Actually, I've found a lot of "web developers" who only know HTML with average graphics skills. They're the ones that can take a template site, and make it say what the customer wants it to say. Unfortunately, a lot of customers eat that up, until the day that they want it to actually DO something.
Then there are the real "web developers". I can code a site to do just about anything. I still don't have an interface to run the kitchen sink, but no one's asked for that.:) My primary work isn't web development though, it's systems administration. In systems, people want stuff to run. In web development, the customer wants it exactly as they have in their head or better, but can never express it. Even still, once they have it, they want more for the same cost. "Oh, that should only take you a minute." Sure. 2 days later, you have this new cool web application, and they don't want to pay an extra $20 for it. A friend of mine specializes in real web development, and I swear she gets that from every customer she has.
About half of mine were Windows. The other half were Linux.:) Add that to the holy war.:)
I happen to be running Windows on my current laptop because there's something with the fans not running properly under Linux, and I've been too lazy to figure it out (but not too lazy to make it dual boot).
I know.:) I would have held onto it longer, but I needed the cash, and the wife was being pissy about my toys. That didn't matter much though, she left anyways. Now I have no wife and not as many toys. {sigh}
Lessons learned. Never let the wife dictate what toys you can keep. Eventually she'll leave. The toys will never leave you. They'll never complain that you're late coming home, or forgot to pick up milk at the store.
Well, it's good to know that someone on here can do network design psychically. Remind me to have you send of the design specs for the next network I work on. I'll pay you, of course. You should have them done already though, since you're so good.
Like I said, there were multiple suites in the same complex. It required 6 switches. I could have run them all back to one central switch, but that would mean running bundles of Cat5/6 along the roof of the building (the only wiring route there), an half of them to a central switch over a road. The total run on quite a few would be greater than 400'. Oh, and I should add, in a very lightning prone area. The city claims to be the "Lightning capital of the world". I don't know about that, but even NOAA marks the state as being the most lightning prone area in the country, and the city lands smack in one of the two big red blobs shown on NOAA's lightning map. That's enough for me to justify running fiber between suites.
And, the old switches were Netgear 10/100 switches of various models. Some suites were linked via a wireless bridge. That part was fine, except when a truck would park in between them (happened about twice a day).
He was talking about 3d glasses, if I recall correctly.
But, for a while I used a pair of Sony Glasstron (PLM-A35) glasses. I had gone out to a worksite that was "suppose" to have a crash cart. They didn't. So I'm sitting there with a dozen servers, no monitor or keyboard, and no way to set the IP's when they finally do provide them.
We went shopping, and found this crappy little store that had the glasses for like $200, or a 14" LCD screen for $400. This was a while ago. Since we were out of town, "what will fit in my luggage" was actually a big concern.
It didn't have VGA inputs, so I got a VGA to RCA adapter, and started working. People at the datacenter got a kick out of it. I was sitting on the floor, keyboard in my lap, apparently staring off into space.:) The best part was, it fit nicely in my laptop bag.
The extra cabling I had to tote around was a little annoying, but I could do an overnight trip with just my laptop bag and not have to check any luggage. This was pre-911. Since then, I have to check a bag just to bring a screwdriver. {sigh}
Ya, I've helped quite a few with their installs, either being on site or by phone or email.. I include the basics with the install.
For the most part, people who have bought stuff from me already know what they intend to do with it, so they rarely ask anything of me afterwards, unless they want more stuff.:)
I got lucky with Cisco stuff. Years ago, I was really thrown into it, because no one else knew how to work any of it. At first, I did some really basic stuff with guidance from our ISP's tech support.
At the second place I was doing this at, I was just starting to get the hang of it, and we ran into a connectivity problem. We had an ancient PIX firewall (the old 4u model) which was between our Cisco 7204 router, and our Cisco 2924 switch. We had a single T3 coming into the site. Mind you, this was state of the art at the time. The provider insisted our firewall was the problem, and walked me through reconfiguring things. A little bit here, a little bit there, and 2 hours later the configuration was completely hosed, as far as getting traffic beyond the router. They did fix a problem on their side, which was the original problem. I was sitting there, in the middle of the night, with a half connected PIX, a router that wouldn't route, and a network that wasn't generating any money. The network would generate about $10k/day, so it was kinda urgent that I brought it back up. That was my worst experience with it. No one to turn to, because no one else knew how to work it. I couldn't even go online to look for information, since we were down. And of course this was before you could just cruise down to Starbucks and get on their wireless.:) I fumbled through it for about an hour, and made it work.
A couple weeks later, I fumbled through, and made it work better.
A couple weeks later, I improved it substantially.
A few years later, I breezed through a CCNA class, and everything I knew when I walked in the door was only from experience and reading. I was a little (a lotta) rough on the Token Ring stuff, but that was expected.:)
Now, every piece I can get my hands on, I try to learn as much as I can. If I can ever afford it, probably after the economy starts picking back up, I'll renew my CCNA, and take the CCNP, or whatever the current designation is.:) At this point though, I've learned enough to make everything I touch work properly, so the cert is just to prove to the people who need to see certs that I really know what I say I know.
I've been reading through the responses to my post. Lots of people have had one laptop that has lasted forever. Then again, they're saying they've had luck with one laptop. If a dozen people out of the hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers can say they have better luck than me, that's not an excellent ratio.
I'm replying to yours because I've known one other person with that specific laptop. He loved his. He is (or was, I haven't talked to him in a while) huge Apple fan. He also had his Titanium for about 6 months before "something" happened with it. He was always very careful with his also. He was sitting in an airport with his on a table. While he was using it, the keyboard started getting warm. The next thing he knew, there was smoke coming out of it.
He took it to an Apple store and got a replacement. The original was so badly damaged, they didn't even want it to return, so it was all mine to dissect.
The fans were all in good shape. The moved freely, and when I put power to them, they spun normally. Everything around the CPU had melted, including warping the heat sink. It was a real mess.
His second one lasted about a year, and then had some fatal flaw. I don't know exactly what happened with that one. He told me it broke. I only asked because he showed up with a new laptop. It was another Apple, because he still likes them.
I find it similar to servers, desktops, and even hard drives. Someone will buy one of any brand, it will work for years for them, so they declare them perfect. I don't try to make real comparisons until I've seen many of them running.
We have quite a few Thinkpads at work. Some people love them, and they've never had a problem in years. Then again, we buy them in bulk for various purposes, and they do come back with fatal problems.
And, yes, I do carry my equipment around in good cases. My back isn't what it used to be, and with the other assorted gear I carry, my bag usually weighs a good bit. I've worn out more cases than I have laptops. Right now, I'm using a Brookstone leather laptop roller case. It looks good, and has handled pretty well.
My current laptop had it's worst incident ever a couple weeks ago. I was coming back from a trip, and as I exited a door into the parking garage on a ramp, the cart tilted and all my gear went tumbling down the ramp. I cracked a piece of plastic on the front left corner. So sad. The laptop is still working fine. I'm sitting on the back porch, using my laptop, as I write this.
3 years old, and the only hardware thing I've done is swapped out the hard drive. It was becoming too small for my purposes. Sometimes when I'm on the road, I want to pull video from my video camera and send it off. Search my name on YouTube, and you'll see an impromptu helicopter video. We received notification just after we booked my plane ticket, that the site I was to be working at would be shut down for one day because there was going to be a helicopter lift. The folks back at the office wanted to see what it was doing, so I filmed it, went back to the hotel and did some light editing, and then uploaded it so they could see.
One place I worked for, they had consumer grade "switches" in 4 suites, with a mismatch of technology connecting the suites (all in the same complex). I spent $300 on 6 Cisco Catalyst 2924's with 4 port 100baseFX fiber cards. I spent another $150 on enough fiber to interconnect them all.
I did the upgrades very carefully so as to not break anything during working hours. One suite per day to change them from their cheap switch to the 2924. I spent 3 days on ladders running fiber between the suites. On the last night, I switched their cross connects from the old ways to the fiber. That next morning, people were amazed how fast everything was working.
The VoIP guy was laughing the whole time. I put an office of about 30 desks on "enterprise" equipment. Well, it's old, but when it was new, sure it was "enterprise" equipment. For $450, I couldn't have done anything better.:)
Actually, when I have the cash (that's going to plenty of other places) I buy Cisco stuff at auction. I generally go for the bigger equipment. I get some broken stuff and give it to a recycler. The good stuff I test, use for a little while to be sure it's good, then sell at a decent markup. I put a decent markup on it, so I always turn a profit, but it's still a whole lot cheaper for the customer than buying it new elsewhere.
I'm not the biggest place doing it, but I can keep my prices low, because I'm working out of the house in my spare time.
For someone with a decent size office (say 100 desks), a Catalyst 5500 for less than $1k customized for them will do them a lot better than a stack of consumer grade hubs and switches.
I focus on Cisco gear, because I know it really well. I tried to touch the server market, but there is so little profit margin it usually ends up costing me money to sell it.
The last "big" purchase I did, I bought 1 Cisco Catalyst 5000 (5 slot) 1 Cisco Catalyst 5505 (5 slot), 1 Cisco Catalyst 5500 (13 slot), and 3 servers. By the time I got rid of the 5500, 5505, and 1 server, I had already turned a profit. I sold the other 5000 and 1 other server, and that was just more profit.
For me, my problem is that I lost my good high pay job about 2 years ago. It took some time to change my cost of living (get rid of the house, one car, etc), so right now I'm in recovery mode and can't buy anything else to move, even though it would always be at a profit.
Some things are just fun. I bought an oscilloscope for something I was working on. It was cheap because the guy selling didn't even know if it worked. I tested it, bought a couple cheap probes, and then sat on it for a year. I finally decided I wouldn't need it again for a while, so I sold it for double what I had invested. It was a Tektronix, built in the 60's, but it still sold as soon as I made it available.
I could be mistaken, but I think once you put it up on 443, they won't be able to block it, because the data will always be encrypted.
[firing up wireshark and testing]
Hmmmm.. I thought the whole HTTPS session was encrypted, but I guess there is some that's in the clear that is fair game to see by an application filter.
If they allow VPN connections out, or even SSH, depending on the laptop, things could be arranged. I was joking with my friend that if her son asks to put a VPN server up on her network, we'd know he's looking to view porn from school.:) Then again, maybe we should let him. I administer the network, so I could monitor everything beyond the VPN to the real world and watch what he's doing.:)
My preferred way is doing it from a Linux box, using PPP over SSH. I have yet to find someone who blocks my access to SSH on my own private high ports.:) I don't use them for this specific purpose, but I do use them (PPP over SSH) on a daily basis to keep nosy ISP's from seeing my private data.
I hadn't seen that before, but I swear she's been on half the flights I've been on.
I know I've offended quite a few flight attendants since then. "No, it will stay with me, under the seat in front of me." When they start getting upset, I usually explain that I don't have a job when I get to my destination if I don't have my laptop with me and working. If they want to risk my job, feel free. If I do lose my job, I'll have nothing better to do than file frivolous lawsuits against her and the airline in every jurisdiction that I can find.
I usually don't get to the last part, and they just give me a funny look and walk away to mangle someone elses gear.:)
Funny you should say that. I get a lot of them brought to me broken.:) The ones that last longest are turned on once a month, never actually leave the office, and otherwise are untouched in locked cabinet.
I guess the sad part is, I don't do laptop repairs. At least not officially. I somehow get suckered into fixing them, being part of my job description is "... and can fix anything..."
I was talking to a friend about this, and we came to a similar conclusion.
Based off of what I know of people, it won't happen quite like you think.
One kid will figure out how to remove all the protective precautions. They may post it online. Lots of kids aren't interested in learning how to break it. Instead, they'll call a kid like I was (oh my, 20 years ago). For $5/ea he or she will unlock the laptop with or without the provided instructions. It will only be a matter of time before they all (or the majority of them) are unlocked, and kids are watching porn in school through a 3rd party proxy on an unfiltered port.:)
I was going to reply to the OP, but you asked the magic question.
Traveling moderately with laptops, mine have had a life expectancy of about 1 year. I've been lucky with my current one (a HP zv6000) which has passed about 3 years or so. I always treat my laptops moderately well (carried carefully, avoided dropping them), yet something fails.
One dropped dead after passing over the rollers at an x-ray machine at an airport.
One dropped dead after running in a warm room for one night.
One got the screen cracked when a helpful stewardess shoved someone's luggage into mine in the overhead storage bin. Ahhh, gotta love airplanes.
Hmmm, I can't remember the others, other than the life expectancy was only about a year.
I know I'm not alone. I've worked on countless office laptops. Those that survive a year are real troopers. The best survivor other than my own was a 3 year old Toshiba tablet. It lost the hard drive and touch screen. Replacement parts were cheaper than replacing the unit, so I fixed it.
I'm talking about grown adults, who like (or depend) on their laptops for work.
Now, a bunch of 8th to 12th graders running around with laptops? Besides mishandling on their own behalf, what happens when the bully makes a frisbee about off the little kids laptop? What happens when they spill a drink on it? Put their books down hard on the top and crack the screen? Oh, the scenarios I could list, and they'll still never account for the all the real possibilities.
With proper handling you may get a year, with improper handling, I'd see replacing hordes of them monthly. I feel sorry for the IT department who's going to handle the problems, but I feel worse for the taxpayers who are going to foot the bill.
The user believed he had increased performance, because his switch said "GigE" on it. He probably did see some performance increase, because he was using a white box 10/100 hub before that. The users are complaining a lot about performance though. Inside the office, we have a lot of machines. He moved a server that I'm responsible for over to one of the cheap "switches". I was getting 0.28ms. I was also having the network hang mysteriously pretty frequently when people are working on other machines attached to those "switches". I moved the connection over to our core switch, a Cisco Catalyst 5500. The latency went down to something like 0.14ms, and the mysterious hanging went away. I don't do large transfers or anything particularly intensive from my desktop to it. I simply ssh to it. It's not so much fun typing out an entire line, and waiting for it to show.:)
I do agree with the fact that most home users don't need anything better than the regular consumer grade stuff. Really, at home between my own computers, I use whatever crap is cheapest.:) Knowing that I will never exceed by upstream bandwidth, and all my computers only talk out over the internet and not very much between each other, I personally will rarely see a use for good hardware at home. I do have Cisco gear at home, but it's to use as spares for real production environments, or to sell on eBay.:) Heck, I have a Cisco 5000 switch sitting in the back of my car right now. That's way overkill for the 20Mb/s upstream bandwidth that I have.
I know Cisco can get bogged down with tiny packets. That's why you have to keep your network up with the proper PPS rates for your network.
I do know someone who could really use good Cisco hardware. He runs virtualized environments. That is, he's made a business out of putting people up on VMWare servers. He serves all of their stored data over a SAN, and that makes a lot of load on his switch all the time. He's using iSCSI, not fiber. He wants to upgrade from his HP switch to a Cisco, but doesn't have the budget for a good Cisco with GigE on all ports. I've seen his bandwidth graphs. They'll pretty regularly go over 200Mb/s, so he actually needs the bandwidth.
For the other users I mentioned, they'll only very very rarely get up to 80Mb/s, because of limitations in what they're doing.
I concur with this. Anything that says "GigE" only means that it's offering an interface that is compliant to the specification, not that it can pass 1000Mb/s.
A few days ago, I went digging for some information on switches. I'm a big Cisco fan, and I have specs on everything that I use. I know which of my switches can handle more traffic than others. That's kind of important.
Someone (to remain nameless) bought a GigE "switch". A name brand, but consumer grade switch. He wanted GigE because he had large files to transfer between several machines simultaniously.
"switch" by their definition in the user manual simply means hub, except it can amplify the signal. No actual switching involved, other than the fact that it can "switch" between 10Mb/s, 100Mb/s and 1000Mb/s. {sigh}
And the pps rates were pathetic. Actually, very pathetic. I broke out my spreadsheet of Cisco specs, and had to scroll down to the slowest, oldest switches that I can get my hands on. A base model Cisco Catalyst 2924 (not enterprise firmware). The 2924 handles 3 times the pps than this spiffy keen new "GigE switch". {sigh}
I only looked into it due to other network problems. Cascaded consumer grade switches in what should be a high speed operating environment. Nothing even came close to the old Cisco 2924. While I'm not advocating running a new enterprise on old 2924's, and the fact that there are much faster ones laying around waiting for a home, wouldn't it be prudent to use something else.
So the moral of my story.... Figure out what you're really dealing with, and don't look only at the label.
I was having a discussion with someone who does SAN work. He was all happy about his piece of equipment. I found out the specs of the components, and then priced it out with better PC based stuff running Linux. His did run Linux, but on a custom board. It was easy to out perform anything he had with better hardware, and even better drives. If I recall correctly, he veto'd the idea of switching because he had once tried it with a Windows based SAN, and it wouldn't work. Tried once. With some 3rd party crap. It didn't work. {sigh}
I'm slowly prepping a friends place to have a Linux machine be the SAN. Decent parts, standard protocols (SMB, NFS, and iSCSI). The only "slowly" part is that there is no rush right now, so when I see something that'll do it well, we buy the parts. Once we have all the parts, it'll be a running machine.
I found a half dozen references to Canada, and none to the U.S.. They could have been wrong though. I was looking more specifically for the 2000 model year, since that's what I was referencing.
1) Your capitalization sucks.
2) Your sentence structure sucks.
3) Your rambling is pathetic.
4) I'm not African American, or anything of African descent.
5) I'm not Jewish, nor has any of my family ever been.
6) I am not homosexual, bisexual, or in any other way going to have oral/genital contact with another man.
7) If someone actually came close enough to cutting my throat, they'd be in for a big surprise.
8) To further points 4 and 5, I am not racist, so race really doesn't matter to me. I am just clarifying the points.
9) To further point 6, I am not homophobic. I respect others choices, as they should respect mine.
So, out of what you said, I will accept "Good luck." Good luck to you too my friend, and have a beautiful day.
As soon as I read the story, I was curious to if they could inject titanium.:) More practically, it would seem they could inject something resembling carbon fiber. Ahh, light and very strong. How long would it be before they started doing it to the military to avoid bone breakage? It doesn't avoid the more fatal problem of bullet holes and IED's though.
I've had two teeth pulled. For the first, I went to the dentist I trust. For me, that's a hard one. I don't trust dentists, after the sadistic one I had as a kid (no anesthetic fillings, and he intentionally sliced open the inside of my cheek just to watch me scream). My regular dentist now (the one I trust) has his Mastership in the Academy of General Dentistry. His office is nice, clean, and professional. He'll discuss anything you'd like.
When the first one was pulled, he popped it out, packed it in gauze, gave me cleaning instructions and a small painkiller prescription. No bone packing. I was told, I could have a porcelain implant put in in 3 months.
The second time, I went to the dentist my insurance would pay for. Messy office. No certifications hung anywhere. Actually, no clue who the doctor was. She didn't speak english very well, and had a bad attitude. While I was sitting there in pain waiting for treatment, they gave me the used car salesman treatment. It was a long price list, including the synthetic bone packing which cost twice as much as the rest of the work. I told them I didn't want it. They insisted. I walked out before they could do the work.
I drove straight back to the dentist that I trust instead. He saw me right away, and I told him what they told me. He confirmed the diagnosis (the tooth needs to go), but he said the synthetic bone is not necessary. It can add some strength to the jaw, but in his experience (like 20 years of it) it's not necessary. Avoid chewing hard foods for a week or two. I let him pull it on the spot. This one was worse. It took him about an hour, and a lot of hard pulling to get it out. I was groggy from the nitrous oxide, but when he finally got it out I saw how long the tooth was, so I asked to keep it. He joked "ya, that was a long one, it went all the way to the bottom of your jaw". After I recovered enough to be able to touch the side of my face, I held the tooth up beside my face, and aligned the top of the chewing surface with my other teeth. Sure enough, it went down to the bottom of my jaw. Best guess is less than 1/16" between the bottom of the root and the bottom of my jaw.
He checked up on it a couple times, and in a pretty quick time the bone had grown back across the hole. If I push on the spot where it came out, it's hard now, not squishy like flesh grown across a hole like it did in the first weeks after it came out.
So, in dental work, synthetic bone packing is really not necessary. Take that 2nd hand from an expert.:) I suspect there may be cases where it is necessary, probably in pulling multiple teeth that are immediately adjacent.
Anyone in the Tampa, Florida area, I can recommend the good doctor to you.
I'm really not sure which is worse, that they post these things, or that they're so old. Really, I saw this years ago.
Feedback is good for any site. It shows the direction which the users would like the site to go in. It's important for good growth of any site (or any company). Try something, see if the users like it. If they do, keep it and/or expand it. If they don't like it, file it away somewhere so the same mistakes aren't made again.
But, posting what the site owner/editor/publisher wants is true. I run a news site also. It's a different format with a different target audience, but it's mine. I (owner/publisher) ran a story about men and their cats. My senior editor got a bit miffed. I'll paraphrase. "We're in the middle of two wars, the economy collapsing, and what could be the most detrimental US election ever, and you're running stories about f***ing cats?!?!"
There was good reason that I did. Because the NYTimes ran it first. Because the regular news is absolutely depressing. Once in a great while you have to give a little bright news. Broadcast TV doesn't want to do the fluff piece on a doughnut shop making the county's largest doughnut, but when all they've run for the last week is car crashes, shootings, and world news on terrorist bombings and the body count in wars we're involved in, sometimes you have to give a little bright spot in the news, even if it is still out of line.
I run what I want, when I want. I want real factual news run all day every day. I also want to keep our readers, so the fluff pieces are almost required. Silly things like the car with the tesla coil on it are good to bring in new readers too. Someone will ask someone else "Did you see the car with lightning around it on Slashdot?" Bringing in readers with fluff is fine. Keeping them around with real news is more important.
Some days it's harder to find real news than on other days. That's why you'll see repeated news on TV and in the newspaper. They have time and space to fill (respectively). We have a luxury on the Internet, where we just have to remain active. We don't have to fill X number of pages to keep our advertisers happy, we only have to bring in X number of viewers. On my site, that's trivial. I don't answer to advertisers, so if I bring in exactly 0 viewers for a year, then I simply won't make any money. If I bring in 1 million users a day, well, I'll be much happier on my yacht, checking my readership numbers once a day.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I've found a lot of "web developers" who only know HTML with average graphics skills. They're the ones that can take a template site, and make it say what the customer wants it to say. Unfortunately, a lot of customers eat that up, until the day that they want it to actually DO something.
Then there are the real "web developers". I can code a site to do just about anything. I still don't have an interface to run the kitchen sink, but no one's asked for that. :) My primary work isn't web development though, it's systems administration. In systems, people want stuff to run. In web development, the customer wants it exactly as they have in their head or better, but can never express it. Even still, once they have it, they want more for the same cost. "Oh, that should only take you a minute." Sure. 2 days later, you have this new cool web application, and they don't want to pay an extra $20 for it. A friend of mine specializes in real web development, and I swear she gets that from every customer she has.
About half of mine were Windows. The other half were Linux. :) Add that to the holy war. :)
I happen to be running Windows on my current laptop because there's something with the fans not running properly under Linux, and I've been too lazy to figure it out (but not too lazy to make it dual boot).
I know. :) I would have held onto it longer, but I needed the cash, and the wife was being pissy about my toys. That didn't matter much though, she left anyways. Now I have no wife and not as many toys. {sigh}
Lessons learned. Never let the wife dictate what toys you can keep. Eventually she'll leave. The toys will never leave you. They'll never complain that you're late coming home, or forgot to pick up milk at the store.
Well, it's good to know that someone on here can do network design psychically. Remind me to have you send of the design specs for the next network I work on. I'll pay you, of course. You should have them done already though, since you're so good.
Like I said, there were multiple suites in the same complex. It required 6 switches. I could have run them all back to one central switch, but that would mean running bundles of Cat5/6 along the roof of the building (the only wiring route there), an half of them to a central switch over a road. The total run on quite a few would be greater than 400'. Oh, and I should add, in a very lightning prone area. The city claims to be the "Lightning capital of the world". I don't know about that, but even NOAA marks the state as being the most lightning prone area in the country, and the city lands smack in one of the two big red blobs shown on NOAA's lightning map. That's enough for me to justify running fiber between suites.
And, the old switches were Netgear 10/100 switches of various models. Some suites were linked via a wireless bridge. That part was fine, except when a truck would park in between them (happened about twice a day).
He was talking about 3d glasses, if I recall correctly.
But, for a while I used a pair of Sony Glasstron (PLM-A35) glasses. I had gone out to a worksite that was "suppose" to have a crash cart. They didn't. So I'm sitting there with a dozen servers, no monitor or keyboard, and no way to set the IP's when they finally do provide them.
We went shopping, and found this crappy little store that had the glasses for like $200, or a 14" LCD screen for $400. This was a while ago. Since we were out of town, "what will fit in my luggage" was actually a big concern.
It didn't have VGA inputs, so I got a VGA to RCA adapter, and started working. People at the datacenter got a kick out of it. I was sitting on the floor, keyboard in my lap, apparently staring off into space. :) The best part was, it fit nicely in my laptop bag.
The extra cabling I had to tote around was a little annoying, but I could do an overnight trip with just my laptop bag and not have to check any luggage. This was pre-911. Since then, I have to check a bag just to bring a screwdriver. {sigh}
Ya, I've helped quite a few with their installs, either being on site or by phone or email.. I include the basics with the install.
For the most part, people who have bought stuff from me already know what they intend to do with it, so they rarely ask anything of me afterwards, unless they want more stuff. :)
I got lucky with Cisco stuff. Years ago, I was really thrown into it, because no one else knew how to work any of it. At first, I did some really basic stuff with guidance from our ISP's tech support.
At the second place I was doing this at, I was just starting to get the hang of it, and we ran into a connectivity problem. We had an ancient PIX firewall (the old 4u model) which was between our Cisco 7204 router, and our Cisco 2924 switch. We had a single T3 coming into the site. Mind you, this was state of the art at the time. The provider insisted our firewall was the problem, and walked me through reconfiguring things. A little bit here, a little bit there, and 2 hours later the configuration was completely hosed, as far as getting traffic beyond the router. They did fix a problem on their side, which was the original problem. I was sitting there, in the middle of the night, with a half connected PIX, a router that wouldn't route, and a network that wasn't generating any money. The network would generate about $10k/day, so it was kinda urgent that I brought it back up. That was my worst experience with it. No one to turn to, because no one else knew how to work it. I couldn't even go online to look for information, since we were down. And of course this was before you could just cruise down to Starbucks and get on their wireless. :) I fumbled through it for about an hour, and made it work.
A couple weeks later, I fumbled through, and made it work better.
A couple weeks later, I improved it substantially.
A few years later, I breezed through a CCNA class, and everything I knew when I walked in the door was only from experience and reading. I was a little (a lotta) rough on the Token Ring stuff, but that was expected. :)
Now, every piece I can get my hands on, I try to learn as much as I can. If I can ever afford it, probably after the economy starts picking back up, I'll renew my CCNA, and take the CCNP, or whatever the current designation is. :) At this point though, I've learned enough to make everything I touch work properly, so the cert is just to prove to the people who need to see certs that I really know what I say I know.
I could buy 6 GigE switches with fiber connections and the fiber on them for $450? Wow, I've been shopping at the wrong places. Care to share where?
I've been reading through the responses to my post. Lots of people have had one laptop that has lasted forever. Then again, they're saying they've had luck with one laptop. If a dozen people out of the hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers can say they have better luck than me, that's not an excellent ratio.
I'm replying to yours because I've known one other person with that specific laptop. He loved his. He is (or was, I haven't talked to him in a while) huge Apple fan. He also had his Titanium for about 6 months before "something" happened with it. He was always very careful with his also. He was sitting in an airport with his on a table. While he was using it, the keyboard started getting warm. The next thing he knew, there was smoke coming out of it.
He took it to an Apple store and got a replacement. The original was so badly damaged, they didn't even want it to return, so it was all mine to dissect.
The fans were all in good shape. The moved freely, and when I put power to them, they spun normally. Everything around the CPU had melted, including warping the heat sink. It was a real mess.
His second one lasted about a year, and then had some fatal flaw. I don't know exactly what happened with that one. He told me it broke. I only asked because he showed up with a new laptop. It was another Apple, because he still likes them.
I find it similar to servers, desktops, and even hard drives. Someone will buy one of any brand, it will work for years for them, so they declare them perfect. I don't try to make real comparisons until I've seen many of them running.
We have quite a few Thinkpads at work. Some people love them, and they've never had a problem in years. Then again, we buy them in bulk for various purposes, and they do come back with fatal problems.
And, yes, I do carry my equipment around in good cases. My back isn't what it used to be, and with the other assorted gear I carry, my bag usually weighs a good bit. I've worn out more cases than I have laptops. Right now, I'm using a Brookstone leather laptop roller case. It looks good, and has handled pretty well.
My current laptop had it's worst incident ever a couple weeks ago. I was coming back from a trip, and as I exited a door into the parking garage on a ramp, the cart tilted and all my gear went tumbling down the ramp. I cracked a piece of plastic on the front left corner. So sad. The laptop is still working fine. I'm sitting on the back porch, using my laptop, as I write this.
3 years old, and the only hardware thing I've done is swapped out the hard drive. It was becoming too small for my purposes. Sometimes when I'm on the road, I want to pull video from my video camera and send it off. Search my name on YouTube, and you'll see an impromptu helicopter video. We received notification just after we booked my plane ticket, that the site I was to be working at would be shut down for one day because there was going to be a helicopter lift. The folks back at the office wanted to see what it was doing, so I filmed it, went back to the hotel and did some light editing, and then uploaded it so they could see.
You're exactly right about the networking gear.
One place I worked for, they had consumer grade "switches" in 4 suites, with a mismatch of technology connecting the suites (all in the same complex). I spent $300 on 6 Cisco Catalyst 2924's with 4 port 100baseFX fiber cards. I spent another $150 on enough fiber to interconnect them all.
I did the upgrades very carefully so as to not break anything during working hours. One suite per day to change them from their cheap switch to the 2924. I spent 3 days on ladders running fiber between the suites. On the last night, I switched their cross connects from the old ways to the fiber. That next morning, people were amazed how fast everything was working.
The VoIP guy was laughing the whole time. I put an office of about 30 desks on "enterprise" equipment. Well, it's old, but when it was new, sure it was "enterprise" equipment. For $450, I couldn't have done anything better. :)
Actually, when I have the cash (that's going to plenty of other places) I buy Cisco stuff at auction. I generally go for the bigger equipment. I get some broken stuff and give it to a recycler. The good stuff I test, use for a little while to be sure it's good, then sell at a decent markup. I put a decent markup on it, so I always turn a profit, but it's still a whole lot cheaper for the customer than buying it new elsewhere.
I'm not the biggest place doing it, but I can keep my prices low, because I'm working out of the house in my spare time.
For someone with a decent size office (say 100 desks), a Catalyst 5500 for less than $1k customized for them will do them a lot better than a stack of consumer grade hubs and switches.
I focus on Cisco gear, because I know it really well. I tried to touch the server market, but there is so little profit margin it usually ends up costing me money to sell it.
The last "big" purchase I did, I bought 1 Cisco Catalyst 5000 (5 slot) 1 Cisco Catalyst 5505 (5 slot), 1 Cisco Catalyst 5500 (13 slot), and 3 servers. By the time I got rid of the 5500, 5505, and 1 server, I had already turned a profit. I sold the other 5000 and 1 other server, and that was just more profit.
For me, my problem is that I lost my good high pay job about 2 years ago. It took some time to change my cost of living (get rid of the house, one car, etc), so right now I'm in recovery mode and can't buy anything else to move, even though it would always be at a profit.
Some things are just fun. I bought an oscilloscope for something I was working on. It was cheap because the guy selling didn't even know if it worked. I tested it, bought a couple cheap probes, and then sat on it for a year. I finally decided I wouldn't need it again for a while, so I sold it for double what I had invested. It was a Tektronix, built in the 60's, but it still sold as soon as I made it available.
hehe. That was so mean. :)
I could be mistaken, but I think once you put it up on 443, they won't be able to block it, because the data will always be encrypted.
[firing up wireshark and testing]
Hmmmm.. I thought the whole HTTPS session was encrypted, but I guess there is some that's in the clear that is fair game to see by an application filter.
If they allow VPN connections out, or even SSH, depending on the laptop, things could be arranged. I was joking with my friend that if her son asks to put a VPN server up on her network, we'd know he's looking to view porn from school. :) Then again, maybe we should let him. I administer the network, so I could monitor everything beyond the VPN to the real world and watch what he's doing. :)
My preferred way is doing it from a Linux box, using PPP over SSH. I have yet to find someone who blocks my access to SSH on my own private high ports. :) I don't use them for this specific purpose, but I do use them (PPP over SSH) on a daily basis to keep nosy ISP's from seeing my private data.
HAHAHAHAA!
I hadn't seen that before, but I swear she's been on half the flights I've been on.
I know I've offended quite a few flight attendants since then. "No, it will stay with me, under the seat in front of me." When they start getting upset, I usually explain that I don't have a job when I get to my destination if I don't have my laptop with me and working. If they want to risk my job, feel free. If I do lose my job, I'll have nothing better to do than file frivolous lawsuits against her and the airline in every jurisdiction that I can find.
I usually don't get to the last part, and they just give me a funny look and walk away to mangle someone elses gear. :)
Funny you should say that. I get a lot of them brought to me broken. :) The ones that last longest are turned on once a month, never actually leave the office, and otherwise are untouched in locked cabinet.
I guess the sad part is, I don't do laptop repairs. At least not officially. I somehow get suckered into fixing them, being part of my job description is "... and can fix anything ..."
I was talking to a friend about this, and we came to a similar conclusion.
Based off of what I know of people, it won't happen quite like you think.
One kid will figure out how to remove all the protective precautions. They may post it online. Lots of kids aren't interested in learning how to break it. Instead, they'll call a kid like I was (oh my, 20 years ago). For $5/ea he or she will unlock the laptop with or without the provided instructions. It will only be a matter of time before they all (or the majority of them) are unlocked, and kids are watching porn in school through a 3rd party proxy on an unfiltered port. :)
I was going to reply to the OP, but you asked the magic question.
Traveling moderately with laptops, mine have had a life expectancy of about 1 year. I've been lucky with my current one (a HP zv6000) which has passed about 3 years or so. I always treat my laptops moderately well (carried carefully, avoided dropping them), yet something fails.
One dropped dead after passing over the rollers at an x-ray machine at an airport.
One dropped dead after running in a warm room for one night.
One got the screen cracked when a helpful stewardess shoved someone's luggage into mine in the overhead storage bin. Ahhh, gotta love airplanes.
Hmmm, I can't remember the others, other than the life expectancy was only about a year.
I know I'm not alone. I've worked on countless office laptops. Those that survive a year are real troopers. The best survivor other than my own was a 3 year old Toshiba tablet. It lost the hard drive and touch screen. Replacement parts were cheaper than replacing the unit, so I fixed it.
I'm talking about grown adults, who like (or depend) on their laptops for work.
Now, a bunch of 8th to 12th graders running around with laptops? Besides mishandling on their own behalf, what happens when the bully makes a frisbee about off the little kids laptop? What happens when they spill a drink on it? Put their books down hard on the top and crack the screen? Oh, the scenarios I could list, and they'll still never account for the all the real possibilities.
With proper handling you may get a year, with improper handling, I'd see replacing hordes of them monthly. I feel sorry for the IT department who's going to handle the problems, but I feel worse for the taxpayers who are going to foot the bill.
The user believed he had increased performance, because his switch said "GigE" on it. He probably did see some performance increase, because he was using a white box 10/100 hub before that. The users are complaining a lot about performance though. Inside the office, we have a lot of machines. He moved a server that I'm responsible for over to one of the cheap "switches". I was getting 0.28ms. I was also having the network hang mysteriously pretty frequently when people are working on other machines attached to those "switches". I moved the connection over to our core switch, a Cisco Catalyst 5500. The latency went down to something like 0.14ms, and the mysterious hanging went away. I don't do large transfers or anything particularly intensive from my desktop to it. I simply ssh to it. It's not so much fun typing out an entire line, and waiting for it to show. :)
I do agree with the fact that most home users don't need anything better than the regular consumer grade stuff. Really, at home between my own computers, I use whatever crap is cheapest. :) Knowing that I will never exceed by upstream bandwidth, and all my computers only talk out over the internet and not very much between each other, I personally will rarely see a use for good hardware at home. I do have Cisco gear at home, but it's to use as spares for real production environments, or to sell on eBay. :) Heck, I have a Cisco 5000 switch sitting in the back of my car right now. That's way overkill for the 20Mb/s upstream bandwidth that I have.
I know Cisco can get bogged down with tiny packets. That's why you have to keep your network up with the proper PPS rates for your network.
I do know someone who could really use good Cisco hardware. He runs virtualized environments. That is, he's made a business out of putting people up on VMWare servers. He serves all of their stored data over a SAN, and that makes a lot of load on his switch all the time. He's using iSCSI, not fiber. He wants to upgrade from his HP switch to a Cisco, but doesn't have the budget for a good Cisco with GigE on all ports. I've seen his bandwidth graphs. They'll pretty regularly go over 200Mb/s, so he actually needs the bandwidth.
For the other users I mentioned, they'll only very very rarely get up to 80Mb/s, because of limitations in what they're doing.
I concur with this. Anything that says "GigE" only means that it's offering an interface that is compliant to the specification, not that it can pass 1000Mb/s.
A few days ago, I went digging for some information on switches. I'm a big Cisco fan, and I have specs on everything that I use. I know which of my switches can handle more traffic than others. That's kind of important.
Someone (to remain nameless) bought a GigE "switch". A name brand, but consumer grade switch. He wanted GigE because he had large files to transfer between several machines simultaniously.
"switch" by their definition in the user manual simply means hub, except it can amplify the signal. No actual switching involved, other than the fact that it can "switch" between 10Mb/s, 100Mb/s and 1000Mb/s. {sigh}
And the pps rates were pathetic. Actually, very pathetic. I broke out my spreadsheet of Cisco specs, and had to scroll down to the slowest, oldest switches that I can get my hands on. A base model Cisco Catalyst 2924 (not enterprise firmware). The 2924 handles 3 times the pps than this spiffy keen new "GigE switch". {sigh}
I only looked into it due to other network problems. Cascaded consumer grade switches in what should be a high speed operating environment. Nothing even came close to the old Cisco 2924. While I'm not advocating running a new enterprise on old 2924's, and the fact that there are much faster ones laying around waiting for a home, wouldn't it be prudent to use something else.
So the moral of my story.... Figure out what you're really dealing with, and don't look only at the label.
I was having a discussion with someone who does SAN work. He was all happy about his piece of equipment. I found out the specs of the components, and then priced it out with better PC based stuff running Linux. His did run Linux, but on a custom board. It was easy to out perform anything he had with better hardware, and even better drives. If I recall correctly, he veto'd the idea of switching because he had once tried it with a Windows based SAN, and it wouldn't work. Tried once. With some 3rd party crap. It didn't work. {sigh}
I'm slowly prepping a friends place to have a Linux machine be the SAN. Decent parts, standard protocols (SMB, NFS, and iSCSI). The only "slowly" part is that there is no rush right now, so when I see something that'll do it well, we buy the parts. Once we have all the parts, it'll be a running machine.
Wow. I don't think I've ever been modded a troll. It must have been the riceburner fanboys.
Ok, so now I'll have a flamebait mod now too. :)
I found a half dozen references to Canada, and none to the U.S.. They could have been wrong though. I was looking more specifically for the 2000 model year, since that's what I was referencing.
I shouldn't say anything, but I will.
1) Your capitalization sucks.
2) Your sentence structure sucks.
3) Your rambling is pathetic.
4) I'm not African American, or anything of African descent.
5) I'm not Jewish, nor has any of my family ever been.
6) I am not homosexual, bisexual, or in any other way going to have oral/genital contact with another man.
7) If someone actually came close enough to cutting my throat, they'd be in for a big surprise.
8) To further points 4 and 5, I am not racist, so race really doesn't matter to me. I am just clarifying the points.
9) To further point 6, I am not homophobic. I respect others choices, as they should respect mine.
So, out of what you said, I will accept "Good luck." Good luck to you too my friend, and have a beautiful day.
As soon as I read the story, I was curious to if they could inject titanium. :) More practically, it would seem they could inject something resembling carbon fiber. Ahh, light and very strong. How long would it be before they started doing it to the military to avoid bone breakage? It doesn't avoid the more fatal problem of bullet holes and IED's though.
I've had two teeth pulled. For the first, I went to the dentist I trust. For me, that's a hard one. I don't trust dentists, after the sadistic one I had as a kid (no anesthetic fillings, and he intentionally sliced open the inside of my cheek just to watch me scream). My regular dentist now (the one I trust) has his Mastership in the Academy of General Dentistry. His office is nice, clean, and professional. He'll discuss anything you'd like.
When the first one was pulled, he popped it out, packed it in gauze, gave me cleaning instructions and a small painkiller prescription. No bone packing. I was told, I could have a porcelain implant put in in 3 months.
The second time, I went to the dentist my insurance would pay for. Messy office. No certifications hung anywhere. Actually, no clue who the doctor was. She didn't speak english very well, and had a bad attitude. While I was sitting there in pain waiting for treatment, they gave me the used car salesman treatment. It was a long price list, including the synthetic bone packing which cost twice as much as the rest of the work. I told them I didn't want it. They insisted. I walked out before they could do the work.
I drove straight back to the dentist that I trust instead. He saw me right away, and I told him what they told me. He confirmed the diagnosis (the tooth needs to go), but he said the synthetic bone is not necessary. It can add some strength to the jaw, but in his experience (like 20 years of it) it's not necessary. Avoid chewing hard foods for a week or two. I let him pull it on the spot. This one was worse. It took him about an hour, and a lot of hard pulling to get it out. I was groggy from the nitrous oxide, but when he finally got it out I saw how long the tooth was, so I asked to keep it. He joked "ya, that was a long one, it went all the way to the bottom of your jaw". After I recovered enough to be able to touch the side of my face, I held the tooth up beside my face, and aligned the top of the chewing surface with my other teeth. Sure enough, it went down to the bottom of my jaw. Best guess is less than 1/16" between the bottom of the root and the bottom of my jaw.
He checked up on it a couple times, and in a pretty quick time the bone had grown back across the hole. If I push on the spot where it came out, it's hard now, not squishy like flesh grown across a hole like it did in the first weeks after it came out.
So, in dental work, synthetic bone packing is really not necessary. Take that 2nd hand from an expert. :) I suspect there may be cases where it is necessary, probably in pulling multiple teeth that are immediately adjacent.
Anyone in the Tampa, Florida area, I can recommend the good doctor to you.
I'm really not sure which is worse, that they post these things, or that they're so old. Really, I saw this years ago.
Feedback is good for any site. It shows the direction which the users would like the site to go in. It's important for good growth of any site (or any company). Try something, see if the users like it. If they do, keep it and/or expand it. If they don't like it, file it away somewhere so the same mistakes aren't made again.
But, posting what the site owner/editor/publisher wants is true. I run a news site also. It's a different format with a different target audience, but it's mine. I (owner/publisher) ran a story about men and their cats. My senior editor got a bit miffed. I'll paraphrase. "We're in the middle of two wars, the economy collapsing, and what could be the most detrimental US election ever, and you're running stories about f***ing cats?!?!"
There was good reason that I did. Because the NYTimes ran it first. Because the regular news is absolutely depressing. Once in a great while you have to give a little bright news. Broadcast TV doesn't want to do the fluff piece on a doughnut shop making the county's largest doughnut, but when all they've run for the last week is car crashes, shootings, and world news on terrorist bombings and the body count in wars we're involved in, sometimes you have to give a little bright spot in the news, even if it is still out of line.
I run what I want, when I want. I want real factual news run all day every day. I also want to keep our readers, so the fluff pieces are almost required. Silly things like the car with the tesla coil on it are good to bring in new readers too. Someone will ask someone else "Did you see the car with lightning around it on Slashdot?" Bringing in readers with fluff is fine. Keeping them around with real news is more important.
Some days it's harder to find real news than on other days. That's why you'll see repeated news on TV and in the newspaper. They have time and space to fill (respectively). We have a luxury on the Internet, where we just have to remain active. We don't have to fill X number of pages to keep our advertisers happy, we only have to bring in X number of viewers. On my site, that's trivial. I don't answer to advertisers, so if I bring in exactly 0 viewers for a year, then I simply won't make any money. If I bring in 1 million users a day, well, I'll be much happier on my yacht, checking my readership numbers once a day. :)