The ones linked in the main article text output actual analog or digital signals - you would still need something to bring this down to serial format to feed it into a machine (like a little basic stamp circuit or something)
You might want to look at Pinnacle Datalogger, which has an ethernet jack and an IP stack, and a web interface, etc... It does temp and humidity.
After actually reading the documentation, here's my informed take on this:
1) In it's current incarnation, it's only useful for very very simple database access. No transactions, no blobs, etc. Basically if you're just storing some simple weblication tables and doing single-statements against them for selects/updates (no big cross-table transactions), you can use it.
2) It's JDBC only. Perhaps someone could port the concept to ODBC though.
3) There's a new middle tier between the JDBC driver and the database itself, which is the bulk of their code. This tier actually re-implements some database constructs like recovery logging, query caching, etc. Of course this is neccesary, as trying to do replication from the client-code side alone would be impossible (what do you do when one of 3 DB mirrors goes offline for an hour? have every jdbc client cache the requests and replay them later, hoping those clients are even stilla round later?)
For some applications and some companies, in it's current state this is a godsend - but it's not a general solution yet. Making it ODBC (or even better, having the front of it emulate a native postgresql or mysql listener) would broaden it's applicability.
Supporting transactions would be a big win too, although I'm not sure how feasible this is - I think at that point they may as well just write their own new database engine which is parallel from the start, seeing as they'll be re-implementing in their cluster tier almost everything the database server does except for actual physical storage.
Still, it's nice to see that someone did this and made it work - and for a lot of simple databases behind java apps it's all you really need.
PostgreSQL has all the transaction support in place already, so of all the free DBs out there it would seem they have the best shot at doing their own native parallelism, if they would just get it done someday.
Obviously it only solves the problem assuming the available machines are within the reach of the law and accountable. It would be pretty easy to ask most major nations to pass an equivalent law and have the major ISPs blacklist traffic from non-participating countries, it shouldn't even be controversial, seeing as the method asks only for rigorous labelling as opposed to censorship.
Now the hijacking thing gets back to security. Am I not criminally liable when someone takes my handgun from my unlocked car and shoots someone? Software vendors and sysadmins need to be held accountable for wide-open servers. ISPs need to be held accountable for allowing "client" addresses on cable modems to send large amounts of smtp traffic.
Spam can be solved very, very simply. Everyone with a brain cell knows this. People need to stfu and do it right. I'll outline the basic steps of one way to do it, there's many others equally simple and valid. Actually, in this outline I'll solve not only the problem of spam, but also the problem of adult content on the web and filtering it for children. Needless to say you can combine the two to stop porn spam too. Here goes:
1) Set a technical standard for senders to classify emails in the header fields. Say, an X-header like "X-Mail-Classification: ". Give it three legal values: "UCE", "SCE", and "Personal". UCE is Spam, SCE is when you told a company explicitly that they could spam you (you really did visit their site and give them your address for future announcements or whatever), and Personal is anything else.
2) Set a similar technical standard for rating the adultness of websites. Make an HTTP header field, call it "Content-Rating", with a range of values similar to modern cable TV ratings (first a rating like PG-13, R, etc... followed by WHY (R - Violence, X - Strong Sexual Content, etc..).
3) Pass a bill in congress making it a legal requirement that all sites and emails MUST contain these headers, unless they fall in the "best" category (by that I mean, emails which actually fall in the Personal category are not required by law to state this, and websites which would have a G rating are not requried to state this). Failure to have a rating results in fines, having an obviously false rating (porn site rated PG, etc) results in even bigger fines - repeat offenses land you in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
4) Obviously once the headers are well-defined, and prevalent because of the legal requirement, software vendors need to mod email clients and web browsers to recognize these headers, which is extremely trivial. The user can then block bad sites and trash bad emails automatically or do whatever else they wish. If something makes it through the system (unwanted porn, unwanted UCE), you've got a clear case that they failed to properly label it with headers, which violates the new law above and lands them with criminal fines.
Agreed. All the mahole covers I remember seeing seemed to be solid cast iron around 1 inch thick. Compare that to the wimpy aluminum sheets on your car. Hell even older cars with real sheet steel bodies would crumble in the face of an inch of solid cast iron. And in any case, how do you "hit" a flat object on the ground with your car? Do you launch your car into the air and then dive back down at the hole? As mentioned before, workers don't leave the covers leaning up against things or roll them on their sides - they use little tools to hook into them and drag them away from the hole flatly and set them flatly on the ground nearby. They are always flat to the ground during the whole process.
Agreed, the lip is a given, but most shapes would still fall through when oriented correctly unless the lip was excessive, which would then be a waste of space, materials, and weight. I'm pretty sure that out of all the simple symmetrical geometric shapes, only the circle and triangles are gauranteed not to fall in. Anything symmetrical with four or more sides can be oriented just right and dropped in, or at leas tthat's my intuition, I haven't actually tried it really.
I lump automobiles into the discussion because they're the other large common source of debt. As I've said 10 times on the "no rent when you lose your job" argument - the argument is that if I lose my job I can move into a cheaper apartment easily, whereas downgrading houses may be hard in hard times (or even worse than downgrading houses, playing debt games with your existing equity to effectively lengthen the term of your home loan and drop the payments).
Shhhh, you're going to cause some eco-hippie to glimpse the real world, break down into psychosis and try to kill us all with his army of trees. It wouldn't be pretty.
Yeah I think you and another guy later down the thread as well read far too much into my insecurities. This is not about conspiracy - it's about simple capitalism and suppression. I know my industry is on a downward spiral. I know the future of the economy is risky but could go positive. I know the housing market is also in a risky position, but it's been that way before and come through ok. I know that banks, credit institutions, insurance companies, etc all want a peice of my pie. They're not involved in a grand conspiracy, they're just trying to win a capitalist game, and me and others like me are the target they're feeding on.
Take an average guy in my job position who plays by the standard rules. He's got a mortgaged house, a car loan, a crapload of various insurance payments on both, 3-4 credit cards running a constant but manageable load, etc. What happens if he stumbles, what happens if he's out of a job for several months? I'm no longer playing this game to "win", because I don't see my situation as very winnable right now until some big economic things change. I'm playing to survive, and that means not taking on debts that I'm unsure I can ever repay.
Well, you didn't have to get offensive with our own brand of ignorance. You could try logic or something.
Yea. You go! Fight the system! W00t!
That sounds nothing like what I said. Did I not say I had a salaried job, etc? I'm not fighting the system - to fight the system I'd have to first stop being an upper middle class wage slave. I'm just trying to make an intelligent decision in uncertain times.
For those of you with a few extra braincells and less interest in the Black UN Helicoptors and government mind control lasers crowd, you might be interested in noting that paying Rent is exactly the same as paying a mortgage... except someone else is getting the equity. And the tax break.
Did I say anything about black helicopters or mind control? I said it was a tool of suppression. Suppression does not mean consipracy theories. Much as stated in the crappy but insightful movie "The Cube", there is no grand conspiracy, just a bunch of bearuacrats with aligned goals trying to steal what they can. Paying rent is not the same as paying mortgage, minus the equity. It's also minus the debt load and risks. There's a reason you get your equity. The tax break is relatively minimal, although it's certainly there.
See, here's how the game works. I, filthy capitalist pig, am part of the scum that has "Old Money". I invest "Old Money" into a dirt-cheap cinderblock POS that I like to call "Arbor Palms, a Beautiful (gated) community." Then, I go find college students and lower-class people and entice them to come in and pay me to live there. The final result is: I turn a profit while at the same time writing off a portion of the loan repayment.
This has nothing to do with Old Money or filthy capitalist pigs. I'm a staunch capitalist, and I would be happy with my own old money if I had it. The way I see it, capitalism is a game between the less-empowered individuals and the more-empowered corporations. You can't just fall in line and expect to win, unless you were so set that you would have won no matter what. I don't think a unix professional in 2003 can say it's a smart move to start taking debt on on continued success in the job market.
In order to maintain my positive cash flow, I then propagate the myth that low-interest debt like mortgages are Bad and a Tool of The Man on popular webboards. Now all these "smart" people see that "equity" is nothing but imaginary numbers, and spend the equivilant amount of cash on an apartment. Because, apartments become free if you lose your job, right? There's no late-payment penalties or evictions put on your credit report. Not like a house at all!
Equity is imaginary numbers. The goal in purchasing a house is to no longer have a monthly house/rent payment. Until you finish the loan, as long as you are making payments, you don't own the place, the bank does. The equity is useful as a source of credit, but that agin extends you further into debt. And yeah, no shit, apartments don't become free when you lose your job. However, if you ahve no large debts over your head, it's pretty damn easy to scale your apartment-lifestyle downwards to match your income. It's a lot harder with a house and mortgage (and all the other financial strings attached there). The debt/credit (and maybe I should toss in insurance) systems are designed to pressure you to achieve more in order to maintain an ever-moving standard of living target, and to punish those who fall.
Hint, folks: Yes, it's expensive to move houses. It's also expensive to move apartments. Security deposits, pet deposits, utility disconnect/hookup plus the cost of moving all your stuff. With a house you do actually come out slightly ahead after a number of years, even AFTER paying comission on selling it.
It isn't expensive at all to move between apartments. A
Well, of course if my job, or entire industry, continues to fall, I'll still be out on my ass, but it's a much softer landing. I can move to a cheaper apartment and work as a bartender or some other random crap job. If I had a typical debt load for someone in my income range and suddenly had a job downgrade, it would be very rough.
As for the fear thing (which some others mention in replies as well but I'll just address it here):
Some people have made some very valid comparisons between the current IT job market situation and what has happened historically with other major US industries in the past - that there is a common pattern where new technology emerges, highly skilled individuals make good money at it, then the processes and skills stabilize and become more "teachable" and doable by your average joe. Then the job becomes commoditized where companies are basically looking for the guy who has taken the training class that goes for the lowest pay. That's when they realize they should export most of the labor overseas to a third world country. According to some articles I read this happened with Textiles and Steel at one point, just like what's happening with IT and India. The difference is that at least those guys saved themselves a little bit with unions, which we don't have in this industry.
I think it's still a fairly open question whether the under-representation of females is because of the societal situation that pushes them away from it, or because male and female brains work differently, and thus more males end up being the right "type" for CS, or other similar fields. It would probably be an interesting research topic for someone who was both psychologically and computer-science saavy.
In any case, whatever the causes are, the results are obvious. There are women who makes great CS people, but they're few and far between. No offense, but about half the female computer professionals I've met didn't get the job on their merits. They got the job because they were female... either to attract better male employees, or because the male geeks interviewing her got a woody, or because some HR person said some department had to hire more females for diversity. The other half are badass coders, no doubt, but they are a small fraction of the overall CS-person pie.
Still, women's CS groups are a good thing - these women need all the support they can get to survive in a land of geeks.
Unless you luck out, it's unlikely that the appreciation will match the interest paid. Sure, you may buy for 100k and sell for 120k some years down the road, but you probably payed most of that 20k in interest by then anyways. Of course there's specific examples of it going extremely in either direction, but I think in the overall these factors are somewhat balanced.
If you play the debt-based home-"ownership" game, you may own a house 30-40 years down the road after you've been through a few partial mortgages and moving around and whatnot. In the meantime, you don't really own jack (well, I take that back, you do own some equity, but that's only useful to back loans, which is digging yourself deeper into the debt game). You may as well be renting unless you manage to pull it off at the end and finally actually pay off a house.
In the very long run, if I knew for sure that I would live in this city, making at least what I make now, for the next 40 years, then it would make long-term financial sense to finance a house to me. But I see the world around me, and especially my industry, as being on shaky ground at the moment. I'm not about to load up on debt just to find my income dropping, or perhaps find myself moving across the country to stay employed.
Once you start falling, it's a long, hard, fall. If you start to fall, and you've got a house mortgage, a car payment, and typical credit card bills and other miscellaneous debt like most Americans - you are unlikely to ever fully recover. The weight of the debt and the ever-compounding interest will crush you, and the financial institutions involved basically get to call you their bitch for the rest of your natural life. You may recover to mediocrity at some point, where you can rent an apartment and spend half your pay on years-old debts while you struggle to be middle-class - or you may just decide at that just going bankrupt and waiting out the seven years to fix your credit automatically is a better option.
Me personally? I don't want to be in that situation, and I'm not sure of my financial future. Therefore, I'll choose a lifestyle that at the very least doesn't leave me being some faceless corporation's bitch. I have no credit cards, credit lines or loans. I may live in an apartment, but that simple transaction is much easier for me to justify. If I ever finally get that brilliant idea that makes me wealthy, or the industry picks up and I cash out some stock options, or maybe I have a few years' good run on the stock market - I may be in a position where I have the money to buy a house, and at that point I'd be glad to do so. I just don't believe in buying things on someone else's dime while signing a percentage of my future over to them on the terms that I must win the job game in order to not be crushed.
Here's my breakdown - it's a rough average I use to keep track of things, it's usually accurate within 10-15% on the variable items:
26 years old, single, Houston, TX market
quality midsize 1 BR apt near downtown 900/mo. Electric/Cable/Net 250/mo. Food (some shopping, maj. eating out) 400/mo. Entertainment (mostly means drinking, clubs, movies, etc - things I can cut back on in a financial pinch) 500/mo. Transportation (car maintenance broken down, gas for a very short commute, bus fares, etc) $120/mo.
Total: $2170/mo, which is less than half my monthly take-home pay - the rest goes to one-off expenditures, toys, savings, emergencies, etc. You'll notice the distinct lack of a car payment, and that I prefer to rent instead of pay mortgage. I don't believe in America's Credit/Debt System at all - it's a tool to supress people into coming into line with what the goverment and major corporations want out of them. I own my car (it's not hard to buy a car outright even on a low budget - find a clean used car from an individual), and I won't buy a house till my savings/investments add up to being able to purchase it in cash, which may be never. I firmly believe this is the way to go, but my opinion is in the minority.
^ What he said. He didn't address your point about caching and https, which is probably the most valid one (email virus scanning can be done at the client side after the network transmission is complete, it makes more sense there anyways).
And yes, caching would be hurt by default-https policies. Of course the servers would have to go https as well - most public http servers don't run an https copy of their data/services. So back to this caching thing... It still doesn't prevent client-side caching in your browser, so that's not so bad. It hurts the backbones and smaller ISPs because they can't cache requests in transit out on the network, but I think that practice is dubious at best. I suppose if you have millions of customers (say AOL), then you may see real cache savings on super-popular front pages like yahoo.com or cnn.com (but you'd have to keep something like cnn refreshed fairly quickly).
For lower-popularity sites and lower numbers of users, I doubt the savings are all that huge if the cache adheres to the server's specified TTLs (which it should, but I bet some providers would be willing to show old or invalid data to save a few bucks), especially in this age of dynamic content.
If you are AOL wanting to cache cnn.com, I'm sure you could arrange cnn to provide a private mirror-feed server inside your network as a super-efficient form of caching that helps both parties cut network costs.
Agreed mostly - but I think it would be a great boon if encryption started being on by default instead of off. Mail clients should default to secure smtp/imap/whatever, and show a security warning if you disable to work with a braindead mail provider. Web browsers should start defaulting to https if no protocol is specified. You get the idea. When *everything* is well-encrypted, privacy is much easier to secure.
Heh, I got the hardware implementation of that two weeks ago, but I was on the wrong end of it:(
Luckily I got my cfar back a week later - the dumbass got away cleanly, but then proceeded to steal about $500 worth of crap from the inside and then leave the car on the side of the road somewhere. If I were him it would've been in a chop-shop somewhere for parts money.
Hey! I bought mine for Gran Turismo. I'd rather see a dedicated hardware implementation of that (oh wait, I already have one of those in my garage...).
You've been lucky on RAM for sure. Now about this static discharge thing. I also never used to use wriststraps or any other static precaution working on home stuff. I always did it right at work because it was required, but at home I routinely did just about anything I could to static damage them because I knew it was unlikely to cause a problem. My experience was always that the components worked fine anyways, and that ESD damage must be such a low occurence that you're just not likely to ever see it so it's not worth the trouble.
However, later on down the line I learned the error of my ways. I was failing to understand the nature of ESD damage. Someone finally clued me in. In short, ESD damage *does* happen with a surprisingly high frequency when you handle components unsafely, but you don't notice because the damage takes time to show. Essentially the high voltage of the ESD (ESD like when you shock yourself on a doorknob is very high voltage, it's just very low current) is destructive to the transistor junctions, but it usually doesn't cause immediate complete failure. A few days, months, or even years down the road, the junction will prematurely break down, having had a shortened lifespan because of the ESD damage.
So those components that failed on you after a few good years of service that you chalked up to just failing from age probably failed to a large degree from ESD back when you first installed them, and had you used the right precautions, they might've lasted a lot longer. Now that I understand this, I'm a lot more careful about ESD even at home. From what I read, the long-term effects of ESD over a large sample are better felt by electronics companies. They can actually see the warranty return rate on their chips drop consistently when they put better ESD precautions into place, although it may take a few years to see.
If you're into Linux, but you're not a self-contained guru, then it would behoove you to make some local connections. Attend users' groups, find people through networks of office-mates, whatever works (try local 2600 meetings even, although they're filled with losers you might stumble on some rare diamonds in the rough there). Find and befreind some local gurus - they probably won't mind you taking em out for a beer to discuss a technical problem with them.
Yes most fire safes I've ever seen are mostly worthless. When you read the specs, it turns out they let through way too much heat for most practical purposes - all they're doing is blocking the physical flame. You're still running a fair chance of total heat destruction on the inside. However, there are fire safes out there that are capable of protecting magnetic media, you just have to look around for them.
For example, check out http://www.firekingoffice.com/fk_data.html
It's a 99, and while I'm sure the drag is great compared to some cars, it's not low enough for truly high speed stuff. Mine is a WS6 with only minor bolt-on performance stuff (lowered thermostat, ported MAF, lid/filter, hypertech, etc) - so probably realistically seeing about 350-360 hp at the rear wheels - and it is definitely drag limited around the 160-165-ish mark on a flat highway (hard to tell - the speedo stops right about the same point - if I had enough highway it might crawl to 170-something over the course of a few minutes, but how would I know?).
Agree completely with what you're saying - but I would like to add a note about downforce and drag. They can and do have an effect even under mere street/highway-racer speeds. Drag in particular is apparent on a straight highway where max speed is all that matters. My extremely (for a sporty car) un-aerodynamic trans am gets drag-limited at around 160mph on the highway, with plenty left on the gears (good luck redlining 6th...). Downforce is a bit harder to argue for, but I'm sure any hard curves or corners at or above 50mph or so probably gain some small effect. Of course downforce gear on a real race car is tuned for each track - so a fixed configuration like the ricers tend to have is going to be unpredictable at best on the street depending on the situation - too much downforce just slows you down, and not enough will cause you to loose control on a fast turn.
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to look at Pinnacle Datalogger, which has an ethernet jack and an IP stack, and a web interface, etc... It does temp and humidity.
After actually reading the documentation, here's my informed take on this:
1) In it's current incarnation, it's only useful for very very simple database access. No transactions, no blobs, etc. Basically if you're just storing some simple weblication tables and doing single-statements against them for selects/updates (no big cross-table transactions), you can use it.
2) It's JDBC only. Perhaps someone could port the concept to ODBC though.
3) There's a new middle tier between the JDBC driver and the database itself, which is the bulk of their code. This tier actually re-implements some database constructs like recovery logging, query caching, etc. Of course this is neccesary, as trying to do replication from the client-code side alone would be impossible (what do you do when one of 3 DB mirrors goes offline for an hour? have every jdbc client cache the requests and replay them later, hoping those clients are even stilla round later?)
For some applications and some companies, in it's current state this is a godsend - but it's not a general solution yet. Making it ODBC (or even better, having the front of it emulate a native postgresql or mysql listener) would broaden it's applicability.
Supporting transactions would be a big win too, although I'm not sure how feasible this is - I think at that point they may as well just write their own new database engine which is parallel from the start, seeing as they'll be re-implementing in their cluster tier almost everything the database server does except for actual physical storage.
Still, it's nice to see that someone did this and made it work - and for a lot of simple databases behind java apps it's all you really need.
PostgreSQL has all the transaction support in place already, so of all the free DBs out there it would seem they have the best shot at doing their own native parallelism, if they would just get it done someday.
Obviously it only solves the problem assuming the available machines are within the reach of the law and accountable. It would be pretty easy to ask most major nations to pass an equivalent law and have the major ISPs blacklist traffic from non-participating countries, it shouldn't even be controversial, seeing as the method asks only for rigorous labelling as opposed to censorship.
Now the hijacking thing gets back to security. Am I not criminally liable when someone takes my handgun from my unlocked car and shoots someone? Software vendors and sysadmins need to be held accountable for wide-open servers. ISPs need to be held accountable for allowing "client" addresses on cable modems to send large amounts of smtp traffic.
Spam can be solved very, very simply. Everyone with a brain cell knows this. People need to stfu and do it right. I'll outline the basic steps of one way to do it, there's many others equally simple and valid. Actually, in this outline I'll solve not only the problem of spam, but also the problem of adult content on the web and filtering it for children. Needless to say you can combine the two to stop porn spam too. Here goes:
1) Set a technical standard for senders to classify emails in the header fields. Say, an X-header like "X-Mail-Classification: ". Give it three legal values: "UCE", "SCE", and "Personal". UCE is Spam, SCE is when you told a company explicitly that they could spam you (you really did visit their site and give them your address for future announcements or whatever), and Personal is anything else.
2) Set a similar technical standard for rating the adultness of websites. Make an HTTP header field, call it "Content-Rating", with a range of values similar to modern cable TV ratings (first a rating like PG-13, R, etc... followed by WHY (R - Violence, X - Strong Sexual Content, etc..).
3) Pass a bill in congress making it a legal requirement that all sites and emails MUST contain these headers, unless they fall in the "best" category (by that I mean, emails which actually fall in the Personal category are not required by law to state this, and websites which would have a G rating are not requried to state this). Failure to have a rating results in fines, having an obviously false rating (porn site rated PG, etc) results in even bigger fines - repeat offenses land you in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
4) Obviously once the headers are well-defined, and prevalent because of the legal requirement, software vendors need to mod email clients and web browsers to recognize these headers, which is extremely trivial. The user can then block bad sites and trash bad emails automatically or do whatever else they wish. If something makes it through the system (unwanted porn, unwanted UCE), you've got a clear case that they failed to properly label it with headers, which violates the new law above and lands them with criminal fines.
Agreed. All the mahole covers I remember seeing seemed to be solid cast iron around 1 inch thick. Compare that to the wimpy aluminum sheets on your car. Hell even older cars with real sheet steel bodies would crumble in the face of an inch of solid cast iron. And in any case, how do you "hit" a flat object on the ground with your car? Do you launch your car into the air and then dive back down at the hole? As mentioned before, workers don't leave the covers leaning up against things or roll them on their sides - they use little tools to hook into them and drag them away from the hole flatly and set them flatly on the ground nearby. They are always flat to the ground during the whole process.
Agreed, the lip is a given, but most shapes would still fall through when oriented correctly unless the lip was excessive, which would then be a waste of space, materials, and weight. I'm pretty sure that out of all the simple symmetrical geometric shapes, only the circle and triangles are gauranteed not to fall in. Anything symmetrical with four or more sides can be oriented just right and dropped in, or at leas tthat's my intuition, I haven't actually tried it really.
I lump automobiles into the discussion because they're the other large common source of debt. As I've said 10 times on the "no rent when you lose your job" argument - the argument is that if I lose my job I can move into a cheaper apartment easily, whereas downgrading houses may be hard in hard times (or even worse than downgrading houses, playing debt games with your existing equity to effectively lengthen the term of your home loan and drop the payments).
Shhhh, you're going to cause some eco-hippie to glimpse the real world, break down into psychosis and try to kill us all with his army of trees. It wouldn't be pretty.
Yeah I think you and another guy later down the thread as well read far too much into my insecurities. This is not about conspiracy - it's about simple capitalism and suppression. I know my industry is on a downward spiral. I know the future of the economy is risky but could go positive. I know the housing market is also in a risky position, but it's been that way before and come through ok. I know that banks, credit institutions, insurance companies, etc all want a peice of my pie. They're not involved in a grand conspiracy, they're just trying to win a capitalist game, and me and others like me are the target they're feeding on.
Take an average guy in my job position who plays by the standard rules. He's got a mortgaged house, a car loan, a crapload of various insurance payments on both, 3-4 credit cards running a constant but manageable load, etc. What happens if he stumbles, what happens if he's out of a job for several months? I'm no longer playing this game to "win", because I don't see my situation as very winnable right now until some big economic things change. I'm playing to survive, and that means not taking on debts that I'm unsure I can ever repay.
Well, you didn't have to get offensive with our own brand of ignorance. You could try logic or something.
That sounds nothing like what I said. Did I not say I had a salaried job, etc? I'm not fighting the system - to fight the system I'd have to first stop being an upper middle class wage slave. I'm just trying to make an intelligent decision in uncertain times.
Did I say anything about black helicopters or mind control? I said it was a tool of suppression. Suppression does not mean consipracy theories. Much as stated in the crappy but insightful movie "The Cube", there is no grand conspiracy, just a bunch of bearuacrats with aligned goals trying to steal what they can. Paying rent is not the same as paying mortgage, minus the equity. It's also minus the debt load and risks. There's a reason you get your equity. The tax break is relatively minimal, although it's certainly there.
This has nothing to do with Old Money or filthy capitalist pigs. I'm a staunch capitalist, and I would be happy with my own old money if I had it. The way I see it, capitalism is a game between the less-empowered individuals and the more-empowered corporations. You can't just fall in line and expect to win, unless you were so set that you would have won no matter what. I don't think a unix professional in 2003 can say it's a smart move to start taking debt on on continued success in the job market.
Equity is imaginary numbers. The goal in purchasing a house is to no longer have a monthly house/rent payment. Until you finish the loan, as long as you are making payments, you don't own the place, the bank does. The equity is useful as a source of credit, but that agin extends you further into debt. And yeah, no shit, apartments don't become free when you lose your job. However, if you ahve no large debts over your head, it's pretty damn easy to scale your apartment-lifestyle downwards to match your income. It's a lot harder with a house and mortgage (and all the other financial strings attached there). The debt/credit (and maybe I should toss in insurance) systems are designed to pressure you to achieve more in order to maintain an ever-moving standard of living target, and to punish those who fall.
It isn't expensive at all to move between apartments. A
Well, of course if my job, or entire industry, continues to fall, I'll still be out on my ass, but it's a much softer landing. I can move to a cheaper apartment and work as a bartender or some other random crap job. If I had a typical debt load for someone in my income range and suddenly had a job downgrade, it would be very rough.
As for the fear thing (which some others mention in replies as well but I'll just address it here):
Some people have made some very valid comparisons between the current IT job market situation and what has happened historically with other major US industries in the past - that there is a common pattern where new technology emerges, highly skilled individuals make good money at it, then the processes and skills stabilize and become more "teachable" and doable by your average joe. Then the job becomes commoditized where companies are basically looking for the guy who has taken the training class that goes for the lowest pay. That's when they realize they should export most of the labor overseas to a third world country. According to some articles I read this happened with Textiles and Steel at one point, just like what's happening with IT and India. The difference is that at least those guys saved themselves a little bit with unions, which we don't have in this industry.
I think it's still a fairly open question whether the under-representation of females is because of the societal situation that pushes them away from it, or because male and female brains work differently, and thus more males end up being the right "type" for CS, or other similar fields. It would probably be an interesting research topic for someone who was both psychologically and computer-science saavy.
In any case, whatever the causes are, the results are obvious. There are women who makes great CS people, but they're few and far between. No offense, but about half the female computer professionals I've met didn't get the job on their merits. They got the job because they were female... either to attract better male employees, or because the male geeks interviewing her got a woody, or because some HR person said some department had to hire more females for diversity. The other half are badass coders, no doubt, but they are a small fraction of the overall CS-person pie.
Still, women's CS groups are a good thing - these women need all the support they can get to survive in a land of geeks.
Kinda. Here's how I view the situation:
Unless you luck out, it's unlikely that the appreciation will match the interest paid. Sure, you may buy for 100k and sell for 120k some years down the road, but you probably payed most of that 20k in interest by then anyways. Of course there's specific examples of it going extremely in either direction, but I think in the overall these factors are somewhat balanced.
If you play the debt-based home-"ownership" game, you may own a house 30-40 years down the road after you've been through a few partial mortgages and moving around and whatnot. In the meantime, you don't really own jack (well, I take that back, you do own some equity, but that's only useful to back loans, which is digging yourself deeper into the debt game). You may as well be renting unless you manage to pull it off at the end and finally actually pay off a house.
In the very long run, if I knew for sure that I would live in this city, making at least what I make now, for the next 40 years, then it would make long-term financial sense to finance a house to me. But I see the world around me, and especially my industry, as being on shaky ground at the moment. I'm not about to load up on debt just to find my income dropping, or perhaps find myself moving across the country to stay employed.
Once you start falling, it's a long, hard, fall. If you start to fall, and you've got a house mortgage, a car payment, and typical credit card bills and other miscellaneous debt like most Americans - you are unlikely to ever fully recover. The weight of the debt and the ever-compounding interest will crush you, and the financial institutions involved basically get to call you their bitch for the rest of your natural life. You may recover to mediocrity at some point, where you can rent an apartment and spend half your pay on years-old debts while you struggle to be middle-class - or you may just decide at that just going bankrupt and waiting out the seven years to fix your credit automatically is a better option.
Me personally? I don't want to be in that situation, and I'm not sure of my financial future. Therefore, I'll choose a lifestyle that at the very least doesn't leave me being some faceless corporation's bitch. I have no credit cards, credit lines or loans. I may live in an apartment, but that simple transaction is much easier for me to justify. If I ever finally get that brilliant idea that makes me wealthy, or the industry picks up and I cash out some stock options, or maybe I have a few years' good run on the stock market - I may be in a position where I have the money to buy a house, and at that point I'd be glad to do so. I just don't believe in buying things on someone else's dime while signing a percentage of my future over to them on the terms that I must win the job game in order to not be crushed.
Unix Sysadmin
Here's my breakdown - it's a rough average I use to keep track of things, it's usually accurate within 10-15% on the variable items:
26 years old, single, Houston, TX market
quality midsize 1 BR apt near downtown 900/mo.
Electric/Cable/Net 250/mo.
Food (some shopping, maj. eating out) 400/mo.
Entertainment (mostly means drinking, clubs, movies, etc - things I can cut back on in a financial pinch) 500/mo.
Transportation (car maintenance broken down, gas for a very short commute, bus fares, etc) $120/mo.
Total: $2170/mo, which is less than half my monthly take-home pay - the rest goes to one-off expenditures, toys, savings, emergencies, etc. You'll notice the distinct lack of a car payment, and that I prefer to rent instead of pay mortgage. I don't believe in America's Credit/Debt System at all - it's a tool to supress people into coming into line with what the goverment and major corporations want out of them. I own my car (it's not hard to buy a car outright even on a low budget - find a clean used car from an individual), and I won't buy a house till my savings/investments add up to being able to purchase it in cash, which may be never. I firmly believe this is the way to go, but my opinion is in the minority.
^ What he said. He didn't address your point about caching and https, which is probably the most valid one (email virus scanning can be done at the client side after the network transmission is complete, it makes more sense there anyways).
And yes, caching would be hurt by default-https policies. Of course the servers would have to go https as well - most public http servers don't run an https copy of their data/services. So back to this caching thing... It still doesn't prevent client-side caching in your browser, so that's not so bad. It hurts the backbones and smaller ISPs because they can't cache requests in transit out on the network, but I think that practice is dubious at best. I suppose if you have millions of customers (say AOL), then you may see real cache savings on super-popular front pages like yahoo.com or cnn.com (but you'd have to keep something like cnn refreshed fairly quickly).
For lower-popularity sites and lower numbers of users, I doubt the savings are all that huge if the cache adheres to the server's specified TTLs (which it should, but I bet some providers would be willing to show old or invalid data to save a few bucks), especially in this age of dynamic content.
If you are AOL wanting to cache cnn.com, I'm sure you could arrange cnn to provide a private mirror-feed server inside your network as a super-efficient form of caching that helps both parties cut network costs.
Agreed mostly - but I think it would be a great boon if encryption started being on by default instead of off. Mail clients should default to secure smtp/imap/whatever, and show a security warning if you disable to work with a braindead mail provider. Web browsers should start defaulting to https if no protocol is specified. You get the idea. When *everything* is well-encrypted, privacy is much easier to secure.
Heh, I got the hardware implementation of that two weeks ago, but I was on the wrong end of it
Luckily I got my cfar back a week later - the dumbass got away cleanly, but then proceeded to steal about $500 worth of crap from the inside and then leave the car on the side of the road somewhere. If I were him it would've been in a chop-shop somewhere for parts money.
Hey! I bought mine for Gran Turismo. I'd rather see a dedicated hardware implementation of that (oh wait, I already have one of those in my garage...).
You've been lucky on RAM for sure. Now about this static discharge thing. I also never used to use wriststraps or any other static precaution working on home stuff. I always did it right at work because it was required, but at home I routinely did just about anything I could to static damage them because I knew it was unlikely to cause a problem. My experience was always that the components worked fine anyways, and that ESD damage must be such a low occurence that you're just not likely to ever see it so it's not worth the trouble.
However, later on down the line I learned the error of my ways. I was failing to understand the nature of ESD damage. Someone finally clued me in. In short, ESD damage *does* happen with a surprisingly high frequency when you handle components unsafely, but you don't notice because the damage takes time to show. Essentially the high voltage of the ESD (ESD like when you shock yourself on a doorknob is very high voltage, it's just very low current) is destructive to the transistor junctions, but it usually doesn't cause immediate complete failure. A few days, months, or even years down the road, the junction will prematurely break down, having had a shortened lifespan because of the ESD damage.
So those components that failed on you after a few good years of service that you chalked up to just failing from age probably failed to a large degree from ESD back when you first installed them, and had you used the right precautions, they might've lasted a lot longer. Now that I understand this, I'm a lot more careful about ESD even at home. From what I read, the long-term effects of ESD over a large sample are better felt by electronics companies. They can actually see the warranty return rate on their chips drop consistently when they put better ESD precautions into place, although it may take a few years to see.
Now all I have to do is get an apartment next to a pr0n fiend and hook up my 2.4Ghz receiver to get free pr0n.
If you're into Linux, but you're not a self-contained guru, then it would behoove you to make some local connections. Attend users' groups, find people through networks of office-mates, whatever works (try local 2600 meetings even, although they're filled with losers you might stumble on some rare diamonds in the rough there). Find and befreind some local gurus - they probably won't mind you taking em out for a beer to discuss a technical problem with them.
Yes most fire safes I've ever seen are mostly worthless. When you read the specs, it turns out they let through way too much heat for most practical purposes - all they're doing is blocking the physical flame. You're still running a fair chance of total heat destruction on the inside. However, there are fire safes out there that are capable of protecting magnetic media, you just have to look around for them.
For example, check out http://www.firekingoffice.com/fk_data.html
It's a 99, and while I'm sure the drag is great compared to some cars, it's not low enough for truly high speed stuff. Mine is a WS6 with only minor bolt-on performance stuff (lowered thermostat, ported MAF, lid/filter, hypertech, etc) - so probably realistically seeing about 350-360 hp at the rear wheels - and it is definitely drag limited around the 160-165-ish mark on a flat highway (hard to tell - the speedo stops right about the same point - if I had enough highway it might crawl to 170-something over the course of a few minutes, but how would I know?).
Agree completely with what you're saying - but I would like to add a note about downforce and drag. They can and do have an effect even under mere street/highway-racer speeds. Drag in particular is apparent on a straight highway where max speed is all that matters. My extremely (for a sporty car) un-aerodynamic trans am gets drag-limited at around 160mph on the highway, with plenty left on the gears (good luck redlining 6th