Further to this, I find these findings quite strange. Most manufacturers go to insane lengths to avoid toner emission into the air so that they do not get an asbestos style class action suit.
Today's my last day on the job as my company's resident "printer bitch." After a year and a half on the job I can safely say that most the toner emission doesn't usually come from normal use. It comes from directly from fucksticks.
Over time, printers will spill some toner that will eventually work its way out of the printer and into the air. It happens. But more often than not you get huge toner spills because some idiot goes slamming and banging cheap cartridges. Apparently, the non-technical response to any printer or fax problem is "pull the toner out and put it back in" (I think this is directly related to the "take out the cartridge and blow on it" NES repair method.) this invariably leads to someone getting pissy, slamming the cartridge back in the machine, and breaking a seal. Now you've got toner spilling out every time someone dicks with the cartridge. I've cleaned out printers that took multiple vacuum filters to clean out. Panasonic faxes were the worst for this, their carts. would crack and spill in a heartbeat.
People can bitch about this as an office hazard, but if the employees would act like adults around the equipment, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place. But no, some idiot thinks it'd be cool to pull a Samir on the fax machine.
(actually, I think I will will pull a Samir later this afternoon. I'll just take the toner out first...)
We are working with our co-location facility managers to assess why it is back-up power generators failed to provide the necessary back-up power to prevent our site going down. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by our site being unavailable this afternoon.
I think that's admin speak for:
I warned these idiots eight months ago during my review that the datacenter had outgrown its generator capacity. But did they listen? Fuck no, they just kept counting money and worrying about the bottom line. The beancounters looked at me like I'd asked them for a blowjob from their grandmothers when I submitted the workup for additional generator capacity. And now that the shit's hit the fan, whose ass are they screaming for? Screw this, I'm applying at Taco Bell.
It has little to do with sports gambling, though that's a concern.
If you're coming to Vegas, the Casinos want you gambling. Period. They could give a rats ass about anything else. Everything is geared around getting you in the door. Any pro sports team that comes to Vegas will want a sweetheart arena deal. The biggest money in town is in the Casino business, and they're damn sure not going to build an arena for something that doesn't put gamblers directly into their casinos. Period.
It's not the American fans that are hurting the sport. It's the greed of the owners and Darth Bettman. The owners snatched up franchises and expansion rights for a song, got sweetheart arena leases, then wondered why they weren't raking in dough. Hockey is not a 30 franchise sport, especially when at least 8 of those franchises are in cities that can't, or won't support the team. So the owners scrambled for a easy market; Families. The owner want the new rules, they want something to market to families. Dear old Gary was more than willing to pander, hoping for growth that will never come.
Don Cherry, as much as I love hearing his weekly 7 minute sermon from the mount on Saturdays, has some misplaced nationalism when it comes to hockey. Americans aren't trying to change the game that he loves, not all European players are gutless, and not all Russian players are money grubbing lazy bums. At most, it's 95% of the Russians give the other 5% a bad name:)
Here's hoping Nashville ends up in Winnipeg after they move next season. After that, trim off a pair of teams, get the game back on ESPN stateside where it belongs, get NHL2Night back on their air, and bring me another case of Molson and all will be right with the world. And of course, get the cup back to Detroit. That's as close to Canada as it needs to get for a while:)
The NHL has never, ever had great ratings on national television. Part of this is indeed a lack of interest. The NHL will never have the interest of any of the other three major sports, and somebody's got to be fourth. But the other major problem is quality hockey in quality markets. Ottawa and Anaheim in this year's finals, Carolina and Edmonton in last years. Why did the ratings suck? because if you add up the populations of those four (Anaheim proper, excluding LA) cities, you're probably not much bigger than Chicago. They could have drawn a 30 share in the American team's city and not made a dent nationally. It's the nature of the sport. Hell, NBC national games featuring Detroit and Buffalo (cradles of US hockey) performed poorly on a national level, but drew Super Bowl-level interest locally. For the NHL to make a dent in national TV ratings, they need a New York Rangers - Los Angeles Kings final every year. (I'd say an Islanders - Kings final, but who are we kidding? I'll sniff a super model's panties before the Isle's sniff a Stanley Cup Finals game.)
FYI NBC does not pay the NHL for rights to broadcast games nationally. Even if hockey draws poorly, it's essentially free to the network. NBC is well aware of how Hockey draws in the US, but knows that they will always make money on any game they show. Some of their Saturday games this year did outdraw the competing NBA games.
As for the deal with slingbox, it's not really desperation. The NHL just landed a fat deal to stay on CBC in Canada (THANK GOD) that dwarfs any of the money Poker and UFC are getting. This on top of the waaaaaaaaay overpriced deal that Comcast (owners of Versus) coughed up in an attempt to legitimize their network (and to give a middle finger to ESPN). Being the red headed stepchild of pro-sports gives Hockey a chance to reach out. Hockey needs to keep it's ratings where they are. They can't afford to alienate even a small percentage of their remaining fan base and if they can find an edge, any edge, to pull an extra 50 or 100k pairs of eyes, they'll do it. Maybe enough folks will latch on to the idea to make the big sports change their tune.
So, Congress wants the FCC to label "broadband" as anything faster than 2mbps? Isn't it convenient that most DSL packages are 1.5mbps down? Comcast would have shitfits if they tried to label broadband as 4, 8, or even 10 mbps down.
But I do like the provision that change how a broadband "served" area are labeled. I'm just waiting for Verizon's FIOS to hit my area.
People considered it a defeat because few military strategists at the time were aware of the full power of the aircraft carrier, and naval air operations.
True. But it was a tactical loss in every sense of the word. Japan struck a huge blow, if not a long term strategic one, against the US fleet in the pacific. They traded a few dozen aircraft for the bulk of the Capital ships in the US fleet. That's a win in anybodys book. No, the didn't get the fuel depots, the sub pens, the dry docks, or the carriers, but they won December 7th 1941. We won September 2nd 1945, so we can now say that Pearl Harbor wasn't a "strategic" victory.
Instead of putting together a large battle fleet to sortie against the Japanese assaults on Wake, the Philippines etc., the United States had to put their carriers in "Run and Hide" mode for the next several months while we tried to figure out exactly what we were supposed to do with a navy that had undergone a rapid "paradigm shift" at the hands of the enemy.
I see so much interest in this film. Lots of summer blockbuster "buzz" and eager fanboys awaiting the release of the film. I just have to say it. I have to rain on the parade. I have to be the buzz kill:
Michael Bay directed and co-produced Pearl Harbor.
The man sat down and, with what I'm assuming was a straight face, said "let's take one of America's greatest military defeats and make it a love story starring Ben Affleck." Read that over a few times. Then remember that the same guy thinks a love story should have a goodbye scene in a train station, especially when your protagonist is leaving New York for F%$#ing London, is directing a film adaptation of a beloved story from your childhood.
I'd like to be wrong....but I'm not holding out a lot of hope.
Aren't we just one or two Coronal Mass Ejections from having all our satellites (and cell service among others) go kerflooey?
As long as we're worrying about things we have no control of, I'd like to point out that we're also one asteroid impact away from wholesale extinction.
Not all of them are. Sony has tried bundling rootkits with their CD's. Others have been using DRM to keep me from ripping the CD's in the first place. But you're right that most of them play just fine in a plain CD player.
have the highest quality audio and will cost about the same
Score one point for higher quality audio, but cost the same? Head down to the mall andsee how many new release CD's you can buy for less than $19.99. The price of CD's hasn't changed in the face of competition from online sales, and the Sam Goody's and FYE's of the world wonder why their stores are empty.
offer a physical medium, and packaging as opposed to what will be available online.
Half a point for the physical medium. Personally, I don't *want* the media. I've got a couple milk crates full of CD's in their cases that I haven't touched since I converted them to mp3's. The packaging can be nice, but iTunes offers "digital booklets" with albums that contains the same information & artwork when you buy online. All that for $9.99, no shipping, no leaving the house. Instant gratification at it's finest.
Someone might see a "box" but that doesn't mean a Wii. Here in Ann Arbor, MI I see Wii boxes at various stores but if you ask they are all empty! In order to get a Wii, you must come in on magic shipment day which the employees will not tell you. You must be there promptly to get the 10 or less Wii systems they get in. They will try to bundle them with crap.
For your friendly neighborhood Meijer stores, it's Sunday. Go to any of the three Meijer stores in your area and they usually have one in stock for most of the day.; Jackson ave. (which would be a haul if you don't have a car), Ann Arbor-Saline rd., or Carpenter rd. Most of the reputable game shops will tell you their ship dates as well, if they're going to get any. Best Buy is hit or miss, but they seem to get more shipments through the week. Also, Meijer doesn't bundle their's with anything. Actually, I haven't heard of anyone doing that, other than Circuit City's online store.
Ann Arbor has a very healthy gaming community, and they're a bit of a technology "counter culture" for lack of a better phrase, which leads to a lack of Wii's. If something is different, trendy, but not nessicarily better, Ann Arbor is all over it. (Heck, I'm amazaed it has taken them so long to get an actual Mac store in the area. Many years ago U of M was supposedly the #2 user of Macs in the world behind NASA.)
Now the only people I've heard of getting a Wii had to go into Walmart. The nearest one I know of is in a bad neighborhood and I probably wouldn't make it to my car with it.
Oh, please. I lived across the street from that Walmart for three years. Other than typical apartment bullshit crime, that neighborhood is no different than any place in A2. It's in Ypsilanti, not fscking Compton. (but then, on Ann Arbor maps, Ypsilanti is just labeled "The land of scary minorities and no lattes!") It *is* a shitty wal-mart for sure, but then, aren't they all?
So instead of dying of the flu, whooping cough, measles, mumps, and rubella, you die of ebola virus. It's not really an improvement. Bots that are harder to hunt down and fix also raise the possibility of greater use of the net as a weapon. Instead of sending spam, the highest bidder on a bot net now uses it to attack financial markets, or DDOS more important communications centers.
It's not the evolution from amino acids to virus that worries me. It's the evolution from "swinging stone axes & clubs" to "advanced mechanized infantry tactics."
It'll be interesting to see just how much detail we get concerning what exactly failed and why the current level of redundancy didn't kick in.
I mean, it's not like the power supply failed on an NT 4 server (you know, the one with the post-it taped in place that says "East Coast B-berry server, DO NOT POWER OFF!!!"), it's not like somebody accidentally drove a nail trough some coax in the wall at RIM's HQ, it's not like somebody accidentally typed "rm -r *" at the wrong prompt. There has to be some serious "Thank God I'm not the one stuck cleaning up that mess" stuff going on here.
Funny unrelated story. We had an exec looking at one of the blackberry's. He put in back in the hard case and was fumbling around with it and saw the "RIM" on the back. Then he asked, in the innocence that only an exec can have, "So, how does one go about getting one of these 'RIM' jobs anyway?" When I am canonized as a saint, one of my miracles will be "not laughing at the VP who asked how to get a rim job."
I agree. Otherwise WWII was caused by Hitler's mom having one too many drinks the night she met his dad.
How can you come up with such a woefully shortsighted and limited in scope analysis? Honestly. There are at least two theories to work under for the cause of World War II.
WWII was caused by a series of reactions several billion years ago between amino acids. Or it was started 5000 years ago when God created Eve for Adam. Everything else in between is just a smattering of minor details.
I overpay my taxes every year. It's a few extra bucks out of my check that I don't notice, and I get a nice refund from the government. Yeah, I know I lose money on the deal based on inflation, since the money I let the feds hold doesn't earn interest. But it works out to a couple dollars a year at most based on what I'm paying, and getting the extra check works out well for me at the beginning of the year.
So two years ago I was filing with turbo tax. I'd been using it for a couple years with no problems. My taxes are simple; no house, no kids, no tax shelter investments. Just a handful of numbers on a W2, to the point where I could just as easily fill out the forms by hand, but I liked the convenience. Now, I overpay by ten bucks every week. 40 bucks a month * 12 months = $480 per year that I should get back (based on my tax bracket at the time) no matter what. My average refund was usually a couple hundred over that, and had been for the years prior. I've cut the feds a check exactly once since I started working 12 years ago.
So what did I get when I used turbo tax that year? They had me paying an additional 280 bucks! I went over that return with a fine tooth comb. All my numbers were right, every box was checked, every i was dotted and t was crossed on my end, and the software was up to date, but Turbo Tax said I owed the feds money. I broke out the disaster recovery computer (also known as a pen & paper), and did my taxes by hand and by the book. Result? My usual refund of around 700 bucks. On a lark I tried Taxcut. Same result, $700-ish refund.
Tax software (at my level anyway) should be no more complicated than a freaking spreadsheet. If they can't get that right for me, I shudder to think what kind of screw ups they've had for people who have real returns to file. At least I got a good lesson in double checking someone else's math.
Yes, Michigan roads stink... I always know I've hit the Michigan border when I hear the "kerchunk, kerchunk" every few seconds... you can set a timer to it. Perhaps it's the fact that you guys drive like 90 MPH.
Ahh michigan, where you can go by a state trooper doing 80, because he's looking for the guys doing 110...
Road conditions in Michigan suck for four reasons:
1. Climate. The temp swings 120 degrees every year, and usually can swing 60 degrees in a week. Yeah, I know this happens in other states, but Michigan usually gets hit harder. 2. Budget vs. Infrastructure. Michigan has a MASSIVE amount of highway space. More than it needs now. But they still have to pay to maintain it. 3. Salt. Michigan salts roads and gets the plow trucks out at the first hint of snow. Here in Sunny South Bend, Plow trucks come out oh, you know, when they get around to it. I've seen double the snow during the winter here in SoBend than I saw in SE Mich, and I've seen half the plows. Don't know if that means we underplow, or they overplow, either way, those trucks are out in force come winter in Mich. 4. Weight limits. Michigan has the 2nd highest weight limit for Semi's in the union. We allow trucks of 164,000 pounds on the roads. For reference, a GE Genesis locomotive (think amtrak) is 254,000 pounds. The official line is that we require more axles to distribute the load. Which in and of itself is a load. You're still driving tanks over abused roads.
Individually, none of these problems are huge. Every other state deals with the same issues. But the cumulative effect makes things pretty rough. The funny thing about it is, driving into and out of Detroit is actually pretty nice now that they've redone I-94. That was a true shithole of a highway until the superbowl motivated them into doing some real work.
I used to think our old vacuum was "just fine." It brushed, it sucked, it had a bag to empty. We needed a 2nd vacuum (we were moving out, but several months apart). Long story short the new vac, an upright bagless hoover, took a "clean" room, freshly vacuumed by the old vac, and pulled out more dust and cat hair then I could have imagined would be in a clean room. I finally understood how someone could be a germaphobe after seeing what was in a "clean" room.
Just because something has always worked doesn't mean it works as well as newer gear.
I'm going to wager a guess the poster means the Sugar Hill Gang, whose single "Rappers Delight" became the first hip-hop track to chart in the Top-40. They're generally credited with bringing hip-hop & rap into the musical consciousness of pop radio.
Which probably will lead to a downstream argument containing the phrases "Rap sux0rs", "Rap is teh ghey", "rap is missing the 'C' at the beginning of the name", "I only listen to obscure classical recordings on wax cylinders because they're the only true form of music fit for human consumption" or "All music has sucked since John Lennon/Jimi Hendrix/Glenn Miller/Beethoven died"
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Further to this, I find these findings quite strange. Most manufacturers go to insane lengths to avoid toner emission into the air so that they do not get an asbestos style class action suit.
Today's my last day on the job as my company's resident "printer bitch." After a year and a half on the job I can safely say that most the toner emission doesn't usually come from normal use. It comes from directly from fucksticks.
Over time, printers will spill some toner that will eventually work its way out of the printer and into the air. It happens. But more often than not you get huge toner spills because some idiot goes slamming and banging cheap cartridges. Apparently, the non-technical response to any printer or fax problem is "pull the toner out and put it back in" (I think this is directly related to the "take out the cartridge and blow on it" NES repair method.) this invariably leads to someone getting pissy, slamming the cartridge back in the machine, and breaking a seal. Now you've got toner spilling out every time someone dicks with the cartridge. I've cleaned out printers that took multiple vacuum filters to clean out. Panasonic faxes were the worst for this, their carts. would crack and spill in a heartbeat.
People can bitch about this as an office hazard, but if the employees would act like adults around the equipment, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place. But no, some idiot thinks it'd be cool to pull a Samir on the fax machine.
(actually, I think I will will pull a Samir later this afternoon. I'll just take the toner out first...)
Nixon: Thanks Morbo. How's the family?
Morbo: Belligerent and numerous
We are working with our co-location facility managers to assess why it is back-up power generators failed to provide the necessary back-up power to prevent our site going down. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by our site being unavailable this afternoon.
I think that's admin speak for:
I warned these idiots eight months ago during my review that the datacenter had outgrown its generator capacity. But did they listen? Fuck no, they just kept counting money and worrying about the bottom line. The beancounters looked at me like I'd asked them for a blowjob from their grandmothers when I submitted the workup for additional generator capacity. And now that the shit's hit the fan, whose ass are they screaming for? Screw this, I'm applying at Taco Bell.
And I'll bet that iPaq has NEVER, EVER dropped a call in the middle of a conversation.....
It has little to do with sports gambling, though that's a concern.
If you're coming to Vegas, the Casinos want you gambling. Period. They could give a rats ass about anything else. Everything is geared around getting you in the door. Any pro sports team that comes to Vegas will want a sweetheart arena deal. The biggest money in town is in the Casino business, and they're damn sure not going to build an arena for something that doesn't put gamblers directly into their casinos. Period.
It's not the American fans that are hurting the sport. It's the greed of the owners and Darth Bettman. The owners snatched up franchises and expansion rights for a song, got sweetheart arena leases, then wondered why they weren't raking in dough. Hockey is not a 30 franchise sport, especially when at least 8 of those franchises are in cities that can't, or won't support the team. So the owners scrambled for a easy market; Families. The owner want the new rules, they want something to market to families. Dear old Gary was more than willing to pander, hoping for growth that will never come.
:)
:)
Don Cherry, as much as I love hearing his weekly 7 minute sermon from the mount on Saturdays, has some misplaced nationalism when it comes to hockey. Americans aren't trying to change the game that he loves, not all European players are gutless, and not all Russian players are money grubbing lazy bums. At most, it's 95% of the Russians give the other 5% a bad name
Here's hoping Nashville ends up in Winnipeg after they move next season. After that, trim off a pair of teams, get the game back on ESPN stateside where it belongs, get NHL2Night back on their air, and bring me another case of Molson and all will be right with the world. And of course, get the cup back to Detroit. That's as close to Canada as it needs to get for a while
The NHL has never, ever had great ratings on national television. Part of this is indeed a lack of interest. The NHL will never have the interest of any of the other three major sports, and somebody's got to be fourth. But the other major problem is quality hockey in quality markets. Ottawa and Anaheim in this year's finals, Carolina and Edmonton in last years. Why did the ratings suck? because if you add up the populations of those four (Anaheim proper, excluding LA) cities, you're probably not much bigger than Chicago. They could have drawn a 30 share in the American team's city and not made a dent nationally. It's the nature of the sport. Hell, NBC national games featuring Detroit and Buffalo (cradles of US hockey) performed poorly on a national level, but drew Super Bowl-level interest locally. For the NHL to make a dent in national TV ratings, they need a New York Rangers - Los Angeles Kings final every year. (I'd say an Islanders - Kings final, but who are we kidding? I'll sniff a super model's panties before the Isle's sniff a Stanley Cup Finals game.)
FYI NBC does not pay the NHL for rights to broadcast games nationally. Even if hockey draws poorly, it's essentially free to the network. NBC is well aware of how Hockey draws in the US, but knows that they will always make money on any game they show. Some of their Saturday games this year did outdraw the competing NBA games.
As for the deal with slingbox, it's not really desperation. The NHL just landed a fat deal to stay on CBC in Canada (THANK GOD) that dwarfs any of the money Poker and UFC are getting. This on top of the waaaaaaaaay overpriced deal that Comcast (owners of Versus) coughed up in an attempt to legitimize their network (and to give a middle finger to ESPN). Being the red headed stepchild of pro-sports gives Hockey a chance to reach out. Hockey needs to keep it's ratings where they are. They can't afford to alienate even a small percentage of their remaining fan base and if they can find an edge, any edge, to pull an extra 50 or 100k pairs of eyes, they'll do it. Maybe enough folks will latch on to the idea to make the big sports change their tune.
"Get me the Pentagon. Yes the Pentagon, monument to military spending. Four walls and a spare!"
So, Congress wants the FCC to label "broadband" as anything faster than 2mbps? Isn't it convenient that most DSL packages are 1.5mbps down? Comcast would have shitfits if they tried to label broadband as 4, 8, or even 10 mbps down.
But I do like the provision that change how a broadband "served" area are labeled. I'm just waiting for Verizon's FIOS to hit my area.
People considered it a defeat because few military strategists at the time were aware of the full power of the aircraft carrier, and naval air operations.
True. But it was a tactical loss in every sense of the word. Japan struck a huge blow, if not a long term strategic one, against the US fleet in the pacific. They traded a few dozen aircraft for the bulk of the Capital ships in the US fleet. That's a win in anybodys book. No, the didn't get the fuel depots, the sub pens, the dry docks, or the carriers, but they won December 7th 1941. We won September 2nd 1945, so we can now say that Pearl Harbor wasn't a "strategic" victory.
Instead of putting together a large battle fleet to sortie against the Japanese assaults on Wake, the Philippines etc., the United States had to put their carriers in "Run and Hide" mode for the next several months while we tried to figure out exactly what we were supposed to do with a navy that had undergone a rapid "paradigm shift" at the hands of the enemy.
Just turn off your brain and enjoy the action scenes. :)
:)
You were a producer on "The Incredible Hulk" weren't you?
I see so much interest in this film. Lots of summer blockbuster "buzz" and eager fanboys awaiting the release of the film. I just have to say it. I have to rain on the parade. I have to be the buzz kill:
Michael Bay directed and co-produced Pearl Harbor.
The man sat down and, with what I'm assuming was a straight face, said "let's take one of America's greatest military defeats and make it a love story starring Ben Affleck." Read that over a few times. Then remember that the same guy thinks a love story should have a goodbye scene in a train station, especially when your protagonist is leaving New York for F%$#ing London, is directing a film adaptation of a beloved story from your childhood.
I'd like to be wrong....but I'm not holding out a lot of hope.
Aren't we just one or two Coronal Mass Ejections from having all our satellites (and cell service among others) go kerflooey?
As long as we're worrying about things we have no control of, I'd like to point out that we're also one asteroid impact away from wholesale extinction.
And yet CDs, which are DRM free,
Not all of them are. Sony has tried bundling rootkits with their CD's. Others have been using DRM to keep me from ripping the CD's in the first place. But you're right that most of them play just fine in a plain CD player.
have the highest quality audio and will cost about the same
Score one point for higher quality audio, but cost the same? Head down to the mall andsee how many new release CD's you can buy for less than $19.99. The price of CD's hasn't changed in the face of competition from online sales, and the Sam Goody's and FYE's of the world wonder why their stores are empty.
offer a physical medium, and packaging as opposed to what will be available online.
Half a point for the physical medium. Personally, I don't *want* the media. I've got a couple milk crates full of CD's in their cases that I haven't touched since I converted them to mp3's. The packaging can be nice, but iTunes offers "digital booklets" with albums that contains the same information & artwork when you buy online. All that for $9.99, no shipping, no leaving the house. Instant gratification at it's finest.
For your friendly neighborhood Meijer stores, it's Sunday. Go to any of the three Meijer stores in your area and they usually have one in stock for most of the day.; Jackson ave. (which would be a haul if you don't have a car), Ann Arbor-Saline rd., or Carpenter rd. Most of the reputable game shops will tell you their ship dates as well, if they're going to get any. Best Buy is hit or miss, but they seem to get more shipments through the week. Also, Meijer doesn't bundle their's with anything. Actually, I haven't heard of anyone doing that, other than Circuit City's online store.
Ann Arbor has a very healthy gaming community, and they're a bit of a technology "counter culture" for lack of a better phrase, which leads to a lack of Wii's. If something is different, trendy, but not nessicarily better, Ann Arbor is all over it. (Heck, I'm amazaed it has taken them so long to get an actual Mac store in the area. Many years ago U of M was supposedly the #2 user of Macs in the world behind NASA.)
Now the only people I've heard of getting a Wii had to go into Walmart. The nearest one I know of is in a bad neighborhood and I probably wouldn't make it to my car with it.
Oh, please. I lived across the street from that Walmart for three years. Other than typical apartment bullshit crime, that neighborhood is no different than any place in A2. It's in Ypsilanti, not fscking Compton. (but then, on Ann Arbor maps, Ypsilanti is just labeled "The land of scary minorities and no lattes!") It *is* a shitty wal-mart for sure, but then, aren't they all?
So instead of dying of the flu, whooping cough, measles, mumps, and rubella, you die of ebola virus. It's not really an improvement. Bots that are harder to hunt down and fix also raise the possibility of greater use of the net as a weapon. Instead of sending spam, the highest bidder on a bot net now uses it to attack financial markets, or DDOS more important communications centers.
It's not the evolution from amino acids to virus that worries me. It's the evolution from "swinging stone axes & clubs" to "advanced mechanized infantry tactics."
It'll be interesting to see just how much detail we get concerning what exactly failed and why the current level of redundancy didn't kick in.
I mean, it's not like the power supply failed on an NT 4 server (you know, the one with the post-it taped in place that says "East Coast B-berry server, DO NOT POWER OFF!!!"), it's not like somebody accidentally drove a nail trough some coax in the wall at RIM's HQ, it's not like somebody accidentally typed "rm -r *" at the wrong prompt. There has to be some serious "Thank God I'm not the one stuck cleaning up that mess" stuff going on here.
Funny unrelated story. We had an exec looking at one of the blackberry's. He put in back in the hard case and was fumbling around with it and saw the "RIM" on the back. Then he asked, in the innocence that only an exec can have, "So, how does one go about getting one of these 'RIM' jobs anyway?" When I am canonized as a saint, one of my miracles will be "not laughing at the VP who asked how to get a rim job."
I agree. Otherwise WWII was caused by Hitler's mom having one too many drinks the night she met his dad.
How can you come up with such a woefully shortsighted and limited in scope analysis? Honestly. There are at least two theories to work under for the cause of World War II.
WWII was caused by a series of reactions several billion years ago between amino acids. Or it was started 5000 years ago when God created Eve for Adam. Everything else in between is just a smattering of minor details.
I overpay my taxes every year. It's a few extra bucks out of my check that I don't notice, and I get a nice refund from the government. Yeah, I know I lose money on the deal based on inflation, since the money I let the feds hold doesn't earn interest. But it works out to a couple dollars a year at most based on what I'm paying, and getting the extra check works out well for me at the beginning of the year.
So two years ago I was filing with turbo tax. I'd been using it for a couple years with no problems. My taxes are simple; no house, no kids, no tax shelter investments. Just a handful of numbers on a W2, to the point where I could just as easily fill out the forms by hand, but I liked the convenience. Now, I overpay by ten bucks every week. 40 bucks a month * 12 months = $480 per year that I should get back (based on my tax bracket at the time) no matter what. My average refund was usually a couple hundred over that, and had been for the years prior. I've cut the feds a check exactly once since I started working 12 years ago.
So what did I get when I used turbo tax that year? They had me paying an additional 280 bucks! I went over that return with a fine tooth comb. All my numbers were right, every box was checked, every i was dotted and t was crossed on my end, and the software was up to date, but Turbo Tax said I owed the feds money. I broke out the disaster recovery computer (also known as a pen & paper), and did my taxes by hand and by the book. Result? My usual refund of around 700 bucks. On a lark I tried Taxcut. Same result, $700-ish refund.
Tax software (at my level anyway) should be no more complicated than a freaking spreadsheet. If they can't get that right for me, I shudder to think what kind of screw ups they've had for people who have real returns to file. At least I got a good lesson in double checking someone else's math.
Yes, Michigan roads stink... I always know I've hit the Michigan border when I hear the "kerchunk, kerchunk" every few seconds... you can set a timer to it. Perhaps it's the fact that you guys drive like 90 MPH.
Ahh michigan, where you can go by a state trooper doing 80, because he's looking for the guys doing 110...
Road conditions in Michigan suck for four reasons:
1. Climate. The temp swings 120 degrees every year, and usually can swing 60 degrees in a week. Yeah, I know this happens in other states, but Michigan usually gets hit harder.
2. Budget vs. Infrastructure. Michigan has a MASSIVE amount of highway space. More than it needs now. But they still have to pay to maintain it.
3. Salt. Michigan salts roads and gets the plow trucks out at the first hint of snow. Here in Sunny South Bend, Plow trucks come out oh, you know, when they get around to it. I've seen double the snow during the winter here in SoBend than I saw in SE Mich, and I've seen half the plows. Don't know if that means we underplow, or they overplow, either way, those trucks are out in force come winter in Mich.
4. Weight limits. Michigan has the 2nd highest weight limit for Semi's in the union. We allow trucks of 164,000 pounds on the roads. For reference, a GE Genesis locomotive (think amtrak) is 254,000 pounds. The official line is that we require more axles to distribute the load. Which in and of itself is a load. You're still driving tanks over abused roads.
Individually, none of these problems are huge. Every other state deals with the same issues. But the cumulative effect makes things pretty rough. The funny thing about it is, driving into and out of Detroit is actually pretty nice now that they've redone I-94. That was a true shithole of a highway until the superbowl motivated them into doing some real work.
I used to think our old vacuum was "just fine." It brushed, it sucked, it had a bag to empty. We needed a 2nd vacuum (we were moving out, but several months apart). Long story short the new vac, an upright bagless hoover, took a "clean" room, freshly vacuumed by the old vac, and pulled out more dust and cat hair then I could have imagined would be in a clean room. I finally understood how someone could be a germaphobe after seeing what was in a "clean" room.
Just because something has always worked doesn't mean it works as well as newer gear.
I am glad I don't live in that state/county but I fully expect that when a tornado or hurricane wipes it out I will have to foot the FEMA bill for it.
Because South-Central New Mexico is such a hotbed for Hurricane & Tornado activity......
+1 for observation
-1 for geography & meteorology
I'm going to wager a guess the poster means the Sugar Hill Gang, whose single "Rappers Delight" became the first hip-hop track to chart in the Top-40. They're generally credited with bringing hip-hop & rap into the musical consciousness of pop radio.
Which probably will lead to a downstream argument containing the phrases "Rap sux0rs", "Rap is teh ghey", "rap is missing the 'C' at the beginning of the name", "I only listen to obscure classical recordings on wax cylinders because they're the only true form of music fit for human consumption" or "All music has sucked since John Lennon/Jimi Hendrix/Glenn Miller/Beethoven died"
Have you considered VGA over Cat-5?
damnit! Oh, if only slashdot had a method of "previewing" a post before letting it loose on the world! Maybe if it came in button form...