Yeah, I've ranted about Sony before with great vigor but have still purchased several Sony products after swearing to stay away. And they actually ripped me off directly so I've got reason to dislike them. "Oh, if that was an out-of-warranty repair, it would cost $$$ but, since you broke it, the repair will cost $$$+50." Because, every once in a while, they produce the exact product that I want which outshines the competition in some way. I've got my Sony ebook reader (because it was more open than the Kindle which was the only competition at the time), I've got my Sony dye-sublimation photo printer, I've got my Sony cell phone (no longer in use for several years but it rocked at the time), I've got my Sony pocket digital camera. All purchased after swearing I'd never purchase another Sony product. There are probably several other purchases I can't remember right now.
I remember when the Newton first came out and there was a huge line at some trade show (probably Comdex). Word quickly filtered back that the handwriting recognition sucked balls and made it pretty pointless. People started wandering off. I didn't bother waiting and never saw a Newton in the wild. Oddly enough, I saw tons of Palms and I remember you had to learn some quirky shorthand to "write" on it and everyone seemed to embrace that concept despite the earlier refusal to learn how to write on a Newton.
Note the complete lack of Hispanics in the picture and lack of Hispanic names in the article. It's probably just a way to apply for minority grants and such.
Especially in that environment. Hospitals have very strict IT requirements.
You've gone about this in a very "rogue" way and the only thing that's probably kept you from getting canned already is that you work at a university hospital and your idea may have some merit.
As has already been made clear, plugging random stuff into a corporate network can be a fireable offense. Plugging random stuff into a hospital network is worse. Back up a few steps and get an official (in writing) okay from the IT department to test your deployment, running the software on their own equipment under their control, with you having access to administer it.
Also, in the future, remember that it is almost never a good idea to use your own personal equipment for work-related services. With the possible exception of very early proof-of-concept stages.
Instead of spending all this money to stamp out online poker, why won't they regulate and tax it? This demonizing makes absolutely no sense. Especially when our country's not exactly flush with cash. The way our government spends money to eliminate the possibility of making money continues to amaze me.
The less I made, the better I dressed. Actually, I guess it was more like a bell curve if you count the McD's job. But, when I was making $8.11/hr way back in the day, I wore fancy silk ties and a silver tie clip and rarely had $20 in my pocket the day before payday.
Your analogy doesn't work. In some cases, it is illegal to modify something you own. Going with the weapon theme, a sawed-off shotgun comes to mind. Even if you have a legitimate reason to make the modification, it's still illegal, in the US, to reduce the length of a shotgun to less than 26" overall and an 18" barrel. Doesn't matter if such a modification could make the weapon more useful during legal use.
I was thinking the same thing. "That can't be right because I played with some very early versions and that was only...Damnit!" I still remember my bundles of B, N, D, etc. floppies. (Base, Networking, Development, etc.)
Bingo. I'm not ashamed to say I paid $90 for my mouse and have yet to use it for gaming even once. Mionix Naos 5000. I bought it because I have big hands and I like a mouse big enough to fit. It's also heavy enough (user-adjustable) to have a solid feel and keep it from skittering away if I bump it. And it can store its basic settings so it operates the same on any computer without needing to be configured. The construction seems very solid and I expect I'll be using it 10 years from now. Heck, I'm considering buying another for work. Ironically, despite being the IT person who pushes to get people moderately expensive peripherals if they have a preference, I can't bring myself to request a $90 mouse.:)
Triple dip? Unless you get paid under the table, you're forgetting the fact that you're using taxed money to pay these additional fees and taxes. Not to mention the state, county, and city all finding ways to get their cut. And you're likely paying an HOA fee to pay for the infrastructure your local government refused to put in place to support your subdivision yet you still get to pay full property tax. And pay fees to get into national forests and parks. It's disgusting the way we let the government double, triple, quadruple, etc. dip with their taxes and fees.
My old house is wired for 200 amps. But it was also built at a time when there was no easy way to get gas for the appliances in that area so it was designed to handle two electric water heaters, electric dryer, electric stove, electric oven, electric heaters in the bathrooms, etc. And, back then, everyone was expecting to get a nuclear reactor in their basement within the next decade so they wanted to be ready to have heater vs. AC battles to use up all that extra power.
I've been using it for about 6 months and it's pretty robust. I especially like the fact that the data isn't striped and it uses a standard filesystem so individual drives can be read on pretty much any Linux system. This means even a multi-drive failure won't trash all of your data. You'll only lose the few files on the bad blocks in most cases. That's getting more important as drives get larger. The greater the amount of data, the greater the probability of experiencing more than one unrecoverable read error. I'm up to 7 data drives and about to add an 8th. All 2tb. My current rig can handle 13 data drives plus parity and that's a limitation of the hardware (only have 14 SATA ports and no way to add more). The beauty of unRAID is that I could put in a new motherboard that can support more ports and keep on growing all the way up to 20 data drives. That's 40tb of fault-tolerant storage on hardware any geek can buy off the shelf.
On the flip side, the dedicated parity drive and non-striped method of storage (it's basically a RAID-4 without striping) limits performance and the allocation method used to automatically spread the writes across multi-disk shares can make recovering from individual drives a tedious process. Still, for a media server where access is generally WORM, it works very well and tedious recovery beats non-recoverable any day of the week.
Definitely not a system for amateurs but, if you know what you're doing, it can be very versatile.
Who's the idiot? The company marketing something they can't provide or the consumer demanding the company provide the experience they marketed?
Look at Verizon's 4G marketing and tell me it isn't the sleaziest load of shit you've ever seen when you compare what they're selling to what they're providing.
BTW, your "download this data at non-peak hours to a DVR or hard disk" thing is essentially bittorrent which is the scourge of the industry. But, if ISPs would dynamically manage that type of traffic based on actual current network loads, that sort of system could have a chance of working. Instead, the ones who "manage" their networks just throw blanket throttles on traffic with no regard to the state of their network at that moment. They use punitive throttling rather than using it to enhance the level of service they're providing.
How funny. Shortly after posting that, I noticed my downlink speed had dropped to around 0.2mbps while my signal meter shows 5 dots. First time that's happened since I started using this service. Now I'm getting 0.7. Oddly, my uplink speed is repeatedly clocking in at the fastest I've ever seen. I'm going to chalk this up to people finishing dinner and streaming Japanese tsunami videos because it doesn't fit the reported throttling pattern.
I'll piggy-back on this comment to share my Clear experience. So far, so good. I've experienced a little hinkiness but nothing like the hard throttling described in other Clear markets. The worst I've encountered is occasionally coming home and finding that my signal is down to 1 "dot" instead of the usual 4-5 and my speed is about what I'd expect from a low signal. Noticeably slower but not the throttled speeds regularly reported. I log into the router, click the "reconnect" button and it jumps back to 4 or 5 dots and full speed which is around 8 down and 0.94 up for me. I assume this happens when my nearest tower flickers off for some reason and my adapter grabs onto the next strongest signal it can get but it never attempts to seek out a stronger signal after latching onto the more distant tower. I suppose it's possible they're intentionally bumping me to a different tower, knowing it'll reduce my throughput temporarily, but a quick click of the "reconnect" button gets me back up to speed instantly without even interrupting my open connections. I can live with that.
As far as data usage goes, I moved over 400 gigs in January, more than 450 gigs in February, and over 150 gigs so far this month. My usage will taper off in a week or so when I'm done with my current syncing project but I think I've really slammed them and there's no sign of intentional throttling.
Being a former pre-FAP DirecPC customer, I came into this fully expecting to unleash the righteous online fury on Clear for their throttling and even planned to offer my experience from the DirecPC class action suit to the people who were rumbling about a Clear class action suit but I ended up having nothing to complain about. I'm not quite sure how to feel about that. I was all set for a multi-year legal throwdown and ended up a content customer.:)
Reminds me of a cousin who decided to try his hand at crab fishing back in the days before Deadliest Catch. He heard you could make a ton of money really fast and then coast the rest of the year. What he didn't grasp is that you don't get a year's wages for two or three months of work. You compact a year's worth of work into two or three months. I knew nothing of crab fishing at the time but it took me about 5 seconds to reason that out. And you get paid shit because you're the new guy. If you can do that reliably for a few seasons, you might get a shot at making decent money. I don't think he even made it through one run, let alone an entire season.
I checked my addresses and they're not even close. Claims I could get FIOS out in the sticks and that Comcast offers 100-10000mbps. (Actually tops out at 50mbps in that area which is still pretty darn fast.) Claims my primary location only has 3mbps DSL and T-Mobile available when DSL is available at twice that speed and cable is available up to 20mbps along with 4G from Clear/Sprint which runs in the 8-10mbps range.
No kidding. All this move does is show us that the "studio execs" don't understand the situation. But we already knew that. It took, what, a few months for point-n-click rippers to hit the streets after BR and HDDVD were introduced? It's like they have a house with 3 walls and they're all proud to announce that they're going to seal off the front door so nobody can steal their stuff. But nobody ever used the front door. They just went through the missing wall because that was faster and easier than bothering with opening a door. So go right ahead and install that new lock.
And, if people actually were copying movies that way, there's already another, better door waiting to be used. The HDCP master key is out. There are probably already HDMI copy boxes in the works. Assuming they're not already available. Though there really isn't much point since that'd still be way more work than just using existing click-n-rip software.
I remember at one time, the Intel Macbook Pros were the fastest windows laptops on the market. And you could put Linux on them. As well as OS X. Makes them more versatile than a non-Apple laptop in my book.
Or you could pay a premium price for a premium product that Just Fucking Works.
I tried building a DVR back in the early days. What a mess. The software sucked in ways that were so bad that it felt like the suckage must have been intentional because they couldn't have made it that bad by accident. After about a week of dicking around trying to make it somewhat functional, I gave up and bought a Tivo. No dicking around. No crappy, unreliable software. It just worked. It did everything that was promised and it did those things well. PC-based products are starting to catch up but it's taken nearly a decade and the new Tivos can be had for as little as $100. And how are you going to deal with cablecards and SDV with your Sage system? Good luck with that. Sure, you pay $13-20/month for the Tivo service but most cable companies charge $15/month for DVRs that are terrible.
Some folks would rather pay a bit more to get a product and service that isn't aggravating.
That doesn't make his information wrong. The fact that he's pledged to give away the bulk of his fortune (and is actually in the process doing it) goes a long way towards alleviating concerns that he's saying these things to increase profits.
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Yeah, I've ranted about Sony before with great vigor but have still purchased several Sony products after swearing to stay away. And they actually ripped me off directly so I've got reason to dislike them. "Oh, if that was an out-of-warranty repair, it would cost $$$ but, since you broke it, the repair will cost $$$+50." Because, every once in a while, they produce the exact product that I want which outshines the competition in some way. I've got my Sony ebook reader (because it was more open than the Kindle which was the only competition at the time), I've got my Sony dye-sublimation photo printer, I've got my Sony cell phone (no longer in use for several years but it rocked at the time), I've got my Sony pocket digital camera. All purchased after swearing I'd never purchase another Sony product. There are probably several other purchases I can't remember right now.
I remember when the Newton first came out and there was a huge line at some trade show (probably Comdex). Word quickly filtered back that the handwriting recognition sucked balls and made it pretty pointless. People started wandering off. I didn't bother waiting and never saw a Newton in the wild. Oddly enough, I saw tons of Palms and I remember you had to learn some quirky shorthand to "write" on it and everyone seemed to embrace that concept despite the earlier refusal to learn how to write on a Newton.
The fun is sharing the CEO's pr0n stash with the entire company.
That's why they bought T-Mobile. Much cheaper and faster to buy existing infrastructure.
And it involves hydraulics.
Note the complete lack of Hispanics in the picture and lack of Hispanic names in the article. It's probably just a way to apply for minority grants and such.
Especially in that environment. Hospitals have very strict IT requirements.
You've gone about this in a very "rogue" way and the only thing that's probably kept you from getting canned already is that you work at a university hospital and your idea may have some merit.
As has already been made clear, plugging random stuff into a corporate network can be a fireable offense. Plugging random stuff into a hospital network is worse. Back up a few steps and get an official (in writing) okay from the IT department to test your deployment, running the software on their own equipment under their control, with you having access to administer it.
Also, in the future, remember that it is almost never a good idea to use your own personal equipment for work-related services. With the possible exception of very early proof-of-concept stages.
You just made The List, buddy.
Instead of spending all this money to stamp out online poker, why won't they regulate and tax it? This demonizing makes absolutely no sense. Especially when our country's not exactly flush with cash. The way our government spends money to eliminate the possibility of making money continues to amaze me.
The less I made, the better I dressed. Actually, I guess it was more like a bell curve if you count the McD's job. But, when I was making $8.11/hr way back in the day, I wore fancy silk ties and a silver tie clip and rarely had $20 in my pocket the day before payday.
Your analogy doesn't work. In some cases, it is illegal to modify something you own. Going with the weapon theme, a sawed-off shotgun comes to mind. Even if you have a legitimate reason to make the modification, it's still illegal, in the US, to reduce the length of a shotgun to less than 26" overall and an 18" barrel. Doesn't matter if such a modification could make the weapon more useful during legal use.
I was thinking the same thing. "That can't be right because I played with some very early versions and that was only...Damnit!" I still remember my bundles of B, N, D, etc. floppies. (Base, Networking, Development, etc.)
Bingo. I'm not ashamed to say I paid $90 for my mouse and have yet to use it for gaming even once. Mionix Naos 5000. I bought it because I have big hands and I like a mouse big enough to fit. It's also heavy enough (user-adjustable) to have a solid feel and keep it from skittering away if I bump it. And it can store its basic settings so it operates the same on any computer without needing to be configured. The construction seems very solid and I expect I'll be using it 10 years from now. Heck, I'm considering buying another for work. Ironically, despite being the IT person who pushes to get people moderately expensive peripherals if they have a preference, I can't bring myself to request a $90 mouse. :)
Triple dip? Unless you get paid under the table, you're forgetting the fact that you're using taxed money to pay these additional fees and taxes. Not to mention the state, county, and city all finding ways to get their cut. And you're likely paying an HOA fee to pay for the infrastructure your local government refused to put in place to support your subdivision yet you still get to pay full property tax. And pay fees to get into national forests and parks. It's disgusting the way we let the government double, triple, quadruple, etc. dip with their taxes and fees.
My old house is wired for 200 amps. But it was also built at a time when there was no easy way to get gas for the appliances in that area so it was designed to handle two electric water heaters, electric dryer, electric stove, electric oven, electric heaters in the bathrooms, etc. And, back then, everyone was expecting to get a nuclear reactor in their basement within the next decade so they wanted to be ready to have heater vs. AC battles to use up all that extra power.
This.
I've been using it for about 6 months and it's pretty robust. I especially like the fact that the data isn't striped and it uses a standard filesystem so individual drives can be read on pretty much any Linux system. This means even a multi-drive failure won't trash all of your data. You'll only lose the few files on the bad blocks in most cases. That's getting more important as drives get larger. The greater the amount of data, the greater the probability of experiencing more than one unrecoverable read error. I'm up to 7 data drives and about to add an 8th. All 2tb. My current rig can handle 13 data drives plus parity and that's a limitation of the hardware (only have 14 SATA ports and no way to add more). The beauty of unRAID is that I could put in a new motherboard that can support more ports and keep on growing all the way up to 20 data drives. That's 40tb of fault-tolerant storage on hardware any geek can buy off the shelf.
On the flip side, the dedicated parity drive and non-striped method of storage (it's basically a RAID-4 without striping) limits performance and the allocation method used to automatically spread the writes across multi-disk shares can make recovering from individual drives a tedious process. Still, for a media server where access is generally WORM, it works very well and tedious recovery beats non-recoverable any day of the week.
Definitely not a system for amateurs but, if you know what you're doing, it can be very versatile.
Who's the idiot? The company marketing something they can't provide or the consumer demanding the company provide the experience they marketed?
Look at Verizon's 4G marketing and tell me it isn't the sleaziest load of shit you've ever seen when you compare what they're selling to what they're providing.
BTW, your "download this data at non-peak hours to a DVR or hard disk" thing is essentially bittorrent which is the scourge of the industry. But, if ISPs would dynamically manage that type of traffic based on actual current network loads, that sort of system could have a chance of working. Instead, the ones who "manage" their networks just throw blanket throttles on traffic with no regard to the state of their network at that moment. They use punitive throttling rather than using it to enhance the level of service they're providing.
How funny. Shortly after posting that, I noticed my downlink speed had dropped to around 0.2mbps while my signal meter shows 5 dots. First time that's happened since I started using this service. Now I'm getting 0.7. Oddly, my uplink speed is repeatedly clocking in at the fastest I've ever seen. I'm going to chalk this up to people finishing dinner and streaming Japanese tsunami videos because it doesn't fit the reported throttling pattern.
I'll piggy-back on this comment to share my Clear experience. So far, so good. I've experienced a little hinkiness but nothing like the hard throttling described in other Clear markets. The worst I've encountered is occasionally coming home and finding that my signal is down to 1 "dot" instead of the usual 4-5 and my speed is about what I'd expect from a low signal. Noticeably slower but not the throttled speeds regularly reported. I log into the router, click the "reconnect" button and it jumps back to 4 or 5 dots and full speed which is around 8 down and 0.94 up for me. I assume this happens when my nearest tower flickers off for some reason and my adapter grabs onto the next strongest signal it can get but it never attempts to seek out a stronger signal after latching onto the more distant tower. I suppose it's possible they're intentionally bumping me to a different tower, knowing it'll reduce my throughput temporarily, but a quick click of the "reconnect" button gets me back up to speed instantly without even interrupting my open connections. I can live with that.
As far as data usage goes, I moved over 400 gigs in January, more than 450 gigs in February, and over 150 gigs so far this month. My usage will taper off in a week or so when I'm done with my current syncing project but I think I've really slammed them and there's no sign of intentional throttling.
Being a former pre-FAP DirecPC customer, I came into this fully expecting to unleash the righteous online fury on Clear for their throttling and even planned to offer my experience from the DirecPC class action suit to the people who were rumbling about a Clear class action suit but I ended up having nothing to complain about. I'm not quite sure how to feel about that. I was all set for a multi-year legal throwdown and ended up a content customer. :)
Reminds me of a cousin who decided to try his hand at crab fishing back in the days before Deadliest Catch. He heard you could make a ton of money really fast and then coast the rest of the year. What he didn't grasp is that you don't get a year's wages for two or three months of work. You compact a year's worth of work into two or three months. I knew nothing of crab fishing at the time but it took me about 5 seconds to reason that out. And you get paid shit because you're the new guy. If you can do that reliably for a few seasons, you might get a shot at making decent money. I don't think he even made it through one run, let alone an entire season.
I checked my addresses and they're not even close. Claims I could get FIOS out in the sticks and that Comcast offers 100-10000mbps. (Actually tops out at 50mbps in that area which is still pretty darn fast.) Claims my primary location only has 3mbps DSL and T-Mobile available when DSL is available at twice that speed and cable is available up to 20mbps along with 4G from Clear/Sprint which runs in the 8-10mbps range.
No kidding. All this move does is show us that the "studio execs" don't understand the situation. But we already knew that. It took, what, a few months for point-n-click rippers to hit the streets after BR and HDDVD were introduced? It's like they have a house with 3 walls and they're all proud to announce that they're going to seal off the front door so nobody can steal their stuff. But nobody ever used the front door. They just went through the missing wall because that was faster and easier than bothering with opening a door. So go right ahead and install that new lock.
And, if people actually were copying movies that way, there's already another, better door waiting to be used. The HDCP master key is out. There are probably already HDMI copy boxes in the works. Assuming they're not already available. Though there really isn't much point since that'd still be way more work than just using existing click-n-rip software.
Just the cage in his mind.
I remember at one time, the Intel Macbook Pros were the fastest windows laptops on the market. And you could put Linux on them. As well as OS X. Makes them more versatile than a non-Apple laptop in my book.
Or you could pay a premium price for a premium product that Just Fucking Works.
I tried building a DVR back in the early days. What a mess. The software sucked in ways that were so bad that it felt like the suckage must have been intentional because they couldn't have made it that bad by accident. After about a week of dicking around trying to make it somewhat functional, I gave up and bought a Tivo. No dicking around. No crappy, unreliable software. It just worked. It did everything that was promised and it did those things well. PC-based products are starting to catch up but it's taken nearly a decade and the new Tivos can be had for as little as $100. And how are you going to deal with cablecards and SDV with your Sage system? Good luck with that. Sure, you pay $13-20/month for the Tivo service but most cable companies charge $15/month for DVRs that are terrible.
Some folks would rather pay a bit more to get a product and service that isn't aggravating.
That doesn't make his information wrong. The fact that he's pledged to give away the bulk of his fortune (and is actually in the process doing it) goes a long way towards alleviating concerns that he's saying these things to increase profits.