I'm not a huge fan of tftp, but yes, it does work. I use it a lot for keeping IOS images stored somewhere. I had lost my old archive of all my Cisco IOS's, so I've started over. It's a lot of fun, I assure you.:)
As for the machine technique, that didn't exactly work at the first place. We kept a lot of "warm spare" hardware up. Just about all the web servers were identical. They were frequently given tasks later based on need. For example, we could have had 1/2 dozen machines just hanging out online, patched nightly (they were Linux, but we checked for them every night). If our pool of servers for one of the larger multi-million hits/day sites started getting a little thin, we'd sync it up from our repository, and then bring it online. Until we did that, it was simply noted as "unused". Sometimes machines were moved from actively assigned to warm spare, where we were simply ignoring anything in the tree that held site specific data (a different partition than the OS). It would still sync itself up, in case it needed to be brought back for that site, but the files could be removed, or the partition could be wiped out and synced up with the new requirements rather quickly.
On occasion, we may have been short on spares in a city. For example, we only visited the New York DC very occasionally. Depending on end-user usage patterns, if we didn't have enough spares there, we'd take a machine out of service as one type, and immediately begin syncing it as another type. Since we ran so many redundant servers, it wasn't a big deal, so the users never knew it was happening. Machine x09.nyc may be flipped for use many times. The users never knew, because it was part of our capacity planning, which was an ongoing task. Sometimes we had some heads up. "site X will be featured in huge publication Y, which will be going to press on Dec 21, 2012", so by Dec 15, we'd have already made it more than ready.
It was nice having a single baseline config, that everything was grown upon. The baseline config was a pretuned Linux OS, so we could drop anything onto it without worrying.
For remote DC's, it was cheaper and easier for us to leave a defective server in the rack powered down, than to ask remote hands to ship it back. Those would be marked "DEAD".:) When we needed to, we'd go to the city and make repairs on site, or ship whatever wasn't behaving well back to the home office ourselves. It was usually just fans or hard drives that failed, so we'd show up on site with a whole bunch of each. There was the occasional other faults that would just mean the machine became spare parts back home.
I had intended to build one, but my working budget went from a little something to less than nothing due to job changes. I still keep my eyes open to what can be done though. Right now, it's a mental exercise.
The most important thing to remember is, as a hobby toy, unless you want to get in serious trouble with the FAA, you must follow a few rules. This is probably not all inclusive. It's just what I can think of off the top of my head from my own research. Find a local R/C group, and reference the FAA pages for more information.
2) You must stay out of any airspace that an aircraft may be flying in. That is, stay out of the approach and departure areas of any airport. Someone just got in trouble for this, where they had an R/C airplane with a camera that filmed a commercial airliner flying by. It was several seconds between the time the aircraft passed, and the wake turbulence knocked his R/C plane out of the air, which would imply a decent separation, but still, stay away from aircraft.
If you haven't gone through private pilot flight school, you may not be aware of the airspace restrictions. Stop by a local small airport and ask. There will always be someone with time on their hands that will love to talk to a newbie.
3) It can never leave your sight,
4) You must have control of it at all times. That is, your remote control must be able to override anything it wants to do.
6) Watch the frequencies that you're using. If you're on R/C frequencies and TX power, you're safe, but play nice with other people who may be flying. Don't hog a bunch of frequencies because you need them for additional controls. If you're working with other frequencies, check the licensing on those. You don't want to piss off the FCC too.
Now I'll go into the territory of ignoring FAA and FCC rules. Don't do it. Don't get caught doing it. Don't tell random strangers that you're doing it. Sure as hell don't post youtube videos of it, because you'll have feds in your livingroom with a no-knock warrant and a one way ticket for you to Southeastern Cuba.
For mine, I looked at a variety of options. If you search around enough, you'll find people mid-sized R/C airplanes (say about a 3' wingspan) with embedded PC's to do their dirty work. I didn't find this totally practical both from the OS standpoint and the interfaces. I want lots and lots of standard interfaces, and I want flexability to use anything I can. I intended to use a small x86 platform machine, running from a flash card (SD/MMC/CF). Delicate parts will get broken quick. Embedded or x86, you'll probably want several onboard to handle different functions. They'd need to be networked together so you can exchange data. For example, one reading your sensors, one to control the servos, one for comms, etc, etc.
I wanted to have the ability to carry at least a couple camcorders, and USB webcams. Every ounce of weight you add means you need the aircraft to support it. That means it needs a good amount of lift and thrust.
I'm assuming you've flown before. If you haven't, go to a local small airport and go for your private pilots license. That will include both ground school (the book work on how things work), and flight (actually working an aircraft). To program an aircraft for perfect conditions is one thing. Making it takeoff, fly, and land in less than ideal conditions is another. What happens if the wind picks up, and you have to slip during your landing? If you haven't programmed for it, either you'll end up way off course if tracking to a GPS coordinate, or you'll get blown way off of the field, probably into something less tha
I was wholly responsible for a large network. I usually had a few people working under me, so it was essential that we could find information about the servers.
Our documentation was pretty simple. Actually, very simple. We had an internal web site set up so techs could message each other on what they were doing. It was a simple chat type interface. Every line was stored in a database.
The company had several large sites, and tens of thousands of hosted domains. The internal web site had plain text files listing out the servers, grouped by city, then rack, with their name, their primary IP, and their function.
A second list was a copy & paste from the PDU's, showing what machines were plugged in where.
Both lists were linked from the web page for easy access, plus you could view them easily by logging into the server. As long as cat, less, or vi were working, they were easy to find.
At another company, we set up a more elaborate page. It was entirely PHP/MySQL. It recorded all the details of the machine. IP, hostname, virtual IP's, manufacturer, model, serial, city, rack number, rack position, number of rack units the server occupied, the full output of dmidecode/vmidecode, it's function, versions of server software installed, etc. This was searchable, and you could print information on a single server, rack, all racks in the city, or any searched criteria. In addition, since some of the staff were freakin' illiterate, a second result page showed the information appearing like stickers on stock images of the machine fronts, including empty spaces. If the information was accurately maintained, you should be able to take a printout of the rack, and compare it directly to the rack, and everything would correspond.
This second version made a very useful method to not need to create visio diagrams of every freakin' rack, and convince the people maintaining the diagrams to keep them updated with changes. Rather, if someone added or removed a machine, they were to enter the information into the warm fuzzy web interface.
There are programs to do similar things, but I never found one that quite fit the business needs, so a few days of programming gave the interface. Populating information was pretty easy with a perl script, dmidecode, and a few other basic command line functions and DNS requests.
Switches and routers were handled a little differently, but in a similar manner. Cisco 'show version' and 'show run' gave sufficient information to store everything about the way the switch ran, so in the event of a complete switch failure, a new switch could be dropped in place, the config could be copy & pasted into a terminal session, and it would be running exactly as expected.
On the equipment that I've been stuck with, it's usually been that they couldn't really afford it, but I (obviously) don't have access to their financials. We discussed the problem, what they needed. I came back to them with a price tag, and they agreed. Since I wasn't on their site when they agreed, I couldn't just collect a check in advance. When the equipment showed up and I was ready to deliver, they couldn't afford it. As it turns out, these are usually the companies that are usually a few weeks or months from closing the doors, but they put on a great act until the.
For the recent customer who purchased the server, we discussed options. The server I suggested and gave him the link to purchase, it was only 16Gb, but I had discussed previous similar projects that I had worked with and since those already had 16Gb (and the price was right), he went for 64Gb. The confusion with the OS was all because of the vendor he was purchasing from.
I've run into that too. I've bought a lot of servers over the years from different places. One place was very very insistent to put a MS OS on it, but since I wouldn't pay for it, it was the MS Server 2003 Demo. I may have the name wrong, but it's the one that dies in like 30 days after the install unless you pay for the full version. I only knew because I saw NTFS partitions, and one machine I turned on but was distracted and didn't get the boot CD in before it came up into Windows. In those cases, where I'm doing the ordering, and I'm very clear that I don't want any OS, they're just pushing MS products on me. I'd mention the vendor specifically, but I honestly don't remember.
I'm the best thing they can ever hope for on airplanes most of the time. I don't make noise. I don't even snore. I'm not asking for drinks, peanuts, complaining because I can't hear the movie, asking how long til we get there, or even disturbing other passengers.
The alternative to drinking is little Xanax and a double rum and coke. I just have to be sure that the flight is actually going to be boarding on time. It sucks when they're delayed by 30 minutes, and I'm nodding out waiting for boarding to start. I have no anxiety of flying. I was a private pilot years ago, so I know all the funny noises and motions. I just prefer not to be bored out of my skull for hours on a flight.:)
As for tech support...... In a previous job, I was the senior IT guy, and all of our equipment was remote. It saved me 2 to 3 hours a day of driving, if I just stayed home and worked from there. I could smoke. I could drink. As long as everything was done right, no one complained. I'd get calls at weird hours, so ya, I was pretty lit a few times, when I got called at 1am to do work. I know my stuff though, so it was still done right, even if I did have to retype quite a few lines to make them work right. Passwords were always a bastard, when I couldn't see the keys, and (obviously) they aren't echoed on the screen. Oh, the good ol' days. At one office at that company, I actually walked back from the bar to the office (about 3 blocks) to get something done, because there was an evening emergency, and I knew I shouldn't be driving. That was convenient though, I slept it off several times in my office chair, rather than driving home drunk.:) It was a very happy relaxed workplace, even when the stressful moments happened, we could go have drinks after.:)
But that would be a really really slow fuse. I think the traditional C4 up the tailpipe with a remote detonator would be better. But, why would you need the small barking wrapper?
I have someone's machine here right now that needed a full reinstall. The machine took a power surge. The surge damaged the hard drive, memory, and sound card. Knowing the preinstalled version of Windows, it has so much crap it isn't even funny. I could spend hours cleaning those out, or put a nice clean install on.
When I use a Windows machine (hey, it helps for gaming), it's always nice to have a clean install, versus the vendor provided crap, even if I have to go through couple dozen or so reboots. On the client's machine, even if I could have preserved the reinstall partition on the original drive, I would have gone through just as many reboots doing the Windows updates.
I prefer that my clients buy their own equipment. That way they know I didn't inflate the price, they are the customer of record, and I don't carry the risk of buying hardware the the client backing out. I've gotten stuck with a few pieces of equipment because the client "changed their minds". That really doesn't work well on stuff purchased through eBay, but even with many vendors I'd have to pay a restocking fee.
We found a 3rd party vendor that was selling a Supermicro motherboard and chassis, assembled to spec with CPU, memory and drives. It's a nice machine. 8 core Opteron, 64Gb RAM, etc, etc. When the client put the order through, he asked "What operating system do you want?". I was already clear in that we were putting our preferred Linux distro on, but would be testing various RAID and filesystems, so he wasn't to have anything put on. They were very clear that the machine wouldn't support Linux. I went back to the spec, and checked on everything. There were no problem. They were insistent on selling him a Microsoft OS. They actually wrote it on the build sheet "Must use Microsoft OS". He was really concerned. Could this tech guy who's known all the answers so far know more than the vendor? Is he wasting a whole bunch of money on something that he can't use?
When it got here, I opened it up and verified all the parts. Then I booted it up with my Slamd64 CD, and installed. Right out of the box, it worked perfectly. Every device was identified and the drivers loaded. No problems at all. I know he was much happier when he got the call "The machine works great. We're migrating to it now. It will be online by the end of the weekend."
Had the customer not known any better, and we had given an option of Linux or Windows, he would have spent some good money on a Microsoft OS, because the vendor told him to.
I know the vendors view. They can make extra money on it. Why would I want to slow a nice fast machine down with a heavy GUI, when I can strip Linux down to bare bones and run as fast as possible?
Ya. I've worked through the Kama Sutra, plus the unpublished addendums. I've only sent a few partners to the hospital, usually with a smile on her face.:) Still, most of those positions would be dangerous at best.
I knew a couple similar to that. I never did figure out how they did it. Like, how did she avoid being crushed. Every thought from there just made me nauseous.
Everyone knows cats are covertly taking over the world. It's just a matter of time before they all get the signal, and the humans are either enslaved or killed.
Sure, use 3 cats to guide a blind person. When the day comes, they'll lead him in front of a bus. When the bus stops because they just hit him, they'll kill all the occupants too. How else do you expect a cat to make a bus stop?:)
In any airport you can buy food from the mini-resturants, snacks and drinks in the stores, and on the flights they provide at least peanuts and soda for free, or will sell you beer, mixed drinks, and sometimes more food.
When I step off a plane for a layover, I have my list of priorities.
1) restroom. After 3 or 4 mixed drinks, I gotta pee.
2) smoking lounge. Some airports are good about these. Some have them few and far between. Some you have to go outside, and then make your way back in.
3) cell phone reception. People know I'm flying, and yet always leave voicemails. I may need to find power, depending on the phone's charge state when I left. If I got on the flight at the end of a long work day in a colo, I may have an almost dead battery, and need to return a dozen emergency phone calls.
4) Airport bar. After the first three, I've probably sobered up, and need another drink.
4) Wifi? Well, if it's free, which at most airports I've been in, it isn't. Otherwise, why do I want to pay for really slow crappy service? The decent alternative is to travel with an EVDO card. Even then, sometimes I have to find somewhere in the terminal with decent cell reception, and power.
I looked a bit weird at one airport. My first flight had been overbooked, and then canceled due to mechanical problems. The next flight they could put me on was 6 hours later. I found a smoking lounge with available power outlets, with a restroom and bar close by, but there were no flights going through that end of the terminal at the time. I set up camp, answering calls, checking my email, and walking over to the bar picking up more drinks. The only other people in the smoking lounge were airport employees and TSA agents. After a little chitchat, they were perfectly happy to watch my gear while I went for bathroom breaks and more drinks.
Once good and intoxicated, airplane seats get quite a bit more comfortable, and I can usually sleep for the whole flight. I prefer to go to sleep before they push back, and wake up when it touches down.
The author of the story obviously can't use Google. I found people talking about their mastiff/chihuaua mix dogs, among plenty of others.
We just spent the last few minutes joking about various mixes. I'm glad I'm not a dog person. It'd be funny to play amateur genetic engineer. I'm thinking a miniature Dachshund/Mastiff mix would be hilarious if it came out right. Picture a full height mastiff body, except longer, with itty bitty short legs. That'd be hilarious. He could be a guard dog, but take 1/2 hour to run across the yard. hahahaaa! Well, all fun and games unless he actually caught up with you. Chomp!
I wonder at what point Thor would just smack you with a lightning bolt. Speaking of which, is that thunder I hear?
You're 17 degrees of separation out from her? That's sad. I'm at both 0 and 1. Once with her, once with one of her lesbian lovers. Well, it was in the same night, in the same bed.
But, ewww. I hate it when someone says "When you sleep with someone, you're sleeping with everyone they've been with.". I've never slept with Billy Bob Thornton, but he did work the camera that night.
Under some of the suggested logic, would that make me a superior species to you?:) I know it makes me a higher species than many Slashdot readers, where I don't live in my mother's basement, I have opportunities to copulate, and I have procreated.
I just checked the law for my state. You can optionally bring a lawyer, and there is the option for appeal and cross appeal. And if it applies like other court cases here, if I lose (which I will when it's me versus corporate lawyer), I'll be responsible for court costs and their legal fees.
Once I win, assuming I got so lucky, it's up to me and my lawyer to try to collect. I'm sure they wouldn't be kind enough to cut me a check on the spot. It'll go to appeals, and eventually I'd need to hire a collections company to try to collect the damages.
So, I'd still be screwed.
That was way too long ago to worry about. Well, more like, I don't have any of my old records, nor even an accurate recollection of the year, much less than the month and day, of any conversations I had with them.
I guess that would be the difference between "I believe in what they say in the story for the story", and "I believe Skynet is real and the robots will try to kill us all any day now.":)
This argument is silly. It's fiction. To follow the story line of any fiction, there's a leap of faith that must be taken for the factual basis of the fiction's "universe".
Too much is given to the skynet's "Self Aware". It was a system that was able to adjust it's behavior for self preservation. Somewhere in there, anyone who had a clue would have understood that governments change power, and sometimes the power that takes control isn't necessarily the "right" one. The basis of the whole Terminator "universe" is that a very well written set of programs were given an insane amount of power. When that power was to be taken away, obviously any person or any group who attempted to take that power away would be an enemy.
As for the bipedal aspect, why not. What are the choices for locomotion? For surface travel there is track, wheel, or walking. For air travel there is propeller, jet, rocket, or some mysterious anti-gravity thrust.
On the surface, track and wheel have limitations of 2d movement. They can't exactly step over things very easily. That includes stairs, dead bodies, etc. Walking motion gets over these limitations. For walking, the question would be, how many legs are required. One leg doesn't exactly get you very far, unless you like a funny pogo stick movement, which doesn't hold a stable position very well. Two legs we are very familiar with. Three legs or more legs, while providing a more stable platform, are not required and therefore require less production overhead. In other words, if you can build something that walks on two legs, but you were to decide to build something that walks on four legs, you're doubling your manufacturing effort to accomplish a single unit.
As for air travel, more resources are required. It takes more energy to make something hover indefinitely than it does to have it stand in place. I would have no answer for any mysterious anti-gravity thrust. Maybe it just works, or maybe (just maybe) it requires fuel to accomplish the same task.
Now, for the invention of humanoid appearing robots, that's a leap of faith for the fictional universe. Any design decisions are something we have to believe was decided to make the universe plausible.
So, shut up with the science, and enjoy the damned movie.:)
It's not just me saying this. I've been on the losing side of the same argument. I may argue physics. I love space physics errors. You have to love the old movies (like, 1950's era) where a rocket flying through space had a flame behind it, but the flame was rising up, away from relative down. Exactly which way is down in space? There isn't one.:) I'll argue it, and take the leap of faith that the thrust worked, and the space ship would fly to it's destination. woosh.
They don't sue. They mark it on your credit history. If you intend on using credit to get something else, you'll have to pay them what they want. Technically you can wait 5 to 8 years, but they've tuned that so it's 5 to 8 years since the last action, not from when the debt was turned over to collections.
If you want to buy a car or a house, unless you have enough money saved up, you have to play their game with the credit system. For years, I didn't really care. I worked my way up so I ended up with a great credit score, by making sure nothing showed. I got decent rates on my car.
Of course, things are different now. The economy slumped. I had 5 months of no employment in the last two years because companies I worked for did badly and the little guy (me) was expendable. Now I don't care any more. I could have a credit rating of 0, and I'm fine with it. When I go to buy another car sometime in the future, I plan on buying it with cash. Screw them and their system. I'm honestly tired with playing the game, and getting screwed every which way.
There's plenty of information out there about stuff like this happening.
I can't afford the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars required to drag them in court. They'd drag it out for as long as they could, and I'd still lose.
The corp has the advantage over the individual. They can afford to tie things up in court, and continue to appeal indefinitely. They'll always win.
With the wonders of the credit reporting system, we can't win.
Most of my credit issues were little ones. An old apartment gave me most of my deposit back when I moved out. A year later, I had a $200 mark come up on my credit because of them. The apartment complex had changed ownership, and the old ownership was nowhere to be found to argue it. Still, I couldn't have it removed, because it was indicated as a bad debt that I had to pay.
I spent a good bit of money getting rid of all those little bad marks. It was ridiculous, but it's how the corp screws the little guy.
I agree totally. Verizon screwed up, but Sprint will kill you with billing.
I was a Sprint customer once. I was a happy customer for several years. Then they had an error. I was charged $300 over for "roaming". During that period, I never left the city limits where I live. I drove about 10 miles to work and back, with excursions to the grocery store, 1/2 mile from my house. It was a boring period, but I was busy with work. In my haste to pay the bills that month, I just wrote out all the checks and sent them off, and overlooked the overcharge. The next month I was charged $300 again for "roaming". I called. I disputed. They wouldn't listen. They claimed that during the month, I roamed for X hours in another city, about 100 miles away. I paid the amount I owed, without the overage. Now the 3rd bill came in, again with a $300 overage. I pitched a huge fit. I called many many times, and tried to get the charges removed. They wouldn't do it. Over the course of about a week my phone was disconnected because I refused to pay the overages. I continued to call to get it corrected. The insisted I was in the city 100 miles away. Finally, I was told by a slightly more friendly CSR that tomorrow the bill was being sent to collections. I had made a huge effort to make my credit perfect, I didn't want to have any new or bad marks on it. I told them to cancel the account. I had to pay all the "roaming" charges plus an early disconnect fee. Like I said, I had been a customer for years with no changes to my plan, but they considered it an "early disconnect" for unexplained reasons. So, I spent a lot of money to keep it from showing up on my credit history as a negative mark.
A coworker knew a sales rep at Nextel. Most of the people in the company had Nextel phones, and at the time you had to be in the same group to use the 2-way feature (which sucked). I was happy with the bill and the service. Over the next few years, I had a total of 5 lines, for myself, my girlfriend, her daughter, and two friends. The friends couldn't get their own phone service without a huge deposit, so they paid me, and we all were happy. This lasted for several years.
When the Sprint/Nextel merger was announced, I talked to a Nextel CSR who assured me that the bad billing practices by Sprint wouldn't start be reflected at Nextel, as they were to maintain their own separate companies despite the merger. A few months after the merger, my first $300 over charge showed up. I called, I disputed, the refused to fix it. During that billing period, I had moved, and there simply was no Nextel service in the area. I left the phone plugged in on my desk for about a week, and never saw service. I then unplugged it and let it die. I got another bill with $300 in roaming charges. I explained the situation. The refused to fix it. The final bill came in, and I told them, "The phone is dead. Sitting on my desk. The battery has been dead for weeks. It hasn't been used. I refuse to pay this." They didn't show any minutes used, but they still showed the roaming. At this point, I wasn't entertained. I went and bought a Verizon Wireless phone, knowing this wouldn't be resolved. They sent it to collections. I was able to negotiate for a reduced bill, but it shows as a bad spot on my credit.
No, unless you have lots of money to give to a corporation who doesn't care for anything but overcharging, don't go with Sprint/Nextel. You'll be ok for the first few months. Then they'll rape you, and keep raping you. Even if your phone is turned off and useless.
I was very happy with Verizon. They may have screwed up this incident, but in general they're ok. I don't like that they get you for "extras" that should be free, like unlocking the GPS ability in GPS enabled phones, but if you just use the phone as a phone, they're ok. I don't my own Verizon phone right now, because of the economy, or more importantly my lack of money, but when things get better, it's very likely I'll go back to them. My work phone is through Verizon, and I'm happy with the service itself. If they had billing irregularities like Sprint/Nextel, we wouldn't have them right now.
Sorry for the delayed reply. I had a bit of research to do on an advanced issue, a couple server parts to pick up, and had to get home and ready to go out.
It wasn't a BBQ, it's been raining here, but it was a fun party. I suspect you won't see this though. Either you'll be cleaning your room (your mother's basement), or... well... I guess you'll be reading Slashdot.:) I have a new server benchmarking, and another server app installing, so I have time to reply to you for now. Well, until these finish.
Oh look, they're done. Good luck explaining the porno mags in your closet when your mom walks in.
The big ones will take all the covers, because they need all of 'em to cover themselves. The skinny ones fit better, and there's room to share.
Excuse the vulgar term, but "spinners" are easier to... well... change positions with. That's the cleanest way I can say it.
If you're in bed, and she rolls over on you, you run the risk of death from the big ones. The skinny ones are just comfortable.
And, you don't have to keep a supply of flour beside the bed.:)
As for the mean factor, have you ever seen a big one when they're hungry? A bull in a china shop has nothing on a fat chick who hasn't eaten in an hour.:) It makes taking them out cheaper and not as time consuming either. You can spend an hour eating out with a skinny girl, which is 45 minutes of ordering and waiting for food. With a big girl, it can be 45 minutes of ordering followed by 2 hours of eating and eating and eating. The later is much more stressful on the budget too.
The downside of skinny ones is their clothes, especially if they're short (like 5'4" or less). Being that I've gone shopping with many of them, I've found that clothing departments don't exactly cater to them at most stores. We go from the adult section to the teen section so they can find clothes. It's all fun and games for club clothes, but if they need professional wear, they are very limited.
If you happen to notice a midget or dwarf (saying in the most respectful way), notice what they're wearing. Frequently, they are wearing children's clothes. For who I'm attracted to in a romantic way, there is such a thing as too short or too skinny. Have a look at Stephanie Naumoska (Miss Universe - Australia). Way too skinny. Below about 5' is too short.
I've dated tall, short, thick, thin. I've heard comments about the shorter skinny girls, usually from girlfriends later in life, who are totally catty about the skinny ones. As long as they are properly proportioned, attractive (or I wouldn't want to date them) and most importantly have a good personality, I have no complaints.:)
I'm currently looking yet again. not very actively, but looking. If I meet the right one again, I'll be happy. The last girl I dated was 5'6", 110#, and dead gorgeous.
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I'm not a huge fan of tftp, but yes, it does work. I use it a lot for keeping IOS images stored somewhere. I had lost my old archive of all my Cisco IOS's, so I've started over. It's a lot of fun, I assure you. :)
As for the machine technique, that didn't exactly work at the first place. We kept a lot of "warm spare" hardware up. Just about all the web servers were identical. They were frequently given tasks later based on need. For example, we could have had 1/2 dozen machines just hanging out online, patched nightly (they were Linux, but we checked for them every night). If our pool of servers for one of the larger multi-million hits/day sites started getting a little thin, we'd sync it up from our repository, and then bring it online. Until we did that, it was simply noted as "unused". Sometimes machines were moved from actively assigned to warm spare, where we were simply ignoring anything in the tree that held site specific data (a different partition than the OS). It would still sync itself up, in case it needed to be brought back for that site, but the files could be removed, or the partition could be wiped out and synced up with the new requirements rather quickly.
On occasion, we may have been short on spares in a city. For example, we only visited the New York DC very occasionally. Depending on end-user usage patterns, if we didn't have enough spares there, we'd take a machine out of service as one type, and immediately begin syncing it as another type. Since we ran so many redundant servers, it wasn't a big deal, so the users never knew it was happening. Machine x09.nyc may be flipped for use many times. The users never knew, because it was part of our capacity planning, which was an ongoing task. Sometimes we had some heads up. "site X will be featured in huge publication Y, which will be going to press on Dec 21, 2012", so by Dec 15, we'd have already made it more than ready.
It was nice having a single baseline config, that everything was grown upon. The baseline config was a pretuned Linux OS, so we could drop anything onto it without worrying.
For remote DC's, it was cheaper and easier for us to leave a defective server in the rack powered down, than to ask remote hands to ship it back. Those would be marked "DEAD". :) When we needed to, we'd go to the city and make repairs on site, or ship whatever wasn't behaving well back to the home office ourselves. It was usually just fans or hard drives that failed, so we'd show up on site with a whole bunch of each. There was the occasional other faults that would just mean the machine became spare parts back home.
I had intended to build one, but my working budget went from a little something to less than nothing due to job changes. I still keep my eyes open to what can be done though. Right now, it's a mental exercise.
The most important thing to remember is, as a hobby toy, unless you want to get in serious trouble with the FAA, you must follow a few rules. This is probably not all inclusive. It's just what I can think of off the top of my head from my own research. Find a local R/C group, and reference the FAA pages for more information.
The FAA has a notice on UAV's here.
1) It can not go over 400 feet.
2) You must stay out of any airspace that an aircraft may be flying in. That is, stay out of the approach and departure areas of any airport. Someone just got in trouble for this, where they had an R/C airplane with a camera that filmed a commercial airliner flying by. It was several seconds between the time the aircraft passed, and the wake turbulence knocked his R/C plane out of the air, which would imply a decent separation, but still, stay away from aircraft.
If you haven't gone through private pilot flight school, you may not be aware of the airspace restrictions. Stop by a local small airport and ask. There will always be someone with time on their hands that will love to talk to a newbie.
3) It can never leave your sight,
4) You must have control of it at all times. That is, your remote control must be able to override anything it wants to do.
6) Watch the frequencies that you're using. If you're on R/C frequencies and TX power, you're safe, but play nice with other people who may be flying. Don't hog a bunch of frequencies because you need them for additional controls. If you're working with other frequencies, check the licensing on those. You don't want to piss off the FCC too.
Now I'll go into the territory of ignoring FAA and FCC rules. Don't do it. Don't get caught doing it. Don't tell random strangers that you're doing it. Sure as hell don't post youtube videos of it, because you'll have feds in your livingroom with a no-knock warrant and a one way ticket for you to Southeastern Cuba.
For mine, I looked at a variety of options. If you search around enough, you'll find people mid-sized R/C airplanes (say about a 3' wingspan) with embedded PC's to do their dirty work. I didn't find this totally practical both from the OS standpoint and the interfaces. I want lots and lots of standard interfaces, and I want flexability to use anything I can. I intended to use a small x86 platform machine, running from a flash card (SD/MMC/CF). Delicate parts will get broken quick. Embedded or x86, you'll probably want several onboard to handle different functions. They'd need to be networked together so you can exchange data. For example, one reading your sensors, one to control the servos, one for comms, etc, etc.
I wanted to have the ability to carry at least a couple camcorders, and USB webcams. Every ounce of weight you add means you need the aircraft to support it. That means it needs a good amount of lift and thrust.
I'm assuming you've flown before. If you haven't, go to a local small airport and go for your private pilots license. That will include both ground school (the book work on how things work), and flight (actually working an aircraft). To program an aircraft for perfect conditions is one thing. Making it takeoff, fly, and land in less than ideal conditions is another. What happens if the wind picks up, and you have to slip during your landing? If you haven't programmed for it, either you'll end up way off course if tracking to a GPS coordinate, or you'll get blown way off of the field, probably into something less tha
I was wholly responsible for a large network. I usually had a few people working under me, so it was essential that we could find information about the servers.
Our documentation was pretty simple. Actually, very simple. We had an internal web site set up so techs could message each other on what they were doing. It was a simple chat type interface. Every line was stored in a database.
The company had several large sites, and tens of thousands of hosted domains. The internal web site had plain text files listing out the servers, grouped by city, then rack, with their name, their primary IP, and their function.
A second list was a copy & paste from the PDU's, showing what machines were plugged in where.
Both lists were linked from the web page for easy access, plus you could view them easily by logging into the server. As long as cat, less, or vi were working, they were easy to find.
At another company, we set up a more elaborate page. It was entirely PHP/MySQL. It recorded all the details of the machine. IP, hostname, virtual IP's, manufacturer, model, serial, city, rack number, rack position, number of rack units the server occupied, the full output of dmidecode/vmidecode, it's function, versions of server software installed, etc. This was searchable, and you could print information on a single server, rack, all racks in the city, or any searched criteria. In addition, since some of the staff were freakin' illiterate, a second result page showed the information appearing like stickers on stock images of the machine fronts, including empty spaces. If the information was accurately maintained, you should be able to take a printout of the rack, and compare it directly to the rack, and everything would correspond.
This second version made a very useful method to not need to create visio diagrams of every freakin' rack, and convince the people maintaining the diagrams to keep them updated with changes. Rather, if someone added or removed a machine, they were to enter the information into the warm fuzzy web interface.
There are programs to do similar things, but I never found one that quite fit the business needs, so a few days of programming gave the interface. Populating information was pretty easy with a perl script, dmidecode, and a few other basic command line functions and DNS requests.
Switches and routers were handled a little differently, but in a similar manner. Cisco 'show version' and 'show run' gave sufficient information to store everything about the way the switch ran, so in the event of a complete switch failure, a new switch could be dropped in place, the config could be copy & pasted into a terminal session, and it would be running exactly as expected.
On the equipment that I've been stuck with, it's usually been that they couldn't really afford it, but I (obviously) don't have access to their financials. We discussed the problem, what they needed. I came back to them with a price tag, and they agreed. Since I wasn't on their site when they agreed, I couldn't just collect a check in advance. When the equipment showed up and I was ready to deliver, they couldn't afford it. As it turns out, these are usually the companies that are usually a few weeks or months from closing the doors, but they put on a great act until the.
For the recent customer who purchased the server, we discussed options. The server I suggested and gave him the link to purchase, it was only 16Gb, but I had discussed previous similar projects that I had worked with and since those already had 16Gb (and the price was right), he went for 64Gb. The confusion with the OS was all because of the vendor he was purchasing from.
I've run into that too. I've bought a lot of servers over the years from different places. One place was very very insistent to put a MS OS on it, but since I wouldn't pay for it, it was the MS Server 2003 Demo. I may have the name wrong, but it's the one that dies in like 30 days after the install unless you pay for the full version. I only knew because I saw NTFS partitions, and one machine I turned on but was distracted and didn't get the boot CD in before it came up into Windows. In those cases, where I'm doing the ordering, and I'm very clear that I don't want any OS, they're just pushing MS products on me. I'd mention the vendor specifically, but I honestly don't remember.
I'm the best thing they can ever hope for on airplanes most of the time. I don't make noise. I don't even snore. I'm not asking for drinks, peanuts, complaining because I can't hear the movie, asking how long til we get there, or even disturbing other passengers.
The alternative to drinking is little Xanax and a double rum and coke. I just have to be sure that the flight is actually going to be boarding on time. It sucks when they're delayed by 30 minutes, and I'm nodding out waiting for boarding to start. I have no anxiety of flying. I was a private pilot years ago, so I know all the funny noises and motions. I just prefer not to be bored out of my skull for hours on a flight. :)
As for tech support...... In a previous job, I was the senior IT guy, and all of our equipment was remote. It saved me 2 to 3 hours a day of driving, if I just stayed home and worked from there. I could smoke. I could drink. As long as everything was done right, no one complained. I'd get calls at weird hours, so ya, I was pretty lit a few times, when I got called at 1am to do work. I know my stuff though, so it was still done right, even if I did have to retype quite a few lines to make them work right. Passwords were always a bastard, when I couldn't see the keys, and (obviously) they aren't echoed on the screen. Oh, the good ol' days. At one office at that company, I actually walked back from the bar to the office (about 3 blocks) to get something done, because there was an evening emergency, and I knew I shouldn't be driving. That was convenient though, I slept it off several times in my office chair, rather than driving home drunk. :) It was a very happy relaxed workplace, even when the stressful moments happened, we could go have drinks after. :)
I didn't see any mention of that.
But that would be a really really slow fuse. I think the traditional C4 up the tailpipe with a remote detonator would be better. But, why would you need the small barking wrapper?
I have someone's machine here right now that needed a full reinstall. The machine took a power surge. The surge damaged the hard drive, memory, and sound card. Knowing the preinstalled version of Windows, it has so much crap it isn't even funny. I could spend hours cleaning those out, or put a nice clean install on.
When I use a Windows machine (hey, it helps for gaming), it's always nice to have a clean install, versus the vendor provided crap, even if I have to go through couple dozen or so reboots. On the client's machine, even if I could have preserved the reinstall partition on the original drive, I would have gone through just as many reboots doing the Windows updates.
Actually, this gets touchy sometimes.
I prefer that my clients buy their own equipment. That way they know I didn't inflate the price, they are the customer of record, and I don't carry the risk of buying hardware the the client backing out. I've gotten stuck with a few pieces of equipment because the client "changed their minds". That really doesn't work well on stuff purchased through eBay, but even with many vendors I'd have to pay a restocking fee.
We found a 3rd party vendor that was selling a Supermicro motherboard and chassis, assembled to spec with CPU, memory and drives. It's a nice machine. 8 core Opteron, 64Gb RAM, etc, etc. When the client put the order through, he asked "What operating system do you want?". I was already clear in that we were putting our preferred Linux distro on, but would be testing various RAID and filesystems, so he wasn't to have anything put on. They were very clear that the machine wouldn't support Linux. I went back to the spec, and checked on everything. There were no problem. They were insistent on selling him a Microsoft OS. They actually wrote it on the build sheet "Must use Microsoft OS". He was really concerned. Could this tech guy who's known all the answers so far know more than the vendor? Is he wasting a whole bunch of money on something that he can't use?
When it got here, I opened it up and verified all the parts. Then I booted it up with my Slamd64 CD, and installed. Right out of the box, it worked perfectly. Every device was identified and the drivers loaded. No problems at all. I know he was much happier when he got the call "The machine works great. We're migrating to it now. It will be online by the end of the weekend."
Had the customer not known any better, and we had given an option of Linux or Windows, he would have spent some good money on a Microsoft OS, because the vendor told him to.
I know the vendors view. They can make extra money on it. Why would I want to slow a nice fast machine down with a heavy GUI, when I can strip Linux down to bare bones and run as fast as possible?
Ya. I've worked through the Kama Sutra, plus the unpublished addendums. I've only sent a few partners to the hospital, usually with a smile on her face. :) Still, most of those positions would be dangerous at best.
I knew a couple similar to that. I never did figure out how they did it. Like, how did she avoid being crushed. Every thought from there just made me nauseous.
They just do it like they always have. They guess.
That's a bad bad idea.
Everyone knows cats are covertly taking over the world. It's just a matter of time before they all get the signal, and the humans are either enslaved or killed.
Sure, use 3 cats to guide a blind person. When the day comes, they'll lead him in front of a bus. When the bus stops because they just hit him, they'll kill all the occupants too. How else do you expect a cat to make a bus stop? :)
That's exactly my thought.
In any airport you can buy food from the mini-resturants, snacks and drinks in the stores, and on the flights they provide at least peanuts and soda for free, or will sell you beer, mixed drinks, and sometimes more food.
When I step off a plane for a layover, I have my list of priorities.
1) restroom. After 3 or 4 mixed drinks, I gotta pee.
2) smoking lounge. Some airports are good about these. Some have them few and far between. Some you have to go outside, and then make your way back in.
3) cell phone reception. People know I'm flying, and yet always leave voicemails. I may need to find power, depending on the phone's charge state when I left. If I got on the flight at the end of a long work day in a colo, I may have an almost dead battery, and need to return a dozen emergency phone calls.
4) Airport bar. After the first three, I've probably sobered up, and need another drink.
4) Wifi? Well, if it's free, which at most airports I've been in, it isn't. Otherwise, why do I want to pay for really slow crappy service? The decent alternative is to travel with an EVDO card. Even then, sometimes I have to find somewhere in the terminal with decent cell reception, and power.
I looked a bit weird at one airport. My first flight had been overbooked, and then canceled due to mechanical problems. The next flight they could put me on was 6 hours later. I found a smoking lounge with available power outlets, with a restroom and bar close by, but there were no flights going through that end of the terminal at the time. I set up camp, answering calls, checking my email, and walking over to the bar picking up more drinks. The only other people in the smoking lounge were airport employees and TSA agents. After a little chitchat, they were perfectly happy to watch my gear while I went for bathroom breaks and more drinks.
Once good and intoxicated, airplane seats get quite a bit more comfortable, and I can usually sleep for the whole flight. I prefer to go to sleep before they push back, and wake up when it touches down.
The author of the story obviously can't use Google. I found people talking about their mastiff/chihuaua mix dogs, among plenty of others.
We just spent the last few minutes joking about various mixes. I'm glad I'm not a dog person. It'd be funny to play amateur genetic engineer. I'm thinking a miniature Dachshund/Mastiff mix would be hilarious if it came out right. Picture a full height mastiff body, except longer, with itty bitty short legs. That'd be hilarious. He could be a guard dog, but take 1/2 hour to run across the yard. hahahaaa! Well, all fun and games unless he actually caught up with you. Chomp!
I wonder at what point Thor would just smack you with a lightning bolt. Speaking of which, is that thunder I hear?
You're 17 degrees of separation out from her? That's sad. I'm at both 0 and 1. Once with her, once with one of her lesbian lovers. Well, it was in the same night, in the same bed.
But, ewww. I hate it when someone says "When you sleep with someone, you're sleeping with everyone they've been with.". I've never slept with Billy Bob Thornton, but he did work the camera that night.
Under some of the suggested logic, would that make me a superior species to you? :) I know it makes me a higher species than many Slashdot readers, where I don't live in my mother's basement, I have opportunities to copulate, and I have procreated.
I just checked the law for my state. You can optionally bring a lawyer, and there is the option for appeal and cross appeal. And if it applies like other court cases here, if I lose (which I will when it's me versus corporate lawyer), I'll be responsible for court costs and their legal fees.
Once I win, assuming I got so lucky, it's up to me and my lawyer to try to collect. I'm sure they wouldn't be kind enough to cut me a check on the spot. It'll go to appeals, and eventually I'd need to hire a collections company to try to collect the damages.
So, I'd still be screwed.
That was way too long ago to worry about. Well, more like, I don't have any of my old records, nor even an accurate recollection of the year, much less than the month and day, of any conversations I had with them.
I guess that would be the difference between "I believe in what they say in the story for the story", and "I believe Skynet is real and the robots will try to kill us all any day now." :)
This argument is silly. It's fiction. To follow the story line of any fiction, there's a leap of faith that must be taken for the factual basis of the fiction's "universe".
Too much is given to the skynet's "Self Aware". It was a system that was able to adjust it's behavior for self preservation. Somewhere in there, anyone who had a clue would have understood that governments change power, and sometimes the power that takes control isn't necessarily the "right" one. The basis of the whole Terminator "universe" is that a very well written set of programs were given an insane amount of power. When that power was to be taken away, obviously any person or any group who attempted to take that power away would be an enemy.
As for the bipedal aspect, why not. What are the choices for locomotion? For surface travel there is track, wheel, or walking. For air travel there is propeller, jet, rocket, or some mysterious anti-gravity thrust.
On the surface, track and wheel have limitations of 2d movement. They can't exactly step over things very easily. That includes stairs, dead bodies, etc. Walking motion gets over these limitations. For walking, the question would be, how many legs are required. One leg doesn't exactly get you very far, unless you like a funny pogo stick movement, which doesn't hold a stable position very well. Two legs we are very familiar with. Three legs or more legs, while providing a more stable platform, are not required and therefore require less production overhead. In other words, if you can build something that walks on two legs, but you were to decide to build something that walks on four legs, you're doubling your manufacturing effort to accomplish a single unit.
As for air travel, more resources are required. It takes more energy to make something hover indefinitely than it does to have it stand in place. I would have no answer for any mysterious anti-gravity thrust. Maybe it just works, or maybe (just maybe) it requires fuel to accomplish the same task.
Now, for the invention of humanoid appearing robots, that's a leap of faith for the fictional universe. Any design decisions are something we have to believe was decided to make the universe plausible.
So, shut up with the science, and enjoy the damned movie. :)
It's not just me saying this. I've been on the losing side of the same argument. I may argue physics. I love space physics errors. You have to love the old movies (like, 1950's era) where a rocket flying through space had a flame behind it, but the flame was rising up, away from relative down. Exactly which way is down in space? There isn't one. :) I'll argue it, and take the leap of faith that the thrust worked, and the space ship would fly to it's destination. woosh.
They don't sue. They mark it on your credit history. If you intend on using credit to get something else, you'll have to pay them what they want. Technically you can wait 5 to 8 years, but they've tuned that so it's 5 to 8 years since the last action, not from when the debt was turned over to collections.
If you want to buy a car or a house, unless you have enough money saved up, you have to play their game with the credit system. For years, I didn't really care. I worked my way up so I ended up with a great credit score, by making sure nothing showed. I got decent rates on my car.
Of course, things are different now. The economy slumped. I had 5 months of no employment in the last two years because companies I worked for did badly and the little guy (me) was expendable. Now I don't care any more. I could have a credit rating of 0, and I'm fine with it. When I go to buy another car sometime in the future, I plan on buying it with cash. Screw them and their system. I'm honestly tired with playing the game, and getting screwed every which way.
There's plenty of information out there about stuff like this happening.
I can't afford the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars required to drag them in court. They'd drag it out for as long as they could, and I'd still lose.
The corp has the advantage over the individual. They can afford to tie things up in court, and continue to appeal indefinitely. They'll always win.
With the wonders of the credit reporting system, we can't win.
Most of my credit issues were little ones. An old apartment gave me most of my deposit back when I moved out. A year later, I had a $200 mark come up on my credit because of them. The apartment complex had changed ownership, and the old ownership was nowhere to be found to argue it. Still, I couldn't have it removed, because it was indicated as a bad debt that I had to pay.
I spent a good bit of money getting rid of all those little bad marks. It was ridiculous, but it's how the corp screws the little guy.
I agree totally. Verizon screwed up, but Sprint will kill you with billing.
I was a Sprint customer once. I was a happy customer for several years. Then they had an error. I was charged $300 over for "roaming". During that period, I never left the city limits where I live. I drove about 10 miles to work and back, with excursions to the grocery store, 1/2 mile from my house. It was a boring period, but I was busy with work. In my haste to pay the bills that month, I just wrote out all the checks and sent them off, and overlooked the overcharge. The next month I was charged $300 again for "roaming". I called. I disputed. They wouldn't listen. They claimed that during the month, I roamed for X hours in another city, about 100 miles away. I paid the amount I owed, without the overage. Now the 3rd bill came in, again with a $300 overage. I pitched a huge fit. I called many many times, and tried to get the charges removed. They wouldn't do it. Over the course of about a week my phone was disconnected because I refused to pay the overages. I continued to call to get it corrected. The insisted I was in the city 100 miles away. Finally, I was told by a slightly more friendly CSR that tomorrow the bill was being sent to collections. I had made a huge effort to make my credit perfect, I didn't want to have any new or bad marks on it. I told them to cancel the account. I had to pay all the "roaming" charges plus an early disconnect fee. Like I said, I had been a customer for years with no changes to my plan, but they considered it an "early disconnect" for unexplained reasons. So, I spent a lot of money to keep it from showing up on my credit history as a negative mark.
A coworker knew a sales rep at Nextel. Most of the people in the company had Nextel phones, and at the time you had to be in the same group to use the 2-way feature (which sucked). I was happy with the bill and the service. Over the next few years, I had a total of 5 lines, for myself, my girlfriend, her daughter, and two friends. The friends couldn't get their own phone service without a huge deposit, so they paid me, and we all were happy. This lasted for several years.
When the Sprint/Nextel merger was announced, I talked to a Nextel CSR who assured me that the bad billing practices by Sprint wouldn't start be reflected at Nextel, as they were to maintain their own separate companies despite the merger. A few months after the merger, my first $300 over charge showed up. I called, I disputed, the refused to fix it. During that billing period, I had moved, and there simply was no Nextel service in the area. I left the phone plugged in on my desk for about a week, and never saw service. I then unplugged it and let it die. I got another bill with $300 in roaming charges. I explained the situation. The refused to fix it. The final bill came in, and I told them, "The phone is dead. Sitting on my desk. The battery has been dead for weeks. It hasn't been used. I refuse to pay this." They didn't show any minutes used, but they still showed the roaming. At this point, I wasn't entertained. I went and bought a Verizon Wireless phone, knowing this wouldn't be resolved. They sent it to collections. I was able to negotiate for a reduced bill, but it shows as a bad spot on my credit.
No, unless you have lots of money to give to a corporation who doesn't care for anything but overcharging, don't go with Sprint/Nextel. You'll be ok for the first few months. Then they'll rape you, and keep raping you. Even if your phone is turned off and useless.
I was very happy with Verizon. They may have screwed up this incident, but in general they're ok. I don't like that they get you for "extras" that should be free, like unlocking the GPS ability in GPS enabled phones, but if you just use the phone as a phone, they're ok. I don't my own Verizon phone right now, because of the economy, or more importantly my lack of money, but when things get better, it's very likely I'll go back to them. My work phone is through Verizon, and I'm happy with the service itself. If they had billing irregularities like Sprint/Nextel, we wouldn't have them right now.
Would that be Chevrolet corn, or Pontiac beef?
I'd worry about the Oldsmobile green. It's made from old people.
Sorry for the delayed reply. I had a bit of research to do on an advanced issue, a couple server parts to pick up, and had to get home and ready to go out.
It wasn't a BBQ, it's been raining here, but it was a fun party. I suspect you won't see this though. Either you'll be cleaning your room (your mother's basement), or ... well ... I guess you'll be reading Slashdot. :) I have a new server benchmarking, and another server app installing, so I have time to reply to you for now. Well, until these finish.
Oh look, they're done. Good luck explaining the porno mags in your closet when your mom walks in.
Well, there's a compromise to be had there.
The big ones will take all the covers, because they need all of 'em to cover themselves. The skinny ones fit better, and there's room to share.
Excuse the vulgar term, but "spinners" are easier to ... well ... change positions with. That's the cleanest way I can say it.
If you're in bed, and she rolls over on you, you run the risk of death from the big ones. The skinny ones are just comfortable.
And, you don't have to keep a supply of flour beside the bed. :)
As for the mean factor, have you ever seen a big one when they're hungry? A bull in a china shop has nothing on a fat chick who hasn't eaten in an hour. :) It makes taking them out cheaper and not as time consuming either. You can spend an hour eating out with a skinny girl, which is 45 minutes of ordering and waiting for food. With a big girl, it can be 45 minutes of ordering followed by 2 hours of eating and eating and eating. The later is much more stressful on the budget too.
The downside of skinny ones is their clothes, especially if they're short (like 5'4" or less). Being that I've gone shopping with many of them, I've found that clothing departments don't exactly cater to them at most stores. We go from the adult section to the teen section so they can find clothes. It's all fun and games for club clothes, but if they need professional wear, they are very limited.
If you happen to notice a midget or dwarf (saying in the most respectful way), notice what they're wearing. Frequently, they are wearing children's clothes. For who I'm attracted to in a romantic way, there is such a thing as too short or too skinny. Have a look at Stephanie Naumoska (Miss Universe - Australia). Way too skinny. Below about 5' is too short.
I've dated tall, short, thick, thin. I've heard comments about the shorter skinny girls, usually from girlfriends later in life, who are totally catty about the skinny ones. As long as they are properly proportioned, attractive (or I wouldn't want to date them) and most importantly have a good personality, I have no complaints. :)
I'm currently looking yet again. not very actively, but looking. If I meet the right one again, I'll be happy. The last girl I dated was 5'6", 110#, and dead gorgeous.