I've driven an awful lot of cars over the years, and have learned the performance characteristics of most of them. The Miata doesn't handle well. It's not bad, compared to a lot of the little crap cars out there. It does have a tight suspension, but doesn't have the handling characteristics that you'd want from a real performance car.
In this WS/6, I've driven in more diverse places, and I'm almost always the fastest one out.
In Buttonwillow, I handled the turns better than any other class of car, and had more power coming out of the turns.
On Angeles Crest, which I drove fairly regularly, I never had a car pass me. I passed quite a few. I never left my lane, which is an accomplishment at any speed on that road. Unfortunately, you don't have much of a choice. Limited visibility means if you cross the center line, you'll likely find yourself head-on into another car in a few seconds. If you try to go off the road on one side, you'll hit the mountain. On the other side, you'll likely fall several hundred feet. There are some turnoffs. I only saw one car that had missed everything, but highway patrol was cleaning up out there about twice a week.
A real performance car will eat up your car any day. I'm annoyed these days, when your type of car whines up and revs the engine, like "oh, I want to race you.", and all I have to do is bump the gas to leave them behind. The only car that's been fun was my neighbor in his Z06. We stayed together up to 80 (it was for fun, not to get someone killed), and both laid off. So, 4-5 seconds of racing.
Once, I let a motorcycle leave me. We were already passing 130, and we were approaching other cars, so it was no longer safe to play. I laid off. He didn't until the last minute. He lost it a little, but you shouldn't try to brake hard in anything going from 130+ to 60.
I had a Miata once. I was kinda short on cash, and I wanted a sports car. It felt fast, but turned out to be very disappointing.
Mine was "broken" into twice. The top was sliced very easily and quietly. A call to the police to file a report, and to the insurance company to get it replaced, and all was well. The stock back window was much less than to be desired. Those damned things dry out and crack, so all you have is some tape holding the shreads of what were window. When the top was slashed the second time, I replaced it with a glass window (and a new top, of course). That was nicer, but the car was still slow compared to... well... almost everything else. I traded for a TransAm WS/6 with T-Tops.:)
I tried to send pictures, but it seems that your email doesn't work.:) I did get an odd picture back of something that I'm pretty sure people shouldn't be able to do.:)
Be careful what you say, even in sarcasm, someone is always going to take it wrong.
I'd phrase it as.... Say my girlfriend likes putting her hair in pigtails, and wearing a schoolgirl outfit. Say my girlfriend likes fantasy roleplay including rape scenerios. Does that make either of us bad? nope.
So, if I (a normal guy with a heartbeat) watch porn with one guy and 6 hot chicks doing all kinds of freaky things, does that mean I'm going to get with 6 hot chicks?
Damn..
I'm not going to even attempt to support any of the child porn stuff, but you have to bring up a justifiable argument, not just "if they have the pictures, they'll do it to the kids". I've seen plenty of freaky porn, and I'll never be able to afford the girls to do it.:)
The surgery wasn't lasik. I actually had a congenital cataract in one eye. It started getting worse about the time I was 18. I joined the military when I was 19, and they kicked me out when my vision couldn't be corrected to 20/20 with glasses. Right after I got out, I went and had it surgically removed. That was right around 1992 or 1993. I've had no bad effects from the surgery, but it removes me from the possibility of serving in the military. I tried to get waivers several times, but each time it was a nice firm "no." For the last... ummm... several years, I haven't tried again, because I don't believe in the actions we're doing. Nothing against the soldiers, all the blame lays on the administration.
The surgery has left me a little odd. The natural lens in your eye absorbs UV light. The replacement lens doesn't. I can clearly see colors that other people can't. For example, "black" lights look like a dull purple in my normal eye. In my adjusted eye, it's a very bright blue. It's just outside of the spectrum that we can normally see.:) For a while, it gave me real bad headaches when I saw black lights,and I'd have to walk around with one eye closed. That didn't last for long. Now, I can still see the colors, but it doesn't hurt any more. I have a hard time explaining it to people. How do you describe a color that no one else can see?
I intend to start flying again. It's been a matter of money more than anything. Sometime soon I will start though.
Wow, and I thought they were just local law enforcement being sent out to do recon for them.:) Silly me. I should have known from the wooshing sounds, and the bright neon lights swirling in a circle.:)
To fly commercial aircraft such as that, you need a commercial rating, and thousands of hours of pilot in command time on multiengine heavy jet aircraft. For average joe, that's not going to happen.
That was a goal of mine when I was a kid. I wanted to fly. I've flown small aircraft. I went to college at one of the best universities studying aeronautical science. When I wasn't in class, I was talking to people around town. I'd mention that I was going to school there, and they'd say "Oh, I got my bachelors in aeronautical science two/three/four years ago". They'd be working in restaurants, or small shops. Nothing like what they had just spent 4 years and a fortune trying to reach.
Before I went to the university, I started learning to fly at a small airport. My instructor had graduated from there too. He was a flight instructor to build up his hours, so when he had thousands of hours he could hopefully get a job with some crappy airline. Until then, he was teaching people how to fly.
As time went on, I found out the sad truth. If you want to be an airline pilot, you need to have been a military pilot with thousands of hours in multiengine jet aircraft, preferably heavy aircraft. You also have to have an excellent safety record. If you had serious incidents that were unclassified, they won't touch you. Even then, there's plenty of competition, and the pay isn't all that great. It's worthwhile to the airline to hire someone who already has their military pension, who's looking for a bit of supplemental income.
I can't go into the military. I had surgery on one of my eyes, which categorically precludes me from joining the military at all. Even if I joined, because I don't have a bachelors degree, I can't obtain an officer rank, and therefore cannot be a pilot. I could be ground crew, but that's about it.
Now, on to the on topic part.:)
I lived in LA for a while. I knew quite a few "aspiring" actors, as well as extras and other somewhat connected people. My wife worked as an extra for years. They're treated as the cattle that fills in the gaps in a scene. To make it from nobody to being an actor/actress/producer/director takes a lot of knowing the right people, and an awful more dumb luck. Being in the right place, at the right time, with the right look, and the right attitude, is what it takes. Oh, and lets not forget the unions/guilds. If I remember the SAG rules correctly, it takes 3 vouchers to be considered, and those vouchers come from the studio or a few other people. If you don't have a SAG card, you can't get a speaking role. Occasionally (very occasionally) they need someone to say something, and that person didn't show, or whatever. They may like you, because you're personable, or because you got hinky with the right person in his/her trailer right before the shoot. (getting hinky doesn't qualify you for anything other than a STD, but it can help).
Say they're shooting a commercial, and they need one more person to say "Ummm, that's good.", and you get picked out of the dozens of other extras they have standing around, then you may get a voucher, and may (oh my gosh) be on your way to advanced extradom, where you can get crappy walk-on parts and say your one line.
I don't have much of an interest in standing in front of a camera. A few extra parts came up on the extra lines (you call in and see what they're looking for), where they needed a car, a dog, or whatever. My wife and our dog showed up on CSI New York once.:) Stupid dog never barked, but they edited it in, but it was only about 2 seconds of video, and all you could see is the back of my wife's head in one shot, and her leg in another.
I was looking at something more interesting to me. Consulting for IT stuff on movies and/or tv
That's why I made this site. Even if you decrypt the first layer, you're still looking at random garbage.
I was reviewing my logs, and lots of interesting places have looked. Occasionally my phone clicks in a very regular pattern. A few folks have said "When I worked with ___ , our wire taps made that sound. Is your phone bugged?"
Only once has a black helicopter parked over my house (and then was filmed for 10 minutes). While a few unusual vehicles have been parked in the neighborhood, they're all attributable to neighbors houses. Well, most of them.:)
I'm not a fan of Dell, but it's for practical observations, not stuff I've read. Sure, things happen to people, and I accept that. A million bad (or good) reviews doesn't mean that I'll have a bad (or good) experience.
I do lots of IT work. If it's not for an employer, it's because someone asked me to give a friend a hand with something. When I talk to someone and they ask "have you worked on X platform", sure, and I can tell them the generalities of when, why, to what extent, etc, etc.
My initial contact with Dell was with some "high end" servers. They may as well have been gold plated for the cost. They were delivered in crates because of their size. That was probably the first thing to annoy me, trying to lift the damned things into the rack. A 6u machine is heavy, and Dell always manages to weight them down quite a bit extra. Not really for practical reasons though, unless dropped machines are a good thing.
It wasn't for a few more months that I got my hands on a severely damaged one. I was very pleased, now I could gut it, and see what all the parts were. The owners of the machines were always glowing about how great Dell is, and they're the only platform to use, and how Mike Dell personally puts his seal of approval on every design, and their test environment to ensure any platform is absolutely stable in any conditions. It was enough to make my puke, or at least be skeptical.
The first Dell I gutted turned out to be all Intel. Not just processors, but almost every piece in it. Dell uses a lot of Intel motherboards, CPU's, and network cards. Fine, I find Intel parts to be stable. Intel motherboards usually are not blazing fast high performance, but they'll usually (usually) keep working. I prefer AMD processors, but when it comes down to it, as long as it works, it's just a preference.
When I looked at more Dell machines, one fact became apparent. They're using the cheapest drives that they can get in bulk. Sometimes they're absolutely crap. I can't say that I've seen too many high quality drives. Sure, good interfaces, but not great drives.
When building good servers, I've always been able to build more machine for half the price (or better) than a Dell. That in itself has helped me win people away from the Dell beastie. Sure, their specials are priced well, because they're clearing out the warehouse of older equipment. When the customer sees the performance, they usually wet themselves.
I switched a customer from a 6u quad processor Dell, to a 1u dual processor SuperMicro. They were having problems on the Dell, where it wouldn't boot with their upgraded memory under Solaris (it was a Solaris problem). They needed to be moved while we switched the box to Linux. This customer was hell bent on Dell from day 1, but after being on the SuperMicro, I couldn't convince them to move back. We were shy on drive redundancy, so we built out two beefier SuperMicro 1u's (RAID5 across 4 SATA drives) for less than the current balance on the Dell lease was. Sorry, you still have $20k in payments to make on the machine you don't want. In time, it ended up sitting in someone's office as a table because no one wanted to carry it anywhere.
So, we've covered the price and technology. How about the support.
I've managed to stay off of most of the support calls. I don't have to call for technical support, if it's broken, I can identify it. With no less than 3 customers, they've been screwed by what they thought was 4 hour response time. What they were later advised, it was "4 hour response between 6am and 4pm, Monday through Friday". Anything outside of those hours were deferred to the next working day. It's hard to tell the customer sitting there with the $40,000 server with a dead hard drive and a 4 hour response contract that he'll just have to live with it.
I was out there for a few years. The building we used had direct fiber to One Wilshire, but their building was suppose to be save to a 9.0 earthquake. In their advertising they say the building will only shift 3/4" in a 9.0 earthquake. Hopefully they never have to prove it.:)
I only felt a few while I was there. A shaking 3.5 while I was in Glendale, and a rolling 4.0 while I was in Northridge. Rolling earthquakes are weird if you're on the second floor.:) I rolled away from my desk, which was my clue to get out. You'd be amazed how fast you can get downstairs and outside when the thought "the building will fall on my head" comes to mind. I think the cat was more disturbed than me, since I grabbed her on the way out.
I'm glad to be back in hurricane country.:) I grew up in it, so the risk of a little rain and a VERY small chance of anything worse happening is always good.
I'm pushing my company for redundancy. The way I've run things in the past, if a site disappears, it's not a big deal. We should pick sites for best ideal conditions (like, there's a connection still there). In a worst case, like if LA has a big quake, we should just divert traffic from there until everything is repaired.
Is that where Elk Grove is? I'm not terribly familiar with Chicago. I found the street, which is a residential street to the north of LaSalle, which didn't make any sense.:)
That may be where Savvis' service comes into the city, but ya, it may be where this datacenter is too. I found Savvis building at 2425 Busse Rd, Elk Grove Village, IL, that appears to have 12 generators and a lot of air conditioning. They're also at 175 W. Jackson Blvd, which would seem to be a more ideal location, just about a block from the Telegraph building.
Screw hosting, I want to move there.:) Their demographics are more pleasing than anywhere else I've looked at. Of course, I'd have to find work there. I'm thinking of becoming a lemming farmer.:)
The next post mentioned connectivity. Many providers fiber runs through there, but those that don't, you'd then be routing through NY, Amsterdam, or London, which may not be ideal.
Sigbus got it. It's a major telecom building. All the big players that I've looked at are in there. As far as I can tell, that's the MAE-Central IX. It if's not that building, it's one damned close.:)
Across the street is usually good in internet terms. They'd just have big fiber run under the street, and be very happily connected. More than likely, that building would be lit up too.
My building of choice for LA isn't actually One Wilshire, but a building 6 blocks away. They have their own dedicated fiber run down the street.
A well constructed network doesn't use just one location though. I've found out the hard way that cities fall off the grid occasionally, so you *HAVE* to have a presence in multiple good locations if you want to always be up. Of course, with that comes redundancy. If you aren't set up for redundancy, you're just screwed.
If I remember correctly, Slashdot uses MySQL. MySQL has a global load balanced version that's commercial now, but gives the database capabilities that they'd require. Then it would be a matter of setting up shop in several cities. At that point, they just put one rack, rather than a cage, in multiple locations, and cluster the whole mess. If Chicago (or LA, or NY, or whatever) fails, it's not a big deal.
I used to shove around hundreds of Mb/s, depending on line quality in a city. We'd get an apology call from the provider when a city was having a problem, and I wouldn't really care. They would though. One city may mean that I'm dumping off 2Gb/s to the other cities. I just hope they have a spare OC48 up to take us.:) I actually tested on a regular basis, so I knew the capabilities of each city, so after the automatic stuff made the immediate correction, I could tune it appropriately. It was fun to do the testing. I'd gracefully turn down servers in other cities, to watch bandwidth come up in the test target city. When the bandwidth flatlined, I knew we reached capacity. I knew our equipment could do way more than the provider could handle, so that was never the concern.
We actually ran out of another city that I didn't list, that had decent bandwidth, but sometimes that wasn't good enough. From what I understand, they have an extra 4Gb/s of capacity on that provider in that city now, because my old work moved, and another large customer moved. I assume they didn't turn down their fiber backbone links, so the capacity is probably still there. They were planning growth. Ours was about 50%+ per year, so they were putting in bigger fiber everywhere for us. Both our company and the other company bailed within a year of each other, so that kinda sucked for them, but I'm sure it made their customers happier.
Actually, my work is considering where to move it's servers. It involves a HUGE amount of fact finding. Chicago is one of the places they want stuff, but that's for customer reasons, not for "center of the universe" reasons. Our locations are chosen based on current customer usage, and statistical information I gathered at previous jobs. When you have 8 million users/day from around the world, those demographics stick in your head real well.:)
In my research, I found the best places to be are.
New York City. 111 8th ave, 60 Hudson, or 25 Broadway. The selection would be based on provider interconnects and availability. Some providers service all three locations with their own private interconnects, so it really doesn't matter.
Los Angeles. One Wilshire, or one of a few select locations nearby, again with private interconnects to One Wilshire.
Miami. Near or at 1 NE First St.
Chicago. Near or at 427 S La Salle St
The runners up are:
Chicago
San Jose
Amsterdam
Frankfurt
London
Paris
Tokyo/Osaka
In time, I'd like to have equipment in all of those locations. Or we can go the Akamai route, and put stuff anywhere there's a rack.:) I swear, they're everywhere I've had an opportunity to wander the colo space.
For just about any provider of English based contact, the rankings of customer location by major geographic area are:
North East United States
South East United States
Europe
Western United States
Obviously that would be skewed for the content. For example, a Japanese speaking site, with local interest content would be best placed near JPNAP in Tokyo or Osaka. Likewise, a Russian site with say daily weather reports of Siberia would probably want to be in Chelyabinsk, Russia, and you probably want to use Rostelecom.
I noticed that Slashdot is now using Savvis. They were offering an amazingly cheap deal on bandwidth recently. I wasn't actively pursuing the bandwidth side, I was looking for the physical location side where my providers of choice would be. I'd be willing to bet they're in the Telegraph building. I'm curious now to who's suite they're in.:)
I'm not much of at breaking the law. Generally, if I can get caught, I will. I prefer freedom.
The statement was that I *could* have. I was actually within the legal limits the whole time, so it didn't matter either way. When I did fire up the 200mw card, I was within the limits because of the lower gain antenna that I used with it.
It's not terribly hard to go over the limits though. You *can* get power amplifiers. I did a quick search on Google, and found 20W amplifiers. The legal limit for the transmitter itself is 1W without a license. a 20W transmitter with a 30dBi antenna would be like waving a sign saying "come get me" when someone complains. The side lobes would give you away in a heart beat, unless of course, you're way out in the middle of nowhere.
dammit, I wrote a long reply, but my browser crashed. That's what I get for using Windows on occasion.:)
Yes, I consulted the charts, and even did the math myself to confirm that the charts were right.:)
a 20mw transmitter and 24dBi antenna puts it.5dBm below the FCC max for a point to multipoint application. Since this was point to point, they have higher tolerances, which still is fine.
Now, my 200mw transmitter with the 24dBi antenna is a wee bit against FCC rules in theory, but with loss in the cables, it may just be at the limit.
Since they were very directional antennas, it was a fairly safe bet they'd never notice anyways. Sitting behind either antenna, I could hear the signal (encrypted, of course). Standing on the ground immediately under the antenna, still with a clear view of the remote side, I couldn't detect it, nor anything at that particular frequency. I even did that with the 200mw transmitter and a 4.5dBi antenna. Only being maybe 15 feet or so below the real antenna was enough to be outside of the beam of the more diverse antenna.
I actually did this before. It was with a pair of WAP11's (current at the time), a 24dBi parabolic, and a 19dBi panel. It was 100% reliable, except for a few circumstances.
After a year, a bamboo tree grew up through the line of site.
One end was in an office, and the WAP11 would overheat because the A/C was turned off on the weekends, and the cleaning crew would shut off the fan blowing on the AP.
In one strong wind, I found I hadn't secured the antenna well enough, and it turned.:)
They were all easy, obvious problems.
In his case, an AP with a high gain antenna on one end, and a decent antenna on the distant end attached to his wireless device would be fine.
IF (big IF) you can trust the outside network with the data, which I would consider to NOT be true in 99% of the cases, you could implement what I laid out on one of my sites. Check out http://cryptmsg.com
Completely open source, implement as you'd like.
Basically, you give them multiple keys, each by different methods (phone, fax, in person, postal mail, IM, etc), and you select the encryption methods. You encrypt the message on an off-line machine, and pass it to an online machine for delivery. The encrypted message goes out through any unsecured channel (i.e., email). They decrypt on their offline machine and now they have the message. All in all, it could be an easy and secure system. Since my code is open source, you can rehash it any way you'd like.
This is pretty much what I wrote it for. Secure, unbreakable transmissions over unsecure networks, where it's a given that someone will intercept it.
I include an encrypted message in my tagline. I'll Paypal $10 to the first person who cracks it.
My biggest concern would be that they're reading it on a machine that has Internet access. You can secure your servers like Fort Knox, but we all know perfectly well that every foreign machine is suspect. That's a risk you have to be willing to take.
I've seen sites that provide "secure" data on demand to authenticated users, over SSL via their web browser. You can key it to the end user's IP, and require a user:pass, but there's still potential for abuse.
If your information is that sensitive, you should only allow access:
1) If they are on the secure portion of your network 2) That part of the network does not have Internet access 3) You have a strong security policy for that part of the network 4) You have a strong security policy for the workstations on that part of the network.
Since that doesn't usually fly in the business world, you'll have to make the exceptions, which you're asking about. Make sure you have upper management approval in writing for the exceptions that you are going to make, so when it hits the fan, you are not the responsible party.
Nope, I'm a good ol' red blooded American, in America, with a rapidly sinking economy. I went from 6 figures 2 years ago, to... well... 1 greasy or out dated vending machine meal a day.
Eleven percent buy their lunch out of a vending machine at least once a week.
Damn, that's it? The only food I get is vending machine, and bad cafeteria food. Of course, I only eat one "meal" a day, so I don't fall into these statistics, unless underweight, underpaid, and overworked counts. I don't get paid enough to eat more than one "meal" a day, and sometimes not even that.
They're obviously overpaying the IT people who can get fat. For the rest of us, our exercise is defending the cardboard box that we're calling home, because we can't afford rent, power, or even the car we used to drive.
I was going to reply to the guy about the hammers. I have 6 or 7 hammers in my house. Somewhere. Sometimes I leave them in one of two places (garage or back porch), but other people move them more frequently than I do, and they never land where I'd expect.
I found one in the bedroom. The wife was hanging something up. The rest are AWOL. I hope to see them again someday.
I think he'll run into some serious problems with RFID's. First, the sensor broadcast all the time, which means you're literally dumping large amounts of non-ionizing radiation into the room. Before anyone argues, look it up.
The other problem is what I've seen before. I have 5 RFID access badges on one lanyard. I have to fold one card out, and get it just in range of the sensor to gain access. If I keep the whole pack of badges, or even just two, the sensor either won't read anything, or will not detect the proper ID. Now imagine a whole room of RFID tags within proximity of the sensor. It'll be so much noise, nothing will be discernible.
Your comments about the kids are funny. I have kids, and I remember doing some of the stuff you're talking about. My mom had a locked desk drawer. It took me until I was about 6 to figure out how to pick the lock.:) The same with doors I wasn't suppose to open. For some reason, I adapted well to opening things, and it wasn't until later that I realized I wasn't suppose to do it in the first place.:)
I used to make forts out of old encyclopedia sets, and spaceship controls out of boxes full of old electronics. Oh, the good ol' days.
Now that I'm old and cranky, I have to buy my own toys to play with.:) I haven't made the spaceship controls since I was little, but with as many electronics I use for my home theater (like THEATER, not just TV), I haven't lost much.:)
I know a guy in the electronics recycling industry. You may have been told that they're thrown away, but in reality most of them aren't.
Usually the hard drives either have to be wiped, or destroyed. The rest of the machine is up for grabs.
In their case, they take the decent machines (including older ones like P2's), refurbish them, and sell them.
The broken, or too old, equipment, they break down in special equipment that separates the various materials (plastic, glass, metals) for reprocessing. Different places handle different equipment, so they ship truck fulls of various materials to different places. For example, one place only deals with the metals. The metal place has more special equipment that sorts the precious metals out, so they can sell it at market value. It's not worth it for you or I to break down a computer for the precious metals, but when you may be processing 10,000 junked PC's, the profit margin goes way up.
I've also been to auction houses that specialize in government and educational facilities. It's stuff the schools don't want any more, but I was more than happy to get.:) That's where I got my first 20" monitor. The thing was huge, and weighed at least 150 pounds, but it was better than the 14" monitors everyone else was using at the time. You can get pallets of used PC's, monitors, etc., at these auctions, so if you go, bring a truck.
I'm sure some places occasionally throw stuff away, but they're in violation of a stack of laws. They *MUST* dispose of hazardous waste (computers fall in that category now) properly. Since most places like schools have to keep inventory and know what moves where, they're also required to show that it was disposed of properly.
Slashdot Mirror
{cough} {cough}
:)
I've driven an awful lot of cars over the years, and have learned the performance characteristics of most of them. The Miata doesn't handle well. It's not bad, compared to a lot of the little crap cars out there. It does have a tight suspension, but doesn't have the handling characteristics that you'd want from a real performance car.
In this WS/6, I've driven in more diverse places, and I'm almost always the fastest one out.
In Buttonwillow, I handled the turns better than any other class of car, and had more power coming out of the turns.
On Angeles Crest, which I drove fairly regularly, I never had a car pass me. I passed quite a few. I never left my lane, which is an accomplishment at any speed on that road. Unfortunately, you don't have much of a choice. Limited visibility means if you cross the center line, you'll likely find yourself head-on into another car in a few seconds. If you try to go off the road on one side, you'll hit the mountain. On the other side, you'll likely fall several hundred feet. There are some turnoffs. I only saw one car that had missed everything, but highway patrol was cleaning up out there about twice a week.
A real performance car will eat up your car any day. I'm annoyed these days, when your type of car whines up and revs the engine, like "oh, I want to race you.", and all I have to do is bump the gas to leave them behind. The only car that's been fun was my neighbor in his Z06. We stayed together up to 80 (it was for fun, not to get someone killed), and both laid off. So, 4-5 seconds of racing.
Once, I let a motorcycle leave me. We were already passing 130, and we were approaching other cars, so it was no longer safe to play. I laid off. He didn't until the last minute. He lost it a little, but you shouldn't try to brake hard in anything going from 130+ to 60.
Did I mention mine is modified?
I had a Miata once. I was kinda short on cash, and I wanted a sports car. It felt fast, but turned out to be very disappointing.
Mine was "broken" into twice. The top was sliced very easily and quietly. A call to the police to file a report, and to the insurance company to get it replaced, and all was well. The stock back window was much less than to be desired. Those damned things dry out and crack, so all you have is some tape holding the shreads of what were window. When the top was slashed the second time, I replaced it with a glass window (and a new top, of course). That was nicer, but the car was still slow compared to
I tried to send pictures, but it seems that your email doesn't work.
Maybe you should get one. If you can't date one, you can at least rent one. Check craigslist.org
Why does your post sound like a confession?
Be careful what you say, even in sarcasm, someone is always going to take it wrong.
I'd phrase it as.... Say my girlfriend likes putting her hair in pigtails, and wearing a schoolgirl outfit. Say my girlfriend likes fantasy roleplay including rape scenerios. Does that make either of us bad? nope.
So, if I (a normal guy with a heartbeat) watch porn with one guy and 6 hot chicks doing all kinds of freaky things, does that mean I'm going to get with 6 hot chicks?
:)
Damn..
I'm not going to even attempt to support any of the child porn stuff, but you have to bring up a justifiable argument, not just "if they have the pictures, they'll do it to the kids". I've seen plenty of freaky porn, and I'll never be able to afford the girls to do it.
Not to skip the rest, but....
The surgery wasn't lasik. I actually had a congenital cataract in one eye. It started getting worse about the time I was 18. I joined the military when I was 19, and they kicked me out when my vision couldn't be corrected to 20/20 with glasses. Right after I got out, I went and had it surgically removed. That was right around 1992 or 1993. I've had no bad effects from the surgery, but it removes me from the possibility of serving in the military. I tried to get waivers several times, but each time it was a nice firm "no." For the last
The surgery has left me a little odd. The natural lens in your eye absorbs UV light. The replacement lens doesn't. I can clearly see colors that other people can't. For example, "black" lights look like a dull purple in my normal eye. In my adjusted eye, it's a very bright blue. It's just outside of the spectrum that we can normally see.
I intend to start flying again. It's been a matter of money more than anything. Sometime soon I will start though.
Wow, and I thought they were just local law enforcement being sent out to do recon for them.
Actually, you're off.
To fly commercial aircraft such as that, you need a commercial rating, and thousands of hours of pilot in command time on multiengine heavy jet aircraft. For average joe, that's not going to happen.
That was a goal of mine when I was a kid. I wanted to fly. I've flown small aircraft. I went to college at one of the best universities studying aeronautical science. When I wasn't in class, I was talking to people around town. I'd mention that I was going to school there, and they'd say "Oh, I got my bachelors in aeronautical science two/three/four years ago". They'd be working in restaurants, or small shops. Nothing like what they had just spent 4 years and a fortune trying to reach.
Before I went to the university, I started learning to fly at a small airport. My instructor had graduated from there too. He was a flight instructor to build up his hours, so when he had thousands of hours he could hopefully get a job with some crappy airline. Until then, he was teaching people how to fly.
As time went on, I found out the sad truth. If you want to be an airline pilot, you need to have been a military pilot with thousands of hours in multiengine jet aircraft, preferably heavy aircraft. You also have to have an excellent safety record. If you had serious incidents that were unclassified, they won't touch you. Even then, there's plenty of competition, and the pay isn't all that great. It's worthwhile to the airline to hire someone who already has their military pension, who's looking for a bit of supplemental income.
I can't go into the military. I had surgery on one of my eyes, which categorically precludes me from joining the military at all. Even if I joined, because I don't have a bachelors degree, I can't obtain an officer rank, and therefore cannot be a pilot. I could be ground crew, but that's about it.
Now, on to the on topic part.
I lived in LA for a while. I knew quite a few "aspiring" actors, as well as extras and other somewhat connected people. My wife worked as an extra for years. They're treated as the cattle that fills in the gaps in a scene. To make it from nobody to being an actor/actress/producer/director takes a lot of knowing the right people, and an awful more dumb luck. Being in the right place, at the right time, with the right look, and the right attitude, is what it takes. Oh, and lets not forget the unions/guilds. If I remember the SAG rules correctly, it takes 3 vouchers to be considered, and those vouchers come from the studio or a few other people. If you don't have a SAG card, you can't get a speaking role. Occasionally (very occasionally) they need someone to say something, and that person didn't show, or whatever. They may like you, because you're personable, or because you got hinky with the right person in his/her trailer right before the shoot. (getting hinky doesn't qualify you for anything other than a STD, but it can help).
Say they're shooting a commercial, and they need one more person to say "Ummm, that's good.", and you get picked out of the dozens of other extras they have standing around, then you may get a voucher, and may (oh my gosh) be on your way to advanced extradom, where you can get crappy walk-on parts and say your one line.
I don't have much of an interest in standing in front of a camera. A few extra parts came up on the extra lines (you call in and see what they're looking for), where they needed a car, a dog, or whatever. My wife and our dog showed up on CSI New York once.
I was looking at something more interesting to me. Consulting for IT stuff on movies and/or tv
That's why I made this site. Even if you decrypt the first layer, you're still looking at random garbage.
:)
I was reviewing my logs, and lots of interesting places have looked. Occasionally my phone clicks in a very regular pattern. A few folks have said "When I worked with ___ , our wire taps made that sound. Is your phone bugged?"
Only once has a black helicopter parked over my house (and then was filmed for 10 minutes). While a few unusual vehicles have been parked in the neighborhood, they're all attributable to neighbors houses. Well, most of them.
I'm not a fan of Dell, but it's for practical observations, not stuff I've read. Sure, things happen to people, and I accept that. A million bad (or good) reviews doesn't mean that I'll have a bad (or good) experience.
I do lots of IT work. If it's not for an employer, it's because someone asked me to give a friend a hand with something. When I talk to someone and they ask "have you worked on X platform", sure, and I can tell them the generalities of when, why, to what extent, etc, etc.
My initial contact with Dell was with some "high end" servers. They may as well have been gold plated for the cost. They were delivered in crates because of their size. That was probably the first thing to annoy me, trying to lift the damned things into the rack. A 6u machine is heavy, and Dell always manages to weight them down quite a bit extra. Not really for practical reasons though, unless dropped machines are a good thing.
It wasn't for a few more months that I got my hands on a severely damaged one. I was very pleased, now I could gut it, and see what all the parts were. The owners of the machines were always glowing about how great Dell is, and they're the only platform to use, and how Mike Dell personally puts his seal of approval on every design, and their test environment to ensure any platform is absolutely stable in any conditions. It was enough to make my puke, or at least be skeptical.
The first Dell I gutted turned out to be all Intel. Not just processors, but almost every piece in it. Dell uses a lot of Intel motherboards, CPU's, and network cards. Fine, I find Intel parts to be stable. Intel motherboards usually are not blazing fast high performance, but they'll usually (usually) keep working. I prefer AMD processors, but when it comes down to it, as long as it works, it's just a preference.
When I looked at more Dell machines, one fact became apparent. They're using the cheapest drives that they can get in bulk. Sometimes they're absolutely crap. I can't say that I've seen too many high quality drives. Sure, good interfaces, but not great drives.
When building good servers, I've always been able to build more machine for half the price (or better) than a Dell. That in itself has helped me win people away from the Dell beastie. Sure, their specials are priced well, because they're clearing out the warehouse of older equipment. When the customer sees the performance, they usually wet themselves.
I switched a customer from a 6u quad processor Dell, to a 1u dual processor SuperMicro. They were having problems on the Dell, where it wouldn't boot with their upgraded memory under Solaris (it was a Solaris problem). They needed to be moved while we switched the box to Linux. This customer was hell bent on Dell from day 1, but after being on the SuperMicro, I couldn't convince them to move back. We were shy on drive redundancy, so we built out two beefier SuperMicro 1u's (RAID5 across 4 SATA drives) for less than the current balance on the Dell lease was. Sorry, you still have $20k in payments to make on the machine you don't want. In time, it ended up sitting in someone's office as a table because no one wanted to carry it anywhere.
So, we've covered the price and technology. How about the support.
I've managed to stay off of most of the support calls. I don't have to call for technical support, if it's broken, I can identify it. With no less than 3 customers, they've been screwed by what they thought was 4 hour response time. What they were later advised, it was "4 hour response between 6am and 4pm, Monday through Friday". Anything outside of those hours were deferred to the next working day. It's hard to tell the customer sitting there with the $40,000 server with a dead hard drive and a 4 hour response contract that he'll just have to live with it.
The
I was out there for a few years. The building we used had direct fiber to One Wilshire, but their building was suppose to be save to a 9.0 earthquake. In their advertising they say the building will only shift 3/4" in a 9.0 earthquake. Hopefully they never have to prove it. :)
:) I rolled away from my desk, which was my clue to get out. You'd be amazed how fast you can get downstairs and outside when the thought "the building will fall on my head" comes to mind. I think the cat was more disturbed than me, since I grabbed her on the way out.
:) I grew up in it, so the risk of a little rain and a VERY small chance of anything worse happening is always good.
I only felt a few while I was there. A shaking 3.5 while I was in Glendale, and a rolling 4.0 while I was in Northridge. Rolling earthquakes are weird if you're on the second floor.
I'm glad to be back in hurricane country.
I'm pushing my company for redundancy. The way I've run things in the past, if a site disappears, it's not a big deal. We should pick sites for best ideal conditions (like, there's a connection still there). In a worst case, like if LA has a big quake, we should just divert traffic from there until everything is repaired.
Is that where Elk Grove is? I'm not terribly familiar with Chicago. I found the street, which is a residential street to the north of LaSalle, which didn't make any sense.
That may be where Savvis' service comes into the city, but ya, it may be where this datacenter is too. I found Savvis building at 2425 Busse Rd, Elk Grove Village, IL, that appears to have 12 generators and a lot of air conditioning. They're also at 175 W. Jackson Blvd, which would seem to be a more ideal location, just about a block from the Telegraph building.
Screw hosting, I want to move there.
The next post mentioned connectivity. Many providers fiber runs through there, but those that don't, you'd then be routing through NY, Amsterdam, or London, which may not be ideal.
Sigbus got it. It's a major telecom building. All the big players that I've looked at are in there. As far as I can tell, that's the MAE-Central IX. It if's not that building, it's one damned close.
Across the street is usually good in internet terms. They'd just have big fiber run under the street, and be very happily connected. More than likely, that building would be lit up too.
My building of choice for LA isn't actually One Wilshire, but a building 6 blocks away. They have their own dedicated fiber run down the street.
A well constructed network doesn't use just one location though. I've found out the hard way that cities fall off the grid occasionally, so you *HAVE* to have a presence in multiple good locations if you want to always be up. Of course, with that comes redundancy. If you aren't set up for redundancy, you're just screwed.
If I remember correctly, Slashdot uses MySQL. MySQL has a global load balanced version that's commercial now, but gives the database capabilities that they'd require. Then it would be a matter of setting up shop in several cities. At that point, they just put one rack, rather than a cage, in multiple locations, and cluster the whole mess. If Chicago (or LA, or NY, or whatever) fails, it's not a big deal.
I used to shove around hundreds of Mb/s, depending on line quality in a city. We'd get an apology call from the provider when a city was having a problem, and I wouldn't really care. They would though. One city may mean that I'm dumping off 2Gb/s to the other cities. I just hope they have a spare OC48 up to take us.
We actually ran out of another city that I didn't list, that had decent bandwidth, but sometimes that wasn't good enough. From what I understand, they have an extra 4Gb/s of capacity on that provider in that city now, because my old work moved, and another large customer moved. I assume they didn't turn down their fiber backbone links, so the capacity is probably still there. They were planning growth. Ours was about 50%+ per year, so they were putting in bigger fiber everywhere for us. Both our company and the other company bailed within a year of each other, so that kinda sucked for them, but I'm sure it made their customers happier.
Chicago is the center of the universe?
Actually, my work is considering where to move it's servers. It involves a HUGE amount of fact finding. Chicago is one of the places they want stuff, but that's for customer reasons, not for "center of the universe" reasons. Our locations are chosen based on current customer usage, and statistical information I gathered at previous jobs. When you have 8 million users/day from around the world, those demographics stick in your head real well.
In my research, I found the best places to be are.
New York City. 111 8th ave, 60 Hudson, or 25 Broadway. The selection would be based on provider interconnects and availability. Some providers service all three locations with their own private interconnects, so it really doesn't matter.
Los Angeles. One Wilshire, or one of a few select locations nearby, again with private interconnects to One Wilshire.
Miami. Near or at 1 NE First St.
Chicago. Near or at 427 S La Salle St
The runners up are:
Chicago
San Jose
Amsterdam
Frankfurt
London
Paris
Tokyo/Osaka
In time, I'd like to have equipment in all of those locations. Or we can go the Akamai route, and put stuff anywhere there's a rack.
For just about any provider of English based contact, the rankings of customer location by major geographic area are:
North East United States
South East United States
Europe
Western United States
Obviously that would be skewed for the content. For example, a Japanese speaking site, with local interest content would be best placed near JPNAP in Tokyo or Osaka. Likewise, a Russian site with say daily weather reports of Siberia would probably want to be in Chelyabinsk, Russia, and you probably want to use Rostelecom.
I noticed that Slashdot is now using Savvis. They were offering an amazingly cheap deal on bandwidth recently. I wasn't actively pursuing the bandwidth side, I was looking for the physical location side where my providers of choice would be. I'd be willing to bet they're in the Telegraph building. I'm curious now to who's suite they're in.
I'm not much of at breaking the law. Generally, if I can get caught, I will. I prefer freedom.
The statement was that I *could* have. I was actually within the legal limits the whole time, so it didn't matter either way. When I did fire up the 200mw card, I was within the limits because of the lower gain antenna that I used with it.
It's not terribly hard to go over the limits though. You *can* get power amplifiers. I did a quick search on Google, and found 20W amplifiers. The legal limit for the transmitter itself is 1W without a license. a 20W transmitter with a 30dBi antenna would be like waving a sign saying "come get me" when someone complains. The side lobes would give you away in a heart beat, unless of course, you're way out in the middle of nowhere.
dammit, I wrote a long reply, but my browser crashed. That's what I get for using Windows on occasion. :)
:)
.5dBm below the FCC max for a point to multipoint application. Since this was point to point, they have higher tolerances, which still is fine.
Yes, I consulted the charts, and even did the math myself to confirm that the charts were right.
a 20mw transmitter and 24dBi antenna puts it
Now, my 200mw transmitter with the 24dBi antenna is a wee bit against FCC rules in theory, but with loss in the cables, it may just be at the limit.
Since they were very directional antennas, it was a fairly safe bet they'd never notice anyways. Sitting behind either antenna, I could hear the signal (encrypted, of course). Standing on the ground immediately under the antenna, still with a clear view of the remote side, I couldn't detect it, nor anything at that particular frequency. I even did that with the 200mw transmitter and a 4.5dBi antenna. Only being maybe 15 feet or so below the real antenna was enough to be outside of the beam of the more diverse antenna.
I just emailed him, but
I actually did this before. It was with a pair of WAP11's (current at the time), a 24dBi parabolic, and a 19dBi panel. It was 100% reliable, except for a few circumstances.
After a year, a bamboo tree grew up through the line of site.
One end was in an office, and the WAP11 would overheat because the A/C was turned off on the weekends, and the cleaning crew would shut off the fan blowing on the AP.
In one strong wind, I found I hadn't secured the antenna well enough, and it turned.
They were all easy, obvious problems.
In his case, an AP with a high gain antenna on one end, and a decent antenna on the distant end attached to his wireless device would be fine.
That's no space station, that's Uranus! You can tell by the Klingons around it!
IF (big IF) you can trust the outside network with the data, which I would consider to NOT be true in 99% of the cases, you could implement what I laid out on one of my sites. Check out http://cryptmsg.com
Completely open source, implement as you'd like.
Basically, you give them multiple keys, each by different methods (phone, fax, in person, postal mail, IM, etc), and you select the encryption methods. You encrypt the message on an off-line machine, and pass it to an online machine for delivery. The encrypted message goes out through any unsecured channel (i.e., email). They decrypt on their offline machine and now they have the message. All in all, it could be an easy and secure system. Since my code is open source, you can rehash it any way you'd like.
This is pretty much what I wrote it for. Secure, unbreakable transmissions over unsecure networks, where it's a given that someone will intercept it.
I include an encrypted message in my tagline. I'll Paypal $10 to the first person who cracks it.
My biggest concern would be that they're reading it on a machine that has Internet access. You can secure your servers like Fort Knox, but we all know perfectly well that every foreign machine is suspect. That's a risk you have to be willing to take.
I've seen sites that provide "secure" data on demand to authenticated users, over SSL via their web browser. You can key it to the end user's IP, and require a user:pass, but there's still potential for abuse.
If your information is that sensitive, you should only allow access:
1) If they are on the secure portion of your network
2) That part of the network does not have Internet access
3) You have a strong security policy for that part of the network
4) You have a strong security policy for the workstations on that part of the network.
Since that doesn't usually fly in the business world, you'll have to make the exceptions, which you're asking about. Make sure you have upper management approval in writing for the exceptions that you are going to make, so when it hits the fan, you are not the responsible party.
Nope, I'm a good ol' red blooded American, in America, with a rapidly sinking economy. I went from 6 figures 2 years ago, to ... well ... 1 greasy or out dated vending machine meal a day.
Eleven percent buy their lunch out of a vending machine at least once a week.
Damn, that's it? The only food I get is vending machine, and bad cafeteria food. Of course, I only eat one "meal" a day, so I don't fall into these statistics, unless underweight, underpaid, and overworked counts. I don't get paid enough to eat more than one "meal" a day, and sometimes not even that.
They're obviously overpaying the IT people who can get fat. For the rest of us, our exercise is defending the cardboard box that we're calling home, because we can't afford rent, power, or even the car we used to drive.
I was going to reply to the guy about the hammers. I have 6 or 7 hammers in my house. Somewhere. Sometimes I leave them in one of two places (garage or back porch), but other people move them more frequently than I do, and they never land where I'd expect.
:) The same with doors I wasn't suppose to open. For some reason, I adapted well to opening things, and it wasn't until later that I realized I wasn't suppose to do it in the first place. :)
:) I haven't made the spaceship controls since I was little, but with as many electronics I use for my home theater (like THEATER, not just TV), I haven't lost much. :)
I found one in the bedroom. The wife was hanging something up. The rest are AWOL. I hope to see them again someday.
I think he'll run into some serious problems with RFID's. First, the sensor broadcast all the time, which means you're literally dumping large amounts of non-ionizing radiation into the room. Before anyone argues, look it up.
The other problem is what I've seen before. I have 5 RFID access badges on one lanyard. I have to fold one card out, and get it just in range of the sensor to gain access. If I keep the whole pack of badges, or even just two, the sensor either won't read anything, or will not detect the proper ID. Now imagine a whole room of RFID tags within proximity of the sensor. It'll be so much noise, nothing will be discernible.
Your comments about the kids are funny. I have kids, and I remember doing some of the stuff you're talking about. My mom had a locked desk drawer. It took me until I was about 6 to figure out how to pick the lock.
I used to make forts out of old encyclopedia sets, and spaceship controls out of boxes full of old electronics. Oh, the good ol' days.
Now that I'm old and cranky, I have to buy my own toys to play with.
I know a guy in the electronics recycling industry. You may have been told that they're thrown away, but in reality most of them aren't.
:) That's where I got my first 20" monitor. The thing was huge, and weighed at least 150 pounds, but it was better than the 14" monitors everyone else was using at the time. You can get pallets of used PC's, monitors, etc., at these auctions, so if you go, bring a truck.
Usually the hard drives either have to be wiped, or destroyed. The rest of the machine is up for grabs.
In their case, they take the decent machines (including older ones like P2's), refurbish them, and sell them.
The broken, or too old, equipment, they break down in special equipment that separates the various materials (plastic, glass, metals) for reprocessing. Different places handle different equipment, so they ship truck fulls of various materials to different places. For example, one place only deals with the metals. The metal place has more special equipment that sorts the precious metals out, so they can sell it at market value. It's not worth it for you or I to break down a computer for the precious metals, but when you may be processing 10,000 junked PC's, the profit margin goes way up.
I've also been to auction houses that specialize in government and educational facilities. It's stuff the schools don't want any more, but I was more than happy to get.
I'm sure some places occasionally throw stuff away, but they're in violation of a stack of laws. They *MUST* dispose of hazardous waste (computers fall in that category now) properly. Since most places like schools have to keep inventory and know what moves where, they're also required to show that it was disposed of properly.