I checked December 2008 and June 2009. I only looked at pages, not at requests, and I did not factor out robots. I have roughly 235k page views in both months. In 12/2008 17% were from all versions of IE. In 6/2009 only 3% were from all versions of IE. In 6/2009 IE 8 was on the list of browsers.
My site appeals to game programmers so the viewers are mostly geeks like me and it has always been light on IE visitors. But, wow, only 3%?
Your post includes a negative answer to every reasonable way of dealing with your problem. *YOU* have already given yourself permission to become a fat weak ugly slob. You have a slow metabolism, bull shit. That is just permission for being fat and staying fat. I need sleep, just permission for being lazy. I live so far away, so what move.
You have decided to be a victim (why else would you take such a piss poor job?) and now you are hoping that we will give permission to be the lazy fat slob you want to be. You have reached out to the whole geek world to ask us to enable you. In just the same way drug addicts look for people to enable them.
BTW, that is why I am being so harsh. To let you know that at least one person does not give you permission to be a victim.
When I was in a similar situation I bought a mini trampoline and used it during for several minutes per hour, just jumping is good exercise, running in place is also good. Look up tension exercise, you can get an amazing work out with using a rope with a few knots tied in it. Buy a book an stretching and begin a flexibility program. Holding those stretches is remarkable exercise. Oh, but you don't have time... DO IT AT WORK. Your job doesn't exactly keep you pinned in a chair 100% of the time. Get up off the chair and run in place in front of your monitor. At the very least get an exercise ball and substitute it for your chair. Sitting on a ball for 12 hours will give you an astonishing core muscle work out. Get rid of the chair and put the monitor on a stack of books and do your job standing up. Standing or sitting on the ball will only hurt for a few weeks.
Now, after all that, I'm going to tell you to sign up for a supervised weight loss program. One that makes you log all your eating. Buy a Dr.'s office style scale and weigh your self and keep a log of daily weight.
Remember that *YOU* went on/. *asking* for permission to be a fat lazy slob, you asked for permission to be a victim... If that is what you want, you will achieve your goal. In a few years, you'll find yourself unable to climb stairs, you'll be too fat to fit through a door, you will be taking 6 or 7 pills every day for you diabetes, your cholesterol, your high blood pressure, your acne, your broken down feet, your social anxiety, your depression.... You'll be a very happen victim then and even happier when you die and a buried in a double wide coffin. Your choice.
Getting more oxygen to the brain is a good idea, but you do not need to elevate your pulse to do it. You need to learn to breath properly. I have personally driven several nurses and a couple of doctors nuts by dropping my heart rate to 40 beats per minutes, slowing my breathing to 2 cycles per minute, while simultaneously pushing my blood oxygen level off the top of the chart. I have done this while in the hospital tied to a heart monitor while waiting to go in for surgery, so it is documented. It is also easy to do.
Not to mention the level of focus you can achieve in the process is beyond belief.
The rest of your advice is not bad, OK, it all works for me, but do not strive for an elevated heart rate, that will kill you in the long run.
Most exciting project in the world and all I could do was play solitaire. Game, after game, after game of solitaire. Why was this happening to me?
That started a long journey of discovery. After talking to several doctors, and a shrink, I learned several things. I learned that on the Myers-Briggs scale I am an INTP, heavy, very heavy on the Introvert, light, very light on the Proceeding part. That means that being around people is stressful for me. I also learned that most programmers are INT types. Funny how that works out. I learned that I had some form of an attentional disorder. Adult men who have undiagnosed attentional disorders tend to develop depression and some form of obsessive compulsive disorder, and anxiety disorders. (Programmers can really benefit from having a bit of OCD.) The doctors recommended a whole raft of different medications.
OK, this is my story, not yours, I am just telling you what doctors told me were the cause of my developer's block (and writer's block too). They were right, but their suggested solution was wrong for me. There was one time when I was out of work for a long period of time recovering from having my ankle rebuilt that I did resort to anti-depressants. There are some very good ones that are now available cheaply as generics. They fit my unemployed budget quite nicely. But, I weened myself off of them.
The whole process that I went through has taken more than 10 years and is on going, when you start to analyze your life you never stop.
Eventually I started exercising. One day I gave my self a gift. I wrote it down. "I grant my self the gift of one hour per day to exercise." That was the best thing I ever did for myself. I started exercising regularly and took up a martial art. The martial art included meditation and Chi Kung training. That lead to my giving myself the added gift of 1/2 hour of meditation per day. After only a couple of months all the external symptoms went away, Internally, they are still there, but I can deal with them. I also lost 50 pounds and dropped my blood pressure. And, oh yeah, my back that had hurt for 20 years stopped hurting.
Then, I had an accident and had to have my ankle rebuilt. I stopped exercising (hard to do when you are in deep pain and can only walk with crutches) and I stopped meditating. All the symptoms came back. I fell back into the pit. I'm back doing my martial art and meditating and the symptoms are gone again.
So, what worked for me? A long journey of self discovery that included my starting a martial art at age 51 and learning to meditate and do Chi Kung.
At the very least, if you do not already do it, exercise for at least one hour per day, at least 5 days per week. It can be as simple as walking. But, I do believe it must be done all at once, not spread through the day. I set a kitchen timer to tell me when I am done and I use the same timer to tell me when meditation is over so I don't disturb myself by constantly checking the clock.
Just an aside, once I forgot to set the timer and I wound up meditating for 3 hours. The need to pee got me out of my chair. BTW, you can meditate sitting normally in a chair. No need to twist up your legs into pretzels.
Seriously, just asking. I, personally, have seen nothing that makes be want to use it. MS has done nothing to make me believe that I will get several hundred dollars worth of value from Windows 7. There are many people reading/. who believe they will get several hundred dollars worth of value from switching to Windows 7. Please tell me your reasons. Please tell me where you think the value is.
Yes, I am asking you to do MS's job and explain the value of Windows 7 in a way that I will understand.
I registered my last name.com. I thought it would be cool, give me some serious net cred to have firstName@LastName.com as my email address.
Trouble is that my last name was registered as a trademark by a nasty clothing company about 150 years ago. They have no legal way to force me to give them the domain. They have offered to buy it, but honestly they never offered me as much as they have spent on lawyers trying to steal it. And no where near to what I consider it to be worth.
OTOH, any time I put anything on the site they threaten to sue me for damaging the value of their trademark. I checked around for what that was going to cost me. If I won, maybe only $100,000, maybe $250,000. If I lost it would be about the same and I would lose the domain name. So.... I really don't want to be sued. The cheapest IP law firm I could find wanted a $30,000 retainer before they would even review the case. And folks, that $30,000 is just the bribe you pay to keep the lawyer from working for the other guys, it doesn't go against *any* of the cost of the work they do.
After 10 years of that kind of crap I put up a page calling for a boycott of the unnamed company and that made them realize that although I really can't afford to defend myself against a lawsuit from them, I can hurt them.
The last few years the site has said "move along, nothing to see here" and they have not bothered me. No registered letters, no calls from lawyers. They have no legal right to stop me from using the domain anyway I see fit. But, they have millions to spend suing me. I do not have millions to spend defending myself. They can sue me and lose and bankrupt me.
It is not rude to say no, it *IS* rude to ask to violate your personal space.
The general rule is always, if you feel in anyway uncomfortable about what is asked, just say "no". If they ask again or act offended or tell you that your are rude, then you say, "FUCK YOU, I SAID NO" you can substitute "WHAT PART OF 'NO' DON"T YOU UNDERSTAND". If they ask after that, well , raising a fist in fair warning is enough to get the point across.
Personally, I would smash my laptop across their face before I would allow them to use it.
I feel that I am older than the IDE, if you don't count the line number editor in BASIC. I learned to program using punched cards... Yes, I am that old and I am only 56. I have seen a lot of IDEs come and go and I have used several. (I was really in love with the original TurboPascal IDE on DOS.:-) I've used several others including different generations of MS VisualStudio. I think I have learned a lot about how programmers program.
What I have learned is that everyone has their own style that fits the way their minds work. If allowed to programmers will eventually find a set of tools that works for them. Once they have found that set of tools they should be allowed to continue to use them.
I learned to program during a time when it felt like every new project was on a computer with a different architecture with a unique operating system. Even machines with the same architecture might have different operating systems. (How many OSes were there for the PDP 11 anyway?). I got to the point where I would invest no (zero) time in learning the new OS. All I wanted to know was how to invoke the editor, call the compiler/assembler, run a batch file (if the OS was that sophisticated) and some basic file handling.
As the chaos settled it became worthwhile to learn some more sophisticated tools. I spent several years on a DEC 20 and learned emacs. (My brain and vi do not get a long.:-). About that time I ran into MG (also known as MicroGNU) a small subset of emacs written in highly portable C. I carried it along with me for many years and used it for all my DOS C and asm programming. I used gemacs on VMS. I have been using variants of emacs for around 28 years now. I am too the point where I do not remember the key strokes to perform a task, my fingers just do the right thing.
Emacs + make works for me. But, I do not recommend it to new programmers or casual programmers. If emacs works for you, you will find it, love it, and use it. If vim works for you, then you will find it, love it and use it. If VisualStudio works for you then... actually I would never recommend proprietary tools to anyone. Tomorrow you might find yourself working on a different OS and all your investment in learning VS will be lost. FLOSS tools can be taken with you. And, you can continue to learn them for ever because they can never be taken away from you. I still have a copy of mg in a.zip file somewhere. If I have to, I can make it work on any machine and OS that has a text based display.
Take a look at http://www.codelite.org/. I occasionally teach C++ and I have the problem that not all students have a C++ dev platform installed. If they have one, I let them use it. If not, I recommend CodeLite. I spent a lot of time looking for an cross platform free IDE that I could recommend to students. I needed something that worked. Something that was pretty simple to get people up on running on. And, because students come from many backgrounds and have different ability to pay I really wanted something that was free. I used to use Dev-C++, but support for that project is over and wxDev-C++ is to closely tied to wxWidgets.
CodeLite works, is reasonable easy to learn, and it is free.
Ok, I'll give the guy proprietary applications. Though only with the caveat that wine is getting better all the time.
Games? All the windows games I own run on Linxu... But, the real point is that by "desktop" he means the recreational home computer, not the serious work desktop.
He also mixes desktop and server functions in the same list. It has been a long time since I set up several of the server systems he mentions. I have done them on Linux, but not on Windows. If there are still no good GUIs for server functions, OK, but he was talking about the desktop not the server.
So, I guess he is talking about the home recreational desktop that doubles as an LDAP server. Weird... But, still if that is what he calls a desktop, OK.
When it comes to the desktop what he says is d *false*. Every complaint is about "some distros"... Ok, why would you use those distributions? I used to have all the problems he lists, many many years ago. Then I switched to Ubuntu and over time they *all* went away. Everyone, all of them, not one of the things he lists as a problem with "some distros" is a problem with Ubuntu 9.04. Seriously, I can't remember them being problems since sometime around 7.
His complaint about libc incompatibility is interesting. Yep, I can load a Windows app written for an ancient version of a Windows.dll and it will load and start to run. And then crash because it depends on bugs that were fixed 3 years ago. The app won't complain, the OS won't complain, it just won't work. At least with Linux you know you are trying to run code against libraries that are not known to work with that code.
The load time problem he mentions, is pure crap. I work on Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP every day. I use OpenOffice and MS Office on Windows and OpenOffice on Linux. I use equivalent machines in both locations. The apps load fast enough that I don't notice a pause on either application. Start up and shut down time is a problem with Linux? Since when. I don't sit there with a stop watch but I do not notice any difference in boot up or shut down times. They are both long enough to be annoying. Ok, he is talking about gigahertz machines like they are fast and not junkers.
I got a BSCS, went out and worked for a few years and saw that all the really good jobs in the company I worked for, and the companies I wanted to work for, were filled with guys with MSCS degrees.
So, I got the MSCS. And, I was able to get the jobs I wanted. Companies will hire a MS for a job that requires a BS. They will also hire an MS with experience for a job the says it requires a Ph.D.
When the world tilted sideways and I couldn't get the kind of jobs I really wanted anymore, the MS let me get jobs teaching in Junior colleges. Not bad. I took an online teaching certificate course and passed the Texas test that qualifies you to teach CS in grades 8-12, so I have that out of the way and that qualifies me as a "Highly Qualified" teacher if I ever get around to working in a high school. But, so far, I have been able to stay ahead of the bills working in junior colleges.
I'm now 56 and looking back, once I made the decision to get a CS degree, the MS was the smartest thing I ever did (except for marrying my wife:-). The only thing that I can think of that would be smarter would be to have gotten a J.D and become a lawyer.
OTOH, I had a boss who nearly cried when I decided to go to college. He kept saying I should study to be a turbine mechanic. Yah, know what? If I had I would have worked fewer hours, in better working conditions, made more money, had more freedom to choose where I wanted to live, and I most likely would be retired with a nice pension by now. And, I would still be able to get jobs as a turbine mechanic. My next door neighbor is my age and is a retired turbine mechanic...
There are no set limits in the TWC contract. People are complaining because they are not getting what they paid for which is unlimited usage at a fixed maximum bandwidth.
First off, I have to laugh at the folks in Europe and Asia bragging on their Internet infrastructure. This is *not* an infrastructure issue. In the Austin, and Round Rock, Texas area TWC already has huge fiber infrastructure. The cable box for this part of the neighborhood is in my back yard. The fiber bundle going into the box is two inches across.
Back in the middle '90s TWC went billions into debt to build out mixed fiber coax infrastructure. When they opened a ditch they dropped a minimum of four cables. Each cable was 4 inches across and each one contained thousands of fiber strands plus power.
The connection to my home is DOCSIS 2.0 There are 4 Gbps coming in and 1 Gbps going out and more than enough fiber to handle that all the way back to the head end. They have the bandwidth. They have already paid for infrastructure.
So what kind of an issue is it? Two things, good old capitalism and a corrupt government.
TWC is desperately trying to preserve their cable tv business and their telephone business. Having sold an all-you-can-eat service they are finding that people are actually using it that way and the people are using it to bypass TWC. They are using it to use VOIP for dirt cheap prices and service like hulu.com that let them access the video they want when they want it. They do not want to be in the business of selling commodity network transport.
The trouble with commodity network transport as a business is that there a few opportunities to sell high profit premium services. You can only compete on price and performance. And, if there is any competition at all, you find your self in a race to see who can sell the "best" service for the lowest price. TWC and AT&T are scared to death, and will fight anyway they can, to avoid winding up in the commodity transport business.
That is where the corrupt government comes in. Those two companies have manipulated the laws in Texas to their own benefit and are doing the same everywhere else. Look at the laws barring cities and counties from build their own networks. That is like barring governments from building roads. Oh, yeah, governor good hair (Perry) has been trying to eight years to privatize all the long distance roads in Texas. And, he is succeeding to.
TW is lying. Look at their federal reports. The cost of delivering data service is dropping at better than 10%/year and revenue is rising at better than 10%/year. Cost in 2008 was less than $150 Million and revenue was more that $4 billion. And, their subscriber base increased by a million people from 2007 to 2008.
I don't know about other areas, but in the Austin, Round Rock, Texas area TW has enormous amounts of fiber in the ground. They laid it down back in the middle '90s when I was working for SBC. I remember executive turning purple over the idea that TWC could afford to build out the kind of infrastructure they built out.
OK, so TWC is lying. They are lying about why they need to raise prices. But, they see a strong reason to do it. I do not claim to know that reason. I am sure it is related to two facts. 1) They were just spun out of Time Warner. 2) DOCSIS 3.0.
What are we going to do about it? Well, I happen to use a wrt54gl router with the tomato firmware so I now exactly how much data comes in and out of my house. With the recent connection of a PC to my TV our usage has gone way up. We currently use over 2GB/Day. There is no pirating going on. There are no P2P servers running. There is a lot of gaming and Hulu.com going on.
Our current household cable bill is ridiculous... My two college student "children" live at home so we have 3 DVRS, the digital tier, a bunch of premium channels, 2 telephone lines, and 10 Mbps Internet service. I am actually a very happy TWC customer. I have been for years.
Looking at what bandwidth caps will do to my current bill I held a family meeting on what to do about the situation. The answer from everyone was that we can live with out TV, we already get that on the net. We can't live without the Internet.
Our plan, if TWC puts in bandwidth caps, we will 1) Get a pre-paid cell phone for the one person who still uses the land lines. 2) transfer the main phone number to a cell phone. 3) Sign up for TWCs most expensive teir, the one that is still unlimited. While seeking any other lower priced service provider. 4) drop TWC telephone and TV services except for maybe basic cable.
Yeah, that's right. The consensus was that we do not need TV or telephone service, but we do need Internet service.
And, oh yeah, I've been talking to the neighbors about splitting the cost of a T1 or a fractional t3/DS3 and sharing it using wireless repeaters. When you look at $100/month from TWC sharing a T1 with a couple of neighbors starts looking very interesting. We're taking the idea to the neighborhood association. Providing broadband Internet for the neighborhood looks like something that can be done quickly and once installed would not cost very much.
Thank you for the clarification. I was responding to what I thought you were trying to say, which is not what you actually meant. That happens some times.
The trouble is that I still don't understand your original point.
The main difference between the US and Australia is that you haul most, nearly all, of your Internet content over very expensive and very limited submerged cables and over satellite links.
We do not have that problem. We have huge amounts of bandwidth and the content is mostly coming from right here. Australia is strangled for bandwidth by the Pacific. The US is not.
They are charging me.9 cents/BG and they are charging.1 cents/GB for transporting HBO to me. It looks like they all ready have about a factor of 10 markup built into my price, so my current price is already roughly 900% higher. That means I am already paying retail with a *huge* percentage markup. Not to mention that I only use about 2% of bandwidth I am paying for and HBO takes up all the bandwidth alloted to it.
I get 10 Mbps all the time. I get it down loading updates to Ubuntu and for many other down loads. I also get that speed on broadband speed tests. Not to mention that they *must* provided that kind of performance to stream the 100 plus digital channels the provide.
Even if I got only a quarter that speed, which I do from some web sites, the cost per GB would still be only a few cents per GB, not a $1.
I live in Round Rock, Texas about 10 miles north of Austin. You might know it as the US headquarters of Dell.
I'm not sure I get your point. They advertise it as 10 Mbps. If I didn't get that rate I would be demanding a refund. Also, I know what my DVR says about the data rate coming into the house, it is 256 QAM at 750 MHz. It is DOCSIS 2.0 and I really do have fiber to within 40 feet of my house.
This was studied back in the '60s and looked pretty good...
1) Find magma up wellings like the one out side of Salt lake City (except for being close to SLC that's a good one because it mostly under a chemical and biological testing range...)
2) Drill a deep hole.
3) Put a small nuke, 1 to 10 kilotons, down the hole.
4) Fill in the hole.
5) Blow the nuke.
6) Wait 5 years for the nasty short lived isotopes to decay.
7) Drill another hole down the the cavern carved by the nuke. It will be full of high temperature steam.
8) Run the steam through a heat exchanger to boil water. Send the condensate back down the hole. (You need to do that because there will still be some radioactive material in the hole after 5 years.)
9) Use the nice clean steam from the heat exchanger to run turbines and generate electricity.
10) Keep doing #9 for 10,000+ years. Because that magma is going to take a very long time to cool off.
Seriously, there are many places where this could be done. The risk of a release of radioactive material is very small and in return you get pollution free power for centuries.
Now, what would be great is if this could be done without nukes. What would be even better is if this could be done any way at all without the gas, oil, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and tide energy people spending billions on lobbying to stop it.
No really, you can build a power plant that works this way. You can spend use the five year waiting period to build the power plant.
The content you are bragging about caching in Australia mostly originates in the US and Europe. The US has huge amounts of landlines for hauling the load. My guess is that there is still more intercity dark fiber than lit fiber and there are still people laying fiber along rail lines. Not to mention that most ISPs already have huge caching servers so that content from Europe, Asia, and most of the US, is already cached.
I'm a TWC customer and they have a fiber bundle 4 inches across (mostly dark fiber) running 40 feet from my house. The TWC connection to my house is DOCSIS 2.0 and delivers 4 Gpbs in and 1.0 Gbps out to most rooms in my house.
I feel for you folks stuck out in the middle of the Pacific with limited access to the outside world. (My father will roll over in his grave if I every say anything bad about you folks he fought side by side with ANZAKs in the Pacific during WWII. I have nothing but respect for you folks.) But, if you have not been to the US you do not know what you are talking about. And, honestly, because of the distances between cities in the US things here are rather uncivilized compared to large parts of the EU.
To be blunt, you do not know what you are talking about.
I'm a TWC subscriber. I have their 10 Mbps service for 29.95/months. Notice, that that is not an unlimited service, never has been, never will be. But, TWC *calls* it an unlimited service. It is limited to 10 Mbps.
TWC wants to start charging me $1 per GB transferred. Ok, that is another usage limit on top of the one they already have in place, and it is stated in different terms so it is hard to compare to my old limit. (OBTW, they want to keep the old limit in place two. I do not get that, but they now want to limit my rate of consumption and my total consumption. Why not just one or the other? Limiting the same thing two different ways makes no sense.)
Ok, so where did I get 10968% increase in price? Well, under my current usage cap I get 10 Mbps 24 hours/day all day every day. How many GBs of transfer am I limited to now? Well, I only figured it out for the downstream side. So, it is really worse than what I figured out.
An average month is 365/12 days long so my current limit is:
First I computed the number of seconds in an average month, then I multiplied by the number of bits per second I get and then I divided by the number of bits in a GB. I did not use binary GiB or Mib numbers because TWC doesn't seem to use those numbers either.
Now I compute my current price per GB from TWC and I get $0.00911720 that is 0.9 *CENTS* per GB. Not a bad price really. TWC now wants me to pay a $1 for what they currently charge $0.0091172 for. If I did the math right that is an increase in cost of 109.68 times as much per GB. Which IIRC (I always get in trouble with grade school math) 10968% times the current price.
Oddly enough, I understand the need to charge per GB of usage. I figure usage based billing would be reasonable if they drop the speed limit and set the rate per GB to what they charge for other data services. Take for example HBO. I pay $12.95/month for HBO which gives me access to 14 digital movie channels and unlimited streaming on demand movies. If you figure about 1.5 Mbps/channel and only look at the movie channels, not the on demand movies then I'm getting 21 Mbps from TWC for only $12.95. And, I believe about half of that goes to HBO.... It looks like TWC is perfectly happy with selling 21 Mbps for about $7. Thats roughly 6500 BG/month for around $7.
So where do they get off charging me $1 for something they are happy to sell for a $0.001 when they use it to deliver HBO? (Even if TWC kept all the money it makes from selling HBO the prices is still only $0.002.)
Wow, did you notice? The current price TWC charges me for transferring data *is*, within a reasonable error range, the same price they charge for sending HBO over the same lines. How odd is that? Now they want to charge me 109 times as much.
I understand the difference between wholesale and retail rates. I would be happy to pay by the GB if TWC dropped the speed cap and charged me a reasonable retail rate of say $0.005 (half a cent per GB) which is a 500% mark up over the wholesale rate charged for delivering HBO and over what they currently charge me.
Which means that if they went to straight usage based billing my monthly bill would drop from $29.95 to between $0.15 and $0.30. That is, I *should* be paying between 15 and 30 cents per month for my current usage.
Stonewolf
P.S.
Someone please check my math. I'm having trouble believing that even a bunch of your typical sociopathic corporate executives could try to raise rates that high in one pop. The normal way to do it is by boiling the frog like the oil companies do.
Engineering week has been creating and running really fun to do, cheap to do, hands on, creative, projects since I was in college in the '70s. Dig into their archives and have your students do the projects. Create a list of 5 or so projects. Have the students in the class vote on the projects and everyone does that one. Then, for extra credit, you let them do as many more as they want over the school year. Allocate time in class for people to demo their projects and require a nicely formatted report as part of the project. (That last is so you can maybe work a deal with the English teacher for extra credit there too. Even students appreciate a multi-bird stone.:-)
If you can't deal with that, then try writing games. Yes, writing games. Getting a good animation going requires vector math, lots of good dx, dy, dz stuff leading into calculus and the physics of motion and interactions. Just getting a realistic ball bouncing in a cubical room can illustrate tons of physics. Yeah, what I'm saying is don't have them run simulations, have them write them. Call it writing video games and 90% of the kids will be all over it. OTOH, there will be parents waiting for you with pitch forks and torches, so be prepared.
Yeah, I've used writing video games to teach programming, math, and some physics and I've been involved with engineering week. Best fun I ever had was getting a bunch of blase science teachers up in the aisles nearly dancing just by getting them to actually *make* a Mobius strip and cut it down the middle instead of just talking about it and pointing a picture in a book. Kids love it too.
Very few science teachers know shit about their subject. They know shit because they really couldn't give a shit about it.
At least that is what it sounds like to me. The jurors are acting like free citizens of a free country and trying to find out what really happened and who is really guilty. That is their job. That is what they are sworn to do.
I've been on a jury. The court won't let you take notes. They will not allow you to look at the legal code covering the crime. They won't let you look up the precedents sited. They won't even tell you what "normal" punishments are. After only a few hours of deliberation and after having every request for information and clarification refused, I would have used the Internet to get the information if I could have. The whole court is designed to create an artificial reality, a construct where the jury is kept in the dark about most of what actually happened.
If you want an education on how courts really work, go spend a day sitting in a court as a spectator. See the bull that takes place behind the jury's back. I've done that too. It will make you sick.
I really hope that the wireless, always available, Internet changes the way courts operate. I'm looking forward to the first report of a juror leaving a bug in the court room so he can hear what goes on when the jury is sent out of court.
I teach freshman courses at the junior college level. One of the classes is a basic course designed to make sure that students can use a word processor and a spread sheet, and know enough so they won't fall for the Nigerian scam and will keep their antivirus software turned on and updated. About 35% of student fail that class.
Every time I teach the class at least one students comes to me and says "I don't see how I could have failed your class, I turned everything in." Yes, they are in college, they graduated from high school, and they do not understand that there is a difference between turning it in and doing it correctly.
I get blank documents turned in because students expect to get more credit for turning in a blank document than for not turning in anything at all.
I have had arguments with students who believed they should get credit for turning in the wrong answer to an arithmetic problem. They expect to get partial credit for turning in 3 when the questions was "What is 2 plus 2". I have had a student tell me that their opinion of the correct answer was a valid as mine and that I had no right to tell them otherwise. I am talking about the answer to a simple arithmetic problem.
Remember that I am talking about 35% of students. The other 65% actually got a pretty good, and in some cases exemplary education, from the same schools that graduated the first 35%.
But, still, it looks like a lot of them come out of high school with an unreasonably high opinion of themselves, and no education at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I checked December 2008 and June 2009. I only looked at pages, not at requests, and I did not factor out robots. I have roughly 235k page views in both months. In 12/2008 17% were from all versions of IE. In 6/2009 only 3% were from all versions of IE. In 6/2009 IE 8 was on the list of browsers.
My site appeals to game programmers so the viewers are mostly geeks like me and it has always been light on IE visitors. But, wow, only 3%?
Stonewolf
Your post includes a negative answer to every reasonable way of dealing with your problem. *YOU* have already given yourself permission to become a fat weak ugly slob. You have a slow metabolism, bull shit. That is just permission for being fat and staying fat. I need sleep, just permission for being lazy. I live so far away, so what move.
You have decided to be a victim (why else would you take such a piss poor job?) and now you are hoping that we will give permission to be the lazy fat slob you want to be. You have reached out to the whole geek world to ask us to enable you. In just the same way drug addicts look for people to enable them.
BTW, that is why I am being so harsh. To let you know that at least one person does not give you permission to be a victim.
When I was in a similar situation I bought a mini trampoline and used it during for several minutes per hour, just jumping is good exercise, running in place is also good. Look up tension exercise, you can get an amazing work out with using a rope with a few knots tied in it. Buy a book an stretching and begin a flexibility program. Holding those stretches is remarkable exercise. Oh, but you don't have time... DO IT AT WORK. Your job doesn't exactly keep you pinned in a chair 100% of the time. Get up off the chair and run in place in front of your monitor. At the very least get an exercise ball and substitute it for your chair. Sitting on a ball for 12 hours will give you an astonishing core muscle work out. Get rid of the chair and put the monitor on a stack of books and do your job standing up. Standing or sitting on the ball will only hurt for a few weeks.
Now, after all that, I'm going to tell you to sign up for a supervised weight loss program. One that makes you log all your eating. Buy a Dr.'s office style scale and weigh your self and keep a log of daily weight.
Remember that *YOU* went on /. *asking* for permission to be a fat lazy slob, you asked for permission to be a victim... If that is what you want, you will achieve your goal. In a few years, you'll find yourself unable to climb stairs, you'll be too fat to fit through a door, you will be taking 6 or 7 pills every day for you diabetes, your cholesterol, your high blood pressure, your acne, your broken down feet, your social anxiety, your depression.... You'll be a very happen victim then and even happier when you die and a buried in a double wide coffin. Your choice.
Stonewolf
Getting more oxygen to the brain is a good idea, but you do not need to elevate your pulse to do it. You need to learn to breath properly. I have personally driven several nurses and a couple of doctors nuts by dropping my heart rate to 40 beats per minutes, slowing my breathing to 2 cycles per minute, while simultaneously pushing my blood oxygen level off the top of the chart. I have done this while in the hospital tied to a heart monitor while waiting to go in for surgery, so it is documented. It is also easy to do.
Not to mention the level of focus you can achieve in the process is beyond belief.
The rest of your advice is not bad, OK, it all works for me, but do not strive for an elevated heart rate, that will kill you in the long run.
Stonewolf
Most exciting project in the world and all I could do was play solitaire. Game, after game, after game of solitaire. Why was this happening to me?
That started a long journey of discovery. After talking to several doctors, and a shrink, I learned several things. I learned that on the Myers-Briggs scale I am an INTP, heavy, very heavy on the Introvert, light, very light on the Proceeding part. That means that being around people is stressful for me. I also learned that most programmers are INT types. Funny how that works out. I learned that I had some form of an attentional disorder. Adult men who have undiagnosed attentional disorders tend to develop depression and some form of obsessive compulsive disorder, and anxiety disorders. (Programmers can really benefit from having a bit of OCD.) The doctors recommended a whole raft of different medications.
OK, this is my story, not yours, I am just telling you what doctors told me were the cause of my developer's block (and writer's block too). They were right, but their suggested solution was wrong for me. There was one time when I was out of work for a long period of time recovering from having my ankle rebuilt that I did resort to anti-depressants. There are some very good ones that are now available cheaply as generics. They fit my unemployed budget quite nicely. But, I weened myself off of them.
The whole process that I went through has taken more than 10 years and is on going, when you start to analyze your life you never stop.
Eventually I started exercising. One day I gave my self a gift. I wrote it down. "I grant my self the gift of one hour per day to exercise." That was the best thing I ever did for myself. I started exercising regularly and took up a martial art. The martial art included meditation and Chi Kung training. That lead to my giving myself the added gift of 1/2 hour of meditation per day. After only a couple of months all the external symptoms went away, Internally, they are still there, but I can deal with them. I also lost 50 pounds and dropped my blood pressure. And, oh yeah, my back that had hurt for 20 years stopped hurting.
Then, I had an accident and had to have my ankle rebuilt. I stopped exercising (hard to do when you are in deep pain and can only walk with crutches) and I stopped meditating. All the symptoms came back. I fell back into the pit. I'm back doing my martial art and meditating and the symptoms are gone again.
So, what worked for me? A long journey of self discovery that included my starting a martial art at age 51 and learning to meditate and do Chi Kung.
At the very least, if you do not already do it, exercise for at least one hour per day, at least 5 days per week. It can be as simple as walking. But, I do believe it must be done all at once, not spread through the day. I set a kitchen timer to tell me when I am done and I use the same timer to tell me when meditation is over so I don't disturb myself by constantly checking the clock.
Just an aside, once I forgot to set the timer and I wound up meditating for 3 hours. The need to pee got me out of my chair. BTW, you can meditate sitting normally in a chair. No need to twist up your legs into pretzels.
That is how I solved my developer's block.
Stonewolf
Seriously, just asking. I, personally, have seen nothing that makes be want to use it. MS has done nothing to make me believe that I will get several hundred dollars worth of value from Windows 7. There are many people reading /. who believe they will get several hundred dollars worth of value from switching to Windows 7. Please tell me your reasons. Please tell me where you think the value is.
Yes, I am asking you to do MS's job and explain the value of Windows 7 in a way that I will understand.
Stonewolf
Rush Limbaugh actually said something I agree with...
I am a yellow dog democrat and I am considered to be a liberal democrat. OTOH, I am a TEXAS yellow dog liberal democrat.
Stonewolf
Long ago in the early days of the Internet....
I registered my last name .com. I thought it would be cool, give me some serious net cred to have firstName@LastName.com as my email address.
Trouble is that my last name was registered as a trademark by a nasty clothing company about 150 years ago. They have no legal way to force me to give them the domain. They have offered to buy it, but honestly they never offered me as much as they have spent on lawyers trying to steal it. And no where near to what I consider it to be worth.
OTOH, any time I put anything on the site they threaten to sue me for damaging the value of their trademark. I checked around for what that was going to cost me. If I won, maybe only $100,000, maybe $250,000. If I lost it would be about the same and I would lose the domain name. So.... I really don't want to be sued. The cheapest IP law firm I could find wanted a $30,000 retainer before they would even review the case. And folks, that $30,000 is just the bribe you pay to keep the lawyer from working for the other guys, it doesn't go against *any* of the cost of the work they do.
After 10 years of that kind of crap I put up a page calling for a boycott of the unnamed company and that made them realize that although I really can't afford to defend myself against a lawsuit from them, I can hurt them.
The last few years the site has said "move along, nothing to see here" and they have not bothered me. No registered letters, no calls from lawyers. They have no legal right to stop me from using the domain anyway I see fit. But, they have millions to spend suing me. I do not have millions to spend defending myself. They can sue me and lose and bankrupt me.
Stonewolf
Say no.
It is not rude to say no, it *IS* rude to ask to violate your personal space.
The general rule is always, if you feel in anyway uncomfortable about what is asked, just say "no". If they ask again or act offended or tell you that your are rude, then you say, "FUCK YOU, I SAID NO" you can substitute "WHAT PART OF 'NO' DON"T YOU UNDERSTAND". If they ask after that, well , raising a fist in fair warning is enough to get the point across.
Personally, I would smash my laptop across their face before I would allow them to use it.
Like I said, grow a pair.
Stonewolf
I feel that I am older than the IDE, if you don't count the line number editor in BASIC. I learned to program using punched cards... Yes, I am that old and I am only 56. I have seen a lot of IDEs come and go and I have used several. (I was really in love with the original TurboPascal IDE on DOS. :-) I've used several others including different generations of MS VisualStudio. I think I have learned a lot about how programmers program.
What I have learned is that everyone has their own style that fits the way their minds work. If allowed to programmers will eventually find a set of tools that works for them. Once they have found that set of tools they should be allowed to continue to use them.
I learned to program during a time when it felt like every new project was on a computer with a different architecture with a unique operating system. Even machines with the same architecture might have different operating systems. (How many OSes were there for the PDP 11 anyway?). I got to the point where I would invest no (zero) time in learning the new OS. All I wanted to know was how to invoke the editor, call the compiler/assembler, run a batch file (if the OS was that sophisticated) and some basic file handling.
As the chaos settled it became worthwhile to learn some more sophisticated tools. I spent several years on a DEC 20 and learned emacs. (My brain and vi do not get a long. :-). About that time I ran into MG (also known as MicroGNU) a small subset of emacs written in highly portable C. I carried it along with me for many years and used it for all my DOS C and asm programming. I used gemacs on VMS. I have been using variants of emacs for around 28 years now. I am too the point where I do not remember the key strokes to perform a task, my fingers just do the right thing.
Emacs + make works for me. But, I do not recommend it to new programmers or casual programmers. If emacs works for you, you will find it, love it, and use it. If vim works for you, then you will find it, love it and use it. If VisualStudio works for you then... actually I would never recommend proprietary tools to anyone. Tomorrow you might find yourself working on a different OS and all your investment in learning VS will be lost. FLOSS tools can be taken with you. And, you can continue to learn them for ever because they can never be taken away from you. I still have a copy of mg in a .zip file somewhere. If I have to, I can make it work on any machine and OS that has a text based display.
Stonewolf
Take a look at http://www.codelite.org/. I occasionally teach C++ and I have the problem that not all students have a C++ dev platform installed. If they have one, I let them use it. If not, I recommend CodeLite. I spent a lot of time looking for an cross platform free IDE that I could recommend to students. I needed something that worked. Something that was pretty simple to get people up on running on. And, because students come from many backgrounds and have different ability to pay I really wanted something that was free. I used to use Dev-C++, but support for that project is over and wxDev-C++ is to closely tied to wxWidgets.
CodeLite works, is reasonable easy to learn, and it is free.
Stonewolf
Ok, I'll give the guy proprietary applications. Though only with the caveat that wine is getting better all the time.
Games? All the windows games I own run on Linxu... But, the real point is that by "desktop" he means the recreational home computer, not the serious work desktop.
He also mixes desktop and server functions in the same list. It has been a long time since I set up several of the server systems he mentions. I have done them on Linux, but not on Windows. If there are still no good GUIs for server functions, OK, but he was talking about the desktop not the server.
So, I guess he is talking about the home recreational desktop that doubles as an LDAP server. Weird... But, still if that is what he calls a desktop, OK.
When it comes to the desktop what he says is d *false*. Every complaint is about "some distros"... Ok, why would you use those distributions? I used to have all the problems he lists, many many years ago. Then I switched to Ubuntu and over time they *all* went away. Everyone, all of them, not one of the things he lists as a problem with "some distros" is a problem with Ubuntu 9.04. Seriously, I can't remember them being problems since sometime around 7.
His complaint about libc incompatibility is interesting. Yep, I can load a Windows app written for an ancient version of a Windows .dll and it will load and start to run. And then crash because it depends on bugs that were fixed 3 years ago. The app won't complain, the OS won't complain, it just won't work. At least with Linux you know you are trying to run code against libraries that are not known to work with that code.
The load time problem he mentions, is pure crap. I work on Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP every day. I use OpenOffice and MS Office on Windows and OpenOffice on Linux. I use equivalent machines in both locations. The apps load fast enough that I don't notice a pause on either application. Start up and shut down time is a problem with Linux? Since when. I don't sit there with a stop watch but I do not notice any difference in boot up or shut down times. They are both long enough to be annoying. Ok, he is talking about gigahertz machines like they are fast and not junkers.
Stonewolf
I got a BSCS, went out and worked for a few years and saw that all the really good jobs in the company I worked for, and the companies I wanted to work for, were filled with guys with MSCS degrees.
So, I got the MSCS. And, I was able to get the jobs I wanted. Companies will hire a MS for a job that requires a BS. They will also hire an MS with experience for a job the says it requires a Ph.D.
When the world tilted sideways and I couldn't get the kind of jobs I really wanted anymore, the MS let me get jobs teaching in Junior colleges. Not bad. I took an online teaching certificate course and passed the Texas test that qualifies you to teach CS in grades 8-12, so I have that out of the way and that qualifies me as a "Highly Qualified" teacher if I ever get around to working in a high school. But, so far, I have been able to stay ahead of the bills working in junior colleges.
I'm now 56 and looking back, once I made the decision to get a CS degree, the MS was the smartest thing I ever did (except for marrying my wife :-). The only thing that I can think of that would be smarter would be to have gotten a J.D and become a lawyer.
OTOH, I had a boss who nearly cried when I decided to go to college. He kept saying I should study to be a turbine mechanic. Yah, know what? If I had I would have worked fewer hours, in better working conditions, made more money, had more freedom to choose where I wanted to live, and I most likely would be retired with a nice pension by now. And, I would still be able to get jobs as a turbine mechanic. My next door neighbor is my age and is a retired turbine mechanic...
Stonewolf
There are no set limits in the TWC contract. People are complaining because they are not getting what they paid for which is unlimited usage at a fixed maximum bandwidth.
Stonewolf
First off, I have to laugh at the folks in Europe and Asia bragging on their Internet infrastructure. This is *not* an infrastructure issue. In the Austin, and Round Rock, Texas area TWC already has huge fiber infrastructure. The cable box for this part of the neighborhood is in my back yard. The fiber bundle going into the box is two inches across.
Back in the middle '90s TWC went billions into debt to build out mixed fiber coax infrastructure. When they opened a ditch they dropped a minimum of four cables. Each cable was 4 inches across and each one contained thousands of fiber strands plus power.
The connection to my home is DOCSIS 2.0 There are 4 Gbps coming in and 1 Gbps going out and more than enough fiber to handle that all the way back to the head end. They have the bandwidth. They have already paid for infrastructure.
So what kind of an issue is it? Two things, good old capitalism and a corrupt government.
TWC is desperately trying to preserve their cable tv business and their telephone business. Having sold an all-you-can-eat service they are finding that people are actually using it that way and the people are using it to bypass TWC. They are using it to use VOIP for dirt cheap prices and service like hulu.com that let them access the video they want when they want it. They do not want to be in the business of selling commodity network transport.
The trouble with commodity network transport as a business is that there a few opportunities to sell high profit premium services. You can only compete on price and performance. And, if there is any competition at all, you find your self in a race to see who can sell the "best" service for the lowest price. TWC and AT&T are scared to death, and will fight anyway they can, to avoid winding up in the commodity transport business.
That is where the corrupt government comes in. Those two companies have manipulated the laws in Texas to their own benefit and are doing the same everywhere else. Look at the laws barring cities and counties from build their own networks. That is like barring governments from building roads. Oh, yeah, governor good hair (Perry) has been trying to eight years to privatize all the long distance roads in Texas. And, he is succeeding to.
Republicans are proof that God hates the USA.
Stonewolf
Hire an experienced person on contract to get you started and mentor/teach your team how to do a professional job of software development.
Stonewolf
TW is lying. Look at their federal reports. The cost of delivering data service is dropping at better than 10%/year and revenue is rising at better than 10%/year. Cost in 2008 was less than $150 Million and revenue was more that $4 billion. And, their subscriber base increased by a million people from 2007 to 2008.
I don't know about other areas, but in the Austin, Round Rock, Texas area TW has enormous amounts of fiber in the ground. They laid it down back in the middle '90s when I was working for SBC. I remember executive turning purple over the idea that TWC could afford to build out the kind of infrastructure they built out.
OK, so TWC is lying. They are lying about why they need to raise prices. But, they see a strong reason to do it. I do not claim to know that reason. I am sure it is related to two facts. 1) They were just spun out of Time Warner. 2) DOCSIS 3.0.
What are we going to do about it? Well, I happen to use a wrt54gl router with the tomato firmware so I now exactly how much data comes in and out of my house. With the recent connection of a PC to my TV our usage has gone way up. We currently use over 2GB/Day. There is no pirating going on. There are no P2P servers running. There is a lot of gaming and Hulu.com going on.
Our current household cable bill is ridiculous... My two college student "children" live at home so we have 3 DVRS, the digital tier, a bunch of premium channels, 2 telephone lines, and 10 Mbps Internet service. I am actually a very happy TWC customer. I have been for years.
Looking at what bandwidth caps will do to my current bill I held a family meeting on what to do about the situation. The answer from everyone was that we can live with out TV, we already get that on the net. We can't live without the Internet.
Our plan, if TWC puts in bandwidth caps, we will 1) Get a pre-paid cell phone for the one person who still uses the land lines. 2) transfer the main phone number to a cell phone. 3) Sign up for TWCs most expensive teir, the one that is still unlimited. While seeking any other lower priced service provider. 4) drop TWC telephone and TV services except for maybe basic cable.
Yeah, that's right. The consensus was that we do not need TV or telephone service, but we do need Internet service.
And, oh yeah, I've been talking to the neighbors about splitting the cost of a T1 or a fractional t3/DS3 and sharing it using wireless repeaters. When you look at $100/month from TWC sharing a T1 with a couple of neighbors starts looking very interesting. We're taking the idea to the neighborhood association. Providing broadband Internet for the neighborhood looks like something that can be done quickly and once installed would not cost very much.
Stonewolf
Thank you for the clarification. I was responding to what I thought you were trying to say, which is not what you actually meant. That happens some times.
The trouble is that I still don't understand your original point.
The main difference between the US and Australia is that you haul most, nearly all, of your Internet content over very expensive and very limited submerged cables and over satellite links.
We do not have that problem. We have huge amounts of bandwidth and the content is mostly coming from right here. Australia is strangled for bandwidth by the Pacific. The US is not.
Stonewolf
They are charging me .9 cents/BG and they are charging .1 cents/GB for transporting HBO to me. It looks like they all ready have about a factor of 10 markup built into my price, so my current price is already roughly 900% higher. That means I am already paying retail with a *huge* percentage markup. Not to mention that I only use about 2% of bandwidth I am paying for and HBO takes up all the bandwidth alloted to it.
Sorry about the mistake.
Stonewolf
I get 10 Mbps all the time. I get it down loading updates to Ubuntu and for many other down loads. I also get that speed on broadband speed tests. Not to mention that they *must* provided that kind of performance to stream the 100 plus digital channels the provide.
Even if I got only a quarter that speed, which I do from some web sites, the cost per GB would still be only a few cents per GB, not a $1.
I live in Round Rock, Texas about 10 miles north of Austin. You might know it as the US headquarters of Dell.
I'm not sure I get your point. They advertise it as 10 Mbps. If I didn't get that rate I would be demanding a refund. Also, I know what my DVR says about the data rate coming into the house, it is 256 QAM at 750 MHz. It is DOCSIS 2.0 and I really do have fiber to within 40 feet of my house.
Stonewolf
This was studied back in the '60s and looked pretty good...
1) Find magma up wellings like the one out side of Salt lake City (except for being close to SLC that's a good one because it mostly under a chemical and biological testing range...)
2) Drill a deep hole.
3) Put a small nuke, 1 to 10 kilotons, down the hole.
4) Fill in the hole.
5) Blow the nuke.
6) Wait 5 years for the nasty short lived isotopes to decay.
7) Drill another hole down the the cavern carved by the nuke. It will be full of high temperature steam.
8) Run the steam through a heat exchanger to boil water. Send the condensate back down the hole. (You need to do that because there will still be some radioactive material in the hole after 5 years.)
9) Use the nice clean steam from the heat exchanger to run turbines and generate electricity.
10) Keep doing #9 for 10,000+ years. Because that magma is going to take a very long time to cool off.
Seriously, there are many places where this could be done. The risk of a release of radioactive material is very small and in return you get pollution free power for centuries.
Now, what would be great is if this could be done without nukes. What would be even better is if this could be done any way at all without the gas, oil, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and tide energy people spending billions on lobbying to stop it.
No really, you can build a power plant that works this way. You can spend use the five year waiting period to build the power plant.
Stonewolf
Talk about comparing grapes and gorillas...
The content you are bragging about caching in Australia mostly originates in the US and Europe. The US has huge amounts of landlines for hauling the load. My guess is that there is still more intercity dark fiber than lit fiber and there are still people laying fiber along rail lines. Not to mention that most ISPs already have huge caching servers so that content from Europe, Asia, and most of the US, is already cached.
I'm a TWC customer and they have a fiber bundle 4 inches across (mostly dark fiber) running 40 feet from my house. The TWC connection to my house is DOCSIS 2.0 and delivers 4 Gpbs in and 1.0 Gbps out to most rooms in my house.
I feel for you folks stuck out in the middle of the Pacific with limited access to the outside world. (My father will roll over in his grave if I every say anything bad about you folks he fought side by side with ANZAKs in the Pacific during WWII. I have nothing but respect for you folks.) But, if you have not been to the US you do not know what you are talking about. And, honestly, because of the distances between cities in the US things here are rather uncivilized compared to large parts of the EU.
To be blunt, you do not know what you are talking about.
Stonewolf
I'm a TWC subscriber. I have their 10 Mbps service for 29.95/months. Notice, that that is not an unlimited service, never has been, never will be. But, TWC *calls* it an unlimited service. It is limited to 10 Mbps.
TWC wants to start charging me $1 per GB transferred. Ok, that is another usage limit on top of the one they already have in place, and it is stated in different terms so it is hard to compare to my old limit. (OBTW, they want to keep the old limit in place two. I do not get that, but they now want to limit my rate of consumption and my total consumption. Why not just one or the other? Limiting the same thing two different ways makes no sense.)
Ok, so where did I get 10968% increase in price? Well, under my current usage cap I get 10 Mbps 24 hours/day all day every day. How many GBs of transfer am I limited to now? Well, I only figured it out for the downstream side. So, it is really worse than what I figured out.
An average month is 365/12 days long so my current limit is:
((365/12) * 24 * 60 * 60 * 10,000,000) / 8,000,000,000 = 3,285 GB downloaded/month.
First I computed the number of seconds in an average month, then I multiplied by the number of bits per second I get and then I divided by the number of bits in a GB. I did not use binary GiB or Mib numbers because TWC doesn't seem to use those numbers either.
Now I compute my current price per GB from TWC and I get $0.00911720 that is 0.9 *CENTS* per GB. Not a bad price really. TWC now wants me to pay a $1 for what they currently charge $0.0091172 for. If I did the math right that is an increase in cost of 109.68 times as much per GB. Which IIRC (I always get in trouble with grade school math) 10968% times the current price.
Oddly enough, I understand the need to charge per GB of usage. I figure usage based billing would be reasonable if they drop the speed limit and set the rate per GB to what they charge for other data services. Take for example HBO. I pay $12.95/month for HBO which gives me access to 14 digital movie channels and unlimited streaming on demand movies. If you figure about 1.5 Mbps/channel and only look at the movie channels, not the on demand movies then I'm getting 21 Mbps from TWC for only $12.95. And, I believe about half of that goes to HBO.... It looks like TWC is perfectly happy with selling 21 Mbps for about $7. Thats roughly 6500 BG/month for around $7.
So where do they get off charging me $1 for something they are happy to sell for a $0.001 when they use it to deliver HBO? (Even if TWC kept all the money it makes from selling HBO the prices is still only $0.002.)
Wow, did you notice? The current price TWC charges me for transferring data *is*, within a reasonable error range, the same price they charge for sending HBO over the same lines. How odd is that? Now they want to charge me 109 times as much.
I understand the difference between wholesale and retail rates. I would be happy to pay by the GB if TWC dropped the speed cap and charged me a reasonable retail rate of say $0.005 (half a cent per GB) which is a 500% mark up over the wholesale rate charged for delivering HBO and over what they currently charge me.
Which means that if they went to straight usage based billing my monthly bill would drop from $29.95 to between $0.15 and $0.30. That is, I *should* be paying between 15 and 30 cents per month for my current usage.
Stonewolf
P.S.
Someone please check my math. I'm having trouble believing that even a bunch of your typical sociopathic corporate executives could try to raise rates that high in one pop. The normal way to do it is by boiling the frog like the oil companies do.
Engineering week has been creating and running really fun to do, cheap to do, hands on, creative, projects since I was in college in the '70s. Dig into their archives and have your students do the projects. Create a list of 5 or so projects. Have the students in the class vote on the projects and everyone does that one. Then, for extra credit, you let them do as many more as they want over the school year. Allocate time in class for people to demo their projects and require a nicely formatted report as part of the project. (That last is so you can maybe work a deal with the English teacher for extra credit there too. Even students appreciate a multi-bird stone. :-)
If you can't deal with that, then try writing games. Yes, writing games. Getting a good animation going requires vector math, lots of good dx, dy, dz stuff leading into calculus and the physics of motion and interactions. Just getting a realistic ball bouncing in a cubical room can illustrate tons of physics. Yeah, what I'm saying is don't have them run simulations, have them write them. Call it writing video games and 90% of the kids will be all over it. OTOH, there will be parents waiting for you with pitch forks and torches, so be prepared.
Yeah, I've used writing video games to teach programming, math, and some physics and I've been involved with engineering week. Best fun I ever had was getting a bunch of blase science teachers up in the aisles nearly dancing just by getting them to actually *make* a Mobius strip and cut it down the middle instead of just talking about it and pointing a picture in a book. Kids love it too.
Very few science teachers know shit about their subject. They know shit because they really couldn't give a shit about it.
Stonewolf
of the whole messed up court system.
At least that is what it sounds like to me. The jurors are acting like free citizens of a free country and trying to find out what really happened and who is really guilty. That is their job. That is what they are sworn to do.
I've been on a jury. The court won't let you take notes. They will not allow you to look at the legal code covering the crime. They won't let you look up the precedents sited. They won't even tell you what "normal" punishments are. After only a few hours of deliberation and after having every request for information and clarification refused, I would have used the Internet to get the information if I could have. The whole court is designed to create an artificial reality, a construct where the jury is kept in the dark about most of what actually happened.
If you want an education on how courts really work, go spend a day sitting in a court as a spectator. See the bull that takes place behind the jury's back. I've done that too. It will make you sick.
I really hope that the wireless, always available, Internet changes the way courts operate. I'm looking forward to the first report of a juror leaving a bug in the court room so he can hear what goes on when the jury is sent out of court.
Stonewolf
I teach freshman courses at the junior college level. One of the classes is a basic course designed to make sure that students can use a word processor and a spread sheet, and know enough so they won't fall for the Nigerian scam and will keep their antivirus software turned on and updated. About 35% of student fail that class.
Every time I teach the class at least one students comes to me and says "I don't see how I could have failed your class, I turned everything in." Yes, they are in college, they graduated from high school, and they do not understand that there is a difference between turning it in and doing it correctly.
I get blank documents turned in because students expect to get more credit for turning in a blank document than for not turning in anything at all.
I have had arguments with students who believed they should get credit for turning in the wrong answer to an arithmetic problem. They expect to get partial credit for turning in 3 when the questions was "What is 2 plus 2". I have had a student tell me that their opinion of the correct answer was a valid as mine and that I had no right to tell them otherwise. I am talking about the answer to a simple arithmetic problem.
Remember that I am talking about 35% of students. The other 65% actually got a pretty good, and in some cases exemplary education, from the same schools that graduated the first 35%.
But, still, it looks like a lot of them come out of high school with an unreasonably high opinion of themselves, and no education at all.
Stonewolf