Seems to me like the warranty is not yet up yet. I'd get on that ASAP. Provided you're the original owner , they'll hook you up promptly.
Even if you're not the original owner, you might have no problems. For instance, if the original owner didn't register the laptop or didn't get support (or possibly even if he did), you should be fine. I've gotten stuff fixed on a Thinkpad before, and the service guy on the phone down in Atlanta didn't say thing one about whether I was the original owner. It was under warranty, and they were going to fix it.
There never has been any sort of valueable comparision between Dell/HP/etc. and IBM desktop/laptop kit.
Dell/HP/etc. have almost invariably been poorly constructed with last-minute design choices, unstable and bloated preinstalled software, insufficient hardware specs (on the base models - mainly RAM), poor support, and shitty ergonomics (keyboards).
IBM kit, particularly laptops, have always focused on the opposite side of those traits: well built with solid engineering, stable and appropriate software preinstalls, adequate hardware specifications (mainly RAM), bar-none the best support in the industry, and excellent ergonomics.
When you consider all that, price isn't even an object.
Not if they didn't want a pile of shit, they couldn't.
"no OS" laptops are generally composed of a bunch of poorly engineered, generic (and no-name) parts and constructed poorly of cheap plastic. They're big and heavy with low battery life. Why would that be preferable over a Thinkpad, exactly?
Pardon my ignorance, but where the hell is Oz? It's not on any of my maps. Might it be slang for New Zealand or such? Or were you speaking tongue in cheek?
I imagine that, provided a sufficiently dense energy form is found to power such a device, structural body armor would quickly become common. Think along the lines of Starship Troopers (the book, not hte movie) or a Mechwarrior Elemental suit. Something that's armored, with jump jets (no more getting cornered or surrounded -just fly over the fuckers and drop a grenade) and a servo-powered exoskeleton.
It would also make combat significantly more difficult for the insurgents. No longer can they take out men with bullets. Bullets just slow them down - marginally, at best. Instead, the bullets glance off their armor (titanium, maybe? I don't know. something strong and lightweight, at least.) Instead, an RPG is required to take out a single man, maybe more - because the suits have built in protections for body hits with explosive devices (as tanks do). A blast wouldn't even harm the soldier, as the suit would be sturdy enough to prevent such harm (provided it wasn't long-term, like a flame thrower or such.) That'd get difficult, and expensive, for any 'insurgents' quickly. Particularly when any given soldier can jumpjet to a roof, then simply jump down on them from a height of 3 stories and shoot methodically without breaking a sweat.
But tanks introduced an element that was beneficial in battle that was not yet the case prior to that point: they provided a mobile, powerful, and armored vehicle which could withstand conventional firearms and even minor explosions (grenades, etc.) without breaking. They were the 900 pound gorilla of battle - granted, one that needed a lot of bannanas and attention.
What would one of these mobile suits provide? They're too slow to be practical, too big to be maneuverable, and too heavy to go many places.
Now, something that strapped to your body frame, ala Starship Troopers (the book, not the bloody movie - more like a Mechwarrior Elemental suit) would indeed be the "new tank".
Or the 'over productive' folks do 2 hours of work, and mess around for the other 6 doing things they like, while still keeping the appearance of productivity (because, hey, they're getting their work done).
Could it be possible that the spammers brought their own stuff down in an attempt to make themselves look like the victims, and provide them with a case against people that are doing these things?
Really, it's ironic, since these are the companies that totally shit-bomb people's servers and workstations on a daily basis. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that their wrong does not justify a wrong in like.
First, their development costs. Judgeing by the credits for Warcraft 3, I'd say WoW had around 3x or more the staff working on it (probably more, due to the infrastructure scale, but let's be conservative). Off the top of my head, I think there may have been around 70 people in the credits, on the low side. Let's say there's 250 people that helped develop and design WoW, with a median income of around $80,000/year. Then consider the cost management for those 250 people - add on another 20% of that cost for management and other personel (secretaries, cleaning, accounting...) Then you have building costs - let's just guess here, at around $5,000/month. I suspect that's far on the low side given the likelyhood they're in a fairly urban (and thus expensive) area. Then we need at least 1, probably more like 2 or 3 systems per developer and artist, plus network infrastructure and furnishings - let's say it's $3,000 per head (that is, those doing actual production - we'll ignore the 'non-productive' part of the company) for equipment over the course of 4 years (or more) that it took to develop. This is likely also conservative, in my opinion.
* Creative and technical talent: $20,000,000 * Management and misc. personel: $4,000,000 * Building costs: $240,000 (this is likely quite short of actual costs, IMO - it doesn't even include things like electricity, for instance) * Technical tools: $750,000
For a grand "total" of... drum roll...
$24.99 million
Now, for the "how many people would buy it" factor? I'll just go with what you've got, because I think it's an unrealisticly positive asessment, and I don't know of the actual to-date figures. A large percentage of people are done Christmas shopping by the end of November in the States, for some reason. This also isn't the kind of game that people buy as a gift, as it requires a subscription (unless it's known that it's a wanted gift). I think the purchases will be, over all, distributed fairly evenly from month to month, curving off after 4 or so months. I suspect the amount earned would be roughly $40 million or so.
I suspect that Blizzard won't be making all that much off of the subscription fee - it costs a lot to run dedicated game servers, and takes a lot of time to keep creating more content for said servers and players, in addition to the slew of security and user concerns.
Also, keep in mind that the millions made aren't really "profit" so much as "we're going to be using this money to help fund future development so we don't have to put off eating for 4 years while we make the game". And, when was the last time you bought a game and actually played it for more than (say) 30 hours (1hr/day) before becoming tired with it (with the exception of rare games such as HL/CS)? If you're going to be playing for more than a month, chances are you're doing it rather than going out and purchasing another game (which, in turn, would likely get played for 8 or so hours and unfortunately discarded as a piece of shit).
In proportion, that $15/month doesn't look so bad when you compare it to the costs of getting another, different boxed game. Compare it to any other form of entertainment (aside from possibly cable TV, if you watch more than 2.5 hours a day), and you'll see that it's hard to find a price-competitive form of entertainment (compared to the $50/30 hours), or subsequent months of $15/20 hours (or whatever).
I do think they need to change their price model, though, to be hour-based for those that don't play much, with a "maximum of $15/month" cap or so, so it's more desireable for the casual player to play.
Regardless of the "staying power" of an MMORPG, a good MMORPG has more staying power than a good single (or even simply multi-) player game.
Single player games, for the most part, have one (or maybe two) paths to completion. Then you're done, and can play it from the start if you so wish.
Multiplayer games are, well, pretty much the same as MMORPG games, but with a more "consistent" game play experience. Sure, you can keep playing indefinately, but nothing much changes. Unless the repetative gameplay is actually fun and can be enjoyed repeatedly, it wears thin. Even then, it'll wear thin eventually unless there's a strong creative force behind it, making changes.
Now, "good" games - of the single player variety - tend to have a good story (Deus Ex), or some sort of addictive quality (Frozen Bubble, Tetris). At the very least, their gameplay is varied and not repetitive. I'd imagine this is why Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are "good games" while Doom 3 is "not". HL and HL2 have quite varied, progressing gameplay, while D3 just tends to meander on repetitively without any significant change.
Take Counter-Strike as something to compare an MMORPG to. For years, CS progressed through betas (which was a token name only, as they were fully playable and stable), with the game mechanics, weapons, and various other aspects changing, making for a diverse, usually balanced, and always changing game environment. They also had a winning combination of Terrorists vs. Counter-Terrorists and guns.
Basically, what I'm hearing people say about WoW, is that the gameplay sucks for long-term stuff. It's boring. It might be geared towards the high-level people - maybe to weed out those that aren't "dedicated" enough to play it enough to create such "community"? - but it fails in providing an entertaining game up until the point where people can "truely" experience the game. I hear Doom 3 fell short in this same fashion, as the later levels were good fun.
In essence, most MMORPGs likely fail, IMO, because of the massive amount of content that needs to be created so people can have a consistently exciting/entertaining experience. This can't be realistically done in a creative fashion in an economical manner while remaining consistent (as I suspect it would need a very, very large army of creative people - and that's expensive), so they settle for a slightly smaller army of creative people (or just drones) who get burnt out creatively and can't produce quality, -different- material consistently for long periods of time.
A displomic pedigree will only make your employer think you're more costly.
Experience is more important. You'll get just as fat on off-brand candy bars and soda as you will on an equal amount of Coke and Fritos. If you take the effort to undertake projects and such on your own, you're helping yourself more than a mere sheet of paper would any day.
I wonder what such a study would show on people that have been 'trained' to think something that is not true, is, or with particularly creative or imaginitive people, or those with lying complexes (folks that don't even realize they're lying).
Might such a technique be a more effective lie detector?
If you've got the stanima, I've found being a male porn star is quite lucrative. It doesn't take more than a couple hours a week, is entertaining, and easier than dating.
I've found that obscenely long work periods can be accomplished with the help of short (20 minute) naps throughout the day.
Key, I think, is to differentiate between actual programming, and solving the problems you run into while programming. Just "going at it" isn't a terribly good problem solving approach.
Work 15 hours for 6 days, and take 1-3 short naps throughout the day in addition to your 8 or so hours of sleep. Even if you can't/don't sleep, just try and meditate - clear your mind of all distractions. It's odd how it works, but your brain will use the "idle clock cycles" and solve the problems - or at least give you comprehension of them to some degree - you were unable to solve in your waking hours. In this case, a 20 minute nap is much more efficient than 20 minutes of hair-pulling, and possibly even more useful than 20 minutes of 'productive' rested work.
Another approach I've heard others have taken, and I've tried, is to sleep for 1.5 - 3 hours at a time throughout the day - however long your personal REM cycle is - and forgo sleeping at "night". Night is a novel concept that applies to other fields that need differentiation between light and day hours. Programmers do not, as we work by display light either way.
Anyway, I've heard that one benefit of this approach is that you're able to sleep the minimal amount required by your body and don't waste time "between REM cylces". You sleep for 2 hours, and will naturally wake up after the cylce. When you get tired, your body will quickly tell you, as you'll go from chipper to exhausted in the matter of minutes. This probably isn't too healthy long-term, as I heard it depletes a chemical compound in the body that is gained by sleeping longer periods (and is needed). My recollection is sketchy, though - google for specifics.
I've tried this approach for two weeks during a summer once. It takes a week or so to get into the swing, but it's incredibly nice once you're into the cylce, as you'll wake refreshed almost every time; for me, waking refreshed is as common as... well, it's not. It just doesn't happen. So I was quite happy.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work - at all - if you've got a family or other people that rely on you holding a schedule that's consistent with theirs'.
I hope they can't. I've not lost so much hope in humanity yet that I want to consider the possibility that these people get away with these crimes against humanity and are still able to sleep.
First two questions were already answered for me...
Step 7's 5% (or more) surplus is for several reasons. 1) the reason alraedy mentioned by an AC 2) so that you don't need to micro-manage daily spending. For instance, if I wanted to go to the pub twice in one week for some reason (or "had" to for after-work social networking), as opposed to never going, I don't want to overdraw, so to speak, from my alloted expence account. In other words, basically so you don't have to fret about pinching pennies - so you can live. If you need $300/week for living expenses, that'd give you an extra $15 or so to do as you please with at the end of the week - buy the wife some flowers, or what have you. 3) inflation or unexpected fluctuation in the cost of various living expenses.
Ideally, you'd probably want it to be somewhat more than 5% (or at least most people would), as that's hardly anything. My wife and I live quite frugally, and spending 15$ a week on needless stuff seems excessive. However, it's nice to have a couple week's worth of surplus sitting around when the car needs a particularly expensive repair you didn't budget for (don't forget your transportation costs while figuring your budget!) is incredibly nice.
So don't give them a "Linux LiveCD" give them a completely self-contained software environment on a CD.
Include on it OO.o, tuxracer, Frozen Bubble, a bunch of card games, firefox, gaim, kde, gnumeric, and all the k* applications, and one of the several 'accounting' programs (I don't know what they're called, but I recall seeing them). Have it run no services, and be fully firewalled, so that it could be used on a network-connected system safely.
Then, write a note with the CD and say, "If you like this and want to use it instead of Windows, I will routinely mail you an updated version. Let me know if there's any task that you can't perform with the included software which you want or need." That'd work well for people that routinely ask you for tech support, I think - at least to some degree.
Ironically, McBride probably should be on that list for being influential - negatively influential, that is. He's the poster child for IP-based companies, which are an increasingly large part of 'corporate computing' business. He's drastically influenced corporate business culture, for the negative. Steve Balmer even jumped on his bandwagon, threatening to sue anyone that uses Linux.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how is Linus Torvalds influencing the industry? What executive decisions has he made that made that changed everything?
Well, for one, he's benevolent. Granted, he doesn't have money dealings, but he is incredibly good at dealing with the feelings and emotions of the people involved. He doesn't anger people (overtly), and he manages to walk away with more friends than enemies.
If more corporate executives were to do this, the whole of business ecology would be much better, we'd have more employment, less offshoring, better wages, and less hours we'd need to work.
1) First, take base pay (P), and multiply by 2/3rds.
2) Then, take out at least 10% for 'short term' savings (S) - in case you lose the job (something like a savings account would do.) If this acct ever gets over a couple thousand, move it to long-term savings.
3) Then, take out another 10-20% and set that side for retirement (R) in a long-term fund. I set it this high for several reasons: 1) you want to retire early, 2) inflation, 3) knowing the flukes of our economy and career choice, you'll likely need it sooner than later. This is also a practice of the Japanese culture (or was, 10 years ago), and it's been shown that the 'recommended' 10% that most Americans save has traditionally not been enough.
4) Now, figure what your annual health (etc.) costs (H) will be, and subtract it from what you have left.
5) This will leave you with the money you have for day to day annual living. Divide by 52 to figure out what your weekly available budget would be.
6) Figure out what you could get by on in order to pay rent/mortgage, food, utilities and a base level of entertainment (eating out, movies, video games) funds for the both of you. Subtract this living cost (L) from the total.
7) You should have at least 5% of your living costs left over at the end of the month.
I imagine that many of the images that images.google uses and accesses are on those many pages that have a couple shots as an 'introduction' to try and get people to buy from the site. Why wouldn't this company want free links to their advertising?
Or, they might be pages that are made available to only google, so that when users click through they get a "subscribe" page. Why wouldn't they want this?
Oh. That's right. Google has a lot of money, and Perfect 10 doesn't.
Meh. I bet it's just a plot to get their name out, anyway.
Well, if you give it a little thought, it makes sense on a purely logical level.
SMB is the protocol used pre-win2k. CIFS is everything after that. It makes little sense to modify (or expect) a device driver to support something that is outside the scope of it's designed purpose. Thus, along came cifsfs, which does indeed support the higher features (and very well might not work in a 'backward compatible' fashion, for all I know). Thus, you wouldn't need both if you didn't have any newer|older windows systems.
Because linux does not fully support an implimentation any longer - an implimentation spec that was long ago abandoned by the people that made it, and was only being supported in linux to aid those people forced to use it - Linux is just as bad as MS for not supporting Microsoft's product, which Microsoft itself will not support - even though they're the ones that got the money?
First off, as someone else said, this doesn't have anything to do with Samba, but smbfs.o, from the kernel. You don't need smbfs.o to use samba, I believe, and I can't recall ever including it in a kernel (or cifsfs), even ones that were to be used as a samba fileserver.
Second, NFS is just as "full of holes" as SMB/CIFS. I'd even wager that its inherrent security model is worse. From my experience, it's also significantly less stable, and does not scale well at all, let alone dynamically on a large network.
On a network where everyone is a peer, SMB/CIFS seems like the better option to me.
Slashdot Mirror
"warranty is up in early 2005"
Seems to me like the warranty is not yet up yet. I'd get on that ASAP. Provided you're the original owner , they'll hook you up promptly.
Even if you're not the original owner, you might have no problems. For instance, if the original owner didn't register the laptop or didn't get support (or possibly even if he did), you should be fine. I've gotten stuff fixed on a Thinkpad before, and the service guy on the phone down in Atlanta didn't say thing one about whether I was the original owner. It was under warranty, and they were going to fix it.
There never has been any sort of valueable comparision between Dell/HP/etc. and IBM desktop/laptop kit.
Dell/HP/etc. have almost invariably been poorly constructed with last-minute design choices, unstable and bloated preinstalled software, insufficient hardware specs (on the base models - mainly RAM), poor support, and shitty ergonomics (keyboards).
IBM kit, particularly laptops, have always focused on the opposite side of those traits: well built with solid engineering, stable and appropriate software preinstalls, adequate hardware specifications (mainly RAM), bar-none the best support in the industry, and excellent ergonomics.
When you consider all that, price isn't even an object.
Not if they didn't want a pile of shit, they couldn't.
"no OS" laptops are generally composed of a bunch of poorly engineered, generic (and no-name) parts and constructed poorly of cheap plastic. They're big and heavy with low battery life. Why would that be preferable over a Thinkpad, exactly?
Damn dude, that's well written. :P Write it on the spot? Thanks, I enjoyed it.
Pardon my ignorance, but where the hell is Oz? It's not on any of my maps. Might it be slang for New Zealand or such? Or were you speaking tongue in cheek?
I imagine that, provided a sufficiently dense energy form is found to power such a device, structural body armor would quickly become common. Think along the lines of Starship Troopers (the book, not hte movie) or a Mechwarrior Elemental suit. Something that's armored, with jump jets (no more getting cornered or surrounded -just fly over the fuckers and drop a grenade) and a servo-powered exoskeleton.
It would also make combat significantly more difficult for the insurgents. No longer can they take out men with bullets. Bullets just slow them down - marginally, at best. Instead, the bullets glance off their armor (titanium, maybe? I don't know. something strong and lightweight, at least.) Instead, an RPG is required to take out a single man, maybe more - because the suits have built in protections for body hits with explosive devices (as tanks do). A blast wouldn't even harm the soldier, as the suit would be sturdy enough to prevent such harm (provided it wasn't long-term, like a flame thrower or such.) That'd get difficult, and expensive, for any 'insurgents' quickly. Particularly when any given soldier can jumpjet to a roof, then simply jump down on them from a height of 3 stories and shoot methodically without breaking a sweat.
But tanks introduced an element that was beneficial in battle that was not yet the case prior to that point: they provided a mobile, powerful, and armored vehicle which could withstand conventional firearms and even minor explosions (grenades, etc.) without breaking. They were the 900 pound gorilla of battle - granted, one that needed a lot of bannanas and attention.
What would one of these mobile suits provide? They're too slow to be practical, too big to be maneuverable, and too heavy to go many places.
Now, something that strapped to your body frame, ala Starship Troopers (the book, not the bloody movie - more like a Mechwarrior Elemental suit) would indeed be the "new tank".
Or the 'over productive' folks do 2 hours of work, and mess around for the other 6 doing things they like, while still keeping the appearance of productivity (because, hey, they're getting their work done).
Could it be possible that the spammers brought their own stuff down in an attempt to make themselves look like the victims, and provide them with a case against people that are doing these things?
Really, it's ironic, since these are the companies that totally shit-bomb people's servers and workstations on a daily basis. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that their wrong does not justify a wrong in like.
Let's think this through a little more logically.
....
First, their development costs. Judgeing by the credits for Warcraft 3, I'd say WoW had around 3x or more the staff working on it (probably more, due to the infrastructure scale, but let's be conservative). Off the top of my head, I think there may have been around 70 people in the credits, on the low side. Let's say there's 250 people that helped develop and design WoW, with a median income of around $80,000/year. Then consider the cost management for those 250 people - add on another 20% of that cost for management and other personel (secretaries, cleaning, accounting...) Then you have building costs - let's just guess here, at around $5,000/month. I suspect that's far on the low side given the likelyhood they're in a fairly urban (and thus expensive) area. Then we need at least 1, probably more like 2 or 3 systems per developer and artist, plus network infrastructure and furnishings - let's say it's $3,000 per head (that is, those doing actual production - we'll ignore the 'non-productive' part of the company) for equipment over the course of 4 years (or more) that it took to develop. This is likely also conservative, in my opinion.
So, in summary, we have:
250($80,000) + 0.2(250)($80,000) + 48($5,000) + 250($3,000) =
* Creative and technical talent: $20,000,000
* Management and misc. personel: $4,000,000
* Building costs: $240,000 (this is likely quite short of actual costs, IMO - it doesn't even include things like electricity, for instance)
* Technical tools: $750,000
For a grand "total" of... drum roll...
$24.99 million
Now, for the "how many people would buy it" factor? I'll just go with what you've got, because I think it's an unrealisticly positive asessment, and I don't know of the actual to-date figures. A large percentage of people are done Christmas shopping by the end of November in the States, for some reason. This also isn't the kind of game that people buy as a gift, as it requires a subscription (unless it's known that it's a wanted gift). I think the purchases will be, over all, distributed fairly evenly from month to month, curving off after 4 or so months. I suspect the amount earned would be roughly $40 million or so.
I suspect that Blizzard won't be making all that much off of the subscription fee - it costs a lot to run dedicated game servers, and takes a lot of time to keep creating more content for said servers and players, in addition to the slew of security and user concerns.
Also, keep in mind that the millions made aren't really "profit" so much as "we're going to be using this money to help fund future development so we don't have to put off eating for 4 years while we make the game". And, when was the last time you bought a game and actually played it for more than (say) 30 hours (1hr/day) before becoming tired with it (with the exception of rare games such as HL/CS)? If you're going to be playing for more than a month, chances are you're doing it rather than going out and purchasing another game (which, in turn, would likely get played for 8 or so hours and unfortunately discarded as a piece of shit).
In proportion, that $15/month doesn't look so bad when you compare it to the costs of getting another, different boxed game. Compare it to any other form of entertainment (aside from possibly cable TV, if you watch more than 2.5 hours a day), and you'll see that it's hard to find a price-competitive form of entertainment (compared to the $50/30 hours), or subsequent months of $15/20 hours (or whatever).
I do think they need to change their price model, though, to be hour-based for those that don't play much, with a "maximum of $15/month" cap or so, so it's more desireable for the casual player to play.
Regardless of the "staying power" of an MMORPG, a good MMORPG has more staying power than a good single (or even simply multi-) player game.
Single player games, for the most part, have one (or maybe two) paths to completion. Then you're done, and can play it from the start if you so wish.
Multiplayer games are, well, pretty much the same as MMORPG games, but with a more "consistent" game play experience. Sure, you can keep playing indefinately, but nothing much changes. Unless the repetative gameplay is actually fun and can be enjoyed repeatedly, it wears thin. Even then, it'll wear thin eventually unless there's a strong creative force behind it, making changes.
Now, "good" games - of the single player variety - tend to have a good story (Deus Ex), or some sort of addictive quality (Frozen Bubble, Tetris). At the very least, their gameplay is varied and not repetitive. I'd imagine this is why Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are "good games" while Doom 3 is "not". HL and HL2 have quite varied, progressing gameplay, while D3 just tends to meander on repetitively without any significant change.
Take Counter-Strike as something to compare an MMORPG to. For years, CS progressed through betas (which was a token name only, as they were fully playable and stable), with the game mechanics, weapons, and various other aspects changing, making for a diverse, usually balanced, and always changing game environment. They also had a winning combination of Terrorists vs. Counter-Terrorists and guns.
Basically, what I'm hearing people say about WoW, is that the gameplay sucks for long-term stuff. It's boring. It might be geared towards the high-level people - maybe to weed out those that aren't "dedicated" enough to play it enough to create such "community"? - but it fails in providing an entertaining game up until the point where people can "truely" experience the game. I hear Doom 3 fell short in this same fashion, as the later levels were good fun.
In essence, most MMORPGs likely fail, IMO, because of the massive amount of content that needs to be created so people can have a consistently exciting/entertaining experience. This can't be realistically done in a creative fashion in an economical manner while remaining consistent (as I suspect it would need a very, very large army of creative people - and that's expensive), so they settle for a slightly smaller army of creative people (or just drones) who get burnt out creatively and can't produce quality, -different- material consistently for long periods of time.
A displomic pedigree will only make your employer think you're more costly.
Experience is more important. You'll get just as fat on off-brand candy bars and soda as you will on an equal amount of Coke and Fritos. If you take the effort to undertake projects and such on your own, you're helping yourself more than a mere sheet of paper would any day.
I wonder what such a study would show on people that have been 'trained' to think something that is not true, is, or with particularly creative or imaginitive people, or those with lying complexes (folks that don't even realize they're lying).
Might such a technique be a more effective lie detector?
If you've got the stanima, I've found being a male porn star is quite lucrative. It doesn't take more than a couple hours a week, is entertaining, and easier than dating.
I've found that obscenely long work periods can be accomplished with the help of short (20 minute) naps throughout the day.
Key, I think, is to differentiate between actual programming, and solving the problems you run into while programming. Just "going at it" isn't a terribly good problem solving approach.
Work 15 hours for 6 days, and take 1-3 short naps throughout the day in addition to your 8 or so hours of sleep. Even if you can't/don't sleep, just try and meditate - clear your mind of all distractions. It's odd how it works, but your brain will use the "idle clock cycles" and solve the problems - or at least give you comprehension of them to some degree - you were unable to solve in your waking hours. In this case, a 20 minute nap is much more efficient than 20 minutes of hair-pulling, and possibly even more useful than 20 minutes of 'productive' rested work.
Another approach I've heard others have taken, and I've tried, is to sleep for 1.5 - 3 hours at a time throughout the day - however long your personal REM cycle is - and forgo sleeping at "night". Night is a novel concept that applies to other fields that need differentiation between light and day hours. Programmers do not, as we work by display light either way.
Anyway, I've heard that one benefit of this approach is that you're able to sleep the minimal amount required by your body and don't waste time "between REM cylces". You sleep for 2 hours, and will naturally wake up after the cylce. When you get tired, your body will quickly tell you, as you'll go from chipper to exhausted in the matter of minutes. This probably isn't too healthy long-term, as I heard it depletes a chemical compound in the body that is gained by sleeping longer periods (and is needed). My recollection is sketchy, though - google for specifics.
I've tried this approach for two weeks during a summer once. It takes a week or so to get into the swing, but it's incredibly nice once you're into the cylce, as you'll wake refreshed almost every time; for me, waking refreshed is as common as... well, it's not. It just doesn't happen. So I was quite happy.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work - at all - if you've got a family or other people that rely on you holding a schedule that's consistent with theirs'.
You hope they can?
I hope they can't. I've not lost so much hope in humanity yet that I want to consider the possibility that these people get away with these crimes against humanity and are still able to sleep.
First two questions were already answered for me...
Step 7's 5% (or more) surplus is for several reasons.
1) the reason alraedy mentioned by an AC
2) so that you don't need to micro-manage daily spending. For instance, if I wanted to go to the pub twice in one week for some reason (or "had" to for after-work social networking), as opposed to never going, I don't want to overdraw, so to speak, from my alloted expence account. In other words, basically so you don't have to fret about pinching pennies - so you can live. If you need $300/week for living expenses, that'd give you an extra $15 or so to do as you please with at the end of the week - buy the wife some flowers, or what have you.
3) inflation or unexpected fluctuation in the cost of various living expenses.
Ideally, you'd probably want it to be somewhat more than 5% (or at least most people would), as that's hardly anything. My wife and I live quite frugally, and spending 15$ a week on needless stuff seems excessive. However, it's nice to have a couple week's worth of surplus sitting around when the car needs a particularly expensive repair you didn't budget for (don't forget your transportation costs while figuring your budget!) is incredibly nice.
So don't give them a "Linux LiveCD" give them a completely self-contained software environment on a CD.
Include on it OO.o, tuxracer, Frozen Bubble, a bunch of card games, firefox, gaim, kde, gnumeric, and all the k* applications, and one of the several 'accounting' programs (I don't know what they're called, but I recall seeing them). Have it run no services, and be fully firewalled, so that it could be used on a network-connected system safely.
Then, write a note with the CD and say, "If you like this and want to use it instead of Windows, I will routinely mail you an updated version. Let me know if there's any task that you can't perform with the included software which you want or need." That'd work well for people that routinely ask you for tech support, I think - at least to some degree.
Ironically, McBride probably should be on that list for being influential - negatively influential, that is. He's the poster child for IP-based companies, which are an increasingly large part of 'corporate computing' business. He's drastically influenced corporate business culture, for the negative. Steve Balmer even jumped on his bandwagon, threatening to sue anyone that uses Linux.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how is Linus Torvalds influencing the industry? What executive decisions has he made that made that changed everything?
Well, for one, he's benevolent. Granted, he doesn't have money dealings, but he is incredibly good at dealing with the feelings and emotions of the people involved. He doesn't anger people (overtly), and he manages to walk away with more friends than enemies.
If more corporate executives were to do this, the whole of business ecology would be much better, we'd have more employment, less offshoring, better wages, and less hours we'd need to work.
2) Then, take out at least 10% for 'short term' savings (S) - in case you lose the job (something like a savings account would do.) If this acct ever gets over a couple thousand, move it to long-term savings.
3) Then, take out another 10-20% and set that side for retirement (R) in a long-term fund. I set it this high for several reasons: 1) you want to retire early, 2) inflation, 3) knowing the flukes of our economy and career choice, you'll likely need it sooner than later. This is also a practice of the Japanese culture (or was, 10 years ago), and it's been shown that the 'recommended' 10% that most Americans save has traditionally not been enough.
4) Now, figure what your annual health (etc.) costs (H) will be, and subtract it from what you have left.
5) This will leave you with the money you have for day to day annual living. Divide by 52 to figure out what your weekly available budget would be.
6) Figure out what you could get by on in order to pay rent/mortgage, food, utilities and a base level of entertainment (eating out, movies, video games) funds for the both of you. Subtract this living cost (L) from the total.
7) You should have at least 5% of your living costs left over at the end of the month.
So, in summary:
I imagine that many of the images that images.google uses and accesses are on those many pages that have a couple shots as an 'introduction' to try and get people to buy from the site. Why wouldn't this company want free links to their advertising?
Or, they might be pages that are made available to only google, so that when users click through they get a "subscribe" page. Why wouldn't they want this?
Oh. That's right. Google has a lot of money, and Perfect 10 doesn't.
Meh. I bet it's just a plot to get their name out, anyway.
Well, if you give it a little thought, it makes sense on a purely logical level.
SMB is the protocol used pre-win2k. CIFS is everything after that. It makes little sense to modify (or expect) a device driver to support something that is outside the scope of it's designed purpose. Thus, along came cifsfs, which does indeed support the higher features (and very well might not work in a 'backward compatible' fashion, for all I know). Thus, you wouldn't need both if you didn't have any newer|older windows systems.
So let me get this straight.
Because linux does not fully support an implimentation any longer - an implimentation spec that was long ago abandoned by the people that made it, and was only being supported in linux to aid those people forced to use it - Linux is just as bad as MS for not supporting Microsoft's product, which Microsoft itself will not support - even though they're the ones that got the money?
First off, as someone else said, this doesn't have anything to do with Samba, but smbfs.o, from the kernel. You don't need smbfs.o to use samba, I believe, and I can't recall ever including it in a kernel (or cifsfs), even ones that were to be used as a samba fileserver.
Second, NFS is just as "full of holes" as SMB/CIFS. I'd even wager that its inherrent security model is worse. From my experience, it's also significantly less stable, and does not scale well at all, let alone dynamically on a large network.
On a network where everyone is a peer, SMB/CIFS seems like the better option to me.