This appears to be about as revolutionary as a coal-fired pocket calculator. Sure, it addresses a need, but in a round-about and probably unsustainable way.
Individual machine addressing through NAT has always been possible using free, commonly-available VPN tools. I've done this for my home machines for years by bouncing traffic through a colo box. It works because I'm willing to pay for the bandwidth. Who's going to pay to run these "Waystations" when they could instead put their resources into fine-tuning IPv6?
JWZ's perspective is at Tabs versus Spaces: An Eternal Holy War. It's not too bad.
No, it's merely shortsighted and moronic.
It all comes down to an elaborate defense of the shortcomings of his preferred editing platform.
The fact is, tabs are the One True Way. Any other approach condemns the entire development team to using the same indentation, despite the deleterious effects it may have on their work (I have a really hard time with large indentation like 8 spaces or so, and many other people have a hard time with the 2 spaces that I prefer). With tabs, we can all set our editor preferences as we please, and freely work in each other's wakes without reformatting, screen-squinting, or other hassles.
Once again, press releases like the ones you've described don't only end up in the office of the Washington Post, but also TRADE publications, and these ones have no problem writing stuff full of marketspeak crap.
I don't doubt you're correct here. I worked in journalism long enough ago that the people I knew then have either given up on the business or moved pretty far along. So when I talk to someone about dealing with dot coms (a topic near and dear to my heart), it's going to be a senior reporter or an editor at a major pub, and that's bound to provide a somewhat warped perspective. But I think the core messages are still just as valid:
Write something that's interesting to the audience, not interesting to you as a company
Get the reporter on your side by doing his job, or by any other reasonable means
Don't treat journalists like a source of free ads (though, as you say, perhaps some writers in the trades have abandoned any pretensions to the contrary)
We use Oracle. Let's pretend that we were evaluating (snicker) MySQL. It doesn't support transactions, rollback, views, foreign keys, or stored procedures. It doesn't fully implement SQL92. It doesn't come with a search engine, or an XML parser, or half of the tools (schema browsers, database managers and such) that Oracle does. It doesn't scale (at least not to our multi-terabyte needs), and there aren't a lot of MySQL experts in the DBA market. It's not supported by our application server. Therefore, the facts that it is free and open-source are irrelevant. End of story.
This is getting off topic, but I couldn't let it go.
I figure you're a junior person at a medium-sized company with very monolothic computer needs. Or for some reason you think like one. Because your rant sure doesn't describe reality in large organizations - or even reality as seen from the top in small ones.
Is MySQL an "enterprise" database? Not on your life. Is it useful to large enterprises? You bet. In a large organization that has hundreds or thousands of projects going on, only a tiny handful need the power and feature bloat of megabucks "enterprise" hardware/software. I'd wager 90% of database projects would be better off in MySQL than in Oracle, just because the maintenance costs are so much lower and the product is so much more accessible to junior staffers.
I spend six figures on Oracle, for use where it's needed. That doesn't mean I'm so stupid that I'm going to spend another six figures on it for projects that don't require it. Likewise I have people doing development in Linux on $500 e-machines servers for projects that deploy on giant rack-sagging monsters running heavy-duty OSen. It just makes good financial sense. And every once in a while we even find something neat that Linux, or MySQL, or what-have-you-open-source-program can do, that all our money can't buy.
Not to be mocked by his peers for blatantly rehashing pure ad crap with no news value (unless he works for a pure ad crap publication).
To have people think he's clever.
To accumulate clips that will help him get a better job.
Okay, so keep all those in mind. Now, how can you help? For starters, take this press release and throw it in the trash:
New York, April 12 - XYZCorp, an online content enabler specializing in the revolutionization of digital synergies through client-focused paradigms, announces the release of SchismThrasher 1.0, a self-contained abstract solution management system.
...because the people who receive it are going to do exactly that: throw it away.
A press release that actually gets picked up has to provide the basis for a story, which more or less means it has to relate directly to things that the reporter knows about and would otherwise be writing about. Reporters do not write about marketspeak crap, except to make fun of it.
So find a trend that's popular but not overplayed, and figure out how you relate to that. Or find an angle the reporter can work with toward a story about how to do something, how to avoid something, how to make something, and build on that. Don't be afraid to mention your competition - having the story appear in print with you as one of three is better than not having it at all. And if your contact info is on the release, your spokesperson is going to be the one who has a quote in the story.
Approaches like this have you doing half the reporter's work for them, without it looking like he just licked up whatever you fed him. That meets his needs and yours too.
And nurture personal relationships with reporters. Get them drunk at conventions (they're the poorly-dressed ones, so they're easy to spot). Find the bar near the local paper where they hang out. Donate some equipment to your local college newspaper.
One last tip - if you don't know how to write, find someone who does. Go outside your office, find someone in grad school, or someone who writes accessible materials for a living. Do not under any circumstances use your neighbor or your mom or your brother-in-law unless this person is actually gainfully employed for his/her writing ability (next week's lesson: Do not use these people for graphic design either, just because they happen to own a copy of Pagemaker and once did their church newsletter). Everyone knows at least one person in such a capacity. Someone who is laughing at your typos or overuse of the thesaurus or weird grammar is not going to be writing a story about your product.
The founder of a hosting company in this area is blind, and you'd barely know it.
In fact, the first time I came to the facility and met him, it was a good 10 minutes before I put it together.
There was a lot of noise in the machine room, as all sorts of digitized voices were mumbling cryptically. But what tipped me off was when I noticed that he sat down to work at his computer, and started typing away, and the monitor was off!
To the best of my knowledge the rest of the staff are sighted, but it ends up being helpful even for them. The place is hyper-organized, and everything is always in a predictable place.
It's pretty amazing to watch him walk across the facility, pull a machine drawer out, and replace the hard drive, facing you and talking the whole time.
I don't know what sort of programmer he is, but he's the fastest thing you'll ever see on the keyboard, and I've seen him do plenty of tricky stuff in the shell. When he's line-editing it seems to read to him what's under the cursor.
I think the skill necessary for keeping a sense of the state of an edit buffer would be similar to that of a childhood friend, who I'd play chess with during class at school. We had a complicated signalling system to exchange moves. I had to keep notes on a piece of paper, constantly erasing and scribbling to keep track of what was going on. He'd just stare straight ahead at the teacher, keeping the whole game inside his head. Not only that, but after he invariably beat me, he'd write down a transcript of the game - every move from start to finish, complete with detail of where I went wrong - and pass it over to me.
Dump communitech and go with Rackspace.com. I was researching places like this awhile back for a little project I was working on, and I only heard good things about rackspace.com.
I'll second that. They're definitely more expensive than the bargain-basement hosting huts, but the it's well worth the money. We've got a growing number of machines over there. The service has been trouble-free (not a single outage that I'm aware of) and they've been very responsive when we've needed someone to go kick the server in the middle of the night.
Forced? Really? That's bulshit. You could have paid someone to go buy the various parts and construct a PC from scratch, no? But that would have likely been more expensive and inconvenient.
Actually, no, I live and work in Washington DC, where there aren't U-Build-It stores (even the shifty places out on Wisconsin Ave near Tenleytown sell name-brand).
The only way I could have built from parts was to cross state lines (in person or via mail).
Within my jurisdiction, the Microsoft Tax is absolute. My grievance is under DC law. The fact that I could go to some state and buy a motherboard is about as relevant to the case as the fact that I could buy something in Moldova would be to a Federal monopoly case.
Well from that, what he himself said to a policeman, he comes across as a dirt-common script kiddie.
Have you ever talked to a police officer?
Did you notice how they decided not to record the conversation despite the availability of equipment in their car?
There's no particular reason to believe that any of that is what he said, especially when it so exactly fits the textbook profile of what is required in order to make a good, sticky confession.
Doesn't it seem a little incongruous that in other contexts Randal is a lucid, fairly sensible speaker, but just that one time, behind closed doors, he went off like a raving lunatic, setting out exactly every single element (including some quite fanciful) necessary to put himself in the worst possible light?
Maybe I'm missing something, but what exactly are people going to sue MS for? When you buy a computer with Windows pre-installed, it's not like they tell you "This system will work perfectly, and will never crash."
I'm suing them because I was forced to buy dozens of computers with their operating system on them, despite the fact that I didn't want it. I want that money back.
you'll see that the IP goes to Oxford, which will publish the results to the scientific community.
That's meaningless.
Surely you're aware that every patent filing is published to the scientific community. In fact, it's available to the entire world community. Call up the patent office and you can have your pick of amazing top-secret scientific developments mailed to your door.
But that sure doesn't mean anyone can benefit from the invention or discovery.
The only way in which this would actually be a philanthropic endeavor is if they specifically agreed to make all generated IP public domain.
Except that those goverment services are usually very inefficient, bourocratic and sometimes corrupt. A much better way to re-distribute the generated wealth of a country would be for that country to pay dividends to his taxpayers.
Yeah, that's what the rich are always saying.
Strange, then, how in most northern European countries people live longer and report themselves to be happier than in the US and other less compassionate places.
The fact is, corporations with large advertising budgets spend an awful lot of money figuring out how to effectively manipulate people into spending their money on crap they don't need. If I had to choose between the "freedom" to buy 15% more crap, or safe streets and guaranteed health care, well, you can have my crap.
I can't believe it took me until the sample code on the interview page to realize it's an April Fool's joke:
# copy stdin to stdout, except for lines starting with #
while left_angle_right_angle:
if dollar_underscore[0] =eq= "#":
continue_next;
}
print dollar_underscore;
}
Though I will say this: The great thing about Parrot is that it slides past the lameness filter like a greased Scotsman.
Call up your local telco and you can get hooked up with a T1 pretty quickly.
On what planet is that??? Most parts of the US, if you can get a T1 provisioned and installed in under 6 weeks, you pretty clearly have a deal with Satan. 8 weeks is more typical.
this goes NO WAY in explaining how Apple would ship "select developers" the "bad" build, while shipping retail customers the "good" one.
I can provide an explanation, but it depends on some complex theoretical physics so you'll have to bear with me.
One of the axes along which objects can move and be measured in the universe is called "time". Science has developed a whole collection of jargon to describe these transformations.
For instance, if a event A occurs at time point 10, and event B occurs at time point 20, we scientists say that event A occurred "before" (bee-four) event B.
Now I will apply this to the situation in question. Developers and reviewers have been receiving unofficial advance copies of OSX for some time now, during the entire period between 4K78 and mass pressing. Consumer copies were prepared in the past few days and are now going out. Therefore, we can use our new words (remember? Read the last few paragraphs again if you've forgotten) to say that some developer-seed copies were released "before" the final consumer version that is even now filling up Fedex trucks around the country.
A consequence of this is that if there were changes made to the software between when the earlier copies were released, and the later ones, then they will be different from each other.
Their are three reasons why I hated the Mac. A one button mouse, no command shell, and all the icons were stuck to the right part of the screen.
The icons have never been "stuck" anywhere. From day one you could move all the icons wherever you wanted them, and they would stay there. The only exceptions are the desktop icons automatically created when you insert a floppy or other removable, or mounted a network volume; those always appear as close to the upper-right as they can find available space.
I'm thrilled that you were able to get "one of the coolest development environments" you could ask for, and I'm not trashing OS X or Macintoshes, but I feel compelled to point out that you're not doing anything that you couldn't do before (except maybe running iMovie). If you already had a Dual PIII 800, why are you paying through the nose for an Apple box just so you can run the same applications and have it "stay out of [your] way and let [you] work"?
Because MacOS actually has a usable interface.
Even if you're using tools that are available on other platforms, it's easier on the Mac. Everything from the smoother motion of the mouse (and the fact that the damn mouse cursor disappears when you start typing, unlike on Windows where it's always blocking whatever you're trying to do), to the easier-to-navigate file system, to the visuals, to the better drag-and-drop, just improves the experience.
I admin roomsfull of FreeBSD and Linux boxes. On my desk I have one NT machine and one Mac. The NT machine is used for exactly two things: Oracle admin tools (since they aren't available for Mac) and Internet Explorer (since it's faster under NT, at least compared to MacOS 9). For everything else I turn my chair to the Mac, because it's just such a more pleasant and productive experience. For me, that's well worth a few extra $$.
I will second that. I had nothing but pleasant experience with Covad.
I will third that. Have lots of Covad lines in various business sites; the installers are always friendly and competent, the service always works. For what it is, it can't be beat. Covad is my daddy.
I compare it to the Verizon DSL I have at home (they were the only game in town a few years ago when I signed up; now I'm too lazy to change, and I'm used to my static IP), and it's not even close. Verizon has frequent slowdowns and outages - frequent enough to annoy me but just shy of enough to push me to leaving. I would never again order Verizon if I had a choice, though: They simply don't know how to do data, or to provide decent customer service.
Every time I read one of these stories, I shudder at what would happen if Covad went away; there doesn't really seem to be a credible alternative. I'm guessing it'd be back to fractional T1 for many times the price.
Those who put their money in the stock market are gambling, and they know it. If they have to lose a little money so that people aren't left high and dry, then waaaahhhh waaaahhh.
What, are you insane? Just because they're knowingly taking a risk doesn't mean they're going to intentionally flush their money down the toilet.
No offense, but what's the point of a microwave if it takes longer than a stove?
I've never tried microwaving rice, but I imagine one nice aspect would be that it shuts itself off.
I cook rice 3 or 4 days a week, and at least once a week I get so caught up in something after I've put it on the stove, that I don't realize how much time has gone by until I have nothing but a pot of smoking mush.
Now my parents have a magnetic induction stove that seems to be the best of both worlds in the decidedly on-topic rice-cooking regard: It cooks like a stove but can be programmed to shut itself off.
San Francisco has plenty of hostels where you can stay for $20 or less per night. Caltrain costs a few bucks to get you to Santa Clara.
I'm sure you could stay somewhere on the peninsula for cheap as well, but let's face it, everything south of Daly City is a suburban hellhole with jack to do at night - or in the daytime for that matter. SF's not that much better for nightlife, but at least it's civilized.
It shouldn't cost you more than $250 for a flight from anywhere in the continental US if you can book a couple weeks in advance. Look at Southwest, Priceline, and the various travel specials out there.
While yes, they do teach computer science (or the local equivalent) in every country, I don't think that's what you should focus on. You've said that you have the travel bug, so that's the itch to scratch. You can always take some summer make-up classes or whatever you need to do. Having lived in another country is far more valuable for you as a person, as an employee, as a friend, as a manager, as a spouse, as a parent, in almost any role you'll take on later in life, than having taken one more CS course.
Also bear in mind that you do not need to go on organized exchange programs that litters your international center with brochures and videotapes. You just have to find a school in a place that interests you, and convince your school to take their credits.
Most schools will take almost any halfway-decent student from almost any halfway-decent school for a semester, so don't sweat the admissions too much.
My advice to you would be to steer far clear of western Europe, especially UK, France & Italy - the countries where all the "I want to say I went overseas but I'm scared shitless of anything foreign" people go (you know the ones: They disappear for three months and come back with an accent to prove how cosmopolitan they've become). Head to Ecuador, to Korea, to Malaysia, to Kazakhstan, to Senegal, to Syria. Go somewhere interesting where you'll really learn something about yourself, and about the ways that life can be different from how it is at home.
The real pain is having to get a certificate for each server in a distributed server network. We're deploying dozens of servers which are supposed to all have server certs. Do the math and see how annoying that is. We're actually concidering deploying less servers just so we won't have to buy so many certs.
This is for public use? Install a single SSL-enabled reverse proxy in front of your servers. Use a URL scheme that allows you to split the traffic as necessary.
Or, if it's for internal use, under no circumstances should you buy a certificate. There's absolutely no point.
Slashdot Mirror
This appears to be about as revolutionary as a coal-fired pocket calculator. Sure, it addresses a need, but in a round-about and probably unsustainable way.
Individual machine addressing through NAT has always been possible using free, commonly-available VPN tools. I've done this for my home machines for years by bouncing traffic through a colo box. It works because I'm willing to pay for the bandwidth. Who's going to pay to run these "Waystations" when they could instead put their resources into fine-tuning IPv6?
No, it's merely shortsighted and moronic.
It all comes down to an elaborate defense of the shortcomings of his preferred editing platform.
The fact is, tabs are the One True Way. Any other approach condemns the entire development team to using the same indentation, despite the deleterious effects it may have on their work (I have a really hard time with large indentation like 8 spaces or so, and many other people have a hard time with the 2 spaces that I prefer). With tabs, we can all set our editor preferences as we please, and freely work in each other's wakes without reformatting, screen-squinting, or other hassles.
I don't doubt you're correct here. I worked in journalism long enough ago that the people I knew then have either given up on the business or moved pretty far along. So when I talk to someone about dealing with dot coms (a topic near and dear to my heart), it's going to be a senior reporter or an editor at a major pub, and that's bound to provide a somewhat warped perspective. But I think the core messages are still just as valid:
This is getting off topic, but I couldn't let it go.
I figure you're a junior person at a medium-sized company with very monolothic computer needs. Or for some reason you think like one. Because your rant sure doesn't describe reality in large organizations - or even reality as seen from the top in small ones.
Is MySQL an "enterprise" database? Not on your life. Is it useful to large enterprises? You bet. In a large organization that has hundreds or thousands of projects going on, only a tiny handful need the power and feature bloat of megabucks "enterprise" hardware/software. I'd wager 90% of database projects would be better off in MySQL than in Oracle, just because the maintenance costs are so much lower and the product is so much more accessible to junior staffers.
I spend six figures on Oracle, for use where it's needed. That doesn't mean I'm so stupid that I'm going to spend another six figures on it for projects that don't require it. Likewise I have people doing development in Linux on $500 e-machines servers for projects that deploy on giant rack-sagging monsters running heavy-duty OSen. It just makes good financial sense. And every once in a while we even find something neat that Linux, or MySQL, or what-have-you-open-source-program can do, that all our money can't buy.
Here's what a reporter wants:
Okay, so keep all those in mind. Now, how can you help? For starters, take this press release and throw it in the trash:
...because the people who receive it are going to do exactly that: throw it away.
A press release that actually gets picked up has to provide the basis for a story, which more or less means it has to relate directly to things that the reporter knows about and would otherwise be writing about. Reporters do not write about marketspeak crap, except to make fun of it.
So find a trend that's popular but not overplayed, and figure out how you relate to that. Or find an angle the reporter can work with toward a story about how to do something, how to avoid something, how to make something, and build on that. Don't be afraid to mention your competition - having the story appear in print with you as one of three is better than not having it at all. And if your contact info is on the release, your spokesperson is going to be the one who has a quote in the story.
Approaches like this have you doing half the reporter's work for them, without it looking like he just licked up whatever you fed him. That meets his needs and yours too.
And nurture personal relationships with reporters. Get them drunk at conventions (they're the poorly-dressed ones, so they're easy to spot). Find the bar near the local paper where they hang out. Donate some equipment to your local college newspaper.
One last tip - if you don't know how to write, find someone who does. Go outside your office, find someone in grad school, or someone who writes accessible materials for a living. Do not under any circumstances use your neighbor or your mom or your brother-in-law unless this person is actually gainfully employed for his/her writing ability (next week's lesson: Do not use these people for graphic design either, just because they happen to own a copy of Pagemaker and once did their church newsletter). Everyone knows at least one person in such a capacity. Someone who is laughing at your typos or overuse of the thesaurus or weird grammar is not going to be writing a story about your product.
Also check out BLINUX.
The founder of a hosting company in this area is blind, and you'd barely know it.
In fact, the first time I came to the facility and met him, it was a good 10 minutes before I put it together.
There was a lot of noise in the machine room, as all sorts of digitized voices were mumbling cryptically. But what tipped me off was when I noticed that he sat down to work at his computer, and started typing away, and the monitor was off!
To the best of my knowledge the rest of the staff are sighted, but it ends up being helpful even for them. The place is hyper-organized, and everything is always in a predictable place.
It's pretty amazing to watch him walk across the facility, pull a machine drawer out, and replace the hard drive, facing you and talking the whole time.
I don't know what sort of programmer he is, but he's the fastest thing you'll ever see on the keyboard, and I've seen him do plenty of tricky stuff in the shell. When he's line-editing it seems to read to him what's under the cursor.
I think the skill necessary for keeping a sense of the state of an edit buffer would be similar to that of a childhood friend, who I'd play chess with during class at school. We had a complicated signalling system to exchange moves. I had to keep notes on a piece of paper, constantly erasing and scribbling to keep track of what was going on. He'd just stare straight ahead at the teacher, keeping the whole game inside his head. Not only that, but after he invariably beat me, he'd write down a transcript of the game - every move from start to finish, complete with detail of where I went wrong - and pass it over to me.
I'll second that. They're definitely more expensive than the bargain-basement hosting huts, but the it's well worth the money. We've got a growing number of machines over there. The service has been trouble-free (not a single outage that I'm aware of) and they've been very responsive when we've needed someone to go kick the server in the middle of the night.
Actually, no, I live and work in Washington DC, where there aren't U-Build-It stores (even the shifty places out on Wisconsin Ave near Tenleytown sell name-brand).
The only way I could have built from parts was to cross state lines (in person or via mail).
Within my jurisdiction, the Microsoft Tax is absolute. My grievance is under DC law. The fact that I could go to some state and buy a motherboard is about as relevant to the case as the fact that I could buy something in Moldova would be to a Federal monopoly case.
Have you ever talked to a police officer?
Did you notice how they decided not to record the conversation despite the availability of equipment in their car?
There's no particular reason to believe that any of that is what he said, especially when it so exactly fits the textbook profile of what is required in order to make a good, sticky confession.
Doesn't it seem a little incongruous that in other contexts Randal is a lucid, fairly sensible speaker, but just that one time, behind closed doors, he went off like a raving lunatic, setting out exactly every single element (including some quite fanciful) necessary to put himself in the worst possible light?
Surely you're not that naïve.
I'm suing them because I was forced to buy dozens of computers with their operating system on them, despite the fact that I didn't want it. I want that money back.
That's meaningless.
Surely you're aware that every patent filing is published to the scientific community. In fact, it's available to the entire world community. Call up the patent office and you can have your pick of amazing top-secret scientific developments mailed to your door.
But that sure doesn't mean anyone can benefit from the invention or discovery.
The only way in which this would actually be a philanthropic endeavor is if they specifically agreed to make all generated IP public domain.
Yeah, that's what the rich are always saying.
Strange, then, how in most northern European countries people live longer and report themselves to be happier than in the US and other less compassionate places.
The fact is, corporations with large advertising budgets spend an awful lot of money figuring out how to effectively manipulate people into spending their money on crap they don't need. If I had to choose between the "freedom" to buy 15% more crap, or safe streets and guaranteed health care, well, you can have my crap.
I can't believe it took me until the sample code on the interview page to realize it's an April Fool's joke:
Though I will say this: The great thing about Parrot is that it slides past the lameness filter like a greased Scotsman.
On what planet is that??? Most parts of the US, if you can get a T1 provisioned and installed in under 6 weeks, you pretty clearly have a deal with Satan. 8 weeks is more typical.
I can provide an explanation, but it depends on some complex theoretical physics so you'll have to bear with me.
One of the axes along which objects can move and be measured in the universe is called "time". Science has developed a whole collection of jargon to describe these transformations.
For instance, if a event A occurs at time point 10, and event B occurs at time point 20, we scientists say that event A occurred "before" (bee-four) event B.
Now I will apply this to the situation in question. Developers and reviewers have been receiving unofficial advance copies of OSX for some time now, during the entire period between 4K78 and mass pressing. Consumer copies were prepared in the past few days and are now going out. Therefore, we can use our new words (remember? Read the last few paragraphs again if you've forgotten) to say that some developer-seed copies were released "before" the final consumer version that is even now filling up Fedex trucks around the country.
A consequence of this is that if there were changes made to the software between when the earlier copies were released, and the later ones, then they will be different from each other.
For more information on concepts like these, check out this scientific site.
The icons have never been "stuck" anywhere. From day one you could move all the icons wherever you wanted them, and they would stay there. The only exceptions are the desktop icons automatically created when you insert a floppy or other removable, or mounted a network volume; those always appear as close to the upper-right as they can find available space.
Because MacOS actually has a usable interface.
Even if you're using tools that are available on other platforms, it's easier on the Mac. Everything from the smoother motion of the mouse (and the fact that the damn mouse cursor disappears when you start typing, unlike on Windows where it's always blocking whatever you're trying to do), to the easier-to-navigate file system, to the visuals, to the better drag-and-drop, just improves the experience.
I admin roomsfull of FreeBSD and Linux boxes. On my desk I have one NT machine and one Mac. The NT machine is used for exactly two things: Oracle admin tools (since they aren't available for Mac) and Internet Explorer (since it's faster under NT, at least compared to MacOS 9). For everything else I turn my chair to the Mac, because it's just such a more pleasant and productive experience. For me, that's well worth a few extra $$.
No it's not; it's not even a word. But if it were, it would mean "three medicine women."
I will third that. Have lots of Covad lines in various business sites; the installers are always friendly and competent, the service always works. For what it is, it can't be beat. Covad is my daddy.
I compare it to the Verizon DSL I have at home (they were the only game in town a few years ago when I signed up; now I'm too lazy to change, and I'm used to my static IP), and it's not even close. Verizon has frequent slowdowns and outages - frequent enough to annoy me but just shy of enough to push me to leaving. I would never again order Verizon if I had a choice, though: They simply don't know how to do data, or to provide decent customer service.
Every time I read one of these stories, I shudder at what would happen if Covad went away; there doesn't really seem to be a credible alternative. I'm guessing it'd be back to fractional T1 for many times the price.
What, are you insane? Just because they're knowingly taking a risk doesn't mean they're going to intentionally flush their money down the toilet.
I've never tried microwaving rice, but I imagine one nice aspect would be that it shuts itself off.
I cook rice 3 or 4 days a week, and at least once a week I get so caught up in something after I've put it on the stove, that I don't realize how much time has gone by until I have nothing but a pot of smoking mush.
Now my parents have a magnetic induction stove that seems to be the best of both worlds in the decidedly on-topic rice-cooking regard: It cooks like a stove but can be programmed to shut itself off.
I'm sure you could stay somewhere on the peninsula for cheap as well, but let's face it, everything south of Daly City is a suburban hellhole with jack to do at night - or in the daytime for that matter. SF's not that much better for nightlife, but at least it's civilized.
It shouldn't cost you more than $250 for a flight from anywhere in the continental US if you can book a couple weeks in advance. Look at Southwest, Priceline, and the various travel specials out there.
While yes, they do teach computer science (or the local equivalent) in every country, I don't think that's what you should focus on. You've said that you have the travel bug, so that's the itch to scratch. You can always take some summer make-up classes or whatever you need to do. Having lived in another country is far more valuable for you as a person, as an employee, as a friend, as a manager, as a spouse, as a parent, in almost any role you'll take on later in life, than having taken one more CS course.
Also bear in mind that you do not need to go on organized exchange programs that litters your international center with brochures and videotapes. You just have to find a school in a place that interests you, and convince your school to take their credits.
Most schools will take almost any halfway-decent student from almost any halfway-decent school for a semester, so don't sweat the admissions too much.
My advice to you would be to steer far clear of western Europe, especially UK, France & Italy - the countries where all the "I want to say I went overseas but I'm scared shitless of anything foreign" people go (you know the ones: They disappear for three months and come back with an accent to prove how cosmopolitan they've become). Head to Ecuador, to Korea, to Malaysia, to Kazakhstan, to Senegal, to Syria. Go somewhere interesting where you'll really learn something about yourself, and about the ways that life can be different from how it is at home.
This is for public use? Install a single SSL-enabled reverse proxy in front of your servers. Use a URL scheme that allows you to split the traffic as necessary.
Or, if it's for internal use, under no circumstances should you buy a certificate. There's absolutely no point.