I downloaded the first free album just to see if it was worth purchasing. I was extremely disappointed. One song consisted of the same 11 notes played over and over again for 3 minutes.
Fortunately for Trent, we all have different tastes. I grabbed the full collection torrent yesterday and am just finishing up track 36 now. Throughout the album, I was thinking things like, "is this it?" and "kind of simple and... lame... for NIN, really." However, while I was working away on the computer, writing email, configuring a new linux server, reading resumes, whatever, I just sort of tuned it out and let it flow.
I never skipped a song.
It did not distract me from my work.
Overall, the effect was quite pleasing.
Oh yea, and the sound quality is the typical amazing you would expect from NIN. Silent where desired, distorted where intended. I'm looping back through on track 2 now and still enjoying it.
So I bought the $10 CD and laughed at the price with S&H: $16.99, just like the record store. But at least it goes to Trent and not a bunch of rapists.
I like the 3 second rule better than the car length rule. Regardless of your speed you should be 2-3 seconds behind the next car.
I'm going to assume you do not commute during, between, before or after rush hour in any major metropolitan region. Otherwise, your statement just doesn't make any practical sense.
60mph == 88 feet per second.
You are recommending a gap of 180 to 270 feet between yourself and the car in front of you. Nevermind the fathomless distance that this veritable FOOTBALL field represents, assuming that a typical car is 20 feet long and we generally leave two car lengths in front of us while in motion, you are inviting 4.5 cars to squeeze in front of you.
Of course, that last 0.5 car is actually a full car so you'll need to back off a bit, requiring use of your brakes and thus inducing exactly the sort of traffic gridlock that we're talking about.
The fact is, when in traffic, you have to drive as traffic does. Deltas in speed, acceleration, braking, even behavior, induce gridlock.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone left 2-3 seconds in between cars? Of course! Then we'd all be driving the same!
But let's play with that for a minute.
The carrying capacity of a freeway lane is generally measured in cars per unit of time. Following the two second rule and assuming a 20 foot car length, we get... huh, roughly one car every two seconds! I'm not even using math here! So that means that at ANY speed, the maximum number of cars we can accommodate is 1 per 2 seconds per lane. Or 1800phpl (per hour per lane). Which would be fine if we designed freeways accordingly.
But we don't. We don't design freeways, we inhibit their expansion at every turn and by the time said expansion is done, it's way under provisioned. We live with a perpetual shortage of freeway carrying capacity.
The only workable solution available to the average driver, which we arrived at collectively, is to reduce the gap between cars. By reducing that gap from two seconds to one, we practically doubled the carrying capacity of our local freeways... when people behave the same way.
It's possible that mixing two-second-rule drivers with one-second-rule drivers is the cause of this gridlock, but I really don't see any other way given the shortage of lanes.
I don't know if anyone ever reads these super-late replies, but since you and others had such helpful suggestions, I thought I'd address some of your (and other's) assumptions:
1. I'm using tc with fairly advanced htb filters and stochaistic leveling. This same tc shaping works wonders for our office T1, even with multiple BT clients competing... which is why I developed these tc scripts. Our office ssh was sucking big time until I tuned the traffic shaping for both up (on eth0) and down (on eth1). The T1 is 1.5Mbps full-duplex. My cable is rated at ~6/1Mbps and yes, I've adjusted the rates appropriately at 80% of typical peak. In fact, even though I've measured 9Mbps with dslreports.com, I've set my cap at 4Mbps.
2. Furthermore, at home, I've throttled BT's maximum dl and ul speeds to absurdly low levels like 0.8Mbps down and 0.25Mbps up. I've also had to limit the number of peers/connections to a global max of about 16 to keep latencies around 1000ms. Any higher and I seem to get shoved up to 3000ms pretty quick. This results in my actual dl rates hovering between 0.16Mbps and 0.08Mbps with upload ranging as high as 0.25Mbps (so my upload seems less affected than my download).
3. Regarding alternatives to Comcraptic's service that are outside of my budget or sensibilities, I can get AT&T ISDN (no kidding!) for about twice the price and 10X less speed. I can also get Satellite service for about 4-5X the cost and again, less speed. Or I can pay 5X or more for T1 or fatter dedicated business circuits. Since this is my RESIDENCE, I was just hoping for the $50/mo that I used to pay for DSL prior to moving. Said DSL did not go to hell when I turned up a BT to download CentOS isos overnight. Comcraptic does.
I have hated comcast for their customer service and service quality since I first subscribed to cable back in the very early 90s. Thank the gods for DirecTV introducing competition to this market of city and county sponsored monopolies.
Unfortunately, I recently moved back under comcast's umbrella and had no other options for internet within my budget. And now I'm suffering latencies as high as three seconds whenever I download a torrent. As soon as I stop torrent downloads, my latency returns to 25ms.
This is not traffic shaping. This is crap.
Shaping involves prioritizing and queing packets so that every process gets fed, regardless of what's running. You can also force downloads like BT, FTP, and even HTTP to take the slow path, moving icmp and ssh to the front of the line. This is quite easy with tc and other professional tools.
However, what comcastic seems to be doing is more akin to load leveling back in the days of mainframes. In those situations, you find that a user is hogging the resource and you would load level ALL of that users processes, regardless of function. As a result, if I'm downloading a torrent, my ssh sessions take 30 seconds to establish and keystroke confirmation lags three seconds behind my typing. Since I type about 60 words per minute, that's about three words or more behind my fingers. Wow.
Nice way to show your colors comcast. Once again, you are guaranteeing that:
1. as soon as I can, I'm dumping you. 2. I'm already telling EVERYONE to avoid you 3. I will go out of my way to starve you of customers 4. I will seek out and endorse your competitors
Good luck. May you soon die a well deserved and early death.
I've noticed that my comcast cable service has semi-reliable ping latency of 25-50ms to certain well known sites.
But within a minute of starting a torrent download, ping latency rises to ~3000ms.
If I kill the torrent, latency immediately starts to drop and returns to 25-50ms within a minute.
I'm running a stealthy client, RC4, minimal tracker access, blah, blah. Reducing the number of torrents and peers to an almost unusable level can reduce the latency impact by 50% (500-1500ms, highly variable). Note, this is for ALL traffic. It makes ssh unbearable, web browsing is annoying. Kill the BT and things return to decently fast.
This isn't just traffic shaping. It's connection shaping. And it sucks. It is so easy to put QoS on a circuit to manage BT traffic that it seems criminal to go overboard screwing with customers to this degree. I feel I'm being punished for using the network efficiently. I'd switch, but there are no alternatives in my area (comcast was last resort). I'd turn it off, but, you know, it's the 21st century.
You say your current company is hiring an IT Manager. You should go ask why they didn't pick you. What could you have done/changed to be considered? I'm certain that when they decided they needed an IT manager they asked the question, "do we have anyone we could promote into this role?" At worst, you'll get on their radar, at best, you might get an interview.
When I was younger, I often heard the phrase, "I'm not doing the work until you pay me for it." And even more often observed the work ethic that phrase describes. As I grew older, I got tired of getting the shaft and started trying to make things better for myself, my team, my department, my company. This led to me doing the work of a lead with the title of an individual contributor. That experience helped me get a job as a lead. Then I started doing the work of a manager...
I used pursue the mission of making my boss look good. That helped for a while, until I ran into some backstabbing bosses. Lesson learned: know the terrain of your political landscape and chose your allies carefully.
People often say that a manager's most important job is... but I find that it is often more complicated than that. Management is about building a business, making it profitable, protecting future revenues. Whether you are the CEO or a line-worker, you have the same mission; the question tends to be, what are the best practices to achieve this at your company, today?
* Building a good team, mentoring, hiring, retaining key staff. Making it enjoyable for people to work at your company. These are critical.
* Managing upward, communicating and adjusting expectations, negotiating achievable goals and reasonable budgets for your team. These are critical.
* Collaborating with peers/departments, helping them build the business, knowing when and how to pitch in and sacrifice (your time or your staff) for team-wins. Knowing when to say "no" so your staff doesn't get abused saving everyone else's ass. All critical.
* Staying focused, setting priorities and getting your tasks done. This means you cannot randomize yourself, you must have short-term goals and hit them. You cannot randomize your team, you must set short-term goals and then allow your staff to hit them. PLANNING, however you best perform that, is essential to choosing goals that you can defend until completion (most of the time).
These practices apply no matter what level you are at in your company. And people who tend to follow them more often than not are regarded favorably. You may know a few. Those are the first people in line for promotions up the technical ladder or, should they show interest, promotions into management.
Be the person you want to be, enjoy your job, everything else follows.
Even if aliens are out there listening, would they really care?
You're kidding, right?
Assuming we progress to the point of cheap and common interstellar travel, if we suddenly heard of a primitive culture "over there" do you think it is more likely we would:
a. shrug
b. watch in horror as scores of independent missionaries from our own species descended on the helpless planet to bring them the word of <insert deity>.
c. enslave them.
d. set up trade negotiations for their resources.
Looking to our own history, I'd say all the above.
Only a complete fucktard who is totally ignorant of what he or she is doing could possibly propose such regulation. Of course, I just described your typical politician. They are ignorant and they really don't care.
Worse, they actually do care and have only the best intentions. However, like the majority of the human species, they lack the ability to form accurate cause->effect predictions around the most basic of behaviors. For any choice of actions with a consequence-time-horizon more distant than the next board meeting, the selection process is basically random--with heavy steering from the vocal minority in attendance at that time.
"If it is illegal to have it, he can't get it". It took quite a while to explain to him that the internet is international and that it's no problem to get it from abroad.... I'm not kidding you, this is not made up, this is real. Those people do exist. They don't realize that borders are meaningless on the internet, that national laws prohibiting the possession of software don't affect a thing, except to criminalize people who did nothing wrong. I had a very hard time convincing him that a law against P2P would only harm his son, not solve the problem.
Where to begin...
a. Such people with broad ignorance of the Internet and laws are the majority.
b. I'm not sure whether to be most concerned at your subject's ignorance of same, or...
c. Your passing assertion that U.S. laws affect behavior within the U.S.
Laws and law enforcement are only effective at punishment. They are exceptionally poor as deterrents. The great tragedy of our time is that so much energy goes into writing laws as preventative measures.
anyone have any favorite, tried and true, game disk restoration tips?
$40 grinder from your favorite home-store.
Buffing wheel attachments ~$20
plastic rouge/polish (near the grinders) ~$5
PATIENCE
If you go too fast, too hard or work the disc too long, it can overheat and tear the polycarbonate. But if you are slow and develop your technique, you can restore most discs quite readily. Always buff from the center toward the edge (radially) and focus on the circular scratches.
I restored 30 fubared XBOX CDROMs over a couple weekends last year. DVD2XBOX was really helpful since it would copy what it could and report the nubmer of bad files. I would go polish for a few minutes and try again, the file count would go down. If I didn't interrupt the XBOX, it would just try to copy those bad files, speeding things up considerably. Eventually, I'd get the whole game, retire the disc and start on another dead game.
This worked WAY better than toothpaste or those stupid disc doctor things they sell OTC. It was fast, and could fix deep scratches too!
There were some discs that the kids had ruined beyond repair, but as long as they weren't cracked or scratched on the label side, I could generally repair them with time. YMMV.
Yea, I know, they claim they will replace broken discs for $5. But that's only if you can figure out which company to call and spend the appropriate amount of time on the phone finding out where to send them and if they have replacement copies. I can fix a disc in that amount of time, and I don't have to wait 4-6 weeks for processing! More importantly, now that I have a copy I'll never have this problem again.
If PC and OS vendors provided us with a product that was impossible to backup, there would be a riot. The game industry gets away with it because loss and replacement IS THEIR BUSINESS MODEL! They want you to buy the games again and again.
Don't forget the coincidental timing required for two civilizations to be looking and broadcasting in each other's direction. We cannot listen to them all simultaneously. And if we wanted to be a broadcaster, we certainly couldn't pump jiggiwatt lasers at them all, simultaneously. And if we did, it would only be this decade. That's 10 years out of 14 billion, last count.
Seti is noble. It's good PR. But it's hopeless and doomed to failure even if the universe is teaming with sentient, space-faring life.
Our efforts are far better served getting off our flat-asses, working together on cooperative, global space projects like an elevator and orbital ring platform and getting out there.
Then there is the incentive issue. We're hoping that another race is broadcasting on hydrogen trying to say hello. Are we broadcasting? Why would they? When we are finally a space faring race, which scenario is more likely:
a. opening up lines of communication with pre-space, primitive industrial and war-faring societies?
b. opening up lines of communication with space-faring societies we come across.
In my years of pursuing a nice sounding stereo on a limited budget, I found a test that was rather simple to conduct and interpret. I checked the noise floor of my system by playing a CD, pressing pause, and cranking my amp up to -0db.
What I found was that there was substantial noise in my system. Most of which I eliminated with an optical cable between the CD Player and my Digital Pre-Amp. Getting the analog signal away from the CD Player's motor dropped the noise floor to a nearly imperceptible level. I'm sure the DAC was nearly identical in both components, but it was obvious that the internal analog wiring was sucking up noise whereas the digital pathway of my cheap Sony CD Player was immune.
As long as my other cables didn't have shorts or pass too close to a noise source, it didn't seem to matter whether I used the cables that came with the components, monster cable, zip cord or pricey oxygen free copper. I still have it all, it's at least fifteen years old now, and I'm sure manufacturers would recommend that I buy all new gear. But as far as I can tell, it's still clean, crisp, and true.
Of course, I sunk all the money I saved on cables into discrete, high-power components so it's probably a wash.
If asking for reciepts make you mad also, here is something you can do.
Alternatively, if you find your self exiting a store and are surprised by the rent-a-cop asking for your receipt here's a more productive thing you can do:
Refuse to comply.
When they insist they cannot let you go without seeing your receipt, ask if they can let you go after you return your items and get your money back.
Return your goods and attempt to leave.
Any attempt to prevent you at this point is an unlawful arrest, call the cops.
The only way to make the merchant change their behavior is to hit their bottom line. Returns show up there as a separate line item.
It is ironic that these policies only affect people who obviously bought something at the store and they allow others with no visible merchandise to leave the premesis freely.
At first glance, I thought WTF? But given the context and the fact that no-one could see what she had under her sweatshirt, the cops probably reacted correctly and (I cannot believe I'm saying this) it is a credit to their professionalism that she did not end up dead.
Considering that if you were a lunatic bomber, you might want to somehow display that you DO HAVE A BOMB, exposing some part of the electronics with lights and a battery might be deemed sufficient to your crazy mind. I seriously doubt whether the average cop, TSA agent or even/.er could accurately discern between LED art gizmo and upper layer of triggering device without intruding sufficiently to give the potential bomber cause to detonate.
Hopefully, this girl will come out of this experience with better judgment suited for our culture of fear.
It's probably too much to ask that we reduce the level of paranoia at our airports instead, but I wish we could do that rather than suppress the young geniuses of today.
Not true, my iPhone has a setting (under Settings) for Mail that allows me to check periodic checking of email to Manual, 15m, 30m and 1h. I found it annoying that it defaulted to manual so the other day I switched it to every 30 minutes. Then it chirped at me at 1am so I switched it back to manual.
If RAM can be subject to subpoenas, and it's illegal to destroy information that may later be subpoenaed, which is my understanding is true thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, that means that all computers used by all companies must keep a permanent record of the contents of computer RAM at any given time.
It is much, much worse than that.
If a volatile medium such as RAM is discoverable and thus allows a judge to compel a defendant to record data from that medium into non-volatile storage, then it follows that these other mediums for data exchange are also discoverable and defendants can be compelled to record their contents in a similar manner:
NAT router mappings
DHCP leases
DNS Queries
Inbound & Outbound email (oh, we're already forced to do that!)
http traffic with focus on POSTs to email providers
Instant Messaging
Oh hell, all your IP traffic too, turn over those P2P packets!
VoIP telephone systems? Dump those streams to disk, please.
PBX? Please copy those calls to tape.
Whiteboards... Use Digital Capture Whiteboards!
Person to Person vocal conversations? Those can be recorded, right? Choose to do so; They're discoverable too.
It may be onerous or difficult to capture these data streams, but it is certainly possible and no less burdensome than recording and archiving all transactions that traverse a computer's RAM. This is a BAD JUDGE making a BAD RULING interpreting BAD LAW setting a BAD PRECEDENT for future discovery actions.
Obviously, it's supposed to be the remnant of a Forerunner Halo ring weapon detonation. It's amazing what lengths MSFT PR will go to in publishing a video game. I'm not sure whether we should be outraged that they did it only five billion light years away or glad they discovered time travel so we could observe the effect in time for this year's product launch.
I was introduced to TSR's D&D and AD&D in the late seventies while in school, so it only affected my dignity as a pre-teen and I was okay with that. Of course, having a bunch of friends that played meant that I played ocassionally through my teens as well. My parents no doubt approved of this method of birth control.
Coincidentally, I worked at WotC when they aquired TSR, but had long ago stopped playing D&D since I had no time as a working professional and my D&D friends had scattered to the winds after High School. I left WotC before they were acquired by Hasbro, but cannot imagine that move was good for the product.
Now I'm a certified adult with job, mortgage, wife, kids, etc. and cannot imagine having time to play D&D. My kids aren't playing it. They're into Madden '08 and Guitar Hero II or sports outside. They'll ride a bike, surf the web^Wmyspace, chat with friends or play video games.
So who exactly is the core audience for this product? And why did it need to get rev'd into what is apparently a very different game from the story-telling enterprise it was thirty years ago?
Re:Can we give "1984" a rest?
on
Manhattan 1984
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· Score: 1
People should not be allowed to reference 1984 (or say "Orwellian") unless they've actually read the thing. It describes a totalitarian state that makes Stalin look like a libertarian. It's not just about a government that spies on its people (though only the upper classes). It's about people willfully changing their own memories of the past and a ruling party that claims to control reality. All of this is set in a world of permanent war and grinding poverty for almost all of humanity.
Ahem...
That's different from present day USA how, exactly?
I added them up. Over $1,000 USD spent on XBOX games since we bought our console in 2001. And that was just the discs that I could find. I have discs without boxes, boxes without discs and I know that I purchased some discs that I can no longer find boxes or disc for at all.
But the rough value of what I was able to find and secure through the years is easily $1,000. I added them up. I think I cried a little. Because they were all, ALL of them, irrevocably scratched.
I have children. Children don't do well with shiny plastic. We had trouble keeping the SNES games working, but at least I could order screwdriver bits from Hong Kong, open the cases and brush the food out with vinegar, a toothbrush and some compressed air. The Nintendo 64 was equally difficult to keep operational. When the industry unanimously went to DVDs with the Gamecube, the XBOX and the PS1, I knew we were doomed. But we settled on the XBOX because of Halo.
Five years later, two XBOXes, four power supplies, twenty controllers, four DVD enablers/remotes, four years of XBM with sample DVDs (most missing), and over $1,000 in games, I did it.
I broke the law.
After installing mod chips, I managed to copy some, not all, but some of our dying games up to a Samba share on our network. I spent another $40 on a DMCA device known as a grinder along with some cotton polishing wheels and plastic polish and managed to restore a few more DVD discs to readability. I also destroyed one permanently learning how to do this slowly and carefully enough. We now have about 23 titles "saved" and usable, and at least another 30 waiting for me to attempt to restore them.
Could we go to blockbuster, rent a game, save it and play it forever? Sure, but we don't. Just like I don't run around committing murder with my kitchen knives on a daily basis. We need to teach the industry that capability != intent. You'd think they would figure this out. When our XBOX wasn't working and I was staring at all our destroyed video games, we STOPPED BUYING GAMES.
Now that I have a modded xbox that can make a permanent recording of the games I legally acquire and pay for, I don't mind buying games.
This sort of rationale is why we still play Halo 2 on our modded xboxes. This is why we no longer have an xbox-live subscription (we'd be banned). This is why we have not purchased an XBOX 360. I am very concerned that the next gen consoles will drain my money away through easily scratched polycarbonate game media. It's almost as if they designed them to disintegrate upon contact with children.
I hope someone in the industry is listening. I need a console that allows me to install software, then put the media in a safe place. Without this feature, my kids cannot play for long (some games only lasted one day) and we don't purchase as many games as we otherwise might.
There are a number of comments in here about how you cannot get rid of buttons because then how would we [press this button]? The posters neglect to imagine the innovation that comes from necessity. If you RTFA, it mentions that Jobs forbade arrow keys on the original Macintosh because he wanted to force developers to accommodate the mouse. You know what? It worked.
With the iPhone, he's forcing developers to think of new ways to use a tactile screen. He's sprinkled the creative field with some suggestions. Touch to click, drag to scroll, flick to page. I'm sure there will be others. One poster wanted to know how you could turn volume up or down without a knob. Why not just draw a clockwise or counter-clockwise circle on the screen? Software can determine that motion from key presses. It's innovation waiting to happen.
This sort of innovation through change and design is a good thing. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it's spectacular. Jobs is great because he keeps hitting this ball despite his failures. In time, we'll regard the iPhone as a success or failure, as a Mac or a Lisa, as an iPod or a Newton. But until then, try to remember that Jobs brings both to the table with regularity.
We should focus on establishing a presence in space first. Let's get space working for lots of people, not just a select three at a time (plus celebrity). Think asteroid mining. Collecting hydrogen from the solar wind. Solar power arrays beaming clean energy back to Earth. Once we have refueling and industrial capacity in orbit or on platforms around the solar system, conquering the gravity wells of the other planets will merely be costly.
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I downloaded the first free album just to see if it was worth purchasing. I was extremely disappointed. One song consisted of the same 11 notes played over and over again for 3 minutes.
Fortunately for Trent, we all have different tastes. I grabbed the full collection torrent yesterday and am just finishing up track 36 now. Throughout the album, I was thinking things like, "is this it?" and "kind of simple and... lame... for NIN, really." However, while I was working away on the computer, writing email, configuring a new linux server, reading resumes, whatever, I just sort of tuned it out and let it flow.
I never skipped a song.
It did not distract me from my work.
Overall, the effect was quite pleasing.
Oh yea, and the sound quality is the typical amazing you would expect from NIN. Silent where desired, distorted where intended. I'm looping back through on track 2 now and still enjoying it.
So I bought the $10 CD and laughed at the price with S&H: $16.99, just like the record store. But at least it goes to Trent and not a bunch of rapists.
I like the 3 second rule better than the car length rule. Regardless of your speed you should be 2-3 seconds behind the next car.
:P
I'm going to assume you do not commute during, between, before or after rush hour in any major metropolitan region. Otherwise, your statement just doesn't make any practical sense.
60mph == 88 feet per second.
You are recommending a gap of 180 to 270 feet between yourself and the car in front of you. Nevermind the fathomless distance that this veritable FOOTBALL field represents, assuming that a typical car is 20 feet long and we generally leave two car lengths in front of us while in motion, you are inviting 4.5 cars to squeeze in front of you.
Of course, that last 0.5 car is actually a full car so you'll need to back off a bit, requiring use of your brakes and thus inducing exactly the sort of traffic gridlock that we're talking about.
The fact is, when in traffic, you have to drive as traffic does. Deltas in speed, acceleration, braking, even behavior, induce gridlock.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone left 2-3 seconds in between cars? Of course! Then we'd all be driving the same!
But let's play with that for a minute.
The carrying capacity of a freeway lane is generally measured in cars per unit of time. Following the two second rule and assuming a 20 foot car length, we get... huh, roughly one car every two seconds! I'm not even using math here! So that means that at ANY speed, the maximum number of cars we can accommodate is 1 per 2 seconds per lane. Or 1800phpl (per hour per lane). Which would be fine if we designed freeways accordingly.
But we don't. We don't design freeways, we inhibit their expansion at every turn and by the time said expansion is done, it's way under provisioned. We live with a perpetual shortage of freeway carrying capacity.
The only workable solution available to the average driver, which we arrived at collectively, is to reduce the gap between cars. By reducing that gap from two seconds to one, we practically doubled the carrying capacity of our local freeways... when people behave the same way.
It's possible that mixing two-second-rule drivers with one-second-rule drivers is the cause of this gridlock, but I really don't see any other way given the shortage of lanes.
Oh wait, yes I do. I ride a motorcycle.
I don't know if anyone ever reads these super-late replies, but since you and others had such helpful suggestions, I thought I'd address some of your (and other's) assumptions:
1. I'm using tc with fairly advanced htb filters and stochaistic leveling. This same tc shaping works wonders for our office T1, even with multiple BT clients competing... which is why I developed these tc scripts. Our office ssh was sucking big time until I tuned the traffic shaping for both up (on eth0) and down (on eth1). The T1 is 1.5Mbps full-duplex. My cable is rated at ~6/1Mbps and yes, I've adjusted the rates appropriately at 80% of typical peak. In fact, even though I've measured 9Mbps with dslreports.com, I've set my cap at 4Mbps.
2. Furthermore, at home, I've throttled BT's maximum dl and ul speeds to absurdly low levels like 0.8Mbps down and 0.25Mbps up. I've also had to limit the number of peers/connections to a global max of about 16 to keep latencies around 1000ms. Any higher and I seem to get shoved up to 3000ms pretty quick. This results in my actual dl rates hovering between 0.16Mbps and 0.08Mbps with upload ranging as high as 0.25Mbps (so my upload seems less affected than my download).
3. Regarding alternatives to Comcraptic's service that are outside of my budget or sensibilities, I can get AT&T ISDN (no kidding!) for about twice the price and 10X less speed. I can also get Satellite service for about 4-5X the cost and again, less speed. Or I can pay 5X or more for T1 or fatter dedicated business circuits. Since this is my RESIDENCE, I was just hoping for the $50/mo that I used to pay for DSL prior to moving. Said DSL did not go to hell when I turned up a BT to download CentOS isos overnight. Comcraptic does.
I have hated comcast for their customer service and service quality since I first subscribed to cable back in the very early 90s. Thank the gods for DirecTV introducing competition to this market of city and county sponsored monopolies.
Unfortunately, I recently moved back under comcast's umbrella and had no other options for internet within my budget. And now I'm suffering latencies as high as three seconds whenever I download a torrent. As soon as I stop torrent downloads, my latency returns to 25ms.
This is not traffic shaping. This is crap.
Shaping involves prioritizing and queing packets so that every process gets fed, regardless of what's running. You can also force downloads like BT, FTP, and even HTTP to take the slow path, moving icmp and ssh to the front of the line. This is quite easy with tc and other professional tools.
However, what comcastic seems to be doing is more akin to load leveling back in the days of mainframes. In those situations, you find that a user is hogging the resource and you would load level ALL of that users processes, regardless of function. As a result, if I'm downloading a torrent, my ssh sessions take 30 seconds to establish and keystroke confirmation lags three seconds behind my typing. Since I type about 60 words per minute, that's about three words or more behind my fingers. Wow.
Nice way to show your colors comcast. Once again, you are guaranteeing that:
1. as soon as I can, I'm dumping you.
2. I'm already telling EVERYONE to avoid you
3. I will go out of my way to starve you of customers
4. I will seek out and endorse your competitors
Good luck. May you soon die a well deserved and early death.
I've noticed that my comcast cable service has semi-reliable ping latency of 25-50ms to certain well known sites.
But within a minute of starting a torrent download, ping latency rises to ~3000ms.
If I kill the torrent, latency immediately starts to drop and returns to 25-50ms within a minute.
I'm running a stealthy client, RC4, minimal tracker access, blah, blah. Reducing the number of torrents and peers to an almost unusable level can reduce the latency impact by 50% (500-1500ms, highly variable). Note, this is for ALL traffic. It makes ssh unbearable, web browsing is annoying. Kill the BT and things return to decently fast.
This isn't just traffic shaping. It's connection shaping. And it sucks. It is so easy to put QoS on a circuit to manage BT traffic that it seems criminal to go overboard screwing with customers to this degree. I feel I'm being punished for using the network efficiently. I'd switch, but there are no alternatives in my area (comcast was last resort). I'd turn it off, but, you know, it's the 21st century.
You say your current company is hiring an IT Manager. You should go ask why they didn't pick you. What could you have done/changed to be considered? I'm certain that when they decided they needed an IT manager they asked the question, "do we have anyone we could promote into this role?" At worst, you'll get on their radar, at best, you might get an interview.
When I was younger, I often heard the phrase, "I'm not doing the work until you pay me for it." And even more often observed the work ethic that phrase describes. As I grew older, I got tired of getting the shaft and started trying to make things better for myself, my team, my department, my company. This led to me doing the work of a lead with the title of an individual contributor. That experience helped me get a job as a lead. Then I started doing the work of a manager...
I used pursue the mission of making my boss look good. That helped for a while, until I ran into some backstabbing bosses. Lesson learned: know the terrain of your political landscape and chose your allies carefully.
People often say that a manager's most important job is... but I find that it is often more complicated than that. Management is about building a business, making it profitable, protecting future revenues. Whether you are the CEO or a line-worker, you have the same mission; the question tends to be, what are the best practices to achieve this at your company, today?
* Building a good team, mentoring, hiring, retaining key staff. Making it enjoyable for people to work at your company. These are critical.
* Managing upward, communicating and adjusting expectations, negotiating achievable goals and reasonable budgets for your team. These are critical.
* Collaborating with peers/departments, helping them build the business, knowing when and how to pitch in and sacrifice (your time or your staff) for team-wins. Knowing when to say "no" so your staff doesn't get abused saving everyone else's ass. All critical.
* Staying focused, setting priorities and getting your tasks done. This means you cannot randomize yourself, you must have short-term goals and hit them. You cannot randomize your team, you must set short-term goals and then allow your staff to hit them. PLANNING, however you best perform that, is essential to choosing goals that you can defend until completion (most of the time).
These practices apply no matter what level you are at in your company. And people who tend to follow them more often than not are regarded favorably. You may know a few. Those are the first people in line for promotions up the technical ladder or, should they show interest, promotions into management.
Be the person you want to be, enjoy your job, everything else follows.
Even if aliens are out there listening, would they really care?
You're kidding, right?
Assuming we progress to the point of cheap and common interstellar travel, if we suddenly heard of a primitive culture "over there" do you think it is more likely we would:
a. shrug
b. watch in horror as scores of independent missionaries from our own species descended on the helpless planet to bring them the word of <insert deity>.
c. enslave them.
d. set up trade negotiations for their resources.
Looking to our own history, I'd say all the above.
Only a complete fucktard who is totally ignorant of what he or she is doing could possibly propose such regulation. Of course, I just described your typical politician. They are ignorant and they really don't care.
Worse, they actually do care and have only the best intentions. However, like the majority of the human species, they lack the ability to form accurate cause->effect predictions around the most basic of behaviors. For any choice of actions with a consequence-time-horizon more distant than the next board meeting, the selection process is basically random--with heavy steering from the vocal minority in attendance at that time.
"If it is illegal to have it, he can't get it". It took quite a while to explain to him that the internet is international and that it's no problem to get it from abroad. ... I'm not kidding you, this is not made up, this is real. Those people do exist. They don't realize that borders are meaningless on the internet, that national laws prohibiting the possession of software don't affect a thing, except to criminalize people who did nothing wrong. I had a very hard time convincing him that a law against P2P would only harm his son, not solve the problem.
Where to begin...
a. Such people with broad ignorance of the Internet and laws are the majority.
b. I'm not sure whether to be most concerned at your subject's ignorance of same, or...
c. Your passing assertion that U.S. laws affect behavior within the U.S.
Laws and law enforcement are only effective at punishment. They are exceptionally poor as deterrents. The great tragedy of our time is that so much energy goes into writing laws as preventative measures.
If you go too fast, too hard or work the disc too long, it can overheat and tear the polycarbonate. But if you are slow and develop your technique, you can restore most discs quite readily. Always buff from the center toward the edge (radially) and focus on the circular scratches.
I restored 30 fubared XBOX CDROMs over a couple weekends last year. DVD2XBOX was really helpful since it would copy what it could and report the nubmer of bad files. I would go polish for a few minutes and try again, the file count would go down. If I didn't interrupt the XBOX, it would just try to copy those bad files, speeding things up considerably. Eventually, I'd get the whole game, retire the disc and start on another dead game.
This worked WAY better than toothpaste or those stupid disc doctor things they sell OTC. It was fast, and could fix deep scratches too!
There were some discs that the kids had ruined beyond repair, but as long as they weren't cracked or scratched on the label side, I could generally repair them with time. YMMV.
Yea, I know, they claim they will replace broken discs for $5. But that's only if you can figure out which company to call and spend the appropriate amount of time on the phone finding out where to send them and if they have replacement copies. I can fix a disc in that amount of time, and I don't have to wait 4-6 weeks for processing! More importantly, now that I have a copy I'll never have this problem again.
If PC and OS vendors provided us with a product that was impossible to backup, there would be a riot. The game industry gets away with it because loss and replacement IS THEIR BUSINESS MODEL! They want you to buy the games again and again.
Shit, now you've gone and made me an accomplice to your copyright violation. Thanks a lot.
Don't forget the coincidental timing required for two civilizations to be looking and broadcasting in each other's direction. We cannot listen to them all simultaneously. And if we wanted to be a broadcaster, we certainly couldn't pump jiggiwatt lasers at them all, simultaneously. And if we did, it would only be this decade. That's 10 years out of 14 billion, last count.
Seti is noble. It's good PR. But it's hopeless and doomed to failure even if the universe is teaming with sentient, space-faring life.
Our efforts are far better served getting off our flat-asses, working together on cooperative, global space projects like an elevator and orbital ring platform and getting out there.
Then there is the incentive issue. We're hoping that another race is broadcasting on hydrogen trying to say hello. Are we broadcasting? Why would they? When we are finally a space faring race, which scenario is more likely:
a. opening up lines of communication with pre-space, primitive industrial and war-faring societies?
b. opening up lines of communication with space-faring societies we come across.
In my years of pursuing a nice sounding stereo on a limited budget, I found a test that was rather simple to conduct and interpret. I checked the noise floor of my system by playing a CD, pressing pause, and cranking my amp up to -0db.
What I found was that there was substantial noise in my system. Most of which I eliminated with an optical cable between the CD Player and my Digital Pre-Amp. Getting the analog signal away from the CD Player's motor dropped the noise floor to a nearly imperceptible level. I'm sure the DAC was nearly identical in both components, but it was obvious that the internal analog wiring was sucking up noise whereas the digital pathway of my cheap Sony CD Player was immune.
As long as my other cables didn't have shorts or pass too close to a noise source, it didn't seem to matter whether I used the cables that came with the components, monster cable, zip cord or pricey oxygen free copper. I still have it all, it's at least fifteen years old now, and I'm sure manufacturers would recommend that I buy all new gear. But as far as I can tell, it's still clean, crisp, and true.
Of course, I sunk all the money I saved on cables into discrete, high-power components so it's probably a wash.
Alternatively, if you find your self exiting a store and are surprised by the rent-a-cop asking for your receipt here's a more productive thing you can do:
The only way to make the merchant change their behavior is to hit their bottom line. Returns show up there as a separate line item.
It is ironic that these policies only affect people who obviously bought something at the store and they allow others with no visible merchandise to leave the premesis freely.
And the next time, he (and the rest of us) will think about that $7,500 legal bill and just show them the fucking receipt.
Totalitarianism: 1
Individuals: -1
At first glance, I thought WTF? But given the context and the fact that no-one could see what she had under her sweatshirt, the cops probably reacted correctly and (I cannot believe I'm saying this) it is a credit to their professionalism that she did not end up dead.
/.er could accurately discern between LED art gizmo and upper layer of triggering device without intruding sufficiently to give the potential bomber cause to detonate.
Considering that if you were a lunatic bomber, you might want to somehow display that you DO HAVE A BOMB, exposing some part of the electronics with lights and a battery might be deemed sufficient to your crazy mind. I seriously doubt whether the average cop, TSA agent or even
Hopefully, this girl will come out of this experience with better judgment suited for our culture of fear.
It's probably too much to ask that we reduce the level of paranoia at our airports instead, but I wish we could do that rather than suppress the young geniuses of today.
Not true, my iPhone has a setting (under Settings) for Mail that allows me to check periodic checking of email to Manual, 15m, 30m and 1h. I found it annoying that it defaulted to manual so the other day I switched it to every 30 minutes. Then it chirped at me at 1am so I switched it back to manual.
It is much, much worse than that.
If a volatile medium such as RAM is discoverable and thus allows a judge to compel a defendant to record data from that medium into non-volatile storage, then it follows that these other mediums for data exchange are also discoverable and defendants can be compelled to record their contents in a similar manner:
It may be onerous or difficult to capture these data streams, but it is certainly possible and no less burdensome than recording and archiving all transactions that traverse a computer's RAM. This is a BAD JUDGE making a BAD RULING interpreting BAD LAW setting a BAD PRECEDENT for future discovery actions.
Thanks MPAA.
Obviously, it's supposed to be the remnant of a Forerunner Halo ring weapon detonation. It's amazing what lengths MSFT PR will go to in publishing a video game. I'm not sure whether we should be outraged that they did it only five billion light years away or glad they discovered time travel so we could observe the effect in time for this year's product launch.
I was introduced to TSR's D&D and AD&D in the late seventies while in school, so it only affected my dignity as a pre-teen and I was okay with that. Of course, having a bunch of friends that played meant that I played ocassionally through my teens as well. My parents no doubt approved of this method of birth control.
Coincidentally, I worked at WotC when they aquired TSR, but had long ago stopped playing D&D since I had no time as a working professional and my D&D friends had scattered to the winds after High School. I left WotC before they were acquired by Hasbro, but cannot imagine that move was good for the product.
Now I'm a certified adult with job, mortgage, wife, kids, etc. and cannot imagine having time to play D&D. My kids aren't playing it. They're into Madden '08 and Guitar Hero II or sports outside. They'll ride a bike, surf the web^Wmyspace, chat with friends or play video games.
So who exactly is the core audience for this product? And why did it need to get rev'd into what is apparently a very different game from the story-telling enterprise it was thirty years ago?
People should not be allowed to reference 1984 (or say "Orwellian") unless they've actually read the thing. It describes a totalitarian state that makes Stalin look like a libertarian. It's not just about a government that spies on its people (though only the upper classes). It's about people willfully changing their own memories of the past and a ruling party that claims to control reality. All of this is set in a world of permanent war and grinding poverty for almost all of humanity.
Ahem...
That's different from present day USA how, exactly?
I added them up. Over $1,000 USD spent on XBOX games since we bought our console in 2001. And that was just the discs that I could find. I have discs without boxes, boxes without discs and I know that I purchased some discs that I can no longer find boxes or disc for at all.
But the rough value of what I was able to find and secure through the years is easily $1,000. I added them up. I think I cried a little. Because they were all, ALL of them, irrevocably scratched.
I have children. Children don't do well with shiny plastic. We had trouble keeping the SNES games working, but at least I could order screwdriver bits from Hong Kong, open the cases and brush the food out with vinegar, a toothbrush and some compressed air. The Nintendo 64 was equally difficult to keep operational. When the industry unanimously went to DVDs with the Gamecube, the XBOX and the PS1, I knew we were doomed. But we settled on the XBOX because of Halo.
Five years later, two XBOXes, four power supplies, twenty controllers, four DVD enablers/remotes, four years of XBM with sample DVDs (most missing), and over $1,000 in games, I did it.
I broke the law.
After installing mod chips, I managed to copy some, not all, but some of our dying games up to a Samba share on our network. I spent another $40 on a DMCA device known as a grinder along with some cotton polishing wheels and plastic polish and managed to restore a few more DVD discs to readability. I also destroyed one permanently learning how to do this slowly and carefully enough. We now have about 23 titles "saved" and usable, and at least another 30 waiting for me to attempt to restore them.
Could we go to blockbuster, rent a game, save it and play it forever? Sure, but we don't. Just like I don't run around committing murder with my kitchen knives on a daily basis. We need to teach the industry that capability != intent. You'd think they would figure this out. When our XBOX wasn't working and I was staring at all our destroyed video games, we STOPPED BUYING GAMES.
Now that I have a modded xbox that can make a permanent recording of the games I legally acquire and pay for, I don't mind buying games.
This sort of rationale is why we still play Halo 2 on our modded xboxes. This is why we no longer have an xbox-live subscription (we'd be banned). This is why we have not purchased an XBOX 360. I am very concerned that the next gen consoles will drain my money away through easily scratched polycarbonate game media. It's almost as if they designed them to disintegrate upon contact with children.
I hope someone in the industry is listening. I need a console that allows me to install software, then put the media in a safe place. Without this feature, my kids cannot play for long (some games only lasted one day) and we don't purchase as many games as we otherwise might.
There are a number of comments in here about how you cannot get rid of buttons because then how would we [press this button]? The posters neglect to imagine the innovation that comes from necessity. If you RTFA, it mentions that Jobs forbade arrow keys on the original Macintosh because he wanted to force developers to accommodate the mouse. You know what? It worked.
With the iPhone, he's forcing developers to think of new ways to use a tactile screen. He's sprinkled the creative field with some suggestions. Touch to click, drag to scroll, flick to page. I'm sure there will be others. One poster wanted to know how you could turn volume up or down without a knob. Why not just draw a clockwise or counter-clockwise circle on the screen? Software can determine that motion from key presses. It's innovation waiting to happen.
This sort of innovation through change and design is a good thing. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it's spectacular. Jobs is great because he keeps hitting this ball despite his failures. In time, we'll regard the iPhone as a success or failure, as a Mac or a Lisa, as an iPod or a Newton. But until then, try to remember that Jobs brings both to the table with regularity.
We should focus on establishing a presence in space first. Let's get space working for lots of people, not just a select three at a time (plus celebrity). Think asteroid mining. Collecting hydrogen from the solar wind. Solar power arrays beaming clean energy back to Earth. Once we have refueling and industrial capacity in orbit or on platforms around the solar system, conquering the gravity wells of the other planets will merely be costly.
Good thing nobody pirates video games or those guys would be going out of business too!
Or is this just another case of the data fitting the conclusion in some cases and being suspiciously absent in all other conversation?