Do any stores actually use real photo paper that has to be chemically developed like from film? I thought they all print photos inkjet style.
Yep, they actually use real photo paper. Your picture is simply projected on an extremely high-res CRT, and that gets the image onto the paper. I imagine CRT's are used because you don't end up with stair-stepping if the phosphors are shaped intelligently.
If they printed photos with an ink-jet, they wouldn't be so cheap.
I've been with IBM for six years (came in straight out of school), and my wife has been with IBM for sixteen years (also came in right out of school). We both get pretty routine pay raises (not every year, but close), and neither of us feels at all underpaid.
While we don't have kids, we do have a house and deep ties to the area.
Errr... U.S. Patents last about a decade and a half. Copyrights are indeed getting extended over and over, but before the latest extensions, they were already several decades.
You can MENTION competitors in ads (i.e. comparison benchmarks), but you shouldn't be drawing attention to them. Yes, Dell is the entrenched company they are trying to toss, but "Dell Rhymes with Hell" or "Dell Sucks" is not going to impress anybody.
For me, anyway, I am LESS likely to believe their claims if this is what they need to do to get attention. I am impressed by results, by numbers, not childish ads.
SirWired
P.S.
The "switcher" campaign was: 1) a bunch of plain-vanilla customer testimonials. It mentioned Microsoft, but it was not the "point" of the ad. The ads were mostly about how much the new users liked their Macs, not how much they hated their Windows. 2) completely ineffective. Apple's PC marketshare isn't any higher than it was before the campaign.
Whats the point of a mature ad campaign that nobody notices. An obnoxious one is almost always better.
That would be a valid point if you were selling soft drinks to teenagers. Then, plublicity is everything. Instead, you are selling servers to people who spend a lot of money on computers. People like that are generally not particularly impressed by childish, insecure ads. While you are allowed to have brash, bold, ad campaings, the general rule in corporate "stuff" advertising is NEVER ADVERTISE YOUR COMPETITION. If you do, the target of the campaign might get the idea that you are tyring a Jedi Mind Trick on him, and figure out that maybe he/she should take a closer look at the company your ad is telling him to ignore.
Ads that extol how great your stuff is are taken far more seriously than ads that say how much your competition sucks.
You can come up with a witty, fun way to do this (IBM's ads come to mind), without resorting to childish insults. (Sun Example: "Their servers run on twice the power and are slow [or something like that]. No wonder their name rhymes with HELL.")
Gimme a break... this is schoolyard recess crap. Most of us outgrew this in fourth grade.
While compound interest is a great tool for many people's retirement plans, ownership of land and houses is more secure in my opinion. At the least, you'll have a roof over your head for nothing (excepting taxes), and at best you'll have a passive income. Plus you'll have an assett that you can sell for a large (possibly tax-free) chunk of change, if you need a large wad of cash.
Tell that to the Japanese that got caught up in the Tokyo Real Estate bubble of the late '80's and early '90's. The collapse of that bubble is STILL being felt 17 years later. Prices are STILL not anywhere near where they were at the height of the bubble.
I'm not saying that the US is caught up in a bubble of that magnitude, but Real Estate certainly CAN drop in value, and it certainly CAN stagnate for an exteneded period of time.
Owning your own house can be a secure place to put your money. It is true that you now have a place to live if you can provide taxes. Owning other houses and speculative land purchases are no different from any other investment. If I need cash (beyond my $40+k emergency fund) I can sell any part of my diversified portfolio of index funds (Domestic stocks, international stocks, and bonds), and only pay taxes on my gains. There is nothing special about selling land vs. selling stocks. (Except that I sell my mutual funds in 10 minutes and have the money in my checking account tomorrow.)
Given the rental market, I could "retire" at the ripe age of 43, never having to lift a finger while bringing in at least $2k/month.
That's a nice idea, but it ignores several realities: 1) Your gross rental income may very well be $2k a month, but... 2) You need to pay insurance on the property. 3) You need to pay taxes on the property. 4) You must maintain the property. Think about the houses you live in... this is NOT a trivial cost. A roof job could easily eat up several months of rental income on a property. Same thing with a new A/C, new siding, etc. What are you going to eat in the meantime? Okay, you say, you will do the maintenance yourself... How is that different from a job? 5) Your tenent may stop paying, but refuse to leave. depending on the laws in your area, evicting him/her may take several months. They may trash the place before going. 6) You must pay income tax on whatever is left over. 7) Two words: Health insurance. A decent group plan offered by the IEEE runs $1,500 a month for the "Standard" Family plan. That is a GOOD rate.
Rental income can be a good source of income, but so can interest from Bonds, dividends from the stocks of utilities, abstracted-out rental income from a REIT, interst from a mortgage pool, etc. ---
The key to a secure retirement is diversification. Ownership of stocks, bonds, cash, and if it is your thing, Real Estate. You do not want your future tied up in a single asset class. No, diversification will not get you rich quick, but it does work.
There is nothing "magical" about Real Estate that somehow lets it transcend the Risk/Return ratio that covers every asset class. Real Estate is the current "fad". Before Real Estate it was tech stocks. Before that, Options and Commodities. Before that, junk bonds. The same things that are being said about Real Estate now, (low risk, high return) have been said about all those other things.
Repeat after me: "You cannot have low risk AND high return, no matter what you are investing in. Skill can reduce risk, but it cannot come anywhere close to eliminating it."
Yes, you can make a fast killing in Real Estate, just as you can make a killing in Bonds, Stocks, or even Cash. However, doing so requires luck, skill, and impeccable timing. (and usually immense amounts of leverage)
---
Own your assets outright, or aim for that as aggressively as possible.
This is also not correct. You should only aim to pay off all debt on all assets as soon as possible if you have an EXTREMELY low risk tolerance.
Offering to ship IBM a new HP laptop with Linux installed? Har-dee-freaking-har...
I guess he also forgot that IBM has absolutely no trouble making cool-running, low-power processors (see Blue Gene). The trouble is that Apple can't seem to get anybody to buy their systems, making it not worth IBM's trouble.
I have no doubt that IBM does not use the GPL for perfectly good reasons. Perhaps they have found some holes in the license, or something along those lines. In any case, IBM has been shoving Free software out the door at a decent clip. Maybe HP would have room to talk when they have an equivalent volume of free software that they have released.
If HP really wants credibility in the corporate marketplace for this stuff as something other than a commodity Linux server supplier, they need to put their money where their mouth is and do some serious investment in open-source software.
Actual customers REALLY see through the cheap shots at competitors, as it is usually a sign that you are all talk and no action. (i.e. Sun for the last few years. Look where all their tough talk has gotten them.)
They can ask Sun to release Solaris under the GPL after they have done the same for HP-UX. Until then, STFU.
SirWired
P.S. For those that suggest the BSD license as an appropriate source license for commercial software vendors. Not a chance. If a big company is going to give away its code for free (already a profit risk), it is certainly not going to let somebody else turn around and charge for it.
One advantage of inkjets that has been pointed out by many on this story is their photo quality compared to color lasers.
This is like saying a port-o-john is better than a pit toilet because it has deodorant in it. Technically true, but it still smells strongly like crap.
If you are a typical consumer that just wants to shove out prints from a digicam, just take your CF, CD-R, SD, whatever to your local drugstore, Wal-Mart, Target, random one-hour photo place, pay them 19 cents a piece, and they will do a much better job than ANY consumer-level inkjet printer.
The photos from a minilab will be more consistent, free of dithering, mostly waterproof, light resistant, and also guaranteed.
The photos from an inkjet mostly fade in sunlight (a few exceptions), are not waterproof, suffer from nasty dithering, and if you screw up, you just flushed your money down the toilet.
If you REALLY want to print out prints at home, then use a home dye-sub. Sony, Kodak, and Olympus make fine dye-sub printers. The prints only cost a little more than inkjet, and they are waterproof, UV resistant, and far higher quality (no dithering).
For non-photo printing, Lasers are superior in every way. Sharper text, cheaper supplies, faster, more reliable, etc.
Why no temperature sensors? That could compromise the sound quality of the speaker itself. Not my much, (if any), but audiophile types are picky.
Why no "protector circuits"? Any measurement of the signal can degrade the signal. In addition, the cutoff device itself (by necessisty a transistor-based device) would degrade the signal.
Having disks in parallel doesn't solve the latency problem, only increases the throughput.
Latency comes from three sources: 1) Head latency. 2) Rotational latency.
These are the two sources you have considered. Striping indeed does absolutely nothing to help there.
You forgot the third source of latency: 3) The-disk-is-busy-serving-another-request latency.
Your comment would be true for a primitive OS with a single-threaded I/O method, and/or a RAID system with no command queue.
Given that modern RAID systems are NOT primitive, I/O performance is no longer measured with rotational + head latency vs. throughput, because those measurements no longer make sense.
There are two kinds of performance measurements for modern disk subsystems: 1) MB/sec. (bandwidth) This is what most people think of when they think of throughput. 2) I/O / sec. This measurement is simply the reciprocal of the head+rotational latency in the case of a SINGLE DRIVE. However, in a multi-drive setup, max I/O / sec. increases proportionally with the number of drives, up to a point (eventually you hit the limits for the RAID controller, bandwidth, whatever).
If we measure latency a the time it takes a single drive to physically get the data given a single request, sure, mutiple drives don't help. If we measure latency as the amount of time between when the application asks for the data, and when the disk delivers it, RAID helps quite a bit, beacuse the different I/Os are distributed to multiple disk heads, each of which can contribute it's own I/O handling capacity.
Remote data transmission maxim, courtesy of Andrew S. Tannenbaum (The Minix guy):
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Seriously, transmitting many GB of data every day is going to cost you quite a bit of money for bandwidth cost alone, never mind storage.
An enterprise-quality tape drive, like a LTO drive, can be had for well under $1000 on ebay. If your company has a remote location, simply mail them a copy of the backup tape(s) once a week. Have them mail the old tapes back. Nothing could be simpler. Keep a copy on-site of course for more routine restores that don't involve the destruction of your data center.
The cheapest provider I found with a cursory web search was around $200/month for a puny 100GB of compressed storage. Ouch. You could pay off a drive + tapes + software pretty quick at those prices.
If you don't have a remote branch, there are numerous off-site document storage companies that will be more than happy to store your tapes for you.
Even an old LTO drive can pump data to tape at around 20-25MB/sec without breaking a sweat. While certainly restoring from an off-site tape is going to take 12-24 hours to physically get the tape to you, if you need the off-site tape, it is probably going to take you at least that long to get replacement hardware anyway.
Whatever method you choose, you MUST run restore tests. In my experience, a restore proceedure that is never tested ALWAYS fails, which causes rather extended restore times while you sort things out by hand.
The Lenovo deal had absolutely bupkis to do with servers. The PC business that IBM sold was losing money hand over fist. The PC division had absolutely no products in common with the server group. IBM even HELD ON to the part of the PC business that was making money, retail systems. The xSeries server line is integrated with the rest of the server group, and is quite profitable. What does the Lenovo deal have to do with anything?
IBM holds the #1 share in Blade Servers, and #2 overall in the Intel/AMD server space, AND the business makes money. Why on earth would they give it up?
Obviously, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. It all depends on what you want.
For sheer processor density, if you need complete servers, the IBM BladeCenter servers offer the most "Bang" (Fast), and they are fairly reliable and compact (Good). They are not cheap. They do have better density than the HP Blades. WETA Digital (Peter Jackson's FX company) uses them.
That will get you 2 server processors, two server-class IDE drives + 2 GigE ports + all peripherals (Power, KVM, CD, Mangement, GigE switches, SAN switches if you want, etc.) per one-half of a rack unit. This is well over twice the density of pizza box units when you count external peripherals like the networking switch, KVM, etc.
Google's setup is Fast and Cheap, but their hardware reliability is quite lousy. However, their clustering setup is specifically designed around expected hardware failure.
(As a side note, Google no longer uses bare boards for their basic nodes. They use fairly small and slow nodes with a LOT of RAM from some company I can't remember. They look kind of like over-sized hard drives.)
If you need crap-loads of raw computing power, in a relatively compact power-efficient chassis (1024 processors/rack), IBM's Blue Gene simply cannot be beat. This is Captial-F Fast, and Capital-G Good, but you certainly can't afford one. (While it provides more cycles for the watt and dollar than any other setup, it isn't exactly as simple as a Beowulf cluster.) And you would still need to buy pesky things like large GigE switches and storage. Check out the current issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development on IBM's website (or your local university library) for all sorts of juicy details.
[Yes, I am an IBM shill]
So realistically, you really need to look at your application. If it can tolerate failure of any individual node on a regular basis, get the cheapest stuff you can find that will fit in your space and CPU requirements. If node reliability is important, but space is not, 1U servers from any of the three major vendors (or Apple, if that is your thing) will do the job just fine. If you need reliability and space, then honestly IBM's BladeCenter boxen are the best, as long as they fit your application. (I am not just speaking as an IBM'er here... they really are the best blades out there.)
...one of the event's selected speakers, has promoted the hacker con as being one of the final bastions of open speech. Is this the birth of a new trend or is this simply geeks doing what they always do... spreading the word about something new and different going on in their world?"
Guys, this is a hacker con, not Babylon 5 brought to life... "Birth of a new trend"? Um, it's shameless PR, and it isn't unique to geeks.
Of course you are still liable for the tax. Otherwise, folks would just call over and over trying to determine more and more complicated ways to ask the same question, in the hopes of getting the IRS to screw up.
However, if the IRS makes a mistake with a tax question, you are freed from penalties and interest on the mistake. Yes, you still owe the tax you would have owed anyway, but you aren't going to jail either...
Ah, but please show me a mini-ITX machine as small as the Mac Mini with the following HW features:
1) Firewire 2) Dual USB Ports 3) DVI Port 4) A real Graphics Acclerator, instead of this "Shared Memory" crap that ships w/ low-end Wintel boxen. 5) Built-in CD-RW/DVD-ROM
Oh, and ship it for $525. (Price of the Mini + a keyboard and mouse.)
Yeah, you can buy a Shuttle that way, but compared to the mac Mini, those things are gigantic. The Mini is literally the size of five CD jewel cases. (Except for the laptop-style power supply, which sits on the floor, or other out-of-the-way location.)
So yes, the mini is something that has not been done before.
Why did I get a mini? I needed to do some PHP/MySQL development in a UNIX environment. I could have pieced together a Linux workstation for $350 or so, and then downloaded a distro and a copy of Eclipse, along with MySQL, and then beat everything into working properly. (Using my Windows-connected printer, getting Apache to play nice with PHP and MySQL, locking down all the "crap" services that seem to get turned on with every distro, beating the window manager into usability, etc.)
With my mini, I paid Apple $550, plugged it up, booted, downloaded XCode tools for free from Apple, followed some easy to find, and use, instructions on PHP and MySQL install, and one hour after taking it out of the box, I was writing code. I had a fully-functioning, BSD-based development environment for cheap. And I didn't have to waste my valuable free time fighing with the thing to get it to cooperate.
Things that are messy in Linux, like using Windows printers, took me about 30 seconds on the mac. It uses CUPS, just like Linux, but it has a front-end that is trivial to use.
While the UNIX dev workstation aspect certainly isn't Apple's target market, it sure came in handy for me.
If you expected to learn how to do system administraton, or other typical IT tasks from your Computer Science classes, you need an attitude re-adjustment.
They call it a "Computer Science" degree for a reason. Just like they don't teach you how to repair cars in Mech. Eng classes, and don't teach you how to pour concrete when becoming a Civil Engineer, they don't teach system administration when taking Computer Scinece classes.
The reason you took that extremely boring "Programming Languages 101" class was so you could understand the fundementals common to all computer languages so you could pick up Perl (or any computer language) with decent aptitude in a short period of time. If the jobs you want to apply for require Perl, or SQL, or BSD, or whatever, nothing is stopping you from picking these skills up on your own.
Being able to learn extremely quickly on your own, and pick up skills you need without taking classes is fundemental to anybody who wants to have a career longer than ten years. A Computer Science degree helps you with the "knack" for practical tasks.
Employers demand a Computer Science degree because they realize it's value. However, the shiny piece of paper does not exempt you, future employee, from picking up required practical skills on your own while you are in school. Yes, you could pick up the practical skills without school, (there are plenty of highly qualified IT folks out there without a college degree), but the degree really does make it easier in the long run.
Prior to my graduation, I had seven job offers, all lucrative, despite a slightly below-average GPA. (2.94 when applying for jobs.) Why? Prior to my Senior year, I had: 2.5 school years working the network helpdesk at my school 1 summer job where I obtained DoD security clearance, while doing lightweight computer security and more PC helpdesk-type work. 1 summer job doing lightweight Web DB front-ends 3 summers (starting in high-school) supervising a staff of two for the retail store of a summer camp. (Don't laugh. Employers like people skills.)
What clinched me that first job doing router support? Likely me telling my future employer how I had to go from being a hard-core Win 3.11 troubleshooter to doing Win95 registry hacking and network troubeshooting in three days, despite only having seen Win95 as a bunch screen shots prior to that.
Initiative and self-learning, in addition to your piece of paper; that is what gets you good jobs.
After less than six years out of school, I have co-authored two books, work sane hours in a low-cost of living part of the country, have a stable job for a well-established employer and clear over $90K/yr after bonuses.
It sounds to me like your school had a very solid CS program. A proper CS degree is NOT vocational training.
The simple fact is that something over 90% of code written in the world is database applications, and database-driven applications. Business computing runs on databases. To prepare yourselves for that kind of IT, a two-year degree from your local comm. college is more than enough.
A Computer Science degree is meant to teach you the many different ways of approaching problems that can be solved by computers. Personally, I have a Computer Engineering degree (1/2 CS, 1/2 EE). I also hated my Calculus classes, and I sucked at them. Like you, I have yet to touch an integral in my now 6-year technical career. I have not designed a single circuit, written a line of assembly, programmed a single UART, done higher mathematics of any kind, used an oscilloscope, calculated any truss loading, plotted light refraction, titrate any acids, been asked any questions on 20th Century social history, written any literary compositions, etc. In fact, I have not removed a single one of my old textbooks from my bookshelf at home, nor have I used directly a single thing I have learned in ANY of my college classes.
Those that do not understand the point of a B.S. degree would look upon that list of "useless" classes I had to take and wonder why I spent 4 years doing all that.
The point of a B.S. degree is to teach you how to solve a far wider range of problems than any course can cover. You are being taught to properly learn, and make your own contributions to the "state of the art". You cannot do that with a simple vocational program.
Employers understand this. My first job in the IT industry was top-level network router support for a network equipment manufacturer. I was essentially the last line of defense between the customer and the developer who wrote the code. My job was to isolate the issue to determine which code module was causing the network problem. On my first day, I had never seen a router in my entire life. I had never read a protocol trace, nor was I at all familiar with the products I was expected to be top-level support for. In six weeks, I was taking calls of the queue and doing my job. Since I was in top-level support, there was no knowledge base to read, nothing to Google, all my issues that I dealt with were new problems. The problems were solved by reading, and understanding the specs for approx. 30 different protocols, and using my intuition to guess which ones were causing the failure. The "knack" necessary to do that properly, and quickly, can't be taught in any one class, but it CAN be taught by teaching you how to "think". THAT is what all those "useless" classes were for.
Wise employers understand that a fresh CS grad, if properly taught, does NOT need vocational training. He/she does NOT need to have ever touched the language you are supposed to program in, or even recognize the hardware you are supposed to design. He/She is supposed to properly equipped to figure these things out on their own, and quickly.
"We'll port all of our software to your OS when you port your OS to POWER hardware, which, by the way, leaves your SPARC boxes completely in the dust. Don't your customers want their OS to run fast?
Even if the ELS frequency is being moved, it is still quite important to keep 121.5 clear, as that is also the standard voice aviation distress frequency. Aircraft voice radios can't tune into 406MHz.
I do something, like, ohhh -- say decrypt a satellite signal (which, mind you, is pouncing down on MY ROOF 24/7..) - I go to jail....then when I get out I have fines to pay that will take the majority of my paycheck for years to come.
Whatever.
So if your telephone emits eletromagnetic signals that hit the antenna of the mysterious black van across the street, the attendant Men In Cheap Suits wearing Shiny Badges are more than welcome to listen in any time they feel like it? After all, your signal hits the roof of THEIR VAN 24/7.
With the Ionic Breeze, I wouldn't lose sleep worrying about the ozone. However, I would stop using it and get a "real" ionizer because the ionic breeze cleans the air about as well as a fan with absolutely no filter involved.
Quick demonstration: 1) Run Ionic Breeze for 1 week. Clean plates with damp rag. 2) Run a decent-size floor fan for a week. Clean off the blades with a damp rag.
Compare the two.
If the fan has approx. the same amount of dirt as the Ionic Breeze(or even slightly less... remember the fan isn't even supposed to clean the air, and it only costs about $20), one could surmize that the Ionic Breeze merely collects dust in the same way that that just about every surface of your house collects dust over time, except this overpriced piece of crap will collect dust that happens to float by it's vertical surfaces, supplemented by it's truly pathetic air-moving ability.
Think about it for a second... A filter, or ionizer, can only clean air that passes through the device. Neither piece of equipment will effect air on the other side of the room. When air passes through an ionizer, the crap in the air sticks to the plates, or in the case of a filter, gets trapped. The particles in air on the other side of the room continue on, blissfully unaware.
A REAL cleaner, with a FAN, (a quite popular air-moving device, used for centuries) recognizes this fundemental principle, and is constructed to move as much air as possible through device without driving you insane with noise. The Ionic Breeze fails to recognize this, and moves about as much air as your CPU fan.
Remember, AIR THAT DOESN'T PASS THROUGH THE DEVICE DOESN'T GET CLEAN.
If you want an Ionizer, try a Freidrich C-90A. $500, but it actually works. You can use it to clean almost 500 sq. ft. An Ionic Breeze can handle the dirt load from about 14.
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Do any stores actually use real photo paper that has to be chemically developed like from film? I thought they all print photos inkjet style.
Yep, they actually use real photo paper. Your picture is simply projected on an extremely high-res CRT, and that gets the image onto the paper. I imagine CRT's are used because you don't end up with stair-stepping if the phosphors are shaped intelligently.
If they printed photos with an ink-jet, they wouldn't be so cheap.
SirWired
I've been with IBM for six years (came in straight out of school), and my wife has been with IBM for sixteen years (also came in right out of school). We both get pretty routine pay raises (not every year, but close), and neither of us feels at all underpaid.
While we don't have kids, we do have a house and deep ties to the area.
SirWired
Errr... U.S. Patents last about a decade and a half. Copyrights are indeed getting extended over and over, but before the latest extensions, they were already several decades.
SirWired
You can MENTION competitors in ads (i.e. comparison benchmarks), but you shouldn't be drawing attention to them. Yes, Dell is the entrenched company they are trying to toss, but "Dell Rhymes with Hell" or "Dell Sucks" is not going to impress anybody.
For me, anyway, I am LESS likely to believe their claims if this is what they need to do to get attention. I am impressed by results, by numbers, not childish ads.
SirWired
P.S.
The "switcher" campaign was:
1) a bunch of plain-vanilla customer testimonials. It mentioned Microsoft, but it was not the "point" of the ad. The ads were mostly about how much the new users liked their Macs, not how much they hated their Windows.
2) completely ineffective. Apple's PC marketshare isn't any higher than it was before the campaign.
Whats the point of a mature ad campaign that nobody notices. An obnoxious one is almost always better.
That would be a valid point if you were selling soft drinks to teenagers. Then, plublicity is everything. Instead, you are selling servers to people who spend a lot of money on computers. People like that are generally not particularly impressed by childish, insecure ads. While you are allowed to have brash, bold, ad campaings, the general rule in corporate "stuff" advertising is NEVER ADVERTISE YOUR COMPETITION. If you do, the target of the campaign might get the idea that you are tyring a Jedi Mind Trick on him, and figure out that maybe he/she should take a closer look at the company your ad is telling him to ignore.
Ads that extol how great your stuff is are taken far more seriously than ads that say how much your competition sucks.
You can come up with a witty, fun way to do this (IBM's ads come to mind), without resorting to childish insults. (Sun Example: "Their servers run on twice the power and are slow [or something like that]. No wonder their name rhymes with HELL.")
Gimme a break... this is schoolyard recess crap. Most of us outgrew this in fourth grade.
SirWired
While compound interest is a great tool for many people's retirement plans, ownership of land and houses is more secure in my opinion. At the least, you'll have a roof over your head for nothing (excepting taxes), and at best you'll have a passive income. Plus you'll have an assett that you can sell for a large (possibly tax-free) chunk of change, if you need a large wad of cash.
Tell that to the Japanese that got caught up in the Tokyo Real Estate bubble of the late '80's and early '90's. The collapse of that bubble is STILL being felt 17 years later. Prices are STILL not anywhere near where they were at the height of the bubble.
I'm not saying that the US is caught up in a bubble of that magnitude, but Real Estate certainly CAN drop in value, and it certainly CAN stagnate for an exteneded period of time.
Owning your own house can be a secure place to put your money. It is true that you now have a place to live if you can provide taxes. Owning other houses and speculative land purchases are no different from any other investment. If I need cash (beyond my $40+k emergency fund) I can sell any part of my diversified portfolio of index funds (Domestic stocks, international stocks, and bonds), and only pay taxes on my gains. There is nothing special about selling land vs. selling stocks. (Except that I sell my mutual funds in 10 minutes and have the money in my checking account tomorrow.)
Given the rental market, I could "retire" at the ripe age of 43, never having to lift a finger while bringing in at least $2k/month.
That's a nice idea, but it ignores several realities:
1) Your gross rental income may very well be $2k a month, but...
2) You need to pay insurance on the property.
3) You need to pay taxes on the property.
4) You must maintain the property. Think about the houses you live in... this is NOT a trivial cost. A roof job could easily eat up several months of rental income on a property. Same thing with a new A/C, new siding, etc. What are you going to eat in the meantime? Okay, you say, you will do the maintenance yourself... How is that different from a job?
5) Your tenent may stop paying, but refuse to leave. depending on the laws in your area, evicting him/her may take several months. They may trash the place before going.
6) You must pay income tax on whatever is left over.
7) Two words: Health insurance. A decent group plan offered by the IEEE runs $1,500 a month for the "Standard" Family plan. That is a GOOD rate.
Rental income can be a good source of income, but so can interest from Bonds, dividends from the stocks of utilities, abstracted-out rental income from a REIT, interst from a mortgage pool, etc.
---
The key to a secure retirement is diversification. Ownership of stocks, bonds, cash, and if it is your thing, Real Estate. You do not want your future tied up in a single asset class. No, diversification will not get you rich quick, but it does work.
There is nothing "magical" about Real Estate that somehow lets it transcend the Risk/Return ratio that covers every asset class. Real Estate is the current "fad". Before Real Estate it was tech stocks. Before that, Options and Commodities. Before that, junk bonds. The same things that are being said about Real Estate now, (low risk, high return) have been said about all those other things.
Repeat after me: "You cannot have low risk AND high return, no matter what you are investing in. Skill can reduce risk, but it cannot come anywhere close to eliminating it."
Yes, you can make a fast killing in Real Estate, just as you can make a killing in Bonds, Stocks, or even Cash. However, doing so requires luck, skill, and impeccable timing. (and usually immense amounts of leverage)
---
Own your assets outright, or aim for that as aggressively as possible.
This is also not correct. You should only aim to pay off all debt on all assets as soon as possible if you have an EXTREMELY low risk tolerance.
Offering to ship IBM a new HP laptop with Linux installed? Har-dee-freaking-har...
I guess he also forgot that IBM has absolutely no trouble making cool-running, low-power processors (see Blue Gene). The trouble is that Apple can't seem to get anybody to buy their systems, making it not worth IBM's trouble.
I have no doubt that IBM does not use the GPL for perfectly good reasons. Perhaps they have found some holes in the license, or something along those lines. In any case, IBM has been shoving Free software out the door at a decent clip. Maybe HP would have room to talk when they have an equivalent volume of free software that they have released.
If HP really wants credibility in the corporate marketplace for this stuff as something other than a commodity Linux server supplier, they need to put their money where their mouth is and do some serious investment in open-source software.
Actual customers REALLY see through the cheap shots at competitors, as it is usually a sign that you are all talk and no action. (i.e. Sun for the last few years. Look where all their tough talk has gotten them.)
They can ask Sun to release Solaris under the GPL after they have done the same for HP-UX. Until then, STFU.
SirWired
P.S. For those that suggest the BSD license as an appropriate source license for commercial software vendors. Not a chance. If a big company is going to give away its code for free (already a profit risk), it is certainly not going to let somebody else turn around and charge for it.
One advantage of inkjets that has been pointed out by many on this story is their photo quality compared to color lasers.
This is like saying a port-o-john is better than a pit toilet because it has deodorant in it. Technically true, but it still smells strongly like crap.
If you are a typical consumer that just wants to shove out prints from a digicam, just take your CF, CD-R, SD, whatever to your local drugstore, Wal-Mart, Target, random one-hour photo place, pay them 19 cents a piece, and they will do a much better job than ANY consumer-level inkjet printer.
The photos from a minilab will be more consistent, free of dithering, mostly waterproof, light resistant, and also guaranteed.
The photos from an inkjet mostly fade in sunlight (a few exceptions), are not waterproof, suffer from nasty dithering, and if you screw up, you just flushed your money down the toilet.
If you REALLY want to print out prints at home, then use a home dye-sub. Sony, Kodak, and Olympus make fine dye-sub printers. The prints only cost a little more than inkjet, and they are waterproof, UV resistant, and far higher quality (no dithering).
For non-photo printing, Lasers are superior in every way. Sharper text, cheaper supplies, faster, more reliable, etc.
SirWired
Why no temperature sensors? That could compromise the sound quality of the speaker itself. Not my much, (if any), but audiophile types are picky.
Why no "protector circuits"? Any measurement of the signal can degrade the signal. In addition, the cutoff device itself (by necessisty a transistor-based device) would degrade the signal.
Let me guess, knows nothing about audio.
SirWired
Having disks in parallel doesn't solve the latency problem, only increases the throughput.
Latency comes from three sources:
1) Head latency.
2) Rotational latency.
These are the two sources you have considered. Striping indeed does absolutely nothing to help there.
You forgot the third source of latency:
3) The-disk-is-busy-serving-another-request latency.
Your comment would be true for a primitive OS with a single-threaded I/O method, and/or a RAID system with no command queue.
Given that modern RAID systems are NOT primitive, I/O performance is no longer measured with rotational + head latency vs. throughput, because those measurements no longer make sense.
There are two kinds of performance measurements for modern disk subsystems:
1) MB/sec. (bandwidth) This is what most people think of when they think of throughput.
2) I/O / sec. This measurement is simply the reciprocal of the head+rotational latency in the case of a SINGLE DRIVE. However, in a multi-drive setup, max I/O / sec. increases proportionally with the number of drives, up to a point (eventually you hit the limits for the RAID controller, bandwidth, whatever).
If we measure latency a the time it takes a single drive to physically get the data given a single request, sure, mutiple drives don't help. If we measure latency as the amount of time between when the application asks for the data, and when the disk delivers it, RAID helps quite a bit, beacuse the different I/Os are distributed to multiple disk heads, each of which can contribute it's own I/O handling capacity.
SirWired
Remote data transmission maxim, courtesy of Andrew S. Tannenbaum (The Minix guy):
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Seriously, transmitting many GB of data every day is going to cost you quite a bit of money for bandwidth cost alone, never mind storage.
An enterprise-quality tape drive, like a LTO drive, can be had for well under $1000 on ebay. If your company has a remote location, simply mail them a copy of the backup tape(s) once a week. Have them mail the old tapes back. Nothing could be simpler. Keep a copy on-site of course for more routine restores that don't involve the destruction of your data center.
The cheapest provider I found with a cursory web search was around $200/month for a puny 100GB of compressed storage. Ouch. You could pay off a drive + tapes + software pretty quick at those prices.
If you don't have a remote branch, there are numerous off-site document storage companies that will be more than happy to store your tapes for you.
Even an old LTO drive can pump data to tape at around 20-25MB/sec without breaking a sweat. While certainly restoring from an off-site tape is going to take 12-24 hours to physically get the tape to you, if you need the off-site tape, it is probably going to take you at least that long to get replacement hardware anyway.
Whatever method you choose, you MUST run restore tests. In my experience, a restore proceedure that is never tested ALWAYS fails, which causes rather extended restore times while you sort things out by hand.
SirWired
I wish however is in control these days would spin off the "real hp" into a company unto its own
Already done several years ago. It's called Agilent.
SirWired
The Lenovo deal had absolutely bupkis to do with servers. The PC business that IBM sold was losing money hand over fist. The PC division had absolutely no products in common with the server group. IBM even HELD ON to the part of the PC business that was making money, retail systems. The xSeries server line is integrated with the rest of the server group, and is quite profitable. What does the Lenovo deal have to do with anything?
IBM holds the #1 share in Blade Servers, and #2 overall in the Intel/AMD server space, AND the business makes money. Why on earth would they give it up?
SirWired
Obviously, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. It all depends on what you want.
For sheer processor density, if you need complete servers, the IBM BladeCenter servers offer the most "Bang" (Fast), and they are fairly reliable and compact (Good). They are not cheap. They do have better density than the HP Blades. WETA Digital (Peter Jackson's FX company) uses them.
That will get you 2 server processors, two server-class IDE drives + 2 GigE ports + all peripherals (Power, KVM, CD, Mangement, GigE switches, SAN switches if you want, etc.) per one-half of a rack unit. This is well over twice the density of pizza box units when you count external peripherals like the networking switch, KVM, etc.
Google's setup is Fast and Cheap, but their hardware reliability is quite lousy. However, their clustering setup is specifically designed around expected hardware failure.
(As a side note, Google no longer uses bare boards for their basic nodes. They use fairly small and slow nodes with a LOT of RAM from some company I can't remember. They look kind of like over-sized hard drives.)
If you need crap-loads of raw computing power, in a relatively compact power-efficient chassis (1024 processors/rack), IBM's Blue Gene simply cannot be beat. This is Captial-F Fast, and Capital-G Good, but you certainly can't afford one. (While it provides more cycles for the watt and dollar than any other setup, it isn't exactly as simple as a Beowulf cluster.) And you would still need to buy pesky things like large GigE switches and storage. Check out the current issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development on IBM's website (or your local university library) for all sorts of juicy details.
[Yes, I am an IBM shill]
So realistically, you really need to look at your application. If it can tolerate failure of any individual node on a regular basis, get the cheapest stuff you can find that will fit in your space and CPU requirements. If node reliability is important, but space is not, 1U servers from any of the three major vendors (or Apple, if that is your thing) will do the job just fine. If you need reliability and space, then honestly IBM's BladeCenter boxen are the best, as long as they fit your application. (I am not just speaking as an IBM'er here... they really are the best blades out there.)
SirWired
With that said, anything from red books to technical documentation would be useful.
Oh, you mean these redbooks?
SirWired
...one of the event's selected speakers, has promoted the hacker con as being one of the final bastions of open speech. Is this the birth of a new trend or is this simply geeks doing what they always do... spreading the word about something new and different going on in their world?"
Guys, this is a hacker con, not Babylon 5 brought to life... "Birth of a new trend"? Um, it's shameless PR, and it isn't unique to geeks.
SirWired
Of course you are still liable for the tax. Otherwise, folks would just call over and over trying to determine more and more complicated ways to ask the same question, in the hopes of getting the IRS to screw up.
However, if the IRS makes a mistake with a tax question, you are freed from penalties and interest on the mistake. Yes, you still owe the tax you would have owed anyway, but you aren't going to jail either...
This seems like a fair compromise to me.
SirWired
Ah, but please show me a mini-ITX machine as small as the Mac Mini with the following HW features:
1) Firewire
2) Dual USB Ports
3) DVI Port
4) A real Graphics Acclerator, instead of this "Shared Memory" crap that ships w/ low-end Wintel boxen.
5) Built-in CD-RW/DVD-ROM
Oh, and ship it for $525. (Price of the Mini + a keyboard and mouse.)
Yeah, you can buy a Shuttle that way, but compared to the mac Mini, those things are gigantic. The Mini is literally the size of five CD jewel cases. (Except for the laptop-style power supply, which sits on the floor, or other out-of-the-way location.)
So yes, the mini is something that has not been done before.
Why did I get a mini? I needed to do some PHP/MySQL development in a UNIX environment. I could have pieced together a Linux workstation for $350 or so, and then downloaded a distro and a copy of Eclipse, along with MySQL, and then beat everything into working properly. (Using my Windows-connected printer, getting Apache to play nice with PHP and MySQL, locking down all the "crap" services that seem to get turned on with every distro, beating the window manager into usability, etc.)
With my mini, I paid Apple $550, plugged it up, booted, downloaded XCode tools for free from Apple, followed some easy to find, and use, instructions on PHP and MySQL install, and one hour after taking it out of the box, I was writing code. I had a fully-functioning, BSD-based development environment for cheap. And I didn't have to waste my valuable free time fighing with the thing to get it to cooperate.
Things that are messy in Linux, like using Windows printers, took me about 30 seconds on the mac. It uses CUPS, just like Linux, but it has a front-end that is trivial to use.
While the UNIX dev workstation aspect certainly isn't Apple's target market, it sure came in handy for me.
SirWired
If you expected to learn how to do system administraton, or other typical IT tasks from your Computer Science classes, you need an attitude re-adjustment.
They call it a "Computer Science" degree for a reason. Just like they don't teach you how to repair cars in Mech. Eng classes, and don't teach you how to pour concrete when becoming a Civil Engineer, they don't teach system administration when taking Computer Scinece classes.
The reason you took that extremely boring "Programming Languages 101" class was so you could understand the fundementals common to all computer languages so you could pick up Perl (or any computer language) with decent aptitude in a short period of time. If the jobs you want to apply for require Perl, or SQL, or BSD, or whatever, nothing is stopping you from picking these skills up on your own.
Being able to learn extremely quickly on your own, and pick up skills you need without taking classes is fundemental to anybody who wants to have a career longer than ten years. A Computer Science degree helps you with the "knack" for practical tasks.
Employers demand a Computer Science degree because they realize it's value. However, the shiny piece of paper does not exempt you, future employee, from picking up required practical skills on your own while you are in school. Yes, you could pick up the practical skills without school, (there are plenty of highly qualified IT folks out there without a college degree), but the degree really does make it easier in the long run.
Prior to my graduation, I had seven job offers, all lucrative, despite a slightly below-average GPA. (2.94 when applying for jobs.) Why? Prior to my Senior year, I had:
2.5 school years working the network helpdesk at my school
1 summer job where I obtained DoD security clearance, while doing lightweight computer security and more PC helpdesk-type work.
1 summer job doing lightweight Web DB front-ends
3 summers (starting in high-school) supervising a staff of two for the retail store of a summer camp. (Don't laugh. Employers like people skills.)
What clinched me that first job doing router support? Likely me telling my future employer how I had to go from being a hard-core Win 3.11 troubleshooter to doing Win95 registry hacking and network troubeshooting in three days, despite only having seen Win95 as a bunch screen shots prior to that.
Initiative and self-learning, in addition to your piece of paper; that is what gets you good jobs.
After less than six years out of school, I have co-authored two books, work sane hours in a low-cost of living part of the country, have a stable job for a well-established employer and clear over $90K/yr after bonuses.
SirWired
It sounds to me like your school had a very solid CS program. A proper CS degree is NOT vocational training.
The simple fact is that something over 90% of code written in the world is database applications, and database-driven applications. Business computing runs on databases. To prepare yourselves for that kind of IT, a two-year degree from your local comm. college is more than enough.
A Computer Science degree is meant to teach you the many different ways of approaching problems that can be solved by computers. Personally, I have a Computer Engineering degree (1/2 CS, 1/2 EE). I also hated my Calculus classes, and I sucked at them. Like you, I have yet to touch an integral in my now 6-year technical career. I have not designed a single circuit, written a line of assembly, programmed a single UART, done higher mathematics of any kind, used an oscilloscope, calculated any truss loading, plotted light refraction, titrate any acids, been asked any questions on 20th Century social history, written any literary compositions, etc. In fact, I have not removed a single one of my old textbooks from my bookshelf at home, nor have I used directly a single thing I have learned in ANY of my college classes.
Those that do not understand the point of a B.S. degree would look upon that list of "useless" classes I had to take and wonder why I spent 4 years doing all that.
The point of a B.S. degree is to teach you how to solve a far wider range of problems than any course can cover. You are being taught to properly learn, and make your own contributions to the "state of the art". You cannot do that with a simple vocational program.
Employers understand this. My first job in the IT industry was top-level network router support for a network equipment manufacturer. I was essentially the last line of defense between the customer and the developer who wrote the code. My job was to isolate the issue to determine which code module was causing the network problem. On my first day, I had never seen a router in my entire life. I had never read a protocol trace, nor was I at all familiar with the products I was expected to be top-level support for. In six weeks, I was taking calls of the queue and doing my job. Since I was in top-level support, there was no knowledge base to read, nothing to Google, all my issues that I dealt with were new problems. The problems were solved by reading, and understanding the specs for approx. 30 different protocols, and using my intuition to guess which ones were causing the failure. The "knack" necessary to do that properly, and quickly, can't be taught in any one class, but it CAN be taught by teaching you how to "think". THAT is what all those "useless" classes were for.
Wise employers understand that a fresh CS grad, if properly taught, does NOT need vocational training. He/she does NOT need to have ever touched the language you are supposed to program in, or even recognize the hardware you are supposed to design. He/She is supposed to properly equipped to figure these things out on their own, and quickly.
SirWired
I suppose IBM could reply with:
"We'll port all of our software to your OS when you port your OS to POWER hardware, which, by the way, leaves your SPARC boxes completely in the dust. Don't your customers want their OS to run fast?
SirWired
Even if the ELS frequency is being moved, it is still quite important to keep 121.5 clear, as that is also the standard voice aviation distress frequency. Aircraft voice radios can't tune into 406MHz.
SirWired
Folks, the 97k is a base unit, with dual, bulletproof controllers, and the minimum amount of storage. Doubling the storage does not double the price.
SirWired
I do something, like, ohhh -- say decrypt a satellite signal (which, mind you, is pouncing down on MY ROOF 24/7..) - I go to jail....then when I get out I have fines to pay that will take the majority of my paycheck for years to come.
Whatever.
So if your telephone emits eletromagnetic signals that hit the antenna of the mysterious black van across the street, the attendant Men In Cheap Suits wearing Shiny Badges are more than welcome to listen in any time they feel like it? After all, your signal hits the roof of THEIR VAN 24/7.
SirWired
With the Ionic Breeze, I wouldn't lose sleep worrying about the ozone. However, I would stop using it and get a "real" ionizer because the ionic breeze cleans the air about as well as a fan with absolutely no filter involved.
Quick demonstration:
1) Run Ionic Breeze for 1 week. Clean plates with damp rag.
2) Run a decent-size floor fan for a week. Clean off the blades with a damp rag.
Compare the two.
If the fan has approx. the same amount of dirt as the Ionic Breeze(or even slightly less... remember the fan isn't even supposed to clean the air, and it only costs about $20), one could surmize that the Ionic Breeze merely collects dust in the same way that that just about every surface of your house collects dust over time, except this overpriced piece of crap will collect dust that happens to float by it's vertical surfaces, supplemented by it's truly pathetic air-moving ability.
Think about it for a second... A filter, or ionizer, can only clean air that passes through the device. Neither piece of equipment will effect air on the other side of the room. When air passes through an ionizer, the crap in the air sticks to the plates, or in the case of a filter, gets trapped. The particles in air on the other side of the room continue on, blissfully unaware.
A REAL cleaner, with a FAN, (a quite popular air-moving device, used for centuries) recognizes this fundemental principle, and is constructed to move as much air as possible through device without driving you insane with noise. The Ionic Breeze fails to recognize this, and moves about as much air as your CPU fan.
Remember, AIR THAT DOESN'T PASS THROUGH THE DEVICE DOESN'T GET CLEAN.
If you want an Ionizer, try a Freidrich C-90A. $500, but it actually works. You can use it to clean almost 500 sq. ft. An Ionic Breeze can handle the dirt load from about 14.