Okay, I just found a list of former Senators that became President -- it includes Nixon and John Quincy Adams, but it also has Truman and Monroe, so I'm still not convinced that "Senators rarely do well" is true.
Only 3 people have ever gone from Congress to the Presidency without first governing a state, serving as Vice President, sitting in a Presidential Cabinet position or being a military general, Abe Lincoln, William Henry Harrison and John F Kennedy. Nixon was a governor and VP, John Quincy Adams was Secretary of State, Truman was VP and Monroe was a governor.
IF the phone company wants to change their TOS to say that the "PEAK" is 10MBps, and the total shared is 10MBPS that's fine. And if I call and say I want more bandwidth, they can say "oh, we can do that, but we have to upgrade the trunk like so that will cost you." That's totally fair and neutral.
My contract with Time Warner/RoadRunner, specifies that they will provide up to a certain level of service (as does all of their advertising that I've seen). The key words there being "UP TO". I get "UP TO" 10Mbps but there's no GUARANTEE of a minimum of 10Mbps. I've never seen a contract or advertising for consumer level internet services offer anything else. Businesses, on the other hand, usually buy guaranteed levels of service.
Network neutrality isn't being sold as just one thing (originally, it was about throttling access to certain servers). It's sold as the original intent, guaranteed bandwidth minimums, traffic shaping and latency issues, etc. The proponents of NN can't seem to come up with a description that all of its supporters agree with and that creates a ton of FUD/counter-FUD on its own. Instead of trying to make a bullshit buzzword, call it "banning bandwidth extortion" if that's what you support. If you support banning traffic shaping, call it "banning traffic shaping." But "network neutrality", at this point, is about as meaningful as "hacker", it means something different to everyone who sees it.
and some of us are still happily playing 1E/2E/PO. I haven't bought any new AD&D books since last century, but I've been happily extending my collection of old material thanks to those who feel the need toss out the old and embrace the new.
I have no interest in the newer rule systems and about the only thing WOTC has a chance at selling me at this point is generic material that isn't closely tied to any particular edition. Of course, I have my own campaign setting, so my need for that is pretty limited as well. But I fully accept that I'm probably in the minority.
Back when I was a teenager, I went through management training for a chain restaurant with an Irish name.
One of the first things we learned is (a series of studies they did said) people are 10x more likely to be vocal about a negative experience than a positive one. I would imagine that's just as true on the employee perspective as it is the customer's side. People usually don't talk about how their boss pretty much met their expectations, just like they don't go around bragging that the toaster they got from Target seems ok. Once in a while, you'll hear about some great manager somewhere, but it's almost always in response to someone (or a bunch of people) talking about how much their management sucks
So, just because he's the only one with a positive story about working there doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other people who had good experiences. It just means that people who had bad experiences are more likely to vocalize them.
Search for Kobar Towers and you get 0 relevant articles. Search for Khobar Towers and you get 62 articles. Yeah, the first is a misspelling, but it's 1 letter off, nothing difficult for a spell checker to check against a dictionary of existing articles. What use is a search engine if it is so strict that I have to enter the terms exactly to get an article when I could just do that in the URL?
As long as I need to use google to search Wikipedia, I don't see Wikipedia creating a google killer.
Bad capacitors were my initial suspicion, especially since the board is from that bad stolen capacitor formula era... but all the caps on the motherboard look fine(I checked then and just double checked now).
I just cracked open that power supply for fun and the two biggest caps are slightly bulging and 4 of the 5 medium sized caps are almost domed. The small and tiny caps all look fine.
I'm still leaning toward my problem being with the power supply, but there may also be some kind of defect in the board design which is triggering these faults in general.
I just went through the same thing in late October.I built the system in June, 2002. Had a problem with the initial power supply (Antec 430W) that came in my case not being big enough and I was getting random lockups. Switched to another power supply and everything was fine for years. I went away for a weekend and sshed in to read my email. On my way home, a friend called me and noticed that I wasn't logged onto AIM. Hmm, ssh was still up. I must have gotten disconnected and it didn't full reconnect right (gaim likes to do that from time to time).
So I get home and notice that my computer had rebooted rather than having a simple AIM disconnect. Odd, but whatever. A week goes by and no problems. I attribute it to a freak power problem since I notice my UPS battery isn't holding a charge. Suddenly, my computer reboots in the middle of playing nethack. Ok, that was weird. Power failure is set to turn the computer off, not reboot. Computer hangs before LILO runs. I reset it and it hangs at LILO again. Odd. So I take the side of the case off to make sure the CPU/GPU fans are spinning. No problems. I let it sit for a few minutes. Turn it on and everything is fine again.
I grumble about losing my nethack game and start anew. I get about 5 minutes in and my computer reboots again. This time, LILO starts loading Linux and the computer reboots before the image is uncompressed. It does the same thing again. I start smelling that aroma of burning electric and plastic. Ok, it's too late to deal with this. I power off for the night and decide to come back in the morning.
Same problem in the morning, as soon as the computer gets warm, it starts rebooting. Electrical smell is getting heavier. I start taking PCI cards and drives out to make sure they aren't causing a problem. I swap in a known working video card and that's the only thing connected to the motherboard. Same problem. Ok, maybe the power supply is flaking out. I go to disconnect it from the motherboard and it was stuck pretty good. Bad enough that I had to get out some pliers and really start yanking.
Exact same pattern as you, all the red (5V) connectors are burned out. Fearing the worst, I ordered parts for a new computer. Later that night, I decided to see how bad the problem really was. I took a scalpel and small finger drill and cleaned all the melted plastic out of the motherboard connector until I could plug my backup power supply in. Some quick testing showed everything worked, so I reassembled it and used it for a week until my new parts got here.
I think what happened, in my case, is that the UPS batteries went bad (I've since replaced them) and the minor power fluctuations caused something to burn out in the power supply, which in turn, affected the current it was providing. It's worth noting the rating on my power supply says it provides 42A across the 5V wires, so we're talking some significant juice to start with.
That said, it is interesting that we've all had the same failure result.
Ubuntu is nice, but it still isn't as noob-friendly as I'd like to see.
Earlier this year, my best friend wanted to setup a server with Linux. He had tried RedHat in the past but ultimately gave up and went back to Windows. I recommended he give Ubuntu a try even though I've never used it (I've been using Gentoo for the last 1.5 years on my systems and I ran LFS systems for 7 years prior to that), based on all the buzz about how newb-friendly it is. He installed it without much problem but needed me to get the servers up and running (even though he configured his servers under RH mostly by himself). In fact, we had a harder time setting up the servers in Ubuntu than I did with Gentoo (but that might be because I'm used to doing everything the way I want it done). Once I got things up and running, it's been humming along just fine.
So, a couple days ago, he gets a message saying there are updates for his system and he's asked if he wants to install them. He clicks yes and decides to reboot because he wanted to add a new sound card. I get a call "Grub comes up but doesn't load anything." Ok, something obviously got moved, no problem. I give him the commands to locate his kernel. He attempts to do so and his system appears to hang while loading the CDROM driver. I have him wait a few minutes to see if it's waiting to time out on something. Eventually the boot process starts chugging along again but eventually gives up and offers him a busybox prompt.
He's 40 miles away so I can't see his screen and I can't SSH in at this point (though, in hindsight, I suppose I could have had him setup netconsole if it's enabled in Ubuntu's kernel), so I start going through some debugging steps to see why it's hanging. Apparently, it's not finding the root filesystem using UUID. Ok, no problem, I know it's on hda1, so we'll just pass that to the kernel on boot and we're up and running. Um, yeah, not. It's still hanging. I have him try booting the old kernel and that drops to busybox now too.
Ok... so we're in busybox. I tell him to "dmesg | less" but dmesg isn't found. Nice, It doesn't have the number one tool to debug boot problems in it's initrd. So, I have him scroll up to see what messages he's getting about his disks. There's nothing about hda but he notes his CDROM came up as sr0 for some reason. A light goes off "for some reason, the kernel is using ide-scsi instead of the ATA drivers." I have him check/dev and sure enough, there are sda devices in there. We attempt to mount sda1 and mount spews an error that it can't mount anything. Helpful tools there. So I have him reboot and specify "root=/dev/sda1". Same problem, it drops him to a busybox shell. I have him do the same thing with the older kernel and we get the same result. By this point, we're a good hour in and I'm starting to get frustrated.
But, he's got a knoppix CD so I have him boot that. We mount his filesystem and everything looks good. We make a couple changes to fstab and his grub configuration and reboot. Still the same problem. He's starting to talk about scrapping the whole system now. He's beyond frustrated and even I can't seem to figure out why it's barfing. But, at least we're running a full system right now. Mount the root partition, chroot into it and start ssh for me. Now I'm in and can check things out for myself.
I spend another hour trying variations of specifying the root partition in fstab and menu.lst. I note that when the new kernel was installed, menu.lst was regenerated and everything was wrong and based on an old system configuration (we switched hard drives and the old UUID was put in place of the new one on all of the kernels). I edit the initrd.img. I delete ide-scsi.ko. Nothing is working. Ok, screw it. I'm going to just compile a kernel without ide-scsi and with the ATA drivers compiled in instead of modules. I'm determined to get this up and running even if I have to skip the whole initrd process and do things the way I do them on my own computer.
Soyata is on West Henrietta Rd just south of the mall, opposite one of the car dealers. I went in there once (back when they were in the bigger space up by the movie theater on West Henrietta Rd) and was less than impressed. CompUSA didn't have any SCSI cables and I went there figuring that surely a local company that advertised their corporate sales/service would have SCSI cables. Nope... they could order them for me though. A lot of good that did me, I could accomplish that myself but wanted to have a new cable in my hand that day. Their store was almost barren and I got the impression that if I wanted anything more complicated than your average home user box and monitor, I'd have to order it.
That said, watch for the Hamfest around Memorial Day at the Dome. I usually take the opportunity to stock up on my various cheap cabling needs for the year ($1 for a Y power splitter, ATA or SATA cable). You can also find more esoteric stuff like the old IBM keyboards (if that's your boat), SCSI stuff, A/V equipment, radio gear, vacuum tubes, bulk LEDs, etc. If you go on Sunday afternoon as the vendors are leaving, you'll also find lots of ditched stuff thrown away (older computers, printers that need a minor fix, etc) that you can use, repair and sell, etc. Back before e-commerce took off, it was a great way to find discount parts (plus cheap CDROMs full of shareware, Linux, etc) and I used to make a killing stocking up there and reselling them throughout the year. If nothing else, it's always fun to watch the hammies walk around with their antenna beanies and three or four radios strapped to themselves.
Wait...are you claiming that the recording industry is able to separate the good artists from the crap for us? Have you seen the crap that they release and call music? No... I'm saying if the RIAA wants to stay in business in an internet age, they're going to have to find a way to make themselves relevant again. I suggested the option that they find the good bands for us as a way of being relevant, I didn't say they currently do a good job of it.
True, but Radiohead made a crapton of money. Even if you think half of what they made was from people paying them solely for the novelty of it, that's still a good story. From the stories I've read, Loki's failure was a combination of financial mismanagement and what they had to pay for those AAA titles they ported. The money was going out faster than it was coming in. Extravagancies of big name bands aside, bands generally don't have that problem, especially bands who are writing their own material.
But here's the key point: Prior to this, there were no data points, and it was people saying it was possible vs people saying it was impossible. Well we now have a data point, showing that at least one band did it and made a boatload of cash. Obviously more data is needed before you can say exactly where and when it can be successful, and more importantly will it work for your band, but the whole idea of "people will never pay for something they can get for free" has been proven false. I'm not judging the data or denying that this isn't a data point, simply forewarning that a single data point doesn't prove a wider business model. As for whether or not people will pay for something they can get for free, a lot of people still didn't pay despite the profits and it remains unclear how many paid just to show that it could work (and whether or not that is to get future artists to do the same so they don't have to pay)/out of novelty/because they really liked the album or band/etc. There needs to be a lot more data before we can draw conclusions from it.
What might be more interesting would be his response upon finding out that Radiohead made at least as much money from their With Rainbows experiment than they have from traditional album releases, and that there's still a "special edition" CD to be released and sold yet. The Radiohead thing is only one data point... I don't think it necessarily shows that mass internet distribution would be profitable.
I know people who bought all of Loki's games, even if they didn't like some of them, because they wanted to support a new company that was catering to something they wanted. How many people threw a few dollars at Radiohead, even if they don't like Radiohead's music, just because they're one of the first big bands to do this ? When every band does it, you'll lose that factor because it's not something special anymore.
Radiohead also already benefited from the existing recording establishment... They were backed by a music distributor who made sure they got on the radio and MTV, that the right professionals were managing their tours, etc. Would people care about Radiohead's new album (in such a large quantity) if they weren't already established as a AAA band? I don't see people dumping millions on the quality bands I see locally who offer their stuff online.
My regional grocery store chain is cutting back the number of brands they offer for any given particular product because "people get confused when they have too many options." If you go from having 100 choices for music to having 100,000, you probably won't even know where to start looking for what you want to hear. Yeah, it'll be cheaper than the current model, but assuming 95% of it is crap, you're filtering out 5 albums out of 100 versus 5,000 out of 100,000.
In short, I don't think the business model has proven itself on an industry wide scale based on Radiohead's experience (which is the optimal experience, rather than the median experience).I think the traditional companies can still provide a benefit in the internet age, but they're going to have to adapt (they could theoretically separate the wheat from the chaff and narrow down that huge selection to the 5,000 good ones for you) and they aren't going to have the margins they used to take anymore (so they'd better make sure they're getting you the wheat).
You aren't paying for 10Mbps. You're paying for a theoretical maximum of 10Mbps, likely with no minimum guaranteed service. If you want a full, unthrottled 10Mbps connection to the internet, look into a pair of T2s. I can guarantee that you'll be paying more than $40/month though.
You aren't forced to acquire the loans... I went to a private college (RIT) that was $18k/yr (base tuition, without room and board) 12 years ago. My financial aid package amounted to me paying about $2100 a year (just over $700 a trimester) out of my pocket and another $2000 in federal loan money. Even if I didn't have any financial aid, I could still afford most of the cost by simply going to my then $7/hr job (retail at a home improvement store, lots of college kids worked there, probably 70 of the 100 or so employees).
Most of the college kids who take on serious debt do so because they insist on going to a school they can't afford and then refuse to work while they go to school. Working at the book store for 10 hours a week for beer money isn't working to pay your way through school. I had 18-21.5 credit hours per trimester and still worked 55 hours a week between two jobs. I know people now who have kids (one who is 31 years old with 4 kids), work full time and still have managed to go get a degree. Was it from MIT or Harvard? No... but MIT and Harvard are more about networking and getting to know the right people. There are some great schools for a fraction of the price that will get you in the door the first almost as easily (and then after you have a degree and experience, where you went matters a whole lot less).
The problem is generation X and Y were raised with the easily life... the best of everything handed to them. They've never had to work for anything and simply assume that the best of everything is forever owed to them. They think they should be able go to a 4 year school, party the whole time, take their spring break vacations and summers off, and come out making $150k a year. Life doesn't work that way... and, unfortunately, nobody told them. So, they spend their $200k for a degree, come out of school to find that it only lands them a $35-45k/year job and complain about all the debt they chose to rack up because they didn't have to think about the consequences before that. Then they cry they were "forced" all along the way.
Ok... I haven't burned a DVD yet but I can confirm that the SATA DVD drive works otherwise.
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x00000000000109f0 ctl 0x0000000000010bf2 bmdma 0x000000000001dc00 irq 22 ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x0000000000010970 ctl 0x0000000000010b72 bmdma 0x000000000001dc08 irq 22 ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) ata1.00: ATA-7: ST3250410AS, 3.AAC, max UDMA/133 ata1.00: 488397168 sectors, multi 1: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32) ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) ata2.00: ATAPI: LITE-ON DVDRW LH-20A1L, BL05, max UDMA/100 ata2.00: configured for UDMA/100
cat/proc/version
Linux version 2.6.23-gentoo-r1 (root@livecd) (gcc version 4.1.1 (Gentoo 4.1.1-r3)) #4 SMP Wed Nov 6 17:12:30 EST 2007
Looking over that, I just realized I need to take the jumper off the hard drive limiting it to 1.5Gbps
I'm still waiting for the motherboard to arrive. The other 6 components came Friday. UPS is such a tease.:)
I'll let you know what I find with the DVD drive after I get it together and get my OS running again (really people, compiling gentoo isn't as bad as you think. It's not 1999 anymore)
Not quite an entire rig, but I had a power supply fail* last week on my trusty old dual athlon box, so I just ordered parts pretty similar to this scenario (with the primary focus of everything working in Linux)
NVidia 7600GT with 256MB: $99.99
Asus M2N-E motherboard (4 PCIE slots, 3 PCI slots for my existing cards): $96.99
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (Brisbane/65 watt version): $84.99
1 GB Corsair RAM: $44
Seagate 250GB SATA drive 16MB cache: $69.99
Lite-On SATA DVD burner: $36.99
Thermaltake 430 watt PS: $39.99
Total: $472.94 not counting the $40 in mail-in rebates
That's basically everything but a case and peripherals... and my focus was getting the best bang for my buck (while being able to retain things like my PCI SCSI controllers), not trying to keep under a certain amount.
* My computer started randomly rebooting and the other night, I smelled that wonderful joy of electric melting plastic. Turns out all the 5 volt lines connecting the power supply to the motherboard melted their connectors. I cleaned the melted plastic out the matching pins on the motherboard side, connected it to my backup power supply and things have been running fine since... though I wasn't sure if it was going to work at all when I ordered my new parts last week./eagerly awaiting the last delivery from UPS today so I can put my first new computer together in 5 years.
I was just saying that if the body turns up later with evidence that he murdered her (say, with a knife with his fingerprints embedded in her), there won't be anything anyone can do about it after he's already been tried... because right now, he can't be convicted of murder because there is no evidence of her death (at least as far as what the prosecution has mentioned of their evidence).
IANAL, but I've seen several lawyers on tv talking about similar cases...
It varies from state to state, but generally, to charge someone with murder, you need some evidence that a murder actually occurred. A body, a pool of blood so large that it could only be created by someone who died, a direct statement from someone that they murdered another, etc.
Now, obviously the police and prosecution aren't obligated to provide any evidence to the media (beyond what might come out in a public preliminary hearing showing they have justification to hold the defendant)... but the key problem, from what we know, is there is still no evidence that Mrs. Reiser is actually dead. You might be able to get a conviction for some type of domestic abuse, but murder needs some evidence of an actual death occurring.
Without a body (or evidence of a death), I've gotta say Hans Reiser should be acquitted of murder. He may be a jackass, but that doesn't make him a murderer. With a body, well, we'll have to look at the weight of the circumstantial evidence pointing to him doing it. Until we get to see all of that evidence and there has been a chance to refute it, I can't say guilty or innocent either way if there is a body. If the body turns up after he's acquitted, it sucks for everyone but Hans that the police/DA acted so quickly since he can't be retried... he'll have his freedom but lose any respect from society.
Crap, I just made myself sound like an impartial juror... good thing I don't live in California.
My best friend is in a trade industry union (I'll live it's name and local out of it so it doesn't come back to him). In his union, it is typical to move from job site to job site every weeks or couple months because that's just how the work is (it's not an electrical union, but just as an example, once you wire a site, you go to a new site to wire that).
The union boss is a lawyer who never worked in the field. There are only a handful of employees on a job site at any given time (generally 2-3) so the union steward for that site has no power, it all goes up to the union boss. Their pension is handled by the son of said boss and they're pretty sure that he's embezzling money from the funds but he refuses to show the books. Nobody can press them to find out what's going on because if they do, the business manager (a MBA type) will make sure that there is no work available for that employee. Of course, the employee can't seek out work on their own outside of the union or else there's a major backlash from the union.
He can go to all the meetings he wants, it won't change anything... they can't risk opposing their bosses or else their work will dry up. Meanwhile, nobody knows the true state of their pension. Also, the sad part is so many people are so brainwashed by their union, that they refuse to do anything unless the union (read the union bosses) approve of it... so the union bosses will never fall unless an outside force does it (ie, they get arrested for embezzlement or something even though nobody can see the books to get probable cause to start an investigation).
My best friend is currently weighing an option to be directly hired at the place where he has spent 90% of the last 7 years at and at nearly double the wage he's making with the union. He'll have to leave the union to do it, however, and that means losing a good chunk of his existing pension, having a lot of his friends turn their back on him because he's no longer union, etc. If he doesn't take the job, someone else will end up doing it anyway so it's not like it's taking a job from the union... but, much like the mafia, once you're in, you aren't "allowed" to leave.
People do dumb things in the heat of the moment... ever get into an argument with something and say something that you regretted afterward? Ever had someone do something to hurt you so much that it took everything you had to not take a swing at them? Ever had someone hit you and your defensive instinct jumped in and you pummeled them (well beyond what you simply needed to escape)?
Emotions are funny things... there are times where they override your logic. Hormones can further affect those emotions (see 'roid rage for an extreme example). His friends said that Chris Benoit wasn't the type of guy who would hurt anyone, but he killed his wife and son before hanging himself. You don't even know this woman, just that she escaped, got married and raised a family and you're already making an emotional judgment that she didn't do it and it must have been a bad lawyer or whatever. I didn't see the evidence in the case... do you know what her state of mind was in 1970? Do you know the particulars of how her husband was murdered? If, among the evidence, was a murder weapon with her fingers all over it, his blood all over her and testimony from people saying she had been telling friends that she couldn't stand him anymore, would you still advocate that "she doesn't seem like the kind of person who would do it and should go free despite what the jury who saw the evidence thought?" The fact is, someone lost their life; One of the chief inalienable rights. Very few people deserve to die and a claim of innocence and 35 years of living an appropriate life after escaping prison shouldn't absolve someone of such a heinous crime.
My cousin was murdered by a guy who had colon cancer with six months to live. The court let him off because the bleeding heart judge decided it would violate the Eighth Amendment. Almost 13 years later, the bastard is still alive and my cousin's kids still don't have a father. But hey, the guy hasn't murdered anyone since, so the people who's lives he screwed up (and the society they are part of) shouldn't care.
I file all of my important receipts, statements, bills, etc (filed by company, 1 year per folder, sorted chronologically internally). I don't consider a $40 purchase of some memory or a $80 hard drive a major receipt though. Do I have them? Yeah, somewhere in my drawer of unimportant receipts. Would it be just as easy to file those receipts with the rest of my bills? Probably, and I generally do these days. The problem is the receipts from 2001. If I need to dispute a charge, it's going to be from a receipt that is, at most, 40 days old and those are generally still handy (prior to my starting to file stuff a couple years ago). And yes, I balance my accounts every month and check the online records every few days. I resent the implication that, because I don't know precisely where a particular 6 year old receipt is, I must be a fiscal idiot.
A lot of people simply throw away receipts for those minor purchases. Others get rid of records more than 3-4 years old, once the IRS audit window ends. What is the reasonable duration to hold on to minor (sub $100) receipts? Do I really need to know, 40 years from now, that I stopped at the grocery store to buy chicken last night?
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The guy who did it, as well as the project manager for AA were both on Fox and Friends either Thursday or Friday morning telling the story as well.
Network neutrality isn't being sold as just one thing (originally, it was about throttling access to certain servers). It's sold as the original intent, guaranteed bandwidth minimums, traffic shaping and latency issues, etc. The proponents of NN can't seem to come up with a description that all of its supporters agree with and that creates a ton of FUD/counter-FUD on its own. Instead of trying to make a bullshit buzzword, call it "banning bandwidth extortion" if that's what you support. If you support banning traffic shaping, call it "banning traffic shaping." But "network neutrality", at this point, is about as meaningful as "hacker", it means something different to everyone who sees it.
and some of us are still happily playing 1E/2E/PO. I haven't bought any new AD&D books since last century, but I've been happily extending my collection of old material thanks to those who feel the need toss out the old and embrace the new.
I have no interest in the newer rule systems and about the only thing WOTC has a chance at selling me at this point is generic material that isn't closely tied to any particular edition. Of course, I have my own campaign setting, so my need for that is pretty limited as well. But I fully accept that I'm probably in the minority.
That totally explains Dr. Danco from Dearly Devoted Dexter
Back when I was a teenager, I went through management training for a chain restaurant with an Irish name.
One of the first things we learned is (a series of studies they did said) people are 10x more likely to be vocal about a negative experience than a positive one. I would imagine that's just as true on the employee perspective as it is the customer's side. People usually don't talk about how their boss pretty much met their expectations, just like they don't go around bragging that the toaster they got from Target seems ok. Once in a while, you'll hear about some great manager somewhere, but it's almost always in response to someone (or a bunch of people) talking about how much their management sucks
So, just because he's the only one with a positive story about working there doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other people who had good experiences. It just means that people who had bad experiences are more likely to vocalize them.
Search for Kobar Towers and you get 0 relevant articles. Search for Khobar Towers and you get 62 articles. Yeah, the first is a misspelling, but it's 1 letter off, nothing difficult for a spell checker to check against a dictionary of existing articles. What use is a search engine if it is so strict that I have to enter the terms exactly to get an article when I could just do that in the URL?
As long as I need to use google to search Wikipedia, I don't see Wikipedia creating a google killer.
Bad capacitors were my initial suspicion, especially since the board is from that bad stolen capacitor formula era... but all the caps on the motherboard look fine(I checked then and just double checked now).
I just cracked open that power supply for fun and the two biggest caps are slightly bulging and 4 of the 5 medium sized caps are almost domed. The small and tiny caps all look fine.
I'm still leaning toward my problem being with the power supply, but there may also be some kind of defect in the board design which is triggering these faults in general.
S2460?
I just went through the same thing in late October.I built the system in June, 2002. Had a problem with the initial power supply (Antec 430W) that came in my case not being big enough and I was getting random lockups. Switched to another power supply and everything was fine for years. I went away for a weekend and sshed in to read my email. On my way home, a friend called me and noticed that I wasn't logged onto AIM. Hmm, ssh was still up. I must have gotten disconnected and it didn't full reconnect right (gaim likes to do that from time to time).
So I get home and notice that my computer had rebooted rather than having a simple AIM disconnect. Odd, but whatever. A week goes by and no problems. I attribute it to a freak power problem since I notice my UPS battery isn't holding a charge. Suddenly, my computer reboots in the middle of playing nethack. Ok, that was weird. Power failure is set to turn the computer off, not reboot. Computer hangs before LILO runs. I reset it and it hangs at LILO again. Odd. So I take the side of the case off to make sure the CPU/GPU fans are spinning. No problems. I let it sit for a few minutes. Turn it on and everything is fine again.
I grumble about losing my nethack game and start anew. I get about 5 minutes in and my computer reboots again. This time, LILO starts loading Linux and the computer reboots before the image is uncompressed. It does the same thing again. I start smelling that aroma of burning electric and plastic. Ok, it's too late to deal with this. I power off for the night and decide to come back in the morning.
Same problem in the morning, as soon as the computer gets warm, it starts rebooting. Electrical smell is getting heavier. I start taking PCI cards and drives out to make sure they aren't causing a problem. I swap in a known working video card and that's the only thing connected to the motherboard. Same problem. Ok, maybe the power supply is flaking out. I go to disconnect it from the motherboard and it was stuck pretty good. Bad enough that I had to get out some pliers and really start yanking.
Exact same pattern as you, all the red (5V) connectors are burned out. Fearing the worst, I ordered parts for a new computer. Later that night, I decided to see how bad the problem really was. I took a scalpel and small finger drill and cleaned all the melted plastic out of the motherboard connector until I could plug my backup power supply in. Some quick testing showed everything worked, so I reassembled it and used it for a week until my new parts got here.
I think what happened, in my case, is that the UPS batteries went bad (I've since replaced them) and the minor power fluctuations caused something to burn out in the power supply, which in turn, affected the current it was providing. It's worth noting the rating on my power supply says it provides 42A across the 5V wires, so we're talking some significant juice to start with.
That said, it is interesting that we've all had the same failure result.
Ubuntu is nice, but it still isn't as noob-friendly as I'd like to see.
Earlier this year, my best friend wanted to setup a server with Linux. He had tried RedHat in the past but ultimately gave up and went back to Windows. I recommended he give Ubuntu a try even though I've never used it (I've been using Gentoo for the last 1.5 years on my systems and I ran LFS systems for 7 years prior to that), based on all the buzz about how newb-friendly it is. He installed it without much problem but needed me to get the servers up and running (even though he configured his servers under RH mostly by himself). In fact, we had a harder time setting up the servers in Ubuntu than I did with Gentoo (but that might be because I'm used to doing everything the way I want it done). Once I got things up and running, it's been humming along just fine.
/dev and sure enough, there are sda devices in there. We attempt to mount sda1 and mount spews an error that it can't mount anything. Helpful tools there. So I have him reboot and specify "root=/dev/sda1". Same problem, it drops him to a busybox shell. I have him do the same thing with the older kernel and we get the same result. By this point, we're a good hour in and I'm starting to get frustrated.
So, a couple days ago, he gets a message saying there are updates for his system and he's asked if he wants to install them. He clicks yes and decides to reboot because he wanted to add a new sound card. I get a call "Grub comes up but doesn't load anything." Ok, something obviously got moved, no problem. I give him the commands to locate his kernel. He attempts to do so and his system appears to hang while loading the CDROM driver. I have him wait a few minutes to see if it's waiting to time out on something. Eventually the boot process starts chugging along again but eventually gives up and offers him a busybox prompt.
He's 40 miles away so I can't see his screen and I can't SSH in at this point (though, in hindsight, I suppose I could have had him setup netconsole if it's enabled in Ubuntu's kernel), so I start going through some debugging steps to see why it's hanging. Apparently, it's not finding the root filesystem using UUID. Ok, no problem, I know it's on hda1, so we'll just pass that to the kernel on boot and we're up and running. Um, yeah, not. It's still hanging. I have him try booting the old kernel and that drops to busybox now too.
Ok... so we're in busybox. I tell him to "dmesg | less" but dmesg isn't found. Nice, It doesn't have the number one tool to debug boot problems in it's initrd. So, I have him scroll up to see what messages he's getting about his disks. There's nothing about hda but he notes his CDROM came up as sr0 for some reason. A light goes off "for some reason, the kernel is using ide-scsi instead of the ATA drivers." I have him check
But, he's got a knoppix CD so I have him boot that. We mount his filesystem and everything looks good. We make a couple changes to fstab and his grub configuration and reboot. Still the same problem. He's starting to talk about scrapping the whole system now. He's beyond frustrated and even I can't seem to figure out why it's barfing. But, at least we're running a full system right now. Mount the root partition, chroot into it and start ssh for me. Now I'm in and can check things out for myself.
I spend another hour trying variations of specifying the root partition in fstab and menu.lst. I note that when the new kernel was installed, menu.lst was regenerated and everything was wrong and based on an old system configuration (we switched hard drives and the old UUID was put in place of the new one on all of the kernels). I edit the initrd.img. I delete ide-scsi.ko. Nothing is working. Ok, screw it. I'm going to just compile a kernel without ide-scsi and with the ATA drivers compiled in instead of modules. I'm determined to get this up and running even if I have to skip the whole initrd process and do things the way I do them on my own computer.
Soyata is on West Henrietta Rd just south of the mall, opposite one of the car dealers. I went in there once (back when they were in the bigger space up by the movie theater on West Henrietta Rd) and was less than impressed. CompUSA didn't have any SCSI cables and I went there figuring that surely a local company that advertised their corporate sales/service would have SCSI cables. Nope... they could order them for me though. A lot of good that did me, I could accomplish that myself but wanted to have a new cable in my hand that day. Their store was almost barren and I got the impression that if I wanted anything more complicated than your average home user box and monitor, I'd have to order it.
That said, watch for the Hamfest around Memorial Day at the Dome. I usually take the opportunity to stock up on my various cheap cabling needs for the year ($1 for a Y power splitter, ATA or SATA cable). You can also find more esoteric stuff like the old IBM keyboards (if that's your boat), SCSI stuff, A/V equipment, radio gear, vacuum tubes, bulk LEDs, etc. If you go on Sunday afternoon as the vendors are leaving, you'll also find lots of ditched stuff thrown away (older computers, printers that need a minor fix, etc) that you can use, repair and sell, etc. Back before e-commerce took off, it was a great way to find discount parts (plus cheap CDROMs full of shareware, Linux, etc) and I used to make a killing stocking up there and reselling them throughout the year. If nothing else, it's always fun to watch the hammies walk around with their antenna beanies and three or four radios strapped to themselves.
I know people who bought all of Loki's games, even if they didn't like some of them, because they wanted to support a new company that was catering to something they wanted. How many people threw a few dollars at Radiohead, even if they don't like Radiohead's music, just because they're one of the first big bands to do this ? When every band does it, you'll lose that factor because it's not something special anymore.
Radiohead also already benefited from the existing recording establishment... They were backed by a music distributor who made sure they got on the radio and MTV, that the right professionals were managing their tours, etc. Would people care about Radiohead's new album (in such a large quantity) if they weren't already established as a AAA band? I don't see people dumping millions on the quality bands I see locally who offer their stuff online.
My regional grocery store chain is cutting back the number of brands they offer for any given particular product because "people get confused when they have too many options." If you go from having 100 choices for music to having 100,000, you probably won't even know where to start looking for what you want to hear. Yeah, it'll be cheaper than the current model, but assuming 95% of it is crap, you're filtering out 5 albums out of 100 versus 5,000 out of 100,000.
In short, I don't think the business model has proven itself on an industry wide scale based on Radiohead's experience (which is the optimal experience, rather than the median experience).I think the traditional companies can still provide a benefit in the internet age, but they're going to have to adapt (they could theoretically separate the wheat from the chaff and narrow down that huge selection to the 5,000 good ones for you) and they aren't going to have the margins they used to take anymore (so they'd better make sure they're getting you the wheat).
You aren't paying for 10Mbps. You're paying for a theoretical maximum of 10Mbps, likely with no minimum guaranteed service. If you want a full, unthrottled 10Mbps connection to the internet, look into a pair of T2s. I can guarantee that you'll be paying more than $40/month though.
You aren't forced to acquire the loans... I went to a private college (RIT) that was $18k/yr (base tuition, without room and board) 12 years ago. My financial aid package amounted to me paying about $2100 a year (just over $700 a trimester) out of my pocket and another $2000 in federal loan money. Even if I didn't have any financial aid, I could still afford most of the cost by simply going to my then $7/hr job (retail at a home improvement store, lots of college kids worked there, probably 70 of the 100 or so employees).
Most of the college kids who take on serious debt do so because they insist on going to a school they can't afford and then refuse to work while they go to school. Working at the book store for 10 hours a week for beer money isn't working to pay your way through school. I had 18-21.5 credit hours per trimester and still worked 55 hours a week between two jobs. I know people now who have kids (one who is 31 years old with 4 kids), work full time and still have managed to go get a degree. Was it from MIT or Harvard? No... but MIT and Harvard are more about networking and getting to know the right people. There are some great schools for a fraction of the price that will get you in the door the first almost as easily (and then after you have a degree and experience, where you went matters a whole lot less).
The problem is generation X and Y were raised with the easily life... the best of everything handed to them. They've never had to work for anything and simply assume that the best of everything is forever owed to them. They think they should be able go to a 4 year school, party the whole time, take their spring break vacations and summers off, and come out making $150k a year. Life doesn't work that way... and, unfortunately, nobody told them. So, they spend their $200k for a degree, come out of school to find that it only lands them a $35-45k/year job and complain about all the debt they chose to rack up because they didn't have to think about the consequences before that. Then they cry they were "forced" all along the way.
Jeez, I sound old. Get off my lawn!
Linux version 2.6.23-gentoo-r1 (root@livecd) (gcc version 4.1.1 (Gentoo 4.1.1-r3)) #4 SMP Wed Nov 6 17:12:30 EST 2007
Looking over that, I just realized I need to take the jumper off the hard drive limiting it to 1.5Gbps
I'm still waiting for the motherboard to arrive. The other 6 components came Friday. UPS is such a tease. :)
I'll let you know what I find with the DVD drive after I get it together and get my OS running again (really people, compiling gentoo isn't as bad as you think. It's not 1999 anymore)
Not quite an entire rig, but I had a power supply fail* last week on my trusty old dual athlon box, so I just ordered parts pretty similar to this scenario (with the primary focus of everything working in Linux)
/eagerly awaiting the last delivery from UPS today so I can put my first new computer together in 5 years.
NVidia 7600GT with 256MB: $99.99
Asus M2N-E motherboard (4 PCIE slots, 3 PCI slots for my existing cards): $96.99
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (Brisbane/65 watt version): $84.99
1 GB Corsair RAM: $44
Seagate 250GB SATA drive 16MB cache: $69.99
Lite-On SATA DVD burner: $36.99
Thermaltake 430 watt PS: $39.99
Total: $472.94 not counting the $40 in mail-in rebates
That's basically everything but a case and peripherals... and my focus was getting the best bang for my buck (while being able to retain things like my PCI SCSI controllers), not trying to keep under a certain amount.
* My computer started randomly rebooting and the other night, I smelled that wonderful joy of electric melting plastic. Turns out all the 5 volt lines connecting the power supply to the motherboard melted their connectors. I cleaned the melted plastic out the matching pins on the motherboard side, connected it to my backup power supply and things have been running fine since... though I wasn't sure if it was going to work at all when I ordered my new parts last week.
I was just saying that if the body turns up later with evidence that he murdered her (say, with a knife with his fingerprints embedded in her), there won't be anything anyone can do about it after he's already been tried... because right now, he can't be convicted of murder because there is no evidence of her death (at least as far as what the prosecution has mentioned of their evidence).
IANAL, but I've seen several lawyers on tv talking about similar cases...
It varies from state to state, but generally, to charge someone with murder, you need some evidence that a murder actually occurred. A body, a pool of blood so large that it could only be created by someone who died, a direct statement from someone that they murdered another, etc.
Now, obviously the police and prosecution aren't obligated to provide any evidence to the media (beyond what might come out in a public preliminary hearing showing they have justification to hold the defendant)... but the key problem, from what we know, is there is still no evidence that Mrs. Reiser is actually dead. You might be able to get a conviction for some type of domestic abuse, but murder needs some evidence of an actual death occurring.
Without a body (or evidence of a death), I've gotta say Hans Reiser should be acquitted of murder. He may be a jackass, but that doesn't make him a murderer. With a body, well, we'll have to look at the weight of the circumstantial evidence pointing to him doing it. Until we get to see all of that evidence and there has been a chance to refute it, I can't say guilty or innocent either way if there is a body. If the body turns up after he's acquitted, it sucks for everyone but Hans that the police/DA acted so quickly since he can't be retried... he'll have his freedom but lose any respect from society.
Crap, I just made myself sound like an impartial juror... good thing I don't live in California.
My best friend is in a trade industry union (I'll live it's name and local out of it so it doesn't come back to him). In his union, it is typical to move from job site to job site every weeks or couple months because that's just how the work is (it's not an electrical union, but just as an example, once you wire a site, you go to a new site to wire that).
The union boss is a lawyer who never worked in the field. There are only a handful of employees on a job site at any given time (generally 2-3) so the union steward for that site has no power, it all goes up to the union boss. Their pension is handled by the son of said boss and they're pretty sure that he's embezzling money from the funds but he refuses to show the books. Nobody can press them to find out what's going on because if they do, the business manager (a MBA type) will make sure that there is no work available for that employee. Of course, the employee can't seek out work on their own outside of the union or else there's a major backlash from the union.
He can go to all the meetings he wants, it won't change anything... they can't risk opposing their bosses or else their work will dry up. Meanwhile, nobody knows the true state of their pension. Also, the sad part is so many people are so brainwashed by their union, that they refuse to do anything unless the union (read the union bosses) approve of it... so the union bosses will never fall unless an outside force does it (ie, they get arrested for embezzlement or something even though nobody can see the books to get probable cause to start an investigation).
My best friend is currently weighing an option to be directly hired at the place where he has spent 90% of the last 7 years at and at nearly double the wage he's making with the union. He'll have to leave the union to do it, however, and that means losing a good chunk of his existing pension, having a lot of his friends turn their back on him because he's no longer union, etc. If he doesn't take the job, someone else will end up doing it anyway so it's not like it's taking a job from the union... but, much like the mafia, once you're in, you aren't "allowed" to leave.
People do dumb things in the heat of the moment... ever get into an argument with something and say something that you regretted afterward? Ever had someone do something to hurt you so much that it took everything you had to not take a swing at them? Ever had someone hit you and your defensive instinct jumped in and you pummeled them (well beyond what you simply needed to escape)?
Emotions are funny things... there are times where they override your logic. Hormones can further affect those emotions (see 'roid rage for an extreme example). His friends said that Chris Benoit wasn't the type of guy who would hurt anyone, but he killed his wife and son before hanging himself. You don't even know this woman, just that she escaped, got married and raised a family and you're already making an emotional judgment that she didn't do it and it must have been a bad lawyer or whatever. I didn't see the evidence in the case... do you know what her state of mind was in 1970? Do you know the particulars of how her husband was murdered? If, among the evidence, was a murder weapon with her fingers all over it, his blood all over her and testimony from people saying she had been telling friends that she couldn't stand him anymore, would you still advocate that "she doesn't seem like the kind of person who would do it and should go free despite what the jury who saw the evidence thought?" The fact is, someone lost their life; One of the chief inalienable rights. Very few people deserve to die and a claim of innocence and 35 years of living an appropriate life after escaping prison shouldn't absolve someone of such a heinous crime.
My cousin was murdered by a guy who had colon cancer with six months to live. The court let him off because the bleeding heart judge decided it would violate the Eighth Amendment. Almost 13 years later, the bastard is still alive and my cousin's kids still don't have a father. But hey, the guy hasn't murdered anyone since, so the people who's lives he screwed up (and the society they are part of) shouldn't care.
I file all of my important receipts, statements, bills, etc (filed by company, 1 year per folder, sorted chronologically internally). I don't consider a $40 purchase of some memory or a $80 hard drive a major receipt though. Do I have them? Yeah, somewhere in my drawer of unimportant receipts. Would it be just as easy to file those receipts with the rest of my bills? Probably, and I generally do these days. The problem is the receipts from 2001. If I need to dispute a charge, it's going to be from a receipt that is, at most, 40 days old and those are generally still handy (prior to my starting to file stuff a couple years ago). And yes, I balance my accounts every month and check the online records every few days. I resent the implication that, because I don't know precisely where a particular 6 year old receipt is, I must be a fiscal idiot.
A lot of people simply throw away receipts for those minor purchases. Others get rid of records more than 3-4 years old, once the IRS audit window ends. What is the reasonable duration to hold on to minor (sub $100) receipts? Do I really need to know, 40 years from now, that I stopped at the grocery store to buy chicken last night?
I generally buy memory only from Crucial. Thanks for the tip.