Honestly, I only print stuff when someone insists these days. I haven't owned a printer at home in years; everything I need to reference is sent to a PDF which is then sync'ed to my iPhone. Signatures... digital. I think the last thing I printed was a gift affidavit that I had to get notarized in order to give a car to my ex wife in my divorce:)
On topic though; when are we going to see the printer now with the optional automatic shredder attachment (spam filter)?:)
Honestly, the 100 user and less company these days doesn't need an IT guy. I know because I manage a number of companies of exactly this size in my spare time. A well set up IT system with a good ticketing system and you're set. The only thing that needs on-site hands is usually problems with hardware or desktop problems... both of which if you've set everything up correctly can be handled by calling in a technician by the hour; for which I have a pool of friends who are willing to pick up work here and there for less than I charge my customer.
99% of the services that a company of this size needs may be found "in the cloud" these days and require almost zero administration. Even my largest customers with onsite servers and such take no more than a couple of hours every week to manage their entire organization and infrastructure. Thanks to good monitoring and cellphone, I typically know there are problems before they do and it wouldn't be the first time I got a call from the receptionist at these companies telling me there's a guy from HP in their lobby to replace an hard drive they didn't even know had failed (though I knew).
This sort of structure does not cost much; as I said I maybe burn a couple of hours a week on my largest customers. Even though my per-hour charge seems high they pay a fraction for my services that they did for a dedicated IT staff and can control their costs much better because the employee overhead is gone.
Now this is a generalization that does not fit every company, but I'm seeing more and more companies picking up on this model and that's just fine for me because it's good for business.
I realize it's a matter of perspective... hell I've filled both roles so I know how it goes. However, the "generalist network admin" is monitoring employee actions and behaviours already. If they're not, then they're not doing a very good job. The perspective difference comes in the fact that most of the time said generalist is doing reactive monitoring, not proactive. As a result, the network admin typically does not realize that someone is attempting to compromise systems until the attempt is already occurring. There is a certain amount of proactive monitoring that the generalist does, but it tends to be limited.
Proactive monitoring at the employees desktop or application level does sometimes tend to highlight trends in employee actions before they get anywhere in a compromise situation. That means that the good generalist with a wider scope will be able to predict much better that problems are or will be occurring and take appropriate actions.
Now, the upper management trend of monitoring just to see exactly what their employees are doing... this I also think is fair so long as the rules are advertised and applied evenly. Remember, we are at work doing a job because we can and do. We are using company resources to do so, and we are paid for our work. I'll leave the conversation about whether we're paid enough to the individual, but I would contest that the best paycheck you're going to get from the job is about the same or less than everyone else in your field and location are demanding. Economics at work.
There is a point at which the monitoring becomes too much. I know my web habits are monitored by my management but I feel I have nothing to hide. I can justify every site I visit and the length of time I spend on those sites because when I'm at work, I'm working. I save personal web surfing for breaks or lunchtime and my management understands there are a few personal websites I visit on a frequent basis. Like Slashdot. I have worked in a much stricter environment where they absolutely stated no personal web surfing at work, and that was also fine because I just found other things to do during break and lunch. Note that I was also far more likely to go out and take my 1 hour lunch because of this policy... my current work environment's policy of "personal stuff OK at lunchtime" means that typically I'm at my desk during lunch so if something comes up, I'm here.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I think the summary and the article are making generalizations that cannot be supported in the real world. Even when I started out as a junior network admin some 20 years ago give or take I understood the need and desire for monitoring employees. Since I also owned my own business for a while, I know what that desire is like but recognize that there's a balance to be found between "big brother" and "free reign".
Economies of scale, my friend. All major revolutions are expensive when you're dealing in hard goods like cars and the like... but as they are produced they are sold, and as they are sold in larger and larger quantities the engineering begins to pay for itself. It just takes time, which the EV-1 was never given.
The reason the EV-1 was expensive was because it contained a lot of new tech which had been expensive to engineer and at the time was expensive to manufacture. However, had they continued to manufacture it then economies of scale would inevitably have led to cheaper manufacturing. They just never gave it a solid chance; it needed 10-15 years before those economies of scale began to kick in and the stockholders didn't like that.
You think you've got it bad... thanks to all this sound card nostalgia I've suddenly got the "scramble" music from Wing Commander going through my head along with Monkey Island. I think I'm going to have a migraine by lunchtime:)
A contrary contrary opinion. I've still got my original Drobo hooked up to my Macbook Pro... purchased probably 2 years ago (can't recall exactly when I bought it) with two 1TB drives in it. Never replaced either of them, and I have since added another two 1TB drives. No, not an huge storage array but more than good enough for my needs (no video but I do a lot of DSLR photography at 12MP). The only true problem I ever had with it was the then hard limitation on using NTFS in order for the capacity lights on the front to work... or anything to work for that matter. However, I put Fuse NTFS on my Mac and then use DMG's to store pretty much everything in a nice, "filing-cabinet" like structure.
I've never lost a byte of data... but having said that I DO back up using Mozy as my assurance of no data loss. The combination of the Drobo and a service like that are just invaluable to me and continue to serve me well. Sorry you got so unlucky with yours. The Drobo is also quiet (at least 99% of the time) and really power efficient. I like that; that's why I use a laptop as my primary computer in the first place rather than a big desktop-class machine that'd suck down more juice.
If you want hard sci-fi on the big screen you could certainly do a lot worse than [a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/"]Moon[/a]
While it's a little contrived in places and suffers from that very 1980's "special effects using toys" vibe compared to most modern movies with spectacular CGI, it's charming, well written and phenomenally well played by Sam Rockwell. It definitely appeals to the classic sci-fi geek in me because the technology literally takes an huge back seat to the psychological drama that ensues, and even which is already extant at the beginning of the movie. Of course, the technology becomes a major plot point later in the movie... but that's something for which you'll have to watch the movie. I highly recommend it.
... instead of focusing all your energies on creating fancy graphics for your latest title, why don't you try something different like making the game actually compelling and fun to play?
I'm not an huge gamer, but my preference is to sit in front of my TV on my XBox 360 or Wii when playing games. In truth I couldn't give a rat's derrière about the graphics of the games I play so long as I find them compelling and fun. Then again when your business model is based solely on churning out the same game time after time and you only differentiate the games by the graphics I suppose this argument becomes reasonable.
Hey game makers, here's a clue: In the last few weeks I have played video games quite a bit due to a knee injury that's meant I can't do much else. If I think seriously about the amount of time I've spent playing video games recently, the one game that really sticks in my mind and has me itching to play it more is Bit Trip Beat on the Wii. Realistically I probably could've run that game on my 25 year old Amiga if I still had it... but damn that game's fun!
I just have to post and say +1 and congratulations! You nailed it in my opinion.
Let me put it this way; I spent $6000 on getting my pilots license about 10 years ago now. In the last 5 years I have racked up less than 20 hours behind the yoke of a plane because I realized that I was far less interested in getting places than I had thought, and decided that I preferred the journey.
Two years ago I bought my third motorbike. I spent about $12,000 on that so I could do just that; enjoy the journey. I put 300 miles on it, yesterday alone. A car is good, the bike is better:)
Seconded on Blockhosts. Had the exact same problem, exact same results. Nowadays my average is about 200 blocked IP's, and I run the script every 15 minutes. I also use certificate auth only so the password problem really is a non-problem. In the event I need to get in to download a cert to a new machine (if I don't have my USB key on me that has the cert already there), I also have an IPSec VPN tunnel set up that's a piece of cake to connect up. The VPN is handled by its own hardware firewall (a Sonicwall Pro 2040), and I allow password auth only from the internal subnet on the back side of the firewall.
In 4 years of running sites on that server, the only successful hack I've ever had was because of a problem with an application hosted on the site. That application was removed pretty rapidly, and the only real impact was that all of a sudden I got people telling me that people couldn't get to their site because there were hidden links that were dead or slow on the served up pages.
Besides which, have you tried programming for USB in an environment where you need a real-time operating system? Even Linux running as an RTOS is a pain with USB.
But if you buy the phone at all, you lock yourself into using T-Mobile anyway, since it doesn't do 3G on AT&T. You also can't take it to Verizon or Sprint for more obvious reasons.
Sure you can use it on AT&T... but only at EDGE speeds. That's sort of sad, at least until Google releases a version that'll do AT&T freqs... which BTW I'll be all over since my phone is getting long in the tooth and I'm SO ready to ditch WinMo but don't like iPhone lock-in very much.
Another hint: floating mountains, people. Come on.
I'm going to really show my geekiness here, but the floating mountains were explained in the original screenplay, though granted only hinted at in the movie. The "Unobtainium" is a room-temperature superconductor. It is well known that a superconductor in presence of a magnetic field will float, and if you look around the entire area it shows curved constructs of rock that look suspiciously like lines of magnetic force... like melted iron twisted by the magnet. This was hinted at because the guy running the base (whose name I forget) had a piece of Unobtainium that floated in a magnetic field on his desk. Although this raises questions like why they didn't just mine the floating mountains, it's still a cool and at least reasonably plausible explanation... at least if you try not to think about it too hard:)
most people think of the blanket-carrying kid in Peanuts.
Perhaps anywhere else, but not here on slashdot. And a heads up: RMS usually refers to Richard Matthew Stallman, not Root Mean Square... even though most of us here know the uses of the latter.
And if you hear the denizens referring to a RIM job, it's getting employment at the maker of Blackberry...
I'm sure it depends on your area, but it also depends on what licenses you need. Figure $3-5000 for a visual-only license, give or take a grand or so. Definitely not the same as getting a car license.
It's a matter of personal opinion whether you feel that a drivers license SHOULD cost more than it does. It would certainly cut down the number of idiots I have to deal with on my daily commute. Yes, elitist comment, but probably fair; a drivers license is FAR too easy to get in the USA. It was a lot more difficult when I took my driving test in the UK than when I took it in the USA... I was actually shocked at how easy it was.
I am a GA pilot as well... VFR only... and GP is right in a lot of ways. GA has really become FAR more appealing to me in recent years with this security theatre, and the more people getting into GA the better (so long as they also consider joining the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association which is working really hard to ensure stupid rules don't get as far as General Aviation). I stopped flying a few years ago simply because the cost became prohibitive and my lifestyle changed to the point that I no longer could justify it. However, in recent months I have been considering taking it up again because the ridiculous security theatre has meant that a 90 minute flight from St. Louis to Chicago becomes a 6 hour ordeal of finding parking, horrible check in lines, ridiculous "security" and awful coffee. Hell, I can DRIVE it in a little under 5 hours and park closer to where I wanted to go. If I were flying a GA aircraft I could cut that down to about a 3 hour trip door to door. Given the ever increasing cost of flying commercially, where's my drive to do it any more?
GA aircraft are expensive, yes... but you can pick up a good instrument certified used Cessna 172 for little more than a Lexus... and they last a hell of a lot longer than cars do. In fact, they tend to appreciate in value like a home rather than depreciate, and if you use it for business you can usually write off a portion of the expenses on taxes. And even with that 172, the entire lower 48 is pretty much your playground, because if you live in the Midwest there's nowhere you can't go in a day.
Of course, YMMV but I am seriously considering going into a partnership with a couple of friends to pick up a good used IFR Cessna or older Cirrus (depending on how much we all put in). Since we're all small business owners we can also use it as a business expense since we'd be using it for sales and technical meetings as well as for pleasure.
I thought the same thing myself; the "Facilitated Communication" has been slammed in court on more than one occasion because it became rapidly quite clear that the facilitator was the one doing the actual communication, not the poor schmo in the wheelchair. Hell, I know if I had true locked-in syndrome then I'd love to have something like this so I can at least have a hope of communicating with the outside world.
I think JarJar could have been cool if he wasn't a complete klutz and was able to fight with capoeira
And if he wore tight shorts and had big boobs.
Yes, if JarJar had only been a little more like Lara Croft,. it might not have been so bad.
Unfortunately, I've now got an image of Jar Jar in a tank top and tight shorts with big boobs... but he's still male. Thanks... I'm not going to sleep for a week, now:P
You're not trying hard enough. Isn't virtualbox available for both OSes?
+1, though Virtualbox isn't always the best solution. Here's what I did last time I had the opportunity to build a "big kick-ass box".
I built out the machine with a Gentoo boot that did nothing but start up VMware Server, then started up an X server. Nothing more, nothing less. Very small, very fast and light. There was nothing else running on the Gentoo host other than a script that monitored the network for the virtual machines... of which I had three auto-booting.
Virtual machine one is an OpenSolaris box that starts up as a file server for all the others. Using ZFS is all kinds of awesome, and using raw partitions instead of VMDK (or equivalent) files makes sure I get the best bang for the buck out of it. This server has a single CPU assigned to it (actually, a dedicated core) because it doesn't do much more than that. A script in the host machine when network and SSH are available launches an SSH session that then launches the panel to the host X desktop that resides at the right of the screen.
Virtual machine 2 is a Debian box which starts up my "desktop apps". Basically, it just boots up and has two dedicated cores (all I need for my usage) and launches the Gnome environment to the host X, home folders mapped through NFS to the file server and so on. This one just has a bootup script that sets DISPLAY and then launches Gnome... no fancy SSH script. The only reason I needed that with Solaris is for some reason it just seems to never launch properly and I can't be bothered debugging:)
The final virtual machine has two CPUs but aren't dedicated. This is running Windows XP for those rare times I need a Windows box for debugging. Since I have RAM to spare, and CPU cycles to spare it costs me nothing to have it sitting in the background. Now, the only problem is the lack of a proper remote display protocol for Windows, so I just have RDP enabled and a button that launches an RDP window when I need it. I'm sure I'll change this with time.
The advantage to all of this is that if any one of those VM's crashes or has some critical hang I can just reboot it and continue working on the others. The instances of an actual host failure are almost zero. I can also create new VM's at whim to do whatever I like... I even created a Gentoo VM to act as a "nice -19" compile host for the physical host updates so that performance impact on the other servers is minimal. In fact, because of the way I have it configured the only VM it really impacts is the Windows one... not that I really care.
It required a lot of resources to build out the system just the way I wanted it, but now that it works... it works. I have in the past also had passing FreeBSD VM's for specific tasks... in fact I have one now that's powered off but I can use it at any time (again, DISPLAY sent to the host). This is all on the private network behind VMware Server so there's no network traffic on my link from any of those VM's unless I want it. I've mapped some ports from the outside back to the file server so other machines on my network can use it, but that's it. I may even segregate my desktop apps again at some point, a second Debian machine for those apps I want to "sandbox", maybe create menu links that launch ssh -CY to the host and then launch the app.
So far the only thing that annoys me is the few apps that ignore X protocols and won't honour the DISPLAY variable... but thankfully they're the exception rather than the rule. And the only negative has been problems with occasional I/O contention. That can be fixed but it's not severe enough a problem to spend a lot of time or resources on it.
The only thing I don't like about VirtualBox is that it's really designed as a desktop VM solution... you close the VM window and the VM goes away. VMware Server allows you to spawn your VM instances with a script and then they're just sitting there in the background waiting to be used.
Obviously didn't work in IT in the early '90s. I did, and pagers were de-facto office-wear.
Of course, once cellphones started to become popular (I remember my first Motorola StarTac... that was an awesome phone), a bunch of drunk IT guys at a local pub could entertain themselves for hours by lining their pagers up at one end of a table with a slight lean and constantly calling them. Vibrating pager races were always a great way to decide who bought the next round.
I lost a job once because the owner of the company became that paranoid. I went back to the UK for a funeral, and while I was away some system problems occurred. These problems were probably mostly because the owner of the company was a cheap bastard and wouldn't give me decent hardware to work with... but whatever. Anyway, he decided that I must be hacking the network remotely and by the time I returned to the US I really didn't have a job any more. Quite how he came to that conclusion when I had built that network on my own with minimal help or resources and was actually quite proud of my accomplishment I will never understand... but this is what cocaine does to the brain...
Anyway, these days I actually work from the other side than the original submitter; I actually do the support for a few companies in town, and yes I do it all remotely. Well, most of it; I do go onsite when hardware problems come up or when desktop issues come up that I need to work on. Quite simply, there has to be a certain amount of trust or the business relationship will never work.
With the customers I work with, part of my standard contract with them is that I am liable for the network security. That means that any data leaks are also my responsibility and so therefore it behooves me to not steal it and ensure the data itself is as secure as possible. Also, the fact that these companies come to me for support mean that they are by default in a different line of business from myself, and so therefore their data has no commercial interest to me whatsoever. If they were networking folks, they'd be doing this themselves and they wouldn't need outsourced IT support. I have made that point in a sales pitch before... and yes, sometimes I see the "light go on" when I mention that because they had worried about it but had been afraid to bring it up.
Simply put; the solution is to charge the outsourcer with security of the network and the data as part of the contract negotiations. If you do this then they are beholden to you and if a breach occurs they are legally and financially liable. If the outsourcer will not accept those terms, find one who does.
Well, you're sort of right... but there is this expectation which is maybe endemic to the Midwest USA rather than a more general comment about marriage in general... but there is an opinion that once married, children are the next logical step and a step that cannot be missed. Thus the social weight that I refer to in the first instance was primarily the pressure we were then under to have children after we had married even though we intended no such thing.
There's also an opinion that a married couple should both lead lives that are totally intertwined... that one partner cannot have friends who do not know the other partner... or perhaps do not like the other partner for whatever reason. This was a big problem in my second marriage as my ex then took it upon herself (with her parents support) to excise those people from my life who she either didn't know, didn't care to know or who didn't care for her... even if those friends pre-dated her being a part of my life.
Perhaps I'm tarring the entire experience of marriage with an overly broad brush, but out of all the relationships I've had that lasted more than a month or two, every one of them with few notable exceptions have stood outside of the opinion that I have of marriage.
It's not helped by the fact that if you're unhappy in a marriage, you're forced into a position where you must work things out or go through an expensive and deeply unsettling legal process. It also leads to unrealistic expectations on the part of one or both partners in the event that things go bad. I can't say more without being specific about my circumstances (which I don't want to be in this open forum) but those expectations made working things out impossible because those expectations could never be met.
Another social weight that is particularly a problem in the part of the world I live (Midwest USA) is that this is still a very sexist society I live in. As such, my ex wife went from being identified as an individual person, to being identified by all around as "xxx's Wife"... and she was effectively forced into my shadow by people around us who felt that since I was the man in the relationship, I was in charge... a situation I neither desired nor appreciated. The alternative... if a woman speaks up and becomes independently identified by those around... the husband is automatically an "uninvolved deadbeat". It's a no-win situation.
Generally, I have to say that my relationship with my girlfriend now is far healthier than any married relationship I ever had. Part of that is the fact that she's an independent woman, I'm an independent man, and if we ever decide that the relationship's not working for us, either of us can take the door at any time with no fear of violating a social contract of any kind. Sure, it may not be for everyone and may not even be "acceptable" to everyone... but it works for me.
I was reading through this comment list and despairing that someone was going to come up with exactly what you said. If I had mod points, I wouldn't have replied:)
I've been married. Twice, now... and I've been divorced twice. The first time around, I married a fellow computer geek. We were far better friends than we were "a couple", and marrying her was a mistake. The simple fact is that there's a certain amount of social weight that gets piled upon you when you get married, and that does wear on a relationship. I don't regret that marriage, but do regret that finally the pressure piled upon us by those around us (family, friends, general social expectations and so forth) tore us apart and even destroyed the friendship we had once shared. In the last few years we tried to rekindle that friendship but found things too hard. My second marriage was to a non-geek and suffered from many of the same problems. I got a son out of the deal, but also ended up split asunder again by social pressures and the fact that her and I just never had enough in common. It wasn't helped by the non-geek in the relationship constantly hounding me for technical support on her laptop... exasperating after dealing with users at work all day... I felt like I never left.
Now, I have a girlfriend. She's also divorced and both of us agree we are NEVER going to marry one another for the simple reason that we'd like to remain as we are; together because we choose to be together, not because some social expectation and contract say we should be together. We both agree that it puts a lot less pressure on a relationship. OK, her mother still encourages us to marry because she's a good Christian woman... but that's the limit of the pressure we get piled upon us. No, I don't get to take advantage of the tax breaks you get for being married... but I earn enough that I was able to soak up the drop in take-home pay after the divorce with minimal lifestyle changes (mostly just doing things like wiping out my credit cards, driving a car that's paid off... things like that).
My girlfriend is also a nice balance; she's an accountant by profession but is still enough of a geek that she flashes a new ROM on her phone periodically because she can... she's looking quite jealously at my AT&T Fuze running Windows Mobile 6.5 right now...;)
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Wait, people still print?
Honestly, I only print stuff when someone insists these days. I haven't owned a printer at home in years; everything I need to reference is sent to a PDF which is then sync'ed to my iPhone. Signatures... digital. I think the last thing I printed was a gift affidavit that I had to get notarized in order to give a car to my ex wife in my divorce :)
On topic though; when are we going to see the printer now with the optional automatic shredder attachment (spam filter)? :)
Honestly, the 100 user and less company these days doesn't need an IT guy. I know because I manage a number of companies of exactly this size in my spare time. A well set up IT system with a good ticketing system and you're set. The only thing that needs on-site hands is usually problems with hardware or desktop problems... both of which if you've set everything up correctly can be handled by calling in a technician by the hour; for which I have a pool of friends who are willing to pick up work here and there for less than I charge my customer.
99% of the services that a company of this size needs may be found "in the cloud" these days and require almost zero administration. Even my largest customers with onsite servers and such take no more than a couple of hours every week to manage their entire organization and infrastructure. Thanks to good monitoring and cellphone, I typically know there are problems before they do and it wouldn't be the first time I got a call from the receptionist at these companies telling me there's a guy from HP in their lobby to replace an hard drive they didn't even know had failed (though I knew).
This sort of structure does not cost much; as I said I maybe burn a couple of hours a week on my largest customers. Even though my per-hour charge seems high they pay a fraction for my services that they did for a dedicated IT staff and can control their costs much better because the employee overhead is gone.
Now this is a generalization that does not fit every company, but I'm seeing more and more companies picking up on this model and that's just fine for me because it's good for business.
I realize it's a matter of perspective... hell I've filled both roles so I know how it goes. However, the "generalist network admin" is monitoring employee actions and behaviours already. If they're not, then they're not doing a very good job. The perspective difference comes in the fact that most of the time said generalist is doing reactive monitoring, not proactive. As a result, the network admin typically does not realize that someone is attempting to compromise systems until the attempt is already occurring. There is a certain amount of proactive monitoring that the generalist does, but it tends to be limited.
Proactive monitoring at the employees desktop or application level does sometimes tend to highlight trends in employee actions before they get anywhere in a compromise situation. That means that the good generalist with a wider scope will be able to predict much better that problems are or will be occurring and take appropriate actions.
Now, the upper management trend of monitoring just to see exactly what their employees are doing... this I also think is fair so long as the rules are advertised and applied evenly. Remember, we are at work doing a job because we can and do. We are using company resources to do so, and we are paid for our work. I'll leave the conversation about whether we're paid enough to the individual, but I would contest that the best paycheck you're going to get from the job is about the same or less than everyone else in your field and location are demanding. Economics at work.
There is a point at which the monitoring becomes too much. I know my web habits are monitored by my management but I feel I have nothing to hide. I can justify every site I visit and the length of time I spend on those sites because when I'm at work, I'm working. I save personal web surfing for breaks or lunchtime and my management understands there are a few personal websites I visit on a frequent basis. Like Slashdot. I have worked in a much stricter environment where they absolutely stated no personal web surfing at work, and that was also fine because I just found other things to do during break and lunch. Note that I was also far more likely to go out and take my 1 hour lunch because of this policy... my current work environment's policy of "personal stuff OK at lunchtime" means that typically I'm at my desk during lunch so if something comes up, I'm here.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I think the summary and the article are making generalizations that cannot be supported in the real world. Even when I started out as a junior network admin some 20 years ago give or take I understood the need and desire for monitoring employees. Since I also owned my own business for a while, I know what that desire is like but recognize that there's a balance to be found between "big brother" and "free reign".
Economies of scale, my friend. All major revolutions are expensive when you're dealing in hard goods like cars and the like... but as they are produced they are sold, and as they are sold in larger and larger quantities the engineering begins to pay for itself. It just takes time, which the EV-1 was never given.
The reason the EV-1 was expensive was because it contained a lot of new tech which had been expensive to engineer and at the time was expensive to manufacture. However, had they continued to manufacture it then economies of scale would inevitably have led to cheaper manufacturing. They just never gave it a solid chance; it needed 10-15 years before those economies of scale began to kick in and the stockholders didn't like that.
You think you've got it bad... thanks to all this sound card nostalgia I've suddenly got the "scramble" music from Wing Commander going through my head along with Monkey Island. I think I'm going to have a migraine by lunchtime :)
A contrary contrary opinion. I've still got my original Drobo hooked up to my Macbook Pro... purchased probably 2 years ago (can't recall exactly when I bought it) with two 1TB drives in it. Never replaced either of them, and I have since added another two 1TB drives. No, not an huge storage array but more than good enough for my needs (no video but I do a lot of DSLR photography at 12MP). The only true problem I ever had with it was the then hard limitation on using NTFS in order for the capacity lights on the front to work... or anything to work for that matter. However, I put Fuse NTFS on my Mac and then use DMG's to store pretty much everything in a nice, "filing-cabinet" like structure.
I've never lost a byte of data... but having said that I DO back up using Mozy as my assurance of no data loss. The combination of the Drobo and a service like that are just invaluable to me and continue to serve me well. Sorry you got so unlucky with yours. The Drobo is also quiet (at least 99% of the time) and really power efficient. I like that; that's why I use a laptop as my primary computer in the first place rather than a big desktop-class machine that'd suck down more juice.
Gahhh... make that Moon
I've been on too many bulletin boards lately trying to post links... :)
If you want hard sci-fi on the big screen you could certainly do a lot worse than [a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/"]Moon[/a]
While it's a little contrived in places and suffers from that very 1980's "special effects using toys" vibe compared to most modern movies with spectacular CGI, it's charming, well written and phenomenally well played by Sam Rockwell. It definitely appeals to the classic sci-fi geek in me because the technology literally takes an huge back seat to the psychological drama that ensues, and even which is already extant at the beginning of the movie. Of course, the technology becomes a major plot point later in the movie... but that's something for which you'll have to watch the movie. I highly recommend it.
I'm not an huge gamer, but my preference is to sit in front of my TV on my XBox 360 or Wii when playing games. In truth I couldn't give a rat's derrière about the graphics of the games I play so long as I find them compelling and fun. Then again when your business model is based solely on churning out the same game time after time and you only differentiate the games by the graphics I suppose this argument becomes reasonable.
Hey game makers, here's a clue: In the last few weeks I have played video games quite a bit due to a knee injury that's meant I can't do much else. If I think seriously about the amount of time I've spent playing video games recently, the one game that really sticks in my mind and has me itching to play it more is Bit Trip Beat on the Wii. Realistically I probably could've run that game on my 25 year old Amiga if I still had it... but damn that game's fun!
I just have to post and say +1 and congratulations! You nailed it in my opinion.
Let me put it this way; I spent $6000 on getting my pilots license about 10 years ago now. In the last 5 years I have racked up less than 20 hours behind the yoke of a plane because I realized that I was far less interested in getting places than I had thought, and decided that I preferred the journey.
Two years ago I bought my third motorbike. I spent about $12,000 on that so I could do just that; enjoy the journey. I put 300 miles on it, yesterday alone. A car is good, the bike is better :)
Seconded on Blockhosts. Had the exact same problem, exact same results. Nowadays my average is about 200 blocked IP's, and I run the script every 15 minutes. I also use certificate auth only so the password problem really is a non-problem. In the event I need to get in to download a cert to a new machine (if I don't have my USB key on me that has the cert already there), I also have an IPSec VPN tunnel set up that's a piece of cake to connect up. The VPN is handled by its own hardware firewall (a Sonicwall Pro 2040), and I allow password auth only from the internal subnet on the back side of the firewall.
In 4 years of running sites on that server, the only successful hack I've ever had was because of a problem with an application hosted on the site. That application was removed pretty rapidly, and the only real impact was that all of a sudden I got people telling me that people couldn't get to their site because there were hidden links that were dead or slow on the served up pages.
HTH
Besides which, have you tried programming for USB in an environment where you need a real-time operating system? Even Linux running as an RTOS is a pain with USB.
But if you buy the phone at all, you lock yourself into using T-Mobile anyway, since it doesn't do 3G on AT&T. You also can't take it to Verizon or Sprint for more obvious reasons.
Sure you can use it on AT&T... but only at EDGE speeds. That's sort of sad, at least until Google releases a version that'll do AT&T freqs... which BTW I'll be all over since my phone is getting long in the tooth and I'm SO ready to ditch WinMo but don't like iPhone lock-in very much.
Another hint: floating mountains, people. Come on.
I'm going to really show my geekiness here, but the floating mountains were explained in the original screenplay, though granted only hinted at in the movie. The "Unobtainium" is a room-temperature superconductor. It is well known that a superconductor in presence of a magnetic field will float, and if you look around the entire area it shows curved constructs of rock that look suspiciously like lines of magnetic force... like melted iron twisted by the magnet. This was hinted at because the guy running the base (whose name I forget) had a piece of Unobtainium that floated in a magnetic field on his desk. Although this raises questions like why they didn't just mine the floating mountains, it's still a cool and at least reasonably plausible explanation... at least if you try not to think about it too hard :)
most people think of the blanket-carrying kid in Peanuts.
Perhaps anywhere else, but not here on slashdot. And a heads up: RMS usually refers to Richard Matthew Stallman, not Root Mean Square... even though most of us here know the uses of the latter.
And if you hear the denizens referring to a RIM job, it's getting employment at the maker of Blackberry...
I'm sure it depends on your area, but it also depends on what licenses you need. Figure $3-5000 for a visual-only license, give or take a grand or so. Definitely not the same as getting a car license.
It's a matter of personal opinion whether you feel that a drivers license SHOULD cost more than it does. It would certainly cut down the number of idiots I have to deal with on my daily commute. Yes, elitist comment, but probably fair; a drivers license is FAR too easy to get in the USA. It was a lot more difficult when I took my driving test in the UK than when I took it in the USA... I was actually shocked at how easy it was.
I am a GA pilot as well... VFR only... and GP is right in a lot of ways. GA has really become FAR more appealing to me in recent years with this security theatre, and the more people getting into GA the better (so long as they also consider joining the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association which is working really hard to ensure stupid rules don't get as far as General Aviation). I stopped flying a few years ago simply because the cost became prohibitive and my lifestyle changed to the point that I no longer could justify it. However, in recent months I have been considering taking it up again because the ridiculous security theatre has meant that a 90 minute flight from St. Louis to Chicago becomes a 6 hour ordeal of finding parking, horrible check in lines, ridiculous "security" and awful coffee. Hell, I can DRIVE it in a little under 5 hours and park closer to where I wanted to go. If I were flying a GA aircraft I could cut that down to about a 3 hour trip door to door. Given the ever increasing cost of flying commercially, where's my drive to do it any more?
GA aircraft are expensive, yes... but you can pick up a good instrument certified used Cessna 172 for little more than a Lexus... and they last a hell of a lot longer than cars do. In fact, they tend to appreciate in value like a home rather than depreciate, and if you use it for business you can usually write off a portion of the expenses on taxes. And even with that 172, the entire lower 48 is pretty much your playground, because if you live in the Midwest there's nowhere you can't go in a day.
Of course, YMMV but I am seriously considering going into a partnership with a couple of friends to pick up a good used IFR Cessna or older Cirrus (depending on how much we all put in). Since we're all small business owners we can also use it as a business expense since we'd be using it for sales and technical meetings as well as for pleasure.
I thought the same thing myself; the "Facilitated Communication" has been slammed in court on more than one occasion because it became rapidly quite clear that the facilitator was the one doing the actual communication, not the poor schmo in the wheelchair. Hell, I know if I had true locked-in syndrome then I'd love to have something like this so I can at least have a hope of communicating with the outside world.
And if he wore tight shorts and had big boobs.
Yes, if JarJar had only been a little more like Lara Croft,. it might not have been so bad.
Unfortunately, I've now got an image of Jar Jar in a tank top and tight shorts with big boobs... but he's still male. Thanks... I'm not going to sleep for a week, now :P
I thought that "Artists Conception" looked oddly familiar. Then I remembered this; http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Discoveries/2009/0729/are-astronomers-watching-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-betelgeuse
I seem to remember it was also in a Slashdot article that references this.
Uhm... so which is it, people? Or is it just clip art?
You're not trying hard enough. Isn't virtualbox available for both OSes?
+1, though Virtualbox isn't always the best solution. Here's what I did last time I had the opportunity to build a "big kick-ass box".
I built out the machine with a Gentoo boot that did nothing but start up VMware Server, then started up an X server. Nothing more, nothing less. Very small, very fast and light. There was nothing else running on the Gentoo host other than a script that monitored the network for the virtual machines... of which I had three auto-booting.
Virtual machine one is an OpenSolaris box that starts up as a file server for all the others. Using ZFS is all kinds of awesome, and using raw partitions instead of VMDK (or equivalent) files makes sure I get the best bang for the buck out of it. This server has a single CPU assigned to it (actually, a dedicated core) because it doesn't do much more than that. A script in the host machine when network and SSH are available launches an SSH session that then launches the panel to the host X desktop that resides at the right of the screen.
Virtual machine 2 is a Debian box which starts up my "desktop apps". Basically, it just boots up and has two dedicated cores (all I need for my usage) and launches the Gnome environment to the host X, home folders mapped through NFS to the file server and so on. This one just has a bootup script that sets DISPLAY and then launches Gnome... no fancy SSH script. The only reason I needed that with Solaris is for some reason it just seems to never launch properly and I can't be bothered debugging :)
The final virtual machine has two CPUs but aren't dedicated. This is running Windows XP for those rare times I need a Windows box for debugging. Since I have RAM to spare, and CPU cycles to spare it costs me nothing to have it sitting in the background. Now, the only problem is the lack of a proper remote display protocol for Windows, so I just have RDP enabled and a button that launches an RDP window when I need it. I'm sure I'll change this with time.
The advantage to all of this is that if any one of those VM's crashes or has some critical hang I can just reboot it and continue working on the others. The instances of an actual host failure are almost zero. I can also create new VM's at whim to do whatever I like... I even created a Gentoo VM to act as a "nice -19" compile host for the physical host updates so that performance impact on the other servers is minimal. In fact, because of the way I have it configured the only VM it really impacts is the Windows one... not that I really care.
It required a lot of resources to build out the system just the way I wanted it, but now that it works... it works. I have in the past also had passing FreeBSD VM's for specific tasks... in fact I have one now that's powered off but I can use it at any time (again, DISPLAY sent to the host). This is all on the private network behind VMware Server so there's no network traffic on my link from any of those VM's unless I want it. I've mapped some ports from the outside back to the file server so other machines on my network can use it, but that's it. I may even segregate my desktop apps again at some point, a second Debian machine for those apps I want to "sandbox", maybe create menu links that launch ssh -CY to the host and then launch the app.
So far the only thing that annoys me is the few apps that ignore X protocols and won't honour the DISPLAY variable... but thankfully they're the exception rather than the rule. And the only negative has been problems with occasional I/O contention. That can be fixed but it's not severe enough a problem to spend a lot of time or resources on it.
The only thing I don't like about VirtualBox is that it's really designed as a desktop VM solution... you close the VM window and the VM goes away. VMware Server allows you to spawn your VM instances with a script and then they're just sitting there in the background waiting to be used.
Obviously didn't work in IT in the early '90s. I did, and pagers were de-facto office-wear.
Of course, once cellphones started to become popular (I remember my first Motorola StarTac... that was an awesome phone), a bunch of drunk IT guys at a local pub could entertain themselves for hours by lining their pagers up at one end of a table with a slight lean and constantly calling them. Vibrating pager races were always a great way to decide who bought the next round.
Yes, this was in East London :)
Not strictly on topic... but Elite is mentioned and I just have to post this as this entire thread reminded me of the following animation;
http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/heyhey16k.swf
Awesome... and good old days. Damn... now I'm going to fill the rest of my week of vacation playing Oolite... thanks, Slashdot :P
+1 to all of the above!
I lost a job once because the owner of the company became that paranoid. I went back to the UK for a funeral, and while I was away some system problems occurred. These problems were probably mostly because the owner of the company was a cheap bastard and wouldn't give me decent hardware to work with... but whatever. Anyway, he decided that I must be hacking the network remotely and by the time I returned to the US I really didn't have a job any more. Quite how he came to that conclusion when I had built that network on my own with minimal help or resources and was actually quite proud of my accomplishment I will never understand... but this is what cocaine does to the brain...
Anyway, these days I actually work from the other side than the original submitter; I actually do the support for a few companies in town, and yes I do it all remotely. Well, most of it; I do go onsite when hardware problems come up or when desktop issues come up that I need to work on. Quite simply, there has to be a certain amount of trust or the business relationship will never work.
With the customers I work with, part of my standard contract with them is that I am liable for the network security. That means that any data leaks are also my responsibility and so therefore it behooves me to not steal it and ensure the data itself is as secure as possible. Also, the fact that these companies come to me for support mean that they are by default in a different line of business from myself, and so therefore their data has no commercial interest to me whatsoever. If they were networking folks, they'd be doing this themselves and they wouldn't need outsourced IT support. I have made that point in a sales pitch before... and yes, sometimes I see the "light go on" when I mention that because they had worried about it but had been afraid to bring it up.
Simply put; the solution is to charge the outsourcer with security of the network and the data as part of the contract negotiations. If you do this then they are beholden to you and if a breach occurs they are legally and financially liable. If the outsourcer will not accept those terms, find one who does.
Well, you're sort of right... but there is this expectation which is maybe endemic to the Midwest USA rather than a more general comment about marriage in general... but there is an opinion that once married, children are the next logical step and a step that cannot be missed. Thus the social weight that I refer to in the first instance was primarily the pressure we were then under to have children after we had married even though we intended no such thing.
There's also an opinion that a married couple should both lead lives that are totally intertwined... that one partner cannot have friends who do not know the other partner... or perhaps do not like the other partner for whatever reason. This was a big problem in my second marriage as my ex then took it upon herself (with her parents support) to excise those people from my life who she either didn't know, didn't care to know or who didn't care for her... even if those friends pre-dated her being a part of my life.
Perhaps I'm tarring the entire experience of marriage with an overly broad brush, but out of all the relationships I've had that lasted more than a month or two, every one of them with few notable exceptions have stood outside of the opinion that I have of marriage.
It's not helped by the fact that if you're unhappy in a marriage, you're forced into a position where you must work things out or go through an expensive and deeply unsettling legal process. It also leads to unrealistic expectations on the part of one or both partners in the event that things go bad. I can't say more without being specific about my circumstances (which I don't want to be in this open forum) but those expectations made working things out impossible because those expectations could never be met.
Another social weight that is particularly a problem in the part of the world I live (Midwest USA) is that this is still a very sexist society I live in. As such, my ex wife went from being identified as an individual person, to being identified by all around as "xxx's Wife"... and she was effectively forced into my shadow by people around us who felt that since I was the man in the relationship, I was in charge... a situation I neither desired nor appreciated. The alternative... if a woman speaks up and becomes independently identified by those around... the husband is automatically an "uninvolved deadbeat". It's a no-win situation.
Generally, I have to say that my relationship with my girlfriend now is far healthier than any married relationship I ever had. Part of that is the fact that she's an independent woman, I'm an independent man, and if we ever decide that the relationship's not working for us, either of us can take the door at any time with no fear of violating a social contract of any kind. Sure, it may not be for everyone and may not even be "acceptable" to everyone... but it works for me.
I was reading through this comment list and despairing that someone was going to come up with exactly what you said. If I had mod points, I wouldn't have replied :)
I've been married. Twice, now... and I've been divorced twice. The first time around, I married a fellow computer geek. We were far better friends than we were "a couple", and marrying her was a mistake. The simple fact is that there's a certain amount of social weight that gets piled upon you when you get married, and that does wear on a relationship. I don't regret that marriage, but do regret that finally the pressure piled upon us by those around us (family, friends, general social expectations and so forth) tore us apart and even destroyed the friendship we had once shared. In the last few years we tried to rekindle that friendship but found things too hard. My second marriage was to a non-geek and suffered from many of the same problems. I got a son out of the deal, but also ended up split asunder again by social pressures and the fact that her and I just never had enough in common. It wasn't helped by the non-geek in the relationship constantly hounding me for technical support on her laptop... exasperating after dealing with users at work all day... I felt like I never left.
Now, I have a girlfriend. She's also divorced and both of us agree we are NEVER going to marry one another for the simple reason that we'd like to remain as we are; together because we choose to be together, not because some social expectation and contract say we should be together. We both agree that it puts a lot less pressure on a relationship. OK, her mother still encourages us to marry because she's a good Christian woman... but that's the limit of the pressure we get piled upon us. No, I don't get to take advantage of the tax breaks you get for being married... but I earn enough that I was able to soak up the drop in take-home pay after the divorce with minimal lifestyle changes (mostly just doing things like wiping out my credit cards, driving a car that's paid off... things like that).
My girlfriend is also a nice balance; she's an accountant by profession but is still enough of a geek that she flashes a new ROM on her phone periodically because she can... she's looking quite jealously at my AT&T Fuze running Windows Mobile 6.5 right now... ;)