earlier today I saw a guy online complain about how the busted the myth that shooting people with bullets will knock them back.
I'll grant you that they got that one right. I've shot silhouette competition for years and I've seen hundreds of thousands of demonstrations that it takes.77 lb/sec of momentum (minimum, 1 is better) to push a 55 pound steel plate an inch under real-world competition conditions. The notion of a bullet blowing someone off their feet is just silly. (Yes, target reaction can be severe due to nerve trauma and associated muscle reactions, but that's not the same thing.)
Yet, I find it irritating that they do so much with firearms and understand so little. I've seen them try to use a kinetic bullet puller on rimfire ammunition; that's very stupid and a tad dangerous. I saw them try the old "frozen ice bullet" thing without ever mentioning the word "sabot"; yes, it's a myth but they could have made it work, after a fashion, if they knew anything about guns. The "shooting into water" segment was just silly; there are water tanks constructed specifically for bullet recovery and the specs on bullet penetration in water are pretty easy to obtain.
The policy, as originally stated, left no wiggle room whatsoever. Yes, that would be brain-dead. Zero-tolerance policies always are.
A sensible approach is to weigh the seriousness of the offense against the position and duties. Where I work, for example, you get conditionally hired for the first year. We trust what you said on your application, bring you on board, and do a full background check during that first year. (Why do we trust what you said on the app? Because lying to us on that application is a felony and, experience shows, dadgum rare. And why do we allow ourselves a year to do the background check? Because we do a serious one - verifying any hits on the initial computer searches, interviewing your family and friends if you're in a sensitive position, and auditing your last three years of tax returns, etc. It takes time.) If there are problems, you may or may not get fired. Bouncing checks, for example, will definitely get you shown the door; it's just a behavior so at odds with our mission of fiscal responsibility that there's no room for second chances. Likewise, we have to be pretty harsh about lots of things and tend to reject anyone without a clean record.
But does every employer need to exercise that same level of caution? Do I really care if the guy selling me my car has a past conviction for felony cruelty to animals? Should someone who has a previous conviction for disturbing the peace be automatically barred from a "you want fries with that?" job? I just think there has to be some room for a judgement call. Any policy that is as was originally stated (iow, absolute) is not smart. Brain dead, even.
Tor's not a real hassle to use, but it is slow (just like FreeNet is), and always will be.
Could you expand on that? I've run Tor and I've run Freenet. Tor is slow, sure, but tolerable. Freenet, otoh, is unuseable. I've installed and run Freenet on three different occasions in the past. I've dedicated a machine to it. I've given it lots of space. I've left it on the network for a week before using it. I've done all the little procedural and configuration tweaks that I've been able to find in all the documentation I've read (which is darn near everything, I think) and I've still never managed to get enough speed from Freenet to make it useable for anything. I have been, from time to time, very motivated to make Freenet work and I've never gotten anything but frustration for my trouble.
If it's your opinion that Freenet is "not a real hassle to use," please share with me any tips you might have on getting it to work. I'd be forever grateful.
and a criminal background check that comes up negative
Is your hiring policy so brain-dead that any blot on a criminal background check is an automatic disqualifier? Or is a potential candidate given a chance to explain? We live in times when it seems that everything is illegal. No one gets through a day without doing something illegal. No one gets through a month without committing a serious crime. (Well, at least that's true if you have a half-way fun sex life.) Is your requirement for a negative background check absolute? If so, why?
Especially since you, as I understand, at least in the USA have the right to remain silent.
Not really. In criminal cases (IANAL, etc.), prosecutors can compel self-incriminating testimony by granting immunity. If you can't be charged for anything you say, nothing you say can be self-incriminatory. Thus, the right to remain silent (which exists solely to protect you from self-incrimination) disappears. At least, that's the way I understand it.
My question was aimed at civil proceedings. Can I say "No, I'm not going to cooperate. Depose me if you want, but I'm not going to utter my password" without finding myself sitting in a jail cell for contempt, or worse? I dunno; that's why I asked.
When I heard that the RIAA wanted to physically take possession of the equipment belonging to people they sued for discovery purposes, I was less than happy with that prospect. I use a hardware-encrypted hard drive that requires a bootup password. Without my cooperation, no one will every see what's on my drive. Given that the revelation of other content on my drive would place me in far greater jeopardy than anything having to do with pirated music (Assume the worst if you wish; you wouldn't be correct), I would never cooperate with such discovery.
Is there any mecahnism by which the court can compel my cooperation and are there any penalties for steadfastly refusing to provide it?
I never knew that there existed manufacturers that didn't require you to send back the entire unit in order to obtain a refund.
Actually, I don't send back anything except a sheet of paper that says the old drive died and I have destroyed it. It helps that I work for an organization that buys 30-40K drives a year; we can negotiate deals like that. As for the possibility of using this situation for personal enrichment, no computer tech in this place is going to risk losing their job and jail time just to pick up a few lousy hundreds of dollars in free computer hardware.
Good books require good writers. Games, generally, don't have good writers. A number of years ago, I played a few games and I was impressed with a number of technical things that were beyond my comprehension. "There's some mighty clever programming, there" I thought to myself. I also thought to myself "but some complete idiot wrote this script. I could do better myself."
I could have done better myself. Though all my paid writing had been nonfiction, the crap that passed for game "plots" was just too silly to stomach. I was sure I could do better, so I did some research. In short order, I came across a short piece (no, I can't find it now and I wish I could) by a famous game developer that covered who did what in making games. The flow of game development was briefly discussed in light of what each job contributed. Each job was respectfully outlined with due attention paid to just how important even small contributions to the whole could be.
Then, as an afterthought, the job of writer was discussed. This noted authority in the business completely dismissed the vocation, saying that every developer, every marketer, every intern and janitor at game companies had a script knocking around in their head and that any of them could do the job of writing a (high-level, conceptual) game script that the developers could flesh out.
I was reminded of the movie business where everyone loathes the writers. They are loathed because they aren't glamorous, aren't "show-business-y", and aren't cool. (Yes, I know that's begun to change recently, but stick with me.) They just don't fit in. However, no good movie gets made without a good idea put on paper by a good writer. That's where it all starts and the Hollywood machine just hates being dependent on that. Whenever moviemaking tries to sidestep the need for real writers, the result is inevitably crap. (There are too many examples to count, but my favorite was "Cannonball Run". The initial script would have made a decent movie but the director actually told the writer "Fuck the script; let's wreck some cars." The resultant mess stands as vibrant testimony to the quality of movie you can make if you care nothing for the writing.)
Game companies are relatively new artistic entities. It's not surprising that they're making the mistakes they see their elders making. I wonder how long it will take them to gain some wisdom and begin to value the contribution of writers?
Rather than trying to make money up off of the marginal copies, which have little to no inherent value, charge for the first copy. Charge interested parties, in advance, for creation of the work.
I know it's only a small example, but lots of camgirls make their biggest money from "custom" work. They exchange emails with you about what you want to see, agree to a scenario and a price, and then make a little vignette for you to enjoy. Generally, they'll make $300 and up (way up!) for as little as 10 minutes of work and a little time for post-production tweaking. More typically, you can get a 30-45 minute performance for about $500. Add in an hour of post-production work and we're talking an hourly wage in the $200/hour and up range. That's not a bad wage. "Model" web sites do the same thing with still pictures. It's a viable way to make a living churning out performance art.
My midlife crisis was...interesting. When all was said and done, I should have just gotten a little red sports car. In the long run, it would have been less expensive and I could still enjoy driving it. The teenager was certainly fun to drive, but there comes a time when the faint ridiculousness of it all weighs heavily on the mind. For example, there are few things as sobering for a 40-year-old man as trying to decide what to get your girlfriend on the occasion of her graduation from high school. My advice? Don't go there.
I remember learning about the "10-year theory" of genius in a graduate course in psychology (that it takes around 10 years of practice to make an expert, not innate talent). It was portrayed as a 'radical' theory in that it flew in the face of the common belief of innateness. But the evidence does support it.
If you've studied comedy, you've run across a couple of truisms. One is that it takes 10 minutes of killer material to make a superstar. If you have a routine 10 minutes long in which every single bit is strongly laugh-inducing (given your delivery), then you should expect to have your own sitcom and endless fame and money in short order. Very, very few people *ever* put together 10 minutes of true, killer material.
Another truism is that your core routine, your truly great material, grows in direct relation to how much time you spend working on it, performing, and writing. If you treat it like a full-time job, write every day, and perform every chance you get, then you'll add about 1 minute of core material to your routine for every year you practice your craft.
In comedy, then, the theory holds. It takes 10 years to become an expert.
On a related note, while talent can reach its potential in a decade, I'm of the opinion that a total lack of talent can never be overcome. Some people can't tell a joke. Ron Jeremy (a name that should be familiar to most Slashdot denizens) used to desperately want to be a standup. (I don't know if he still feels that way.) I've seen his act many times over a number of years. He has no timing and even though the material is pretty good, he just can't tell a joke. He gets some laughs. He may even be just good enough to make a living at it (as a novelty act) if he wanted to. But I'm convinced that he proves that a LACK of talent can never be overcome no matter how hard you work.
The current wireless providers cancel accounts when people actually use them; the boards are littered with EVDO users complaining that, for example, Verizon axed them when their throughput hit 10 gigs a month. Heck, even Consumer Affairs got shafted.
Will there be similar limitations on WiMax? Without a reasonable TOS, I'd turn it down.
Re:Another first-timer
on
Gen Con Bingo
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Good point about watching your wallet. The ONLY time I've ever had my pocket picked was at a comic book convention. I was about 30 and surrounded by mostly kids, so I let my guard down. Next thing I know, I'm making a police report when a hotel janitor brings up my wallet (the staff had been instructed to look for it), minus the cash. It had been found in the men's room wastebin.
Yessiree, "extraordinary precautions with your wallet" are mandatory. Don't learn like I did, the hard way.
Wrong, depending on jurisdiction. Occasionally the Galveston, Texas police department makes the news when they arrest someone for looking into a car. I don't know enough to cite a statute, but my understanding is that it's considered some sort of necessary precursor to committing a crime, "casing the joint," so to speak. Cars parked along the seawall in Galveston are right next to a walkway and, believe it or not, cops with nothing better to do will ocasionally hang out and arrest people just for looking in other peoples cars.
So seeing an old car in a rich neighborhood constitutes probable cause these days?
It certainly did at one time.
Back in the day, long before cell phones up until the late 1970s or early 1980s, there existed in Houston, Texas, something called the River Oaks Police Department. Now, River Oaks isn't a city or town. It's just a very, very rich neighborhood. And the River Oaks Police Department wasn't a police department. It was a private security guard service. However, the River Oaks Police Department bought their patrol cars as piggybacks to the City of Houston contracts, i.e. they paid some money to the city and the city tacked a few extra cars onto the next contract then delivered them to the River Oaks P.D. The same went for uniforms and all that neat-o police paraphernalia.
If you had the audacity to drive through River Oaks in a broken down old car (not towing a lawn care trailer and a load of illegals, that is) you would soon find yourself with red flashing lights in your rearview, being pulled over by the River Oaks Police Department. Give 'em any lip and they'd simply radio the Houston PD and hand you over to them on some trumped-up charges.
So not only is a ratty old car in a rich neighborhood a crime, it's such a serious crime that the police will actually outsource enforcement just to make sure more people get caught./sarcasm
Not an option. I don't own or admin the servers. They belong to our corp lan admins; the most I've ever been aked to do with them is power down or up when electrical service is going to be/has been interrupted. I'm just a lowly desktop technician. Normally, when I visit the office I just plop down at an unused workstation and, if I need more space, I can take over an interview room. No longer. After the rebuild, there will be no more room for me to camp out in the office space controlled by the customer-facing divisions. The corp lan guys, however, have offered to let me use the server closet on an occasional basis so I'll at least have a place to sit. In return, I'm going to have to spec the furniture. Furniture suggestions, basically, are what I was soliciting in the original question.
Update - I re-ran my tests for the first 18 hours of Friday and got a total sustained throughput of 14.6 kbps. I guess my cable company (Charter, btw) was having a better day.
Thanks for the suggestion about wireless. I'm looking into it. If that doesn't work out, I've asked Charter to contact me about a business account with a service level agreement. And if those crap out, I'll just go back to dialup until I move.
Just a short note to let you know that most of your assumptions are wrong. I can see where you might reach those conclusions, but the actual case is that this is a large federal agency. The reason there are only three servers onsite is that only three specific tasks are deemed to be such bandwidth hogs that we have to place them in remote posts of duty, close to their users. Most local servers are in our two main offices with a total of about 6000 square feet of dedicated server room space.
As for the form factors, I don't get to choose. Our corp lan folks do that and I can't change it. Also, the biggest problem here isn't really fitting in the equipment. The problem is that our desktop support people (that's me and whoever gets this rotational assignment in the future) will no longer be able to plop down at an unused workstation in this remote office to camp out for the day. No more such workstations will be available. Thus, even though it's not a fulltime workstation, a workstation large enough to handle the needs of a desktop support tech must nevertheless also be included in the server closet. Considering that my everyday workstation/office is 100 square feet plus about 40 linear feet of shared bench space dedicated to testing, setup, and repair, the idea of actually *working* out of 45 square feet, even if it's just for one day a week, is something I'm having trouble adjusting to.
Thanks, though, for trying to see past the surface. If you had been right, you would have deserved lots of "insightful" mod points.
start talking to management about the wisdom of putting a human in the server room
It's only for one person, one day a week, who will typcially spend less than 4 hours in the room. Oddly enough, while we won't put someone in a non-ergo chair with a non-adjustable work surface, we frequently don't care squat about other issues. Example? In our main server room, we have a completely screwed up air handling system that keeps the air pressure in the room much higher than the rest of the floor. It is *very* difficult to open the doors. I'm over 300 pounds and strong, and it's a struggle for me. Under no circumstances could someone in a wheelchair manage to get it open.
I actually posted on the doors various quotes from the ADA-related regulatons that the doors violated. I also formally objected through proper channels; this is an installation for a federal agency, so we have plenty of formal channels for such things. The bottom line was this - when the time came to sign off on the work, the response of the General Services Administration official overseeing the work was "We're the federal government. We don't have to obey the law." That's an almost direct quote.
I really can't imagine an objection based on ambient noise levels will get much traction.
Here's some more info, even though I doubt anyone will read it. A couple of days ago, just for fun, I decided to test my internet connection. I fired up a web crawler, pointed it at Google News, and told it to go deep. I also pointed a newsreader at some huge MP3 newsgroup, selected over 100,000 messages, and set it running. Last night, I shut everything down and checked my machine.
In the nineteen hours since midnight, I found a total of 913 megs of files had been created or modified. Now, that's a rough estimate of throughput. The actual throughput would be quite a bit lower, because some of those new/modified files are system logs and other things created locally. However, just for the sake of argument and to be very charitable to my ISP, let's say I had 900 megs of throughput in 19 hours.
Lessee if I can get the math right. (This is a rough estimate, so I'll use 1000 instead of 1024.) 19 hours times 60 minutes times 60 seconds equals 68400 seconds. 900 megs divided by 68400 equals.0131 megs per second.
I'm getting 13 kbps. I might as well be using dialup with the old 14.4kbps modem I was using more than 10 years ago.
Something has gotta change.
I'm going to repeat the test tonite, this time going only to servers hosted by my ISP. I don't want them to have any excuses.
I pay roughly the same for roughly the same performance. Where I am it's called "cable internet service." 10 years ago when cable internet service was made available in my isolated subdivision, I was among the first to sign up and I was happier than a pig in slop. A decade on, the size of the subdivision has tripled, every last person has signed on with the cable company, and they haven't upgraded a thing. My sustained d/l speeds for large amounts of data rarely break 100kbps.
DSL? Too far from the CO.
Dish? Gigantic pine trees everywhere that can't be cut down on pain of death from the homeowners association mean that satellite dishes are useless.
Because of this one issue, I'm considering moving. And nobody hates moving more than me. Gawd, I wish I had an alternative.
When Carly left, HP employees litteraly threw champagne parties
I was on the phone with HP support on the day her departure was announced. I connected to the tech about 2 minutes after the announcement had been made at that location. The atmosphere was surreal and we almost couldn't complete the call. The tech was actually so giddy he sounded drunk. There were people *literally* screaming with joy in the background. I could hardly hear anything. And, you know, I didn't mind. I'd been talking to those people for years and hearing the pain in their voices for so long that even if they were too distracted to do a good job on my call, I was willing to cut them some slack just so they could have a moment of well-deserved relief and celebration.
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I'll grant you that they got that one right. I've shot silhouette competition for years and I've seen hundreds of thousands of demonstrations that it takes .77 lb/sec of momentum (minimum, 1 is better) to push a 55 pound steel plate an inch under real-world competition conditions. The notion of a bullet blowing someone off their feet is just silly. (Yes, target reaction can be severe due to nerve trauma and associated muscle reactions, but that's not the same thing.)
Yet, I find it irritating that they do so much with firearms and understand so little. I've seen them try to use a kinetic bullet puller on rimfire ammunition; that's very stupid and a tad dangerous. I saw them try the old "frozen ice bullet" thing without ever mentioning the word "sabot"; yes, it's a myth but they could have made it work, after a fashion, if they knew anything about guns. The "shooting into water" segment was just silly; there are water tanks constructed specifically for bullet recovery and the specs on bullet penetration in water are pretty easy to obtain.
Conclusion? It's mostly just entertainment.
The policy, as originally stated, left no wiggle room whatsoever. Yes, that would be brain-dead. Zero-tolerance policies always are.
A sensible approach is to weigh the seriousness of the offense against the position and duties. Where I work, for example, you get conditionally hired for the first year. We trust what you said on your application, bring you on board, and do a full background check during that first year. (Why do we trust what you said on the app? Because lying to us on that application is a felony and, experience shows, dadgum rare. And why do we allow ourselves a year to do the background check? Because we do a serious one - verifying any hits on the initial computer searches, interviewing your family and friends if you're in a sensitive position, and auditing your last three years of tax returns, etc. It takes time.) If there are problems, you may or may not get fired. Bouncing checks, for example, will definitely get you shown the door; it's just a behavior so at odds with our mission of fiscal responsibility that there's no room for second chances. Likewise, we have to be pretty harsh about lots of things and tend to reject anyone without a clean record.
But does every employer need to exercise that same level of caution? Do I really care if the guy selling me my car has a past conviction for felony cruelty to animals? Should someone who has a previous conviction for disturbing the peace be automatically barred from a "you want fries with that?" job? I just think there has to be some room for a judgement call. Any policy that is as was originally stated (iow, absolute) is not smart. Brain dead, even.
Could you expand on that? I've run Tor and I've run Freenet. Tor is slow, sure, but tolerable. Freenet, otoh, is unuseable. I've installed and run Freenet on three different occasions in the past. I've dedicated a machine to it. I've given it lots of space. I've left it on the network for a week before using it. I've done all the little procedural and configuration tweaks that I've been able to find in all the documentation I've read (which is darn near everything, I think) and I've still never managed to get enough speed from Freenet to make it useable for anything. I have been, from time to time, very motivated to make Freenet work and I've never gotten anything but frustration for my trouble.
If it's your opinion that Freenet is "not a real hassle to use," please share with me any tips you might have on getting it to work. I'd be forever grateful.
Is your hiring policy so brain-dead that any blot on a criminal background check is an automatic disqualifier? Or is a potential candidate given a chance to explain? We live in times when it seems that everything is illegal. No one gets through a day without doing something illegal. No one gets through a month without committing a serious crime. (Well, at least that's true if you have a half-way fun sex life.) Is your requirement for a negative background check absolute? If so, why?
Not really. In criminal cases (IANAL, etc.), prosecutors can compel self-incriminating testimony by granting immunity. If you can't be charged for anything you say, nothing you say can be self-incriminatory. Thus, the right to remain silent (which exists solely to protect you from self-incrimination) disappears. At least, that's the way I understand it.
My question was aimed at civil proceedings. Can I say "No, I'm not going to cooperate. Depose me if you want, but I'm not going to utter my password" without finding myself sitting in a jail cell for contempt, or worse? I dunno; that's why I asked.
When I heard that the RIAA wanted to physically take possession of the equipment belonging to people they sued for discovery purposes, I was less than happy with that prospect. I use a hardware-encrypted hard drive that requires a bootup password. Without my cooperation, no one will every see what's on my drive. Given that the revelation of other content on my drive would place me in far greater jeopardy than anything having to do with pirated music (Assume the worst if you wish; you wouldn't be correct), I would never cooperate with such discovery.
Is there any mecahnism by which the court can compel my cooperation and are there any penalties for steadfastly refusing to provide it?
Actually, I don't send back anything except a sheet of paper that says the old drive died and I have destroyed it. It helps that I work for an organization that buys 30-40K drives a year; we can negotiate deals like that. As for the possibility of using this situation for personal enrichment, no computer tech in this place is going to risk losing their job and jail time just to pick up a few lousy hundreds of dollars in free computer hardware.
Yeah, but.
Good books require good writers. Games, generally, don't have good writers. A number of years ago, I played a few games and I was impressed with a number of technical things that were beyond my comprehension. "There's some mighty clever programming, there" I thought to myself. I also thought to myself "but some complete idiot wrote this script. I could do better myself."
I could have done better myself. Though all my paid writing had been nonfiction, the crap that passed for game "plots" was just too silly to stomach. I was sure I could do better, so I did some research. In short order, I came across a short piece (no, I can't find it now and I wish I could) by a famous game developer that covered who did what in making games. The flow of game development was briefly discussed in light of what each job contributed. Each job was respectfully outlined with due attention paid to just how important even small contributions to the whole could be.
Then, as an afterthought, the job of writer was discussed. This noted authority in the business completely dismissed the vocation, saying that every developer, every marketer, every intern and janitor at game companies had a script knocking around in their head and that any of them could do the job of writing a (high-level, conceptual) game script that the developers could flesh out.
I was reminded of the movie business where everyone loathes the writers. They are loathed because they aren't glamorous, aren't "show-business-y", and aren't cool. (Yes, I know that's begun to change recently, but stick with me.) They just don't fit in. However, no good movie gets made without a good idea put on paper by a good writer. That's where it all starts and the Hollywood machine just hates being dependent on that. Whenever moviemaking tries to sidestep the need for real writers, the result is inevitably crap. (There are too many examples to count, but my favorite was "Cannonball Run". The initial script would have made a decent movie but the director actually told the writer "Fuck the script; let's wreck some cars." The resultant mess stands as vibrant testimony to the quality of movie you can make if you care nothing for the writing.)
Game companies are relatively new artistic entities. It's not surprising that they're making the mistakes they see their elders making. I wonder how long it will take them to gain some wisdom and begin to value the contribution of writers?
I know it's only a small example, but lots of camgirls make their biggest money from "custom" work. They exchange emails with you about what you want to see, agree to a scenario and a price, and then make a little vignette for you to enjoy. Generally, they'll make $300 and up (way up!) for as little as 10 minutes of work and a little time for post-production tweaking. More typically, you can get a 30-45 minute performance for about $500. Add in an hour of post-production work and we're talking an hourly wage in the $200/hour and up range. That's not a bad wage. "Model" web sites do the same thing with still pictures. It's a viable way to make a living churning out performance art.
Is that really a useful distinction? I mean, there aren't any places that belong in the latter group.
Been there. Done that. Not worth the trouble.
My midlife crisis was...interesting. When all was said and done, I should have just gotten a little red sports car. In the long run, it would have been less expensive and I could still enjoy driving it. The teenager was certainly fun to drive, but there comes a time when the faint ridiculousness of it all weighs heavily on the mind. For example, there are few things as sobering for a 40-year-old man as trying to decide what to get your girlfriend on the occasion of her graduation from high school. My advice? Don't go there.
If you've studied comedy, you've run across a couple of truisms. One is that it takes 10 minutes of killer material to make a superstar. If you have a routine 10 minutes long in which every single bit is strongly laugh-inducing (given your delivery), then you should expect to have your own sitcom and endless fame and money in short order. Very, very few people *ever* put together 10 minutes of true, killer material.
Another truism is that your core routine, your truly great material, grows in direct relation to how much time you spend working on it, performing, and writing. If you treat it like a full-time job, write every day, and perform every chance you get, then you'll add about 1 minute of core material to your routine for every year you practice your craft.
In comedy, then, the theory holds. It takes 10 years to become an expert.
On a related note, while talent can reach its potential in a decade, I'm of the opinion that a total lack of talent can never be overcome. Some people can't tell a joke. Ron Jeremy (a name that should be familiar to most Slashdot denizens) used to desperately want to be a standup. (I don't know if he still feels that way.) I've seen his act many times over a number of years. He has no timing and even though the material is pretty good, he just can't tell a joke. He gets some laughs. He may even be just good enough to make a living at it (as a novelty act) if he wanted to. But I'm convinced that he proves that a LACK of talent can never be overcome no matter how hard you work.
How are things going with occulus.net? Do you figure to be online anytime soon?
The current wireless providers cancel accounts when people actually use them; the boards are littered with EVDO users complaining that, for example, Verizon axed them when their throughput hit 10 gigs a month. Heck, even Consumer Affairs got shafted.
Will there be similar limitations on WiMax? Without a reasonable TOS, I'd turn it down.
Good point about watching your wallet. The ONLY time I've ever had my pocket picked was at a comic book convention. I was about 30 and surrounded by mostly kids, so I let my guard down. Next thing I know, I'm making a police report when a hotel janitor brings up my wallet (the staff had been instructed to look for it), minus the cash. It had been found in the men's room wastebin.
Yessiree, "extraordinary precautions with your wallet" are mandatory. Don't learn like I did, the hard way.
Wrong, depending on jurisdiction. Occasionally the Galveston, Texas police department makes the news when they arrest someone for looking into a car. I don't know enough to cite a statute, but my understanding is that it's considered some sort of necessary precursor to committing a crime, "casing the joint," so to speak. Cars parked along the seawall in Galveston are right next to a walkway and, believe it or not, cops with nothing better to do will ocasionally hang out and arrest people just for looking in other peoples cars.
Weird, huh?
It certainly did at one time.
Back in the day, long before cell phones up until the late 1970s or early 1980s, there existed in Houston, Texas, something called the River Oaks Police Department. Now, River Oaks isn't a city or town. It's just a very, very rich neighborhood. And the River Oaks Police Department wasn't a police department. It was a private security guard service. However, the River Oaks Police Department bought their patrol cars as piggybacks to the City of Houston contracts, i.e. they paid some money to the city and the city tacked a few extra cars onto the next contract then delivered them to the River Oaks P.D. The same went for uniforms and all that neat-o police paraphernalia.
If you had the audacity to drive through River Oaks in a broken down old car (not towing a lawn care trailer and a load of illegals, that is) you would soon find yourself with red flashing lights in your rearview, being pulled over by the River Oaks Police Department. Give 'em any lip and they'd simply radio the Houston PD and hand you over to them on some trumped-up charges.
So not only is a ratty old car in a rich neighborhood a crime, it's such a serious crime that the police will actually outsource enforcement just to make sure more people get caught. /sarcasm
Not an option. I don't own or admin the servers. They belong to our corp lan admins; the most I've ever been aked to do with them is power down or up when electrical service is going to be/has been interrupted. I'm just a lowly desktop technician. Normally, when I visit the office I just plop down at an unused workstation and, if I need more space, I can take over an interview room. No longer. After the rebuild, there will be no more room for me to camp out in the office space controlled by the customer-facing divisions. The corp lan guys, however, have offered to let me use the server closet on an occasional basis so I'll at least have a place to sit. In return, I'm going to have to spec the furniture. Furniture suggestions, basically, are what I was soliciting in the original question.
Update - I re-ran my tests for the first 18 hours of Friday and got a total sustained throughput of 14.6 kbps. I guess my cable company (Charter, btw) was having a better day.
Thanks for the suggestion about wireless. I'm looking into it. If that doesn't work out, I've asked Charter to contact me about a business account with a service level agreement. And if those crap out, I'll just go back to dialup until I move.
Bummer all around, wouldn't you say?
Just a short note to let you know that most of your assumptions are wrong. I can see where you might reach those conclusions, but the actual case is that this is a large federal agency. The reason there are only three servers onsite is that only three specific tasks are deemed to be such bandwidth hogs that we have to place them in remote posts of duty, close to their users. Most local servers are in our two main offices with a total of about 6000 square feet of dedicated server room space.
As for the form factors, I don't get to choose. Our corp lan folks do that and I can't change it. Also, the biggest problem here isn't really fitting in the equipment. The problem is that our desktop support people (that's me and whoever gets this rotational assignment in the future) will no longer be able to plop down at an unused workstation in this remote office to camp out for the day. No more such workstations will be available. Thus, even though it's not a fulltime workstation, a workstation large enough to handle the needs of a desktop support tech must nevertheless also be included in the server closet. Considering that my everyday workstation/office is 100 square feet plus about 40 linear feet of shared bench space dedicated to testing, setup, and repair, the idea of actually *working* out of 45 square feet, even if it's just for one day a week, is something I'm having trouble adjusting to.
Thanks, though, for trying to see past the surface. If you had been right, you would have deserved lots of "insightful" mod points.
It's only for one person, one day a week, who will typcially spend less than 4 hours in the room. Oddly enough, while we won't put someone in a non-ergo chair with a non-adjustable work surface, we frequently don't care squat about other issues. Example? In our main server room, we have a completely screwed up air handling system that keeps the air pressure in the room much higher than the rest of the floor. It is *very* difficult to open the doors. I'm over 300 pounds and strong, and it's a struggle for me. Under no circumstances could someone in a wheelchair manage to get it open.
I actually posted on the doors various quotes from the ADA-related regulatons that the doors violated. I also formally objected through proper channels; this is an installation for a federal agency, so we have plenty of formal channels for such things. The bottom line was this - when the time came to sign off on the work, the response of the General Services Administration official overseeing the work was "We're the federal government. We don't have to obey the law." That's an almost direct quote.
I really can't imagine an objection based on ambient noise levels will get much traction.
That there be some mighty clear thinkin', I sez.
Here's some more info, even though I doubt anyone will read it. A couple of days ago, just for fun, I decided to test my internet connection. I fired up a web crawler, pointed it at Google News, and told it to go deep. I also pointed a newsreader at some huge MP3 newsgroup, selected over 100,000 messages, and set it running. Last night, I shut everything down and checked my machine.
.0131 megs per second.
In the nineteen hours since midnight, I found a total of 913 megs of files had been created or modified. Now, that's a rough estimate of throughput. The actual throughput would be quite a bit lower, because some of those new/modified files are system logs and other things created locally. However, just for the sake of argument and to be very charitable to my ISP, let's say I had 900 megs of throughput in 19 hours.
Lessee if I can get the math right. (This is a rough estimate, so I'll use 1000 instead of 1024.) 19 hours times 60 minutes times 60 seconds equals 68400 seconds. 900 megs divided by 68400 equals
I'm getting 13 kbps. I might as well be using dialup with the old 14.4kbps modem I was using more than 10 years ago.
Something has gotta change.
I'm going to repeat the test tonite, this time going only to servers hosted by my ISP. I don't want them to have any excuses.
I pay roughly the same for roughly the same performance. Where I am it's called "cable internet service." 10 years ago when cable internet service was made available in my isolated subdivision, I was among the first to sign up and I was happier than a pig in slop. A decade on, the size of the subdivision has tripled, every last person has signed on with the cable company, and they haven't upgraded a thing. My sustained d/l speeds for large amounts of data rarely break 100kbps.
DSL? Too far from the CO.
Dish? Gigantic pine trees everywhere that can't be cut down on pain of death from the homeowners association mean that satellite dishes are useless.
Because of this one issue, I'm considering moving. And nobody hates moving more than me. Gawd, I wish I had an alternative.
I was on the phone with HP support on the day her departure was announced. I connected to the tech about 2 minutes after the announcement had been made at that location. The atmosphere was surreal and we almost couldn't complete the call. The tech was actually so giddy he sounded drunk. There were people *literally* screaming with joy in the background. I could hardly hear anything. And, you know, I didn't mind. I'd been talking to those people for years and hearing the pain in their voices for so long that even if they were too distracted to do a good job on my call, I was willing to cut them some slack just so they could have a moment of well-deserved relief and celebration.