devices out there running on 32bit CPUs. There is no need for these devices to use a 64bit CPU - for these applications 8megs of memory is plenty, 4gigs is just crazy!!
32 bit CPUs may be here for a relatively long time after 64bit gets absorbed into the desktop, but forever? Even though a given embedded application may not *need* a 64bit CPU, economies of production and fabrication suggest that it may be *cheaper* to use a 64bit CPU as chip makers are likely to make more of them and less 32bit CPUs.
It's like B&W teevees -- I don't need a color TV in my kitchen, a B&W one would do, but I'll be damned if I can find one. It seems that they're all color.
3. Forget about making music, split up the band, and do something else. Upside: They don't owe the RIAA anything and they stay out of jail. Downside: Another independent band squished by the RIAA.
This is what they want. In the olden days (pre-mid 80s), it was expensive and time-consuming to produce an actual record (flat hunk of plastic) and the RIAA *liked* that kind of barrier to entry as it pretty much funneled talent through their "system".
Now its pretty simple to make your own music. I'm guessing that a sub-$1k investment for software and hardware would allow you to record, mix, master and reproduce CDs on a PC. It might get more expensive if you wanted to record a large number of tracks without pre-mixing them.
The only kind of deal you would need with any label is a distribution deal if you wanted CDs in stores.
You missed the point. The reason you can't get a job is lack of experience. I'd wager that about half that "experience" isn't "experience doing the job" but the ability to use the tools.
And you don't have to compete with people getting free, on-the-job training -- be one of them getting the training!
There's a catch-22 here, though. Since we're all willing to use a warez copy of expensive applications in order to get enough familiarity with them to do the work, businesses have no reason to provide training or other tool-exposure time, since we're doing it for them, even if it is piracy.
Wouldn't we be better off if businesses recognized that 3D SuperMagic Dot Net cost $5k per copy and required a testicular implant -- and thus people with the background and skills to learn the application and do the job weren't likely to walk in with those skills and should instead be exposed to a training period where they (A) learned the application in a productive fashion that helped them get productive faster?
As long as we're willing to do the industrial training businesses want ourselves, why should we expect them to hire us without work-for-pay experience?
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Crap aspects of the Univerisity:
- I worked in the administrative area, so there was no academic politics but there was politics, often hostile and highly personal.
-
There was never enough money, we ran our systems until they broke, without software that would have made many jobs much easier. The lack of resources often made who got what resources *intensely* political.
- The paychecks were small and the standard bennies lame, especially the manditory state employee pension plan and the group death, er, health plan made all the bad things I've heard about Britain's National Health sound good.
Good aspects of the University:- Lots of campus discounts and freebies. Classes could be taken for next to nothing, if they weren't out-and-out free. Deep discounts at the bookstore on software and computer bits (this meant something 15 years ago).
- Awesome internet connectivity and network access. Our office's specific technology sucked goat nuts, but campuswide there was a shitpile of stuff that could be utilized and lots of smart people.
-
A really relaxed atmosphere -- from the bucolic surroundings, to pretty easy work and no slave hours.
- I got laid A LOT. Time, place, people, general zeitgeist? Who knows, but it was sure easy.
I moved to the corporate world because I kept getting told by lifers that if I didn't soon I wouldn't be hirable in the private sector, as gummint employees were seen as having too much lead in their asses. I also moved to the corporate world because I just wasn't making enough money to live on. I was sick of working a second job, sick of having to share a hovel with others. Poverty motivates.There I days I miss the easy aspects of the old job -- better hours, nicer people -- but then I remember that I drive a nice car, have a nice house, travel at will and don't worry about money like I used to and it seems worth it.
I think I meant the Rev 1 Blue and White models; its new information brought to my attention by a co-worker trying to figure out why a firewire CDR works flawlessly on several machines but dies on several others.
The PB520 was ages ago, but at the time it was a problem. The first bunch of our machines to get fixed (and many required service) all had their ribbon cables disintegrate, leaving the machines further out of comission until new parts could be had; it wasn't until later that the service guys just ordered many extra parts because they got sick of fixing the machine twice.
The point wasn't that Apples are necessarily bad, but that "Apples are superior" has really not been the case for us, based upon the machines we've had to deal with.
We have about 500 people in our company and roll all our desktops every 3 years. Since I've worked here 9 years, I've seen nearly three complete waves of desktops (and tail end of a previous one), or about 1500 machines. We bought a lot of Digital PCs, and when they became unavailable it was a carnival of Compaqs, HPs, Dells and then the last wave was all Dells. Macs are now all G3/G4.
Then again, it could be that Apple hardware tends to not be made from tinfoil and rubber bands.
Total rubbish from my experience. I found Macs to be overall more plasticky and less reliably manufactured than the PCs. We had countless problems with many series of Macs, including many people now working on rev 1 G3s who bitch about hardware bugs in the firewire ports. Then there was the recent powerbook powersupply problem and waves of problems with PB 520s (techs that would repair them would always bring extra parts because the ribbon cables would disintegrate). The G3/G4 lines have been an improvement, but look at the wasteland of problems with many Apples powerbooks that seem to continue to today.
Of course we've had DOA PCs, PCs that had problems, PCs with icky case designs (all of the classic Pentium DECs), but never the patterns of problems with specific vendors or models that we had with Macs. They were unsexy and boring, but they generally worked. I've seen but never worked with much (because we didn't buy them) some pretty bad low-end PCs, but that was really olden-days 386/486 stuff -- bad cases, mobos with brand X parallel and serial port cards, and poor assembly.
From a broad design and OS integration perspective, Apple has an advantage over PCs because of the single source nature of their products, but I don't think that this has meant a superior manufactured product in the field. Low unit numbers? Problems resulting from rapid design changes, parts source changes? Just bad QC? Who knows.
Look at the parallels in political alignment and the DVD region map, and ask yourself if limiting what people can watch wasn't also part of someone's marketing-meets-political-posturing plan, too.
I'm sure its my own paranoia, but given that a big chunk of the world still actively tries to censor and limit people's access to information why wouldn't this allow Hollywood to try to please politicians? Release a movie; popular in America, unpopular in a given region of the world; edit the movie to make it acceptable in the non-US region; release the region x version of the movie using this edit. You make money, dictators stay fat and happy, "everybody" wins.
The trouble is, I'd wager that most of the places you'd be likely to find censorship are also the places most likely to be selling bootleg region 1 DVDs and modded players that can play them, or totally bootleg players with region selection menus.
I'm sure that distribution structure argument is the "most" correct, but you can't tell me this hasn't crossed someone's mind in Hollywood before.
So while we're having a 'Barrel of Fun', you're having a keg-o-fun -eh? :P
Usually we're out back doing bong hits, but hey.
On most machines, the local buffer holds a scan of all the pages BEFORE the machine even dials. Your machine may differ.
There's lots of problems with the continuous black page attack, but this one is the most easy to mitigate. Most FAX machines that I've dealt with can disable the "memory send" feature, which results in a direct transmission of the FAX. I do this all the time, since my FAX machine is brain dead and waits 5-10 minutes before even starting a memory send.
The other problems others have mentioned: no actual printing machine on the other end, expensive toll calls, are hard to get around. I would imagine that "pro" faxsmappers use outbound-only trunks that cannot accept an incoming call, their computers are originate-only. And how do you get their number in the first place, providing they're dumb enough to call from a regular line with whatever machine they have set to accept?
Better to get their home address, some friends and a couple of fungo bats.
No, Minnesota. You must be from Wisconsin, where they drink soda when they're not drinking beer from "barrels".
Here in Minnesota, we drink our beer from kegs when not drinking pop.
I wonder why competitors don't advertise they carry critically acclaimed films like Crash and Bad Lietenant uncut[?]
Because both of those movies were appallingly bad? I personally found BL to be halfway entertaining, but Crash was one of those arty experiments that went bad. Anybody read the Ballard book it was based on?
I would imagine that there's two kinds of spam operators:
- Basically legitimate "entrepeneurs" who stretch the law as far as they can but actually try not to break it. Same class of person as you might find at Enron or WorldCom.
- Scam artists. These guys have an "angle" on everything, work all in cash and have been involved in other fraudulent or criminal activity.
I'd expect the entrepeneurs to engage in petty tax games, like declaring stuff they're not supposed to and so on, but not engaging in out-and-out tax fraud. The scam artists I'd imagine are largely working for themselves (promoting sham businesses, stocks or products) and are fully engaged in the all-cash underground economy, and don't even file taxes.If I were an IRS auditor, I'd consider spammers as prime candidates for shakedown.
Report them to the IRS as suspected tax cheats. It's your duty under the government's new anti-terrorism programme..
$90k sounds good on paper, but:
1) Technology costs. Either spammers are burning through ISPs (less than a months usage before being dropped) or they're paying big bucks for a spam-friendly account. Printers, computers, etc.
2) Insurance (health, dental, etc etc).
3) Taxes - Presuming that tax fraud isn't part of the package; maybe that would be a better angle, reporting known spammers as tax frauds to the IRS.
4) Legal - Either to fight people who are pissed at them or to do a minimal amount of self-protection (incorporation, etc)
5) All the other costs of living -- car, housing, clothes, food, etc etc.
Even not including many of the business-expenses, $90k isn't getting rich in many parts of the country. After taxes, it's like what, $55k? Nothing to sneeze at, but add in another $10k or so for business expenses and it starts looking less appealing.
That "skip" that you have during movies (should only be once per side) is probably a layer switch.
.5 second.
It only happens on every 5th movie or less, but I would estimate that of the movies that do skip, they typically skip more than once. We had one movie that skipped easily 20 times, with pauses often up to
I also wondered if maybe there wasn't some goofy branching going on and the buffer got exhausted as the player had to seek another part of the disc. Overall though I just assume its beat-on discs. The keepcases my video store uses often cause discs to fly from the case when the case works "right" or require you to grab the disc surface to get it out when it doesn't. This does not bode well for long term playability.
Overall I think I got a good deal. Mp3 is great for parties (two CDs in the changer plays longer than I can party), its played every movie I've put in it. I feel a lot better off than people who spent $$$ more and didn't even get CDR(W) or (S)VCD playback capabilities.
They have trouble playing a ton of legit dvds..
I won't describe myself as a an "avid" DVD viewer, but I rent 1-2 typically new release Hollywood type DVDs every week and have never had a problem playing them in my Apex 3Disc model.
The only thing that somewhat approaches a "problem" has been some discs will "skip" once or twice during playback; the scene will freeze for 250 ms or so and then continue on. I've always attributed this to dust/scratches on the medium and not to software problems in the player.
As far as picture and sound quality goes, I'm probably a neophyte. My Apex is connected via S-Video to a 10 year old Sony Trinitron and the picture is way better than either of my VCRs, so good in fact that my wife even preferred it. I'm not doing surround sound with it, but the sound is much better than VHS, too. I found rental VHS tapes had non-usable stereo tracks about 30% of the time and damaged ones another 20% of the time, even on new releases I was sure had fewer than 20 playings.
The MP3 playback is pretty much laughable, though, although it is functional. Navigation is bad and there's no shuffle feature. Shuffle is even lacking on regular CDs. Again, it does all work and has worked since I got it, though.
Altogether I'd say it was a reasonable $150 investment 18 months ago; nothing else was available with MP3 then, and I doubt the MP3 features of other players are all that great anyway.
We got a demo of an Avocent unit that did the same thing. It did have a centralized user database capability (unfortunately I think it was like Windows domain auth or something less flexible than RADIUS/LDAP/TACACS+).
It worked well, but REALLY expensive for a 16 port version. Expensive to the tune of around $10k for the box, the auth server module, and 2-3 client licenses. I was most turned off by the fact that the server and client software were $old $eperately, since the software is useless without the hardware.
I read a USENET post (circa 11/2001) that said the devices were buggy and the vendor was an asshole about other platform clients and future development/changes.
I think digitized video and IP KVM connectivity is probably not a fluke and represents the "future" of KVM, but vendors will need to seriously get their shit together in terms of client access and pricing otherwise computer makers are just going to crush this product with their own built-in remote management. All our HP servers have built-in serial management that can do power on/off/reboot, environment management, and text/keyboard redirection; HP and Compaq both have boards that can do it natively over IP, the *only* thing missing is the ability to do transparent video redirection. When they do that, KVM will be obsoleted by a laptop running a redirection client.
Mainly because it's convoluted, nonstandard way of doing something. I'll give you that its clever and probably functional, but in terms of understandability and maintainability by others it loses a lot of points.
I guess I'm just thinking of the number of "money saving", "clever" kludges/hacks I've had to detangle and re-assemble or integrate with other environments. It's goes from either more complex than usual (when the kludger is around to explain/understand it) to a total nightmare (no kludger, no docs, serious tear-apart required).
Maybe I'm just not clever or I'm lazy, but I find KISS to be a sound principal...
If I can buy an IP KVM and ditch a convoluted, impossible-to-maintain system like you propose, I'm saving myself thousands in future consulting fees when your house of cards system collapses.
WrightLine was selling Avocents for a while. They were expensive and required a server and client component in addition to the hardware, but were real slick -- total KVM over IP.
They even had software tools to re-sample a big display (eg, 1600x1200) down to a more managable size (eg, 1024x768) without losing usability.
They lost me due to (1) licensing costs for the management client based on per-machine, (2) it was real dodgy whether it was usable on a DSL-type broadband connection, (3) it was REAL expensive, even if you "waved" the extra client licensing costs (as the salesdude suggested I do).
I hope this kind of tech becomes more common and cheaper to do; it looked like a hardware-based video capture engine and a client application to decompress the video.
I wonder if we're really looking for Microsoft competitors, or just looking for Microsoft to act the benevolent part of being a benevolent dictator.
While everyone wishes there was a viable desktop alternative to Microsoft, there isn't one and NO set of DOJ terms (except, maybe, open-sourcing of Windows) is going to bring forward a desktop alternative.
I think most people would be happy if MS would just appreciate that they own the market for PC desktops and many corporate server installations and quit trying to own the *world*. If MS actually focused on producing quality, secure products, providing sane documentation (more sane than "see technet article xyz123 involving registry key additions and changes...") for products and APIs, and licensing terms that didn't feel like sodomy I think most people could live with it.
The computer biz largely thrives on standards; you don't have to guess or reinvent the wheel every day, and I think the MS desktop standard is certainly not that much worse than any other monopoly desktop standard would be other than the bloodthirsty, all-your-base-are-belong-to-us marketing philosophy.
I've often thought of doing this myself where I get paid to work, not so much to sniff passwords but to have a little back door should I decide to leave. It'd be trivial to stash a laptop or other device in a little-used ceiling space and run a drop directly to a patch panel.
More challenging would be setting up a way to get the machine to periodically reconfigure itself to get out of the office network and establish a tunnel to the outside that could be used to get back inside.
The way that occurs to me is to have it load a public web page periodically and parse out the destination IP and then have the "automaton" search for ways out of the network to a destination host set to listen for tunnel attempts from the automaton.
I'd imagine you'd have to come up with really clever ways to get out of heavily firewalled/proxied business networks, some really don't allow any random end nodes to get unfiltered/proxied packets out of the network. Best way would be to tap into a fax line and have the machine periodically dial out, leaving a more clever human to fix any dedicated network tunnel.
I'm not sure what I'd *do* with a host if I had one, though.
Very informative bit on transit relationships, although I think a more hardnosed analysis would suffice to explain why this won't work.
Loss of Indian eyeballs is worth probably zero to major western portals; 35% of the population lives below the poverty line and probably another 35% doesn't have the purchasing power to buy anything other than basic staples.
This may not be true for portals that have a local variant (Yahoo India or something), but you have to wonder if web economics don't work in the West, how can they possibly work in country with such a high rate of poverty?
It would be best to have an "appliance server" that is capable of handling the communications to the devices and generating interfaces from standard libraries created for appliance control.
Please make sure that the appliance server can get libraries from the appliances if it doesn't have them. I'm sure people will buy a new appliance that isn't in the current appliance server's standard libraries.
I'd imagine a mechanism similar to an SNMP management station querying a network device, finding out that it doesn't have the MIB and being able to get the MIB from the device so that it turn can then control the device.
Did you read any of my original posts?! The problem is that I CAN'T get a job, even ones I am perfectly qualified for (I just got 3 more rejections today). How the fuck am I supposed to get this training?
OF COURSE you have to get hired to get training in this scenerio! Not getting hired prevents you from getting the training (barring self-paid training), but the idea is that when you don't get hired it's NOT because you don't know the tool it's because there were others more suited for the job (aptitude, attitude, etc etc).
The idea is that a business looking to have someone perform an entry-level task with a specialized tool will provide the training on the job for the tool; ie, aptitude for the tool not direct experience with it becomes important. Business makes an investment in their personnel, guaranteeing themselves a person who really can use the tool. New employees then expend less energy learning the tool for real and more time learning work processes and the rest of the "job".
My original point, which seems to have been lost, is that entry-level employees CHEAT THEMSELVES by pirating applications. It only encourages businesses to hire only people with experience with expensive software tools and to NOT provide training or hire people with no or very limited experience.
This also cheats businesses because people who pirate expensive, complex packages often exaggerate their limited skills and experience, resulting in ineffective ad-hoc on the job training, high levels of employee churn and an unproductive workplace.
Even if desktop PC's migrate to 64 bit in the next couple of years, you still have all the other embedded devices out there running on 32bit CPUs. There is no need for these devices to use a 64bit CPU - for these applications 8megs of memory is plenty, 4gigs is just crazy!!
32 bit CPUs may be here for a relatively long time after 64bit gets absorbed into the desktop, but forever? Even though a given embedded application may not *need* a 64bit CPU, economies of production and fabrication suggest that it may be *cheaper* to use a 64bit CPU as chip makers are likely to make more of them and less 32bit CPUs.
It's like B&W teevees -- I don't need a color TV in my kitchen, a B&W one would do, but I'll be damned if I can find one. It seems that they're all color.
3. Forget about making music, split up the band, and do something else. Upside: They don't owe the RIAA anything and they stay out of jail. Downside: Another independent band squished by the RIAA.
This is what they want. In the olden days (pre-mid 80s), it was expensive and time-consuming to produce an actual record (flat hunk of plastic) and the RIAA *liked* that kind of barrier to entry as it pretty much funneled talent through their "system".
Now its pretty simple to make your own music. I'm guessing that a sub-$1k investment for software and hardware would allow you to record, mix, master and reproduce CDs on a PC. It might get more expensive if you wanted to record a large number of tracks without pre-mixing them. The only kind of deal you would need with any label is a distribution deal if you wanted CDs in stores.
You missed the point. The reason you can't get a job is lack of experience. I'd wager that about half that "experience" isn't "experience doing the job" but the ability to use the tools.
And you don't have to compete with people getting free, on-the-job training -- be one of them getting the training!
There's a catch-22 here, though. Since we're all willing to use a warez copy of expensive applications in order to get enough familiarity with them to do the work, businesses have no reason to provide training or other tool-exposure time, since we're doing it for them, even if it is piracy.
Wouldn't we be better off if businesses recognized that 3D SuperMagic Dot Net cost $5k per copy and required a testicular implant -- and thus people with the background and skills to learn the application and do the job weren't likely to walk in with those skills and should instead be exposed to a training period where they (A) learned the application in a productive fashion that helped them get productive faster?
As long as we're willing to do the industrial training businesses want ourselves, why should we expect them to hire us without work-for-pay experience?