Maybe you live in a different part of the world than I, but around here, customers expect to get screwed a little bit more with each passing day. That's what we call inflation. That's why people need more money year after year - which of course leads back to more inflation but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Now I'll say this frankly: I don't know you, nor your business, yet I already have a bad feeling about it all. A lot of people just want to do what they gotta do, get paid and get out. That's probably not in-line with your way of thinking, but you have to respect that mentality because that's how it works everywhere else. Anything less leads to instability, high stress and excessive turnover. It's inevitable, and others have said it many times already: if you don't reward your tenured employees, they will find someone else who will. Experience matters!
More importantly, employees don't suddenly lose their value as soon as they peak - they're not transistors, they don't get a die shrink every 18 months with doubled throughput. Humans are a limited resource, and the true genius of a successful business is finding new ways to maximize that resource, by creating more efficient tools or finding a new niche that is more profitable.
I wonder how much of that is caused by current US foreign policies, and the common distaste other nations have for American affairs. China won't give us the time of day, unless there's a lucrative business deal tied to their cooperation. They open and close their borders as they see fit, ignoring the rest of the world whenever they don't feel like dealing with the problem. They know the US government has no balls because our retail economy is so sickly dependent on Asian imports.
I've also driven in 3rd world countries where people have habits that would utterly blow your mind (Right turns from left lanes, driving in reverse on major roads, no headlights, 6 cars abreast in 3 lanes, I saw all 4 of these just TONIGHT on my way home)
Oh.. right.. so now they're saying it's a cultural thing ?
I don't care where people were born, if they drive like homicidal retards, they're homicidal retards! Just because everyone else from their hometown is equally retarded doesn't mean that shit will fly in north america.
No, that's just what the "BMW Book of Style" says to do, because almost everyone I see in a german car feels the need to be an asshole. I don't care, if they accidently smash into my car, I can revel in the knowledge that their repairs will be FAR more costly than my dinky old Ford.
If it passes, I wish you had enough money to leave the country and find a more respectable place to live. The way things are going, each passing day the USA's future looks evermore bleak and regressive.
It's a "revelation" to these guys because they're selling it to mass media. Joe Smith, who falls for phishing sites, doesn't understand what's really going on under the hood. He can barely spell his own friggin' name on a form. Joe Smith watches TV and reads the daily paper, along with a handful of "topical magazines" that are all-too happy to publish this sort of tripe.
It's the journalistic equivalent of "Lost", a whole pile of bullshit spread out so very thinly even the retards can enjoy it.
The good thing about this movie is all the norms will see it and hear about how Russia is a bastion for spammers and bot farmers.
The BAD thing about this movie is all the norms will assume it's all fiction.
Russia, Korea, Malaysia, and a few dozen other lax countries are my worst nightmare as a sysadmin. I'm so fed up with it, I just download country-wide blacklists and feed them into iptables, because I can't possibly care about the handful of english-speaking southwest-asians who might give a damn about my vengeful blogs and counter-culture wikis. And isn't pr0n considered satanic over there ? Ya, I'm doing these wedgeless tards a favor by banning them all.
I'd like to copyright a court verdict. Specifically, I want to copyright the process of declaring a defendant guilty when the RIAA/MPAA are the plaintiffs. Every time that specific ingredient mix occurs in a courtroom, I want royalties paid to ME, because I'm the asshole who copyrighted it.
Maybe (okay, not maybe) I'm an anti-war psycho, but I think the guy's choice should have been : live with no legs, or we finish what the Iraqi started and put you to sleep.
Of all the people who need medical help in this world, anyone who willingly puts themselves in harm's way should go to the very end of the list. You don't go to war with the intention of surviving, you go all-or-nothing.
I'm kind of irritated at these "feature requests". Popularity usually means there are a lot of dumber people sticking their nose where it doesn't belong. nLite/vLite are fantastic tools, but they're not for the average MySpace-hacking suburban inbred. The last thing I would ever want is for Dino (the author) to give up because of the massive influx of cretins on the forums.
If there's one thing I've learned about "feature requests", 1% of them are brilliant, the other 99% come from people who are too illiterate or too young to RTFM. nLite is a mature piece of software whose purpose is well-defined and its execution is lithe and focused. If a potential user is unfulfilled by its functionality, it's quite likely that they are treading where they should not.
Two times crap is just a bigger pile of crap. The fact that this card only occasionally outpaces the 15-month-old 8800GTX is just pathetic. Sad and pathetic.
Take the same money, buy a pair of cheap 8800GT's and you'll cream this ATI blunder.
When it comes to graphics, I'm all about rooting for the winner. I've jumped from one company to the other many times over the last decade, but ATI has been all thumbs for the last little while. They finally cleaned up their drivers but that only highlighted the fact that the hardware still sucks. Just like AMD's Phenom, it's a big boring release over a year too late. There's nothing to be proud about when your flagship product falls in the "budget" category before it's even released.
Wake me when the Geforce 9 hits, or the Radeon 5xxx (yeah, skip the 4xxx range) - until then it's going to be a dull ride.
Cisco ceased being relevant a LONG time ago for most people. They still have their place in the ultra-high-end optical market, but most offices are best served by a bunch of big dumb switches and PC-based routers.
The day someone can recover data from media I've killed with thermite, then we'll talk.
Right now, if someone sketchy wants to cover their tracks, it's cheap and relatively easy. I've personally witnessed the awesome destruction that thermite does to a hard drive, it leaves a big drippy hole where the platters once sat. It's basically super-welding the drive into one big block. I don't think there's any way to get data back, at least not with current nor near-future technology.
Step 1: Buy Symantec Home Internet Security Suite Step 2: Pay Geek Squad douche to remove bloated Symantec Suite Step 3: ???? Step 4: PROFIT!
Seriously, Symantec hasn't produced anything of worth since Norton Utilities 8 for DOS! Every new release of whatever cryptically named software pot-pourri just eats up more and more Ram and CPU for the privilege of letting more viruses and spyware leak through. The only way they could make their software any worse would be to re-skin McAfee's apps.
It's pretty farking sad when the free virus and spyware scanners are TONS faster and more reliable than the biggest company's flagship product.
The big problem with this levy is that I don't give a crap about Canadian songwriters.
Yeah, I'm Canadian; that's no secret. I just don't like many local artists, because this lame folky pop-rock alternative MTV-lite snore just isn't my cup of tea. In fact much of the music I like comes from the dirtiest clubs in Detroit, New York and Britain. House baybee! And guess what: those folks aren't signed to any big labels, so they wouldn't be seeing a penny of this tax.
The artists have the solution available to them: cut out the middleman! I haven't bought a music CD in ages, it's redundant! The first thing I do is rip it to my computer, then fling the MP3 over to my car deck, or stream it over the net to wherever I am at that moment, be it the office or a friend's house. The physical disc is dead to me, I buy tracks off of Beatport.com, largely because they have a pretty nice selection of house/trance/techno. I pay between 1.49 and 2.49 per track, which may appear steep compared to 99c elsewhere, but tracks purchased from Beatport come with DJ playback rights, the same as buying a vinyl record. Of course they contain no DRM whatsoever, and are all encoded in 320kbps MP3, ~190kbps MP4, or uncompressed wave for a slight surcharge. Most of their stuff is also hard to find elsewhere, except in other online DJ stores. Considering the niche, I think their model is excellent and there's not much I'd want to change about it.
If Canadian artists want to make money off the internet, they should sell their music on the internet! DUH! The biggest thing they're ignoring is that music downloaders, while plentiful, still make up a small portion of total internet users. There are a LOT of people out there in the later stages of life who couldn't care less about Britney Spears or even Radiohead. They use the internet for email, eBay, casual blogging and Skype, with a few social games on Pogo. The music industry has no business charging these already cash-strapped people $60/year for something they don't use. Heck, they have no business charging ME $60/year because I don't even spend that much on their overplayed undertalented releases in the first place!
The fact that my local PC retailer (read: Chinese import scam-shop) sells unlocked iPhones en-masse probably isn't helping. I'm in Canada. AFAIK, Apple isn't selling iPhones in Canada (yet). Me, I just hate that particular shop, so everything they do must be evil! >:-$
It's silly for Apple/AT&T to ever think they could lock their phones down. There are entire (clandestine) businesses built around the unlocking/hacking of cell phones. I personally think our immigrants should seek employment in more respectable industries, but that's just one more reason why I'm not in charge.
Everywhere I go, people say "don't login as root", and yet every box I run, I login as root almost exclusively (unless I'm testing a bitch account).
So am I just so infinitely brilliant that I am immune to root mishaps, or are you still going to tell me I'm extremely lucky ?
Most people manage Windows servers as Administrator, and for the most part, it's Microsoft bugs that will get you, not your choice of unencumbered system accounts. Sure, it doesn't stop me from hosing my entire system with a few misjudged commands, but as I said earlier, my endless wisdom prevents me from doing so, and my various network security schemes ensure that I'm the only root on the box. For me, that's more than safe enough.
From my own IP ranges, that is. Home, work, my other boxes. I don't see why anyone should be trying to ssh into my gear if they're not me.
In fact, I drop all other SSH accesses at the firewall, and I use a key pair to login.
My real worry is the actual web server. It's hard to run any ready-made apps like posting boards, galleries or others - they're all coded by retarded teenage monkeys who apparently learned everything they know from PHP 3.0. Nothing says "fuck korea" like a bunch of rogue processes running as the apache user.
here is an idea, make the drivers modular. Drivers cause more BSODs and crashes than anything else. Don't let a single driver bring down a system.
Well the drivers are already modular, but what I think you meant was to isolate them from the rest of the kernel. That's pretty much impossible, the whole point of device drivers is to have a small piece of trusted code acting as a gatekeeper between the hardware and application software.
It's not impossible to abstract the hardware interface one step further, but in practice this results in a significant performance hit as you now have to virtualize every hardware access. It's essentially running all your drivers inside a VM.
The problem with drivers is they try to do too much, and they do it poorly. I'd much much rather see true bare-metal interfaces at the driver level, with userland helpers to do the heavy lifting. The problem is Windows doesn't lend itself too easily to this two-tiered design. Heck, just a printer driver can hose your kernel if (or rather WHEN) things go sour. What the hell is a printer doing in the kernel ? Lord knows. It should really be an unprivileged app talking to a USB printing mediator... something like that.
In any case, Vista did a whole lot of things wrong, and it didn't fix the driver issues at all. The main reason it requires signed drivers is because of the whole TPM affair. By having all drivers signed, it significantly reduces the possibility of a hacked driver crumbling the delicate house of cards that is DRM. It's got nothing to do with driver quality.
Slashdot Mirror
I know the pieces fit...
Lateralus, by Tool
Maybe you live in a different part of the world than I, but around here, customers expect to get screwed a little bit more with each passing day. That's what we call inflation. That's why people need more money year after year - which of course leads back to more inflation but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Now I'll say this frankly: I don't know you, nor your business, yet I already have a bad feeling about it all. A lot of people just want to do what they gotta do, get paid and get out. That's probably not in-line with your way of thinking, but you have to respect that mentality because that's how it works everywhere else. Anything less leads to instability, high stress and excessive turnover. It's inevitable, and others have said it many times already: if you don't reward your tenured employees, they will find someone else who will. Experience matters!
More importantly, employees don't suddenly lose their value as soon as they peak - they're not transistors, they don't get a die shrink every 18 months with doubled throughput. Humans are a limited resource, and the true genius of a successful business is finding new ways to maximize that resource, by creating more efficient tools or finding a new niche that is more profitable.
I wonder how much of that is caused by current US foreign policies, and the common distaste other nations have for American affairs. China won't give us the time of day, unless there's a lucrative business deal tied to their cooperation. They open and close their borders as they see fit, ignoring the rest of the world whenever they don't feel like dealing with the problem. They know the US government has no balls because our retail economy is so sickly dependent on Asian imports.
I've also driven in 3rd world countries where people have habits that would utterly blow your mind (Right turns from left lanes, driving in reverse on major roads, no headlights, 6 cars abreast in 3 lanes, I saw all 4 of these just TONIGHT on my way home)
Oh.. right.. so now they're saying it's a cultural thing ?
I don't care where people were born, if they drive like homicidal retards, they're homicidal retards! Just because everyone else from their hometown is equally retarded doesn't mean that shit will fly in north america.
No, that's just what the "BMW Book of Style" says to do, because almost everyone I see in a german car feels the need to be an asshole. I don't care, if they accidently smash into my car, I can revel in the knowledge that their repairs will be FAR more costly than my dinky old Ford.
If it passes, I wish you had enough money to leave the country and find a more respectable place to live. The way things are going, each passing day the USA's future looks evermore bleak and regressive.
Correction: If you find something like this, you make a HUGE fuss over it on your "apple leaks" site and rake in the ad revenue.
Apple fan sites aren't concerned with right vs wrong, they're just in it for the sensationalism.
It's a "revelation" to these guys because they're selling it to mass media. Joe Smith, who falls for phishing sites, doesn't understand what's really going on under the hood. He can barely spell his own friggin' name on a form. Joe Smith watches TV and reads the daily paper, along with a handful of "topical magazines" that are all-too happy to publish this sort of tripe.
It's the journalistic equivalent of "Lost", a whole pile of bullshit spread out so very thinly even the retards can enjoy it.
Technical, yes.
Technological, no.
After all, royalties are just a technicality.
And let's face it, the vanilla scheduler sucks ass. Context switches are so expensive.
In case you were wondering, Republicans' brains run a scaled-down version of the NT kernel.
Obama's on a hacked BSD.
The good thing about this movie is all the norms will see it and hear about how Russia is a bastion for spammers and bot farmers.
The BAD thing about this movie is all the norms will assume it's all fiction.
Russia, Korea, Malaysia, and a few dozen other lax countries are my worst nightmare as a sysadmin. I'm so fed up with it, I just download country-wide blacklists and feed them into iptables, because I can't possibly care about the handful of english-speaking southwest-asians who might give a damn about my vengeful blogs and counter-culture wikis. And isn't pr0n considered satanic over there ? Ya, I'm doing these wedgeless tards a favor by banning them all.
I'd like to copyright a court verdict. Specifically, I want to copyright the process of declaring a defendant guilty when the RIAA/MPAA are the plaintiffs. Every time that specific ingredient mix occurs in a courtroom, I want royalties paid to ME, because I'm the asshole who copyrighted it.
Seriously, this is bullshit.
Maybe (okay, not maybe) I'm an anti-war psycho, but I think the guy's choice should have been : live with no legs, or we finish what the Iraqi started and put you to sleep.
Of all the people who need medical help in this world, anyone who willingly puts themselves in harm's way should go to the very end of the list. You don't go to war with the intention of surviving, you go all-or-nothing.
I wish I could mod you higher than 5!
Corruption is the root of a HUGE number of problems in today's corporate society. Abuse of power is a direct contributor to social decline.
I'm kind of irritated at these "feature requests". Popularity usually means there are a lot of dumber people sticking their nose where it doesn't belong. nLite/vLite are fantastic tools, but they're not for the average MySpace-hacking suburban inbred. The last thing I would ever want is for Dino (the author) to give up because of the massive influx of cretins on the forums.
If there's one thing I've learned about "feature requests", 1% of them are brilliant, the other 99% come from people who are too illiterate or too young to RTFM. nLite is a mature piece of software whose purpose is well-defined and its execution is lithe and focused. If a potential user is unfulfilled by its functionality, it's quite likely that they are treading where they should not.
Two times crap is just a bigger pile of crap. The fact that this card only occasionally outpaces the 15-month-old 8800GTX is just pathetic. Sad and pathetic.
Take the same money, buy a pair of cheap 8800GT's and you'll cream this ATI blunder.
When it comes to graphics, I'm all about rooting for the winner. I've jumped from one company to the other many times over the last decade, but ATI has been all thumbs for the last little while. They finally cleaned up their drivers but that only highlighted the fact that the hardware still sucks. Just like AMD's Phenom, it's a big boring release over a year too late. There's nothing to be proud about when your flagship product falls in the "budget" category before it's even released.
Wake me when the Geforce 9 hits, or the Radeon 5xxx (yeah, skip the 4xxx range) - until then it's going to be a dull ride.
Cisco ceased being relevant a LONG time ago for most people. They still have their place in the ultra-high-end optical market, but most offices are best served by a bunch of big dumb switches and PC-based routers.
Yaya okay, Portal was freakin' awesome. Time to turn the page and get on with your life!
Not that I wouldn't enjoy an A.I. that's just as bitter and nihilistic as myself, but we won't be seeing that sort of thing for a looooong time.
The day someone can recover data from media I've killed with thermite, then we'll talk.
Right now, if someone sketchy wants to cover their tracks, it's cheap and relatively easy. I've personally witnessed the awesome destruction that thermite does to a hard drive, it leaves a big drippy hole where the platters once sat. It's basically super-welding the drive into one big block. I don't think there's any way to get data back, at least not with current nor near-future technology.
Step 1: Buy Symantec Home Internet Security Suite
Step 2: Pay Geek Squad douche to remove bloated Symantec Suite
Step 3: ????
Step 4: PROFIT!
Seriously, Symantec hasn't produced anything of worth since Norton Utilities 8 for DOS! Every new release of whatever cryptically named software pot-pourri just eats up more and more Ram and CPU for the privilege of letting more viruses and spyware leak through. The only way they could make their software any worse would be to re-skin McAfee's apps.
It's pretty farking sad when the free virus and spyware scanners are TONS faster and more reliable than the biggest company's flagship product.
The big problem with this levy is that I don't give a crap about Canadian songwriters.
Yeah, I'm Canadian; that's no secret. I just don't like many local artists, because this lame folky pop-rock alternative MTV-lite snore just isn't my cup of tea. In fact much of the music I like comes from the dirtiest clubs in Detroit, New York and Britain. House baybee! And guess what: those folks aren't signed to any big labels, so they wouldn't be seeing a penny of this tax.
The artists have the solution available to them: cut out the middleman! I haven't bought a music CD in ages, it's redundant! The first thing I do is rip it to my computer, then fling the MP3 over to my car deck, or stream it over the net to wherever I am at that moment, be it the office or a friend's house. The physical disc is dead to me, I buy tracks off of Beatport.com, largely because they have a pretty nice selection of house/trance/techno. I pay between 1.49 and 2.49 per track, which may appear steep compared to 99c elsewhere, but tracks purchased from Beatport come with DJ playback rights, the same as buying a vinyl record. Of course they contain no DRM whatsoever, and are all encoded in 320kbps MP3, ~190kbps MP4, or uncompressed wave for a slight surcharge. Most of their stuff is also hard to find elsewhere, except in other online DJ stores. Considering the niche, I think their model is excellent and there's not much I'd want to change about it.
If Canadian artists want to make money off the internet, they should sell their music on the internet! DUH! The biggest thing they're ignoring is that music downloaders, while plentiful, still make up a small portion of total internet users. There are a LOT of people out there in the later stages of life who couldn't care less about Britney Spears or even Radiohead. They use the internet for email, eBay, casual blogging and Skype, with a few social games on Pogo. The music industry has no business charging these already cash-strapped people $60/year for something they don't use. Heck, they have no business charging ME $60/year because I don't even spend that much on their overplayed undertalented releases in the first place!
The fact that my local PC retailer (read: Chinese import scam-shop) sells unlocked iPhones en-masse probably isn't helping. I'm in Canada. AFAIK, Apple isn't selling iPhones in Canada (yet). Me, I just hate that particular shop, so everything they do must be evil! >:-$
It's silly for Apple/AT&T to ever think they could lock their phones down. There are entire (clandestine) businesses built around the unlocking/hacking of cell phones. I personally think our immigrants should seek employment in more respectable industries, but that's just one more reason why I'm not in charge.
Everywhere I go, people say "don't login as root", and yet every box I run, I login as root almost exclusively (unless I'm testing a bitch account).
So am I just so infinitely brilliant that I am immune to root mishaps, or are you still going to tell me I'm extremely lucky ?
Most people manage Windows servers as Administrator, and for the most part, it's Microsoft bugs that will get you, not your choice of unencumbered system accounts. Sure, it doesn't stop me from hosing my entire system with a few misjudged commands, but as I said earlier, my endless wisdom prevents me from doing so, and my various network security schemes ensure that I'm the only root on the box. For me, that's more than safe enough.
That's funny, I allow root ssh on all my boxes.
From my own IP ranges, that is. Home, work, my other boxes. I don't see why anyone should be trying to ssh into my gear if they're not me.
In fact, I drop all other SSH accesses at the firewall, and I use a key pair to login.
My real worry is the actual web server. It's hard to run any ready-made apps like posting boards, galleries or others - they're all coded by retarded teenage monkeys who apparently learned everything they know from PHP 3.0. Nothing says "fuck korea" like a bunch of rogue processes running as the apache user.
here is an idea, make the drivers modular. Drivers cause more BSODs and crashes than anything else. Don't let a single driver bring down a system.
Well the drivers are already modular, but what I think you meant was to isolate them from the rest of the kernel. That's pretty much impossible, the whole point of device drivers is to have a small piece of trusted code acting as a gatekeeper between the hardware and application software.
It's not impossible to abstract the hardware interface one step further, but in practice this results in a significant performance hit as you now have to virtualize every hardware access. It's essentially running all your drivers inside a VM.
The problem with drivers is they try to do too much, and they do it poorly. I'd much much rather see true bare-metal interfaces at the driver level, with userland helpers to do the heavy lifting. The problem is Windows doesn't lend itself too easily to this two-tiered design. Heck, just a printer driver can hose your kernel if (or rather WHEN) things go sour. What the hell is a printer doing in the kernel ? Lord knows. It should really be an unprivileged app talking to a USB printing mediator... something like that.
In any case, Vista did a whole lot of things wrong, and it didn't fix the driver issues at all. The main reason it requires signed drivers is because of the whole TPM affair. By having all drivers signed, it significantly reduces the possibility of a hacked driver crumbling the delicate house of cards that is DRM. It's got nothing to do with driver quality.