For the cost of cable or satellite for a year ($70 * 12) = $840, you can afford to buy season sets of about ten series, assuming $80 per set, which is a high assumption; season sets frequently sell for a lot less.
And you get to keep it afterwards, and the quality is better than what you get on TV and without commercials.
So yeah, I canceled cable and haven't looked back. If you're willing to bend the law you can also get torrents if you want instant gratification. What the heck is the point of cable/satellite, unless you like sports?
I'm sure many fellow geeks who couldn't care less about sports feel the same way.
Speed limits and speeding tickets are a huge scam. They are mostly in place to generate revenue, not improve safety.
Speed limits should be abolished, and police officers merely told to pull over people who are driving recklessly. This would improve safety and eliminate some of the antagonism people have towards the police.
I was recently ticketed for doing 56 in a 40 zone. The problem is this 40 zone stops at the bottom of a highway offramp. I would have had to slam on the brakes to get from 70 (highway speed) to 40 in the amount of distance I was given to do it. This might have caused me to get rear-ended. Yet there was a speed trap just in front of the end of the ramp. There was hardly any traffic. I wasn't being unsafe. Yet they stopped me anyway.
They should go after the kids who do 90MPH in a 40 residential neighborhood with straight pipes on their cars making noise at 3AM. But there's not enough money in that.
If I have to answer a quick call while I'm driving, it is MUCH safer for me to simply pick up the phone and hold it to my face, talk, then hang up, than to reach for my bluetooth headset, try to get it on my head and adjusted right, make sure it pairs properly with the phone, then answer the call.
I avoid talking on the phone while I'm driving, but seriously, mandating headset use would make things arguably worse, not better, unless you ALWAYS have the headset on and ready to go, and I'm sure most of us don't. And most cars don't have handsfree speakerphone kits.
Exabyte got a foothold because they used the same mechanisms used in 8mm video tape decks. Since these were being mass-manufactured for consumer camcorders, the technology was already cheap.
It evolved to higher densities from there, but never got around the original problem that helical scan puts a LOT of stress on the tape so it's not good for any medium you are going to be doing a lot of write/read passes with.
Helical scan is the horribly unreliable technology that gave tape a bad rap.
The linear technologies such as DLT, LTO, and 9-track (which you mentioned) have always been reliable and capable formats.
Anyone who has substantial experience working with tape systems is happy to give Exabyte the finger. Their drives were pure junk from the very start, but were the only option for high density until the linear tech began to mature.
>I've actually yet to meet anyone whose ever done a successful restore of any significant amount of data from tape
That's because exabyte helical scan was absolute garbage in every way imaginable.
I've yet to understand why that format was so popular for so long. We couldn't go a few months without a failed tape or drive errors. Meanwhile the older DLT and the newer LTO systems were/are rock solid. We've only had one tape failure in the many years we've been running LTO, and we think it was a defective tape from the factory because it failed as soon as we put it in the drive.
No data loss. LTO is amazing. LTO5 is coming out soon, with 1.6TB per tape native. It's sweet stuff.
Once a bank tells you that a check you deposited is valid, the bank is now liable for that deposit. If the check ends up being fraudulent in this case, the bank is out the $200,000, not the customer who deposited it.
If we change the law so this is the case, banks will be a lot more thorough about checking the validity of deposited checks. Trust me.:)
>please start requiring restaurants to label their foods (on the menu)
This is a bad idea. While companies like Wendy's and Burger King can easily afford to do the lab work required to print up nutritional info for their plates, small family-owned restaurants cannot, and this will hurt them severely.
You need to think about ALL the ramifications of these sort of ideas before pushing them. Do you really want nothing but the Burger Kings and Pizza Huts to survive? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Any "idiot" that's been in IT and networking knows HOW to crimp their own connectors properly so that they work reliably.
If you can't trust your people to do the job correctly, then yes you may be forced to buy pre-made patch cords. This doesn't mean there's something inherently wrong with doing your own crimping; you just have to do it properly.
As someone who crimps our own cables at work, full agreement here.
I rarely have problems with self-crimped cables. Another group that crimped its own cables here was having all sorts of problems. Why? They were doing a lousy job of it.
Test every cable. Make sure the conductor order is correct. Make sure the conductors go all the way into the connector to the stop at the end. USE THE RIGHT CRIMPER. Some cheap crimpers don't crimp all the crimp points and leave the wires less mechanically supported. The crimp point that's usually missed is the one just behind the metal contacts, which is one of the most critical points of all.
And most importantly, make sure you are using the correct plug ends for the cable you are using! Stranded and solid conductor cables require different types of plug. Using the wrong one nets you a connection that works now but won't work later.
Re:behavioral problems have virtually disappeared
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As with many things, this is easier said than done.
When you're treated as an outcast, and no matter what you do, you're not allowed to be part of the crowd, you have no choice but retreat to the sides and spend time with the few friends you do have.
I had no interest in sports when I was a kid. I still don't, other than sometimes watching the Superbowl or World Series because they can be fun. That, combined with my intense interest in everything geeky, made me an outcast. What should I have done, pretend to like something I don't just so I could hang out with people who don't like me anyway?
I'm sorry, I'd rather have a small handful of friends I like than a large number of "friends" who I don't care for. I'd rather not have to pretend to be someone I'm not in order to get ahead. Abandoning who you are to conform to an ideal you don't care for is a heck of a lot worse than just accepting you are not part of the "in crowd" and working to live a happy life among those you *can* relate to.
So seriously, wake up, stop blaming yourself. Blame our culture for excluding those who are intellectual. Many other countries aren't like this; their scientists are celebrities. I wish we could be more like them.
I'm not sure I get this... Right now WB is making *some* money from streaming sites. This money is 100% pure profit, since all expenses are borne by the streaming sites. It's money flowing in that they have to do absolutely nothing for.
Yet they want to shut down their content on those sites. This will take their profit from some number X > $0 to $0.
It will be a net loss for WB. No money at all from streaming services.
I'm not sure I understand their business model. How does this make sense? I thought the entire point of a corporation was to make money, yet they are making less money by doing this. The music industry is completely batshit insane!
It's harder to regulate, and easier for people to get addicted and gamble away all their assets at home.
I'd much rather online gambling remain banned, and we unban brick and mortar casinos across the country. At least the latter can be regulated, brings money into the local economy, and gets people out of the house.
It's because being able to freely exchange information is one of the most important tenets of freedom. It goes completely against the desire of most governments, which is to gain power and subdue the populace.
Some people may think it's about "copyright infringement", it's not. It's about controlling the public. It always has been.
The same technology used to fight "copyright infringement" can be used to further much more sinister plans.
Be vigilant. Even if you don't pirate a single byte you need to fight this.
They won't bother you unless they're having performance problems on that node, and even then they only bother the top n% (not sure what n is) which is not necessarily 250GB.
250GB is just the floor for "we won't bother anyone under this amount".
Trust me, Comcast doesn't WANT to lose customers, and won't get rid of you unless you're causing real, actual problems. They may be greedy at times but they're not entirely stupid. $40 a month is better than $0.
Does it matter, as long as they get their work done?
Really, some people are too uptight about things. The only metric should be if an employee does their job. If they do their job and do it well, who cares if they visit an amusing website for a laugh to break up an otherwise dull day?
Not necessarily; even though people are struggling there are always people who are doing very well. Just a few of those pitching in can help considerably.
It never hurts to ask, the worst that can happen is "no".
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, only cable TV/satellite pays for the delivery of the shows, not the shows themselves. The shows are paid for with advertising.
So whether I records with a DVR and skip the ads, or watch a torrent, it's the same deal.
For the cost of cable or satellite for a year ($70 * 12) = $840, you can afford to buy season sets of about ten series, assuming $80 per set, which is a high assumption; season sets frequently sell for a lot less.
And you get to keep it afterwards, and the quality is better than what you get on TV and without commercials.
So yeah, I canceled cable and haven't looked back. If you're willing to bend the law you can also get torrents if you want instant gratification. What the heck is the point of cable/satellite, unless you like sports?
I'm sure many fellow geeks who couldn't care less about sports feel the same way.
Our anti-trust regulators no longer have balls.
I mean, they let AT&T buy Bellsouth, who they themselves split apart back in 1984.
If they let that happen, I can't see any chance they'll stop this.
Speed limits and speeding tickets are a huge scam. They are mostly in place to generate revenue, not improve safety.
Speed limits should be abolished, and police officers merely told to pull over people who are driving recklessly. This would improve safety and eliminate some of the antagonism people have towards the police.
I was recently ticketed for doing 56 in a 40 zone. The problem is this 40 zone stops at the bottom of a highway offramp. I would have had to slam on the brakes to get from 70 (highway speed) to 40 in the amount of distance I was given to do it. This might have caused me to get rear-ended. Yet there was a speed trap just in front of the end of the ramp. There was hardly any traffic. I wasn't being unsafe. Yet they stopped me anyway.
They should go after the kids who do 90MPH in a 40 residential neighborhood with straight pipes on their cars making noise at 3AM. But there's not enough money in that.
If I have to answer a quick call while I'm driving, it is MUCH safer for me to simply pick up the phone and hold it to my face, talk, then hang up, than to reach for my bluetooth headset, try to get it on my head and adjusted right, make sure it pairs properly with the phone, then answer the call.
I avoid talking on the phone while I'm driving, but seriously, mandating headset use would make things arguably worse, not better, unless you ALWAYS have the headset on and ready to go, and I'm sure most of us don't. And most cars don't have handsfree speakerphone kits.
Exabyte got a foothold because they used the same mechanisms used in 8mm video tape decks. Since these were being mass-manufactured for consumer camcorders, the technology was already cheap.
It evolved to higher densities from there, but never got around the original problem that helical scan puts a LOT of stress on the tape so it's not good for any medium you are going to be doing a lot of write/read passes with.
Helical scan is the horribly unreliable technology that gave tape a bad rap.
The linear technologies such as DLT, LTO, and 9-track (which you mentioned) have always been reliable and capable formats.
Anyone who has substantial experience working with tape systems is happy to give Exabyte the finger. Their drives were pure junk from the very start, but were the only option for high density until the linear tech began to mature.
>I've actually yet to meet anyone whose ever done a successful restore of any significant amount of data from tape
That's because exabyte helical scan was absolute garbage in every way imaginable.
I've yet to understand why that format was so popular for so long. We couldn't go a few months without a failed tape or drive errors. Meanwhile the older DLT and the newer LTO systems were/are rock solid. We've only had one tape failure in the many years we've been running LTO, and we think it was a defective tape from the factory because it failed as soon as we put it in the drive.
No data loss. LTO is amazing. LTO5 is coming out soon, with 1.6TB per tape native. It's sweet stuff.
Hmm, the solution to this problems seems obvious.
Once a bank tells you that a check you deposited is valid, the bank is now liable for that deposit. If the check ends up being fraudulent in this case, the bank is out the $200,000, not the customer who deposited it.
If we change the law so this is the case, banks will be a lot more thorough about checking the validity of deposited checks. Trust me. :)
You can use tar and serial ports.
Once you get the systems connected via serial, you can do something like this on the Xenix box:
tar cf /dev/serialdevice0 /home (or whatever directory you want to move)
then on the Linux box on the other end:
tar xpf /dev/ttyS0
will unpack the data. Tar hasn't changed much in decades, and works very well through pipes like this. Good luck. :)
Ack, I am not an idiot, I don't know why I typed "you're" instead of "your" there...
'If there is information that harms stability or the people, of course we will have to block it,'
If information can harm the stability of you're country, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!!
>please start requiring restaurants to label their foods (on the menu)
This is a bad idea. While companies like Wendy's and Burger King can easily afford to do the lab work required to print up nutritional info for their plates, small family-owned restaurants cannot, and this will hurt them severely.
You need to think about ALL the ramifications of these sort of ideas before pushing them. Do you really want nothing but the Burger Kings and Pizza Huts to survive? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Any "idiot" that's been in IT and networking knows HOW to crimp their own connectors properly so that they work reliably.
If you can't trust your people to do the job correctly, then yes you may be forced to buy pre-made patch cords. This doesn't mean there's something inherently wrong with doing your own crimping; you just have to do it properly.
As someone who crimps our own cables at work, full agreement here.
I rarely have problems with self-crimped cables. Another group that crimped its own cables here was having all sorts of problems. Why? They were doing a lousy job of it.
Test every cable. Make sure the conductor order is correct. Make sure the conductors go all the way into the connector to the stop at the end. USE THE RIGHT CRIMPER. Some cheap crimpers don't crimp all the crimp points and leave the wires less mechanically supported. The crimp point that's usually missed is the one just behind the metal contacts, which is one of the most critical points of all.
And most importantly, make sure you are using the correct plug ends for the cable you are using! Stranded and solid conductor cables require different types of plug. Using the wrong one nets you a connection that works now but won't work later.
As with many things, this is easier said than done.
When you're treated as an outcast, and no matter what you do, you're not allowed to be part of the crowd, you have no choice but retreat to the sides and spend time with the few friends you do have.
I had no interest in sports when I was a kid. I still don't, other than sometimes watching the Superbowl or World Series because they can be fun. That, combined with my intense interest in everything geeky, made me an outcast. What should I have done, pretend to like something I don't just so I could hang out with people who don't like me anyway?
I'm sorry, I'd rather have a small handful of friends I like than a large number of "friends" who I don't care for. I'd rather not have to pretend to be someone I'm not in order to get ahead. Abandoning who you are to conform to an ideal you don't care for is a heck of a lot worse than just accepting you are not part of the "in crowd" and working to live a happy life among those you *can* relate to.
So seriously, wake up, stop blaming yourself. Blame our culture for excluding those who are intellectual. Many other countries aren't like this; their scientists are celebrities. I wish we could be more like them.
I'm not sure I get this... Right now WB is making *some* money from streaming sites. This money is 100% pure profit, since all expenses are borne by the streaming sites. It's money flowing in that they have to do absolutely nothing for.
Yet they want to shut down their content on those sites. This will take their profit from some number X > $0 to $0.
It will be a net loss for WB. No money at all from streaming services.
I'm not sure I understand their business model. How does this make sense? I thought the entire point of a corporation was to make money, yet they are making less money by doing this. The music industry is completely batshit insane!
>Starting with Mac OS v.10.5, upgrade discs no longer checked to see if you had an older version already installed.
There was never any point to doing this. Since all Macs come with Mac OS X, *ALL* copies of OS X are "upgrades".
There's no such thing as a non-upgrade install of OS X, technically.
It's harder to regulate, and easier for people to get addicted and gamble away all their assets at home.
I'd much rather online gambling remain banned, and we unban brick and mortar casinos across the country. At least the latter can be regulated, brings money into the local economy, and gets people out of the house.
It's because being able to freely exchange information is one of the most important tenets of freedom. It goes completely against the desire of most governments, which is to gain power and subdue the populace.
Some people may think it's about "copyright infringement", it's not. It's about controlling the public. It always has been.
The same technology used to fight "copyright infringement" can be used to further much more sinister plans.
Be vigilant. Even if you don't pirate a single byte you need to fight this.
They won't bother you unless they're having performance problems on that node, and even then they only bother the top n% (not sure what n is) which is not necessarily 250GB.
250GB is just the floor for "we won't bother anyone under this amount".
Trust me, Comcast doesn't WANT to lose customers, and won't get rid of you unless you're causing real, actual problems. They may be greedy at times but they're not entirely stupid. $40 a month is better than $0.
Does it matter, as long as they get their work done?
Really, some people are too uptight about things. The only metric should be if an employee does their job. If they do their job and do it well, who cares if they visit an amusing website for a laugh to break up an otherwise dull day?
Not necessarily; even though people are struggling there are always people who are doing very well. Just a few of those pitching in can help considerably.
It never hurts to ask, the worst that can happen is "no".
It should be illegal to award damages higher than a certain percentage of the net worth of the losing party.
It's insane that any individual can be expected to pay $625,000 unless they are wealthy.
The ability for the defendant to pay should be considered when damages are decided. Our legal system is so seriously screwed up.
FRS radios operate in the 400MHz range, which is UHF just like you desire. So there you go. :)