You're right; the Corvette/WRX comparison is more apt!
I'm not sure why they didn't compare a Xeon to an Opteron. That's a more apples/apples comparison, at least in the way the CPUs are marketed. I think the article mentioned an upcoming dual Opteron/Xeon shootout, which should be interesting.
From the article: "That's not to say that the Xeon CPU necessarily deserves excessive praise just yet. At time of publication, our Xeon processor retails for $850 and the Athlon 3500+ retails for about $500 less"
In other news, a Corvette just smooooookkkked a Ford Taurus.
I have a medium-sized website (about 170,000 pageviews a month and 1,300 members) and while I'm sure they aren't even going to NOTICE a lack of links from my site, I'll do my small part and not link to them ever again.
Inspect it carefully, make sure you can see it working, have it checked out by a qualified mechanic, and just accept the fact that you're going to be completely fucked when it breaks down in a week.
"Have you tried asking any of the companies in question? Believe it or not, they may be staffed by humans who can answer your questions." ----------
If they're not interested in taking money from Canadians, they probably wouldn't be interested in spending the time to answer them, either.
Also, a lot of the reasons why companies don't ship to Canada come from laziness or ignorace of what's required, legally and customs-wise, to ship to Canada. Companies don't want to admit to that!
Yeah, but they're also run off on cheap newsprint there in black and white so the cost is very low. Graphic novels in the USA are slick glossies using fancy color techniques and cost as much as a nice hardcover. These two things are apples and durien for comparison.
Have you ever considered that the higher production values of American comics is what's holding them back from becoming the "Everyman's" novel in America?
The high production quality, slick graphics, and glossy paper of American comics translate to a higher price tag and make American comics more suitable as collectors' objects, as opposed to the equivalent of a novel that you don't mind tossing into your bag and reading on the train or at the beach.
That's why Japanese comics are sold at newstands everywhere in Japan, and American comics are mostly found at specialty shops these days.
One annoying thing about web browsing is that clicking links is sort of a leap of faith. You don't know what's behind the link. Clicking a link and reading a page isn't a very large time investment, but with thousands of links out there and only a finite amount of time to look at them all, it IS an area in which improvement's crucial.
So, I'd like my browser to show me some sort of preview of the content that lies behind each link, as well as intelligently predict whether it might be of interest to me or not.
The browser should build a list of keywords that I'm interested in, based on: ** Content from pages I've already browsed. This could be accomplished through some sort of low-priority thread which indexes page content from the browser's cache in the background, for absolutely minimal performance impact. ** The browser could weight those terms based on how long I spend on a page... the longer I spend on a page, on average, will reflect my interest level in the content. Obviously, some allowance would have to be made for times when we leave the computer idle with the browser open... stop timing once there's been no user input (scrolling, etc) after a set number of seconds. ** User-inputted terms. This would be optional, but if users are interested, they could directly input things they're interested in... ("Mustangs", "Rolling Stones", "Athlon Overclocking", etc)
Once the users' likes have been established, we can start to predict which pages they might be interested in. This would involve some "looking ahead", and pre-fetching the content of pages that are linked from the current one.
To minimize bandwidth consumption (for the user AND the server) the "look-ahead" feature could fetch only the first 1K or so of text from the page. This amount could be intelligently varied; if the page is slow to respond (Slashdot effect!) the fetch could be aborted. If the page is on the same subnet as the user, more text could be fetched for a more complete preview (great for intranet or offline pages).
Once this look-ahead data is obtained, it could be used in many different ways by the browser:
-Links that are likely to be of interest to the user could be highlighted by a specific graphical effect... colored outlines, etc. -When the user hovers the mouse pointer over the link, preview information (keywords/phrases of interest, etc) could be displayed via various means... detailed information in a sidebar panel, or a more concise view in a mouse tooltip
I think this addresses a very real need. The only real flaw I see is the Slashdot effect would occur even if users don't click on the link explicitly! This effect is largely mitigated by the "intelligent" pre-fetching, but would still be an issue.
Perhaps conscientious site owners could specify, through some sort of markup or whitelist, that their pages ought to be ignored by pre-fetch mechanisms.
I remember working on OpenVMS on VAX and (later) Alpha systems. The OS was pretty cool for its time...it looks like Microsoft lifted a lot of its security features for NTFS in Windows NT.
Microsoft didn't lift the features. They just lifted the guy who designed VMS, Dave Cutler, and had him architect WindowsNT for them.:-)
I will say that if you DO have the replacement plan, the service is pretty damned good should you need to take advantage of it - one week turnaround from dropping the thing off to it being shipped back and in my possession.
Laptops are one of the few items I'd get a replacement plan for, since they're a) portable and b) far more fragile than any other "portable" item I can possibly think of. For laptops, those plans make perfect sense (assuming the terms of the agreement are sufficiently generous to be worth the cost).
For things like TVs, though... man, what's the point? I've never even heard of a TV that stopped working in the first couple of years. I mean... it HAPPENS... but not 10% of the time, and 10% is what those plans typically cost. More like 0.1% of the time.
Nasty - best way to do a "DELETE... WHERE" if you're at an SQL console is to do...
"SELECT something FROM table WHERE conditions"
then, once you're happy that it's showing you the things to delete, backup the command and remove the "SELECT something" and replace it with "DELETE". Much safer:-)
Oh, hell yes. That's what I've been doing in all the years since.:D
Back in my first year or two of programming full-time, I deleted some LIVE data belonging to a customer, because I forgot the "where" clause. For those not familiar with SQL, you'd say the following to delete only certain rows from a table:
"Delete From SomeTable Where SomeTable.SomeField > 500"
However, if simply you type:
"Delete From SomeTable"
...that will delete all rows from that table. (Actually, I did type the WHERE clause, but I had only part of the statement highlighted, so that's the only part that got executed.)
What a nightmare. Obviously it was my own stupid fault, but to make matters worse, the IT dudes weren't performing nightly backups as they'd promised, compounding the problem. Recovery of the table from the transaction logs proved impossible for several reasons. It cost our company a few thousand dollars to re-conduct our client's survey and we had to endure a lot of screaming.
I consider myself lucky to have done this early in my career, on a small job that amounted to thousands of dollars instead of 5-, 6-, or 7-figure dollar amounts. I figure it's the sort of thing that everybody does once and never does again....Right?:P I've continued to work with SQL databases for the past 7 years, and I literally NEVER execute a DELETE statement without thinking about that fateful day. Never ever, even if it's data that doesn't matter.
If you create something you can show a prospective employer, not only are you gaining experience but it goes a long way towards showing you're a self-starter and eager to learn.
I'm in "in the trenches" programmer, not a manager who does hiring. But I've been doing it for about 8 years, and I've been sometimes involved in the hiring process at the companies I've worked for.
Anyway, I agree with the above post. To me, a person who loves this stuff enough to code something up on their own has the right mentality to be a talented programmer. In fact, I've seen somebody with no professional experience whatsoever get hired that way... the person doing the hiring was so impressed at the kid's demo software that he hired him right away. He turned out to be a brilliant programmer.
Hiring people is an expensive, crucial process. So managers face a lot of heat when new hires don't work out. Furthermore, we all know that a lot of new hires *don't* work out.
That's why IT certifications can help people get hired. If a manager takes a chance on an "unproven" but possibly brilliant guy with no certs, she's going to have a lot of explaining to do if that new hire turns out to suck.
However, if she hires somebody with all the proper certifications, she can have a) piece of mind b) a nice, plausible excuse if the new dude doesn't work out. "He had all his certifications and gave an impressive interview - we did everything right, but the guy just turned out to be a dude"
For whatever it's worth, I'm a programmer with no certifications. And I think that references are more important than certs, at least in the hiring processes *I've* seen, from both the hiring and the hiree end. However, there's no denying that certifications can be a nice comfort factor as well as be a deciding point between two otherwise-equivalent potential hires.
I'm not sure why you were modded down, apart from your MTBF numbers for IDE being a bit odd. Still, that is another good point. Here's a page that really covers the SCSI vs IDE debate well:
That pages does a good job of explaining why SCSI is "better", in terms of MTBF, seek time, etc. However, I can't help but feel that those numbers are kind of missing the original poster's requirements, which were for a *personal* fileserver. The MTBF for IDE may be lower, but in a RAID-1 or higher setup, this isn't really an issue. Realistically, multiple drives aren't going to fail *at once*.
For a home fileserver, IDE is more than fast enough, unless you're dealing with many gigabytes of data (video editing?). There's also the noise/heat/power issue of having multiple 10,000 or 15,000RPM drives spinning around the clock. A couple of 7,200RPM IDE drives in RAID-1 are quiet enough to run in my bedroom while I sleep; can the same be said for fast SCSI drives?
Don't get me wrong: SCSI is wonderful when screaming-fast performance and/or lots of concurrent users are a requirement, and things like price, noise, and power aren't a factor. Nobody disputes that. But for small office/home use, I don't always think it's the best choice.
For a few years I used an inexpensive (about $50) Highpoint ATA-100 RAID card on my home development server. It was perfectly adequate. I ran two drives in a RAID-1 config. Read/Write speed was very comparable to a single-drive solution, since it was a dual-channel card and I only had one drive on each channel.
I didn't have any hardware failures, so I didn't get a chance to give it a "real" disaster recovery test, but when I disassembled that PC and plugged the drives into another machine, each one was perfectly readable. So I'm assuming that, if one of the drives had failed, I would have been able to access the data on the other drive with zero complications and problems.
I don't think you *want* a more complicated solution than this for home or small business use. For home use, two hard drives are plenty noise- and heat-producing enough. The only reason you'd want a higher RAID level would be if you needed hot-swappability, or ATA-100 performance was a real bottleneck, neither of which would be a factor for home/small office use. A higher RAID level would give you less "wasted" disk space, but it's still going to be more expensive overall, since any kind of RAID-5 card will be far more expensive than a $50 (or built-in) RAID-1 solution.
One thing I didn't like: the drives never seemed to spin down, no matter how I played with Win2K Server's power settings. I don't know if that was the driver or OS's fault, but I didn't like having those guys spin 24/7.
A patent all depends on how broad you make the claims, but the first thing I thought of is the aircraft IFF [dean-boys.com] (identification friend or foe) transponder which dates back to WWar II. A radio signal is sent out to an aircraft and an identification is returned - definitely 'rfid' on an airspace scale.
What's unique about RFID is that the responding device (ie, the RFID tag on your clothes, or your Mobil Speedpass keychain, or your FreedomPay tag) isn't self-powered. Most RFID chips have no internal power source; they get their power from the RF waves broadcast from the RFID reader. The power from the RF waves powers the RFID chip long enough for the chip to power up, and broadcast a reply to the RFID reader's query.
Now that's cool. And it's also what makes them so low-cost and useful (for good and bad). You can literally print those RFID tags; no need to include a battery.
He has a patent for it, after all. And we all know that the US Parent Office only grants patents when there are clear examples of existing prior art, right?
Think about it!
Most importantly of all, it needs to support server-side calendar store!
Thunderbird can publish calendars that are compatible with Apple's iCal calendar format. It's not exactly a replacement for groupware-type stuff like Exchange, as far as I can tell, but you can subscribe to others' calendars and keep your own calendar online so that you can access it from whereever you want.
"Speed. Though I'm sure many can provide their own anecdotal evidence on how iTunes works fine on their machines, that doesn't invalidate the many, MANY claims of iTunes being a bloated, resource hog (at least on Windows.)."
Performance and start-up time got a lot better for me with the updates Apple has released - the initial release of iTunes had a "lag time" of serveral seconds between the application gaining focus, and when the application actually became responsive, but that's gone now.
It's not as resource-stingy as Winamp, but on what sort of machine is iTunes too "bloated"? Right now it's using 17MB of memory, with about a 20GB library of songs, and performance is snappy on my 1600mhz Duron - a $40 cpu, hardly "high-end". Perhaps if you've got an older machine, the resource usage of iTunes might be a problem, but on anything reasonably modern performance is quite acceptable. I've also heard anecdotally that it runs just fine on 600mhz G3 iMacs.
"Though I love iTunes, it isn't really competing or matching up against the progress of other players. While ease-of-use and "party mixes" might be good enough for your average teen or someone who doesn't ask for much, for myself and others looking for the best music experience, they're falling behind other players in terms of quality in favor of promoting their store/brand."
I have exactly the opposite opinion - for small music collections, other software like WinAmp and Foobar work fine, but for large librariesI find iTunes' ease-of-use when it comes to playlist management to be indispensible. Other applications seek to emulate iTunes' playlist and smart playlist features, and sometimes *exceed* iTunes' capability, but I've found them clunky to use by comparison.
I agree that iTunes is missing some features, but of all the imperfect software on the market, I think that iTunes is the closest to perfect. (also, even though it doesn't play certain formats like Ogg "out of the box", there are easily installable plugins that handle most formats known to mankind)
I'm not a doctor, but two things have helped me...
1. Try to have a variety of motion. I think the key part of "repetitive stress injury" that most people overlook is "repetitive". Think about it- human bodies are designed to be in motion as long as you're awake. But evolution has not designed our bodies to make the same, small, twitchy, repetitive motions over and over again for 8, 9, or 10 hours a day. So rather than trying to reduce the amount of motion your body and hands do, switch it up a bit-change chair, armrest, and keyboard positions.
1a. For the reasons listed in #1, I suspect that "hunt and peck" typing might be better than "correct" typing for one's hands and wrists in this regard- I have a greater variety of motion as my hands roam around the keyboard like a piano than a "proper" touch-typist. And, after many years of practice, I can even do it without looking.:P
2. Get an AWESOME wristrest. Seriously. Drop $20 on a niiiiiice thick, gel-filled wrist rest. Also, and this is KEY - get the kind with a nice, soft, shiny, synthetic cloth (neoprene or whatever) surface that is pleasant to slide your wrists across. If it does not have that property, you will not use it properly, because you will then LIFT your wrists off the wristrest while they move around, thusly defeating the purpose of the wristrest. The idea is to have the wristrest constantly supporting as much of the weight of your wrists as possible.
Hope this helps. BTW, I'm 27 and these things have worked for me so far. Around 4 years ago I started to get some pain and tingling; adopting these practices has left me comfortable and symptom-free since then.
I'm not a doctor, but two things have helped me...
1. Try to have a variety of motion. I think the key part of "repetitive stress injury" that most people overlook is "repetitive". Think about it- human bodies are designed to be in motion as long as you're awake. But evolution has not designed our bodies to make the same, small, twitchy, repetitive motions over and over again for 8, 9, or 10 hours a day. So rather than trying to reduce the amount of motion your body and hands do, switch it up a bit-change chair, armrest, and keyboard positions.
1a. For the reasons listed in #1, I suspect that "hunt and peck" typing might be better than "correct" typing for one's hands and wrists in this regard- I have a greater variety of motion as my hands roam around the keyboard like a piano than a "proper" touch-typist. And, after many years of practice, I can even do it without looking.:P
2. Get an AWESOME wristrest. Seriously. Drop $20 on a niiiiiice thick, gel-filled wrist rest. Also, and this is KEY - get the kind with a nice, soft, shiny, synthetic cloth (neoprene or whatever) surface that is pleasant to slide your wrists across. If it does not have that property, you will not use it properly, because you will then LIFT your wrists off the wristrest while they move around, thusly defeating the purpose of the wristrest. The idea is to have the wristrest constantly supporting as much of the weight of your wrists as possible.
Hope this helps. BTW, I'm 27 and these things have worked for me so far. Around 4 years ago I started to get some pain and tingling; adopting these practices has left me comfortable and symptom-free since then.
I dunno, choice, maybe?
Because it is being offered and some people perceive it as better value than other offerings?
As long as they have willing, paying customers, I say more power to them.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be choice - I'd love to see more choices on the market, as well as cheap PowerPC hardware, like I said. But it's also a marketplace reality that you need to do *something* better than others in order to stand out, and for the life of me I can't figure out what on Earth Amiga supposedly does better in 2004.
Windows - Market share, lots of apps, retail presense, game support
Macs/OSX - Sleek and sexy, superior OS, killer apps for certain markets such as Final Cut
Linux - Open source community, corporate support from IBM, etc
AmigaOS - ???
I'm not saying that it shouldn't exist... I'm asking what's the appeal?
When Amigas were in their heyday, they had a lot of stuff that nobody else had- a lightning fast graphics blitter chip, a modern OS, and video capability. There were quite a few areas where they were demonstrably and clearly lightyears (or Lightwaves;-P) ahead of everybody else at the time.
Totally the opposite now, though. Other computers have had all that stuff for at least ten years. So what's the "raison d'etre" for Amigas, now? Is there anything that the AmigaOS does better than other OSs?
I'm not trolling; I just don't see the selling point to these things. More OS and hardware choices are always a Good Thing, and I'd love to see the rise of cheap PowerPC motherboards. But either I'm absolutely failing to comprehend the selling points of the new AmigaOS, or there simply aren't any. I would like somebody to prove me wrong and point some out, I really would!
I've used three models: the original SV24 (Celeron, no heat pipe), the SN41G2 (AthlonXP 2500, heatpipe) and the SN45G (AthlonXP 3000, heatpipe).
The SV24 is really noisy and high-pitched. But the other two are nearly silent. You may have been using an older BIOS, or had some funky BIOS settings, if you had noise troubles.... newer Shuttle BIOSs allow you to enable fan control that keeps the fans near-silent at normal temperatures. If you set the BIOS to have the fans at full blast 100% the time, yes, they're very noisy, but this doesn't need to be an issue with the proper BIOS version and/or settings. Newer Shuttles come with the BIOSes already updated and configured properly, so for somebody buying a Shuttle today, it's not an issue.:P
Slashdot Mirror
You're right; the Corvette/WRX comparison is more apt!
I'm not sure why they didn't compare a Xeon to an Opteron. That's a more apples/apples comparison, at least in the way the CPUs are marketed. I think the article mentioned an upcoming dual Opteron/Xeon shootout, which should be interesting.
From the article: "That's not to say that the Xeon CPU necessarily deserves excessive praise just yet. At time of publication, our Xeon processor retails for $850 and the Athlon 3500+ retails for about $500 less"
In other news, a Corvette just smooooookkkked a Ford Taurus.
I'll boycott linking to them, for sure.
I have a medium-sized website (about 170,000 pageviews a month and 1,300 members) and while I'm sure they aren't even going to NOTICE a lack of links from my site, I'll do my small part and not link to them ever again.
If everybody did the same...
Inspect it carefully, make sure you can see it working, have it checked out by a qualified mechanic, and just accept the fact that you're going to be completely fucked when it breaks down in a week.
"Have you tried asking any of the companies in question? Believe it or not, they may be staffed by humans who can answer your questions."
----------
If they're not interested in taking money from Canadians, they probably wouldn't be interested in spending the time to answer them, either.
Also, a lot of the reasons why companies don't ship to Canada come from laziness or ignorace of what's required, legally and customs-wise, to ship to Canada. Companies don't want to admit to that!
Yeah, but they're also run off on cheap newsprint there in black and white so the cost is very low. Graphic novels in the USA are slick glossies using fancy color techniques and cost as much as a nice hardcover. These two things are apples and durien for comparison.
Have you ever considered that the higher production values of American comics is what's holding them back from becoming the "Everyman's" novel in America? The high production quality, slick graphics, and glossy paper of American comics translate to a higher price tag and make American comics more suitable as collectors' objects, as opposed to the equivalent of a novel that you don't mind tossing into your bag and reading on the train or at the beach. That's why Japanese comics are sold at newstands everywhere in Japan, and American comics are mostly found at specialty shops these days.
One annoying thing about web browsing is that clicking links is sort of a leap of faith. You don't know what's behind the link. Clicking a link and reading a page isn't a very large time investment, but with thousands of links out there and only a finite amount of time to look at them all, it IS an area in which improvement's crucial.
So, I'd like my browser to show me some sort of preview of the content that lies behind each link, as well as intelligently predict whether it might be of interest to me or not.
The browser should build a list of keywords that I'm interested in, based on:
** Content from pages I've already browsed. This could be accomplished through some sort of low-priority thread which indexes page content from the browser's cache in the background, for absolutely minimal performance impact.
** The browser could weight those terms based on how long I spend on a page... the longer I spend on a page, on average, will reflect my interest level in the content. Obviously, some allowance would have to be made for times when we leave the computer idle with the browser open... stop timing once there's been no user input (scrolling, etc) after a set number of seconds.
** User-inputted terms. This would be optional, but if users are interested, they could directly input things they're interested in... ("Mustangs", "Rolling Stones", "Athlon Overclocking", etc)
Once the users' likes have been established, we can start to predict which pages they might be interested in. This would involve some "looking ahead", and pre-fetching the content of pages that are linked from the current one.
To minimize bandwidth consumption (for the user AND the server) the "look-ahead" feature could fetch only the first 1K or so of text from the page. This amount could be intelligently varied; if the page is slow to respond (Slashdot effect!) the fetch could be aborted. If the page is on the same subnet as the user, more text could be fetched for a more complete preview (great for intranet or offline pages).
Once this look-ahead data is obtained, it could be used in many different ways by the browser:
-Links that are likely to be of interest to the user could be highlighted by a specific graphical effect... colored outlines, etc.
-When the user hovers the mouse pointer over the link, preview information (keywords/phrases of interest, etc) could be displayed via various means... detailed information in a sidebar panel, or a more concise view in a mouse tooltip
I think this addresses a very real need. The only real flaw I see is the Slashdot effect would occur even if users don't click on the link explicitly! This effect is largely mitigated by the "intelligent" pre-fetching, but would still be an issue.
Perhaps conscientious site owners could specify, through some sort of markup or whitelist, that their pages ought to be ignored by pre-fetch mechanisms.
I remember working on OpenVMS on VAX and (later) Alpha systems. The OS was pretty cool for its time...it looks like Microsoft lifted a lot of its security features for NTFS in Windows NT.
:-)
Microsoft didn't lift the features. They just lifted the guy who designed VMS, Dave Cutler, and had him architect WindowsNT for them.
I will say that if you DO have the replacement plan, the service is pretty damned good should you need to take advantage of it - one week turnaround from dropping the thing off to it being shipped back and in my possession.
Laptops are one of the few items I'd get a replacement plan for, since they're a) portable and b) far more fragile than any other "portable" item I can possibly think of. For laptops, those plans make perfect sense (assuming the terms of the agreement are sufficiently generous to be worth the cost).
For things like TVs, though... man, what's the point? I've never even heard of a TV that stopped working in the first couple of years. I mean... it HAPPENS... but not 10% of the time, and 10% is what those plans typically cost. More like 0.1% of the time.
Nasty - best way to do a "DELETE ... WHERE" if you're at an SQL console is to do ...
"SELECT something FROM table WHERE conditions"
then, once you're happy that it's showing you the things to delete, backup the command and remove the "SELECT something" and replace it with "DELETE". Much safer :-)
:D
Oh, hell yes. That's what I've been doing in all the years since.
Back in my first year or two of programming full-time, I deleted some LIVE data belonging to a customer, because I forgot the "where" clause. For those not familiar with SQL, you'd say the following to delete only certain rows from a table:
...that will delete all rows from that table. (Actually, I did type the WHERE clause, but I had only part of the statement highlighted, so that's the only part that got executed.)
...Right? :P I've continued to work with SQL databases for the past 7 years, and I literally NEVER execute a DELETE statement without thinking about that fateful day. Never ever, even if it's data that doesn't matter.
"Delete From SomeTable Where SomeTable.SomeField > 500"
However, if simply you type:
"Delete From SomeTable"
What a nightmare. Obviously it was my own stupid fault, but to make matters worse, the IT dudes weren't performing nightly backups as they'd promised, compounding the problem. Recovery of the table from the transaction logs proved impossible for several reasons. It cost our company a few thousand dollars to re-conduct our client's survey and we had to endure a lot of screaming.
I consider myself lucky to have done this early in my career, on a small job that amounted to thousands of dollars instead of 5-, 6-, or 7-figure dollar amounts. I figure it's the sort of thing that everybody does once and never does again.
If you create something you can show a prospective employer, not only are you gaining experience but it goes a long way towards showing you're a self-starter and eager to learn.
I'm in "in the trenches" programmer, not a manager who does hiring. But I've been doing it for about 8 years, and I've been sometimes involved in the hiring process at the companies I've worked for.
Anyway, I agree with the above post. To me, a person who loves this stuff enough to code something up on their own has the right mentality to be a talented programmer. In fact, I've seen somebody with no professional experience whatsoever get hired that way... the person doing the hiring was so impressed at the kid's demo software that he hired him right away. He turned out to be a brilliant programmer.
Hiring people is an expensive, crucial process. So managers face a lot of heat when new hires don't work out. Furthermore, we all know that a lot of new hires *don't* work out.
That's why IT certifications can help people get hired. If a manager takes a chance on an "unproven" but possibly brilliant guy with no certs, she's going to have a lot of explaining to do if that new hire turns out to suck.
However, if she hires somebody with all the proper certifications, she can have a) piece of mind b) a nice, plausible excuse if the new dude doesn't work out. "He had all his certifications and gave an impressive interview - we did everything right, but the guy just turned out to be a dude"
For whatever it's worth, I'm a programmer with no certifications. And I think that references are more important than certs, at least in the hiring processes *I've* seen, from both the hiring and the hiree end. However, there's no denying that certifications can be a nice comfort factor as well as be a deciding point between two otherwise-equivalent potential hires.
I'm not sure why you were modded down, apart from your MTBF numbers for IDE being a bit odd. Still, that is another good point. Here's a page that really covers the SCSI vs IDE debate well:
That pages does a good job of explaining why SCSI is "better", in terms of MTBF, seek time, etc. However, I can't help but feel that those numbers are kind of missing the original poster's requirements, which were for a *personal* fileserver. The MTBF for IDE may be lower, but in a RAID-1 or higher setup, this isn't really an issue. Realistically, multiple drives aren't going to fail *at once*.
For a home fileserver, IDE is more than fast enough, unless you're dealing with many gigabytes of data (video editing?). There's also the noise/heat/power issue of having multiple 10,000 or 15,000RPM drives spinning around the clock. A couple of 7,200RPM IDE drives in RAID-1 are quiet enough to run in my bedroom while I sleep; can the same be said for fast SCSI drives?
Don't get me wrong: SCSI is wonderful when screaming-fast performance and/or lots of concurrent users are a requirement, and things like price, noise, and power aren't a factor. Nobody disputes that. But for small office/home use, I don't always think it's the best choice.
For a few years I used an inexpensive (about $50) Highpoint ATA-100 RAID card on my home development server. It was perfectly adequate. I ran two drives in a RAID-1 config. Read/Write speed was very comparable to a single-drive solution, since it was a dual-channel card and I only had one drive on each channel.
I didn't have any hardware failures, so I didn't get a chance to give it a "real" disaster recovery test, but when I disassembled that PC and plugged the drives into another machine, each one was perfectly readable. So I'm assuming that, if one of the drives had failed, I would have been able to access the data on the other drive with zero complications and problems.
I don't think you *want* a more complicated solution than this for home or small business use. For home use, two hard drives are plenty noise- and heat-producing enough. The only reason you'd want a higher RAID level would be if you needed hot-swappability, or ATA-100 performance was a real bottleneck, neither of which would be a factor for home/small office use. A higher RAID level would give you less "wasted" disk space, but it's still going to be more expensive overall, since any kind of RAID-5 card will be far more expensive than a $50 (or built-in) RAID-1 solution.
One thing I didn't like: the drives never seemed to spin down, no matter how I played with Win2K Server's power settings. I don't know if that was the driver or OS's fault, but I didn't like having those guys spin 24/7.
A patent all depends on how broad you make the claims, but the first thing I thought of is the aircraft IFF [dean-boys.com] (identification friend or foe) transponder which dates back to WWar II. A radio signal is sent out to an aircraft and an identification is returned - definitely 'rfid' on an airspace scale.
What's unique about RFID is that the responding device (ie, the RFID tag on your clothes, or your Mobil Speedpass keychain, or your FreedomPay tag) isn't self-powered. Most RFID chips have no internal power source; they get their power from the RF waves broadcast from the RFID reader. The power from the RF waves powers the RFID chip long enough for the chip to power up, and broadcast a reply to the RFID reader's query.
Now that's cool. And it's also what makes them so low-cost and useful (for good and bad). You can literally print those RFID tags; no need to include a battery.
He has a patent for it, after all. And we all know that the US Parent Office only grants patents when there are clear examples of existing prior art, right? Think about it!
Most importantly of all, it needs to support server-side calendar store!
# share
Thunderbird can publish calendars that are compatible with Apple's iCal calendar format. It's not exactly a replacement for groupware-type stuff like Exchange, as far as I can tell, but you can subscribe to others' calendars and keep your own calendar online so that you can access it from whereever you want.
More info: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/faq.html
"Speed. Though I'm sure many can provide their own anecdotal evidence on how iTunes works fine on their machines, that doesn't invalidate the many, MANY claims of iTunes being a bloated, resource hog (at least on Windows.)."
Performance and start-up time got a lot better for me with the updates Apple has released - the initial release of iTunes had a "lag time" of serveral seconds between the application gaining focus, and when the application actually became responsive, but that's gone now.
It's not as resource-stingy as Winamp, but on what sort of machine is iTunes too "bloated"? Right now it's using 17MB of memory, with about a 20GB library of songs, and performance is snappy on my 1600mhz Duron - a $40 cpu, hardly "high-end". Perhaps if you've got an older machine, the resource usage of iTunes might be a problem, but on anything reasonably modern performance is quite acceptable. I've also heard anecdotally that it runs just fine on 600mhz G3 iMacs.
"Though I love iTunes, it isn't really competing or matching up against the progress of other players. While ease-of-use and "party mixes" might be good enough for your average teen or someone who doesn't ask for much, for myself and others looking for the best music experience, they're falling behind other players in terms of quality in favor of promoting their store/brand."
I have exactly the opposite opinion - for small music collections, other software like WinAmp and Foobar work fine, but for large librariesI find iTunes' ease-of-use when it comes to playlist management to be indispensible. Other applications seek to emulate iTunes' playlist and smart playlist features, and sometimes *exceed* iTunes' capability, but I've found them clunky to use by comparison.
I agree that iTunes is missing some features, but of all the imperfect software on the market, I think that iTunes is the closest to perfect. (also, even though it doesn't play certain formats like Ogg "out of the box", there are easily installable plugins that handle most formats known to mankind)
I'm not a doctor, but two things have helped me...
:P
1. Try to have a variety of motion. I think the key part of "repetitive stress injury" that most people overlook is "repetitive". Think about it- human bodies are designed to be in motion as long as you're awake. But evolution has not designed our bodies to make the same, small, twitchy, repetitive motions over and over again for 8, 9, or 10 hours a day. So rather than trying to reduce the amount of motion your body and hands do, switch it up a bit-change chair, armrest, and keyboard positions.
1a. For the reasons listed in #1, I suspect that "hunt and peck" typing might be better than "correct" typing for one's hands and wrists in this regard- I have a greater variety of motion as my hands roam around the keyboard like a piano than a "proper" touch-typist. And, after many years of practice, I can even do it without looking.
2. Get an AWESOME wristrest. Seriously. Drop $20 on a niiiiiice thick, gel-filled wrist rest. Also, and this is KEY - get the kind with a nice, soft, shiny, synthetic cloth (neoprene or whatever) surface that is pleasant to slide your wrists across. If it does not have that property, you will not use it properly, because you will then LIFT your wrists off the wristrest while they move around, thusly defeating the purpose of the wristrest. The idea is to have the wristrest constantly supporting as much of the weight of your wrists as possible.
Hope this helps. BTW, I'm 27 and these things have worked for me so far. Around 4 years ago I started to get some pain and tingling; adopting these practices has left me comfortable and symptom-free since then.
I'm not a doctor, but two things have helped me... 1. Try to have a variety of motion. I think the key part of "repetitive stress injury" that most people overlook is "repetitive". Think about it- human bodies are designed to be in motion as long as you're awake. But evolution has not designed our bodies to make the same, small, twitchy, repetitive motions over and over again for 8, 9, or 10 hours a day. So rather than trying to reduce the amount of motion your body and hands do, switch it up a bit-change chair, armrest, and keyboard positions. 1a. For the reasons listed in #1, I suspect that "hunt and peck" typing might be better than "correct" typing for one's hands and wrists in this regard- I have a greater variety of motion as my hands roam around the keyboard like a piano than a "proper" touch-typist. And, after many years of practice, I can even do it without looking. :P
2. Get an AWESOME wristrest. Seriously. Drop $20 on a niiiiiice thick, gel-filled wrist rest. Also, and this is KEY - get the kind with a nice, soft, shiny, synthetic cloth (neoprene or whatever) surface that is pleasant to slide your wrists across. If it does not have that property, you will not use it properly, because you will then LIFT your wrists off the wristrest while they move around, thusly defeating the purpose of the wristrest. The idea is to have the wristrest constantly supporting as much of the weight of your wrists as possible.
Hope this helps. BTW, I'm 27 and these things have worked for me so far. Around 4 years ago I started to get some pain and tingling; adopting these practices has left me comfortable and symptom-free since then.
...next time that guy shows up in Munich on a sales call.
"Okay, you know all that stuff I told you? Nevermind. I've got something better, now... hey! Put down the pitchforks! Aiiiiieeee!"
I dunno, choice, maybe? Because it is being offered and some people perceive it as better value than other offerings? As long as they have willing, paying customers, I say more power to them.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be choice - I'd love to see more choices on the market, as well as cheap PowerPC hardware, like I said. But it's also a marketplace reality that you need to do *something* better than others in order to stand out, and for the life of me I can't figure out what on Earth Amiga supposedly does better in 2004.
Windows - Market share, lots of apps, retail presense, game support Macs/OSX - Sleek and sexy, superior OS, killer apps for certain markets such as Final Cut Linux - Open source community, corporate support from IBM, etc AmigaOS - ???
I'm not saying that it shouldn't exist... I'm asking what's the appeal?
When Amigas were in their heyday, they had a lot of stuff that nobody else had- a lightning fast graphics blitter chip, a modern OS, and video capability. There were quite a few areas where they were demonstrably and clearly lightyears (or Lightwaves ;-P) ahead of everybody else at the time.
Totally the opposite now, though. Other computers have had all that stuff for at least ten years. So what's the "raison d'etre" for Amigas, now? Is there anything that the AmigaOS does better than other OSs?
I'm not trolling; I just don't see the selling point to these things. More OS and hardware choices are always a Good Thing, and I'd love to see the rise of cheap PowerPC motherboards. But either I'm absolutely failing to comprehend the selling points of the new AmigaOS, or there simply aren't any. I would like somebody to prove me wrong and point some out, I really would!
Which model Shuttles have you dealt with?
:P
I've used three models: the original SV24 (Celeron, no heat pipe), the SN41G2 (AthlonXP 2500, heatpipe) and the SN45G (AthlonXP 3000, heatpipe).
The SV24 is really noisy and high-pitched. But the other two are nearly silent. You may have been using an older BIOS, or had some funky BIOS settings, if you had noise troubles.... newer Shuttle BIOSs allow you to enable fan control that keeps the fans near-silent at normal temperatures. If you set the BIOS to have the fans at full blast 100% the time, yes, they're very noisy, but this doesn't need to be an issue with the proper BIOS version and/or settings. Newer Shuttles come with the BIOSes already updated and configured properly, so for somebody buying a Shuttle today, it's not an issue.