This anouncement effectively signals the death of wireless networking in business networks;
Bullshit. The underlying encryption is based on AES*. AES is not a toy algorithm, and is designed to defend against specialized cracking hardware, and all other known attacks. It is *plenty* strong enough to hold up to a 100X increase in cracking speed, as long as you use good keys, which hopefully you are in a business environment.
I'm willing to believe that a key handling vulnerability might exist in WPA, or a flaw in AES, but the notion that brute force has brought about the death of WPA in business networks is just absurd. At best, this is a reminder to use good keys.
any network handling sensitive data should start using VPN encryption on machines connecting over Wi-Fi networks, or stop using these networks altogether.
Do you think your VPN software has a better underlying algorithm than AES?
* Unless you're using TKIP, which is a toy algorithm, which exists for backwards hardware compatibility, and in my experience isn't used by anyone who cares about security... But even there, the potential attack vectors are through algorithm weaknesses, not brute forcing the keys.
The categories are fuzzy, of course, but I see two main ones:
1) What I call a netbook, which is a reduced-functionality, super tiny notebook, with emphasis on wireless connectivity, startup time, and battery life, to give you a minimal terminal to access your online life from anywhere. It's cheap enough that you'd likely buy it in addition to a normal notebook, and between being rugged (SSD) and cheap, you wouldn't worry about banging it around as you take it everywhere. It doesn't apologize for not starting OpenOffice quickly, or other traditional things you'd do with a notebook (let alone gaming)... That's not its purpose, and if you miss those things, look at #2. The original Eee nailed it.
2) Sub-sub-notebooks. These are the "larger" ones, which work as super light notebook for people who travel away from their main PC a lot. More CPU, a little heavier, a much bigger screen, somewhat less battery life, and you get a tiny, convenient notebook. It costs more. It's more about "running applications" than "hop online for a second". See: Dell, or the new Eee.
For me, the perfect netbook starts with #1, and keeps going in the direction of small, light, power efficient, instant-on, connectivity everywhere, and feels no shame about its limitations. To improve, try adding one of those trick transflective flip-around displays from the OLPC, and an ultra-low-power display-only mode to make it a usuable ebook... Or just put an e-ink display on the lid. Some are adding cell data interfaces... Good move, though plan pricing will probably render it useless.
I believe we have a decent amount of proof that unlicensed bandwidth works well: WiFi, cordless phones, and a myriad of other technologies [....]
Unlicensed bandwidth works great for very low power devices where you normally have the same person in charge of both ends of the connection. My wifi basically covers my house, and only causes moderate interference to one house-width on each side of me. With a dozen channels to hop between, things work out OK. If you scan wireless networks, you'll see 2 or 3 in a suburban setting, or 7 or 8 in an apartment complex... Low enough that there's not much incentive for aggressive competition over bandwidth, and so spectrum licensing is unnecessary.
Cell towers are a different story. They operate at higher power, from higher altitudes, to cover *much* larger swaths of land. Since the endpoints are controlled by different people (service providers vs customers), the strategy of the service providers becomes "Cover all the channels at the highest power possible so I'm the signal people will choose, and bonus points for interfering with other networks". You end up with companies trying to exploit loopholes in what regulations there are (say, using tunable antenna arrays to broadcast beacons extra-strong toward potential customers, while reducing data power to stay within regulated average power limits).
By assigning a company a specific band, their objective narrows to making the best use of their band. That's to everyone's benefit, at the expense of there being less competition... But at least the competition is trying to make efficient use of a limited resource, instead of turning it into a noisy mess.
This report is particularly bad since they do not record/report any decrease in exhaust temperature, a necessary sign of increased efficiency (work extraction from heat energy).
Nitpick: Reduced exhaust temperature is a sign of increased thermodynamic efficiency. If this device works, it would be due to increased combustion efficiency.
A proper test for overall efficiency would be to put the engine on a dyno, and test the power output per fuel input.
So let me ask you, what would you, in all your wisdom, do if you woke up tommorow as the product manager of Windows tommorow?
Heroin.
But to make this problem go away for good, I'd support doing this. The brand is screwed, and they just have to move on. Getting a real, significant release out would be better, but MicroSoft's never been able to get their major releases out quickly, so they have to ship a stopgap.
I don't think it's a bad decision from a business perspective, given where they are. I'm just surprised their marketing guys let them get into this mess.
It *is* an improvement, but could arguably be described as a refined and matured version of Vista, with a couple new features. It's a bigger change, especially from the user perspective, than XP RTM to XP SP2, but much smaller than XP SP2 to Vista.
Well, thats my point, really. Because of the stigma around Vista, instead of releasing some good service packs for Vista, they're rolling them up, adding a few new features they were working on that don't belong in a service pack (like the UI changes), and calling it a new release... Because at this point the Vista brand is hopeless, and they need to move on.
I'm not criticizing that as a business decision. It's a logical thing to do, from where they are. I'm just astounded that they've screwed up their PR and marketing of Vista so badly that they've had to resort to this. Normally they manage to pull off their overpromise and underdeliver cycle smoothly enough that after some initial backlash (Protesters at the 98SE launch come to mind...) people calm down and just buy it. Not this time...
The name. They couldn't figure out how to salvage Vista trademark, so they're just making some relatively minor changes, and releasing it with a new name.
I've been a PayTrust customer for a long time. I was originally a PayMyBills customer, but the service has been the same even after they were bought out. It works exactly as advertised, and I'm completely satisfied with what they do.
I use them because I am simply terrible at keeping track of paperwork. I know some people can do it. My mother can't understand why I can't do something that is so easy for her, but I fail miserably when I try. Things stack up, I lose track of which ones I paid with a credit card when they call me to collect the delinquent accounts, and if I want to look through my history, my files were so terrible I'd never find what I needed.
Then there was PayTrust. I don't think of it as automatic bill payment. Instead, it's an automated filing service, and a check writing service. They receive bills, and file them into various categories for me, keep track of which ones I haven't yet paid, and after I review them and tell them how much to pay, they print and mail a check on my behalf. The few bucks a month they charge much more than covers the late fees I used to incur by losing track of things. Even if it weren't for that, their fee would be worth it for hassle reduction, and for having easy to access, categorized records.
They have the ability to automatically pay things if you want. I use it for a few small, fixed costs, like my phone bill for the DSL line. My credit cards are set to automatically make a minimum payment before it's due if I haven't reviewed and manually set a payment amount.
I have had zero problems with their service ever. The fearmongering is completely misplaced, IMO. If I don't tell them to pay an account, they won't. I have full faith in that, because they have always handled it correctly in the past, and have no incentive to try to slime something by. I'm even a privacy nut, but really, there's nothing on my credit card that I care if people know. In a worst case if someone someone stole all their records and published them, they'd find out that I've *gasp* paid for porn a couple times. Bring it... The risk-reward profile is fine.
OTOH, I would never authorize a phone company to autobill my credit card (pull billing). Phone companies are detestable, soulless, unethical piles of crap, and have not earned the trust to have the responsibility of billing me the same amount every month and not silently try to tack on more services. I completely agree with TFA's criticism of this method.
If you're in a software shop, you'll have a lot of IT people to support a large number of people whose job revolves around computers.
If it's a restaurant chain, probably not so many.
If you're running a retail web site, a stock exchange, a telephone company, or anything where you bleed money fast when the computers are unhappy, you'll probably have some extra IT guys around to tend to them.
If you're a law firm and you're using the computers for secretaries to type up memos, it's not as big a deal.
The ratio also turns more IT-heavy as a company gets larger, because the systems get more complicated. A company with ten employees just needs desktops. A company with a hundred needs a few servers. A company with ten thousand can have some incredibly sophisticated infrastructure.
What is reasonable? Take the number of computers you have, and multiply by the rate that you lose money if they aren't working. That'll let you estimate the scale pretty well, excluding management overhead as the company gets bigger.
... But as someone who dabbles in both sides, I'd suggest you look into hacking some hardware.
I don't have enough details to give you the specifics, but here's a generic solution in general terms:
First, look how you can simplify your problem. Does the music really need to be through the same headset? If you can play it through speakers, you can eliminate mixing, which makes things easier. If you need to mix, it depends what kind of headset you have. USB? Line out/mic-in? USB will limit your options.
I'll assume it's analog, so we need to mix a line-level out from your sound card with a line-level out from the phone. Many cheap phones provide a line-out, or you can just add an amp to the handset connection of your existing phone, or perhaps even get away with just a transformer or even wiring straight in. Experiment and see what works.
Mixing can be done with a DJ-style mixer. This also gives you convenient knobs to turn up and down your music and callers' voices. So just plug the sound card line out and the phone's line out into the mix board and you're ready to go.
You'll need some sort of switch to answer your phone. Buy a DPDT toggle switch. Wire one half into the phone's hook switch. Use the other half to control a mute button / kill switch / input select / any other control on your DJ mixer which can be used to cut out the music input. If your mixer doesn't have this, or you mix some other way, you can use the second half of the switch to control a pair of relays, which cut out the signal from the sound card. Now you can answer without picking up the handset, and the music will cut out at the same time.
Possible variations on this theme: Wire the phone line-out to your computer's line-in, and wire the second half of the DPDT to control a pin on your parallel port, then write a small program to poll the port and mute the line-in or pause the MP3 playback when the bit toggles. This moves some functionality into the computer; I'm sure you can figure out the tradeoffs.
The advantages of a hardware solution like this are: Your phone no longer depends on the computer to work; you get convenient hardware knobs to adjust the audio; you can answer the phone with a hardware switch instead of trying to find your phone app; and you hopefully have fun hacking together a simple but useful electronics project.
Good luck with your new job, and whatever phone solution you create!
I agree with this. I don't tend to ask a lot of questions of the community myself, but when searching I've found the Ubuntu community answers questions pretty well.
I started on Slackware, and back in those days, it really made you do your homework to accomplish anything. It took me a long time before I even got X working, or a basic mail config... And I loved it. This was great at that time in my nerd life: I was only supporting my desktop. I'm a geek who enjoys fiddling with things and learning how they work, and doing so, I learned a TON about how Linux and Unix work. I wouldn't be where I am today without that.
These days, I support far too many machines, and I can't give that level of attention to each of them, so I'm really appreciative of Ubuntu's ability to make 98% of what I need work right out of the box, because it lets me spend more of my time fiddling with the parts that actually need to be custom-hacked... And I appreciate that Ubuntu keeps the hacking easy.
I didn't mean to imply that Just Works was the only way to go, though. I love tearing into the guts of complicated technical things, and I'm glad that there are distros out there that cater to this.
I was a Debian user for a very long time at home, and on my personal servers, and I supported Red Hat Enterprise at work, which was a necessary compromise. I experimented with other distros many times, but always kept coming back to Debian, because in the long run, it ran smoothest. Setting it up as a desktop (or laptop!) required a lot of work, but when done, it was bulletproof.
One day I tried Ubuntu in my usual spirit of checking out what the competition was up to... And I was blown away. Everything Just Worked even on my balky laptop. And yet, under the hood, it is just a refined Debian system, and when I need to change something (rare, due to the attention to detail in the base install) it could be done easily without breaking things, or fighting against a configuration system... Fully easy and refined, yet fully hackable.
There's no going back, the same as I would never go back to Red Hat from Debian, or to Slackware from Red Hat.
Other important factors are:
Fast release cycle to keep apps up to date (Gentoo does well here, RHEL was fair, Debian was failing miserably)
Good QA before release (Debian's has always been excellent, RHEL fair, Gentoo fair)
A good security update process (Debian's excellent, RHEL usually worked OK in exchange for money, Gentoo... should not be used on a server.)
It Just Works (RHEL fair, Debian poor, Gentoo is aimed at a different market, so I won't say they failed, but it certainly doesn't Just Work)
A pragmatic approach to handling non-free components (RHEL and Debian make you deal with Nvidia drivers yourself, and when they upgrade the kernel and it breaks X, and you need to work... you go deal with it yourself. Again. And again. Fail. Debian is all about Free, so their lack of codecs is understandable, but if you want it to Just Work, Debian doesn't. Ubuntu struck a good balance, nagging you that you were using non-free software, but happily installing and maintaining it for you if that was your choice.)
Commercial support (RHEL is obviously a leader here, support for Debian is only fair since it requires third parties, and Gentoo is simply not aimed at people who want support)
Available software (RHEL's pretty good with a number of people producing RPMs, especially if you need closed-source software; Debian's good with an extremely large package selection; most other distros have a fairly small package base, and few people interested in supplying third-party packages, so poor. Ubuntu shares Debian's excellent pre-built selection, and most third-party packages for Debian install smoothly.)
Putting the user's interests first (Debian puts Freedom first - many people value this, but Ubuntu gives the option to prioritize Just Works, while maintaining a general commitment to software freedom. RHEL made me waste a lot of time managing licenses so I could update; while understandable, they're putting their profits ahead of my interests.)
So in my view, it's no one thing - they've just managed to do well in many areas, without screwing up any major aspect.
My in-laws run a CD repair business. (Link excluded to prevent accusations of spam.) Mostly they buy beat up junk in bulk lots, fix them up and resell them at a profit, but they can easily handle salvaging damaged collections too.
The machine they use is a professional-grade one that you can drop the most horribly mangled CDs into, and a few minutes later they come out looking *new*. Search around the net a bit, and you'll find plenty of mom-and-pop operations that will be able to do this for you for a reasonable fee.
For a more DIY approach, if you're happy being able to get the CD readable once so you can rip-and-reburn it: Try nose grease. In private to avoid funny looks, hold the CD up to the front of your nose, and give it a good wipe. Spread the grease mark out with your fingers, and notice how all the scratches are now much less visible. The nose grease fills in small scratches, and it has an index of refraction close enough to the polycarbonate to make it optically sound. I've had very good luck doing this after the whitening toothpaste trick others have mentioned. The whitening toothpaste makes a good first pass, but leaves a little haze... The nose grease fills in the haze, and makes the CD salvagable.
Governments ares run by people even more deceptive than you could ever imagine.
...are you talking about the same people that couldn't even keep a simple blow-job quiet?
This comment just goes to show they could be more deceptive than you could ever imagine.
I don't buy the 9-11 conspiracy, but I absolutely believe that the guys in charge could orchestrate a blow job fiasco to distract us from other underhanded plans, while simultaneously making us view them as utterly incapable of running a giant conspiracy.
I'm not saying this is true, but it's plausible. If I was an evil overlord, I'd have a program to keep a constant stream of these fake situations flowing.
I'm not the OP, but this is being sillily unreasonable.
Not necessarily. Do you consider your data safe in the hands of everyone who has admin rights to the machine? Do they keep the machine patched and secured to a level appropriate for your secrets?
The answers to these questions depend on your threat model.
In my experience, attempting to legislate common courtesy, or any other sort of common sense, just results in people feeling like they don't have any obligation to obey common sense as long as they stay within the bounds of the law.
I think you're mixing your stories up. Most devices continue to use a small trickle of power even when they're soft-off, on the order of a watt or two. That's still a problem worth investigating, but it's only a small number of devices that use more than a few percent of their on power when they're soft-off.
Perhaps he belongs on a "greatest trolls ever" list somewhere, but I think Thompson should come in below:
* Mahatma Gandhi
* Michael Moore
* Jonathan Swift
* Fred Phelps
* Osama bin Laden
Adolph Hitler should get honorable mention for severe disruption of political discourse for well over half a century, but he doesn't get to be on the list because I'm pretty sure that wasn't his motive.
RAID 1+0 is the way to go for redundancy. Unless you're unlucky enough to lose both drives in one of the pairs making up the array, you can survive more than one drive failing. Actually, RAID 6 is preferable these days. It'll allow you to fail ANY two drives without data loss.
This summary takes the article's original title, which compares how this will hurt Google, but help YouTube, as an example of how the new ranking method will affect different sites.
If the ratings didn't change with a new metric, it wouldn't really be a new metric, would it? Why does Slashdot need to spin this just for the negative side?
Personally, I think this is a good change. Page views are a terrible metric, and encourage sites to make bad design choices, like breaking articles into twenty parts to make you keep clicking for more. In the end, the people who look at these metrics (ie, advertisers), are mainly interested in how much time people's eyes are spending on the site. So why not measure that directly?
Slashdot Mirror
This is seriously overhyped. #1:
This anouncement effectively signals the death of wireless networking in business networks;
Bullshit. The underlying encryption is based on AES*. AES is not a toy algorithm, and is designed to defend against specialized cracking hardware, and all other known attacks. It is *plenty* strong enough to hold up to a 100X increase in cracking speed, as long as you use good keys, which hopefully you are in a business environment.
I'm willing to believe that a key handling vulnerability might exist in WPA, or a flaw in AES, but the notion that brute force has brought about the death of WPA in business networks is just absurd. At best, this is a reminder to use good keys.
any network handling sensitive data should start using VPN encryption on machines connecting over Wi-Fi networks, or stop using these networks altogether.
Do you think your VPN software has a better underlying algorithm than AES?
* Unless you're using TKIP, which is a toy algorithm, which exists for backwards hardware compatibility, and in my experience isn't used by anyone who cares about security... But even there, the potential attack vectors are through algorithm weaknesses, not brute forcing the keys.
or indeed that my air freshener is busily filling my surroundings with "contaminants".
Actually, that's not too inaccurate, if you look at some of the crap in air fresheners.
Personally, I think they're obnoxious, and ARE contaminating my surroundings.
The categories are fuzzy, of course, but I see two main ones:
1) What I call a netbook, which is a reduced-functionality, super tiny notebook, with emphasis on wireless connectivity, startup time, and battery life, to give you a minimal terminal to access your online life from anywhere. It's cheap enough that you'd likely buy it in addition to a normal notebook, and between being rugged (SSD) and cheap, you wouldn't worry about banging it around as you take it everywhere. It doesn't apologize for not starting OpenOffice quickly, or other traditional things you'd do with a notebook (let alone gaming)... That's not its purpose, and if you miss those things, look at #2. The original Eee nailed it.
2) Sub-sub-notebooks. These are the "larger" ones, which work as super light notebook for people who travel away from their main PC a lot. More CPU, a little heavier, a much bigger screen, somewhat less battery life, and you get a tiny, convenient notebook. It costs more. It's more about "running applications" than "hop online for a second". See: Dell, or the new Eee.
For me, the perfect netbook starts with #1, and keeps going in the direction of small, light, power efficient, instant-on, connectivity everywhere, and feels no shame about its limitations. To improve, try adding one of those trick transflective flip-around displays from the OLPC, and an ultra-low-power display-only mode to make it a usuable ebook... Or just put an e-ink display on the lid. Some are adding cell data interfaces... Good move, though plan pricing will probably render it useless.
I believe we have a decent amount of proof that unlicensed bandwidth works well: WiFi, cordless phones, and a myriad of other technologies [....]
Unlicensed bandwidth works great for very low power devices where you normally have the same person in charge of both ends of the connection. My wifi basically covers my house, and only causes moderate interference to one house-width on each side of me. With a dozen channels to hop between, things work out OK. If you scan wireless networks, you'll see 2 or 3 in a suburban setting, or 7 or 8 in an apartment complex... Low enough that there's not much incentive for aggressive competition over bandwidth, and so spectrum licensing is unnecessary.
Cell towers are a different story. They operate at higher power, from higher altitudes, to cover *much* larger swaths of land. Since the endpoints are controlled by different people (service providers vs customers), the strategy of the service providers becomes "Cover all the channels at the highest power possible so I'm the signal people will choose, and bonus points for interfering with other networks". You end up with companies trying to exploit loopholes in what regulations there are (say, using tunable antenna arrays to broadcast beacons extra-strong toward potential customers, while reducing data power to stay within regulated average power limits).
By assigning a company a specific band, their objective narrows to making the best use of their band. That's to everyone's benefit, at the expense of there being less competition... But at least the competition is trying to make efficient use of a limited resource, instead of turning it into a noisy mess.
This report is particularly bad since they do not record/report any decrease in exhaust temperature, a necessary sign of increased efficiency (work extraction from heat energy).
Nitpick: Reduced exhaust temperature is a sign of increased thermodynamic efficiency. If this device works, it would be due to increased combustion efficiency.
A proper test for overall efficiency would be to put the engine on a dyno, and test the power output per fuel input.
So let me ask you, what would you, in all your wisdom, do if you woke up tommorow as the product manager of Windows tommorow?
Heroin.
But to make this problem go away for good, I'd support doing this. The brand is screwed, and they just have to move on. Getting a real, significant release out would be better, but MicroSoft's never been able to get their major releases out quickly, so they have to ship a stopgap.
I don't think it's a bad decision from a business perspective, given where they are. I'm just surprised their marketing guys let them get into this mess.
It *is* an improvement, but could arguably be described as a refined and matured version of Vista, with a couple new features. It's a bigger change, especially from the user perspective, than XP RTM to XP SP2, but much smaller than XP SP2 to Vista.
Well, thats my point, really. Because of the stigma around Vista, instead of releasing some good service packs for Vista, they're rolling them up, adding a few new features they were working on that don't belong in a service pack (like the UI changes), and calling it a new release... Because at this point the Vista brand is hopeless, and they need to move on.
I'm not criticizing that as a business decision. It's a logical thing to do, from where they are. I'm just astounded that they've screwed up their PR and marketing of Vista so badly that they've had to resort to this. Normally they manage to pull off their overpromise and underdeliver cycle smoothly enough that after some initial backlash (Protesters at the 98SE launch come to mind...) people calm down and just buy it. Not this time...
The name. They couldn't figure out how to salvage Vista trademark, so they're just making some relatively minor changes, and releasing it with a new name.
How'd I know that people would latch onto that? :)
But since you asked, yes, I've commissioned art. No, I'm not paying to download someone else's used electrons.
I've been a PayTrust customer for a long time. I was originally a PayMyBills customer, but the service has been the same even after they were bought out. It works exactly as advertised, and I'm completely satisfied with what they do.
I use them because I am simply terrible at keeping track of paperwork. I know some people can do it. My mother can't understand why I can't do something that is so easy for her, but I fail miserably when I try. Things stack up, I lose track of which ones I paid with a credit card when they call me to collect the delinquent accounts, and if I want to look through my history, my files were so terrible I'd never find what I needed.
Then there was PayTrust. I don't think of it as automatic bill payment. Instead, it's an automated filing service, and a check writing service. They receive bills, and file them into various categories for me, keep track of which ones I haven't yet paid, and after I review them and tell them how much to pay, they print and mail a check on my behalf. The few bucks a month they charge much more than covers the late fees I used to incur by losing track of things. Even if it weren't for that, their fee would be worth it for hassle reduction, and for having easy to access, categorized records.
They have the ability to automatically pay things if you want. I use it for a few small, fixed costs, like my phone bill for the DSL line. My credit cards are set to automatically make a minimum payment before it's due if I haven't reviewed and manually set a payment amount.
I have had zero problems with their service ever. The fearmongering is completely misplaced, IMO. If I don't tell them to pay an account, they won't. I have full faith in that, because they have always handled it correctly in the past, and have no incentive to try to slime something by. I'm even a privacy nut, but really, there's nothing on my credit card that I care if people know. In a worst case if someone someone stole all their records and published them, they'd find out that I've *gasp* paid for porn a couple times. Bring it... The risk-reward profile is fine.
OTOH, I would never authorize a phone company to autobill my credit card (pull billing). Phone companies are detestable, soulless, unethical piles of crap, and have not earned the trust to have the responsibility of billing me the same amount every month and not silently try to tack on more services. I completely agree with TFA's criticism of this method.
If you're in a software shop, you'll have a lot of IT people to support a large number of people whose job revolves around computers.
If it's a restaurant chain, probably not so many.
If you're running a retail web site, a stock exchange, a telephone company, or anything where you bleed money fast when the computers are unhappy, you'll probably have some extra IT guys around to tend to them.
If you're a law firm and you're using the computers for secretaries to type up memos, it's not as big a deal.
The ratio also turns more IT-heavy as a company gets larger, because the systems get more complicated. A company with ten employees just needs desktops. A company with a hundred needs a few servers. A company with ten thousand can have some incredibly sophisticated infrastructure.
What is reasonable? Take the number of computers you have, and multiply by the rate that you lose money if they aren't working. That'll let you estimate the scale pretty well, excluding management overhead as the company gets bigger.
... But as someone who dabbles in both sides, I'd suggest you look into hacking some hardware.
I don't have enough details to give you the specifics, but here's a generic solution in general terms:
First, look how you can simplify your problem. Does the music really need to be through the same headset? If you can play it through speakers, you can eliminate mixing, which makes things easier. If you need to mix, it depends what kind of headset you have. USB? Line out/mic-in? USB will limit your options.
I'll assume it's analog, so we need to mix a line-level out from your sound card with a line-level out from the phone. Many cheap phones provide a line-out, or you can just add an amp to the handset connection of your existing phone, or perhaps even get away with just a transformer or even wiring straight in. Experiment and see what works.
Mixing can be done with a DJ-style mixer. This also gives you convenient knobs to turn up and down your music and callers' voices. So just plug the sound card line out and the phone's line out into the mix board and you're ready to go.
You'll need some sort of switch to answer your phone. Buy a DPDT toggle switch. Wire one half into the phone's hook switch. Use the other half to control a mute button / kill switch / input select / any other control on your DJ mixer which can be used to cut out the music input. If your mixer doesn't have this, or you mix some other way, you can use the second half of the switch to control a pair of relays, which cut out the signal from the sound card. Now you can answer without picking up the handset, and the music will cut out at the same time.
Possible variations on this theme: Wire the phone line-out to your computer's line-in, and wire the second half of the DPDT to control a pin on your parallel port, then write a small program to poll the port and mute the line-in or pause the MP3 playback when the bit toggles. This moves some functionality into the computer; I'm sure you can figure out the tradeoffs.
The advantages of a hardware solution like this are: Your phone no longer depends on the computer to work; you get convenient hardware knobs to adjust the audio; you can answer the phone with a hardware switch instead of trying to find your phone app; and you hopefully have fun hacking together a simple but useful electronics project.
Good luck with your new job, and whatever phone solution you create!
I agree with this. I don't tend to ask a lot of questions of the community myself, but when searching I've found the Ubuntu community answers questions pretty well.
I started on Slackware, and back in those days, it really made you do your homework to accomplish anything. It took me a long time before I even got X working, or a basic mail config... And I loved it. This was great at that time in my nerd life: I was only supporting my desktop. I'm a geek who enjoys fiddling with things and learning how they work, and doing so, I learned a TON about how Linux and Unix work. I wouldn't be where I am today without that.
These days, I support far too many machines, and I can't give that level of attention to each of them, so I'm really appreciative of Ubuntu's ability to make 98% of what I need work right out of the box, because it lets me spend more of my time fiddling with the parts that actually need to be custom-hacked... And I appreciate that Ubuntu keeps the hacking easy.
I didn't mean to imply that Just Works was the only way to go, though. I love tearing into the guts of complicated technical things, and I'm glad that there are distros out there that cater to this.
I was a Debian user for a very long time at home, and on my personal servers, and I supported Red Hat Enterprise at work, which was a necessary compromise. I experimented with other distros many times, but always kept coming back to Debian, because in the long run, it ran smoothest. Setting it up as a desktop (or laptop!) required a lot of work, but when done, it was bulletproof.
One day I tried Ubuntu in my usual spirit of checking out what the competition was up to... And I was blown away. Everything Just Worked even on my balky laptop. And yet, under the hood, it is just a refined Debian system, and when I need to change something (rare, due to the attention to detail in the base install) it could be done easily without breaking things, or fighting against a configuration system... Fully easy and refined, yet fully hackable.
There's no going back, the same as I would never go back to Red Hat from Debian, or to Slackware from Red Hat.
Other important factors are:
So in my view, it's no one thing - they've just managed to do well in many areas, without screwing up any major aspect.
My in-laws run a CD repair business. (Link excluded to prevent accusations of spam.) Mostly they buy beat up junk in bulk lots, fix them up and resell them at a profit, but they can easily handle salvaging damaged collections too.
The machine they use is a professional-grade one that you can drop the most horribly mangled CDs into, and a few minutes later they come out looking *new*. Search around the net a bit, and you'll find plenty of mom-and-pop operations that will be able to do this for you for a reasonable fee.
For a more DIY approach, if you're happy being able to get the CD readable once so you can rip-and-reburn it: Try nose grease. In private to avoid funny looks, hold the CD up to the front of your nose, and give it a good wipe. Spread the grease mark out with your fingers, and notice how all the scratches are now much less visible. The nose grease fills in small scratches, and it has an index of refraction close enough to the polycarbonate to make it optically sound. I've had very good luck doing this after the whitening toothpaste trick others have mentioned. The whitening toothpaste makes a good first pass, but leaves a little haze... The nose grease fills in the haze, and makes the CD salvagable.
Governments ares run by people even more deceptive than you could ever imagine.
...are you talking about the same people that couldn't even keep a simple blow-job quiet?
This comment just goes to show they could be more deceptive than you could ever imagine.
I don't buy the 9-11 conspiracy, but I absolutely believe that the guys in charge could orchestrate a blow job fiasco to distract us from other underhanded plans, while simultaneously making us view them as utterly incapable of running a giant conspiracy.
I'm not saying this is true, but it's plausible. If I was an evil overlord, I'd have a program to keep a constant stream of these fake situations flowing.
I'm not the OP, but this is being sillily unreasonable.
Not necessarily. Do you consider your data safe in the hands of everyone who has admin rights to the machine? Do they keep the machine patched and secured to a level appropriate for your secrets?
The answers to these questions depend on your threat model.
Nor would you want to.
In my experience, attempting to legislate common courtesy, or any other sort of common sense, just results in people feeling like they don't have any obligation to obey common sense as long as they stay within the bounds of the law.
I think you're mixing your stories up. Most devices continue to use a small trickle of power even when they're soft-off, on the order of a watt or two. That's still a problem worth investigating, but it's only a small number of devices that use more than a few percent of their on power when they're soft-off.
I think YHBT.
You can produce value without having to pay for it, which is the reason fair use (And copyright expirations!) exist.
Cost != Value, grandparent knows it, and he's just screwing with you.
Perhaps he belongs on a "greatest trolls ever" list somewhere, but I think Thompson should come in below:
* Mahatma Gandhi
* Michael Moore
* Jonathan Swift
* Fred Phelps
* Osama bin Laden
Adolph Hitler should get honorable mention for severe disruption of political discourse for well over half a century, but he doesn't get to be on the list because I'm pretty sure that wasn't his motive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
The performance tradeoffs are different from RAID 1+0 of course.
This summary takes the article's original title, which compares how this will hurt Google, but help YouTube, as an example of how the new ranking method will affect different sites.
If the ratings didn't change with a new metric, it wouldn't really be a new metric, would it? Why does Slashdot need to spin this just for the negative side?
Personally, I think this is a good change. Page views are a terrible metric, and encourage sites to make bad design choices, like breaking articles into twenty parts to make you keep clicking for more. In the end, the people who look at these metrics (ie, advertisers), are mainly interested in how much time people's eyes are spending on the site. So why not measure that directly?