Re:Already approaching from the wrong direction
on
64kbps @ 40,000 ft.
·
· Score: 2
Of course, at 30K feet the reception leaves much to be desired.
Actually I left my phone on once on a flight from Minnesota to LA. As the pilot was nattering on about Denver being below is, in that screechy, too loud voice, I noticed my 800Mhz CDMA phone was on. Sure enough I had a full signal!
I always thought that cell signals were poor at vertical travel. I guess not.
My guesses for why they won't let you use them on planes:
Maintain $5/minute monopoly
Poor performance due to bad handoffs and large no-service zones
Too bad the penalties for property crime are so small, we mostly use our jails for drug crime.
And too bad we're too stupid to realize that our property crimes are almost always tied to the artificially high prices being charged for drugs.
Not only would not wasting time on drugs free up massive police resources to fight property crimes, people wouldn't have to steal to afford them. I'm sure there would be some theft, but if you could get high for a month on $20, how much would you have to steal?
I think that's awesome when they lock the guys in the car automatically and they can't get out. It's even funnier when the cops are calmly walking towards the car and the theif's panic level starts to hit maximum.
A hidden alarm/alert and a locking door system couldn't cost more than $5k. I think they should put these in lots and lots of places. It might actually put a dent in the car theft business.
If the police woman offers "The John" money for sex that is entraping
Haha. No one should ever fall for this, I mean, if some woman is offering you money for sex you should assume either she's a cop or that you have died and that Heaven is just like earth, except for all the assumptions about how the world works are in your favor....
Electricity is expensive when you start adding it up. I stopped taking home the giveaway server equipment from work because it was so damn expensive to operate versus buying stuff.
I had a free disk array cabinet+card. The array formatted out at RAID5 at only 20 gigs -- usable, but not phenomenal. The killer was it was going to cost me $20 per month to power it! The new IDE HD I bought was $100 and gave me double the disk storage.
stereotyping germans as people who look away when evil is done is insulting, whether you encapsulate it into a reference to Hogans Heroes or not.
There is no reference to the holocaust in Hogan's Heros -- the humour is entirely related to the bumbling of the camp guards and commander. Most of the German civilians referenced in the show are either outright members of the resistance or sympathetic and complicit in the resistance.
There is no reference to Nazi ideology, and even American racism never plays a part -- the "electrical engineer" of the show is a black who is well treated by both his peers and the guards.
Even the Gestapo is misrepresented. Major Hochstedter is frequently portrayed performing Gestapo duties in a pre-war Waffen SS dress uniform. The Waffen SS dress uniform was changed from black to grey at the start of the war. It's also unlikely that the Gestapo performed their duties in Waffen SS uniforms, even if they were Waffen SS members. I'd call it technically correct in that its likely that Gestapo officers were SS members as the SS controlled all state security apparatus and would have put their men in the officer ranks, but...wrong uniform for the job, and wrong uniform style for the period.
The original Kubrick-directed Lolita doesn't have any sex scenes -- it might not even have any kissing. All of the sex in it is implied, and quite obliquely -- this was 1962 afterall.
I haven't seen the remake but the reviews claim that there is actual sexuality depicted.
Strangely enough, the actress who played Lolita, Sue Lyon's IMDB biography claims she was 13 when cast as Lolita, which was released in '62, and that she married in '64. Even adding an additional year for casting, that gets her married at age 16, which is kind a funny irony at that.
I read a VoIP dealie on Cisco's web site about a year ago that said that the acceptable cutoff was 150ms of RTT. Outside that the delays were just too much.
The gateway question is interesting -- presumably the VoIP provider saves money by aggregating their infrastructure, but does that mean that everyone who calls me has to make a long-distance call? Are all my calls local as long as they're too the home market of the VoIP provider?
I would think there would be some really hairy tarriff issues, too -- would ILECs even sell trunks to these people?
Exclusive reviews and coverdisk demos are what skew reviews.
This is the never-ending battle between publishing, the business of running a publication, and journalism, the profession of writing. Journalists always bitch that the biz guys are muzzling them to keep advertisers happy, and the biz guys are always pissed that journalists don't get that it takes money to run the paper. They're both right, of course, but I think that commercial interests are often triumphant over journalistic ones.
Jewelers have a tool for this
on
The Sexiest Metal
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
My dad had to have his ring resized back in the late 70s and I went with him to the jewelers. His ring finger had swollen substantially over time and his ring had become quite uncomfortable.
To remove it the jeweler had a tool with a flat bit that slid between the ring and the finger and had a cutting wheel (like a dremel cutting disk) that cut through the ring. The bit that slid under the ring was aligned with the cutting wheel so that when you went through the ring you didn't start cutting flesh.
The ring was then resized and re-fused to be a continuous ring. I'd guess that cutting is a last resort and that cut rings might have been resized by actually adding material to make them bigger rather than just stretching them.
IIRC the cutting part was hand actuated, but with the safety "backstop" I see no reason other than heat that it couldn't be mechanically operated.
I work in the private sector and I can't begin to tell you about the bureaucratic headaches, recursive reporting structures, and on and on.
I miss the job I had at the local state University. Totally laid back, a real "campus" setting with trees, grass and places to go outside -- not that poured concrete and crabgrass around a drainage slough that passes for a corporate campus or the brick-and-glass downtown corporate scene.
The advantages of a corporate job though seem to be MUCH better money both in terms of pay and in budgets. I also get to travel to class-A cities on the man's dime, which often means $100 meals, luxury hotels and limo rides.
It gets stressful at times, but a lot of the stress is internal -- the desire to do a great job despite a high workload. You get thrown into the deep end of the pool and management isn't afraid to replace you if you can't swim. If you *can* swim, they don't mind giving you more in your pay packet and more to spend.
I'm getting to the point though where I've travelled enough, ate enough, drank enough and achieved enough "stuff" financially that a government job on less pay with less stress to finish of my next 20 years sounds pretty good. I'd rather have the time to travel on my own.
It's kind of a meaningless statement. I read it to mean that 90% of the 630 are working on this -- some are in development, some in sales and marketing, some on project management, etc etc.
Most legitimate sales people with any experience will see through this ruse in a minute. They'll quickly stop wasting time on your company and move on. They won't sell this "contact" information to anyone. Sales leads that produce sales are valuable and can be sold. Sales leads that don't produce sales are junk and only tar the seller.
Many businesses, especially those that have sales forces, will not pursue this strategy because they value sales contacts, even if they don't buy anything. Some sales people are interesting to talk to and can provide valuable information, even stuff they're not selling.
Sure, there are some sleazy sales people but they're easy to hang up on. But there's a lot of legitimate people trying to do business.
Would be a great idea, even better would be one in the *shower*.
Re:FUD through "positive assertions"
on
Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 2
You couldn't do anything on an enterprise-wide scale, but think of the departments that had to eat big central IT chargebacks for small-time databases.
486 certainly could have satisfied their database requirements, and no IT chargebacks.
Re:FUD through "positive assertions"
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 2
And, I have to ask, what sort of hole have you been living in for the last 10 years? Commercial Unix has lost market after market to cheaper hardware running NT, and recently, Linux/BSD. Reports of it's death have been exaggerated, but it hasn't exactly been growing, except on the high-end.
I thought the *commercial* computing timeline was somthing like this:
(1) Beginning of computing to mid-late 70s: Everything runs on the mainframe. Period.
(2) Late 70s to mid-80s. Minis storm the mainframe server rooms. Mainframes lose market share to minis. Rise of PDP, VAX.
(3) Early 80s - Rise of UNIX systems. Begin to do work of VAX. Mainframe relegated to minority status.
(4) Mid-late 80s. Rise of x86 servers. First as filesharing and email for x86 clients, then as storage, performance and OS power increases machines that do real work.
(5) Mid-late 90s to today: Commercial UNIX installations lose market share on the lower third of their installed base to x86 solutions as cost benefits and performance increases continue in x86 land. MS mostly benefits, but free unix does too. UNIX hurt on low end by high hardware costs and perceived labor shortages.
(6) Future: MS and UNIX battle for high end computing solutions. UNIX experience dominates big installations but is forced to subsidize market dominance by decreased margins. MS faces hardware performance problems and increased software costs and complexity to obtain performance parity on clustered x86 machines.
I'm not sure what you mean. A "smart" person has an IQ of about 120. A half-smart person has an IQ of 60. What part of an IQ of 60 makes you something other than a complete moron?
I suppose you could add a fourth definition of complete morons to include someone who continually kites checks to buy exercise machines they never use..
It is the difference between "The artist certainly has rights, but the industry is subverting the process to their substantial benefit, and this must be altered." and "Hey, we have a right to free music, how dare you take it away?"
Unless you're an artists involved with the major labels, who gives a shit about artists? I know I don't. Anybody who gets to make music as a full-time job already is so far ahead of the rest of us working slobs that unless they're living on the streets with nothing to eat I have little sympathy for whether they're making $100k or $10m per year.
The real thing to protest is why the recording industry wants to expend so much energy fighting for an old, brick-and-mortar, album-based sales strategy that clearly is not in tune with how people want to relate to music.
I have around 500 tunes I've gotten online. Nearly all of these represent back-catalog tunes from old 70s dinosaurs. I'd never buy the albums for $15 (the arists aren't that good and the entire album is full of BS filler material), but I'm pretty sure if I was browsing online I'd have bought the tune for a $1.
That's over $500 the music industry *hasn't* made on me. I wouldn't have the music without Napster, but they *still* wouldn't have gotten me to shell out $15 for album with two songs I want.
Even with Napster, I would have gladly paid $1 for each song -- no BSing around, better downloads and quality encodes, and so on. Why can't they figure this out?
I'll go out on a limb and assume you bought them for yourself. 3, though?
Usually exercise machine purchasers fall into three categories:
Smart and disciplined people usually take up running or biking and never buy an exercise machine. Sometimes they a peice of strength training equipment and actually use it, and some actually buy cardio stuff and use it too.
Smart people generally buy one or maybe two different types of exercise equipment in their lifetime. Usually after they get sick of tripping over a machine they don't use and they sell it, and they never buy another one because they're smart enough to realize they didn't use the first one why would they use any more?
Half-smart people keep buying exercise machines they don't use. Why they keep buying them is something of a mystery, but they usually blame a bad machine for lack of a workout and keep buying them. Or they may be continually lured by the promise of a machine that actually makes them look like a supermodel or sports star with only 10 minutes a day commitment. This is why they are only half-smart.
If you run a business and you provide what the customers are asking for, your sales go up and so does your profit!!
But they're following the Microsoft business model -- if you don't give them any choices, you can raise your prices and your profits. I think this most closely fits what the entertainment industry is trying to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I left my phone on once on a flight from Minnesota to LA. As the pilot was nattering on about Denver being below is, in that screechy, too loud voice, I noticed my 800Mhz CDMA phone was on. Sure enough I had a full signal!
I always thought that cell signals were poor at vertical travel. I guess not.
My guesses for why they won't let you use them on planes:
Too bad the penalties for property crime are so small, we mostly use our jails for drug crime.
And too bad we're too stupid to realize that our property crimes are almost always tied to the artificially high prices being charged for drugs.
Not only would not wasting time on drugs free up massive police resources to fight property crimes, people wouldn't have to steal to afford them. I'm sure there would be some theft, but if you could get high for a month on $20, how much would you have to steal?
I thought since they took away your guns you guys were crime-free over there...
I think that's awesome when they lock the guys in the car automatically and they can't get out. It's even funnier when the cops are calmly walking towards the car and the theif's panic level starts to hit maximum.
A hidden alarm/alert and a locking door system couldn't cost more than $5k. I think they should put these in lots and lots of places. It might actually put a dent in the car theft business.
If the police woman offers "The John" money for sex that is entraping
Haha. No one should ever fall for this, I mean, if some woman is offering you money for sex you should assume either she's a cop or that you have died and that Heaven is just like earth, except for all the assumptions about how the world works are in your favor....
Electricity is expensive when you start adding it up. I stopped taking home the giveaway server equipment from work because it was so damn expensive to operate versus buying stuff.
I had a free disk array cabinet+card. The array formatted out at RAID5 at only 20 gigs -- usable, but not phenomenal. The killer was it was going to cost me $20 per month to power it! The new IDE HD I bought was $100 and gave me double the disk storage.
I swear I read someplace about how to make a Perl binary. It involved getting your Perl app to dump core and then using the core as your binary.
stereotyping germans as people who look away when evil is done is insulting, whether you encapsulate it into a reference to Hogans Heroes or not.
There is no reference to the holocaust in Hogan's Heros -- the humour is entirely related to the bumbling of the camp guards and commander. Most of the German civilians referenced in the show are either outright members of the resistance or sympathetic and complicit in the resistance.
There is no reference to Nazi ideology, and even American racism never plays a part -- the "electrical engineer" of the show is a black who is well treated by both his peers and the guards.
Even the Gestapo is misrepresented. Major Hochstedter is frequently portrayed performing Gestapo duties in a pre-war Waffen SS dress uniform. The Waffen SS dress uniform was changed from black to grey at the start of the war. It's also unlikely that the Gestapo performed their duties in Waffen SS uniforms, even if they were Waffen SS members. I'd call it technically correct in that its likely that Gestapo officers were SS members as the SS controlled all state security apparatus and would have put their men in the officer ranks, but...wrong uniform for the job, and wrong uniform style for the period.
The original Kubrick-directed Lolita doesn't have any sex scenes -- it might not even have any kissing. All of the sex in it is implied, and quite obliquely -- this was 1962 afterall.
I haven't seen the remake but the reviews claim that there is actual sexuality depicted.
Strangely enough, the actress who played Lolita, Sue Lyon's IMDB biography claims she was 13 when cast as Lolita, which was released in '62, and that she married in '64. Even adding an additional year for casting, that gets her married at age 16, which is kind a funny irony at that.
I read a VoIP dealie on Cisco's web site about a year ago that said that the acceptable cutoff was 150ms of RTT. Outside that the delays were just too much.
The gateway question is interesting -- presumably the VoIP provider saves money by aggregating their infrastructure, but does that mean that everyone who calls me has to make a long-distance call? Are all my calls local as long as they're too the home market of the VoIP provider?
I would think there would be some really hairy tarriff issues, too -- would ILECs even sell trunks to these people?
Exclusive reviews and coverdisk demos are what skew reviews.
This is the never-ending battle between publishing, the business of running a publication, and journalism, the profession of writing. Journalists always bitch that the biz guys are muzzling them to keep advertisers happy, and the biz guys are always pissed that journalists don't get that it takes money to run the paper. They're both right, of course, but I think that commercial interests are often triumphant over journalistic ones.
My dad had to have his ring resized back in the late 70s and I went with him to the jewelers. His ring finger had swollen substantially over time and his ring had become quite uncomfortable.
To remove it the jeweler had a tool with a flat bit that slid between the ring and the finger and had a cutting wheel (like a dremel cutting disk) that cut through the ring. The bit that slid under the ring was aligned with the cutting wheel so that when you went through the ring you didn't start cutting flesh.
The ring was then resized and re-fused to be a continuous ring. I'd guess that cutting is a last resort and that cut rings might have been resized by actually adding material to make them bigger rather than just stretching them.
IIRC the cutting part was hand actuated, but with the safety "backstop" I see no reason other than heat that it couldn't be mechanically operated.
I work in the private sector and I can't begin to tell you about the bureaucratic headaches, recursive reporting structures, and on and on.
I miss the job I had at the local state University. Totally laid back, a real "campus" setting with trees, grass and places to go outside -- not that poured concrete and crabgrass around a drainage slough that passes for a corporate campus or the brick-and-glass downtown corporate scene.
The advantages of a corporate job though seem to be MUCH better money both in terms of pay and in budgets. I also get to travel to class-A cities on the man's dime, which often means $100 meals, luxury hotels and limo rides.
It gets stressful at times, but a lot of the stress is internal -- the desire to do a great job despite a high workload. You get thrown into the deep end of the pool and management isn't afraid to replace you if you can't swim. If you *can* swim, they don't mind giving you more in your pay packet and more to spend.
I'm getting to the point though where I've travelled enough, ate enough, drank enough and achieved enough "stuff" financially that a government job on less pay with less stress to finish of my next 20 years sounds pretty good. I'd rather have the time to travel on my own.
It's kind of a meaningless statement. I read it to mean that 90% of the 630 are working on this -- some are in development, some in sales and marketing, some on project management, etc etc.
This won't work universally.
Most legitimate sales people with any experience will see through this ruse in a minute. They'll quickly stop wasting time on your company and move on. They won't sell this "contact" information to anyone. Sales leads that produce sales are valuable and can be sold. Sales leads that don't produce sales are junk and only tar the seller.
Many businesses, especially those that have sales forces, will not pursue this strategy because they value sales contacts, even if they don't buy anything. Some sales people are interesting to talk to and can provide valuable information, even stuff they're not selling.
Sure, there are some sleazy sales people but they're easy to hang up on. But there's a lot of legitimate people trying to do business.
No, for watching TV while showering in the morning.
Would be a great idea, even better would be one in the *shower*.
You couldn't do anything on an enterprise-wide scale, but think of the departments that had to eat big central IT chargebacks for small-time databases.
486 certainly could have satisfied their database requirements, and no IT chargebacks.
And, I have to ask, what sort of hole have you been living in for the last 10 years? Commercial Unix has lost market after market to cheaper hardware running NT, and recently, Linux/BSD. Reports of it's death have been exaggerated, but it hasn't exactly been growing, except on the high-end.
I thought the *commercial* computing timeline was somthing like this:
(1) Beginning of computing to mid-late 70s: Everything runs on the mainframe. Period.
(2) Late 70s to mid-80s. Minis storm the mainframe server rooms. Mainframes lose market share to minis. Rise of PDP, VAX.
(3) Early 80s - Rise of UNIX systems. Begin to do work of VAX. Mainframe relegated to minority status.
(4) Mid-late 80s. Rise of x86 servers. First as filesharing and email for x86 clients, then as storage, performance and OS power increases machines that do real work.
(5) Mid-late 90s to today: Commercial UNIX installations lose market share on the lower third of their installed base to x86 solutions as cost benefits and performance increases continue in x86 land. MS mostly benefits, but free unix does too. UNIX hurt on low end by high hardware costs and perceived labor shortages.
(6) Future: MS and UNIX battle for high end computing solutions. UNIX experience dominates big installations but is forced to subsidize market dominance by decreased margins. MS faces hardware performance problems and increased software costs and complexity to obtain performance parity on clustered x86 machines.
People are really like that. If you had a referendum on capital punishment and the choices were:
1) Yes, televised nationwide
2) Yes, not televised
2) No capital punishment
I can pretty much guarantee you that (1) would get the most votes. People are kind sick and twisted.
If the nuke project had a screen saver of cool mushroom clouds, blast waves and other eye candy people would be all over it.
They could give a shit if it meant speeding up the extermination of homo sapiens.
I'm not sure what you mean. A "smart" person has an IQ of about 120. A half-smart person has an IQ of 60. What part of an IQ of 60 makes you something other than a complete moron?
I suppose you could add a fourth definition of complete morons to include someone who continually kites checks to buy exercise machines they never use..
It is the difference between "The artist certainly has rights, but the industry is subverting the process to their substantial benefit, and this must be altered." and "Hey, we have a right to free music, how dare you take it away?"
Unless you're an artists involved with the major labels, who gives a shit about artists? I know I don't. Anybody who gets to make music as a full-time job already is so far ahead of the rest of us working slobs that unless they're living on the streets with nothing to eat I have little sympathy for whether they're making $100k or $10m per year.
The real thing to protest is why the recording industry wants to expend so much energy fighting for an old, brick-and-mortar, album-based sales strategy that clearly is not in tune with how people want to relate to music.
I have around 500 tunes I've gotten online. Nearly all of these represent back-catalog tunes from old 70s dinosaurs. I'd never buy the albums for $15 (the arists aren't that good and the entire album is full of BS filler material), but I'm pretty sure if I was browsing online I'd have bought the tune for a $1.
That's over $500 the music industry *hasn't* made on me. I wouldn't have the music without Napster, but they *still* wouldn't have gotten me to shell out $15 for album with two songs I want.
Even with Napster, I would have gladly paid $1 for each song -- no BSing around, better downloads and quality encodes, and so on. Why can't they figure this out?
Usually exercise machine purchasers fall into three categories:
If you run a business and you provide what the customers are asking for, your sales go up and so does your profit!!
But they're following the Microsoft business model -- if you don't give them any choices, you can raise your prices and your profits. I think this most closely fits what the entertainment industry is trying to do.