I'm sure that Microsoft also *hates* having to use Akamai servers for anything, due to Akamai's understandable reliance on Linux for core services.
You don't research before you post do you? I dunno about all but many msn sites use either savvis or akamai for content caching. putting heavy objects near the client speeds page load times and that is more important than not using a service that might have linux underpinnings.
also, as others point out, any corp is going to be using internal dns. same is true for any ISPs. Truthfully i don't see this being that big of an issue. at worst, traffic will double to the root servers as we have to request a ipv4 and a v6. But it isn't going to happen overnight, there may be a budgetting issue but adding the capacity to a datacenter farm like that should be fairly simple.
Regardless of what wall you put up, somebody is going to find a way around it. The only thing you can do is limit your attack vectors and then limit the damage they can do.
The real issue here is what you brought up in your first point. what is considered "nasty"? Firefox? Apple.com? Will we turn on a list in china to comply w/ their rules? This has to be user controlable or it is worse than useless.
I know we all love to hate MS but this is a good idea. First off, I have seen first hand some of MSResearch fairs and they is a lot of great stuff coming out of them. Anything that comes out of those labs is worth at least some thought before you dismiss it.
That aside, stripping nasties using a simple system before they reach a more complex system isn't really a bad idea. All of our mail servers have some sort of filter that does this (granted, more for dumb users). IIS 5 did this using a tool that was later built into IIS 6. Hell, firewalls aren't a much different idea. Most of us already run some sort of proxy software to block popups, scripts, or ads. All MS is proposing here is the equivalent of proximity or similar proxy software.
MS is already in the ad business. It is the primary source of revenue for MSN and they have decided to push it more agressively.
Ads aren't going anywhere. It is an industry unto itself. Saying google only has one revenue stream in ads is like saying Microsoft only has one revenue stream in software.
Yeah, THey make good money in adds. Nearly $2.5bil net/annum . But, while that sounds like alot of money to you and me (and most companies), to MS, it is only like 5% of yearly profit. It is a nice business to keep around but hardly the company focus.
You really have no clue. Besides that it isn't till the 3rd step that you ask your "higher power" to help beat whatever your addiction is, there are many steps of acting "like a man" as you put it. 9 is usually "Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others". Isn't that your "acting like a man"? "Making a fearless moral inventory" is no picnic, even for those of us w/o serious addiction issues.
I am not a 12 stepper but I have seen many people really successfully turn their lives around through the support of a 12 step group.
This isn't so outlandish. I use windows on most of my home machines and i have little to no spyware. (that I or my tools know of).
I often forget how bad it is to use a machine that is constantly doing things you didn't ask it to. Every now and then, I go to a friend/family's machine and I am sickened by the amount of crap that is on there. I assume most/.ers are savvy enough to keep their machine mostly clean. We all know this. I know quite a few MSers and they are mostly savvy enough to keep their machines mostly clean too. If you know what you are doing you know what to expect from your machine and if it does something you don't expect, you notice. if you don't know what you are doing, the machine is constantly doing things you don't expect so you don't know what is "evil" and what is expected.
I am not saying Ballmer isn't clueless to a lot of things. I am also not saying that MS didn't know about the spyware problem. What I am assuming is that the client support types who really knew the depth of the problem had processes in place to deal w/ their workload. When a high level exec at any company sees the extent of a problem and decides to focus on it, big shit happens. IN this case, a new department/product was created.
as sad as it is, i did eventually get to the point where I could beat it straight through w/out dying. Just quest one though, I never did do it for quest 2.
Another fun zelda story is that it was the first game that got my father addicted. We would wake up in the morning during that time and he would be asleep on the couch w/ the contine/save/retry screen. The sad thing was that the first time he made it to level nine, I beat the game while he wasn't there. Second time, he worked his way up there, he lost the save game. Third time, my cousin beat it. It took him four times to get to the end until he was finally able to beat it.
what is w/ all this drek about ID. I know the poster included the flamebait in the article description but can't anybody have a discussion on the actual mechanics of how bees fly?
I mean c'mon that's why i use slashdot, am I going to have to actually read the article to get that?
I mean partitioning in this way... Logically segregate functional areas. Don't put your business logic in the db. Don't intermingle your static and your dynamic content. Draw out your application and define strict interaction between functions. If you are going this far, separate your view controls from your middle tier business logic. This will allow you to pull the app apart as it grows without major reworking. As others have mentioned, separate web sites for static and dynamic content is a start (even if they live on teh same machine).
One thing I didn't mention is the importance of load testing. Make sure you do this. Until you perform the load test you are really just flying blind. Profile your app while you do this to allow you to focus your optimizations. You may be able to write your (i assume) php scripts to gain some efficiencies but if you tests reveal that 85% of your response time is due to db queries, work on the db. It all becomes common sense once you have good statistics in front of you. Even when you do this, remember that the load test simulation is not going to be exact. You will cache the big issues but perhaps not all of the issues.
Remember this is an iteritive process. change, test, wash, rinse, repeat. Establish a baseline and test your changes to see how they effect your app.
At the end of the day, hardware is cheaper than manpower. or downtime, hopefully. Don't try to squeeze every last ounce out of your hardware. Often you will waste much more money/time in manpower and outages than if you just bought a few extra machines in your initial order.
Also, remember to use client browser caching intelligently. Some objects on your pages will be very dynamic and will need a round trip to your site for each request but most of your site will not be that dynamic. Set the default cache for objects at 1 day and specify shorter times in the specific modules that need it. There are many levels of caching involved in a full web application and make sure you learn them all, they are invaluable (db caches, web server caches, memory caches, client browser caches, content provider caches). You can also consider sending anything that isn't tooo dynamic to your content provider (savvis, et al).
There are couple of things here but the first and foremost point is to partion your app. Loose coupling is the name of the game. This will give you the ability to upgrade hard hit parts of your app individually.
Note that where this all lives on teh hardware is really immaterial if you partion it correctly. If something is taking too much power, move it to it's own setup.
Static content is relatively straight forward. Have a specific web service for your static content (css, img, scripts, swf, etc). If your service grows to necessitate it, get a content caching service (akamai, savvis, mirrorimage). This part of your site will be teh most able to scale quickly (read immediately) as they are already pushing enough traffic to make yours basically immaterial.
You will need some sort of load balancing solution. Something like NLB is fine if you can't afford dedicated hardware. Not sure what the current hotness on linux is but I am sure somebody here will chime in on that.
Make sure your application layer is stateless as much as possible. If you do this correctly, you can add web heads as neceessary to handle the traffic. If you do have to rely on state you can either keep it in the client (know that they will lie to you and handle appropriately) or keep it in the db. If you absolutely must keep state at the web head, accept that at least 5% of your traffic is going to bounce around between boxes no matter what sort of sticky algorithms you use at the load balancer. This is a function of one user coming through different IPs between clicks (due to large network routing) and there is really little you are going to do about it. Web heads are cheap and make sure you have plenty so you can yank them out for maintenance (planned or otherwise) while the service still runs.
The db's are always the hardest part. At the end of the day, all the data has to live somewhere. Your db's will probably be the most expensive part of your app. Make sure you take advantage of the full IO of the system by partitioning: logging on one set of spindles, each heavily used db on it's own set of spindles as much as possible. If your dbs are read only, you can put them behind a load balancer but if they are read/write that may not be an option. A preferred way in the win world is to have clusters and a SAN but that is expensive. A less expensive way is to have a replicated warm failover available for a scripted save.
Keep in mind that you will be taking chunks of your system out for maintenance (planned and unplanned) so make sure each function is replicated across at least two pieces of hardware.
some other points... make sure you keep stats and watch your trends. It is unlikely you will drastically change your traffic patterns overnight (barring an Event). Have a relationship w/ your supplier and know how long new hardware takes to be delivered. If you can afford it, keep your peak traffic under 60% capacity, when you start getting much over 80% you are running too hot. Depending on how professional you are going, don't cheese out on the small shit. HA network gear and dual nics have saved me many a time. Know your single points of failure. Make sure you monitor these very closely and, preferrably, automate your failover. Assuming adequate monitoring, the computers will know much more quickly then you will if something is wrong and if you script it, you can recover quickly. Even if it does this, you want to know when shit breaks. Don't assume b/c you have two of something that both are ready and running. Test your failovers. There are lots of fun queueing apps that allow you to decouple your applications even further. It is another service to run but, depending on scale, it can be worth it.
secway makes a nice encyrption proxy that I have used for msn messenger for a long time now. THey have it for other services as well. Free for casual use www.secway.fr. Basically it sits as a proxy and if detects the other side has SIMP as well, it enrypts and authenticates teh user. It color codes the text coming in so you can see at a glance if it is encrypted. I also like the notifications about when the connections happen, it isn't always as intant as you may think.
not affiliated, just a happy user. The biggest drawback is that the other side has to be using simp to set up the encryption.
I do really miss teh invisible feature and the ability to leave messages that was in icq.
The problem with cities is that there's just nothing to do without driving for hours. Museums and shows are cool for a a while, but they get old. The only good thing about city life is the abundance of restaurants, IMNSHO.
Funny, I usually say it as: The problem with living out of the cities is that there's just nothing to do without driving for hours. Solitude and roughing it in the woods are cool for a while, but they get old. The only good thing about it is the abundance of stars, IMNSHO.
This will be wildly scewed by people who use IM for work. In my experience, most workplaces use MSN but I am sure some use AIM. I have dozens of workmates grouped by their functional area. According to this, I am really popular. THere are people here at work that have 100s in their lists, since they are on my list does that make me cool?
I wonder - if Microsoft were to post hacking requests/challenges/whatever of security measures like this before they were released commercially, and actually invite people to hack it, would hackers respond?
They do this already. They did it for Windows 2000 at the least. I think there was even a prize if you could do it. When the OS released it was "secure". It would take all of 5 minutes to root a win 2k box now but that is b/c these exploits are difficult to find. Finding them generally takes a lot of time and effort.
It is of course a good idea to get people to try to hack your "secure" stuff anyways. It brings to mind a quote from the evil overlord list: "When I am an evil overlord, I will run all my nefarious schemes by an average 5 year old child and fix any holes he can point out."
Unfortunately, it seems as though alot of the vids are coming down as.exes (or rars containing exes). Supposedly, the.exes are just self extracting archives but I don't trust them, I generally send the.exe into winrar. If it is just an archive, winrar can extract it. If winrar can't open it I assume it is a trojan, delete it and immediately stop seeding.
Why does this have anything to do w/ the ISP? THere are many software packages that you can buy that provide this functionality. If you are concerned about it, buy one. Why does it come to the ISP to make an attempt to filter it? How can you accept and back a law like this? This is not a government issue. If you don't want something in your house (your right) there are many options w/o calling the government and writing yet more useless legislation.
IMHO, you should accept that there is a big world out there and your kids are going to see some of it. By the time they are old enough to go searching for this stuff you should be guiding them through some of it. This puritanical repression and shame around our sexuality does far more harm than seeing some people bumping uglies on your computer screen.
I use itunes to keep my ipod synced but it lacks some basic functionality that I keep expecting to see in these updates.
How about an option to rescan a directory? If I drop new music in my Music folder, I have to either import that directory manually into itunes or delete everything and reimport. Ideally, I could drop the whole folder on itunes and it would find the new items. Instead, it reimports all of them so I end up w/ duplicates in my library. WTF? Similarl issues show up if I update my tags.
Everything else I have used has a "rescan" function, why doesn't iTunes?
sure, there is no real difference between the functionality on broadband vs dialup. If you compress the data you are sending fewer bits down the pipe. Whether those bits are travelling at 5kps or 500kps, the total download will be quicker than w/o it.
Of course, the difference between it taking 10 seconds compressed vs 13 seconds uncompressed on dialup (and really good compression rates) is noticeable whereas 1 second compressed/1.3 seconds uncompressed may not be.
Vision around and beyond 20/20 isn't always possible w/ lasik or anything else for that matter.
THere is a notion of maximum correctible vision. When I had my lasik done I ended up at 20/20 and 20/15. The doctor explained to me that it becomes less a problem of focusing the light than one of your brain processing the imagery. Each person has a different threshhold that their brain can process and I believe it is fairly rare for it to be much beyond 20/20, 20/15.
Great idea, other than the fact that I have seen no less than 3 old beetles on fire. guess air cooling doesn't cut it in warm weather (last one was in vegas in june, 115 deg f.)
ditto any real city.... I spent some years in NYC (manhattan - 25,849.9/km density). There are just too many people to become involved in anybody elses dramas. you find the people you find but, often, you don't have the time or interest to interact. It may come off as brusque but anybody in the city understands this.
I had obnoxious parisian experience when I was there but that was before I lived in a city, so my perception may have changed.
NYC also has the 6in of personal space, it is almost a law. except on that f*($& 6 train in the mornings.
soft-hearted (or soft-headed) judges won't enforce the penalties
These judges are in a far better position than you (or I) to make those calls though. This world is not black and white, there needs to be some flexibility (mitigating circumstances) built into the law. This is supposed to be the judge and the jury. If you can convince a "jury of your peers" of mitigating circumstances, it is stupid to impose to sort of hard, artificial, mandatory, minimum sentence.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that Microsoft also *hates* having to use Akamai servers for anything, due to Akamai's understandable reliance on Linux for core services.
You don't research before you post do you? I dunno about all but many msn sites use either savvis or akamai for content caching. putting heavy objects near the client speeds page load times and that is more important than not using a service that might have linux underpinnings.
also, as others point out, any corp is going to be using internal dns. same is true for any ISPs. Truthfully i don't see this being that big of an issue. at worst, traffic will double to the root servers as we have to request a ipv4 and a v6. But it isn't going to happen overnight, there may be a budgetting issue but adding the capacity to a datacenter farm like that should be fairly simple.
Regardless of what wall you put up, somebody is going to find a way around it. The only thing you can do is limit your attack vectors and then limit the damage they can do.
The real issue here is what you brought up in your first point. what is considered "nasty"? Firefox? Apple.com? Will we turn on a list in china to comply w/ their rules? This has to be user controlable or it is worse than useless.
I know we all love to hate MS but this is a good idea.
First off, I have seen first hand some of MSResearch fairs and they is a lot of great stuff coming out of them. Anything that comes out of those labs is worth at least some thought before you dismiss it.
That aside, stripping nasties using a simple system before they reach a more complex system isn't really a bad idea. All of our mail servers have some sort of filter that does this (granted, more for dumb users). IIS 5 did this using a tool that was later built into IIS 6. Hell, firewalls aren't a much different idea. Most of us already run some sort of proxy software to block popups, scripts, or ads. All MS is proposing here is the equivalent of proximity or similar proxy software.
Do we just hate this idea b/c MS is doing it?
MS is already in the ad business. It is the primary source of revenue for MSN and they have decided to push it more agressively.
Ads aren't going anywhere. It is an industry unto itself. Saying google only has one revenue stream in ads is like saying Microsoft only has one revenue stream in software.
Yeah, THey make good money in adds. Nearly $2.5bil net/annum . But, while that sounds like alot of money to you and me (and most companies), to MS, it is only like 5% of yearly profit. It is a nice business to keep around but hardly the company focus.
You really have no clue. Besides that it isn't till the 3rd step that you ask your "higher power" to help beat whatever your addiction is, there are many steps of acting "like a man" as you put it. 9 is usually "Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others". Isn't that your "acting like a man"? "Making a fearless moral inventory" is no picnic, even for those of us w/o serious addiction issues.
I am not a 12 stepper but I have seen many people really successfully turn their lives around through the support of a 12 step group.
This isn't so outlandish. I use windows on most of my home machines and i have little to no spyware. (that I or my tools know of).
/.ers are savvy enough to keep their machine mostly clean. We all know this. I know quite a few MSers and they are mostly savvy enough to keep their machines mostly clean too. If you know what you are doing you know what to expect from your machine and if it does something you don't expect, you notice. if you don't know what you are doing, the machine is constantly doing things you don't expect so you don't know what is "evil" and what is expected.
I often forget how bad it is to use a machine that is constantly doing things you didn't ask it to. Every now and then, I go to a friend/family's machine and I am sickened by the amount of crap that is on there. I assume most
I am not saying Ballmer isn't clueless to a lot of things. I am also not saying that MS didn't know about the spyware problem. What I am assuming is that the client support types who really knew the depth of the problem had processes in place to deal w/ their workload. When a high level exec at any company sees the extent of a problem and decides to focus on it, big shit happens. IN this case, a new department/product was created.
as sad as it is, i did eventually get to the point where I could beat it straight through w/out dying. Just quest one though, I never did do it for quest 2.
Another fun zelda story is that it was the first game that got my father addicted. We would wake up in the morning during that time and he would be asleep on the couch w/ the contine/save/retry screen. The sad thing was that the first time he made it to level nine, I beat the game while he wasn't there. Second time, he worked his way up there, he lost the save game. Third time, my cousin beat it. It took him four times to get to the end until he was finally able to beat it.
what is w/ all this drek about ID. I know the poster included the flamebait in the article description but can't anybody have a discussion on the actual mechanics of how bees fly?
I mean c'mon that's why i use slashdot, am I going to have to actually read the article to get that?
ej
I mean partitioning in this way... Logically segregate functional areas. Don't put your business logic in the db. Don't intermingle your static and your dynamic content. Draw out your application and define strict interaction between functions. If you are going this far, separate your view controls from your middle tier business logic. This will allow you to pull the app apart as it grows without major reworking. As others have mentioned, separate web sites for static and dynamic content is a start (even if they live on teh same machine).
One thing I didn't mention is the importance of load testing. Make sure you do this. Until you perform the load test you are really just flying blind. Profile your app while you do this to allow you to focus your optimizations. You may be able to write your (i assume) php scripts to gain some efficiencies but if you tests reveal that 85% of your response time is due to db queries, work on the db. It all becomes common sense once you have good statistics in front of you. Even when you do this, remember that the load test simulation is not going to be exact. You will cache the big issues but perhaps not all of the issues.
Remember this is an iteritive process. change, test, wash, rinse, repeat. Establish a baseline and test your changes to see how they effect your app.
At the end of the day, hardware is cheaper than manpower. or downtime, hopefully. Don't try to squeeze every last ounce out of your hardware. Often you will waste much more money/time in manpower and outages than if you just bought a few extra machines in your initial order.
Also, remember to use client browser caching intelligently. Some objects on your pages will be very dynamic and will need a round trip to your site for each request but most of your site will not be that dynamic. Set the default cache for objects at 1 day and specify shorter times in the specific modules that need it. There are many levels of caching involved in a full web application and make sure you learn them all, they are invaluable (db caches, web server caches, memory caches, client browser caches, content provider caches). You can also consider sending anything that isn't tooo dynamic to your content provider (savvis, et al).
good luck
There are couple of things here but the first and foremost point is to partion your app. Loose coupling is the name of the game. This will give you the ability to upgrade hard hit parts of your app individually.
Note that where this all lives on teh hardware is really immaterial if you partion it correctly. If something is taking too much power, move it to it's own setup.
Static content is relatively straight forward. Have a specific web service for your static content (css, img, scripts, swf, etc). If your service grows to necessitate it, get a content caching service (akamai, savvis, mirrorimage). This part of your site will be teh most able to scale quickly (read immediately) as they are already pushing enough traffic to make yours basically immaterial.
You will need some sort of load balancing solution. Something like NLB is fine if you can't afford dedicated hardware. Not sure what the current hotness on linux is but I am sure somebody here will chime in on that.
Make sure your application layer is stateless as much as possible. If you do this correctly, you can add web heads as neceessary to handle the traffic. If you do have to rely on state you can either keep it in the client (know that they will lie to you and handle appropriately) or keep it in the db. If you absolutely must keep state at the web head, accept that at least 5% of your traffic is going to bounce around between boxes no matter what sort of sticky algorithms you use at the load balancer. This is a function of one user coming through different IPs between clicks (due to large network routing) and there is really little you are going to do about it. Web heads are cheap and make sure you have plenty so you can yank them out for maintenance (planned or otherwise) while the service still runs.
The db's are always the hardest part. At the end of the day, all the data has to live somewhere. Your db's will probably be the most expensive part of your app. Make sure you take advantage of the full IO of the system by partitioning: logging on one set of spindles, each heavily used db on it's own set of spindles as much as possible. If your dbs are read only, you can put them behind a load balancer but if they are read/write that may not be an option. A preferred way in the win world is to have clusters and a SAN but that is expensive. A less expensive way is to have a replicated warm failover available for a scripted save.
Keep in mind that you will be taking chunks of your system out for maintenance (planned and unplanned) so make sure each function is replicated across at least two pieces of hardware.
some other points...
make sure you keep stats and watch your trends. It is unlikely you will drastically change your traffic patterns overnight (barring an Event). Have a relationship w/ your supplier and know how long new hardware takes to be delivered.
If you can afford it, keep your peak traffic under 60% capacity, when you start getting much over 80% you are running too hot. Depending on how professional you are going, don't cheese out on the small shit. HA network gear and dual nics have saved me many a time.
Know your single points of failure. Make sure you monitor these very closely and, preferrably, automate your failover. Assuming adequate monitoring, the computers will know much more quickly then you will if something is wrong and if you script it, you can recover quickly. Even if it does this, you want to know when shit breaks. Don't assume b/c you have two of something that both are ready and running. Test your failovers.
There are lots of fun queueing apps that allow you to decouple your applications even further. It is another service to run but, depending on scale, it can be worth it.
secway makes a nice encyrption proxy that I have used for msn messenger for a long time now. THey have it for other services as well. Free for casual use www.secway.fr. Basically it sits as a proxy and if detects the other side has SIMP as well, it enrypts and authenticates teh user. It color codes the text coming in so you can see at a glance if it is encrypted. I also like the notifications about when the connections happen, it isn't always as intant as you may think.
not affiliated, just a happy user. The biggest drawback is that the other side has to be using simp to set up the encryption.
I do really miss teh invisible feature and the ability to leave messages that was in icq.
The problem with cities is that there's just nothing to do without driving for hours. Museums and shows are cool for a a while, but they get old. The only good thing about city life is the abundance of restaurants, IMNSHO.
Funny, I usually say it as:
The problem with living out of the cities is that there's just nothing to do without driving for hours. Solitude and roughing it in the woods are cool for a while, but they get old. The only good thing about it is the abundance of stars, IMNSHO.
This will be wildly scewed by people who use IM for work. In my experience, most workplaces use MSN but I am sure some use AIM. I have dozens of workmates grouped by their functional area. According to this, I am really popular. THere are people here at work that have 100s in their lists, since they are on my list does that make me cool?
I wonder - if Microsoft were to post hacking requests/challenges/whatever of security measures like this before they were released commercially, and actually invite people to hack it, would hackers respond?
They do this already. They did it for Windows 2000 at the least. I think there was even a prize if you could do it. When the OS released it was "secure". It would take all of 5 minutes to root a win 2k box now but that is b/c these exploits are difficult to find. Finding them generally takes a lot of time and effort.
It is of course a good idea to get people to try to hack your "secure" stuff anyways. It brings to mind a quote from the evil overlord list: "When I am an evil overlord, I will run all my nefarious schemes by an average 5 year old child and fix any holes he can point out."
Unfortunately, it seems as though alot of the vids are coming down as .exes (or rars containing exes). Supposedly, the .exes are just self extracting archives but I don't trust them, I generally send the .exe into winrar. If it is just an archive, winrar can extract it. If winrar can't open it I assume it is a trojan, delete it and immediately stop seeding.
YMMV
Why does this have anything to do w/ the ISP? THere are many software packages that you can buy that provide this functionality. If you are concerned about it, buy one. Why does it come to the ISP to make an attempt to filter it? How can you accept and back a law like this? This is not a government issue. If you don't want something in your house (your right) there are many options w/o calling the government and writing yet more useless legislation.
IMHO, you should accept that there is a big world out there and your kids are going to see some of it. By the time they are old enough to go searching for this stuff you should be guiding them through some of it. This puritanical repression and shame around our sexuality does far more harm than seeing some people bumping uglies on your computer screen.
just wait until the sensor shorts out and tells the engine that I want to floor it, or vice versa.
Because we all know mechanical things never fail. Brake lines never rupture or (as happened to me) the accelerator never gets stuck to the floor.
Most of these sensors that we are using are replacing less reliable parts. The MTBF is (should be) much higher w/ the newer parts.
not everything was better yesterday.
I use itunes to keep my ipod synced but it lacks some basic functionality that I keep expecting to see in these updates.
How about an option to rescan a directory? If I drop new music in my Music folder, I have to either import that directory manually into itunes or delete everything and reimport. Ideally, I could drop the whole folder on itunes and it would find the new items. Instead, it reimports all of them so I end up w/ duplicates in my library. WTF? Similarl issues show up if I update my tags.
Everything else I have used has a "rescan" function, why doesn't iTunes?
sure, there is no real difference between the functionality on broadband vs dialup. If you compress the data you are sending fewer bits down the pipe. Whether those bits are travelling at 5kps or 500kps, the total download will be quicker than w/o it.
Of course, the difference between it taking 10 seconds compressed vs 13 seconds uncompressed on dialup (and really good compression rates) is noticeable whereas 1 second compressed/1.3 seconds uncompressed may not be.
Vision around and beyond 20/20 isn't always possible w/ lasik or anything else for that matter.
THere is a notion of maximum correctible vision. When I had my lasik done I ended up at 20/20 and 20/15. The doctor explained to me that it becomes less a problem of focusing the light than one of your brain processing the imagery. Each person has a different threshhold that their brain can process and I believe it is fairly rare for it to be much beyond 20/20, 20/15.
Great idea, other than the fact that I have seen no less than 3 old beetles on fire. guess air cooling doesn't cut it in warm weather (last one was in vegas in june, 115 deg f.)
ej
ditto any real city....
I spent some years in NYC (manhattan - 25,849.9/km density). There are just too many people to become involved in anybody elses dramas. you find the people you find but, often, you don't have the time or interest to interact. It may come off as brusque but anybody in the city understands this.
I had obnoxious parisian experience when I was there but that was before I lived in a city, so my perception may have changed.
NYC also has the 6in of personal space, it is almost a law. except on that f*($& 6 train in the mornings.
What happened to the (once) obligatory....
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these babies!!!!
So sad to see a stalwart go the way of the dodo...
soft-hearted (or soft-headed) judges won't enforce the penalties
These judges are in a far better position than you (or I) to make those calls though. This world is not black and white, there needs to be some flexibility (mitigating circumstances) built into the law. This is supposed to be the judge and the jury. If you can convince a "jury of your peers" of mitigating circumstances, it is stupid to impose to sort of hard, artificial, mandatory, minimum sentence.