In general, a guy who's been spamming is more likely to be the nerdy computer type, and even if he's fit, he's still probably not one to fit in with the social norms of hardened criminals. Meaning once he's inside that prison he's a social outcast. This means he's far more likely to be on the catching end of bubba the pitcher and his gang of violent offenders who wouldn't think twice about shivving someone.
Your "vote" aside. Running from a prison sentence, even if its a minimum security country club is taken VERY seriously. This guy could be looking at many many years in pound-me-in-the-ass and don't let me see the sun kinda prison.
And thats where you use a combination of nuclear, wind, hydro, tidal, etc, as well as some form of capacitance to balance the energy demands in different weather/times of day
I worked in a company with several locations around the country. In their "temp" offices for workers visiting a site from another site they had Aerons in all the guest offices. I wanted to take it with me when I left.
I later found out that if you fail your ergo test 3 times in a row it frees up like $1000 for you to upgrade your office furniture, got me one after that:)
not to mention that by you seeing over it, someone behind you can't see a damn thing.
That more than anything is my biggest beef with SUV's and their drivers. They hamper my perception of the road. With other cars in front of you, you have a sense of whats occurring immediately around you, but ALSO whats occurring up the road from you. Your stop distances improve, etc when you can survey more of the road.
When you're stuck behind an SUV or other large truck you can't see anything except the actions of that vehicle. If there was a crash immediately in front of that truck you wouldn't be able to react until you saw him responding. This drastically cuts down on your time to respond, thus increasing the likelihood of that car hitting the SUV.
So just think about that while you're enjoying looking over traffic, that you might in fact be increasing the chances of being in an accident as a result.
Are you judging that off beta or release? While I didn't think beta was that bad, I was amazed at how much better the release client is. They definitely held back in beta.
I'm one of the early release players AND I played in the closed beta for about 4 months.
While the beta did have its minor issues in the end, you can tell that they were definitely holding back on the production client/game in the beta and focusing heavily on testing the game systems.
The look and feel of the game upon release blows away the beta. The client is half the size and much more stable. I played from launch until the servers came down for the first patch (about 30 hours, minus a few hours to sleep) without a single crash or freeze.
Occasionally you will run across a bush thats shaped strange or similar things, but they appear to be few and far between and largely trivial polish issues. In MMO terms this has been a pristine launch, though admittedly it was only a small subset. The real test will come Wednesday.
From a technical perspective the game is exceptional. I'll leave the deeper content debate for another time, but I'll say in short that I think you're underselling the PvE. The beta again held back a huge amount of the lore/story elements so as not to show all its cards. Any fan of the Conan lore and/or fantasy in general will probably find the storyline progression and heavy quest centric leveling to be very fun.
Heh, I probably sound like an ad or some wicked fanboi. In either case, I wouldn't discount the game. I think 1 mil subs is probably a reasonable possibility. Not going to unseat WoW, but still an achievement for any MMO. The month free play will probably hook more people than you think.
As a side note I'm also seeing a HUGE WoW backlash in the AoC forums and even in game in some guild names. It would appear that there is a very disgruntled subset of WoW players who were waiting for ANYTHING good to come out for them to go to. Seems like every time something new came out it was seriously flawed and those people stuck with WoW. I think finally they have a viable alternative.
While that wins props for most secure, it would also raise a bunch of questions if they find it. Also would require a lot of work to get set up.
In general a fully encrypted disk and dual booting are very normal things for a tech type person to do.
On the policy itself I have to wonder what they would say if you simply say you aren't allowed to show them. For instance you work for a company that is PCI compliant and you potentially have credit information in an encrypted disk? You're bound by your companies compliance and federal privacy law to not give them access to that information without a warrant.
On the flip side for us Digital folks who had been under Compaq, HP was a return to much more what Digital was like than what Compaq was. It was kind of like putting up with 5 years of people saying "the culture won't change" while they tried to change it, to finally going back to a similar culture.
I think more than anything it has to deal with where the companies priorities are.
Compaq's priorities were obviously its PC business, so the Unix/Linux/VMS/etc etc folks felt like they were getting the corporate culture shaft. Then after the HP merger the culture became much more focused on services and enterprise business, so suddenly everyone at traditional Compaq felt their culture was being crushed because the focus was elsewhere.
If HP's focus really is on growing its services, then there is a decent chance that the culture might stay fairly in tact (they want them for how they are). If instead they simply plan on using EDS as a tool for driving other business goals, then there is a fair chance of being pulled into the same corporate culture.
As a final note as a DECPaq HPer. I much preferred HP's culture under Mark Hurd to the culture at Compaq. He's a cost cutter, but he's also made for a very efficient productive well focused company. More than Carly ever did for sure. Even HP's innovations seemed to have started coming back, with some of the recent announcements in nano computing, etc.
You'd be surprised how much code from the 70's is actually still in corporate systems.
A lot of times is code that was written for which the source was later lost or misplaced.
This is one of the reasons VMS has lived on so long. When I was working at HP we constantly had VMS customers coming to us telling us they had some critical binary, but they no longer had the source for it and thus we had to be binary compatible from release to release.
Often times these would be industrial or facility applications dating back to pre 1980. Many written in Cobol or Fortran.
I have no expectations of a dedicated 7Mb connection. I fully realize it will be shared and I'll be lucky to ever get a sustained connection at half that or even a quarter.
Yes I get good burst speeds and low latency, which are fine, but when someone pays $100+ a month for cable/internet I expect them to let me use it as much as I want. If that means downloading 15GB files every night so be it.
The point was more that I'm fairly certain I could use 250GB, but the limiting factor is how slow my actual connection is regardless of what I pay for. If they realistically know that I will see the same performance in a 3Mb, 5Mb, 7Mb line, then they shouldn't charge differently for them. If I pay for a separate level of connection I expect there to be some gain for it, even if that means my share of the overall pipe is 200k on average instead of 150k.
I don't think thats unreasonable depending on what you're doing.
I have a 7Mb Comcast connection and I expect to get to be able to use it.
I have my connection shared out between myself, my room mate, and a collection of devices. We both work from home a decent amount during any given month (I am on call and he works on projects after hours if there is a crunch), plus we both game on our PC's, I have a Linux box I use for ventrilo, and sharing photos with friends, etc. I also have my Xbox, Wii and Tivo running off my network.
For a game beta I'm in I know I've pulled at least 10-20GB alone in the last month. With streaming video and music downloads, etc I could probably hit that cap fairly easily.
All of this is exactly why I pay through the ass to comcast in the first place for the 7Mb connection. And now they tell me I can't do what I pay to do? F-that. I've been waiting for FiOS for month, since it won't be at my place any time soon it looks like it might be time to go back to DSL.
Then again all this would be contingent on actually getting even 800Kb transfer rates when I pay for 7Mb. I'm lucky sometimes if I can pull 200Mb over their service. Though my overnight rates to tend to be higher than 1 Mb. Guessing its tied to shared lines on their network.
Indeed the best thing MS might have going for it was their eventual inclusion of Divx in their media connector.
IF Sony pushes DRM as much as some suspect it will kill this before it even starts, as people won't be able to mix and match formats they have from various places.
I never bothered with the MS content downloads or the iTunes downloads or any of the others, but I've sure as hell loaded up Divx-ed episodes of TV shows over my network to watch on my TV stored on my PC. Thats really the model Sony needs to compete with.
That probably has more to do with the quality of the individual blades. Cheap $1 razor will cut like a cheap $1 razor.
That being said I used to use the 2 blade Gilette razor and have since moved on to a 3. What I have noticed is that it does the job faster and the overall blade lasts longer. What i suspect is happening is that the first blade may dull, but its making the rough cut anyway, then one of the other blades which is sharper follows up with a cleaner cut.
I think the more important advancement has been all the other stuff on the blade head. the mounted springs, the lube strip, the rubber precut strips that tension the skin, etc. I suspect all those contribute more to the newer blades being better.
Indeed, you're also assuming that the company is running at optimal efficiency and any loss of people will hinder performance.
Its very possible that they are cutting entire projects that are producing no tangible benefit, or trimming business functions in other parts of the company (IT consolidation, facilities overhead, administrative staff, etc) Sure some engineers/sales/marketing probably goes too, but they could be tied to projects not currently contributing to the bottom line.
Also if you can change your business models and processes so that fewer people can do more, you could both gain efficiency and increase revenue.
The key really is how the layoffs are applied. They should be targeted and implemented in each location for a specific reason, not just "every group has to lose 10% headcount".
Lay-offs are not almost always ineffective as you state. Lay-offs can actually be quite beneficial to even a healthy company. Trimming dead weight tends to always be a good thing. I know I've hated having to prop up poor performers in the past. I'd rather them get laid off and us bring in a good person and pay them the same amount. the net benefit to the company is a gain.
Additionally companies saddled with all sorts of bloated projects that build over years and years either need to trim that, or they will suffer for it, nothing wrong with cutting your losses wisely rather than carrying a dead albatross along for the sake of seeing something through.
The real power of quantum computing will be in factoring primes. Which most certainly will affect public key crypto, but public key was never the FULL solution. Like anything in crypto different problems have different solutions.
Public key crypto is great in the web age because you can use it for establishing connections, exchanging private keys, etc.
One of the first things you learn in any crypto grad class is that creating the crypto schemes is only part of the problem. Creating the usage scheme is the other. Most man in the middle and other such attacks can defeat the algorithms by which we use crypto far easier than we can defeat the encryption itself. (or just social engineer your way past it)
While it does suck a bit that the heyday of public key crypto might come to an end because of quantum computing, some other scheme will take its place. Perhaps someone will come up with a key gen scheme that doesn't rely on the difficulty of factoring large primes and instead some other mathematical relationship that quantum computing won't be able to stop.
Perhaps the optimal solution will be a mix. Perhaps each public key will in fact be 2 operations. One large prime factor to defeat traditional systems, combined with some as yet created scheme that stops quantum systems (but may be easy to beat on a tradition system).
As with all things, crypto will adapt. Perhaps one day we'll figure out a way using quantum mechanics to create true OTP encryption. Maybe 2 entangled particles or something (I know technically this is impossible, but just making the point maybe there's something we don't know yet that will help us in the future implement todays theoretically impossible/infeasible crypto)
I agree, I've been trying to drop Comcast like a diseased sh!tbrick for about a year now. The only thing keeping me is that I can't find any other service for my area that provides moderately similar service.
I would gladly pay Verizon the same $120 I pay Comcast each month for FiOS internet and TV, but they don't have it in a lot of the Urban parts of Boston yet. I could move 1 town over to the burbs and get it, but thats not where I want to live.
Comcasts horrid DVR, terrible channel quality, horrific network quality, and bandwidth throttling have driven me to my wits end at times, no amount of bandwidth will repair the ill will I have toward them.
I agree, I often tell people I learned more in my first 4 months working than I did in 4 years of college, but I realized that what I was learning in college wasn't how to perform as an engineer, so much as acquiring the tools, language and basis by which to be a productive engineer. Every engineering project is about understanding, solving and creating, but you can't do those things if you can't speak the basic language of engineering with your coworkers.
Additionally you learn the process by which to approach problems. Will I ever have to do an analysis of search algorithms for a real project, probably not, but understanding how performance is tied to algorithm performance allows me to look critically at applications I'm writing today.
If I went into an engineering job without my engineering degree I wouldn't be able to pick up the slightest new concept or approach the simplest problem in any kind of effective manner.
All that being said I went through a CS program during one of the "enrollment booms" around the.com era and the number of fluff students who had no interest, no natural mindset for the material, and marginal motivation ("why do I need to take all this math?"), definitely watered down the grading pool some, but it allowed me to get a higher GPA;)
I think what you also see a lot of times is people starting as engineering majors and ending up as management or other more liberal arts focused majors.
The sad truth also is that I see a lot of the half-assing slackers as the types pulling down large 6 figure salaries expense accounting clients and working their way into the board room.
Slashdot Mirror
But it could be a good source for manufacturing Oxygen. Something we sorta need to survive on long space trips ;)
One would also assume you could potentially use the Oxygen stripped off for other things besides breathing.
The issue at stake here is trademark, not copyright. They sued for trademark infringement on the name.
nothing like hurling hot gooey DNA at each other.
In general, a guy who's been spamming is more likely to be the nerdy computer type, and even if he's fit, he's still probably not one to fit in with the social norms of hardened criminals. Meaning once he's inside that prison he's a social outcast. This means he's far more likely to be on the catching end of bubba the pitcher and his gang of violent offenders who wouldn't think twice about shivving someone.
Your "vote" aside. Running from a prison sentence, even if its a minimum security country club is taken VERY seriously. This guy could be looking at many many years in pound-me-in-the-ass and don't let me see the sun kinda prison.
And thats where you use a combination of nuclear, wind, hydro, tidal, etc, as well as some form of capacitance to balance the energy demands in different weather/times of day
Indeed, greatest chair ever.
:)
I worked in a company with several locations around the country. In their "temp" offices for workers visiting a site from another site they had Aerons in all the guest offices. I wanted to take it with me when I left.
I later found out that if you fail your ergo test 3 times in a row it frees up like $1000 for you to upgrade your office furniture, got me one after that
not to mention that by you seeing over it, someone behind you can't see a damn thing.
That more than anything is my biggest beef with SUV's and their drivers. They hamper my perception of the road. With other cars in front of you, you have a sense of whats occurring immediately around you, but ALSO whats occurring up the road from you. Your stop distances improve, etc when you can survey more of the road.
When you're stuck behind an SUV or other large truck you can't see anything except the actions of that vehicle. If there was a crash immediately in front of that truck you wouldn't be able to react until you saw him responding. This drastically cuts down on your time to respond, thus increasing the likelihood of that car hitting the SUV.
So just think about that while you're enjoying looking over traffic, that you might in fact be increasing the chances of being in an accident as a result.
Are you judging that off beta or release? While I didn't think beta was that bad, I was amazed at how much better the release client is. They definitely held back in beta.
Everyone is OP until about 15-16. The point in the early levels is to learn the game.
Even as a healer I was 1-shotting things up until about 12.
After that it tails off and you need much more damage to kill things.
Level 9 is not a good enough sample to judge a whole game IMO.
I'm one of the early release players AND I played in the closed beta for about 4 months.
While the beta did have its minor issues in the end, you can tell that they were definitely holding back on the production client/game in the beta and focusing heavily on testing the game systems.
The look and feel of the game upon release blows away the beta. The client is half the size and much more stable. I played from launch until the servers came down for the first patch (about 30 hours, minus a few hours to sleep) without a single crash or freeze.
Occasionally you will run across a bush thats shaped strange or similar things, but they appear to be few and far between and largely trivial polish issues. In MMO terms this has been a pristine launch, though admittedly it was only a small subset. The real test will come Wednesday.
From a technical perspective the game is exceptional. I'll leave the deeper content debate for another time, but I'll say in short that I think you're underselling the PvE. The beta again held back a huge amount of the lore/story elements so as not to show all its cards. Any fan of the Conan lore and/or fantasy in general will probably find the storyline progression and heavy quest centric leveling to be very fun.
Heh, I probably sound like an ad or some wicked fanboi. In either case, I wouldn't discount the game. I think 1 mil subs is probably a reasonable possibility. Not going to unseat WoW, but still an achievement for any MMO. The month free play will probably hook more people than you think.
As a side note I'm also seeing a HUGE WoW backlash in the AoC forums and even in game in some guild names. It would appear that there is a very disgruntled subset of WoW players who were waiting for ANYTHING good to come out for them to go to. Seems like every time something new came out it was seriously flawed and those people stuck with WoW. I think finally they have a viable alternative.
While that wins props for most secure, it would also raise a bunch of questions if they find it. Also would require a lot of work to get set up.
In general a fully encrypted disk and dual booting are very normal things for a tech type person to do.
On the policy itself I have to wonder what they would say if you simply say you aren't allowed to show them. For instance you work for a company that is PCI compliant and you potentially have credit information in an encrypted disk? You're bound by your companies compliance and federal privacy law to not give them access to that information without a warrant.
Except that you could encrypt the disks.
In the first case if they make you enter your password and log in, then the encryption is foiled, but that second partition wouldn't do them any good.
If they mirror the whole disk again they are hosed without your pw to log in again later.
HP labs has been on a roll lately, where have you been?
Crossbar-latch? Memristor? (both featured here)
Its very possible that the fundamental shifts in computing over the next 10-15 years will come about heavily from technology coming out of the labs.
At last count the labs were turning out something like 10,000 patents a year.
On the flip side for us Digital folks who had been under Compaq, HP was a return to much more what Digital was like than what Compaq was. It was kind of like putting up with 5 years of people saying "the culture won't change" while they tried to change it, to finally going back to a similar culture.
I think more than anything it has to deal with where the companies priorities are.
Compaq's priorities were obviously its PC business, so the Unix/Linux/VMS/etc etc folks felt like they were getting the corporate culture shaft. Then after the HP merger the culture became much more focused on services and enterprise business, so suddenly everyone at traditional Compaq felt their culture was being crushed because the focus was elsewhere.
If HP's focus really is on growing its services, then there is a decent chance that the culture might stay fairly in tact (they want them for how they are). If instead they simply plan on using EDS as a tool for driving other business goals, then there is a fair chance of being pulled into the same corporate culture.
As a final note as a DECPaq HPer. I much preferred HP's culture under Mark Hurd to the culture at Compaq. He's a cost cutter, but he's also made for a very efficient productive well focused company. More than Carly ever did for sure. Even HP's innovations seemed to have started coming back, with some of the recent announcements in nano computing, etc.
You'd be surprised how much code from the 70's is actually still in corporate systems.
A lot of times is code that was written for which the source was later lost or misplaced.
This is one of the reasons VMS has lived on so long. When I was working at HP we constantly had VMS customers coming to us telling us they had some critical binary, but they no longer had the source for it and thus we had to be binary compatible from release to release.
Often times these would be industrial or facility applications dating back to pre 1980. Many written in Cobol or Fortran.
I have no expectations of a dedicated 7Mb connection. I fully realize it will be shared and I'll be lucky to ever get a sustained connection at half that or even a quarter.
Yes I get good burst speeds and low latency, which are fine, but when someone pays $100+ a month for cable/internet I expect them to let me use it as much as I want. If that means downloading 15GB files every night so be it.
The point was more that I'm fairly certain I could use 250GB, but the limiting factor is how slow my actual connection is regardless of what I pay for. If they realistically know that I will see the same performance in a 3Mb, 5Mb, 7Mb line, then they shouldn't charge differently for them. If I pay for a separate level of connection I expect there to be some gain for it, even if that means my share of the overall pipe is 200k on average instead of 150k.
I don't think thats unreasonable depending on what you're doing.
I have a 7Mb Comcast connection and I expect to get to be able to use it.
I have my connection shared out between myself, my room mate, and a collection of devices. We both work from home a decent amount during any given month (I am on call and he works on projects after hours if there is a crunch), plus we both game on our PC's, I have a Linux box I use for ventrilo, and sharing photos with friends, etc. I also have my Xbox, Wii and Tivo running off my network.
For a game beta I'm in I know I've pulled at least 10-20GB alone in the last month. With streaming video and music downloads, etc I could probably hit that cap fairly easily.
All of this is exactly why I pay through the ass to comcast in the first place for the 7Mb connection. And now they tell me I can't do what I pay to do? F-that. I've been waiting for FiOS for month, since it won't be at my place any time soon it looks like it might be time to go back to DSL.
Then again all this would be contingent on actually getting even 800Kb transfer rates when I pay for 7Mb. I'm lucky sometimes if I can pull 200Mb over their service. Though my overnight rates to tend to be higher than 1 Mb. Guessing its tied to shared lines on their network.
Indeed the best thing MS might have going for it was their eventual inclusion of Divx in their media connector.
IF Sony pushes DRM as much as some suspect it will kill this before it even starts, as people won't be able to mix and match formats they have from various places.
I never bothered with the MS content downloads or the iTunes downloads or any of the others, but I've sure as hell loaded up Divx-ed episodes of TV shows over my network to watch on my TV stored on my PC. Thats really the model Sony needs to compete with.
That probably has more to do with the quality of the individual blades. Cheap $1 razor will cut like a cheap $1 razor.
That being said I used to use the 2 blade Gilette razor and have since moved on to a 3. What I have noticed is that it does the job faster and the overall blade lasts longer. What i suspect is happening is that the first blade may dull, but its making the rough cut anyway, then one of the other blades which is sharper follows up with a cleaner cut.
I think the more important advancement has been all the other stuff on the blade head. the mounted springs, the lube strip, the rubber precut strips that tension the skin, etc. I suspect all those contribute more to the newer blades being better.
Indeed, you're also assuming that the company is running at optimal efficiency and any loss of people will hinder performance.
Its very possible that they are cutting entire projects that are producing no tangible benefit, or trimming business functions in other parts of the company (IT consolidation, facilities overhead, administrative staff, etc) Sure some engineers/sales/marketing probably goes too, but they could be tied to projects not currently contributing to the bottom line.
Also if you can change your business models and processes so that fewer people can do more, you could both gain efficiency and increase revenue.
The key really is how the layoffs are applied. They should be targeted and implemented in each location for a specific reason, not just "every group has to lose 10% headcount".
Lay-offs are not almost always ineffective as you state. Lay-offs can actually be quite beneficial to even a healthy company. Trimming dead weight tends to always be a good thing. I know I've hated having to prop up poor performers in the past. I'd rather them get laid off and us bring in a good person and pay them the same amount. the net benefit to the company is a gain.
Additionally companies saddled with all sorts of bloated projects that build over years and years either need to trim that, or they will suffer for it, nothing wrong with cutting your losses wisely rather than carrying a dead albatross along for the sake of seeing something through.
Somewhat. Private key schemes are still secure.
The real power of quantum computing will be in factoring primes. Which most certainly will affect public key crypto, but public key was never the FULL solution. Like anything in crypto different problems have different solutions.
Public key crypto is great in the web age because you can use it for establishing connections, exchanging private keys, etc.
One of the first things you learn in any crypto grad class is that creating the crypto schemes is only part of the problem. Creating the usage scheme is the other. Most man in the middle and other such attacks can defeat the algorithms by which we use crypto far easier than we can defeat the encryption itself. (or just social engineer your way past it)
While it does suck a bit that the heyday of public key crypto might come to an end because of quantum computing, some other scheme will take its place. Perhaps someone will come up with a key gen scheme that doesn't rely on the difficulty of factoring large primes and instead some other mathematical relationship that quantum computing won't be able to stop.
Perhaps the optimal solution will be a mix. Perhaps each public key will in fact be 2 operations. One large prime factor to defeat traditional systems, combined with some as yet created scheme that stops quantum systems (but may be easy to beat on a tradition system).
As with all things, crypto will adapt. Perhaps one day we'll figure out a way using quantum mechanics to create true OTP encryption. Maybe 2 entangled particles or something (I know technically this is impossible, but just making the point maybe there's something we don't know yet that will help us in the future implement todays theoretically impossible/infeasible crypto)
I agree, I've been trying to drop Comcast like a diseased sh!tbrick for about a year now. The only thing keeping me is that I can't find any other service for my area that provides moderately similar service.
I would gladly pay Verizon the same $120 I pay Comcast each month for FiOS internet and TV, but they don't have it in a lot of the Urban parts of Boston yet. I could move 1 town over to the burbs and get it, but thats not where I want to live.
Comcasts horrid DVR, terrible channel quality, horrific network quality, and bandwidth throttling have driven me to my wits end at times, no amount of bandwidth will repair the ill will I have toward them.
I agree, I often tell people I learned more in my first 4 months working than I did in 4 years of college, but I realized that what I was learning in college wasn't how to perform as an engineer, so much as acquiring the tools, language and basis by which to be a productive engineer. Every engineering project is about understanding, solving and creating, but you can't do those things if you can't speak the basic language of engineering with your coworkers.
.com era and the number of fluff students who had no interest, no natural mindset for the material, and marginal motivation ("why do I need to take all this math?"), definitely watered down the grading pool some, but it allowed me to get a higher GPA ;)
Additionally you learn the process by which to approach problems. Will I ever have to do an analysis of search algorithms for a real project, probably not, but understanding how performance is tied to algorithm performance allows me to look critically at applications I'm writing today.
If I went into an engineering job without my engineering degree I wouldn't be able to pick up the slightest new concept or approach the simplest problem in any kind of effective manner.
All that being said I went through a CS program during one of the "enrollment booms" around the
I think what you also see a lot of times is people starting as engineering majors and ending up as management or other more liberal arts focused majors.
The sad truth also is that I see a lot of the half-assing slackers as the types pulling down large 6 figure salaries expense accounting clients and working their way into the board room.
Doesn't the next rover use an RTG?
No need for solar panels.