Remember, in addition to the IP telephone, data, and on-demand viedeo being transmitted over the fiber, there's still plenty of bandwidth on the fiber for single direction "broadcast channels"...be they SD or HD. Not everything over the fiber has to be packet switched, you can provide seperate channels for packet switched traffic and passive one way traffic over the same fiber just through some simple modulation techniques. Remember, if you're not limited by the speed of switching, fiber bandwidth is still 10x that of coax.
In general, I like how the civ games have progressed over the year and disagree strongly that it's just been tacking better graphics and cut scenes on the same old game.
I started playing with civ2.....played a lot of civ3 and now have been playing a bunch of civ4. What I like about the game...and what is rare in a computer game is that each game you play will be unique, there's so many different variables and so many ways to win.
For example, civ2 (as I recall) focused on aquiring land, technology and military. Civ3 came along and added culture and diplomacy to the mix....and civ4 added religion and really did a good job refining everything that was added in 3 and making it less tedious at times. All of these represent ways to win; you can focus on one and ignore the others, but it's often at your peril.
It's a complex game and one that I keep coming back to.
I find it interesting that lots of suggestions have been thrown out there without anyone actually asking who this "beginner" is. Is is a young student with an interest in computers who you're trying to get interested? Is is an intro to programming student in college? Or is it someone out of school, in a completely different field who's just trying to automate some of his more tedious computer tasks?
Now i've been all 3. I grew up with BASIC on the commodore and apple....writing simple little programs to play music and scroll text on the screen. I think what makes BASIC good here is that it's about the closest computer langauge to English there is, so it makes it easy for someone interested to jump right in.
In college (I'm an electrical enginneer, not CS) we took a few intro to programming courses using C++, though I heard that soon after they've now switched over to java. These sound reasonable to me because they introduce you to a large number of programming concepts, in a generally well designed and highly popular language for large projects.
As an intern, I worked for a collections agency. At the time this agency and many of it's clients were still using database systems from the early 80's....essentially using flat files. Information was emailed back and forth between agencies in flat files and every day we'd have to open a bunch of them....and manually add up a bunch of numbers to generate checksums for the clients, and reports for the managers. These reports were generally created in Excel and took about 2-3 hours each day to complete. I learned a bit of vba, and created a spreadsheet that could select the flat files and generate the report automaticly...cutting the time from 2-3 hours each day...to 5 minutes. They wound up using the spreadsheet for a few more years until they lost that client, though the amount of time saved over the apps lifetime was still several thousand times what it took to write it.
Today I work for an engineering company, and VBA has been invaluable in automating and extending AutoCAD to make our lives easier and save time. You have to remember, Dozens of the most popular office apps can be automated by vba...and increasingly VBA.NET. Generally these are all small projects, many of them with very limited lives...but they're very usefuly, and there's tons of them out there.
I'm shocked that everyone has glossed over this point. I guess most people here assume that everyone wants to grow up to be a top notch open source programmer, ignoring the fact that it represents only a small percentage of all the programming going on in the world.
Read the article: It says the shortfall occured because the home was incorectly valued; The taxes on an 8 million dollar home are not 8 million dollars...but a fraction of that.
So here on Long Island for example, taxes would only be about 7 million...
-The charts showing "...performance per watt of processors from 1993 to today" that mention time on neither axis.
-The picture and caption describing James Watt....as though most of his readership had never heard of him.
-The picture of a sticker with the caption that read "This seal guarantees that the box is unopened.". Duh.
Good stuff...good stuff. I do however agree with the assesment that the floppy drive is not dead. Although I may use it once a year if i'm lucky, it does still come in handy from time to time.
I know I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but an above post got me thinking. How many average computer users are currently running their CRT based monitors at a 60HZ refresh? I know I can pick out a 60Hz refresh from a distance however your average person doesn't seem to notice...except for their eyes hurting at the end of the day. I know even back in the day when i was working in a computer store and there would be two monitors with different refresh rates next to each other, even when pointed out half the time the customer couldn't tell the different.
Which raises another question...If the display settings are set at 60Hz, and then locked out so you couldn't even change it if you wanted to, is that grounds for a protential lawsuit?
Um...yeah....notice how i said "Manhattan" and not "NYC"? Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey are:::not::: part of manhattan. Manhattan is the older world style city, where most of the rest of it was designed with autos in mind. I suspect you've missed the point completely.
It's been pondered elsewhere why cities like Atlanta don't have better mass transit systems then they do. Some suggested higher water tables, others suggested race/cultural issues, but I'm going to suggest a third option.
The reason I suspect is that "old world" cities are far better suited for mass transit in the first place. Cities like New York, Boston and European cities were developed when transportation mostly consisted of walking. As a result, these cities tended to emphasize a "build up, not out" approach to development resulting in more compact cities realtive to their size.
Then came the concept of Suburbia....country living for everyone. Automobiles became affordable and cities started to sprawl. Now you have cities like Atlanta, LA, etc who occupy a far larger land area relative to their population then older cities. This means that building a mass transit network becomes far more expensive to build and maintain. It also means that unless it's a fairly comprehensive network (even more expensive) it's ridership will be relatively low.
This is best evidenced by the New York Metro Area. Mass Transit in manhattan is exceptional...you can get just about everywhere you want to go. Access in brooklyn and queens where building densities are lower isn't quite as good as manhattan, but is still pretty good. Transit access out on long island (which was developed with cars in mind) is good for going to and from Manhattan, but poor going everywhere else.
Now sure, there's no technological reason we couldn't build a comprehensive subway system out on Long Island, but low ridership compared to operating and construction costs would make it economicly unfeasable. All we can do is identify a few major routes along which rail lines would ease congestion on the highways. I imagine it's much the same for an Atlanta or LA.
There's a difference between a sequal and a remake. A sequel usually involves the same characters in a new (though perhaps similar) story. A remake however involves the same characters in pretty much the same story.
GTA3, GTA VC, GTA SA each use a slightly updated engine, but with new characters, in a new story.
The EA games however use a slightly updated engine, with the same characters, and the same story.
While sports games are sometimes an exception because the rules of the game are fairly ridgid, people tend to prefer sequels over remakes.
As for the people who would buy the new version even for the updated roster, I'm reminding of P.T. Barnum's statement "There's a sucker born every minute".
Has there actually been any sort of study to prove this new setup is more effcient? Aside from the reasons mentioned above:
-High temperature differentials on the insulation -Lost productivity from datacenter workers
How about the fact that by undersizing the a/c you may be forcing the unit to act very ineffciently? I'm no mechanical engineer, but i work with them and from what i understand either undersizing or oversizing an a/c can ruin the effciency of the whole system.
Also you need to take into account that the heat needs to be dispersed twice, once from the rack to the space and again from the space to outside, compounding ineffciencies.
I suspect this could be a potential "Penny Wise, Pound Foolish" sort of situation. You know, those same people who balk at spending $10,000 more in equipment to save $20,000 in energy over 3 years.
Plus, occassionally you do need to::::work::::: in a datacenter, and i can imagine myself being all that productive in a datacenter pushing 110 degrees.
Hmmm.....replacing a perfectly fine cd writer and a massive stockpile of blank cdr's and having spiffy labels vs using a sharpie and having functional ones.
And this, my friends is a shining example of why wireless will never completely replace cables. With wireless, you've got a few select bands/channels as approved by the FCC (or equivalent body), and everyone has to share them.
Compare this to a cable, where every cable you run is potentially a completely new dedicated channel. It's a basic limitation of wireless, and unavoidable.
Wireless is a wonderful thing to have available, but it's no panacea.
-Chris
The Easiest Counter
on
Gone Phishing?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I too have been getting quite a few more of these lately, but there is a pretty easy way to combat them:
:::never::: follow a link from an email
If you recieve an email about company bla bla bla, needing bla bla bla, open your brower and:::type::: the known, valid address in and see if they mention it. If you're still curious...call.
I knew this would make them come out of the woodwork.....that certain demographic of people who somehow think that the only fair price, is the:::lowest::: price.
There's more to shopping then just price folks, and that attitude is exactly what led us to the situation we find outselves into today. There used to be a large number, of helpfull, friendly, local audio / tv / computer stores....but over time people passed them up to go to a larger box store...then an even larger box store and now these.
What motivation does a business have to provide good service when they know their "clients" would abandon them in a heartbeat just to save a few pennies on the dollar? Then...then....have the nerve to claim they're being ripped off?
Hmm...hadn't meant to turn this into a rant...but I guess it just kinda headed that way.
1) All PCs are disposable. Even your $4000 server. After all, a 10 year old $4000 server often isn't even worth $100 now.
non "disposable" doesn't mean that it lasts forever. "disposable" means that if it breaks you throw it away and buy another one. If my $4000 server breaks in a year....you can bet I'm not going to throw it away. If my $100 computer breaks in a year.....then it may not be worth the hastle of having it fixed.
2) To answer your question, it's a matter of labor costs. To make those corporate used machines usable, they need to be checked (half probably have at least one part broken), disks erased and a new OS installed. Once you consider the laber involved in doing this, it's not quite so cheap
An hour tops of work if you've got a nicely tuned sysprep / ghost disc....@ 15/hr for your average tech....comes out to a total of about....$15. Support:::is::: an issue however, but I'll get to that.
I'll give them $200 and let them buy one from Frys, already built. They even come with some tech support:)
And how good exactly do you think the tech support on a $100 machine would be?
Slashdot Mirror
Well duh, what else would you use a robotic arm for?
-Chris
Remember, in addition to the IP telephone, data, and on-demand viedeo being transmitted over the fiber, there's still plenty of bandwidth on the fiber for single direction "broadcast channels"...be they SD or HD. Not everything over the fiber has to be packet switched, you can provide seperate channels for packet switched traffic and passive one way traffic over the same fiber just through some simple modulation techniques. Remember, if you're not limited by the speed of switching, fiber bandwidth is still 10x that of coax.
-Chris
In general, I like how the civ games have progressed over the year and disagree strongly that it's just been tacking better graphics and cut scenes on the same old game.
I started playing with civ2.....played a lot of civ3 and now have been playing a bunch of civ4. What I like about the game...and what is rare in a computer game is that each game you play will be unique, there's so many different variables and so many ways to win.
For example, civ2 (as I recall) focused on aquiring land, technology and military. Civ3 came along and added culture and diplomacy to the mix....and civ4 added religion and really did a good job refining everything that was added in 3 and making it less tedious at times. All of these represent ways to win; you can focus on one and ignore the others, but it's often at your peril.
It's a complex game and one that I keep coming back to.
-Chris
...kinda like Peter Norton who I suspect only shows up to work once a year to take the picture for the box.
You know the one.....shirt and tie......arms crossed.....looks serious...classic.
-Chris
but my enthusiasm will remain subdued until I hear how well it performs through, say, several hundred meters of thick fog.
You're from the UK, aren't you...
-Chris
I find it interesting that lots of suggestions have been thrown out there without anyone actually asking who this "beginner" is. Is is a young student with an interest in computers who you're trying to get interested? Is is an intro to programming student in college? Or is it someone out of school, in a completely different field who's just trying to automate some of his more tedious computer tasks?
Now i've been all 3. I grew up with BASIC on the commodore and apple....writing simple little programs to play music and scroll text on the screen. I think what makes BASIC good here is that it's about the closest computer langauge to English there is, so it makes it easy for someone interested to jump right in.
In college (I'm an electrical enginneer, not CS) we took a few intro to programming courses using C++, though I heard that soon after they've now switched over to java. These sound reasonable to me because they introduce you to a large number of programming concepts, in a generally well designed and highly popular language for large projects.
As an intern, I worked for a collections agency. At the time this agency and many of it's clients were still using database systems from the early 80's....essentially using flat files. Information was emailed back and forth between agencies in flat files and every day we'd have to open a bunch of them....and manually add up a bunch of numbers to generate checksums for the clients, and reports for the managers. These reports were generally created in Excel and took about 2-3 hours each day to complete. I learned a bit of vba, and created a spreadsheet that could select the flat files and generate the report automaticly...cutting the time from 2-3 hours each day...to 5 minutes. They wound up using the spreadsheet for a few more years until they lost that client, though the amount of time saved over the apps lifetime was still several thousand times what it took to write it.
Today I work for an engineering company, and VBA has been invaluable in automating and extending AutoCAD to make our lives easier and save time. You have to remember, Dozens of the most popular office apps can be automated by vba...and increasingly VBA.NET. Generally these are all small projects, many of them with very limited lives...but they're very usefuly, and there's tons of them out there.
I'm shocked that everyone has glossed over this point. I guess most people here assume that everyone wants to grow up to be a top notch open source programmer, ignoring the fact that it represents only a small percentage of all the programming going on in the world.
-Chris
Bah....no time to read articles when you're busy being a wiseass.
-Chris
Read the article: It says the shortfall occured because the home was incorectly valued; The taxes on an 8 million dollar home are not 8 million dollars...but a fraction of that.
So here on Long Island for example, taxes would only be about 7 million...
-Chris
Here's some things i particularly enjoyed:
-The charts showing "...performance per watt of processors from 1993 to today" that mention time on neither axis.
-The picture and caption describing James Watt....as though most of his readership had never heard of him.
-The picture of a sticker with the caption that read "This seal guarantees that the box is unopened.". Duh.
Good stuff...good stuff. I do however agree with the assesment that the floppy drive is not dead. Although I may use it once a year if i'm lucky, it does still come in handy from time to time.
-Chris
Yeah, standards are great.....we've got lots of them :-)
-Chris
I know I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but an above post got me thinking. How many average computer users are currently running their CRT based monitors at a 60HZ refresh? I know I can pick out a 60Hz refresh from a distance however your average person doesn't seem to notice...except for their eyes hurting at the end of the day. I know even back in the day when i was working in a computer store and there would be two monitors with different refresh rates next to each other, even when pointed out half the time the customer couldn't tell the different.
Which raises another question...If the display settings are set at 60Hz, and then locked out so you couldn't even change it if you wanted to, is that grounds for a protential lawsuit?
Just some thoughts...
-Chris
I know they've produced a few questionable products in the past, but is that really enough to require an alias?
And what is it for that matter?
ManualChair (R)?
BikeSofa (R)?
StickOttoman (R)?
AutoCrap (R)?
A bit more information, please....
-Chris
Um...yeah....notice how i said "Manhattan" and not "NYC"? Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey are :::not::: part of manhattan. Manhattan is the older world style city, where most of the rest of it was designed with autos in mind. I suspect you've missed the point completely.
-Chris
It's been pondered elsewhere why cities like Atlanta don't have better mass transit systems then they do. Some suggested higher water tables, others suggested race/cultural issues, but I'm going to suggest a third option.
The reason I suspect is that "old world" cities are far better suited for mass transit in the first place. Cities like New York, Boston and European cities were developed when transportation mostly consisted of walking. As a result, these cities tended to emphasize a "build up, not out" approach to development resulting in more compact cities realtive to their size.
Then came the concept of Suburbia....country living for everyone. Automobiles became affordable and cities started to sprawl. Now you have cities like Atlanta, LA, etc who occupy a far larger land area relative to their population then older cities. This means that building a mass transit network becomes far more expensive to build and maintain. It also means that unless it's a fairly comprehensive network (even more expensive) it's ridership will be relatively low.
This is best evidenced by the New York Metro Area. Mass Transit in manhattan is exceptional...you can get just about everywhere you want to go. Access in brooklyn and queens where building densities are lower isn't quite as good as manhattan, but is still pretty good. Transit access out on long island (which was developed with cars in mind) is good for going to and from Manhattan, but poor going everywhere else.
Now sure, there's no technological reason we couldn't build a comprehensive subway system out on Long Island, but low ridership compared to operating and construction costs would make it economicly unfeasable. All we can do is identify a few major routes along which rail lines would ease congestion on the highways. I imagine it's much the same for an Atlanta or LA.
-Chris
There's a difference between a sequal and a remake. A sequel usually involves the same characters in a new (though perhaps similar) story. A remake however involves the same characters in pretty much the same story.
GTA3, GTA VC, GTA SA each use a slightly updated engine, but with new characters, in a new story.
The EA games however use a slightly updated engine, with the same characters, and the same story.
While sports games are sometimes an exception because the rules of the game are fairly ridgid, people tend to prefer sequels over remakes.
As for the people who would buy the new version even for the updated roster, I'm reminding of P.T. Barnum's statement "There's a sucker born every minute".
-Chris
Has there actually been any sort of study to prove this new setup is more effcient? Aside from the reasons mentioned above:
-High temperature differentials on the insulation
-Lost productivity from datacenter workers
How about the fact that by undersizing the a/c you may be forcing the unit to act very ineffciently? I'm no mechanical engineer, but i work with them and from what i understand either undersizing or oversizing an a/c can ruin the effciency of the whole system.
Also you need to take into account that the heat needs to be dispersed twice, once from the rack to the space and again from the space to outside, compounding ineffciencies.
I suspect this could be a potential "Penny Wise, Pound Foolish" sort of situation. You know, those same people who balk at spending $10,000 more in equipment to save $20,000 in energy over 3 years.
-Chris
Plus, occassionally you do need to ::::work::::: in a datacenter, and i can imagine myself being all that productive in a datacenter pushing 110 degrees.
-Chris
:::eyes my UPS::::
::::ponders for a momment::::
:::eyes the serial cable that gracefully shuts down said computer in the event of a power failure::::
:::ponders some more::::
:::eyes the spare UPS sitting in the corner that used to be connected to a database server::::
Hmm, I think i'm almost onto something here, but i just can't seem to nail it down...
-Chris
Hmmm.....replacing a perfectly fine cd writer and a massive stockpile of blank cdr's and having spiffy labels vs using a sharpie and having functional ones.
Hmmm....let me think about this one a momment...
Wait Wait, don't tell me...
-Chris
I
-Chris
And this, my friends is a shining example of why wireless will never completely replace cables. With wireless, you've got a few select bands/channels as approved by the FCC (or equivalent body), and everyone has to share them.
Compare this to a cable, where every cable you run is potentially a completely new dedicated channel. It's a basic limitation of wireless, and unavoidable.
Wireless is a wonderful thing to have available, but it's no panacea.
-Chris
I too have been getting quite a few more of these lately, but there is a pretty easy way to combat them:
If you recieve an email about company bla bla bla, needing bla bla bla, open your brower and :::type::: the known, valid address in and see if they mention it. If you're still curious...call.
It's really that simple folks.
-Chris
I knew this would make them come out of the woodwork.....that certain demographic of people who somehow think that the only fair price, is the
There's more to shopping then just price folks, and that attitude is exactly what led us to the situation we find outselves into today. There used to be a large number, of helpfull, friendly, local audio / tv / computer stores....but over time people passed them up to go to a larger box store...then an even larger box store and now these.
What motivation does a business have to provide good service when they know their "clients" would abandon them in a heartbeat just to save a few pennies on the dollar? Then..
Hmm...hadn't meant to turn this into a rant...but I guess it just kinda headed that way.
-Chris
non "disposable" doesn't mean that it lasts forever. "disposable" means that if it breaks you throw it away and buy another one. If my $4000 server breaks in a year....you can bet I'm not going to throw it away. If my $100 computer breaks in a year.....then it may not be worth the hastle of having it fixed.
An hour tops of work if you've got a nicely tuned sysprep / ghost disc....@ 15/hr for your average tech....comes out to a total of about....$15. Support :::is::: an issue however, but I'll get to that.
And how good exactly do you think the tech support on a $100 machine would be?
-Chris
Absolutely; They're sold by a company named "used".
Seriously though, do we really need a $100 disposible pc when there are so many functional used machines stacking up in corporate closets?
-Chris