I've been using BlueHost for a few years, ever since Scottsdale Hosting fell off the face of the earth. They run $10ish a month and have had, in my experience, very good uptime. I've only had one problem with them that required a restore, and they were very quick about it.
For domain reg, I use NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I also use their privacy service, which I have found no negative press for (in terms of them rolling over like GoDaddy has done in the past).
Just remembered another one. They finally got rid of that idiotic restriction of 65,000 rows in an Excel spreadsheet, I think it went away with the Vista version of Office.
I noticed one difference between Access XP and Access 2003. They apparently added data dictionary triggers, so if you changed a field name or table name in a database, it automatically updated views and forms and reports based on that table. I thought that was pretty cool.
I just spent a few days downloading album artwork from Amazon and other sources and cleaning up my library, deleting dupes, etc. The iTunes automagical Get Album Artwork did not work for most of my albums. One of my reasons for doing the artwork update was so that my iPod Touch would look spiffier. Naturally this slows down my laptop sync, also increases my backups a bit. Which, for a one-shot update, is ok. But if my library is constantly receiving updates, then it's going to be a constant increase in sync time and backup time and space.
Excellent point re: paying subsidized rates without getting a phone subsidy. My wife's phone is on my contract, we just replaced her phone a couple of weeks ago as her battery died and Alltel no longer had a replacement. My phone is up for replacement, but I'm not going to replace it now as I'd like to get either an iPhone or an Android OS and Alltel only does Windows Mobile at this time. I'm hoping that'll change with the exclusivity change later this week.
I don't like changing phones just because the contract is up. If my phone has problems, that's one thing. But if there aren't compelling features to upgrade to, then I don't want to do it. Plus, going to a data plan will increase my monthly bill by over 50%, so I have no problem holding off on that.
Doesn't your contract go month-to-month at that point? Can't you just continue to pay your normal monthly and wait for a carrier switch to happen? I'd wait before switching to a different carrier and getting locked in to another contract, only to find a couple of months later that the carrier that you want now offers it.
And better memory management. It's annoying that it doesn't seem to do garbage collection when I close tabs and pages in Snow Leopard. I end up closing it and having it reload my pages and tabs at least once a day to shrink its memory footprint.
I manage two guilds on one server, one each faction. One of our members got hacked. His account got cleaned out to the tune of over 4,000 gold. Both guild vaults got hit, several items and some 430ish gold.
We got everything back.
The only bad thing was it came in the form of an in-game mail message, so lots of arranging of items needs to be done.
The sad thing? The guy who got hacked has an authenticator, just hadn't activated it yet. The curious thing? He doesn't know how he was compromised.
I may be speaking in over-generalizations. It's quite common for there to be aquifer contamination and hot spots of antibiotic resistance around feed lots. I don't know specifically that the ones in the area have had any biohazard problems, but neither would I be surprised if the EPA were to come in that something might be found. The EPA, SEC, and many agencies were severely underfunded by the previous administration when it came to field investigators.
I'm definitely an exception to the rule. I've believed that antibiotics have been overprescribed for a long time. My fourth pneumonia was followed by a bronchoscopy, the samples of which revealed an excessive growth of strep bacteria which, when cultured, proved to be resistant to the 4th pneumonia's antibiotics, but not the 3rd, which was kind of curious, which then required yet an additional course of antibiotics.
I read an interesting article on overuse of antibiotics in food supplies, I think it was in the book Food Nation. Two pig-raising communities about 50 miles apart, in Germany and Switzerland IIRC. One used antibiotics heavily in their pig feed, the other only used them as needed. The first community had terrible problems with human infections and antibiotic resistance, the second did not.
Cattle feed lot practices concern me greatly because of the number of feed lots in my general area (southern NM/west TX). Fortunately since I live at high altitude, I'm probably not sharing the same aquifers that they're contaminating.
I agree with you overall. However, I have a primary immunodeficiency (PI = genetic as opposed to acquired). If I get a virus, I have to take antibiotics because the depression in my immune system trying to fight the virus will make me susceptible to bacterial infection. I had pneumonia four times from February to June 2009 and now require $10,000 a month immune globulin product to have something resembling a normal immune system.
I think I did antibiotics 6 or 7 times in 2009, I even have to do antibiotics before having dental work done. My wife and I don't like the quantity that I have to do, but I have to do it. Heck, I have to travel with the damn things in case I get sick on the road, which happened over my birthday last month. It sucks, but it's my life these days and probably for the rest of my days.
My wife's college roomie was a complete dual-gender hermaphrodite, and while in college, went through the surgery to go straight female. She has major endocrine problems and is legally blind.
I agree fully re: your science vs pseudoscience remark. I think one of the biggest failings of the USA has been our being dominated by Puritan thought. It's amazing how backwards we are compared to some countries, yet we try to spread our way of life to others.
My condition falls in to the category of potentially fatal, probably not directly fatal. I had pneumonia four times this year from February to June, it took my wife demanding that a specific test be run for me to get diagnosed. It's common for people with my condition, CVID (Common Variable Immune Deficiency), to go six years before diagnosis. That was on top of two operations for carpal tunnel. I was fortunate in that I never had to be hospitalized for my pneumonias.
If I didn't get my Vivaglobin, I'd probably be an almost total shut-in. As it is, my immunologist has released me to return to school. It did cost me my full-time job: we decided it was best for my health to go to part-time telecommuting and avoid all of the people who go in to work sick, also to reduce my stress level and to try and improve my mental health.
The thing that makes my treatment so expensive is that it takes 1,000 blood donations to make one treatment, and I need it weekly. And it's quite possible that I'm about to get screwed: some health insurance companies have been changing the tier that primary immunodeficiency falls in to, making the patient pay 10-30% of the costs. We have no idea what will happen if that takes place, probably see how low we can go in treatment dosage and still maintain my health.
Heh. Remember QEMM386? Stupid Compaqs split their upper bios into two parts, making it a stone cold bitch to get QEMM to properly map it.
Compaqs were pure PITBs. I thought their servers were OK but never had to admin them, so take my opinion for what it's worth.
I also had no love for HP computers. The ones I worked with were totally non-standard. As far as I was concerned, when HP and Compaq merged, it was two lousy brands combining to make a monumentally lousy brand. And thus far, I don't think I've been proven wrong.
When I worked as a civilian for the police department, part of computer services was officers involved in computer crimes. While I was there, to the best of my knowledge, they always took great care in disassembling systems and mirroring drives so that the computers were functional when returned (original disks were NEVER booted). They were all computer geeks and didn't want to disrupt things for the user when they got their stuff back. Not to mention they would have to defend their practices in court regarding chain of evidence, so they had to be careful.
Of course, the ones that I worked with weren't feds, and this was some years ago. Now with the apparent presumption of guilt overriding presumption of innocence, who knows. So many of the cases were kiddie porn I'd just as soon see the computers torched, but that's just my opinion.
Sorry, can't agree. I've worked in government IT for almost 20 years, including half that time with police. If someone was in the office working at midnight on December 31, it was important. If a system was not being used at that time, it wasn't important and no one would have noticed if we'd powered it off.
Though I have no problem with pranks in general, just ask my wife and previous girlfriends about how I give presents, I don't think pranking in the office is a good idea when you have a thousand or two users.
Agreed. Most was hype. There were big problems, but they were addressed and remediated, the stuff that wasn't caught was cleaned up very quickly. What was funny was a friend of mine who was a veteran computer guy, though to be fair, more hardware/networking than from the programming/admin side, moved to Idaho. Apparently he had two generators, who knows how many gallons of fuel, a year's worth of MREs, and thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammo. All for naught.
The one that gets me was Prez Bush changing daylight savings time. So many controllers have dates burned in to ROM, and twice every year thermostats are wonky and many electronic time clocks are off for a couple of weeks.
I really wish Obama would cancel that Bush order as it's been proven that it did not save any energy, but he has plenty of other problems he needs to deal with.
I was working for the police department at Y2K as their SQL Server DBA. We put a lot of work in to verifying that our apps used the century in date fields, and as most databases at that time did, it wasn't a big deal. I don't recall having to do a lot of application remediation to accommodate the rollover. We went in at 6pm and were told we'd be staying for 12 hours, another shift was coming in at 9pm for 12 hours. We had a big checklist of things to check, pre and post midnight, and all of the MS-based stuff rolled over just fine and I think we went home around 2 or 3am
What didn't work? The mini computers (HP3000) that ran the dispatch system. They received a patch from the vendor that would kick in at midnight, compiled it, but didn't run it through the link/edit step, and when midnight came the system went down. Fortunately the operators on that shift were the most experienced, they knew their precinct maps, and had plenty of paper and pencils standing by. They switched over to dispatching manually and tracking units with paper, and there were no hiccups.
The funniest thing was Motorola. All of our MDTs ran Windows 3, which was not Y2K compliant, and Motorola wanted $500 per unit to patch it to handle Y2K. As it turns out, as soon as the MDT logged on to the mainframe, the software downloaded the current time stamp, including century, which the system had no problem accepting. The officers were told to sign off and sign back on to their MDT after midnight, and all was well.
There were 2,000 MDTs deployed, it was a pretty chunk of change that Motorola wanted to screw us out of.
I'll be really happy if they can find a cure or longer-lasting treatment for immune disorders. I have CVID, which costs approximately $10,000 a month (thank ghod for insurance!) and requires four needles in my abdomen for 90 minutes or so twice a week. I met a fellow geek at a sci fi convention in Dallas last year with a similar condition, he's been getting IV treatments monthly since he was an infant.
This would be a tremendous return on the dollar, not to mention the possibility of curing AIDS.
The place where you really see the problem is when people like me have to install a commercial program, it doesn't work, and their tech says "give the user local admin rights." NO. It seems like half the applications that I have to install or upgrade want the running user to have local admin rights. We tried setting up specific directory permissions and all sorts of other non-standard crap, it wasn't pleasant. I don't remember what the final outcome was, it was more than six months ago.
I've long been out of the development game (I'm a DBA), and then it was a Windows environment and you didn't need local admin. Maybe it's different in a *nix environment. But Windows developers having admin rights while developing causes hell when deploying such code. Giving Joe/Jane Doe average user local admin rights to their machine on a network that you're trying to keep reasonably secure because they have to run a program as a corporate standard is not a good thing.
I have two network accounts: domain admin and a non-admin account. I'm always logged in to my local machine as non-admin, I don't remember the last time I signed on to my local machine as admin. When I need to do administrative work on one of my database servers locally, I remote over using my admin account then log off. I know developers have to do things differently, I guess I should be thankful that I can do most of my job without needing admin access to machines as long as my non-admin account is set as database owner on my servers.
There has to be a better way. I can understand that developers need special debuggers. I appreciate that. But they cause absolute hell with network security.
I don't have cancer, but the immuneglobin product that I need twice a week in order to have an immune system costs on the order of $10,000 a month. Fortunately I have insurance, at least for now. Unfortunately there are health insurance companies are reclassifying the tier that primary immunodeficiency diseases fall in to and some people are having to pay 10-30% of the cost of meds. If both my wife and I were making $100,000 a year, that might be OK, but we don't make anything near that. It's going to get tough if that happens to our plan.
My problem there is I need a color laser that can handle thick card stock and hopefully is well under $500. Admittedly I haven't researched it yet, but I gave away my previous laser (a wonderful Lexmark 16ppm) just to clear space, plus I understand the cartridges are very expensive and it doesn't support USB interface.
The only printer that I have sitting and collecting dust is a Lexmark multifunction inkjet that doesn't have Mac drivers.
But given the choice, I'd use a laser. Don't have a huge need for color, except when printing the test kits and envelopes for the card games that I sell and am making.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using BlueHost for a few years, ever since Scottsdale Hosting fell off the face of the earth. They run $10ish a month and have had, in my experience, very good uptime. I've only had one problem with them that required a restore, and they were very quick about it.
For domain reg, I use NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I also use their privacy service, which I have found no negative press for (in terms of them rolling over like GoDaddy has done in the past).
Just remembered another one. They finally got rid of that idiotic restriction of 65,000 rows in an Excel spreadsheet, I think it went away with the Vista version of Office.
I noticed one difference between Access XP and Access 2003. They apparently added data dictionary triggers, so if you changed a field name or table name in a database, it automatically updated views and forms and reports based on that table. I thought that was pretty cool.
If you're on a Mac, you might check out iBank (http://www.iggsoftware.com/). I don't know what alternatives exist in the Windows sphere.
I just spent a few days downloading album artwork from Amazon and other sources and cleaning up my library, deleting dupes, etc. The iTunes automagical Get Album Artwork did not work for most of my albums. One of my reasons for doing the artwork update was so that my iPod Touch would look spiffier. Naturally this slows down my laptop sync, also increases my backups a bit. Which, for a one-shot update, is ok. But if my library is constantly receiving updates, then it's going to be a constant increase in sync time and backup time and space.
This does not appeal.
Excellent point re: paying subsidized rates without getting a phone subsidy. My wife's phone is on my contract, we just replaced her phone a couple of weeks ago as her battery died and Alltel no longer had a replacement. My phone is up for replacement, but I'm not going to replace it now as I'd like to get either an iPhone or an Android OS and Alltel only does Windows Mobile at this time. I'm hoping that'll change with the exclusivity change later this week.
I don't like changing phones just because the contract is up. If my phone has problems, that's one thing. But if there aren't compelling features to upgrade to, then I don't want to do it. Plus, going to a data plan will increase my monthly bill by over 50%, so I have no problem holding off on that.
Doesn't your contract go month-to-month at that point? Can't you just continue to pay your normal monthly and wait for a carrier switch to happen? I'd wait before switching to a different carrier and getting locked in to another contract, only to find a couple of months later that the carrier that you want now offers it.
And better memory management. It's annoying that it doesn't seem to do garbage collection when I close tabs and pages in Snow Leopard. I end up closing it and having it reload my pages and tabs at least once a day to shrink its memory footprint.
I manage two guilds on one server, one each faction. One of our members got hacked. His account got cleaned out to the tune of over 4,000 gold. Both guild vaults got hit, several items and some 430ish gold.
We got everything back.
The only bad thing was it came in the form of an in-game mail message, so lots of arranging of items needs to be done.
The sad thing? The guy who got hacked has an authenticator, just hadn't activated it yet. The curious thing? He doesn't know how he was compromised.
I may be speaking in over-generalizations. It's quite common for there to be aquifer contamination and hot spots of antibiotic resistance around feed lots. I don't know specifically that the ones in the area have had any biohazard problems, but neither would I be surprised if the EPA were to come in that something might be found. The EPA, SEC, and many agencies were severely underfunded by the previous administration when it came to field investigators.
I'm definitely an exception to the rule. I've believed that antibiotics have been overprescribed for a long time. My fourth pneumonia was followed by a bronchoscopy, the samples of which revealed an excessive growth of strep bacteria which, when cultured, proved to be resistant to the 4th pneumonia's antibiotics, but not the 3rd, which was kind of curious, which then required yet an additional course of antibiotics.
I read an interesting article on overuse of antibiotics in food supplies, I think it was in the book Food Nation. Two pig-raising communities about 50 miles apart, in Germany and Switzerland IIRC. One used antibiotics heavily in their pig feed, the other only used them as needed. The first community had terrible problems with human infections and antibiotic resistance, the second did not.
Cattle feed lot practices concern me greatly because of the number of feed lots in my general area (southern NM/west TX). Fortunately since I live at high altitude, I'm probably not sharing the same aquifers that they're contaminating.
I agree with you overall. However, I have a primary immunodeficiency (PI = genetic as opposed to acquired). If I get a virus, I have to take antibiotics because the depression in my immune system trying to fight the virus will make me susceptible to bacterial infection. I had pneumonia four times from February to June 2009 and now require $10,000 a month immune globulin product to have something resembling a normal immune system.
I think I did antibiotics 6 or 7 times in 2009, I even have to do antibiotics before having dental work done. My wife and I don't like the quantity that I have to do, but I have to do it. Heck, I have to travel with the damn things in case I get sick on the road, which happened over my birthday last month. It sucks, but it's my life these days and probably for the rest of my days.
I loved the magazine, then they became a magazine for the supernatural and other crap that I could care less about.
It was a nice run for the first year or so, then I stopped buying it.
My wife's college roomie was a complete dual-gender hermaphrodite, and while in college, went through the surgery to go straight female. She has major endocrine problems and is legally blind.
I agree fully re: your science vs pseudoscience remark. I think one of the biggest failings of the USA has been our being dominated by Puritan thought. It's amazing how backwards we are compared to some countries, yet we try to spread our way of life to others.
My condition falls in to the category of potentially fatal, probably not directly fatal. I had pneumonia four times this year from February to June, it took my wife demanding that a specific test be run for me to get diagnosed. It's common for people with my condition, CVID (Common Variable Immune Deficiency), to go six years before diagnosis. That was on top of two operations for carpal tunnel. I was fortunate in that I never had to be hospitalized for my pneumonias.
If I didn't get my Vivaglobin, I'd probably be an almost total shut-in. As it is, my immunologist has released me to return to school. It did cost me my full-time job: we decided it was best for my health to go to part-time telecommuting and avoid all of the people who go in to work sick, also to reduce my stress level and to try and improve my mental health.
The thing that makes my treatment so expensive is that it takes 1,000 blood donations to make one treatment, and I need it weekly. And it's quite possible that I'm about to get screwed: some health insurance companies have been changing the tier that primary immunodeficiency falls in to, making the patient pay 10-30% of the costs. We have no idea what will happen if that takes place, probably see how low we can go in treatment dosage and still maintain my health.
Health problems suck. Good luck to you, V.
Heh. Remember QEMM386? Stupid Compaqs split their upper bios into two parts, making it a stone cold bitch to get QEMM to properly map it.
Compaqs were pure PITBs. I thought their servers were OK but never had to admin them, so take my opinion for what it's worth.
I also had no love for HP computers. The ones I worked with were totally non-standard. As far as I was concerned, when HP and Compaq merged, it was two lousy brands combining to make a monumentally lousy brand. And thus far, I don't think I've been proven wrong.
When I worked as a civilian for the police department, part of computer services was officers involved in computer crimes. While I was there, to the best of my knowledge, they always took great care in disassembling systems and mirroring drives so that the computers were functional when returned (original disks were NEVER booted). They were all computer geeks and didn't want to disrupt things for the user when they got their stuff back. Not to mention they would have to defend their practices in court regarding chain of evidence, so they had to be careful.
Of course, the ones that I worked with weren't feds, and this was some years ago. Now with the apparent presumption of guilt overriding presumption of innocence, who knows. So many of the cases were kiddie porn I'd just as soon see the computers torched, but that's just my opinion.
Sorry, can't agree. I've worked in government IT for almost 20 years, including half that time with police. If someone was in the office working at midnight on December 31, it was important. If a system was not being used at that time, it wasn't important and no one would have noticed if we'd powered it off.
Though I have no problem with pranks in general, just ask my wife and previous girlfriends about how I give presents, I don't think pranking in the office is a good idea when you have a thousand or two users.
Agreed. Most was hype. There were big problems, but they were addressed and remediated, the stuff that wasn't caught was cleaned up very quickly. What was funny was a friend of mine who was a veteran computer guy, though to be fair, more hardware/networking than from the programming/admin side, moved to Idaho. Apparently he had two generators, who knows how many gallons of fuel, a year's worth of MREs, and thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammo. All for naught.
The one that gets me was Prez Bush changing daylight savings time. So many controllers have dates burned in to ROM, and twice every year thermostats are wonky and many electronic time clocks are off for a couple of weeks.
I really wish Obama would cancel that Bush order as it's been proven that it did not save any energy, but he has plenty of other problems he needs to deal with.
I was working for the police department at Y2K as their SQL Server DBA. We put a lot of work in to verifying that our apps used the century in date fields, and as most databases at that time did, it wasn't a big deal. I don't recall having to do a lot of application remediation to accommodate the rollover. We went in at 6pm and were told we'd be staying for 12 hours, another shift was coming in at 9pm for 12 hours. We had a big checklist of things to check, pre and post midnight, and all of the MS-based stuff rolled over just fine and I think we went home around 2 or 3am
What didn't work? The mini computers (HP3000) that ran the dispatch system. They received a patch from the vendor that would kick in at midnight, compiled it, but didn't run it through the link/edit step, and when midnight came the system went down. Fortunately the operators on that shift were the most experienced, they knew their precinct maps, and had plenty of paper and pencils standing by. They switched over to dispatching manually and tracking units with paper, and there were no hiccups.
The funniest thing was Motorola. All of our MDTs ran Windows 3, which was not Y2K compliant, and Motorola wanted $500 per unit to patch it to handle Y2K. As it turns out, as soon as the MDT logged on to the mainframe, the software downloaded the current time stamp, including century, which the system had no problem accepting. The officers were told to sign off and sign back on to their MDT after midnight, and all was well.
There were 2,000 MDTs deployed, it was a pretty chunk of change that Motorola wanted to screw us out of.
I'll be really happy if they can find a cure or longer-lasting treatment for immune disorders. I have CVID, which costs approximately $10,000 a month (thank ghod for insurance!) and requires four needles in my abdomen for 90 minutes or so twice a week. I met a fellow geek at a sci fi convention in Dallas last year with a similar condition, he's been getting IV treatments monthly since he was an infant.
This would be a tremendous return on the dollar, not to mention the possibility of curing AIDS.
NO THEY SHOULD NOT.
The place where you really see the problem is when people like me have to install a commercial program, it doesn't work, and their tech says "give the user local admin rights." NO. It seems like half the applications that I have to install or upgrade want the running user to have local admin rights. We tried setting up specific directory permissions and all sorts of other non-standard crap, it wasn't pleasant. I don't remember what the final outcome was, it was more than six months ago.
I've long been out of the development game (I'm a DBA), and then it was a Windows environment and you didn't need local admin. Maybe it's different in a *nix environment. But Windows developers having admin rights while developing causes hell when deploying such code. Giving Joe/Jane Doe average user local admin rights to their machine on a network that you're trying to keep reasonably secure because they have to run a program as a corporate standard is not a good thing.
I have two network accounts: domain admin and a non-admin account. I'm always logged in to my local machine as non-admin, I don't remember the last time I signed on to my local machine as admin. When I need to do administrative work on one of my database servers locally, I remote over using my admin account then log off. I know developers have to do things differently, I guess I should be thankful that I can do most of my job without needing admin access to machines as long as my non-admin account is set as database owner on my servers.
There has to be a better way. I can understand that developers need special debuggers. I appreciate that. But they cause absolute hell with network security.
I don't have cancer, but the immuneglobin product that I need twice a week in order to have an immune system costs on the order of $10,000 a month. Fortunately I have insurance, at least for now. Unfortunately there are health insurance companies are reclassifying the tier that primary immunodeficiency diseases fall in to and some people are having to pay 10-30% of the cost of meds. If both my wife and I were making $100,000 a year, that might be OK, but we don't make anything near that. It's going to get tough if that happens to our plan.
My problem there is I need a color laser that can handle thick card stock and hopefully is well under $500. Admittedly I haven't researched it yet, but I gave away my previous laser (a wonderful Lexmark 16ppm) just to clear space, plus I understand the cartridges are very expensive and it doesn't support USB interface.
The only printer that I have sitting and collecting dust is a Lexmark multifunction inkjet that doesn't have Mac drivers.
But given the choice, I'd use a laser. Don't have a huge need for color, except when printing the test kits and envelopes for the card games that I sell and am making.
Seti@Home doesn't use a lot of network resources, you're sending 1k of data every few hours per machine? Insignificant and possibly not measurable.
Don't forget this is Arizona, where the Phoenix Lights still gets air play. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights