Microtel SYSMAR801 PC With 900 MHz Duron 391.00 (128, 40gb)
Microtel SYSMAR802 PC With 1.3 GHz Duron $428.00 (128, 40gb)
Microtel SYSMAR803 PC With 1.3 GHz Celeron
$438.00 (128, 40gb)
Microtel SYSMAR804 PC With 1.3 GHz Duron and CD-RW $498.00 (256, 40gb)
Microtel SYSMAR805 PC With 1.3 GHz Celeron and CD-RW $498.00 (256, 40gb)
Microtel SYSMAR806 PC With 1.7 GHz Pentium 4
$528.00 (128, 40gb)
Microtel SYSMAR807 PC With 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 and CD-RW $588.00 (256, 40gb)
Microtel SYSMAR808 PC With 2.0 GHz Pentium 4$598.00 (256, 40gb)
Microtel SYSMAR809 PC With 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 and CD-RW $648.00 (256, 40gb)
The caption text for the cheap one is:
$391.00, Availability: Usually takes 1 to 7 business days to process before shipping,
128 MB memory, 40 GB hard drive, CD-ROM drive,
Ethernet connection, 56 Kbps modem, Mandrake 8.2 Linux OS, Monitor not included
Mainly the difference seems to be the processor speed and the memory included, all have 40 gb drives and no monitor.
I was reading Slashdot (http://www.Slashdot.org, a great geek / technical site) and found a story about someone there at the Dept. of Commerce Technology Administration soliciting input on Digital Rights Management (DRM). There was much to-do on this Slashdot report about the fact that your office was soliciting comments by July 11th, 2002, but that it was impossible to figure out how to do so via your website. This might possibly be interpreted as being disingenuous.
I'd like to suggest that you put more email addresses on your web page, as well as having a link about where to submit comments about specific topics. There are many technically literate and astute observers of technical trends and complex issues that read slashdot.
If you have issues about which you'd like technical people to vote, you can always ask slashdot to run the poll for you, or put it on your own website and mention it on TomsHardware.com, Slashdot.org, Arstechnica.com, etc. and they'll get you people with a range of technically well-considered opinions.
Please feel free to visit slashdot (it's a very widely read site) and post a message about where to find this DRM comment-solicitation link, be it a web-submit form or an email address. Or, respond to me, and I'll post the link there.
I guarantee once you have a valid link available, you'll find lots of people willing to provide constructive input.
thanks for your time, Cordially yours, -- Kevin Rice Buffalo grove, Illinois http://www.Justanyone.com kevin@justany one.com
Find a subject or area that interests you, and follow up on it by finding an open source project (see Sourceforge.net for good ideas).
Basically, find a module on CPAN that is neglected, or look for some idea that hasn't been done elsewhere, work on it and post it to the web, and get your claim to fame!
Another great idea is to help out with the CJAN (sourceforge has the project) and bone up on your Java skills, converting ideas from CPAN into Java and posting them on some kind of CJAN site. You'll
get Java experience,
help the community,
prove you can program well,
prove to a future employer that you know something, and
prove you're motivated to do good work you're not afraid for other programmers to use/read.
Some other ideas:
Don't be afraid to brag on the resume,
practice answering the top 50 interview questions believably, with good and truthful answers,
post your resume on lots of job boards,
create a kickin' homepage,
find old documents like howto's that you've written that are generally usefull to everyone and post them on your page,
Don't piss off Federal Judges. Municipal judges, maybe. State court judges, work real hard to be nice to 'em. Federal Judges - um, pretend they're God and remember you aren't.
Federal Judges are appointed by the President and approved by the senate. We have a lot of unfilled judgeships because it takes so long to put through the appointments. Congress, the President, the Supremes, the FBI, INS, and basically The Entire Federal Bureaucracy know many of their names personally and like to be in their good graces. They Get Things Done and they Dispense Justice to BAD GUYS.
I know, they probably eat cheesburgers and fart like the rest of us, but it's a very BAD thing to piss them off. These kind of courtroom stunts will get you put in small rooms with Bad Guys and your anatomy will never be the same.
"Don't play games with these guys! They can lock you up in a room and throw away the Room!" -Lithgow in 'Manhattan Project'.
use Ad Aware and discover what we already should have known. Bearshare and AudioGalaxy do, too. Big deal.
Zonealarm shows it's doing funky stuff.
The solution to this is: don't use them. Or, use a version of them that doesn't have the spyware. Limewire version 1.3 is a little slower but doens't have ads or spyware (but 1.7+ does).
It seems to me that Radio stations often determine what songs will be hits. How often have I heard songs that are plainly second rate just because they're by an already famous group?
Due to the limited number of radio stations, and the (probably very large) 'entertainment' budgets (read this as: bribe money set-asides) the record companies pay to have their leading albums played, the number of new independent and local bands played is very, very limited.
If the local bands and groups have a following from a bunch of gigs they play where people know them and like them, they will be playable locally. Trouble is, the station is typically owned by a large corporation. Strategic investment by radio media means less choice for us consumers.
Likewise, if local bands have airtime, they can make their own label and print CDs as they're needed, stocking record stores and via website sales.
There's more to minimizing rocket costs than bidding. Reform at NASA would be great too...
By the way, ----- GREAT ARTICLE !!! ------ (see the above link or click here
I really like your Rocket A Day Keeps the High Costs Away article. It makes a strong case.
What I hope for is NASA will get back to doing what it does best - research and development. It's not supposed to be a commercial venture. The entrenched interests of Boeing and Lockheed are in keeping the shuttle flying when we really need Big Dumb Booster(s).
NASA should stick with engineering studies that like characterizing components (studying all parameters and testing the heck out of different configurations). Example: turbocompressor pump designs (needed for rocket engines), high temperature and pressure effects on LOX, kerosene, ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, methoanol, etc. as fluids going through straight and bendy pipes of various sizes, looking at fluid breakdowns, viscous effects, etc. That way, engineers from rocket-building companies don't have to do repeat work and can just build the darn things.
>> We adopted XP earlier on and it's working for us
We've got to figure that the XP is "Extreme Progrmaming" as in the book by the same name (at This amazon.com link here.
Team programming, like code review paradigms of the past, increase effectiveness of programming, but do require significant personnell and management input. People working together closely calls for matching personalities and resolving tech approach disputes cordially and effectively. This means adding good technical management to the team. Management is supposedly a science, but like p-sychology there are hard areas and (throat-clearing noise)really SOFT science areas that defy characterization.
I'm somewhat more accurate when I'm the architect as well as developer;
Systems complexity determines uncertainty;
GOOD project management (not me - someone to run interference for me w/ management) can increase my effective productivity by 30-50% by assigning achievable tasks with adequate testing time;
BAD project management can cut my effectiveness to nearly zip likewise;
If I have free reign to do simplification / moderate rearchitecture as part of improvements, my effectiveness goes up again - I can solve underlying problems of bad code sections before they turn into TIME-CONSUMING BUGS.
All this adds up to good experience and a good corporate culture. Writing SIMPLE code that morons could debug (and whoever comes after you might just be one) saves tons of time and effort over the life of the code.
Book recommendation: "Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot" by Holub has great stuff about simplifying code and reducing uncertainty in software project time estimations.
Time Estimate Uncertainty == Complexity / (ProgrammerCompetence * GoodManagement)
Try Starband Starband.Com and get internet access via satellite. It works almost everywhere in North America. Equipment cost is less than $500. If you need more bandwidth, buy more than one subscription.
I believe download is DSL or better, probably 1.5 MB/sec, not sure. Upload IS included (2 way); this isn't an 'upload via phone' solution.
A friend of mine installed one 'cuz broadband access stinks in his area.
This is a simple solution. No land lines required.
several million people having access to do improvements and coding on a product;
100 people working part time on a project with some amount of dedication and coordination;
3 people working full time plus a good systems architect participating;
if those 3 people have 10 years experience or are now in college and writing hard-to-read academic code (with an assumption that an experienced coder will write easy-to-read code because they've seen so much schlock);
I would be happy to participate in an open source project, but they seldom are easy to jump into. You have to have task lists, simple routines to write, and a bunch of systems integrators to put those routines together into the code's baseline.
Plus, Mythical Man Month makes a strong case that systems complexity increases with the cube of the number of developers. This makes open source more susceptible to systems complexity issues due to the large number of people interacting with it.
Just some ideas... Anyone disagree with my presumptions?
I worked on a magazine subscription website cds.com in 1996 and had severe problems with addresses being too U.S.A. specific. The mainframe code (5000+ mainly Cobol programs) presumed fixed-byte records with a 13 character City Name field (USPS standards abbreviate all U.S. cities to 13 chars) and 7 chars for postal code.
The issue of International addresses (city names like 'Petrakalinosorvabad') was STICKY. Further complication: conversions between ASCII and EBCDIC !! So, the whole Unicode problem is thus even further afield.
This illustrates the size of the problem with huge amounts of legacy code that runs well, is debugged, but is out of date in international markets of today. UNICODE would solve some of this with addresses being printed in the actual national language. Imagine delivering mail to Saudi Arabia with the address in (gasp) ARABIC !
Americans presume that foreign postal workers read Engligh characters.
Mainframes that speak Linux and run RDBMS's are a first step to rewriting / converting this legacy code to the new international age. There's a lot of room for better service and greater efficiency - by encouraging non-U.S. postal workers to not have to speak english and therefore deliver our packages faster!
Unicode will solve problems, but create them, too.
Blowing up the landmine is often avoided by clearing crews, though I don't know why. My ideas are as follows:
lightly armored steamroller-type vehicles with human-foot-sized and weighted but very dumb appendages that stomp on the ground.
spring mounted human-weighted pogo sticks on a square platform suspended by a wheeled crane. Driver drives forward and bounces platform on ground ahead. Clears anti-personnel mines on rough ground.
vertical concentric steel tubes chained together, placed over active mine, with slack between tubes, held up by center tube. When lowered over mine, explodes up, channeling debris vertically.
There's a small company named Microware based in Des Moines that's been producing a small Real time operating system for at least 10 years. The OS is named "OS/9". It was popular for use in set top boxes. The interesting thing about it was that any component of the OS could be turned on/off while it was running; it used a dynamic lookup table to be able to reconfigure itself on the fly. Microsoft never would dream of a no-reboot-necessary-ever Op system! (or could it?) Microware used to have their OS in a lot of cable TV set top boxes. They've been purchased recently, and I don't know how widely they're used, but it was a pretty cool OS for a while!
Having a foam-rubber sound absorber box in which to enclose my old PC WOULD HAVE been great (running FreeSCO). But, my (relatively new) Linksys router has no fan and is ultra quiet. Plus, I don't worry about the hard drive, the CD Rom, or whatever other component that old PC had failing and bringing down the box.
Spider Their Site - Bandwidth Costs teach lessons
on
Sean In The Middle
·
· Score: 1
Here's a tool: SuperHTTP (off Download.com) will let you download an entire site.
I suggest getting it and spidering their site. The robot downloads every page on the site and that's a lot of bandwidth.
If they had a big public arrival, they'd get more respect.
What about keeping them safe from fanatical religious folk?
Fanatical government folk (military) might quarantine them.
Quarantine might be a good idea until establishing that they don't have any bugs that would kill us.
What do they eat? Us? (unlikely - if they can space travel, they can farm food. See also: "To Serve Man" Twilight Zone episode).
Negotiations for visiting rights would include behavioral norms. Anyone inside the U.S. would be required to abide by U.S. law.
What if they wanted to trade for something that we held precious - art, DNA samples of people or animals, etc. Ethics of DNA samples from humans are interesting if they intend to clone you.
Are the aliens best described as ET, Mork, Alien-the-movie, Independence-Day, Starman, Spock, Marvin the Martian, or Bill Clinton.
Why not just treat them like Canadians? Limited right of travel, polite deportation if nasty, various kinds of visa requirements.
And, my wife asks, what kind of shoes would they wear? Styles are important, you know.
A 'handful' is great. Natural trumps size by far. I, and lots of my friends (we've discussed this at length) agree - breast enhancement is for looking NOT touching.
We hate the artificial stuff. Girls that get it are looking for something you won't be able to give them.
If you want bigger breasts, take the Birth Control Pill and it'll happen, over time. Or, get pregnant once and they stay bigger. If you must do it (I stress MUST - cancer or something) get the fat implantation kind where they suction fat out of your butt and put it in your breasts. Much more natural.
Want to look better? Get an education and impress their brains, get self-esteem by joining a civic group like Jaycees, Kiwanis, etc., and get a body by working out doing something fun that you'll stick to.
Check out Starband.com for $60/month full 2-way communication.
My friend said they wanted $200 for installation - he's a CCNA/MCSE Siemens network engineer. For $50, you can take a test and be a 'certified starband installing engineer' which he is going to be doing. Starband is at http://www.Starband.com
Slashdot Mirror
The caption text for the cheap one is: $391.00, Availability: Usually takes 1 to 7 business days to process before shipping, 128 MB memory, 40 GB hard drive, CD-ROM drive, Ethernet connection, 56 Kbps modem, Mandrake 8.2 Linux OS, Monitor not included
Mainly the difference seems to be the processor speed and the memory included, all have 40 gb drives and no monitor.
Yeah, but can we buy one online from them via walmart.com?
Mr. Chris Israel:
y one.com
I was reading Slashdot (http://www.Slashdot.org, a great geek / technical site) and found a story about someone there at the Dept. of Commerce Technology Administration soliciting input on Digital Rights Management (DRM). There was much to-do on this Slashdot report about the fact that your office was soliciting comments by July 11th, 2002, but that it was impossible to figure out how to do so via your website. This might possibly be interpreted as being disingenuous.
I'd like to suggest that you put more email addresses on your web page, as well as having a link about where to submit comments about specific topics. There are many technically literate and astute observers of technical trends and complex issues that read slashdot.
If you have issues about which you'd like technical people to vote, you can always ask slashdot to run the poll for you, or put it on your own website and mention it on TomsHardware.com, Slashdot.org, Arstechnica.com, etc. and they'll get you people with a range of technically well-considered opinions.
Please feel free to visit slashdot (it's a very widely read site) and post a message about where to find this DRM comment-solicitation link, be it a web-submit form or an email address. Or, respond to me, and I'll post the link there.
I guarantee once you have a valid link available, you'll find lots of people willing to provide constructive input.
thanks for your time,
Cordially yours,
-- Kevin Rice
Buffalo grove, Illinois
http://www.Justanyone.com
kevin@justan
Basically, find a module on CPAN that is neglected, or look for some idea that hasn't been done elsewhere, work on it and post it to the web, and get your claim to fame!
Another great idea is to help out with the CJAN (sourceforge has the project) and bone up on your Java skills, converting ideas from CPAN into Java and posting them on some kind of CJAN site. You'll
Some other ideas:
- Don't be afraid to brag on the resume,
- practice answering the top 50 interview questions believably, with good and truthful answers,
- post your resume on lots of job boards,
- create a kickin' homepage,
- find old documents like howto's that you've written that are generally usefull to everyone and post them on your page,
- don't forget to wax your car! It's summer!
-- KevinWhy isn't there a version of Evolution for windows? It's great software - I'd pay for it if it wasn't free. And, NO VIRUSES!!!
Don't piss off Federal Judges. Municipal judges, maybe. State court judges, work real hard to be nice to 'em. Federal Judges - um, pretend they're God and remember you aren't.
Federal Judges are appointed by the President and approved by the senate. We have a lot of unfilled judgeships because it takes so long to put through the appointments. Congress, the President, the Supremes, the FBI, INS, and basically The Entire Federal Bureaucracy know many of their names personally and like to be in their good graces. They Get Things Done and they Dispense Justice to BAD GUYS.
I know, they probably eat cheesburgers and fart like the rest of us, but it's a very BAD thing to piss them off. These kind of courtroom stunts will get you put in small rooms with Bad Guys and your anatomy will never be the same.
"Don't play games with these guys! They can lock you up in a room and throw away the Room!" -Lithgow in 'Manhattan Project'.
I didn't get that link, anyone have a better one?
Let the private sector do the work. Fund cheaper engine technology! On to Mars!
I want to lend an opinion to this class action suit. I feel I have been wronged by MS and want compensation.
Where do I file? What jurisdiction?
use Ad Aware and discover what we already should have known. Bearshare and AudioGalaxy do, too. Big deal.
Zonealarm shows it's doing funky stuff.
The solution to this is: don't use them. Or, use a version of them that doesn't have the spyware. Limewire version 1.3 is a little slower but doens't have ads or spyware (but 1.7+ does).
-- Kevin
It seems to me that Radio stations often determine what songs will be hits. How often have I heard songs that are plainly second rate just because they're by an already famous group?
Due to the limited number of radio stations, and the (probably very large) 'entertainment' budgets (read this as: bribe money set-asides) the record companies pay to have their leading albums played, the number of new independent and local bands played is very, very limited.
If the local bands and groups have a following from a bunch of gigs they play where people know them and like them, they will be playable locally. Trouble is, the station is typically owned by a large corporation. Strategic investment by radio media means less choice for us consumers.
Likewise, if local bands have airtime, they can make their own label and print CDs as they're needed, stocking record stores and via website sales.
-- Kevin
By the way, ----- GREAT ARTICLE !!! ------ (see the above link or click here
I really like your Rocket A Day Keeps the High Costs Away article. It makes a strong case.
Some private/corporate groups are developing the launchers and hoping, though -Burt Rutan's EZ Rocket plane (xcor.com) and Pioneer Astronautics at pioneerastro.com.
What I hope for is NASA will get back to doing what it does best - research and development. It's not supposed to be a commercial venture. The entrenched interests of Boeing and Lockheed are in keeping the shuttle flying when we really need Big Dumb Booster(s).
NASA should stick with engineering studies that like characterizing components (studying all parameters and testing the heck out of different configurations). Example: turbocompressor pump designs (needed for rocket engines), high temperature and pressure effects on LOX, kerosene, ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, methoanol, etc. as fluids going through straight and bendy pipes of various sizes, looking at fluid breakdowns, viscous effects, etc. That way, engineers from rocket-building companies don't have to do repeat work and can just build the darn things.
my five cents, anyway. Again, Great article.
We've got to figure that the XP is "Extreme Progrmaming" as in the book by the same name (at This amazon.com link here.
Team programming, like code review paradigms of the past, increase effectiveness of programming, but do require significant personnell and management input. People working together closely calls for matching personalities and resolving tech approach disputes cordially and effectively. This means adding good technical management to the team. Management is supposedly a science, but like p-sychology there are hard areas and (throat-clearing noise)really SOFT science areas that defy characterization.
All this adds up to good experience and a good corporate culture. Writing SIMPLE code that morons could debug (and whoever comes after you might just be one) saves tons of time and effort over the life of the code.
Book recommendation: "Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot" by Holub has great stuff about simplifying code and reducing uncertainty in software project time estimations.
Time Estimate Uncertainty == Complexity / (ProgrammerCompetence * GoodManagement)
Has anyone done this personally? I'd love to do this - has anyone out there tried it?
Do the tools cost money? Are they easy to use?
Any experienced people, please respond...?
Try Starband Starband.Com and get internet access via satellite. It works almost everywhere in North America. Equipment cost is less than $500. If you need more bandwidth, buy more than one subscription. I believe download is DSL or better, probably 1.5 MB/sec, not sure. Upload IS included (2 way); this isn't an 'upload via phone' solution. A friend of mine installed one 'cuz broadband access stinks in his area. This is a simple solution. No land lines required.
I would be happy to participate in an open source project, but they seldom are easy to jump into. You have to have task lists, simple routines to write, and a bunch of systems integrators to put those routines together into the code's baseline.
Plus, Mythical Man Month makes a strong case that systems complexity increases with the cube of the number of developers. This makes open source more susceptible to systems complexity issues due to the large number of people interacting with it. Just some ideas... Anyone disagree with my presumptions?
The issue of International addresses (city names like 'Petrakalinosorvabad') was STICKY. Further complication: conversions between ASCII and EBCDIC !! So, the whole Unicode problem is thus even further afield.
This illustrates the size of the problem with huge amounts of legacy code that runs well, is debugged, but is out of date in international markets of today. UNICODE would solve some of this with addresses being printed in the actual national language. Imagine delivering mail to Saudi Arabia with the address in (gasp) ARABIC !
Americans presume that foreign postal workers read Engligh characters.
Mainframes that speak Linux and run RDBMS's are a first step to rewriting / converting this legacy code to the new international age. There's a lot of room for better service and greater efficiency - by encouraging non-U.S. postal workers to not have to speak english and therefore deliver our packages faster!
Unicode will solve problems, but create them, too.
There's a small company named Microware based in Des Moines that's been producing a small Real time operating system for at least 10 years. The OS is named "OS/9". It was popular for use in set top boxes. The interesting thing about it was that any component of the OS could be turned on/off while it was running; it used a dynamic lookup table to be able to reconfigure itself on the fly. Microsoft never would dream of a no-reboot-necessary-ever Op system! (or could it?) Microware used to have their OS in a lot of cable TV set top boxes. They've been purchased recently, and I don't know how widely they're used, but it was a pretty cool OS for a while!
Having a foam-rubber sound absorber box in which to enclose my old PC WOULD HAVE been great (running FreeSCO). But, my (relatively new) Linksys router has no fan and is ultra quiet. Plus, I don't worry about the hard drive, the CD Rom, or whatever other component that old PC had failing and bringing down the box.
Here's a tool: SuperHTTP (off Download.com) will let you download an entire site.
I suggest getting it and spidering their site. The robot downloads every page on the site and that's a lot of bandwidth.
Enjoy!
- If they had a big public arrival, they'd get more respect.
- What about keeping them safe from fanatical religious folk?
- Fanatical government folk (military) might quarantine them.
- Quarantine might be a good idea until establishing that they don't have any bugs that would kill us.
- What do they eat? Us? (unlikely - if they can space travel, they can farm food. See also: "To Serve Man" Twilight Zone episode).
- Negotiations for visiting rights would include behavioral norms. Anyone inside the U.S. would be required to abide by U.S. law.
- What if they wanted to trade for something that we held precious - art, DNA samples of people or animals, etc. Ethics of DNA samples from humans are interesting if they intend to clone you.
- Are the aliens best described as ET, Mork, Alien-the-movie, Independence-Day, Starman, Spock, Marvin the Martian, or Bill Clinton.
- Why not just treat them like Canadians? Limited right of travel, polite deportation if nasty, various kinds of visa requirements.
- And, my wife asks, what kind of shoes would they wear? Styles are important, you know.
Just some ideas.We hate the artificial stuff. Girls that get it are looking for something you won't be able to give them.
If you want bigger breasts, take the Birth Control Pill and it'll happen, over time. Or, get pregnant once and they stay bigger. If you must do it (I stress MUST - cancer or something) get the fat implantation kind where they suction fat out of your butt and put it in your breasts. Much more natural.
Want to look better? Get an education and impress their brains, get self-esteem by joining a civic group like Jaycees, Kiwanis, etc., and get a body by working out doing something fun that you'll stick to.
just my five cents.
Check out Starband.com for $60/month full 2-way communication.
My friend said they wanted $200 for installation - he's a CCNA/MCSE Siemens network engineer. For $50, you can take a test and be a 'certified starband installing engineer' which he is going to be doing. Starband is at http://www.Starband.com