Yes. A 1000ms roundtrip ping is equal to 1 second of lag in my estimation. That's on a bad day though, evidently depending on a handful of factors it can get as low as 500ms.
You still have to do that to a certain extent with modern synthesis software. I remember trying all kinds of combos before to get SID to say things right, still works on my wife's Talking Dict.
Her Talking Dict is from Thailand, a handheld translator more or less, that pronounces words and defines them for you. Strangely enough it was engineered in Berkeley, CA and sounds alot like SID.
Where does the battle come into it? I think the engineers should have them do kung fu or another form of destruction to determine the winner. That way you have 2 types of drama. Who is the best singer? And is it strong enough to win the fight? Yes indeed, it'll be on the air in Japan within the week if they get wind of it.
Isn't Gamespot part of that damn IGN network that forces you to login to watch video clips (advertising) of upcoming games? Don't they also force you to stare at an ad for a few seconds before you can read the article?
Wow, did I really get a +5 for a few minutes or the parent I originally replied to? I was asking an honest question..it's been so long since my Physics course I forgot about the speed of light/em radiation correlation. Back to sleep.:)
I guess after reading my long-winded post you completely forgot my preamble mentioning that it's my brother's connection and not mine. I'll pass on your upgrade advice though.
Thanks for the scoop. My brother emailed me about wanting to build a network in his house a few days ago, I'll have to pass this on to him before he starts drilling.
Re:Another day, another batch of applications
on
Joel Rants About Resumes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's always a good idea to get creative with your abilities on your resume, particularly now. Since it's an employer's market, generally employers will list unreasonable requirements for a given position just to cut down on the resume flood. I've seen tech support jobs requiring 5 years of experience, a bachelor's degree, php, cold fusion, asp, visual basic, 2 years of c++ and flash, all for $10 an hour. It's totally ridiculous, but, if you're clever, you can add all that stuff and fake your way through it if you get the job.
From my experience (both hiring and being hired), nobody and I mean NOBODY knows everything they say they do in an interview. Some people are sharper than others but 90% of the time, you or whoever you hire will be faking their way through it for the first three weeks or so. Also keep in mind that most managers that will be interviewing you don't know the minutae of what you will be doing at your new job and that also makes faking it easier.
So here's some advice: if you see a job you're pretty close to matching, go for it. Don't walk in there with Taco Bell burrito making skills and expect to land a SAP admin job, but if you're missing 1 or 2 things they're looking for and are confident in your ability to learn quickly, go for it.
My brother lives out in the boonies and I'll relay what he's told me about his satellite.
1. Latency is horrible. He gets a 1000ms ping to anywhere, so that's a 1 second delay after he clicks anything before the remote server he's hitting even gets his attention.
2. Download caps. I think he's limited to a few gigs a month, maybe one.
3. Bandwidth throttling. This is time dependent as in time of day also. If you download too fast during certain hours of the day (internet prime time if you will), you get throttled waaaay down to a few KB/sec for hours.
4. Complicated software that's windows only. Everytime he calls me for tech support, I cringe. It's always an XP problem and always hard to troubleshoot. I've been wanting to get him on linux for years but with the satellite it's just not an option. He has the 2 usb boxes setup for his connection, maybe this new router would help.
5. Awful browsing. Since the latency is so high, some servers timeout before you can get a page from them. I had him install Opera awhile back (the lightning fast caching helps alot when navigating sites on a high latency connection) and he loves it, uses it exclusively. Without Opera, surfing the web is painful.
6. Unplayable online games. With that kind of ping, you can't play anything online, except maybe Yahoo Java Chess or something where reflexes don't count. Flash games may be playable too, not sure.
It basically sucks for anything but leeching big files, and for that it sucks too thanks to throttling and bandwidth limits. It's hard to believe that in this day and age people in remote locations have to suffer with crap like this. Then again, bandwidth isn't a god-given right...but it should be.
I'm sorry if you took my opinion as an affront, but I felt your criticism of 'linux desktops in general' lacked even a single example. I provided a few to back up my point.
The clutter that Windows' taskbar used to have when you had more than 5 or 6 windows open has been slightly cleaned up by another copied concept: window grouping. KDE has had this for a few versions (and subversions) now.
Whether or not you can adjust to tabbed browsing (I'll admit, it took me some time) doesn't mean it's useless or targetted at advanced users. However, once I got accustomed to using tabs regularly, any Windows machine felt primitive when browsing because they're missing. If I want to google something I have to either install the google toolbar and type it in there or open a new window; either way, it's just another open app to track or group to watch when it could be just the window I'm in.
I agree that having multiple tabs open then closing the whole window sucks when you forgot what you were doing in another tab. It needs an option that warns you that you have other tabs open (like Konsole does if you open multiple konsole sessions in a single window) when you try to close it. With that, tabs would be perfect and dummy-proof. Maybe it's an option that I haven't seen yet, if so the default needs to be set to whatever it's not set to now.:)
Anyway this has got me thinking about usability and how it can be improved. I guess it's a process that needs user feedback that may indeed be lacking in the linux community. Nobody ever mentions things unless they're broken, right?
Judging by your mod points, there are some rich crack dealers on the street right now.
Explorer is horrible at doing what it should do (besides surfing the web which it doesn't do right either thanks to flubbed standards). It can't do tabbed browsing (konqueror), you can't split the window into multiple frames to make ftp'ing and file management easier (konqueror), if you visit a website you can't go recursively up the website's root tree (konqueror) among many other things.
I guess it's not really fair since windows is so far behind at this point. MacOS and KDE both support better features for file management and web browsing than Explorer does. Just wait until Longhorn is out I guess, by then Microsoft will have reaped the other apps' harvests and make it look new by painting it a different color.
By the way, you make alot of suppositions but have zero facts backing you up. Your opinion is pure conjecture.
I think Lego started releasing the Technics kits around the same time as Capsela got popular, or a little afterwards. I never got to play with Capsela but a friend of mine got Technics kits for every holiday. Christmas, birthdays, you name it. I was so jealous of his dune buggy kit.
Later I ended up getting some Lego kit with the battery pack and a motor. It took massive D sized batteries (does anything use these anymore?) and was too heavy to engineer something small because the motor it drove was weak. Eventually I made a balsa wood boat and used the motor/battery on this but it wasn't practical without being remote controlled.
My favorite combo was my slot car racing set and my erector set tower with the electric motor mounted to the top of the tower. The motor was powered by the slot car track (all it takes is two wires straight to the slots:)). The faster the cars went the faster the motor spun. Oh and did I mention a gigantic erector set windmill blade was mounted to the motor? The drivers were always headed for disaster on that track.
Now that I think about it, it's a miracle nobody got hurt by Erector sets. Either that or back then people weren't insanely litigious like they are now. Erector sets were hella dangerous by nature; sharp metal edges on everything, real nuts and bolts (but to be fair they did include some paper and metal washers).
Wow. I guess it's time to update my collection. Since I started supermame a few years ago I've let the whole thing slip. Yes, the roms are available but nobody asks how. They assume the site is broken.
Anyway there are still guys on the mame burners list right? Time to get a new set.:)
While reading all this stuff today I came up with an idea.
I have a stack of 7 Mame cds sitting here, and about 3 more filled with console games intended for use with Mame. Anyway I think it'd be cool to finally put all these discs together on a dvd (since I have a dvd burner) and create a linux distro that boots from the dvd to house it all. Set it all up to where you throw in the disc and you can play the entire mame collection anywhere.
This will enable me to eventually create a standup arcade machine with no hard drive. Sure, it'll be slow, but I'm cheap. Maybe if I spend a big chunk of money on the ram instead I can have most of it cached in ram, or at least the parts that would take a long time to load.
I'm gonna fire up vmware, install pclinuxos, move all these roms to the right places and attempt the mklivecd thing. Wish me luck.
What you guys are forgetting is that the 699MB that Knoppix is composed of is a severely compressed cloop image. You know that cloop decompresses stuff from the cd in near-realtime right? So your 699MB image on the cd is probably around a gig or 2 decompressed.
You can build your own distro, and not to evangelize but PCLinuxOS 2k4 makes it easy.
Basically you setup the distro the way you want it, apt-get rpms via synaptic (yes that's right, apt-get and rpm in the same sentence), setup all your bookmarks, address books, etc. Then you run the mklivecd shell script and voila! Your own distro, with everything you want and need and nothing you don't.
Go to pclinuxonline.com and hunt down the left side for the pclinuxos download link and forums link.
Hahaha, yeah good point. I thought 'wtf this guy can't get past a missing floppy?'. Then I thought..never in Mandrake or any of the other distros I've tried have I ever had a problem with not having a floppy in my machine. Floppies are so 1987.
I could see him getting stuck on linux back in 97, but things have changed alot. He just picked the wrong distro. I call for him to rebuild it using knoppmyth or something else more interesting.
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Yes. A 1000ms roundtrip ping is equal to 1 second of lag in my estimation. That's on a bad day though, evidently depending on a handful of factors it can get as low as 500ms.
Hey, don't forget seabirds, turtles and alligators. I've seen all 3 cry before.
Right after I robbed their nests.
You still have to do that to a certain extent with modern synthesis software. I remember trying all kinds of combos before to get SID to say things right, still works on my wife's Talking Dict.
Her Talking Dict is from Thailand, a handheld translator more or less, that pronounces words and defines them for you. Strangely enough it was engineered in Berkeley, CA and sounds alot like SID.
I totally agree with you 100%. I mean, come on, the Terminator had a hella thick accent, and he came from like 30 years in the future.
Ah'll be BECK.
Ten years ago? BAH! Why 20 years ago my commodore 64 could do this with SID synthesis software.
Where does the battle come into it? I think the engineers should have them do kung fu or another form of destruction to determine the winner. That way you have 2 types of drama. Who is the best singer? And is it strong enough to win the fight? Yes indeed, it'll be on the air in Japan within the week if they get wind of it.
Idoru Battle Zero!
Since they're so old and obsolete, if you find one in your attic, I'll take it off your hands for a cool $20 USD.
Or "Microsoft sued, I lost my other shirt". :)
Isn't Gamespot part of that damn IGN network that forces you to login to watch video clips (advertising) of upcoming games? Don't they also force you to stare at an ad for a few seconds before you can read the article?
I really hate models like this.
Wow, did I really get a +5 for a few minutes or the parent I originally replied to? I was asking an honest question..it's been so long since my Physics course I forgot about the speed of light/em radiation correlation. Back to sleep. :)
I guess after reading my long-winded post you completely forgot my preamble mentioning that it's my brother's connection and not mine. I'll pass on your upgrade advice though.
Thanks for the scoop. My brother emailed me about wanting to build a network in his house a few days ago, I'll have to pass this on to him before he starts drilling.
It's always a good idea to get creative with your abilities on your resume, particularly now. Since it's an employer's market, generally employers will list unreasonable requirements for a given position just to cut down on the resume flood. I've seen tech support jobs requiring 5 years of experience, a bachelor's degree, php, cold fusion, asp, visual basic, 2 years of c++ and flash, all for $10 an hour. It's totally ridiculous, but, if you're clever, you can add all that stuff and fake your way through it if you get the job.
From my experience (both hiring and being hired), nobody and I mean NOBODY knows everything they say they do in an interview. Some people are sharper than others but 90% of the time, you or whoever you hire will be faking their way through it for the first three weeks or so. Also keep in mind that most managers that will be interviewing you don't know the minutae of what you will be doing at your new job and that also makes faking it easier.
So here's some advice: if you see a job you're pretty close to matching, go for it. Don't walk in there with Taco Bell burrito making skills and expect to land a SAP admin job, but if you're missing 1 or 2 things they're looking for and are confident in your ability to learn quickly, go for it.
If this is the case, hedge your bets by sending MORE THAN ONE. It's a 50/50 chance either way.
You forgot to add that the satellite transmitters these little boogers have are regulated by the FCC to be extremely weak. That adds to the latency.
Also what bearing does the speed of light have on microwave receivers/transmitters?
My brother lives out in the boonies and I'll relay what he's told me about his satellite.
1. Latency is horrible. He gets a 1000ms ping to anywhere, so that's a 1 second delay after he clicks anything before the remote server he's hitting even gets his attention.
2. Download caps. I think he's limited to a few gigs a month, maybe one.
3. Bandwidth throttling. This is time dependent as in time of day also. If you download too fast during certain hours of the day (internet prime time if you will), you get throttled waaaay down to a few KB/sec for hours.
4. Complicated software that's windows only. Everytime he calls me for tech support, I cringe. It's always an XP problem and always hard to troubleshoot. I've been wanting to get him on linux for years but with the satellite it's just not an option. He has the 2 usb boxes setup for his connection, maybe this new router would help.
5. Awful browsing. Since the latency is so high, some servers timeout before you can get a page from them. I had him install Opera awhile back (the lightning fast caching helps alot when navigating sites on a high latency connection) and he loves it, uses it exclusively. Without Opera, surfing the web is painful.
6. Unplayable online games. With that kind of ping, you can't play anything online, except maybe Yahoo Java Chess or something where reflexes don't count. Flash games may be playable too, not sure.
It basically sucks for anything but leeching big files, and for that it sucks too thanks to throttling and bandwidth limits. It's hard to believe that in this day and age people in remote locations have to suffer with crap like this. Then again, bandwidth isn't a god-given right...but it should be.
I'm sorry if you took my opinion as an affront, but I felt your criticism of 'linux desktops in general' lacked even a single example. I provided a few to back up my point.
:)
The clutter that Windows' taskbar used to have when you had more than 5 or 6 windows open has been slightly cleaned up by another copied concept: window grouping. KDE has had this for a few versions (and subversions) now.
Whether or not you can adjust to tabbed browsing (I'll admit, it took me some time) doesn't mean it's useless or targetted at advanced users. However, once I got accustomed to using tabs regularly, any Windows machine felt primitive when browsing because they're missing. If I want to google something I have to either install the google toolbar and type it in there or open a new window; either way, it's just another open app to track or group to watch when it could be just the window I'm in.
I agree that having multiple tabs open then closing the whole window sucks when you forgot what you were doing in another tab. It needs an option that warns you that you have other tabs open (like Konsole does if you open multiple konsole sessions in a single window) when you try to close it. With that, tabs would be perfect and dummy-proof. Maybe it's an option that I haven't seen yet, if so the default needs to be set to whatever it's not set to now.
Anyway this has got me thinking about usability and how it can be improved. I guess it's a process that needs user feedback that may indeed be lacking in the linux community. Nobody ever mentions things unless they're broken, right?
Judging by your mod points, there are some rich crack dealers on the street right now.
Explorer is horrible at doing what it should do (besides surfing the web which it doesn't do right either thanks to flubbed standards). It can't do tabbed browsing (konqueror), you can't split the window into multiple frames to make ftp'ing and file management easier (konqueror), if you visit a website you can't go recursively up the website's root tree (konqueror) among many other things.
I guess it's not really fair since windows is so far behind at this point. MacOS and KDE both support better features for file management and web browsing than Explorer does. Just wait until Longhorn is out I guess, by then Microsoft will have reaped the other apps' harvests and make it look new by painting it a different color.
By the way, you make alot of suppositions but have zero facts backing you up. Your opinion is pure conjecture.
I think Lego started releasing the Technics kits around the same time as Capsela got popular, or a little afterwards. I never got to play with Capsela but a friend of mine got Technics kits for every holiday. Christmas, birthdays, you name it. I was so jealous of his dune buggy kit.
:)). The faster the cars went the faster the motor spun. Oh and did I mention a gigantic erector set windmill blade was mounted to the motor? The drivers were always headed for disaster on that track.
Later I ended up getting some Lego kit with the battery pack and a motor. It took massive D sized batteries (does anything use these anymore?) and was too heavy to engineer something small because the motor it drove was weak. Eventually I made a balsa wood boat and used the motor/battery on this but it wasn't practical without being remote controlled.
My favorite combo was my slot car racing set and my erector set tower with the electric motor mounted to the top of the tower. The motor was powered by the slot car track (all it takes is two wires straight to the slots
Now that I think about it, it's a miracle nobody got hurt by Erector sets. Either that or back then people weren't insanely litigious like they are now. Erector sets were hella dangerous by nature; sharp metal edges on everything, real nuts and bolts (but to be fair they did include some paper and metal washers).
Wow. I guess it's time to update my collection. Since I started supermame a few years ago I've let the whole thing slip. Yes, the roms are available but nobody asks how. They assume the site is broken.
:)
Anyway there are still guys on the mame burners list right? Time to get a new set.
While reading all this stuff today I came up with an idea.
I have a stack of 7 Mame cds sitting here, and about 3 more filled with console games intended for use with Mame. Anyway I think it'd be cool to finally put all these discs together on a dvd (since I have a dvd burner) and create a linux distro that boots from the dvd to house it all. Set it all up to where you throw in the disc and you can play the entire mame collection anywhere.
This will enable me to eventually create a standup arcade machine with no hard drive. Sure, it'll be slow, but I'm cheap. Maybe if I spend a big chunk of money on the ram instead I can have most of it cached in ram, or at least the parts that would take a long time to load.
I'm gonna fire up vmware, install pclinuxos, move all these roms to the right places and attempt the mklivecd thing. Wish me luck.
What you guys are forgetting is that the 699MB that Knoppix is composed of is a severely compressed cloop image. You know that cloop decompresses stuff from the cd in near-realtime right? So your 699MB image on the cd is probably around a gig or 2 decompressed.
You can build your own distro, and not to evangelize but PCLinuxOS 2k4 makes it easy.
Basically you setup the distro the way you want it, apt-get rpms via synaptic (yes that's right, apt-get and rpm in the same sentence), setup all your bookmarks, address books, etc. Then you run the mklivecd shell script and voila! Your own distro, with everything you want and need and nothing you don't.
Go to pclinuxonline.com and hunt down the left side for the pclinuxos download link and forums link.
Let's all pray that she gets a touch of Parkinsons and accidentally severs both of Bill's jugular veins with that sword.
Not like it'll happen but hey, weirder stuff has.
Hahaha, yeah good point. I thought 'wtf this guy can't get past a missing floppy?'. Then I thought..never in Mandrake or any of the other distros I've tried have I ever had a problem with not having a floppy in my machine. Floppies are so 1987.
I could see him getting stuck on linux back in 97, but things have changed alot. He just picked the wrong distro. I call for him to rebuild it using knoppmyth or something else more interesting.