I guess you must have some unique skills, or are a leader in your field, or your resume is so good that it would also open doors and guarantee you a new job without references. Pretty confident for this economic environment, huh?
Most of that was international. Cattle class within N. America, and particularly US domestic, has the lowest standards and seems to be last to be upgraded. A few years ago they started charging for a snack (free advertising for the likes of Subway), but somehow dropped the quality even further. What a privilege, especially considering some of the flights are almost as long as the trans-Atlantic ones, and often just as expensive (five hours Toronto to San Francisco, versus 6.5 hours Toronto to London, and under 6 on one occasion).
Not true. Never flown business class in my life. I did accumulate 85,000 miles on Air Canada, United, ANA, Air China and Shanghai Airlines last year, and found standard N. American sockets on many planes in cattle class, especially on Air Canada.
They've been updating their cabin interiors. However, Toronto to Shanghai and Toronto to Sydney (two of the main routes for me) are brand new 777s. When I fly Toronto to London, I pick either a new plane or one with an upgraded cabin - their website specifies, and they have several flights a day to chose from. Too bad you got one that hadn't been updated yet.
Asian Airlines though seem to live in a world of their own when it comes to customer service.
The so called Apple Tax comes with second-to-none customer support. My MBP is just over a year old. My battery started playing up a fortnight ago. I called Apple, and in no time whatsoever they had a brand new replacement battery in the mail to me. Oh, and I bought the laptop in the US, I live in Canada, but I'm currently visiting Australia. Try getting that level of service out of Dell.
I know you're being funny, but isn't it possible to run a MBP off the power socket in the seat? What airline do you go on? I haven't flown Qantas on that route, but I'd imagine United are too shit for the sockets, but Air Canada's planes are beautiful. My work laptops though... my Dell M6300 has a 130W power adapter that immediately overloads those 65W sockets. My older Dell M60 (90W adapter) didn't overload it if the battery was already charged, or I removed it.
I guess when I looked, the upstream rates were ridiculously low. I got the fastest (8Mbs/384Kbs), and have been waiting for over a month for the line to be upgraded to ADSL2+. I work from home, and even this upstream rate is too low. Yes, I could have more quota for the download for fewer dollars, but I'd have to give up some of that upstream throughput. It's not an option. I haven't had upstream so low for ten years, and that was when Bell Canada was still on it's original Nortel platform and not G.DMT - as soon as they pulled the linecard and installed a DSLAM on my phone line, I had 800Kbs from then on. One of our contractors is also here in Australia, with cable, so he gets 18Mbs downstream, but to have sufficient upstream (I guess), he pays through the roof, and still seems to frequently end up being shaped. Maybe I made a poor choice as I wasn't so familiar with the ISP landscape, but now I'm locked in to a six month contract (another irritating concept we don't have in Canada, although I've seen in the UK, which helps lock people in and keep prices up). The line originally had dirt-cheap TPG, but their latency was all over the place, which is a killer for me RDPing in to computers in California and China, and their prices for what I needed weren't really that much less.
You think that's bad? Try Australia: AUD$33 for a pair of tickets in Melbourne recently. I'm only visiting, so I'm happy the AUD$ has dropped from almost parity with the USD$, but it would have sucked six months ago. Bittorrent isn't really an alternative as the internet is tiered and ridiculously expensive (try AUD$90 for 15GB per month, especially when I'm used to paying CAD$25 for the same speed and unlimited bandwidth). Maybe that's why the cinemas can get away with extortion.
With one slight catch: they didn't have anything worth listening to anyway. I had a rental car with XM last year, and I spent a huge amount of time searching through all of the channels, and cursing that I hadn't been able to find the the audio cable for my MP3 player. They were broadcasting rubbish, and unfortunately the CBC were on one of their weird kicks too.
Other countries don't have such a big problem with radio fading as you drive across country. The BBC has several country-wide radio stations, and most modern radios in the UK automatically retune to the new frequencies as reception fades. No advertising too, which is one of my major draws to the CBC in Canada (as well as fairly intelligent and well educated presenters who aren't bombarding us with moronic mindless drivel like most radio presenters).
I used to use this attenna when I was living in Toronto to get my OTA HDTV signals. Way better than any amplified indoor attenna. It's highly directional, which was okay for me as most of the signals came from one place (CN Tower), but could be irritating if you have to rotate it for each channel. My line of sight was straight through several brick walls, and other brick buildings that could presumably cause reflections.
Mouse traps don't kill instantly. I've had to use a hammer on the occasions they haven't. Still more humane though. (recommend dropping the trap with attached mouse in a plastic bag first though)
It's still not a big deal - that's what the load-balancer is for. Take half the servers out of the pool and wait for them to become inactive, then reboot them. Easy.
Toronto FC's home ground of BMO Field used to have a problem with seagulls. Bizarre considering it's a turf and not grass pitch. Then they got a hawk, affectionately named by the fans "Bitchy". There's no problem now.
Having to reboot a server, or restart all the services when a shared library is replaced by a patch makes little difference to me: both cases take it offline and thus unavailable to serve requests. My Windows servers reboot quickly, so it's really not a big deal. Especially as they're behind a load-balancer, so down-time has no effect. Also, most of my servers are still running Windows 2000 Server, which gets rebooted so infrequently that I don't remember the last time I did it... probably when we moved to a new co-lo last summer.
No, I think it's just the reality of what happens. Maybe people don't write exploits until they've seen the issues that Microsoft are patching. A believe a lot issues are reported privately to Microsoft to give them time to investigate and patch. Then public disclosure comes. Then the exploits are implemented.
Microsoft have a shocking history of sitting on a known vulnerability for years, but saying that releasing monthly instead of immediately is a problem is to spread your own FUD. They used to release as they patched, but that was even more problematic and so they responded to their customer's needs. In most cases, exploits don't appear in the wild until Microsoft release a patch for it.
Refused entry in to the US by a rotten apple in the INS. I guess there were a lot of them at the time, which was something that was supposed to be cleaned up when the DHS was created. I was travelling with a former RCMP officer, who couldn't believe what he witnessed that day. US immigration were rather incredulous about the whole thing the next time I tried to visit, five years later. Obviously I'd done nothing wrong or I wouldn't have my Nexus card, which is a zero tolerance programme. It's on my record though for the rest of my life, because of one arsehole. Most Americans don't realise how badly visitors are treated. I travel a lot around the world (just in the last couple of years: US, Canada, UK, Germany, Peru, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Australia and Japan), and nowhere is as bad as the US - if given a choice of visiting US or China, I would pick China any day just because the border is a better experience, even though the risks are perhaps higher if things don't go in your favour.
Great attitude dickhead. Perhaps other countries should take the same attitude towards expat Britons too. You realised 1 in 10 Britons live overseas? How about we start with the 761,000 (2006 numbers) who live in Spain, and send them home? That will surely help, or at least in Spain. Australia has 1.3 million, many of whom are retired and screwed by the British government on their pensions and so costing the Aussie taxpayers a lot of money... I'm sure Gordon Brown will be happy to raise taxes or government debt further to provide for them.
I believe Canada does it. When I returned to Canada last year from one of my trips, the guy at the border swiped my passport, looked at the computer screen, and commented on how much I travel. He hadn't even looked at all the visas and stamps in passport.
The US has definitely been keeping track of everything for years. When I went for the final interview for enrolment in the Nexus programme, the US immigration guy swiped my Canadian passport. After a while he asked me what happened at Detroit in Oct 2000. I'd been refused entry whilst travelling on my British passport, before I had Canadian permanent residency and long before citizenship, but he'd connected my two passports.
Yes, that's so true. The changes that China has gone through in the last 100 years are staggering. Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China gives a fantastic account of what China was like during the Communist Revolution. It brought them forward a millennia in a few years, spreading education, and raising standards for 100 of millions of poor Chinese peasants. But that still left China far behind what we consider a well developed country. Of course, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution didn't really help. Then again in the last ten or fifteen years, it's almost as if China has come forward another millennia, where cities like Shanghai are fairly easy to live in as Westerner. The people there are now beginning to resist change for this reason. Want to build a new Maglev line to Hangzhou or high speed rail link to Beijing? The people organised together and forced the government to re-route it via somebody else's neighbourhood. Out in the country though, people still put up with being relocated because their lives haven't changed as fast and are some way behind.
Hessler's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze is a great account of an American journalist living in China in an area to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. He quite clearly articulates how the people of China passively accept things like this. It's a great read, especially if you've even been to the country. Quite often though, the people think their government is correct and efficient, and that you have to accept some inconvenience for a better future for all. As always, the government is a symptom of the people, and vice-versa.
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And to prove the point, you have a mistake in your two line comment!
I guess you must have some unique skills, or are a leader in your field, or your resume is so good that it would also open doors and guarantee you a new job without references. Pretty confident for this economic environment, huh?
College? That was secondary school maths for me. The sample is definitely big enough, but how representative or random it is is another question.
Most of that was international. Cattle class within N. America, and particularly US domestic, has the lowest standards and seems to be last to be upgraded. A few years ago they started charging for a snack (free advertising for the likes of Subway), but somehow dropped the quality even further. What a privilege, especially considering some of the flights are almost as long as the trans-Atlantic ones, and often just as expensive (five hours Toronto to San Francisco, versus 6.5 hours Toronto to London, and under 6 on one occasion).
Not true. Never flown business class in my life. I did accumulate 85,000 miles on Air Canada, United, ANA, Air China and Shanghai Airlines last year, and found standard N. American sockets on many planes in cattle class, especially on Air Canada.
Wish I hadn't wasted my money on that MagSafe Airline adapter. Never used it. I've always found standard N. American three pin plugs, I think at 110V.
They've been updating their cabin interiors. However, Toronto to Shanghai and Toronto to Sydney (two of the main routes for me) are brand new 777s. When I fly Toronto to London, I pick either a new plane or one with an upgraded cabin - their website specifies, and they have several flights a day to chose from. Too bad you got one that hadn't been updated yet.
Asian Airlines though seem to live in a world of their own when it comes to customer service.
The so called Apple Tax comes with second-to-none customer support. My MBP is just over a year old. My battery started playing up a fortnight ago. I called Apple, and in no time whatsoever they had a brand new replacement battery in the mail to me. Oh, and I bought the laptop in the US, I live in Canada, but I'm currently visiting Australia. Try getting that level of service out of Dell.
I know you're being funny, but isn't it possible to run a MBP off the power socket in the seat? What airline do you go on? I haven't flown Qantas on that route, but I'd imagine United are too shit for the sockets, but Air Canada's planes are beautiful. My work laptops though... my Dell M6300 has a 130W power adapter that immediately overloads those 65W sockets. My older Dell M60 (90W adapter) didn't overload it if the battery was already charged, or I removed it.
I guess my biggest concern with it is that forgetting to turn it off could result in losing GBs from the monthly limit.
I guess when I looked, the upstream rates were ridiculously low. I got the fastest (8Mbs/384Kbs), and have been waiting for over a month for the line to be upgraded to ADSL2+. I work from home, and even this upstream rate is too low. Yes, I could have more quota for the download for fewer dollars, but I'd have to give up some of that upstream throughput. It's not an option. I haven't had upstream so low for ten years, and that was when Bell Canada was still on it's original Nortel platform and not G.DMT - as soon as they pulled the linecard and installed a DSLAM on my phone line, I had 800Kbs from then on. One of our contractors is also here in Australia, with cable, so he gets 18Mbs downstream, but to have sufficient upstream (I guess), he pays through the roof, and still seems to frequently end up being shaped. Maybe I made a poor choice as I wasn't so familiar with the ISP landscape, but now I'm locked in to a six month contract (another irritating concept we don't have in Canada, although I've seen in the UK, which helps lock people in and keep prices up). The line originally had dirt-cheap TPG, but their latency was all over the place, which is a killer for me RDPing in to computers in California and China, and their prices for what I needed weren't really that much less.
You think that's bad? Try Australia: AUD$33 for a pair of tickets in Melbourne recently. I'm only visiting, so I'm happy the AUD$ has dropped from almost parity with the USD$, but it would have sucked six months ago. Bittorrent isn't really an alternative as the internet is tiered and ridiculously expensive (try AUD$90 for 15GB per month, especially when I'm used to paying CAD$25 for the same speed and unlimited bandwidth). Maybe that's why the cinemas can get away with extortion.
With one slight catch: they didn't have anything worth listening to anyway. I had a rental car with XM last year, and I spent a huge amount of time searching through all of the channels, and cursing that I hadn't been able to find the the audio cable for my MP3 player. They were broadcasting rubbish, and unfortunately the CBC were on one of their weird kicks too.
Other countries don't have such a big problem with radio fading as you drive across country. The BBC has several country-wide radio stations, and most modern radios in the UK automatically retune to the new frequencies as reception fades. No advertising too, which is one of my major draws to the CBC in Canada (as well as fairly intelligent and well educated presenters who aren't bombarding us with moronic mindless drivel like most radio presenters).
I used to use this attenna when I was living in Toronto to get my OTA HDTV signals. Way better than any amplified indoor attenna. It's highly directional, which was okay for me as most of the signals came from one place (CN Tower), but could be irritating if you have to rotate it for each channel. My line of sight was straight through several brick walls, and other brick buildings that could presumably cause reflections.
Mouse traps don't kill instantly. I've had to use a hammer on the occasions they haven't. Still more humane though. (recommend dropping the trap with attached mouse in a plastic bag first though)
It's still not a big deal - that's what the load-balancer is for. Take half the servers out of the pool and wait for them to become inactive, then reboot them. Easy.
Toronto FC's home ground of BMO Field used to have a problem with seagulls. Bizarre considering it's a turf and not grass pitch. Then they got a hawk, affectionately named by the fans "Bitchy". There's no problem now.
Having to reboot a server, or restart all the services when a shared library is replaced by a patch makes little difference to me: both cases take it offline and thus unavailable to serve requests. My Windows servers reboot quickly, so it's really not a big deal. Especially as they're behind a load-balancer, so down-time has no effect. Also, most of my servers are still running Windows 2000 Server, which gets rebooted so infrequently that I don't remember the last time I did it... probably when we moved to a new co-lo last summer.
No, I think it's just the reality of what happens. Maybe people don't write exploits until they've seen the issues that Microsoft are patching. A believe a lot issues are reported privately to Microsoft to give them time to investigate and patch. Then public disclosure comes. Then the exploits are implemented.
Microsoft have a shocking history of sitting on a known vulnerability for years, but saying that releasing monthly instead of immediately is a problem is to spread your own FUD. They used to release as they patched, but that was even more problematic and so they responded to their customer's needs. In most cases, exploits don't appear in the wild until Microsoft release a patch for it.
Refused entry in to the US by a rotten apple in the INS. I guess there were a lot of them at the time, which was something that was supposed to be cleaned up when the DHS was created. I was travelling with a former RCMP officer, who couldn't believe what he witnessed that day. US immigration were rather incredulous about the whole thing the next time I tried to visit, five years later. Obviously I'd done nothing wrong or I wouldn't have my Nexus card, which is a zero tolerance programme. It's on my record though for the rest of my life, because of one arsehole. Most Americans don't realise how badly visitors are treated. I travel a lot around the world (just in the last couple of years: US, Canada, UK, Germany, Peru, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Australia and Japan), and nowhere is as bad as the US - if given a choice of visiting US or China, I would pick China any day just because the border is a better experience, even though the risks are perhaps higher if things don't go in your favour.
Great attitude dickhead. Perhaps other countries should take the same attitude towards expat Britons too. You realised 1 in 10 Britons live overseas? How about we start with the 761,000 (2006 numbers) who live in Spain, and send them home? That will surely help, or at least in Spain. Australia has 1.3 million, many of whom are retired and screwed by the British government on their pensions and so costing the Aussie taxpayers a lot of money... I'm sure Gordon Brown will be happy to raise taxes or government debt further to provide for them.
... that they're not already doing this.
I believe Canada does it. When I returned to Canada last year from one of my trips, the guy at the border swiped my passport, looked at the computer screen, and commented on how much I travel. He hadn't even looked at all the visas and stamps in passport.
The US has definitely been keeping track of everything for years. When I went for the final interview for enrolment in the Nexus programme, the US immigration guy swiped my Canadian passport. After a while he asked me what happened at Detroit in Oct 2000. I'd been refused entry whilst travelling on my British passport, before I had Canadian permanent residency and long before citizenship, but he'd connected my two passports.
Yes, that's so true. The changes that China has gone through in the last 100 years are staggering. Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China gives a fantastic account of what China was like during the Communist Revolution. It brought them forward a millennia in a few years, spreading education, and raising standards for 100 of millions of poor Chinese peasants. But that still left China far behind what we consider a well developed country. Of course, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution didn't really help. Then again in the last ten or fifteen years, it's almost as if China has come forward another millennia, where cities like Shanghai are fairly easy to live in as Westerner. The people there are now beginning to resist change for this reason. Want to build a new Maglev line to Hangzhou or high speed rail link to Beijing? The people organised together and forced the government to re-route it via somebody else's neighbourhood. Out in the country though, people still put up with being relocated because their lives haven't changed as fast and are some way behind.
Hessler's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze is a great account of an American journalist living in China in an area to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. He quite clearly articulates how the people of China passively accept things like this. It's a great read, especially if you've even been to the country. Quite often though, the people think their government is correct and efficient, and that you have to accept some inconvenience for a better future for all. As always, the government is a symptom of the people, and vice-versa.