This is a terrible customer service experience you're detailing, and it's the exact type of customer experience that is frequently mocked here on Slashdot when the (other) big corps engage in it.
You subscribed to a paid service but you can't get the free part of it. How lame. I'm sorry, but they don't deserve to have your money anymore. You should ask for a refund.
I'm not trying to pick on Slashdot here. I'm being fair. Even if there is a technical problem, you owe it to your customers to be direct and accommodating about it. I know this is an isolated incident, but this is no way to run a business. It's completely unacceptable and unprofessional.
The ISS is not dying of neglect. Far from it. If your computer loses a secondary hard drive to old age and you replace it with a new one, is your computer dying of neglect? No. If a car's tire goes flat and you put on a new one, are you neglecting it? No.
That said, the ISS is the biggest white elephant program going on in space travel at the moment relative to everything else. Actually, they're all pretty undefendable except Hubble. (And, of course, except any other additions to the list that I'm sure people more familiar with NASA will spank me with in the replies) Nothing makes money, and the science-to-spending ratio is obscene compared to most programs. If we had to transfer funding away from these projects specifically for... oh, let's say, education, cancer research, or domestic security (this is HYPOTHETICAL! No flame here, I know what our war budgets and football stadium budgets are, I'd NEVER advocate cutting NASA before those things)... then most people would never argue the loss of the projects. They wouldn't like it, but they wouldn't think twice either.
Besides, the entire point of these risky, socially purposeless, complicated, budget-eating manned space missions is basically to do more things big and showy to pat ourselves on the back as a species. In that sense, Mars would be a greater success than the ISS. We've never been to another planet, but we've already done the orbital-sardine-can trick.
Pretty soon, robotics and remotely-operated mechanical systems will eliminate the need for a human presence on many science missions, so the cost of science should decline rapidly. This will be excellent. As for the manned missions... well, if we get into the space tourism game or we privatize some elements of the various programs, things may improve. For now, we do what we can, and we're in a tough spot. We've always recovered from disaster and tragedy in space travel, and we shall do so again.
Simple, it's the scan time. It's not that the computers are slow in processing the image data, it's that the actual scanner takes such a damn long time.
Of course, with such a setup, a G5 is a little more future-proof than a barebones computer that can just handle the task at hand for a lot cheaper.
I think this is a good setup for now... there are a lot of films that are in very poor shape that could use this kind of remastering. You WON'T find most of these out on DVD already because there was simply no way available prior to this to make an acceptable copy of the movie. Hollywood has had a big problem on their hands with this sort of thing for a while; preservation was a distant afterthought for years and now they're frantically rushing to save these movies before the prints completely deteriorate and we have nothing left.
Remember, there's no original print left of Citizen Kane, widely considered the best movie ever. We can't let that happen to every movie. I think any type of scanning project like this - film, drawings, portraits, photography - is noble when you consider how the original media can simply crumble to dust, losing the art forever.
Besides, this sort of thing keeps Apple rolling in the dough, eh? I don't see any Microsoft products listed here, so it seems like the regular crowd here should be happy with that sort of thing. *shrug*
The other high tech parking garage that they alluded to in the subject article is located in Hoboken, NJ, a stone's throw from NYC. In this particular case, a Cadillac DeVille was pushed off its pallet and smashed into oblivion due to the trunk popping open during retrieval. The trunk apparently clipped the machinery or something like that.
Heh.
The Hoboken municipal garage, by the way, is very similar to what they mention here but has a far higher capacity. It looks like a row of upscale apartments. It went far over budget and was finished quite late. It too resulted in a cost of about $25,000 a parking space.
However, Hoboken is absolutely atrocious when it comes to parking... even more so than many parts of Manhattan. Simply no parking during the day, no parking at night. If you want a garage space for a weekend night, that's a cool $20 right there. Because these garages save a lot of space... and space is at quite a premium around this area... they do make a lot of sense.
No, these garages don't make sense in the middle of Iowa or Idaho. Sort of like it doesn't make sense to buy a pickup truck to commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan every day.
Then Radiohead might be a bad example. For no other reason than the "cut your own nose off to spite your face" mentality.
Then again, he probably meant "we may not make anymore full length albums published by a big record company as we search for a more appropriate medium to express our artistry." Rather than "we're just not gonna do this anymore."
(Note that, although I by no means wish to talk crap about Radiohead as they are a tremendous band, it is common for a recording artist or band to give some terribly lame side excuse as a diversion from lack of motivation, lack of creativity, or lack of civility among band members as the true reason for an impending retirement/breakup. I hope this is not the case)
No, it's not Britney Spears who needs to be afraid, it is indeed Radiohead.
Britney is (well, more appropriately, WAS) a massive marketing/publicity generating celebrity, who makes money off of being famous. Britney's music has almost nothing to do with artistry as far as music goes... she's a performer and she makes money off of performing. Her songs were not composed by her with a pad and paper and guitar in her bedroom, they were written by a hot songwriter, produced by a hot producer, music performed by experienced studio musicians, and sung by a hot recording artist / celebrity image. It's all MARKETING. Music for the people. There is some traces of artistry there on individual levels, but generally the whole thing is for making money and it's music by committee. Don't forget, the record execs have their meeting where they decide whether the album is good enough to release and if not, they send you back to the studio.
The point? For Britney, success is money and publicity. 99 cent singles contribute to this and don't detract from any secondary goals. Why would they sell singles for all these years if they hurt the companies and these kind of artists, their biggest money makers?
Now, Radiohead, on the other hand...
Radiohead is the type of band that makes an album, writes songs for the sake of writing music and expressing feelings. For a band like Radiohead, the album is a unit of expression. Radio airplay and singles don't really mean much... they're nice for promotion, but they don't mean as much on their own as does the whole album. Also, since Radiohead doesn't compose individual songs for the sake of promotion and celebrity, they won't make too much money going that route.
It's not entirely black and white like that - yea, Radiohead might write a song that might be radio friendly, and Britney might write a song on her own about some terrible thing she felt that will never make it to radio... but the point is, Radiohead wants to sell their albums as units of works of art. They don't mind singles as long as the albums are for sale. And Britney doesn't care about albums, because if she didn't have to sing 9 "other" songs on a 12 song album, she'd rather not.
Enter the possibility that the record companies may no longer wish to sell albums because 99 cent singles are making all the money. This is plausible for no other reason other than if 99 cent electronic singles are a huge hit, as we have been trying to get them to do that for SIX YEARS now, then they would obviously pour all their resources into that, albums be damned. Radiohead is then phased out and Britney is completely in. (or the next Britney, anyway)
1. People in the mid-popularity range pick on whoever seems to be an easy target.
2. People who are cerebral and don't participate much in the sham that is high school society wind up to be easy targets. It gets better later on... you won't get beat up anymore, you'll just have your VCR stolen, your wallet pickpocketed, or your car jacked...
3. High school is an institutionalized teenager prison. Innocent until proven 18.
4. Geeks are highly pretentious because they know they're smart (even if they're not) making them not only morally superior but also intellectually superior - meaning society needs them more and will reward them more later on. (is this true? haha, only when it's convenient for The Man to have you around...)
5. Geeks can't wait until all the popular kids are working at McDonalds one day... We clarified in the article that, in fact, the most popular kids have no interest in torturing others for fun and social gain; this is the domain of the middle crowd. So, in fact, this is not due revenge, but blind jealousy. Also, since the end of the tech boom, geeks have been picking up spatula duty as well...
6. Teenagers are not inherently depressed, they're just bored and imprisoned by society. As opposed to all the grown-ups who became office workers...... so, what have we learned today? That people like to bitch and moan! People feel trapped in their lives and feel they can do nothing to help themselves! Other people can be real assholes at times!
Yes, the article hits a nerve, but the comments here make me realize that it was written to do that. And somehow that'll make someone money, so I don't put 100% philosophical value in articles written to hit a nerve.
Someone wake me up when they write an article that says how we can move past the bullshit. This is just preaching to the choir.
No, the whole reason you have a credit card is to spend money you don't have with you at the time.
Whether that money is going to be there when the bill arrives or not is the rub. The credit card companies love that part. The whole point for them is to trick you into spending money you won't have for a long time... hence generating billions of dollars in interest and fees from stupid consumers (like me).
Welcome Slashdot visitor! You have been redirected to a ligher version of our slashvertiseme... I mean, article in order to conserve bandwidth and keep the site running smoothly for everybody. This is the whole text of the article, if you would like to read the story along with our other adverti... I mean, reader comments, please click here.
Microsoft actually happens to adapt to things very quickly at times, in comparison to organizations with their size and complexity. Some large corporations take years to adapt to the presence of a new product, a new strategy, or a new competitor. Microsoft has, in the past, made big changes in weeks.
Sure, a small development team may be able to change directions more quickly, but that's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
So, if MS really wants to adapt to something, they will, and they will do it quickly, and they will roll over anyone who tries to stand in their way. And, as far as I see, their current strategy is still making money and is still leading the software industry.
Just for concession's sake, though... the fact that the open source movement (or for that matter, Apple) has been able to live and thrive on the niche markets and margins of the software/hardware industries is a great credit to their tenacity and robustness. It's a difficult market out there...
I would agree with your reasoning, but from my experience, I find that many managers and executives only want one of two things:
* Hot-shot coders for new hires - if you're starting from the bottom, you're expected to be of the burnout, fast-track variety. That's why it's the bottom
* Experienced coders with very specific and detailed prerequisites - basically, they have a position and they want someone who's already spent 3 years doing exactly that and who can hit the ground running.
First, this means there aren't any positions for new programmers (now, anyway) who want to work sane hours and spend time learning. It's not a cost-effective option for many companies. Second, usually the hot-shot programmers work 3-4 years on some hot-shot technology - such that when many are finally ready to get back to normal, the things that they were working on required obsolete skills that no one wants anymore - hence they aren't really in the hunt for the jobs that want very specific skills.
Yes, there is also a certain degree of "quantity vs quality" in this. Just because you burned yourself out coding 14 hours a day for 4 years does not mean you did anything that you could build a career from. You may have simply been a dumb slave, hauling bricks up the side of the pyramid. Which is an appropriate metaphor... working your ass off to build what will eventually be a tomb for you and everyone you worked with.
The entire economy is dealing with this sort of thing right now, though, so it's not just us.
Actually, from what I've heard, they use radar to help commercial airplanes navigate. Furthermore, there are few crucial military domestic uses of radar other than national airspace security - that is, we need it to see if someone's sending over bombers to New York or Miami.
I would argue that, in this case, giving priority to consumer telecommunications would result in killing people. Not the other way around.
There's something about the parent post that made me queasy. As in, it's possible that the IDE drive results might be in the ballpark of the SCSI results. And if that's true, then an IDE RAID constructed with these "15%" partitions (if possible) would cost considerably less than a SCSI RAID and yet offer reasonably comparable performance.
Then again, I dunno. I wanted to buy a RAID controller this week cause I already have the drives. Between reading about IDE RAID from about 20 different sites, and now this article, I've had it up to here. I think I'm just gonna get a $20 IDE controller and do WinXP software RAID. It's cheap, it'll probably be fast - faster than a standalone drive, and I really have no use for it anyway so I could give a hoot about reliability.
I can see how this would be a fast setup, but I can't see why you paid $400 for just the speed part, when the space itself you could have had for just $100 (still overpriced, cause that's what an 80gig 7200RPM IDE drive costs nowadays).
If you did this because you're really having issues with hard disk access, you might want to turn off BonziBuddy.
(because I got on line at Best Buy at 4am on the day after Thanksgiving, and after the shopping spree that ensued, there is absolutely nothing left on my wish list that I can think of at the moment...)
They just do. Corporate America is not always that smart. I usually see "Must have 3 Years of Java/Perl/SQL/Javascript/.NET" or something similar, and I wonder... can I add them all up to get 3 years?
The terrible thing is that I couldn't get the Java class into my schedule at college - always a conflict with required courses for my major, minor, or concentration. This makes me a much less appealing job candidate until I take that local community college Java class (knowing I can't get out of work until 8pm most days, this won't happen anytime soon...)
If they do... well, I'm sure someone just lost their masterpiece pr0n directory, but otherwise, things like this happen. (ask Hemos) You have to make it through such things. In this case, it was a commercial (educational) building and no one is homeless, so it's less of a tragedy than usual. Let's hope that they rebuild with something better and newer.
That said, I get the feeling that those plumes of smoke really are millions of dollars floating away in the wind...
Can someone hack a highly "secure" network with this? Well, they can certainly see and do things that normally cannot be seen or done, but I'm frankly not overly worried about intruder access with this. I think there's more of a threat from crackers thoroughly violating an unsecured SQL server setup, and there doesn't have to be a terrible lot of skill in that.
This, however, puts a whole new angle on espionage, insider corruption, coordinated intruder-assisted theft and cracking, and possibly underground peer-to-peer networks. Just to get the tip of the iceberg.
One would argue that some of this stuff may not be new, but it's certainly the first I'm hearing of any such tools or concepts being used.
I like the LC program a lot. Someone could build a whole new network on that concept. It probably doesn't make much sense outright, but I can see all kinds of nasty tricks being played with that. That traceroute-like tool is also impressive... it could be downright dangerous for certain people with a level of network knowledge and intent of evil far beyond mine.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a terrible customer service experience you're detailing, and it's the exact type of customer experience that is frequently mocked here on Slashdot when the (other) big corps engage in it.
You subscribed to a paid service but you can't get the free part of it. How lame. I'm sorry, but they don't deserve to have your money anymore. You should ask for a refund.
I'm not trying to pick on Slashdot here. I'm being fair. Even if there is a technical problem, you owe it to your customers to be direct and accommodating about it. I know this is an isolated incident, but this is no way to run a business. It's completely unacceptable and unprofessional.
well at least I know where to look for things for the remainder of the day.
Yes, me too. I wholeheartedly support the future scientific discovery of cosmic shrubbery. /whoops
Gah! I'll bite on this one:
The ISS is not dying of neglect. Far from it. If your computer loses a secondary hard drive to old age and you replace it with a new one, is your computer dying of neglect? No. If a car's tire goes flat and you put on a new one, are you neglecting it? No.
That said, the ISS is the biggest white elephant program going on in space travel at the moment relative to everything else. Actually, they're all pretty undefendable except Hubble. (And, of course, except any other additions to the list that I'm sure people more familiar with NASA will spank me with in the replies) Nothing makes money, and the science-to-spending ratio is obscene compared to most programs. If we had to transfer funding away from these projects specifically for... oh, let's say, education, cancer research, or domestic security (this is HYPOTHETICAL! No flame here, I know what our war budgets and football stadium budgets are, I'd NEVER advocate cutting NASA before those things)... then most people would never argue the loss of the projects. They wouldn't like it, but they wouldn't think twice either.
Besides, the entire point of these risky, socially purposeless, complicated, budget-eating manned space missions is basically to do more things big and showy to pat ourselves on the back as a species. In that sense, Mars would be a greater success than the ISS. We've never been to another planet, but we've already done the orbital-sardine-can trick.
Pretty soon, robotics and remotely-operated mechanical systems will eliminate the need for a human presence on many science missions, so the cost of science should decline rapidly. This will be excellent. As for the manned missions... well, if we get into the space tourism game or we privatize some elements of the various programs, things may improve. For now, we do what we can, and we're in a tough spot. We've always recovered from disaster and tragedy in space travel, and we shall do so again.
Simple, it's the scan time. It's not that the computers are slow in processing the image data, it's that the actual scanner takes such a damn long time.
Of course, with such a setup, a G5 is a little more future-proof than a barebones computer that can just handle the task at hand for a lot cheaper.
I think this is a good setup for now... there are a lot of films that are in very poor shape that could use this kind of remastering. You WON'T find most of these out on DVD already because there was simply no way available prior to this to make an acceptable copy of the movie. Hollywood has had a big problem on their hands with this sort of thing for a while; preservation was a distant afterthought for years and now they're frantically rushing to save these movies before the prints completely deteriorate and we have nothing left.
Remember, there's no original print left of Citizen Kane, widely considered the best movie ever. We can't let that happen to every movie. I think any type of scanning project like this - film, drawings, portraits, photography - is noble when you consider how the original media can simply crumble to dust, losing the art forever.
Besides, this sort of thing keeps Apple rolling in the dough, eh? I don't see any Microsoft products listed here, so it seems like the regular crowd here should be happy with that sort of thing. *shrug*
or more appropriately, their insurance company pays.
Caddy takes plunge at high-tech garage
The other high tech parking garage that they alluded to in the subject article is located in Hoboken, NJ, a stone's throw from NYC. In this particular case, a Cadillac DeVille was pushed off its pallet and smashed into oblivion due to the trunk popping open during retrieval. The trunk apparently clipped the machinery or something like that. Heh. The Hoboken municipal garage, by the way, is very similar to what they mention here but has a far higher capacity. It looks like a row of upscale apartments. It went far over budget and was finished quite late. It too resulted in a cost of about $25,000 a parking space. However, Hoboken is absolutely atrocious when it comes to parking... even more so than many parts of Manhattan. Simply no parking during the day, no parking at night. If you want a garage space for a weekend night, that's a cool $20 right there. Because these garages save a lot of space... and space is at quite a premium around this area... they do make a lot of sense. No, these garages don't make sense in the middle of Iowa or Idaho. Sort of like it doesn't make sense to buy a pickup truck to commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan every day.
Then Radiohead might be a bad example. For no other reason than the "cut your own nose off to spite your face" mentality.
Then again, he probably meant "we may not make anymore full length albums published by a big record company as we search for a more appropriate medium to express our artistry." Rather than "we're just not gonna do this anymore."
(Note that, although I by no means wish to talk crap about Radiohead as they are a tremendous band, it is common for a recording artist or band to give some terribly lame side excuse as a diversion from lack of motivation, lack of creativity, or lack of civility among band members as the true reason for an impending retirement/breakup. I hope this is not the case)
No, it's not Britney Spears who needs to be afraid, it is indeed Radiohead.
Britney is (well, more appropriately, WAS) a massive marketing/publicity generating celebrity, who makes money off of being famous. Britney's music has almost nothing to do with artistry as far as music goes... she's a performer and she makes money off of performing. Her songs were not composed by her with a pad and paper and guitar in her bedroom, they were written by a hot songwriter, produced by a hot producer, music performed by experienced studio musicians, and sung by a hot recording artist / celebrity image. It's all MARKETING. Music for the people. There is some traces of artistry there on individual levels, but generally the whole thing is for making money and it's music by committee. Don't forget, the record execs have their meeting where they decide whether the album is good enough to release and if not, they send you back to the studio.
The point? For Britney, success is money and publicity. 99 cent singles contribute to this and don't detract from any secondary goals. Why would they sell singles for all these years if they hurt the companies and these kind of artists, their biggest money makers?
Now, Radiohead, on the other hand...
Radiohead is the type of band that makes an album, writes songs for the sake of writing music and expressing feelings. For a band like Radiohead, the album is a unit of expression. Radio airplay and singles don't really mean much... they're nice for promotion, but they don't mean as much on their own as does the whole album. Also, since Radiohead doesn't compose individual songs for the sake of promotion and celebrity, they won't make too much money going that route.
It's not entirely black and white like that - yea, Radiohead might write a song that might be radio friendly, and Britney might write a song on her own about some terrible thing she felt that will never make it to radio... but the point is, Radiohead wants to sell their albums as units of works of art. They don't mind singles as long as the albums are for sale. And Britney doesn't care about albums, because if she didn't have to sing 9 "other" songs on a 12 song album, she'd rather not.
Enter the possibility that the record companies may no longer wish to sell albums because 99 cent singles are making all the money. This is plausible for no other reason other than if 99 cent electronic singles are a huge hit, as we have been trying to get them to do that for SIX YEARS now, then they would obviously pour all their resources into that, albums be damned. Radiohead is then phased out and Britney is completely in. (or the next Britney, anyway)
Hey... you have to admit, the "blue screen of death" is pretty original. :)
1. People in the mid-popularity range pick on whoever seems to be an easy target.
... so, what have we learned today? That people like to bitch and moan! People feel trapped in their lives and feel they can do nothing to help themselves! Other people can be real assholes at times!
2. People who are cerebral and don't participate much in the sham that is high school society wind up to be easy targets. It gets better later on... you won't get beat up anymore, you'll just have your VCR stolen, your wallet pickpocketed, or your car jacked...
3. High school is an institutionalized teenager prison. Innocent until proven 18.
4. Geeks are highly pretentious because they know they're smart (even if they're not) making them not only morally superior but also intellectually superior - meaning society needs them more and will reward them more later on. (is this true? haha, only when it's convenient for The Man to have you around...)
5. Geeks can't wait until all the popular kids are working at McDonalds one day...
We clarified in the article that, in fact, the most popular kids have no interest in torturing others for fun and social gain; this is the domain of the middle crowd. So, in fact, this is not due revenge, but blind jealousy. Also, since the end of the tech boom, geeks have been picking up spatula duty as well...
6. Teenagers are not inherently depressed, they're just bored and imprisoned by society. As opposed to all the grown-ups who became office workers...
Yes, the article hits a nerve, but the comments here make me realize that it was written to do that. And somehow that'll make someone money, so I don't put 100% philosophical value in articles written to hit a nerve.
Someone wake me up when they write an article that says how we can move past the bullshit. This is just preaching to the choir.
No, the whole reason you have a credit card is to spend money you don't have with you at the time.
Whether that money is going to be there when the bill arrives or not is the rub. The credit card companies love that part. The whole point for them is to trick you into spending money you won't have for a long time... hence generating billions of dollars in interest and fees from stupid consumers (like me).
Welcome Slashdot visitor! You have been redirected to a ligher version of our slashvertiseme... I mean, article in order to conserve bandwidth and keep the site running smoothly for everybody. This is the whole text of the article, if you would like to read the story along with our other adverti... I mean, reader comments, please click here.
Microsoft actually happens to adapt to things very quickly at times, in comparison to organizations with their size and complexity. Some large corporations take years to adapt to the presence of a new product, a new strategy, or a new competitor. Microsoft has, in the past, made big changes in weeks.
Sure, a small development team may be able to change directions more quickly, but that's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
So, if MS really wants to adapt to something, they will, and they will do it quickly, and they will roll over anyone who tries to stand in their way. And, as far as I see, their current strategy is still making money and is still leading the software industry.
Just for concession's sake, though... the fact that the open source movement (or for that matter, Apple) has been able to live and thrive on the niche markets and margins of the software/hardware industries is a great credit to their tenacity and robustness. It's a difficult market out there...
I would agree with your reasoning, but from my experience, I find that many managers and executives only want one of two things:
* Hot-shot coders for new hires - if you're starting from the bottom, you're expected to be of the burnout, fast-track variety. That's why it's the bottom
* Experienced coders with very specific and detailed prerequisites - basically, they have a position and they want someone who's already spent 3 years doing exactly that and who can hit the ground running.
First, this means there aren't any positions for new programmers (now, anyway) who want to work sane hours and spend time learning. It's not a cost-effective option for many companies. Second, usually the hot-shot programmers work 3-4 years on some hot-shot technology - such that when many are finally ready to get back to normal, the things that they were working on required obsolete skills that no one wants anymore - hence they aren't really in the hunt for the jobs that want very specific skills.
Yes, there is also a certain degree of "quantity vs quality" in this. Just because you burned yourself out coding 14 hours a day for 4 years does not mean you did anything that you could build a career from. You may have simply been a dumb slave, hauling bricks up the side of the pyramid. Which is an appropriate metaphor... working your ass off to build what will eventually be a tomb for you and everyone you worked with.
The entire economy is dealing with this sort of thing right now, though, so it's not just us.
Actually, from what I've heard, they use radar to help commercial airplanes navigate. Furthermore, there are few crucial military domestic uses of radar other than national airspace security - that is, we need it to see if someone's sending over bombers to New York or Miami.
I would argue that, in this case, giving priority to consumer telecommunications would result in killing people. Not the other way around.
Apparently, .cn has similar restrictions...
There's something about the parent post that made me queasy. As in, it's possible that the IDE drive results might be in the ballpark of the SCSI results. And if that's true, then an IDE RAID constructed with these "15%" partitions (if possible) would cost considerably less than a SCSI RAID and yet offer reasonably comparable performance.
Then again, I dunno. I wanted to buy a RAID controller this week cause I already have the drives. Between reading about IDE RAID from about 20 different sites, and now this article, I've had it up to here. I think I'm just gonna get a $20 IDE controller and do WinXP software RAID. It's cheap, it'll probably be fast - faster than a standalone drive, and I really have no use for it anyway so I could give a hoot about reliability.
Blah.
Pardon me for a second, but I think I counted...
... for $500.
36 gigs total
I can see how this would be a fast setup, but I can't see why you paid $400 for just the speed part, when the space itself you could have had for just $100 (still overpriced, cause that's what an 80gig 7200RPM IDE drive costs nowadays).
If you did this because you're really having issues with hard disk access, you might want to turn off BonziBuddy.
Links, please.
(because I got on line at Best Buy at 4am on the day after Thanksgiving, and after the shopping spree that ensued, there is absolutely nothing left on my wish list that I can think of at the moment...)
They just do. Corporate America is not always that smart. I usually see "Must have 3 Years of Java/Perl/SQL/Javascript/.NET" or something similar, and I wonder... can I add them all up to get 3 years?
The terrible thing is that I couldn't get the Java class into my schedule at college - always a conflict with required courses for my major, minor, or concentration. This makes me a much less appealing job candidate until I take that local community college Java class (knowing I can't get out of work until 8pm most days, this won't happen anytime soon...)
It's a shame I remember these things. I really need to get out more.
They're not gone. They're just experiencing a Distributed Combustion Denial-of-Service attack.
Was anyone killed?
If not, was anyone hurt?
If not, do they have insurance?
If they do... well, I'm sure someone just lost their masterpiece pr0n directory, but otherwise, things like this happen. (ask Hemos) You have to make it through such things. In this case, it was a commercial (educational) building and no one is homeless, so it's less of a tragedy than usual. Let's hope that they rebuild with something better and newer.
That said, I get the feeling that those plumes of smoke really are millions of dollars floating away in the wind...
Can someone hack a highly "secure" network with this? Well, they can certainly see and do things that normally cannot be seen or done, but I'm frankly not overly worried about intruder access with this. I think there's more of a threat from crackers thoroughly violating an unsecured SQL server setup, and there doesn't have to be a terrible lot of skill in that.
This, however, puts a whole new angle on espionage, insider corruption, coordinated intruder-assisted theft and cracking, and possibly underground peer-to-peer networks. Just to get the tip of the iceberg.
One would argue that some of this stuff may not be new, but it's certainly the first I'm hearing of any such tools or concepts being used.
I like the LC program a lot. Someone could build a whole new network on that concept. It probably doesn't make much sense outright, but I can see all kinds of nasty tricks being played with that. That traceroute-like tool is also impressive... it could be downright dangerous for certain people with a level of network knowledge and intent of evil far beyond mine.
Oh, man. That's bad. That's worse than what Harry Belafonte said about Colin Powell.
And you got modded up, too.
Hey, maybe the truth is that bad so that even something that looks like trolling is considered "Insightful".