...and I am afraid that you misunderstood the original poster. The rest of us seem to agree that he's talking about replacing the existing controller, not "chaining another controller on top", whatever the hell the means. You trolling, or what?
You're dead right about that. Big Law doesn't like quitters. Firms like A&P, Skadden, etc. are staffed & partnered by the top 10-20% of law school grads, who are the worst kind of Type-A, hypomanic, aggressive, need-to-win kids. (They're also pretty damn smart, but that's orthogonal.) The attitude is like a boot-camp drill instructor: If you didn't kick the other guy's ass, you weren't trying hard enough, even if "hard enough" means working 100-hour weeks for months on end. It's unreal.
I have a bunch of friends from college that went to the good law schools and ended up taking Big Law offers before the diploma ink was dry. Most of them left before the 5-year mark, got their lives back, and are much happier. The few still climbing the partner-track cliff are some of the smartest, most dedicated people I know, but they have no family life and I only see them about twice a year.
Of course, they start at $150k+ salaries and move up to $200k and $300k range by their 5th year, so I don't feel too sorry for them. And for the rare few who do manage to hold on all the way to the brass ring (making partner), the annual compensation gets into the low 7-figure range. If they ever get tired of that, they can pretty much pick their next jobs in the corporate world at the $1M+ level.
Sigh. Technically true, this old saw, but that's not the damn point. Don't get me wrong, the CTO's quote IS bullshit, and you're correct that nothing about Linux prevents programmers from writing bad software for it.
But there is a kernel of truth in what the CTO meant. So before you go congratulating yourself on that +5 (Insightful) for your smug insistence on literalism (and thereby missing the real point, entirely), why not consider what you're missing?
Almost everybody on Linux uses a distro, right? And the tendency is toward laziness, so we mostly use software on Linux as our distro packages and provides it to us. Sure, you COULD install anything you want, but 99% of the time you won't. Even Linux From Scratch is basically step-by-step recipes, and the package list is pre-selected for you.
So in practice, the distro maintainers are the gatekeepers, standing between the app programers and the end Linux users, deciding what kind of experience the end user gets. Bad programs get written all the time, but they tend to get censored at the distro level. And most distros are heavily biased toward open-source software, so the distro has the power to patch bugs and fix problems, again hiding flaws from the end user. (BTW, the biggest exception to the open-source bias, proprietary binary drivers, is a nice illustration-in-reverse of this mechanism.)
Contrast this process with the Windows world: It's hard to get as much done without downloading and installing extra apps and/or drivers that Microsoft didn't package. And that's where the fun starts. Sure, there are lots of high-quality Windows apps (I'm partial to FF, Notepad++, and Eclipse, myself), but there's a lot of shit, too. Anybody who's been forced to work with proprietary, domain-specific, business-oriented Windows apps can tell you horror stories of crap interfaces, random crashes, and slow bug fix cycles, all back-stopped by data format lock-in to make sure that it's just slightly more painful to switch platforms than to keep crawling along with your current torture instrument.
And I'm willing to give this CTO the benefit of the doubt, since he's giving sound bites to reporters. Reporters don't report what YOU tell them to report, they get to pick and choose on their own. And since they generally have to write to a much lower common denominator than technical people, most reporters will badger you into breaking everything down into over-simplified, simple, single-sentence restatements. Most of the time, these restatements are technically misleading, or just wrong. But the reporter doesn't care, because his readers don't give a shit, and he'll lose them if he writes the accurate technical truth.
So they simply killed it because it did not bring them any revenues!
But has Google actually killed access methods to G*, in the past, that didn't directly bring it revenue?
* Exhibit "A": IMAP for Gmail. Despite the lack of advertising revenue during IMAP sessions, Google provides free, quality IMAP service to all Gmail accounts.
* Exhibit "B": Mobile clients for Gmail: As with IMAP, the mobile Gmail clients (Blackberry, etc.) don't display any advertising to the user during mobile sessions.
In both the IMAP and mobile cases, Google actually spent time and money (engineering hours) building capacities that let people access Gmail with zero advertising. To the untrained idiot, this might see paradoxical: Why would Google spend money on things that don't directly generate revenue?
Of course, if you ponder it for a hot five seconds, the answer is pretty obvious: Good IMAP and mobile options can increase user adoption of Gmail, generally, because the end user finds more to use. This means more people will integrate Gmail more deeply into their lives, and the overall increased Gmail usage could very well drive up absolute web UI page views. The alternatives help get me hooked on Gmail, but in the end I spend more time logging in through the web UI because I'm just using Gmail all that much more. In the end, Google gets more ad views, and revenue increases.
There's a similar concept in retail called the "loss leader": You sell a popular item at below cost, and advertise the hell out of it, just to get people into your store. While they're in your store, they will are likely to buy other, non-sale (profit-making) items, too, since they're already there. Voila! Your revenue increases.
So who do you think you are, calling these suspicions totally idiotic? Google has suddenly broken with its past policies regarding alternative, non-ad-viewing Gmail interfaces. If you've been trusting Google in the past, due to their general friendliness to end users, this apparent change of heart is kind of alienating.
That's funny--I've never had to spend more than 10 minutes tweaking a new KDE desktop. And most of that is usually just adding the plasmoids I like, and setting up a quicklaunch with the apps I want.
It takes a hot 5 seconds to open up the right menu and check the box to turn on Compiz. And all those wonderful productivity effects work basically identically on KDE and Gnome.
There, see how I completely negated every point you thought you just made. Let this be a lesson as to why you shouldn't try to argue points based on anecdotes.
I'll bet you haven't used RPM in-depth since before YUM became the preferred front-end. If you had, you would have already known that rpm:dpkg what yum:apt, and there really isn't much of a difference between the two stacks, at this point.
It's funny how little some people can be bothered to know about the Linux world outside their own little preferred ecosystems. Last week, I suggested that a co-worker might want use RPMs instead of tarballs to distribute a patched custom LAMP stack to a server farm. Rather than admit that he didn't know anything about writing spec files and couldn't be bothered to learn, he started lecturing me on the evils of "RPM dependency hell".
In 2050, I'm sure some people who use some kind of Linux on a daily basis will still be spouting these old saws, feebly unaware that everybody is just too polite to whack an old geezer with the clue bat.
"The big thing is that they were able to track and hit the missile with the laser."
Sorry to spoil the fun, but no, that's NOT a very big thing. You don't even need to know much about physics to understand why. In short, the actual damage capability of the laser is heavily dependent on how long you can keep the beam tracking on a defined (small) area of the target's surface. Hitting the target momentarily doesn't say much about the weapon's effectiveness, which may still be quite limited.
Usually, a given laser device has a fixed, constant output power level (power = energy/time). Laser pointers are normally 1 MW and 1,000 MW).
The AL works by heating the missile's skin and structure, which are made of metal and therefore lose tensile strength at higher temperatures, to the point where the missile can't withstand normal flight stresses and breaks apart. (Kind of like the failure of structural steel during bad high-rise fire.) In order to heat the missile sufficiently, the laser needs to deliver a enough energy, and do it faster than the missile can shed the excess heat via radiative and convective cooling.
The total amount of energy delivered is the beam's output power multiplied by the amount of time the beam is held on target. If the targeting system can only keep the beam aligned with the (rapidly moving) missile momentarily, for 1/100th of a second, then a hypothetical 500 MW laser will only deliver 5 MW to the target. Even if the beam's output power is sustainable for a longer time interval, the tracking system's limits are the real ceiling on effectiveness.
Now, WP describes the AL's primary laser as having a 3-5 second output interval (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1#Intercept_sequence). But neither WP nor TFA tell us how long the laser can actually track the missile-in-flight. Did they keep the laser on target for 3 seconds, or 5 seconds, or 0.001 seconds? Even a 1 GW laser beam would only deliver 1 MW to the target, in 0.001 second. Unless you know that critical little statistic, you don't know jack shit about what the AL's real capability is.
And then there's the issue of how tightly the beam can track a particular point on the missile's body. If the contact area wobbles up and down the length of the fuselage, the delivered energy gets spread out over a larger area than if the contact point was entirely confined to (say) a 1 cm^2 area. The more diffuse the contact area, the lower the heating of any one part of the missile. In order to reliably induce break-up, you need to raise a certain-size area of fuselage to a certain critical temperature. A targeting system might be able to keep the beam on the target object for 3-5 seconds, but not keep the beam on the same spot over that whole time period, and therefore not destroy a missile.
For all we know, the technical hurdles involved in tracking a target for 3-5 seconds are 1,000x worse than hitting it momentarily. Or maybe their targeting is just too wobbly to reliably destroy anything. It wouldn't be the first time a defense contractor engages in optimistic PR to defend the continued existence of a big-budget military project.
Attempting to force the end of a thread by mentioning Nazis or Hilter, with the sole purpose of invoking Godwin's Law, doesn't work. This is a common misconception, and it's based on a lack of understanding of how and why Godwin's Law works.
So, can you hear me in the back? Good, let's educate you all:
Godwin's Law requires that everybody believes in the SINCERITY of the poster who mentioned Nazis or Hitler in the thread, hence the "intentionality exception".
The Law isn't magical. It relies on a fundamental fact of human psychology: Nobody likes talking to a brick wall. My willingness to continue a thread relies on my perception that somebody MIGHT be listening, and MIGHT be persuaded by my comments. If that perception vanishes, my urge to argue any further also dies.
When we believe that the other party in the argument is truly irrational (i.e., schizophrenic-type REAL crazy), or has stopped listening to us, or even is just fundamentally disconnected from our side of the discussion, we'll just walk away and save our energies for something more productive.
A sincere mention of Nazis or Hitler suggests strongly that the poster has lost touch with us. If the original discussion isn't about Nazis, it's often a sign that the other party doesn't have a leg to stand on, and is falling back on a logical fallacy. If the other party in an argument is resorting to logical fallacies involving sensitive, borderline-offensive topics, you can be pretty sure that he's never going to come around to your side. After that point, your continued efforts are just so much wasted typing, and you go find some other thread.
Your concerns are irrelevant, here. SSH fingerprints make man-in-the-middle attacks effectively impossible, as long as the user doesn't habitually ignore the (rather obvious) messages and errors when keys change. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time glossing over a message like "KEY CHANGED--SOMEBODY COULD BE TRYING TO BREAK IN!" and the subsequent error.
The initial "unknown key" error message isn't quite as loud, and lots of people don't bother validating key fingerprints, but that doesn't matter because initial connections aren't the scenario we're discussing, here. Whether the use decides to make new connections or keep existing ones open, he's already approved the key fingerprints during a previous connection.
Class rankings are very helpful in normalizing amongst different grading scales and academic standards. But rankings don't completely solve the problems of lax grading standards and grade inflation. If the students' grades are tightly grouped at the top of the grading scale, with a larger proportion of the class occupying a relatively smaller range, there will be a larger amount of noise in the assessment. Since class rankings are simply an ordering of each student's average grades (which is how it's always working, in my experience), the probability that a rank difference actually describes a "real" difference between students is smaller.
But this isn't a catastrophic problem with class rankings. Intra-class rankings, combined with accurate inter-school comparisions, contain a hell of a lot more information about student performance than the actual grades do. But I don't know how many institutions actually use rankings over grades to assess students--it does require more effort and sophistication than just comparing the grade-point averages.
In the U.S., law schools are pretty much the only place where everybody agrees that class + school rankings are king. If you attended a top-10 law school (Harvard, NYU, Stanford), you can probably get a good job ($150K+, on the partner track) right out of school if you placed anywhere in the top 75% of your class. The lower your school's ranking, the higher your intra-class ranking needs to be--students coming from schools in the 2nd or 3rd tier need to be in the top 40% or even 20% of the class to get a shot at a good job.
I guess it's just too bad that you won't ever get Bluetooth PAN profiles on VZ--you're stuck with using only DUN. So, basically, your Verizon Droid blocks your Internet connection whenever you're making or receiving a voice call, and there's no technical reason why, just that they want to choke you off from using as much data bandwidth as you otherwise would, but without the nasty PR headache of explicit caps or overuse penalties.
Martian colonists get angsty, and decide to get liberated. The Earth-based companies that own the colonies decide (naturally) to launch a transport full of a few thousand space marines to retake control. That trip takes a few months, minimum, even on the fastest, least fuel-efficient course that the transport is capable of making. So the colonists know that the marines will be dropping in, well in advance of their showing up in orbit.
Now, instead of using the ship's main engines to decelerate completely on arrival, most of the Earth-Mars ships aero-brake in the thin Martian atmosphere, which conserves fuel (which can instead be used at the beginning of the trip, to accelerate out from Earth, so that the whole trip takes less time). The ship slows down partially with its engines, and then flies into the beginnings of a very close hyperbolic "slingshot" pass that grazes the upper reaches the atmosphere. The added friction slows the ship down, curling the orbit inward and turning the actual course into a parabola. In theory, if done correctly, the ship would end up in a stable "parked" orbit, with zero fuel expenditures after the slowdown and course-correction it performed at the beginning of the approach.
But, unfortunately for the intrepid space marines, a crafty scientist amongst the colonists builds a small, cheap solid-fuel rocket with a basic guidance system and a nasty payload: An explosive packed with scrap-metal shrapnel. As the marines' ship approaches and its pilots initiate their aero-braking manoeuvre, the lone colonist launches his flak rocket into the ship's approach path, where it explodes and scatters a cloud of metallic debris.
The ship's radar detects the sudden appearance of the cloud of space junk, and the navigation computer performs an emergency space-ward course adjustment to avoid a collision with the potentially dangerous debris. But the new course is too high in the atmosphere to burn off enough of its momentum, and its course stays hyperbolic--the transport ship "skips" off the Martian atmosphere and continues back out into space at high speed, on a random new course. Sorry, no invasion, this year.
The troop ship has enough fuel left to change course toward Jupiter, and it takes a conventional hyperbolic return course around the gas giant to get back heading toward the inner Solar system. Eventually, it DOES manage to get into a Martian orbit (much more carefully, this time), but the additional Jupiter round-trip buys the colonists the extra time they need to prepare to handle the invaders on the ground.
While the parent post was modded "insightful", I really can't see why. He asks "How do you determine who it is "Safe" to hand over the passwords to?" as if there was no easy way to answer that question. But that's just silly. There IS an answer to this question. Any technical professional with an ounce of professionalism could tell you the simple version: Do what your superiors tell you. If in doubt, run it up to higher levels of management. If you're overruled, get on the record with a CYA memo. If you cannot in good conscience do as you're ordered, and all else fails, resign gracefully.
1) Obey company policy, as interpreted in the past by your boss. Whatever company rules or procedures govern the situation, or prior, related "standing orders" from your superiors, are your first guide.
2) If anybody not your supervisor (like the head of marketing) tells you to violate company policy, ask your direct supervisor for instructions. Your boss will either decide the issue and tell you what to do, or escalate it up to his own management, if necessary.
3) In any case, if you disagree with your direct supervisor, ask your boss's supervisor for instructions. If he sides with your boss, take it to his boss. Repeat until satisfied.
You will have to ask yourself, when considering whether to invoke rules 2 and 3, whether you want to suffer the political consequences of questioning those senior to you. Because if it's not really important, you're just a whiner--and you have to be careful, because your own judgement might be blinded by your position in the company. In any case, you should always respectfully and clearly explain your position, and frame your petitions to management as being in the company's best interests.
It's up to your own conscience whether you want to drop the issue and go along, at any point. If so, it's usually politically best to document your disagreements in a persistent written memo, or electronic document. (Usually, a group emal to the interested parties is enough.) This is usually called a "Cover-Your-Ass" (CYA) memo, and if you respectfully and clearly explain your position, and acknowledge that your management has overridden your judgement, you can't be held responsible if it goes wrong. If your only concern is that you'll be blamed for a screwup that you were ordered into, you should be satisfied, here.
And if you get as high up in management as you can reach, and you still disagree with the decisions that are coming back down, you have a final option if your conscience absolutely won't let you go along: Resign gracefully, with a lengthy notice and a proper hand-over of your responsibilities, projects, secrets, etc. This is best considered carefully, with consultations from trusted people who can help you see things objectively.
If you're asked to do anything illegal, the rules do change, a little. You may need to step outside the company and blow the whistle to the proper authorities. But the political consequences to your position will almost certainly be terminal, so again, consider carefully.
The parent post has been modded "troll". How is that possibly justified? He didn't insult anyone, or make any obnoxious remarks--unless the moderator happens to be politically offended by the ideas the poster expressed. And that's the worst reason to mod "troll".
The bullies that engage in this kind of crappy, argumentative moderating need to be called out. I will bust out the insults, but I'm reserving them for someone who can't possibly be involved in the comments, here: I'm talking aobut the asshat limp-dick insecure loser who gets off on abusing power, even if it's as lame of a power as Slashdot moderating. He probably has an undiagnosed learning disability (not a retard, probably ADHD or dyslexia), and a consequent massive authority-defiance complex as a result of being humiliated in front of schoolteachers his whole life. His obviously fragile self-esteem has to-date kept him from ever having sex with a woman, though he may have gotten some the rude way, after getting drunk one night by himself and running into the wrong bull queer in a dark alley. He probably has a hard drive full of BDSM and rape porn, which is the only thing that gets him going because he's too afraid of intimate vulnerability to express his sexuality as anything but a power trip.
The sad part is, you may know him and not suspect any of this. You probably just think he's a douchebag, and while you never really want him to hang out with you, you probably aren't overtly rude to him. He's got a "loser-y" vibe, rather than a "creepy" vibe, so you might even feel a little sorry for him. (But if you ever have given in to the pity, and tried to connect with him, you've concluded that you'd rather be mean than hand out with a combination douche / buzzkill like him.)
The funny part is (and this is where I get back on-topic), he'd make an OK small-town cop, he's certainly got the instincts for bullying. But he can't, because he's unable to muster the basic social skills needed to hang out with other men in a locker room for five minutes without causing everyone around him to fantasize about stuffing his head into a toilet. And he's probably quite the physical coward, too--standard Internet Tough Guy syndrome.
Hoo-ee, that's going to cost me some karma!
(It was worth it, if Fuckup McGee the Moderating Queen actually reads it.)
I'll probably go down as "offtopic" or "redundant", possibly even "troll"--how about that, for a touch of irony?
You are missing the point entirely, in calculus the validity of how you derived your answers is as important as the answer, how you organize your notes is not at all important in a speech(references are and I handed those over in the correct format).
News flash, son: Your actual speech performance was only part of the goal of that speech class. Your mastery of the techniques of constructing your speech was just as important. That's why the teacher docked you: To be graded, you must demonstrate knowledge of the techniques and knowledge that the course teaches.
The organization of notes IS part of the technique that the course teaches!
If you train with a good technique, in any discipline, you'll go further and get better than if you train sloppily, in your natural habits. You can spend hours throwing a baseball around, but unless you pay close, constant attention to your form and technique, you won't get to be a better fastball pitcher than when you started.
Remember, you were IN the speech class, meaning that you were LEARNING the techniques of making speeches. You were the least-qualified person to be making judgements about the importance of proper organization and note-making.
I never did anything remotely approaching that essay to any other teacher, 99% of whom I respected immensely even when I received (well-deserved) grades that were less than spectacular.
OK, maybe you're a good human being, other than that incident. But to be *proud* of something like that? That's pretty narcissistic, at least.
But enforcing a requirement that has no bearing on the final product is absurd and needs to be called out.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that your speech was the "final product", here. The truth is that YOU are the final product.
The whole point of the class, the institution, etc. was to impart proper basic presentation techniques to you. You didn't realize this, at the time, and so the requirements seemed arbitrary, and you got irked. You didn't understand, and you were frustrated, so you lashed out at a teacher who probably doesn't get paid enough to justify putting up with shit like that from jerks like you.
Yeah, that's a lot to be proud of. You're a real hero, Spartacus, sticking it to the Man like that. Go, you!
heh, i was wrong on the protocol level, but the physical layer is still shared between all users on the same cable.
First, your statement is a tautology: Every Layer2 networking protocol that supports IP provides a "shared medium", by definition.
That's like patting yourself on the back for recognizing that water is wet. Good job, there, kid.
Second, you are misconstruing the significance of the word "SHARED", which does not mean the same thing as "BROADCAST". A pure time-domain multiple-access (TDMA) protocol provides a shared medium by giving each transmitter a fixed time window. There can be no contention, and my usage will never negatively impact your performance. Contrast that with a pure collision-sensing (CSMA) protocol, where there is a lot of contention, and your performance gets worse I increase my usage.
All unswitched Ethernet variants, including 10BASE2, are pure CSMA protocols. DOCSIS is a mixture of mostly TDMA and code-division (CDMA), with a *slight* amount of CSMA behavior.
In other words: CABLE IS NOT A BROADCAST MEDIUM. If you and I are both CATV customers in the same neighborhood, sharing a DOCSIS medium, MY USAGE DOES NOT DEGRADE YOUR PERFORMANCE on the medium.
thing is that dsl, fiber and similar behaves, for the customer at least, as a scaled up star network, as the connection between customer and first hop of the isp network is dedicated to the individual customer (i am probably generalizing heavily here, but hang with me).
cable and wireless on the other hand, shares the transmission medium (or whatever its called) between multiple users, and such is much more sensitive to one user pushing the limits of the bandwidth.
Utter nonsense.
It's possible that I could hog the upload bandwidth, on the link from our neighborhood to the Internet, *if* that uplink capacity is smaller than my DOCSIS channel capacity. In that scenario, your performance would suffer if I maxed out my download rate. But this is totally unrelated to Layer2 contention, be it Ethernet or DOCSIS. I could hog the uplink and slow you down even if our local medium was a contention-less protocol (say, pure TDMA, or frequency-division).
In other words, the problem would be that your Cable provider cheaped out or oversold your neighborhood (depending on your point of view), and they provisioned an uplink that is too small.
But, (AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART), the same kind of congestion can (and does) happen regardless of what kind of Internet connection you have, if your ISP fails to provision enough uplink capacity. So using a Cable modem versus using DSL is irrelevant. Your local medium could be DSL, T-1, FiOS, Metro Ethernet, WiMax, WiFi, EVDO, HAM radio, or frigging carrier pigeons: If your ISP oversold the shared uplink, there's going to be congestion.
while the protocols have become much better since the days of coax ethernet, this basic behavior have not changed, and probably never will, unless some new physics comes along...
That's... I don't even know what to say to that.
Anyway, you've dug yourself into quite the hole, here. Maybe you should think about stopping with the digging?
No, it doesn't. He had no idea what the term "DOCSIS" meant. He believed that cable modems and 10BASE2 Ethernet operated on the same principles because they both used coax cable.
The cable type is 100% irrelevent to the networking protocol. Hell, you can operate a collision-based protocol that's basically identical to 10BASE2 via radio broadcasts, it's just less energy efficient.
He wasn't just wrong--he blew right past "wrong" and left it in the dust, behind him. As for him talking about collisions, well... Even a stopped clock is right, twice a day.
You missed the point, double, here. Imagine that--Slashdot is full of people with authority problems so bad that their reading skills have suffered! Who'd'a thunk it?
If I'm writing a solution to an assignment question, I write it in the standard format so that others (specifically, the marker) can read it.
Ever heard the phrase "Show your work"? In every math class I've taken since I was 9 years old (including college), the instructor specifically warned us that we needed to document the entire reasoning process that we used to arrive at the answer. Even if I could have gotten the correct answers without writing anything out, I would have failed if I didn't cooperate with the teacher and show my notes. If the teacher didn't like the process I was using, but I still somehow got the correct answer, I would have gotten docked points.
If I'm taking notes for my own benefit, they can be in any format I like - whatever's easiest for me to understand.
Here's your big fail: The format of the students' notes WAS part of the assignment. Do you think the teacher didn't explain this to the class ahead of time? (Notice that the poster doesn't try to claim that the teacher unfairly surprised him with this requirement--just that he thinks the requirement is stupid.)
The notes aren't just for his own benefit. His speech teacher was trying to impart a specific method of preparation to him. If that method involves making notes in a special way, do you think there might be a reason for it? Gee, do ya?
It sounds like you're almost proud of this story, or at least feel justified in your conduct. If I misinterpreted that part, sorry in advance, but...
That's a terrible thing to do to a teacher, or anybody, really. I think you acted inappropriately, and displayed an incredible lack of maturity for someone old enough and sophisticated enough to be in college.
Also, you're flat-out wrong about whether having notes in the correct format is important. Would you get pissy with your Calculus teacher because she insisted that you show all the little nitty-gritty steps in your solutions, instead of just writing a final answer? If she docked your score because you didn't follow instructions, would you throw a temper tantrum and tell her she ought to be fired? Or how about a composition teacher who insists that you submit an outline and a rough draft, before your final draft?
BTW, are you one of those jerkoff, should-be-on-Ritalin babies who can't get his shit together, and acts out and gets mad at everybody else for the fact that God made him broken?
I think the fact that she gave you an "A", in the end, is purely a testament to her professionalism and self-control. The fact that you got the "A" doesn't really prove much about you--after all, everybody knows a speech class is an easy "A" if you just do what you're told. If anything, you should be ashamed of yourself.
comcast = cable = coax style networking in modern form, no?
that is, its like going back to pre-hub style ethernet, where every computer is listening for the next millisecond of no signal on the coax so that it can hopefully push its next packet on there. There is a reason why this was quickly replaced with switches when said tech became available at acceptable prices...
No, No NO! For the love of God, NO! You're completely wrong, and you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no such thing as "coax style networking", and there never has been. And the network behavior of cable broadband connectivity has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that some cable connections use coaxial wiring.
You are probably thinking of the old 10BASE2 Ethernet standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2), which used coaxial cable with BNC connections and T-connectors to a shared cable bus medium. Cable broadband uses the DOCSIS protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS) over coaxial cable with F connectors. The cable is the only really similar thing between the two technologies, everything else is pretty different.
10BASE2, like all Ethernet technologies, is a shared-medium, PURE collision-detection protocol. The hosts share the cable segment as a broadcast medium, so that a transmission by one host will be "heard" by all the rest. Each host makes its own decisions about when it wants to transmit, independent of the rest, and then transmits when it senses that the cable is "silent". If multiple hosts start transmitting at almost exactly the same time, they will all shortly detect the "collision". They all cease transmitting, and each picks a short random-length interval to wait before trying to transmit again, unless another host that picked a shorter timeout window starts transmitting, first. Statistically, it's unlikely that two hosts will pick the same random wait timeout, so most collisions resolve quickly unless the network is particularly congested.
DOCSIS uses a mixture of time-division, code-division, and collision-based contention behaviors (depending on the exact revision, too), but the impact of contention is really limited. From a bandwidth scheduling and congestion standpoint, it's nothing like 10BASE2, because the TDMA and CDMA elements of the protocol help each node sees a "fair share" of throughput. Plus, modern DOCSIS supports quality-of-service tags, which (if properly implemented) are pretty much a brick wall against congestion issues.
mostly to me it seems that the ISPs that cries highest are the ones that geared up when the net was mostly static webpages and ftp file transfers, able to handle the odd spike of traffic when someone clicked a link. But now the gear they have sitting around, and that they where banking on where not to be replaced for the next decade or so, baring hardware failure, is being swamped by continual "spikes". And the only way they can fix that at their end is by replacing the gear ahead of schedule, playing havoc with their earnings estimates. And rather then doing that, they break out the whip, trying to force the "cattle" back into the "pen".
I don't think you have any kind of real grasp on the technical implications of terms like "swamped" or "spike" in this context. You certainly understand the metaphor, and I bet you could analogize extensively comparing electrical, water, or highway systems to the Internet, but you don't seem to know too much about actual networking beyond setting up your home LAN.
No, but it might be a sign that our sun is dying, and that we need to send Cilian Murphy and a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan into the sun's core to reignite it.
Slashdot Mirror
Tape storage does store better.
CITATION MISSING
...and I am afraid that you misunderstood the original poster. The rest of us seem to agree that he's talking about replacing the existing controller, not "chaining another controller on top", whatever the hell the means. You trolling, or what?
You're dead right about that. Big Law doesn't like quitters. Firms like A&P, Skadden, etc. are staffed & partnered by the top 10-20% of law school grads, who are the worst kind of Type-A, hypomanic, aggressive, need-to-win kids. (They're also pretty damn smart, but that's orthogonal.) The attitude is like a boot-camp drill instructor: If you didn't kick the other guy's ass, you weren't trying hard enough, even if "hard enough" means working 100-hour weeks for months on end. It's unreal.
I have a bunch of friends from college that went to the good law schools and ended up taking Big Law offers before the diploma ink was dry. Most of them left before the 5-year mark, got their lives back, and are much happier. The few still climbing the partner-track cliff are some of the smartest, most dedicated people I know, but they have no family life and I only see them about twice a year.
Of course, they start at $150k+ salaries and move up to $200k and $300k range by their 5th year, so I don't feel too sorry for them. And for the rare few who do manage to hold on all the way to the brass ring (making partner), the annual compensation gets into the low 7-figure range. If they ever get tired of that, they can pretty much pick their next jobs in the corporate world at the $1M+ level.
Sigh. Technically true, this old saw, but that's not the damn point. Don't get me wrong, the CTO's quote IS bullshit, and you're correct that nothing about Linux prevents programmers from writing bad software for it.
But there is a kernel of truth in what the CTO meant. So before you go congratulating yourself on that +5 (Insightful) for your smug insistence on literalism (and thereby missing the real point, entirely), why not consider what you're missing?
Almost everybody on Linux uses a distro, right? And the tendency is toward laziness, so we mostly use software on Linux as our distro packages and provides it to us. Sure, you COULD install anything you want, but 99% of the time you won't. Even Linux From Scratch is basically step-by-step recipes, and the package list is pre-selected for you.
So in practice, the distro maintainers are the gatekeepers, standing between the app programers and the end Linux users, deciding what kind of experience the end user gets. Bad programs get written all the time, but they tend to get censored at the distro level. And most distros are heavily biased toward open-source software, so the distro has the power to patch bugs and fix problems, again hiding flaws from the end user. (BTW, the biggest exception to the open-source bias, proprietary binary drivers, is a nice illustration-in-reverse of this mechanism.)
Contrast this process with the Windows world: It's hard to get as much done without downloading and installing extra apps and/or drivers that Microsoft didn't package. And that's where the fun starts. Sure, there are lots of high-quality Windows apps (I'm partial to FF, Notepad++, and Eclipse, myself), but there's a lot of shit, too. Anybody who's been forced to work with proprietary, domain-specific, business-oriented Windows apps can tell you horror stories of crap interfaces, random crashes, and slow bug fix cycles, all back-stopped by data format lock-in to make sure that it's just slightly more painful to switch platforms than to keep crawling along with your current torture instrument.
And I'm willing to give this CTO the benefit of the doubt, since he's giving sound bites to reporters. Reporters don't report what YOU tell them to report, they get to pick and choose on their own. And since they generally have to write to a much lower common denominator than technical people, most reporters will badger you into breaking everything down into over-simplified, simple, single-sentence restatements. Most of the time, these restatements are technically misleading, or just wrong. But the reporter doesn't care, because his readers don't give a shit, and he'll lose them if he writes the accurate technical truth.
So they simply killed it because it did not bring them any revenues!
But has Google actually killed access methods to G*, in the past, that didn't directly bring it revenue?
* Exhibit "A": IMAP for Gmail. Despite the lack of advertising revenue during IMAP sessions, Google provides free, quality IMAP service to all Gmail accounts.
* Exhibit "B": Mobile clients for Gmail: As with IMAP, the mobile Gmail clients (Blackberry, etc.) don't display any advertising to the user during mobile sessions.
In both the IMAP and mobile cases, Google actually spent time and money (engineering hours) building capacities that let people access Gmail with zero advertising. To the untrained idiot, this might see paradoxical: Why would Google spend money on things that don't directly generate revenue?
Of course, if you ponder it for a hot five seconds, the answer is pretty obvious: Good IMAP and mobile options can increase user adoption of Gmail, generally, because the end user finds more to use. This means more people will integrate Gmail more deeply into their lives, and the overall increased Gmail usage could very well drive up absolute web UI page views. The alternatives help get me hooked on Gmail, but in the end I spend more time logging in through the web UI because I'm just using Gmail all that much more. In the end, Google gets more ad views, and revenue increases.
There's a similar concept in retail called the "loss leader": You sell a popular item at below cost, and advertise the hell out of it, just to get people into your store. While they're in your store, they will are likely to buy other, non-sale (profit-making) items, too, since they're already there. Voila! Your revenue increases.
So who do you think you are, calling these suspicions totally idiotic? Google has suddenly broken with its past policies regarding alternative, non-ad-viewing Gmail interfaces. If you've been trusting Google in the past, due to their general friendliness to end users, this apparent change of heart is kind of alienating.
That's funny--I've never had to spend more than 10 minutes tweaking a new KDE desktop. And most of that is usually just adding the plasmoids I like, and setting up a quicklaunch with the apps I want.
It takes a hot 5 seconds to open up the right menu and check the box to turn on Compiz. And all those wonderful productivity effects work basically identically on KDE and Gnome.
There, see how I completely negated every point you thought you just made. Let this be a lesson as to why you shouldn't try to argue points based on anecdotes.
I'll bet you haven't used RPM in-depth since before YUM became the preferred front-end. If you had, you would have already known that rpm:dpkg what yum:apt, and there really isn't much of a difference between the two stacks, at this point.
It's funny how little some people can be bothered to know about the Linux world outside their own little preferred ecosystems. Last week, I suggested that a co-worker might want use RPMs instead of tarballs to distribute a patched custom LAMP stack to a server farm. Rather than admit that he didn't know anything about writing spec files and couldn't be bothered to learn, he started lecturing me on the evils of "RPM dependency hell".
In 2050, I'm sure some people who use some kind of Linux on a daily basis will still be spouting these old saws, feebly unaware that everybody is just too polite to whack an old geezer with the clue bat.
Typo. My bad.
"The big thing is that they were able to track and hit the missile with the laser."
Sorry to spoil the fun, but no, that's NOT a very big thing. You don't even need to know much about physics to understand why. In short, the actual damage capability of the laser is heavily dependent on how long you can keep the beam tracking on a defined (small) area of the target's surface. Hitting the target momentarily doesn't say much about the weapon's effectiveness, which may still be quite limited.
Usually, a given laser device has a fixed, constant output power level (power = energy/time). Laser pointers are normally 1 MW and 1,000 MW).
The AL works by heating the missile's skin and structure, which are made of metal and therefore lose tensile strength at higher temperatures, to the point where the missile can't withstand normal flight stresses and breaks apart. (Kind of like the failure of structural steel during bad high-rise fire.) In order to heat the missile sufficiently, the laser needs to deliver a enough energy, and do it faster than the missile can shed the excess heat via radiative and convective cooling.
The total amount of energy delivered is the beam's output power multiplied by the amount of time the beam is held on target. If the targeting system can only keep the beam aligned with the (rapidly moving) missile momentarily, for 1/100th of a second, then a hypothetical 500 MW laser will only deliver 5 MW to the target. Even if the beam's output power is sustainable for a longer time interval, the tracking system's limits are the real ceiling on effectiveness.
Now, WP describes the AL's primary laser as having a 3-5 second output interval (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1#Intercept_sequence). But neither WP nor TFA tell us how long the laser can actually track the missile-in-flight. Did they keep the laser on target for 3 seconds, or 5 seconds, or 0.001 seconds? Even a 1 GW laser beam would only deliver 1 MW to the target, in 0.001 second. Unless you know that critical little statistic, you don't know jack shit about what the AL's real capability is.
And then there's the issue of how tightly the beam can track a particular point on the missile's body. If the contact area wobbles up and down the length of the fuselage, the delivered energy gets spread out over a larger area than if the contact point was entirely confined to (say) a 1 cm^2 area. The more diffuse the contact area, the lower the heating of any one part of the missile. In order to reliably induce break-up, you need to raise a certain-size area of fuselage to a certain critical temperature. A targeting system might be able to keep the beam on the target object for 3-5 seconds, but not keep the beam on the same spot over that whole time period, and therefore not destroy a missile.
For all we know, the technical hurdles involved in tracking a target for 3-5 seconds are 1,000x worse than hitting it momentarily. Or maybe their targeting is just too wobbly to reliably destroy anything. It wouldn't be the first time a defense contractor engages in optimistic PR to defend the continued existence of a big-budget military project.
Attempting to force the end of a thread by mentioning Nazis or Hilter, with the sole purpose of invoking Godwin's Law, doesn't work. This is a common misconception, and it's based on a lack of understanding of how and why Godwin's Law works.
So, can you hear me in the back? Good, let's educate you all:
Godwin's Law requires that everybody believes in the SINCERITY of the poster who mentioned Nazis or Hitler in the thread, hence the "intentionality exception".
The Law isn't magical. It relies on a fundamental fact of human psychology: Nobody likes talking to a brick wall. My willingness to continue a thread relies on my perception that somebody MIGHT be listening, and MIGHT be persuaded by my comments. If that perception vanishes, my urge to argue any further also dies.
When we believe that the other party in the argument is truly irrational (i.e., schizophrenic-type REAL crazy), or has stopped listening to us, or even is just fundamentally disconnected from our side of the discussion, we'll just walk away and save our energies for something more productive.
A sincere mention of Nazis or Hitler suggests strongly that the poster has lost touch with us. If the original discussion isn't about Nazis, it's often a sign that the other party doesn't have a leg to stand on, and is falling back on a logical fallacy. If the other party in an argument is resorting to logical fallacies involving sensitive, borderline-offensive topics, you can be pretty sure that he's never going to come around to your side. After that point, your continued efforts are just so much wasted typing, and you go find some other thread.
Your concerns are irrelevant, here. SSH fingerprints make man-in-the-middle attacks effectively impossible, as long as the user doesn't habitually ignore the (rather obvious) messages and errors when keys change. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time glossing over a message like "KEY CHANGED--SOMEBODY COULD BE TRYING TO BREAK IN!" and the subsequent error.
The initial "unknown key" error message isn't quite as loud, and lots of people don't bother validating key fingerprints, but that doesn't matter because initial connections aren't the scenario we're discussing, here. Whether the use decides to make new connections or keep existing ones open, he's already approved the key fingerprints during a previous connection.
Class rankings are very helpful in normalizing amongst different grading scales and academic standards. But rankings don't completely solve the problems of lax grading standards and grade inflation. If the students' grades are tightly grouped at the top of the grading scale, with a larger proportion of the class occupying a relatively smaller range, there will be a larger amount of noise in the assessment. Since class rankings are simply an ordering of each student's average grades (which is how it's always working, in my experience), the probability that a rank difference actually describes a "real" difference between students is smaller.
But this isn't a catastrophic problem with class rankings. Intra-class rankings, combined with accurate inter-school comparisions, contain a hell of a lot more information about student performance than the actual grades do. But I don't know how many institutions actually use rankings over grades to assess students--it does require more effort and sophistication than just comparing the grade-point averages.
In the U.S., law schools are pretty much the only place where everybody agrees that class + school rankings are king. If you attended a top-10 law school (Harvard, NYU, Stanford), you can probably get a good job ($150K+, on the partner track) right out of school if you placed anywhere in the top 75% of your class. The lower your school's ranking, the higher your intra-class ranking needs to be--students coming from schools in the 2nd or 3rd tier need to be in the top 40% or even 20% of the class to get a shot at a good job.
I guess it's just too bad that you won't ever get Bluetooth PAN profiles on VZ--you're stuck with using only DUN. So, basically, your Verizon Droid blocks your Internet connection whenever you're making or receiving a voice call, and there's no technical reason why, just that they want to choke you off from using as much data bandwidth as you otherwise would, but without the nasty PR headache of explicit caps or overuse penalties.
Martian colonists get angsty, and decide to get liberated. The Earth-based companies that own the colonies decide (naturally) to launch a transport full of a few thousand space marines to retake control. That trip takes a few months, minimum, even on the fastest, least fuel-efficient course that the transport is capable of making. So the colonists know that the marines will be dropping in, well in advance of their showing up in orbit.
Now, instead of using the ship's main engines to decelerate completely on arrival, most of the Earth-Mars ships aero-brake in the thin Martian atmosphere, which conserves fuel (which can instead be used at the beginning of the trip, to accelerate out from Earth, so that the whole trip takes less time). The ship slows down partially with its engines, and then flies into the beginnings of a very close hyperbolic "slingshot" pass that grazes the upper reaches the atmosphere. The added friction slows the ship down, curling the orbit inward and turning the actual course into a parabola. In theory, if done correctly, the ship would end up in a stable "parked" orbit, with zero fuel expenditures after the slowdown and course-correction it performed at the beginning of the approach.
But, unfortunately for the intrepid space marines, a crafty scientist amongst the colonists builds a small, cheap solid-fuel rocket with a basic guidance system and a nasty payload: An explosive packed with scrap-metal shrapnel. As the marines' ship approaches and its pilots initiate their aero-braking manoeuvre, the lone colonist launches his flak rocket into the ship's approach path, where it explodes and scatters a cloud of metallic debris.
The ship's radar detects the sudden appearance of the cloud of space junk, and the navigation computer performs an emergency space-ward course adjustment to avoid a collision with the potentially dangerous debris. But the new course is too high in the atmosphere to burn off enough of its momentum, and its course stays hyperbolic--the transport ship "skips" off the Martian atmosphere and continues back out into space at high speed, on a random new course. Sorry, no invasion, this year.
The troop ship has enough fuel left to change course toward Jupiter, and it takes a conventional hyperbolic return course around the gas giant to get back heading toward the inner Solar system. Eventually, it DOES manage to get into a Martian orbit (much more carefully, this time), but the additional Jupiter round-trip buys the colonists the extra time they need to prepare to handle the invaders on the ground.
Amazing stuff, fantastic book (and trilogy, too).
While the parent post was modded "insightful", I really can't see why. He asks "How do you determine who it is "Safe" to hand over the passwords to?" as if there was no easy way to answer that question. But that's just silly. There IS an answer to this question. Any technical professional with an ounce of professionalism could tell you the simple version: Do what your superiors tell you. If in doubt, run it up to higher levels of management. If you're overruled, get on the record with a CYA memo. If you cannot in good conscience do as you're ordered, and all else fails, resign gracefully.
1) Obey company policy, as interpreted in the past by your boss. Whatever company rules or procedures govern the situation, or prior, related "standing orders" from your superiors, are your first guide.
2) If anybody not your supervisor (like the head of marketing) tells you to violate company policy, ask your direct supervisor for instructions. Your boss will either decide the issue and tell you what to do, or escalate it up to his own management, if necessary.
3) In any case, if you disagree with your direct supervisor, ask your boss's supervisor for instructions. If he sides with your boss, take it to his boss. Repeat until satisfied.
You will have to ask yourself, when considering whether to invoke rules 2 and 3, whether you want to suffer the political consequences of questioning those senior to you. Because if it's not really important, you're just a whiner--and you have to be careful, because your own judgement might be blinded by your position in the company. In any case, you should always respectfully and clearly explain your position, and frame your petitions to management as being in the company's best interests.
It's up to your own conscience whether you want to drop the issue and go along, at any point. If so, it's usually politically best to document your disagreements in a persistent written memo, or electronic document. (Usually, a group emal to the interested parties is enough.) This is usually called a "Cover-Your-Ass" (CYA) memo, and if you respectfully and clearly explain your position, and acknowledge that your management has overridden your judgement, you can't be held responsible if it goes wrong. If your only concern is that you'll be blamed for a screwup that you were ordered into, you should be satisfied, here.
And if you get as high up in management as you can reach, and you still disagree with the decisions that are coming back down, you have a final option if your conscience absolutely won't let you go along: Resign gracefully, with a lengthy notice and a proper hand-over of your responsibilities, projects, secrets, etc. This is best considered carefully, with consultations from trusted people who can help you see things objectively.
If you're asked to do anything illegal, the rules do change, a little. You may need to step outside the company and blow the whistle to the proper authorities. But the political consequences to your position will almost certainly be terminal, so again, consider carefully.
The parent post has been modded "troll". How is that possibly justified? He didn't insult anyone, or make any obnoxious remarks--unless the moderator happens to be politically offended by the ideas the poster expressed. And that's the worst reason to mod "troll".
The bullies that engage in this kind of crappy, argumentative moderating need to be called out. I will bust out the insults, but I'm reserving them for someone who can't possibly be involved in the comments, here: I'm talking aobut the asshat limp-dick insecure loser who gets off on abusing power, even if it's as lame of a power as Slashdot moderating. He probably has an undiagnosed learning disability (not a retard, probably ADHD or dyslexia), and a consequent massive authority-defiance complex as a result of being humiliated in front of schoolteachers his whole life. His obviously fragile self-esteem has to-date kept him from ever having sex with a woman, though he may have gotten some the rude way, after getting drunk one night by himself and running into the wrong bull queer in a dark alley. He probably has a hard drive full of BDSM and rape porn, which is the only thing that gets him going because he's too afraid of intimate vulnerability to express his sexuality as anything but a power trip.
The sad part is, you may know him and not suspect any of this. You probably just think he's a douchebag, and while you never really want him to hang out with you, you probably aren't overtly rude to him. He's got a "loser-y" vibe, rather than a "creepy" vibe, so you might even feel a little sorry for him. (But if you ever have given in to the pity, and tried to connect with him, you've concluded that you'd rather be mean than hand out with a combination douche / buzzkill like him.)
The funny part is (and this is where I get back on-topic), he'd make an OK small-town cop, he's certainly got the instincts for bullying. But he can't, because he's unable to muster the basic social skills needed to hang out with other men in a locker room for five minutes without causing everyone around him to fantasize about stuffing his head into a toilet. And he's probably quite the physical coward, too--standard Internet Tough Guy syndrome.
Hoo-ee, that's going to cost me some karma!
(It was worth it, if Fuckup McGee the Moderating Queen actually reads it.)
I'll probably go down as "offtopic" or "redundant", possibly even "troll"--how about that, for a touch of irony?
You are missing the point entirely, in calculus the validity of how you derived your answers is as important as the answer, how you organize your notes is not at all important in a speech(references are and I handed those over in the correct format).
News flash, son: Your actual speech performance was only part of the goal of that speech class. Your mastery of the techniques of constructing your speech was just as important. That's why the teacher docked you: To be graded, you must demonstrate knowledge of the techniques and knowledge that the course teaches.
The organization of notes IS part of the technique that the course teaches!
If you train with a good technique, in any discipline, you'll go further and get better than if you train sloppily, in your natural habits. You can spend hours throwing a baseball around, but unless you pay close, constant attention to your form and technique, you won't get to be a better fastball pitcher than when you started.
Remember, you were IN the speech class, meaning that you were LEARNING the techniques of making speeches. You were the least-qualified person to be making judgements about the importance of proper organization and note-making.
I never did anything remotely approaching that essay to any other teacher, 99% of whom I respected immensely even when I received (well-deserved) grades that were less than spectacular.
OK, maybe you're a good human being, other than that incident. But to be *proud* of something like that? That's pretty narcissistic, at least.
But enforcing a requirement that has no bearing on the final product is absurd and needs to be called out.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that your speech was the "final product", here. The truth is that YOU are the final product.
The whole point of the class, the institution, etc. was to impart proper basic presentation techniques to you. You didn't realize this, at the time, and so the requirements seemed arbitrary, and you got irked. You didn't understand, and you were frustrated, so you lashed out at a teacher who probably doesn't get paid enough to justify putting up with shit like that from jerks like you.
Yeah, that's a lot to be proud of. You're a real hero, Spartacus, sticking it to the Man like that. Go, you!
heh, i was wrong on the protocol level, but the physical layer is still shared between all users on the same cable.
First, your statement is a tautology: Every Layer2 networking protocol that supports IP provides a "shared medium", by definition.
That's like patting yourself on the back for recognizing that water is wet. Good job, there, kid.
Second, you are misconstruing the significance of the word "SHARED", which does not mean the same thing as "BROADCAST". A pure time-domain multiple-access (TDMA) protocol provides a shared medium by giving each transmitter a fixed time window. There can be no contention, and my usage will never negatively impact your performance. Contrast that with a pure collision-sensing (CSMA) protocol, where there is a lot of contention, and your performance gets worse I increase my usage.
All unswitched Ethernet variants, including 10BASE2, are pure CSMA protocols. DOCSIS is a mixture of mostly TDMA and code-division (CDMA), with a *slight* amount of CSMA behavior.
In other words: CABLE IS NOT A BROADCAST MEDIUM. If you and I are both CATV customers in the same neighborhood, sharing a DOCSIS medium, MY USAGE DOES NOT DEGRADE YOUR PERFORMANCE on the medium.
thing is that dsl, fiber and similar behaves, for the customer at least, as a scaled up star network, as the connection between customer and first hop of the isp network is dedicated to the individual customer (i am probably generalizing heavily here, but hang with me).
cable and wireless on the other hand, shares the transmission medium (or whatever its called) between multiple users, and such is much more sensitive to one user pushing the limits of the bandwidth.
Utter nonsense.
It's possible that I could hog the upload bandwidth, on the link from our neighborhood to the Internet, *if* that uplink capacity is smaller than my DOCSIS channel capacity. In that scenario, your performance would suffer if I maxed out my download rate. But this is totally unrelated to Layer2 contention, be it Ethernet or DOCSIS. I could hog the uplink and slow you down even if our local medium was a contention-less protocol (say, pure TDMA, or frequency-division).
In other words, the problem would be that your Cable provider cheaped out or oversold your neighborhood (depending on your point of view), and they provisioned an uplink that is too small.
But, (AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART), the same kind of congestion can (and does) happen regardless of what kind of Internet connection you have, if your ISP fails to provision enough uplink capacity. So using a Cable modem versus using DSL is irrelevant. Your local medium could be DSL, T-1, FiOS, Metro Ethernet, WiMax, WiFi, EVDO, HAM radio, or frigging carrier pigeons: If your ISP oversold the shared uplink, there's going to be congestion.
while the protocols have become much better since the days of coax ethernet, this basic behavior have not changed, and probably never will, unless some new physics comes along...
That's... I don't even know what to say to that.
Anyway, you've dug yourself into quite the hole, here. Maybe you should think about stopping with the digging?
No, it doesn't. He had no idea what the term "DOCSIS" meant. He believed that cable modems and 10BASE2 Ethernet operated on the same principles because they both used coax cable.
The cable type is 100% irrelevent to the networking protocol. Hell, you can operate a collision-based protocol that's basically identical to 10BASE2 via radio broadcasts, it's just less energy efficient.
He wasn't just wrong--he blew right past "wrong" and left it in the dust, behind him. As for him talking about collisions, well... Even a stopped clock is right, twice a day.
You missed the point, double, here. Imagine that--Slashdot is full of people with authority problems so bad that their reading skills have suffered! Who'd'a thunk it?
If I'm writing a solution to an assignment question, I write it in the standard format so that others (specifically, the marker) can read it.
Ever heard the phrase "Show your work"? In every math class I've taken since I was 9 years old (including college), the instructor specifically warned us that we needed to document the entire reasoning process that we used to arrive at the answer. Even if I could have gotten the correct answers without writing anything out, I would have failed if I didn't cooperate with the teacher and show my notes. If the teacher didn't like the process I was using, but I still somehow got the correct answer, I would have gotten docked points.
If I'm taking notes for my own benefit, they can be in any format I like - whatever's easiest for me to understand.
Here's your big fail: The format of the students' notes WAS part of the assignment. Do you think the teacher didn't explain this to the class ahead of time? (Notice that the poster doesn't try to claim that the teacher unfairly surprised him with this requirement--just that he thinks the requirement is stupid.)
The notes aren't just for his own benefit. His speech teacher was trying to impart a specific method of preparation to him. If that method involves making notes in a special way, do you think there might be a reason for it? Gee, do ya?
So, how's that an invalid comparison, again?
It sounds like you're almost proud of this story, or at least feel justified in your conduct. If I misinterpreted that part, sorry in advance, but...
That's a terrible thing to do to a teacher, or anybody, really. I think you acted inappropriately, and displayed an incredible lack of maturity for someone old enough and sophisticated enough to be in college.
Also, you're flat-out wrong about whether having notes in the correct format is important. Would you get pissy with your Calculus teacher because she insisted that you show all the little nitty-gritty steps in your solutions, instead of just writing a final answer? If she docked your score because you didn't follow instructions, would you throw a temper tantrum and tell her she ought to be fired? Or how about a composition teacher who insists that you submit an outline and a rough draft, before your final draft?
BTW, are you one of those jerkoff, should-be-on-Ritalin babies who can't get his shit together, and acts out and gets mad at everybody else for the fact that God made him broken?
I think the fact that she gave you an "A", in the end, is purely a testament to her professionalism and self-control. The fact that you got the "A" doesn't really prove much about you--after all, everybody knows a speech class is an easy "A" if you just do what you're told. If anything, you should be ashamed of yourself.
I really hope you have grown up since then.
comcast = cable = coax style networking in modern form, no?
that is, its like going back to pre-hub style ethernet, where every computer is listening for the next millisecond of no signal on the coax so that it can hopefully push its next packet on there. There is a reason why this was quickly replaced with switches when said tech became available at acceptable prices...
No, No NO! For the love of God, NO! You're completely wrong, and you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no such thing as "coax style networking", and there never has been. And the network behavior of cable broadband connectivity has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that some cable connections use coaxial wiring.
You are probably thinking of the old 10BASE2 Ethernet standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2), which used coaxial cable with BNC connections and T-connectors to a shared cable bus medium. Cable broadband uses the DOCSIS protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS) over coaxial cable with F connectors. The cable is the only really similar thing between the two technologies, everything else is pretty different.
10BASE2, like all Ethernet technologies, is a shared-medium, PURE collision-detection protocol. The hosts share the cable segment as a broadcast medium, so that a transmission by one host will be "heard" by all the rest. Each host makes its own decisions about when it wants to transmit, independent of the rest, and then transmits when it senses that the cable is "silent". If multiple hosts start transmitting at almost exactly the same time, they will all shortly detect the "collision". They all cease transmitting, and each picks a short random-length interval to wait before trying to transmit again, unless another host that picked a shorter timeout window starts transmitting, first. Statistically, it's unlikely that two hosts will pick the same random wait timeout, so most collisions resolve quickly unless the network is particularly congested.
DOCSIS uses a mixture of time-division, code-division, and collision-based contention behaviors (depending on the exact revision, too), but the impact of contention is really limited. From a bandwidth scheduling and congestion standpoint, it's nothing like 10BASE2, because the TDMA and CDMA elements of the protocol help each node sees a "fair share" of throughput. Plus, modern DOCSIS supports quality-of-service tags, which (if properly implemented) are pretty much a brick wall against congestion issues.
mostly to me it seems that the ISPs that cries highest are the ones that geared up when the net was mostly static webpages and ftp file transfers, able to handle the odd spike of traffic when someone clicked a link. But now the gear they have sitting around, and that they where banking on where not to be replaced for the next decade or so, baring hardware failure, is being swamped by continual "spikes". And the only way they can fix that at their end is by replacing the gear ahead of schedule, playing havoc with their earnings estimates. And rather then doing that, they break out the whip, trying to force the "cattle" back into the "pen".
I don't think you have any kind of real grasp on the technical implications of terms like "swamped" or "spike" in this context. You certainly understand the metaphor, and I bet you could analogize extensively comparing electrical, water, or highway systems to the Internet, but you don't seem to know too much about actual networking beyond setting up your home LAN.
Heim wasn't exactly a crank, but your cheerleading of him is pretty crank-ish.
Just out of curiousity, what level of formal physics education did you complete?
Who the hell modded this "offtopic"? Waves, surfing, hello?
I swear, some of the responses and mod decisions I've been seeing on Slashdot lately make me wonder whether people are browsing in their sleep.
No, but it might be a sign that our sun is dying, and that we need to send Cilian Murphy and a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan into the sun's core to reignite it.