In Tikka to Ride, Lister convinces the crew that they won't polute the timeline if they go back in time, get a really big curry take out order, and come back.
They go to the wrong place and time, and ruin the assassination attempt. They jump forward in time, only to find that they've completely hosed history to the point where the mob have indirectly taken over the white house. So, they go to JFK, and convince him that if he kills himself, he'll go down in history as a hero. He agrees, and shoots himself.
You might be able to see what's in front of the person (by the reflection), but you can't track the eye itself, to determine what the user was looking at.
And read the article -- they specifically mention that due to the curvature of the eye, there is a lot of tolerance for the viewing angle.
if you're doing the work for a recognized non-profit organization, then you might want to talk to an accountant, and see if it's worthwhile to do. There are probably implications where you work for non-profit, and it produces code that you can re-use in other for-profit applications.
But I'm not a tax lawyer or an accountant, so if you're really interested in writing off some of your work, it'd be worth looking into.
Not even including the cost of housing the media, or the mechanisms for reading/writing, the cost alone is prohibitive --
You can't buy 1x1 bricks singly, and the cost of a green baseplate (from the LEGO store) is US$5. If you were to use plates for the reduced size, you get 16 1x1s in a US$5 pack, which has another 68 pieces you don't need ( )
The cheapest I can find pieces for are about US$0.06 per piece. We'll assume they'd give you the 15% discount for bulk orders, which would mean about US$68.75 per KB (7/8 populated, as per spec).
I've sold a few when I had a larger stockpile, and I gave one away at someone's going away party (signed by the office staff, with keys replaced to spell a message, and a 'Made for Windows XP' sticker added) but my packrat nature keeps me from selling any more, unless I can trade them for something else that might be useful.
Looking at eBay, there's one going for $40, with 15 min left, and one at $8 (no bids yet) w/ 5hrs left.
If you work for a company that has an HR department, go directly there, and tell them that you want to resolve the issue. Any larger company will have a way to handle this.
If nothing else, this puts you on the record as wanting to resolve the issue, so that should things escallate, and you get fired by said person (as happened to me), HR has a record of the issue. I was informed later, as I had not complained through the proper chain, that I had nothing to support a claim of harrassment by my boss, etc, and being in DC, a 'right to work' area (which means 'right to fire', for the most part, they're allowed to fire people without cause, as they see fit.
Hell, at this point, depending on how severe it is, you might be better off going to a lawyer, and asking them. (you might look into some of the pre-paid legal offerings, which are similar to insurance for needing a lawyer.)
Not necessarily together (although, that is amusing as well).
I find that nerf guns work well not just for frustration, but for boredom as well... Especially if you have a good target at a decent distance -- whiteboards are particularly good, as you can draw various sized pictures to shoot at.
If people take objection to guns, or the noise of the darts hitting targets, you can switch to shooting rubber bands.
But I also keep a few 260Qs (the standard size for twisting balloons) on me, for those times I'm really bored. However, some people take issue to the squeeking noise, or are afraid of them popping, so might not look kindly on it. You also get odd looks from people when you do it in an airport waiting lounge. [but I can't carry tools on me to knit chainmail at the airport, like I used to].
Balloons also come in handy when you find out at the last minute that it was someone's birthday, or some other occassion.
Then reply back, and inform them that you've already paid, and that you have the certificate confirming your payment. You can offer to send them a copy of the certificate, but I doubt they'd be willing to give you an address to send it to.
Alternatively, you can claim that you paid $50k, and now that they've lowered the price, you want $10k back.
There are way too many possibilities of how to annoy the sender on this one.
Or, you use someone else's phone line.
on
VoIP Questioned
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· Score: 1
When one of my friends was having phone problems, she came over to my place, set up the box, and then took it back home.
Just because it needs a phone line, doesn't mean it needs your phone line -- as well as I know, these things aren't tied to your phone like satellite dishes are (if you want to order pay-per-view on 'em)
I mean, it's searching your local files... have you really gone to that much trouble to organize and classify all of your porn?
I'm guessing that at least some people won't, for fear that someone might find the kiddle porn folder, which you then can't claim 'I don't know how that got there'.
I was given specific instructions by my mother that I was to use up all of the shots on the camera at my brother's wedding. For some reason, she got all pissed off at me for using up the pictures.
I mean, we were in a boat, and I tried taking pictures of things we passed on the boat...how was I to know the cameras were too cheap for them to come out well? And besides, wouldn't you want a picture of the bathroom to remember your wedding by?
She said she wouldn't have had to pay as much if the cameras hadn't been full... so just be careful when you tell soemone to use up the shots on the cameras, unless you want pictures of people's feet. [But those feet happened to have been the bride and her father, during the father/daughter dance]
There are very good scanning systems that can build a model (at least, the external skin) of an object from a 3-D object.
In the past, you had a robotic arm, and you'd have to move it along the surface, or to specific points along a grid that had been drawn on the object, so the computer taking the recordings could use sensors to determine the angle of each of the joints, and calculate where in space the tip of the arm was.
Laser range finders have made that obsolete, and they can automate the whole system without touching the object being digitzed.
The clay mockup of a new car design has been done for years; well before they've been using compuers in the process.
There might be uses for this glove as an input device (ie, being able to store an animation of exactly what was done to get it that way... which would be cool for a 'making of' for Wallace and Gromit, but current technology would be more convenient for scanning in objects in which you can easily view all surfaces from the outside.
The NYT's has a history of slanting and even making up its news. So why would anyone who's interested in facts and factual accounts want anything to do with looking up its articles?
So they can point out all the lies and deception that occured, then point out how it's all a conspiracy, and the government is trying to inject us with mind control devices....as opposed to taking the more probably correct belief, that NYT, like any other corporation, is willing to do whatever it takes for them to make money, and that so long as they make more money by slanting the articles, they're going to continue to do so.
You'll find that those who are 'interested in facts' are the ones who are most interested in lies, so they can point out how obvious they were (after the fact), and keep you distracted by looking at those lies, while they feed you more of their own.
There might be a few people out there who just want to know about 'em, just so they can catalog them for whatever purposes, and actually present them in full context, as opposed to putting their own political slant on things, but it's hard to find 'em when they're mixed in with every other person fighting to get attention out there.
During that same project I was complaining about, we finally found out why the director of our department wanted to make the change -- and it was because of a misconception about the front end, which wasn't directly tied to the back end, and could've been changed out without doing nearly as much work.
That's not to say that the change wasn't needed, as it was, because of other problems, which we started discovering during the course of the project, but then again, they never should've gone to the software they were running in the first place, as it didn't have a benefit/cost ratio better than the software they were on originally.
Of course, we also went through 4 different PMs on the project, had 'co-project managers' at one point, and I'd get bitched at for bringing up flaws in the project plan, even though I had been told in the first meeting that I was the technical oversight, and if something went wrong, it'd be my fault.
From my experience, a good project comes when the programmers know what the goals and objectives of the organization are, and are then told what their constraints are (budget, time, etc), to make it happen. It rarely comes when the higher level mangers decide on the solution, and then tell you how you have to build it. For some reason, I got yelled at after putting up the following sign in my cubicle:
"We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management could ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs."
-- Mike Andrews in alt.sysadmin.recovery 10 October 2000
<eUJE5.880$ln6.119642@news.flash.net>
Both questions, with one answer -- Speakeasy
on
Unix Shell Accounts?
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· Score: 1
I have their Sysadmin DSL package, which includes a shell account, dialup and static IPs.
(I've never had reason to use the shell account, as I have plenty of others that I've collected through the years, so I have no idea if they have compilers available, so this may not answer the original question)
I know that this is centering more around commercial programming, which is much more generic than custom programming.
But normally, for custom programming work (ie, trying to solve the needs of a specific company), I'm lucky if the requirements stay consistant through the development of the project. At one place I worked, it wasn't uncommon for the management to change significant parts of the project on a weekly basis -- at one point, they kept flip flopping on two major components for about a month... then they get pissed off when we're behind schedule to meet a deadline that the technical staff said was unrealistic in the first place.
His specific examples were in regards to data storage for the most part, which has entirely different design requirements than your basic calculator application.
Oh -- and I've gone back and opened up 15+ year old files... but typically, I have to do it older hardware, especially in the case of old PC software, where the current hardware won't run an OS old enough to run the software correctly. Hopefully, these issues with help to drive the emulation market, so we can just emulate the Apple ][e to run Quark Word Juggler or whatever else we might need.
No matter who you order from someone has to do the last mile (aka, local loop). Typically, that's the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC), which is normally one of the baby-bells, or whatever they've become since they've started merging back together.
You might get a line from Sprint that goes through Chicago, and another from MCI that comes from Dallas, but when they get to your town, they hand it off to the ILEC, who runs the last mile.
Even if it was hooked up to a different switch, or was terminaed at a different CO, you still have redundancy problems -- odds are, the lines come into your building at a fixed point, which could be hit by a backhoe.
I know of an ISP that was serviced directly by a CLEC (the city-run cable company pulled fibre to them, besides the copper run from the ILEC...) but they were run on the same poles, so it didn't matter.
The only really redundant systems I know of didn't use wires for one of the components. Typically, they had lines pulled to two different places, through two different COs (in once case, in bordering states, that were on different power grids), and then connected the two with microwave. This way, the second leg completely avoided the ILEC.
It's not cheap, but well, redundancy doesn't tend to be.
In the long run, you have to look at what the costs are going to be, and what sort of losses it's going to prevent, and if the additional benefits are going to outweigh the cost.
Oh -- and typically, even if a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) has their own switch, the last mile is still typically handled through the ILEC, which puts you back in the same boat. Even with DSL, it doesn't matter if there are two different DSLAMs, if they're routed through the same CO or SLIC.
Unless there are some new models I don't know of, they're just way too large. We used to use little squirt guns that we could palm off... I think they were like 2 for $1 in the early 90s. You might be able to get something at the dollar store these days... And well, they cost a whole lot less than a supersoaker, so it wasn't as big of a deal with they got confiscated.
And well, there was always hitting the person with a rubber band, for the really stealthy.
It's the concept of stalking people and having 'contracts' on each other that I'm guessing would be more of an issue if you got caught. (it'd probably be good to make sure that any game materials clearly explained that it was a game, and where to find the rules, etc, just incase someone acts stupid, and gets stopped by some authority)
There are many varients of the game Assassin, and there was also a set of rules put out by Steve Jackson called Killer
In Assassin, everyone had to fill out their class schedule, and include a picture, and give it to the person running the game. Everyone was given a card at random (redraw if you got your own card).
The goal was to get your card -- but you weren't allowed to draw on anyone unless they were your target, or if they drew on you first (ie, they were trying to kill you).
I'm guessing that these games wouldn't go down so well in today's high schools, though.
There are some varients that aren't quite as obvious, but use your own judgement
For whatever I'm trying to accomplish, I want a language that can do what I need it to do to accomplish the task. Preferably, that lets me get the task done in a time under the amount of time that I have been given to complete it.
[and when run, will complete the task within the accepted specifications, such as run time, memory utilization, etc]
There are times when the right language for the job is assembly, and there are others where it'd be a shell script.
There are times when it's appropriate for me to spend my time with memory management,and other times when it's irrelevent to the environment that the program's going to run it.
A language might work well for a particular situation, but I think it's unrealistic to think that any one feature is going to make me always want to use a particular language.
Your main limiting factor of designing your backup strategy is the time to recovery, in your typical situation. (Time to recovery typically being a function of the cost of downtime)
Here are a few sensitive variable which may affect your solution:
time to recovery
initial capital outlay
total cost of ownership
time window for backups
cost of downtime
man-hours of intervention required.
type of recovery needed
Some less significant variables include:
power consumption
space required
support contract options
For instance -- you have 1TB/month of data. That's fine. I am going to make an assumption that your work in some way is either based on a weekly (256GB/week), or daily (~51GB/day) cycle. From that, we have to look at how long you can have a load on the system as you back it up on a daily/weekly basis.
When you have to recover, is it going to be a disaster situation (ie, restore the entire system), or used as an 'undelete' type repository (restore files x,y and z). In the first, you're limited by physics... busses can only push data so fast; disks can only spin at a certain rate, etc. In the second, seek time is an issue -- you can get by some of the later problems by using a database that catalogs the location of files, but make sure you don't get something that can't do a restore without the database, or you're hosed in a full recovery situation.
blah...I could go on for hours on the subject, about the type of stuff that would be useful to consider before designing a backup solution. Quite simply, you want the price of the solution to be lower or equal to the benefit that you'd get out of it -- it's not typically worth paying 3x the money for a 10% reduction in recovery time, unless there are some odd factors (ie, users get their month free if you have an outage of more than 12hrs).
Slashdot Mirror
In Tikka to Ride, Lister convinces the crew that they won't polute the timeline if they go back in time, get a really big curry take out order, and come back.
They go to the wrong place and time, and ruin the assassination attempt. They jump forward in time, only to find that they've completely hosed history to the point where the mob have indirectly taken over the white house. So, they go to JFK, and convince him that if he kills himself, he'll go down in history as a hero. He agrees, and shoots himself.
You might be able to see what's in front of the person (by the reflection), but you can't track the eye itself, to determine what the user was looking at.
And read the article -- they specifically mention that due to the curvature of the eye, there is a lot of tolerance for the viewing angle.
if you're doing the work for a recognized non-profit organization, then you might want to talk to an accountant, and see if it's worthwhile to do. There are probably implications where you work for non-profit, and it produces code that you can re-use in other for-profit applications.
But I'm not a tax lawyer or an accountant, so if you're really interested in writing off some of your work, it'd be worth looking into.
Not even including the cost of housing the media, or the mechanisms for reading/writing, the cost alone is prohibitive --
You can't buy 1x1 bricks singly, and the cost of a green baseplate (from the LEGO store) is US$5. If you were to use plates for the reduced size, you get 16 1x1s in a US$5 pack, which has another 68 pieces you don't need ( )
The cheapest I can find pieces for are about US$0.06 per piece. We'll assume they'd give you the 15% discount for bulk orders, which would mean about US$68.75 per KB (7/8 populated, as per spec).
Just do what the Easter Bunny did -- hire Lobo deal with him.
(For those who don't read comic books, see The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special. The AFI even did a short film version
I've sold a few when I had a larger stockpile, and I gave one away at someone's going away party (signed by the office staff, with keys replaced to spell a message, and a 'Made for Windows XP' sticker added) but my packrat nature keeps me from selling any more, unless I can trade them for something else that might be useful.
Looking at eBay, there's one going for $40, with 15 min left, and one at $8 (no bids yet) w/ 5hrs left.
Do it at night, when there's no sunlight --it makes the transition much easier.
And when you hear birds chirping, find cover -- it's a sign that the sun's going to come back up.
If you work for a company that has an HR department, go directly there, and tell them that you want to resolve the issue. Any larger company will have a way to handle this.
If nothing else, this puts you on the record as wanting to resolve the issue, so that should things escallate, and you get fired by said person (as happened to me), HR has a record of the issue. I was informed later, as I had not complained through the proper chain, that I had nothing to support a claim of harrassment by my boss, etc, and being in DC, a 'right to work' area (which means 'right to fire', for the most part, they're allowed to fire people without cause, as they see fit.
Hell, at this point, depending on how severe it is, you might be better off going to a lawyer, and asking them. (you might look into some of the pre-paid legal offerings, which are similar to insurance for needing a lawyer.)
Not necessarily together (although, that is amusing as well).
I find that nerf guns work well not just for frustration, but for boredom as well... Especially if you have a good target at a decent distance -- whiteboards are particularly good, as you can draw various sized pictures to shoot at.
If people take objection to guns, or the noise of the darts hitting targets, you can switch to shooting rubber bands.
But I also keep a few 260Qs (the standard size for twisting balloons) on me, for those times I'm really bored. However, some people take issue to the squeeking noise, or are afraid of them popping, so might not look kindly on it. You also get odd looks from people when you do it in an airport waiting lounge. [but I can't carry tools on me to knit chainmail at the airport, like I used to].
Balloons also come in handy when you find out at the last minute that it was someone's birthday, or some other occassion.
They're still being made, with a little variation (you can get the original, in black, with 104 keys, with a trackball built in,122 key models, wireless, with mag stripe reader, etc. )
I have no experience with the company, I just know they exist. [I still have a couple more original Model Ms in storage.
Then reply back, and inform them that you've already paid, and that you have the certificate confirming your payment. You can offer to send them a copy of the certificate, but I doubt they'd be willing to give you an address to send it to.
Alternatively, you can claim that you paid $50k, and now that they've lowered the price, you want $10k back.
There are way too many possibilities of how to annoy the sender on this one.
When one of my friends was having phone problems, she came over to my place, set up the box, and then took it back home.
Just because it needs a phone line, doesn't mean it needs your phone line -- as well as I know, these things aren't tied to your phone like satellite dishes are (if you want to order pay-per-view on 'em)
I mean, it's searching your local files... have you really gone to that much trouble to organize and classify all of your porn?
I'm guessing that at least some people won't, for fear that someone might find the kiddle porn folder, which you then can't claim 'I don't know how that got there'.
I was given specific instructions by my mother that I was to use up all of the shots on the camera at my brother's wedding. For some reason, she got all pissed off at me for using up the pictures.
I mean, we were in a boat, and I tried taking pictures of things we passed on the boat...how was I to know the cameras were too cheap for them to come out well? And besides, wouldn't you want a picture of the bathroom to remember your wedding by?
She said she wouldn't have had to pay as much if the cameras hadn't been full... so just be careful when you tell soemone to use up the shots on the cameras, unless you want pictures of people's feet. [But those feet happened to have been the bride and her father, during the father/daughter dance]
There are very good scanning systems that can build a model (at least, the external skin) of an object from a 3-D object.
In the past, you had a robotic arm, and you'd have to move it along the surface, or to specific points along a grid that had been drawn on the object, so the computer taking the recordings could use sensors to determine the angle of each of the joints, and calculate where in space the tip of the arm was.
Laser range finders have made that obsolete, and they can automate the whole system without touching the object being digitzed.
The clay mockup of a new car design has been done for years; well before they've been using compuers in the process.
There might be uses for this glove as an input device (ie, being able to store an animation of exactly what was done to get it that way... which would be cool for a 'making of' for Wallace and Gromit, but current technology would be more convenient for scanning in objects in which you can easily view all surfaces from the outside.
You'll find that those who are 'interested in facts' are the ones who are most interested in lies, so they can point out how obvious they were (after the fact), and keep you distracted by looking at those lies, while they feed you more of their own.
There might be a few people out there who just want to know about 'em, just so they can catalog them for whatever purposes, and actually present them in full context, as opposed to putting their own political slant on things, but it's hard to find 'em when they're mixed in with every other person fighting to get attention out there.
That's not to say that the change wasn't needed, as it was, because of other problems, which we started discovering during the course of the project, but then again, they never should've gone to the software they were running in the first place, as it didn't have a benefit/cost ratio better than the software they were on originally.
Of course, we also went through 4 different PMs on the project, had 'co-project managers' at one point, and I'd get bitched at for bringing up flaws in the project plan, even though I had been told in the first meeting that I was the technical oversight, and if something went wrong, it'd be my fault.
From my experience, a good project comes when the programmers know what the goals and objectives of the organization are, and are then told what their constraints are (budget, time, etc), to make it happen. It rarely comes when the higher level mangers decide on the solution, and then tell you how you have to build it. For some reason, I got yelled at after putting up the following sign in my cubicle:
Speakeasy offers dialup, and it comes with a shell account.
I have their Sysadmin DSL package, which includes a shell account, dialup and static IPs.
(I've never had reason to use the shell account, as I have plenty of others that I've collected through the years, so I have no idea if they have compilers available, so this may not answer the original question)
I know that this is centering more around commercial programming, which is much more generic than custom programming.
But normally, for custom programming work (ie, trying to solve the needs of a specific company), I'm lucky if the requirements stay consistant through the development of the project. At one place I worked, it wasn't uncommon for the management to change significant parts of the project on a weekly basis -- at one point, they kept flip flopping on two major components for about a month... then they get pissed off when we're behind schedule to meet a deadline that the technical staff said was unrealistic in the first place.
His specific examples were in regards to data storage for the most part, which has entirely different design requirements than your basic calculator application.
Oh -- and I've gone back and opened up 15+ year old files... but typically, I have to do it older hardware, especially in the case of old PC software, where the current hardware won't run an OS old enough to run the software correctly. Hopefully, these issues with help to drive the emulation market, so we can just emulate the Apple ][e to run Quark Word Juggler or whatever else we might need.
No matter who you order from someone has to do the last mile (aka, local loop). Typically, that's the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC), which is normally one of the baby-bells, or whatever they've become since they've started merging back together.
You might get a line from Sprint that goes through Chicago, and another from MCI that comes from Dallas, but when they get to your town, they hand it off to the ILEC, who runs the last mile.
Even if it was hooked up to a different switch, or was terminaed at a different CO, you still have redundancy problems -- odds are, the lines come into your building at a fixed point, which could be hit by a backhoe.
I know of an ISP that was serviced directly by a CLEC (the city-run cable company pulled fibre to them, besides the copper run from the ILEC...) but they were run on the same poles, so it didn't matter.
The only really redundant systems I know of didn't use wires for one of the components. Typically, they had lines pulled to two different places, through two different COs (in once case, in bordering states, that were on different power grids), and then connected the two with microwave. This way, the second leg completely avoided the ILEC.
It's not cheap, but well, redundancy doesn't tend to be.
In the long run, you have to look at what the costs are going to be, and what sort of losses it's going to prevent, and if the additional benefits are going to outweigh the cost.
Oh -- and typically, even if a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) has their own switch, the last mile is still typically handled through the ILEC, which puts you back in the same boat. Even with DSL, it doesn't matter if there are two different DSLAMs, if they're routed through the same CO or SLIC.
Dell is not using Linspire. That is completely the doing of their reseller, and Dell has distanced themselves from Linspire.
See the article at C|Net from last week on the matter
Unless there are some new models I don't know of, they're just way too large. We used to use little squirt guns that we could palm off... I think they were like 2 for $1 in the early 90s. You might be able to get something at the dollar store these days... And well, they cost a whole lot less than a supersoaker, so it wasn't as big of a deal with they got confiscated.
And well, there was always hitting the person with a rubber band, for the really stealthy.
It's the concept of stalking people and having 'contracts' on each other that I'm guessing would be more of an issue if you got caught. (it'd probably be good to make sure that any game materials clearly explained that it was a game, and where to find the rules, etc, just incase someone acts stupid, and gets stopped by some authority)
There are many varients of the game Assassin, and there was also a set of rules put out by Steve Jackson called Killer
In Assassin, everyone had to fill out their class schedule, and include a picture, and give it to the person running the game. Everyone was given a card at random (redraw if you got your own card).
The goal was to get your card -- but you weren't allowed to draw on anyone unless they were your target, or if they drew on you first (ie, they were trying to kill you).
I'm guessing that these games wouldn't go down so well in today's high schools, though.
There are some varients that aren't quite as obvious, but use your own judgement
For whatever I'm trying to accomplish, I want a language that can do what I need it to do to accomplish the task. Preferably, that lets me get the task done in a time under the amount of time that I have been given to complete it.
,and other times when it's irrelevent to the environment that the program's going to run it.
[and when run, will complete the task within the accepted specifications, such as run time, memory utilization, etc]
There are times when the right language for the job is assembly, and there are others where it'd be a shell script.
There are times when it's appropriate for me to spend my time with memory management
A language might work well for a particular situation, but I think it's unrealistic to think that any one feature is going to make me always want to use a particular language.
Here are a few sensitive variable which may affect your solution:
- time to recovery
- initial capital outlay
- total cost of ownership
- time window for backups
- cost of downtime
- man-hours of intervention required.
- type of recovery needed
Some less significant variables include:For instance -- you have 1TB/month of data. That's fine. I am going to make an assumption that your work in some way is either based on a weekly (256GB/week), or daily (~51GB/day) cycle. From that, we have to look at how long you can have a load on the system as you back it up on a daily/weekly basis.
When you have to recover, is it going to be a disaster situation (ie, restore the entire system), or used as an 'undelete' type repository (restore files x,y and z). In the first, you're limited by physics
blah...I could go on for hours on the subject, about the type of stuff that would be useful to consider before designing a backup solution. Quite simply, you want the price of the solution to be lower or equal to the benefit that you'd get out of it -- it's not typically worth
paying 3x the money for a 10% reduction in recovery time, unless there are some odd factors (ie, users get their month free if you have an outage of more than 12hrs).