Restored services? Makes up for it! Maybe I can figure out what a firewall is, after all!
If you can figure out a firewall, you can figure out port forwarding.
I actually did set up IPv6 on my local network, using HE's tunnel broker. I got everything working, including an IPv6 web, DNS, and mail server. I set up Linux, OS X, and WinXP dual-stack clients. I even then had some fun and set up an IPv6-only Windows 7 machine. I left it all up for about three weeks, then realized it was basically useless right now and turned it off.
IPv6 is a neat technology that will probably eventually arrive for the masses, *despite* the terrible transition plan.
If they ask for advice, you can advise on which computer you think will serve them *best*, but *best* should never ever mean "good enough".
Best computer for the person != best computing experience for the person
Some people really do want to just email, write documents, IM, and use Facebook. If the video stutters during Youtube, that's annoying but acceptable. What's best for them may be to spend as little as possible to get something workable, and to use that extra money in other aspects of their lives.
Spending $300 on a netbook and $200 elsewhere (new tires for their car, new music/movies, new clothes) may be better for the person than spending $500 on the computer and nothing on the other things. So yes, the netbook is not the best computing experience for the person, but it may be the best computer purchase.
That would be the smart way to do it, but Blizzard has not said that that is how they *will* do it.
People have complained that the bandwidth at a large event (100 people for example) would be too much. They could easily counter that statement with what you've said - but they haven't.
What annoys me worse is the new voice-recognition ones when they're asking for a numeric value. No, I don't want to say my zip code or date of birth; I might be in a public place. Most systems will let you punch it in anyways with touchtones, but some won't.
So you spend about half your waking hours doing stuff you don't care about? Let us know how that strategy works out for you after 10 or 20 wasted years.
I'm on year 11. The previous 5 years were spent working really hard, and caring about how projects at work went. When projects at work succeeded, I was ecstatic. When they failed or were cut due to outside business demands, I was mad and hurt. Then I poured my heart and soul into a project for 3 months, only to have it canceled on the day it was being rolled out. It turned out later this was a good decision, but at the time I was upset because all I could see was that they had killed my pet project. So I stopped trying to achieve satisfaction and status in life from work, and instead started treating work for what it is - a means to an end. My self-worth comes from things I do outside of paycheck hours, and I've been much, much happier.
I still try to do my best; I just don't get emotionally invested. Think of taking out the garbage or washing dishes. You need to do these things, and it's good to do them well, but you don't need to *care* about these things. You also don't have to hate them. Is it fun and exciting? No, but it's also not bad. It's just kind of there.
What's funny is that when you become emotionally detached from your work, it's easier to make decisions that would have otherwise been painful. Compromising on or sacrificing your "baby" (project) for the good of the company? No problem. Doing something that is technically atrocious but makes sense for the business? No problem. You start to think about ways to do what the business wants instead of what would bring you personally the most satisfaction - which ironically makes you a better employee. Way too many people get caught up in doing what they think is the right thing technically, regardless of what the business needs or wants. There's always the argument of what the business wants right now and what it needs long term, and you can still argue that - in fact it's your job to examine requirements and try and do what's best for the business both in the short and long term - but you don't have to be emotionally invested in the outcome.
Now for the math!
Let's assume the standard "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will", so 40 hours a week of work. Not 60, because after all, we're talking about someone who doesn't care about work.
There are about 260 weekdays in a year. Subtract 12 for holidays, 25 for vacation, and you're down to 223. There are 365*24 = 8760 hours in a year. Sleep: 365*8 = 2920 hours (33% of total) Waking hours = 8760-2920 = 5840 Work: 223*8 = 1784 hours (20% of total, 30% of waking) Free time: 8760-2920-1784 = 4056 hours (46% of total, 70% of waking)
You spend more time sleeping than you do working! Even if you had no holidays or vacation, work would still only be 23% of your time and 35% of your waking.
If you sleep 7 hours a night like me: Sleep: 365*7 = 2555 hours (29% of total) Waking hours = 8760-2920 = 6205 Work: 223*8 = 1784 hours (20% of total, 29% of waking) Free time: 8760-2920-1784 = 4056 hours (50% of total, 71% of waking)
So for 29% of my waking hours, I'm doing something that I neither love nor hate - and my happiness during the other 71% of my waking hours depends on what happens during those "me" hours, not on what happens in my workplace.
P.S. I wrote all of this at work. Even spreadsheets can be fun when you're using them to calculate silly things like waking hours.
>Unfortunately, since downloading numbers are hard/expensive to estimate with any accuracy,
Many games check for updates or otherwise dial home (send diagnostic info, hardware survey, etc). Any game that didn't have copy protection (so no reason to crack it and remove the dial-home part) could get a fair estimate of sales vs number of copies dialing home.
One thing nobody's brought up is that when learning a new alphabet (Roman vs Cyrillic vs Greek for example), you get to learn three whole new letter sets: Uppercase, lowercase, and handwriting, and usually in that order. If your writing will be read by non-native speakers, then they will likely be more familiar with the block letters.
PhoneGap is not an "external API" any more than any other piece of open source code is.
Open source is orthogonal to the issue; the same issues would exist were it closed source.
The title page for PhoneGap's website, is "Cross platform mobile framework". It's a 3rd party API for various device-specific features (geolocation, vibration, accelerometer, etc) and lets you access them from Javascript. Point your UIWebView at a website instead of local content and now you're loading and executing new interpreted code on the fly (Javascript that gets turned into system API calls). So yeah, this framework seems to be against Apple's rules of no external code loading and no interpreters.
The other thing to consider is that Apple has resisted allowing 3rd party APIs to become the development target. They want you to make an iPhone app, not a cross-platform PhoneGap app.
Moreover, while ideally there is no physical contact, in real live, heads crash.
Hard drives heads can crash. At rest, hard drive heads sit on the magnetic disc itself. Once the disc in the drive is spinning, hard drive heads float over the magnetic disc on a cushion of air. If that cushion fails somehow, the head hits the spinning disc and "crashes". CD lasers however sit a fixed height below the CD; there's no air cushion to fail. Since the CD laser doesn't (can't) change height relative to the disc, there's no way for it to touch the disc, short of applying a hammer or other blunt object.
Disks flex, and deform, as they're spun and stopped and spun and stopped.
Indeed - and data discs are spun at 40x the speed of an audio CD (depending on the drive), thus more stress on the disc itself.
So please do not assume that the wear of a music recording (with several minutes of consecutively recorded music) are handled or physically wear the same as randomly accessed data.
Newer CD drives are constant angular velocity (CAV) - they spin the same speed regardless of where you are reading on the disc, so access pattern (random vs sequential) won't change the stress on the disc. The extra stress comes from when the drive spins up and down because there are pauses between accesses, whereas a music CD will be started, spin continuously, then stop.
4. We would like to protect against natural disasters. For someone living in New Orleans, it would be nice to have a backup somewhere outside the path of Hurricane Katrina. Remote backups may be pretty much the only way to accomplish this, unless you're a frequent traveler and can hand-deliver backup media to remote locations.
If you actually have a remote site, UPS/Fedex will carry the tapes for you. You don't have to send your own human along. I imagine that with most home users the issue is that they don't have a reliable remote site to send tapes to, not that they can't get the tapes there.
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If you can figure out a firewall, you can figure out port forwarding.
I actually did set up IPv6 on my local network, using HE's tunnel broker. I got everything working, including an IPv6 web, DNS, and mail server. I set up Linux, OS X, and WinXP dual-stack clients. I even then had some fun and set up an IPv6-only Windows 7 machine. I left it all up for about three weeks, then realized it was basically useless right now and turned it off.
IPv6 is a neat technology that will probably eventually arrive for the masses, *despite* the terrible transition plan.
One option is a Femtocell, sold under all sorts of weird names. Basically it's a personal cell tower.
If I remember right, you're allowed to use that license for testing and development, but not production.
I use VMs every day both at home and work. VMs are only going to get more and more common, especially with XP mode in Windows 7.
You're also forgetting about games. Bejeweled and Solitaire don't benefit from gobs of RAM, but almost any major game does, from Sims to WoW to C&C.
Starcraft 2 is rumored to come with a 2 GB RAM recommendation, which really means 3 GB.
If that's so, then the manual needs to state why it should be done the official way and not the unofficial way.
And if not, what do I have to do?!?!
Best computer for the person != best computing experience for the person
Some people really do want to just email, write documents, IM, and use Facebook. If the video stutters during Youtube, that's annoying but acceptable. What's best for them may be to spend as little as possible to get something workable, and to use that extra money in other aspects of their lives.
Spending $300 on a netbook and $200 elsewhere (new tires for their car, new music/movies, new clothes) may be better for the person than spending $500 on the computer and nothing on the other things. So yes, the netbook is not the best computing experience for the person, but it may be the best computer purchase.
The downside is that the urge to tell people that you don't watch TV becomes very, very strong. :)
The main problem is that it's fairly easy to replace the first 4 steps with "download it", so they'd rather sell you a subscription.
What in the world does this have to do with hardware abuse detection sensors?
And what makes you think other vendors (who already have liquid detection sensors) won't add new sensors as well?
That would be the smart way to do it, but Blizzard has not said that that is how they *will* do it.
People have complained that the bandwidth at a large event (100 people for example) would be too much. They could easily counter that statement with what you've said - but they haven't.
To be fair, C&C3 works great on my Mac Pro. Wine has come a long way.
But that's what XP mode is for - running IE6 in XP on top of Windows 7.
>Why would Google negotiate with a one-doctor office on terms of a NDA, again?
They could, and should set up a standard contract and NDA if they want to service this market.
What annoys me worse is the new voice-recognition ones when they're asking for a numeric value. No, I don't want to say my zip code or date of birth; I might be in a public place. Most systems will let you punch it in anyways with touchtones, but some won't.
I had a boss who phrased this during my (positive) performance review as "it's not that you're that great, it's that everyone else sucks".
I'm on year 11. The previous 5 years were spent working really hard, and caring about how projects at work went. When projects at work succeeded, I was ecstatic. When they failed or were cut due to outside business demands, I was mad and hurt. Then I poured my heart and soul into a project for 3 months, only to have it canceled on the day it was being rolled out. It turned out later this was a good decision, but at the time I was upset because all I could see was that they had killed my pet project. So I stopped trying to achieve satisfaction and status in life from work, and instead started treating work for what it is - a means to an end. My self-worth comes from things I do outside of paycheck hours, and I've been much, much happier.
I still try to do my best; I just don't get emotionally invested. Think of taking out the garbage or washing dishes. You need to do these things, and it's good to do them well, but you don't need to *care* about these things. You also don't have to hate them. Is it fun and exciting? No, but it's also not bad. It's just kind of there.
What's funny is that when you become emotionally detached from your work, it's easier to make decisions that would have otherwise been painful. Compromising on or sacrificing your "baby" (project) for the good of the company? No problem. Doing something that is technically atrocious but makes sense for the business? No problem. You start to think about ways to do what the business wants instead of what would bring you personally the most satisfaction - which ironically makes you a better employee. Way too many people get caught up in doing what they think is the right thing technically, regardless of what the business needs or wants. There's always the argument of what the business wants right now and what it needs long term, and you can still argue that - in fact it's your job to examine requirements and try and do what's best for the business both in the short and long term - but you don't have to be emotionally invested in the outcome.
Now for the math!
Let's assume the standard "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will", so 40 hours a week of work. Not 60, because after all, we're talking about someone who doesn't care about work.
There are about 260 weekdays in a year. Subtract 12 for holidays, 25 for vacation, and you're down to 223.
There are 365*24 = 8760 hours in a year.
Sleep: 365*8 = 2920 hours (33% of total)
Waking hours = 8760-2920 = 5840
Work: 223*8 = 1784 hours (20% of total, 30% of waking)
Free time: 8760-2920-1784 = 4056 hours (46% of total, 70% of waking)
You spend more time sleeping than you do working! Even if you had no holidays or vacation, work would still only be 23% of your time and 35% of your waking.
If you sleep 7 hours a night like me:
Sleep: 365*7 = 2555 hours (29% of total)
Waking hours = 8760-2920 = 6205
Work: 223*8 = 1784 hours (20% of total, 29% of waking)
Free time: 8760-2920-1784 = 4056 hours (50% of total, 71% of waking)
So for 29% of my waking hours, I'm doing something that I neither love nor hate - and my happiness during the other 71% of my waking hours depends on what happens during those "me" hours, not on what happens in my workplace.
P.S. I wrote all of this at work. Even spreadsheets can be fun when you're using them to calculate silly things like waking hours.
Could be worse - you could have to be present at work during the day, and then work from home on top of that.
>Unfortunately, since downloading numbers are hard/expensive to estimate with any accuracy,
Many games check for updates or otherwise dial home (send diagnostic info, hardware survey, etc). Any game that didn't have copy protection (so no reason to crack it and remove the dial-home part) could get a fair estimate of sales vs number of copies dialing home.
5) all the data is wrong (screwed up the experiment, faulty sensors, etc), and you don't want people to use invalid data
Of course if this was the case, they would say "this data is wrong because of X,Y,Z" unless they're protecting their ego.
One thing nobody's brought up is that when learning a new alphabet (Roman vs Cyrillic vs Greek for example), you get to learn three whole new letter sets: Uppercase, lowercase, and handwriting, and usually in that order. If your writing will be read by non-native speakers, then they will likely be more familiar with the block letters.
Why not automate this and have the computer read it aloud?
Open source is orthogonal to the issue; the same issues would exist were it closed source.
The title page for PhoneGap's website, is "Cross platform mobile framework". It's a 3rd party API for various device-specific features (geolocation, vibration, accelerometer, etc) and lets you access them from Javascript. Point your UIWebView at a website instead of local content and now you're loading and executing new interpreted code on the fly (Javascript that gets turned into system API calls). So yeah, this framework seems to be against Apple's rules of no external code loading and no interpreters.
The other thing to consider is that Apple has resisted allowing 3rd party APIs to become the development target. They want you to make an iPhone app, not a cross-platform PhoneGap app.
Hard drives heads can crash. At rest, hard drive heads sit on the magnetic disc itself. Once the disc in the drive is spinning, hard drive heads float over the magnetic disc on a cushion of air. If that cushion fails somehow, the head hits the spinning disc and "crashes". CD lasers however sit a fixed height below the CD; there's no air cushion to fail. Since the CD laser doesn't (can't) change height relative to the disc, there's no way for it to touch the disc, short of applying a hammer or other blunt object.
Indeed - and data discs are spun at 40x the speed of an audio CD (depending on the drive), thus more stress on the disc itself.
Newer CD drives are constant angular velocity (CAV) - they spin the same speed regardless of where you are reading on the disc, so access pattern (random vs sequential) won't change the stress on the disc. The extra stress comes from when the drive spins up and down because there are pauses between accesses, whereas a music CD will be started, spin continuously, then stop.
Great summary, with one quibble:
If you actually have a remote site, UPS/Fedex will carry the tapes for you. You don't have to send your own human along. I imagine that with most home users the issue is that they don't have a reliable remote site to send tapes to, not that they can't get the tapes there.