I usually don't notice the cuts until I find blood on the case and wonder "where's that coming from?".
When I was building computers for a living I used to permanently have at least one cut healing somewhere on my hands.
I'm mainly a windows user, but I'd agree that out of all the methods of raising permission levels, sudo is my favourite, UAC is ok (it's not really that annoying), and whatever the admin popup in OSX is called, it only shows up occasionally so I can't really comment on that.
"Windows apologists and their revisionist history are just pathetic."
I believe there's a saying about ignorance and malice and their relative occurrences which is of relevance here...
You might not care, but it would make a massive difference to youtube/vimeo/othervideosite if in 6 years time they're expected to pay license fees just to host content in H.264.
This is what the discussion is about, as consumers it has limited effects on us (and most people will happily use H.264 without paying a penny for it).
I realise the OP said that company wide meetings are a problem, but company wide activities are a good way to bond across departments.
Last year at work we were split into a bunch of different teams, (deliberately picked to mix up different departments), and throughout the year we had a succession of different games nights. One night was a pub quiz, another was a Wii games and pizza night, etc.
The (essentially forced) mingling between people who perhaps wouldn't otherwise have chatted does seem to have brought people together a bit.
Of course the recent layoffs buggered that all up a bit.
I've electrocuted myself off 240V a couple of times, and it's quite painful. I'd say it felt about as painful as a shock of a small electric fence (the sort you'd keep chickenz in), but I did get more of a 'jolt'. (it's all pretty hard to describe, but it kinda felt like there was more going through than an electric fence).
Of course, that's just a shock through one hand, if it had arced through my chest I might not have got off so lightly...
Also, out of interest, are the plugs that are used for three phase the same all over the world?
At work we've just picked up a Draytek Vigor 2820 ADSL router, it's a bit fuller featured than your usual home modem, and it also allows aggregating bandwidth between the built in ADSL modem and either a USB connected 3G modem or any other IP connection connected over ethernet.
We use the latter connected to a vanilla ADSL modem.
As a whole it seems to work pretty well, the web interface is nonstandard, but after a while I got used to it, and you can set it up to either keep both connections active, or only fail over to WAN2 at a predetermined bandwidth usage or on failure of WAN1 (built in ADSL).
Not sure what the OP is looking for, but the Vigor is just what we were looking for. (they do other versions with built in wireless and voip)
Obviously Microsoft aren't doing this just to torpedo OSS down the road, people seem to be forgetting that Apple rely on Samba to get OSX to interact with AD environments.
(as a windows admin with multiple platforms to worry about, my personal take on this is that it's all good news, ymmv)
Given that this was a public forum then that's a pretty good idea. I wonder if they've chatted to the Wayback machine or google about getting a copy of previously cached data?
IIRC XPM is based on M$ Visrtual Pc, and that's been able to cope with moving USB devices between host and VMs for years now, so while it might be a problem, it's a solved problem for M$ (and every other VMM I've used)
I'd put money on them using redundant power supplies for starters, and the way they were speaking it sounds like they took the survival of some/most of the machines as 'working'. Which to be fair is more than you'd expect if your data center got that kind of shaking.
You could go out and by a multiprocessor box with loads of RAM, but you can get by with less.
Over the last year I've been doing training for an MCSA and all you get to play with there is a 2.8GHz P4 with 1Gb of RAM which turns out to be enough to run a whole active directory environment (2-3 servers and a client).
If you just want to play with a few OS's then pretty much any box you buy today will have loads of RAM and at least a dual core CPU, more than enough imo.
Not to mention, a lot of nerds (like me) cope better in a highly hierarchical structure like the military. You can look at someone and know how to treat them at a glance (by looking at their rank) and most of your interaction with other people is almost as highly codified as a programming language.
Personally, as a cadet, I found military life comfortable, certainly less stressful than school.
We've just been looking at getting an extra two years support for some of our servers (originally bought 3 years ago), there's nothing wrong with the servers, they still do the job just fine, but another two years of support worked out at £1500ish each, and a brand new server with 3 years of support was £2000ish...
Guess who gets new servers:)
90% of our desktop machines (running XP) are out of support this year so their successors may well go straight to Win7.
(yes I'm sure it would be cheaper and easier and just plain better with linux etc. but I takes my pay cheque and does wot I'm told)
yup, and the Inspiron 8600 I use at work....
The bigger dock that they do (can't remember the naming, sorry) has a slot for a slim CDrom etc, just pop one straight out of one laptop and into the dock, and space for an extra harddrive, not to mention various ports round the back.
quite nice really, handy in an office with various slaes people coming and going, which is what we use them for.
Ok, just in case the original questioner is looking for something a bit more concrete than just 'rip the dvd to hard drive', then here's the way I'd do it if I had the cash, purely based on my biases...
so from scratch assuming all we've got is a big arse plasma screen and a big shiny home cinema set-up to go with it (yeah, _all_ we've got).
Need to get the vid and sound to the home cinema:
Well, for sound, find something with a digital output, a lot of motherboards nowadays with onboard sound have the right out puts, so why not go for that and let the home cinema setup do the decoding
(I'm assuming this will work easily, tho I can just imagine the hoards of replies telling me how stupid I am to think I can output an encoded dts stream [for example] out of the digital out put, in which case, buy a nice sound card that can decode dts etc. and output the sound from that thru the digital output...)
Now video, well, most video cards seem to come with SVideo output so why not use that? Possibly you might want to go for something like a Radeon AllInWonder so you can watch TV through the same system. Or maybe not, I don't know, I'm not you.
Now we just need storage. Personally I'd go for an array of SATA drives, purely because I can with my motherboard (an MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R). If I was going to do it i'd set-up some kind of RAID across about 4 drives of about 250-300Gb each, not really bothering much about redundancy because I'd not be using it 24/7, four drives plus a boot drive are easy enough to house, plus there's onboard Gb ethernet so you can put it in the next room and just use a little boxen in the lounge to play the stuff.
As for acctually playing the stuff, I'd be using a wireless keyboard and/or mouse, and I'd probably just rip each disk to the arrray in it's own dir and play it using powerDVD or what ever.
With this you can set up what ever system you like for sorting the disks into genre etc., and possibly knock up some kind of html frontend to make it easier to just jump to the disk you want, plus as others have pointed out you can get rid of bits you don't need/want like other language audio etc.
hmm, what have I missed? I'm sure there's something but i'm sure a hundred sarky bastards will point out my errors in just a moment.
As for cost, well, I can't be arsed to add it up properly, but a bit less than the cost of a plasma screen i recon, depending on what bit's you already have lying around (it's amazing how much things like psu's and crap bump the price up isn't it?)
(minor and compleatly o/t sidenote:
The company where I work building computers uses the afformentioned motherboard quite a bit. They ended up with a 53% fail rate on any boxes with SATA drives in, purely because - the cables fell out of the drives in transit.
Their solution? Better cable ties. The result, a reduction to 24% fail rate. The new solution? Glue the cables in place with that silicon sealent stuff. No shit, it seems to work, coz when something goe's wrong and we have to strip the computer apart agian it's fucking impossible to get the cables out, and when we do either the connector on the mobo or the hd end up fucked. Clearly there is a bit of a problem with SATA cable connections atm.)
WEll, bittorrent is a good, maybe even best solution to a/.ing, but it's not the ultimate - case in point, bytemonsoon just went down (Problem connecting to tracker - timeout exceeded). It's useful becase it reduces the bandwidth load on a server, but it doesn't eliminate it. If your server is'nt up to the job, it'll still go down if the load is high enough.
From the wording of the article it sounds like Bioware put the torrent on bytemonsoon themselves (kinda ambiguous though). If that's true, it was a bit strange of them to put it on what was obviously a primarily warez site, rather than hosting a tracker themselves (which would probably have stood up to the onslaught a bit better). I could be interpreting the wording wrong though.
hmmm, there i was wondering why all my torrents were suddenly giving me tracker errors, "ahh, it's just my crappy connection". Then I find they've all been/.ed, maybe bittorrent isn't so great for avoiding a/.ing after all? Though I suppose that if Bioware were hosting the tracker, it would ease the load compared to just hosting the file direct.
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I usually don't notice the cuts until I find blood on the case and wonder "where's that coming from?". When I was building computers for a living I used to permanently have at least one cut healing somewhere on my hands.
Same back to you :)
Or you could read the Bit-Tech system guide . (and/or any of the other similar guides from other tech sites)
(the uk in case you were wondering)
(and oddly enough I used to get private health care in my old job, but that's really unusual for over here)
(ps, if you don't have public health care, why do you have public schools?)
I'm mainly a windows user, but I'd agree that out of all the methods of raising permission levels, sudo is my favourite, UAC is ok (it's not really that annoying), and whatever the admin popup in OSX is called, it only shows up occasionally so I can't really comment on that.
"Windows apologists and their revisionist history are just pathetic." I believe there's a saying about ignorance and malice and their relative occurrences which is of relevance here...
You might not care, but it would make a massive difference to youtube/vimeo/othervideosite if in 6 years time they're expected to pay license fees just to host content in H.264. This is what the discussion is about, as consumers it has limited effects on us (and most people will happily use H.264 without paying a penny for it).
I realise the OP said that company wide meetings are a problem, but company wide activities are a good way to bond across departments. Last year at work we were split into a bunch of different teams, (deliberately picked to mix up different departments), and throughout the year we had a succession of different games nights. One night was a pub quiz, another was a Wii games and pizza night, etc. The (essentially forced) mingling between people who perhaps wouldn't otherwise have chatted does seem to have brought people together a bit. Of course the recent layoffs buggered that all up a bit.
50 users (about 20 of which are on the road) 10 windows servers (overprovisioned) 1 admin (me)
Yeah, but we just say that so the yanks don't get too jealous of our superior plug technology. ;)
Don't forget that the queen is German (House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha).
I've electrocuted myself off 240V a couple of times, and it's quite painful. I'd say it felt about as painful as a shock of a small electric fence (the sort you'd keep chickenz in), but I did get more of a 'jolt'. (it's all pretty hard to describe, but it kinda felt like there was more going through than an electric fence). Of course, that's just a shock through one hand, if it had arced through my chest I might not have got off so lightly... Also, out of interest, are the plugs that are used for three phase the same all over the world?
At work we've just picked up a Draytek Vigor 2820 ADSL router, it's a bit fuller featured than your usual home modem, and it also allows aggregating bandwidth between the built in ADSL modem and either a USB connected 3G modem or any other IP connection connected over ethernet. We use the latter connected to a vanilla ADSL modem. As a whole it seems to work pretty well, the web interface is nonstandard, but after a while I got used to it, and you can set it up to either keep both connections active, or only fail over to WAN2 at a predetermined bandwidth usage or on failure of WAN1 (built in ADSL). Not sure what the OP is looking for, but the Vigor is just what we were looking for. (they do other versions with built in wireless and voip)
Obviously Microsoft aren't doing this just to torpedo OSS down the road, people seem to be forgetting that Apple rely on Samba to get OSX to interact with AD environments. (as a windows admin with multiple platforms to worry about, my personal take on this is that it's all good news, ymmv)
And if you can't restore from it then it's not backed up either. Test those backups people, test 'em!
Given that this was a public forum then that's a pretty good idea. I wonder if they've chatted to the Wayback machine or google about getting a copy of previously cached data?
IIRC XPM is based on M$ Visrtual Pc, and that's been able to cope with moving USB devices between host and VMs for years now, so while it might be a problem, it's a solved problem for M$ (and every other VMM I've used)
I'd put money on them using redundant power supplies for starters, and the way they were speaking it sounds like they took the survival of some/most of the machines as 'working'. Which to be fair is more than you'd expect if your data center got that kind of shaking.
You could go out and by a multiprocessor box with loads of RAM, but you can get by with less. Over the last year I've been doing training for an MCSA and all you get to play with there is a 2.8GHz P4 with 1Gb of RAM which turns out to be enough to run a whole active directory environment (2-3 servers and a client). If you just want to play with a few OS's then pretty much any box you buy today will have loads of RAM and at least a dual core CPU, more than enough imo.
Not to mention, a lot of nerds (like me) cope better in a highly hierarchical structure like the military. You can look at someone and know how to treat them at a glance (by looking at their rank) and most of your interaction with other people is almost as highly codified as a programming language. Personally, as a cadet, I found military life comfortable, certainly less stressful than school.
We've just been looking at getting an extra two years support for some of our servers (originally bought 3 years ago), there's nothing wrong with the servers, they still do the job just fine, but another two years of support worked out at £1500ish each, and a brand new server with 3 years of support was £2000ish... Guess who gets new servers :)
90% of our desktop machines (running XP) are out of support this year so their successors may well go straight to Win7.
(yes I'm sure it would be cheaper and easier and just plain better with linux etc. but I takes my pay cheque and does wot I'm told)
yup, and the Inspiron 8600 I use at work.... The bigger dock that they do (can't remember the naming, sorry) has a slot for a slim CDrom etc, just pop one straight out of one laptop and into the dock, and space for an extra harddrive, not to mention various ports round the back. quite nice really, handy in an office with various slaes people coming and going, which is what we use them for.
so from scratch assuming all we've got is a big arse plasma screen and a big shiny home cinema set-up to go with it (yeah, _all_ we've got).
Need to get the vid and sound to the home cinema: Well, for sound, find something with a digital output, a lot of motherboards nowadays with onboard sound have the right out puts, so why not go for that and let the home cinema setup do the decoding
(I'm assuming this will work easily, tho I can just imagine the hoards of replies telling me how stupid I am to think I can output an encoded dts stream [for example] out of the digital out put, in which case, buy a nice sound card that can decode dts etc. and output the sound from that thru the digital output...)
Now video, well, most video cards seem to come with SVideo output so why not use that? Possibly you might want to go for something like a Radeon AllInWonder so you can watch TV through the same system. Or maybe not, I don't know, I'm not you.
Now we just need storage. Personally I'd go for an array of SATA drives, purely because I can with my motherboard (an MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R). If I was going to do it i'd set-up some kind of RAID across about 4 drives of about 250-300Gb each, not really bothering much about redundancy because I'd not be using it 24/7, four drives plus a boot drive are easy enough to house, plus there's onboard Gb ethernet so you can put it in the next room and just use a little boxen in the lounge to play the stuff.
As for acctually playing the stuff, I'd be using a wireless keyboard and/or mouse, and I'd probably just rip each disk to the arrray in it's own dir and play it using powerDVD or what ever. With this you can set up what ever system you like for sorting the disks into genre etc., and possibly knock up some kind of html frontend to make it easier to just jump to the disk you want, plus as others have pointed out you can get rid of bits you don't need/want like other language audio etc.
hmm, what have I missed? I'm sure there's something but i'm sure a hundred sarky bastards will point out my errors in just a moment. As for cost, well, I can't be arsed to add it up properly, but a bit less than the cost of a plasma screen i recon, depending on what bit's you already have lying around (it's amazing how much things like psu's and crap bump the price up isn't it?)
(minor and compleatly o/t sidenote: The company where I work building computers uses the afformentioned motherboard quite a bit. They ended up with a 53% fail rate on any boxes with SATA drives in, purely because - the cables fell out of the drives in transit. Their solution? Better cable ties. The result, a reduction to 24% fail rate. The new solution? Glue the cables in place with that silicon sealent stuff. No shit, it seems to work, coz when something goe's wrong and we have to strip the computer apart agian it's fucking impossible to get the cables out, and when we do either the connector on the mobo or the hd end up fucked. Clearly there is a bit of a problem with SATA cable connections atm.)
WEll, bittorrent is a good, maybe even best solution to a /.ing, but it's not the ultimate - case in point, bytemonsoon just went down (Problem connecting to tracker - timeout exceeded). It's useful becase it reduces the bandwidth load on a server, but it doesn't eliminate it. If your server is'nt up to the job, it'll still go down if the load is high enough.
From the wording of the article it sounds like Bioware put the torrent on bytemonsoon themselves (kinda ambiguous though). If that's true, it was a bit strange of them to put it on what was obviously a primarily warez site, rather than hosting a tracker themselves (which would probably have stood up to the onslaught a bit better). I could be interpreting the wording wrong though.
hmmm, there i was wondering why all my torrents were suddenly giving me tracker errors, "ahh, it's just my crappy connection". Then I find they've all been /.ed, maybe bittorrent isn't so great for avoiding a /.ing after all? Though I suppose that if Bioware were hosting the tracker, it would ease the load compared to just hosting the file direct.