I've actually been talking about this sort of thing with friends for years --
some radar detectors claim they can alert you to 'emergency' vehicles (trains crossing, ambulances, some even claim school buses). I have yet to see one work, but I would love if they did, especially with today's cars, if you have your windows up, you can barely hear a siren...and if your stereo's on, there's no chance in hell.
It'd also be great for alerting that there's construction ahead, or an exit's closed, etc.
I would prefer that this band be liscensed for specific services, or that everyone be required to send some sort of a signature that we could block on, or even a 'type' so we could single out restaurants, tourism, etc.
This may be a semantic point to most people, but a reservior is usually for storing (relatively) clean water. Lagoons are used for anaerobic digestion of sludge.
Basically, once you get rid of the big stuff (flitering, letting it settle out, or grinding it in), the oil and scum (skimmed off the top), and the stuff that clumps together (floculation and letting it settle), you have two things -- relatively clear water, which is decanted off, and sludge.
If you take the sludge, and let it sit in an oxygen less environment, it'll break down further, but it produces methane as a byproduct. Sometimes, a lagoon is used, other times, they just warn it up in a controled environment.
Oh -- and for drinking water, there might be some de-hardening/de-ionizing done (depends on the source), some biological filtering, and some form of sanitizing (ozone or chlorine).
Magic conforms to the 802.3af spec for providing power over Ethernet.
Now, I admit that this doesn't mention if the 'Magic' system is providing power, or receiving power, but well, something's getting power over the cable. I don't know how you're going to pull that off with wireless.
It's typically refered to as 'self-signing', which normally happens when you first install your webserver.
And yes, it will complain that it's coming from an untrusted source, but it can be usefull for test boxes and intranets, where you have a limited number of people whom you can control accessing the system.
You gain the benefits of encryption, but because a certificate authority hasn't approved it, you'll get the 'untrusted' box popping up when people connect.
It's like putting up a fence when you're trying to keep out solicitors. Although you only push the solicitors back to the fence, you can walk around your front yard now without anyone harrassing you.
So although you won't be preventing any infections of your system, you will keep out the traffic caused by external infections from adversely flooding your internal networks. You may take a slight penalty at the border router, as it will have an extra rule in it, of course.
No..however, when you try to use it to pry something up, and the pen breaks, and leaks all over your hand, yes.
I've had them dry up, and you can still see there's ink in there, too. Which makes me wonder if they actually fill them with 1/2 the amount of ink, and the rest is some lower cost filler that they use, if the manufacturers just assume that you'd lose it before you actually run out.
(yeah, yeah, this is offtopic, that's why I'm posting without my karma bonus, okay?)
Personally, I liked Good Omens, but then again, I also like British comedy in general. If you aren't a fan of that genre, I can see how some people might not have cared for it. [personally, I think it still ranks as my favorite book to date, but then again, I also love MPFC, Red Dwarf and the like]. [not directly a reply to you, but to some of the others in this thread]
As for Neverwhere, the problem is that you read the book. This is one of those cases where the book didn't come first. [ie, it's like reading the book adaptation of a movie... it's going to suck, so don't bother]. It was decent, but it wasn't nearly as good as the BBC mini series, that Neil Gaimen did with Lenny Henry [whom most Americans would only recognize from Chef! if their PBS station carried it]. The current anticipated release date for it in the US is June 2003. [See the Jan 17th entry]
It was shown in the US, however, as a promotion through the release of the book in the US by Borders, which is when I saw it. [Personally, I know it's sick, but I liked the frog scene]. Oh...and although it was done 6 years ago, and US standards were low, it had that gritty 'Dr. Who' production budget feel to it, but it was still good TV.
Personally, the thing that interests me the most is that the mention of bundling ROMS with it, which would suggest [assuming it's legal], that some of the original companies are willing to liscense them out.
The other major difference is the price. The arcade in a box (full version), is over US$1k, and this new article is talking about a US$300 price.
You also start looking at theoretical [HanaHo] vs. already done [Arcade in a Box]. Then there's controls...Arcade in a Box comes with the arcade-like buttons, etc, while it sounds like HanaHo's thinking about USB support, and you'd plug whatever gamepad/joystick/etc it can support, but it'd be seperate from the box.
Although I haven't used the latest version of PHP (sorry, don't do web development these days, mostly system and database administration), but it would upload all files into one directory, and then move the files into the directory that you requested.
So, if you have multiple users with access to the system, they have to make sure that they don't ever have a file uploading at the same time with the same name, even if it's being written to a different directory. [Because, well, it was intended for a single user to be used, not a multiuser system]. In my environment (a university), this model just isn't sound. It may work for a long time, but it'll be a bitch to debug when it finally does happen.
Actually, I've had quite a few classes over the years where computers were allowed.
When I took Statistics for Engineers, we were allowed anything provided it wasn't a communication device. [so well, you load all the data into a spreadsheet, click a button, and hope you got the right answer... although in 1996, I didn't see anyone else with a portable during the final but me]. I've also had programming classes where the teachers allow access to computers [although, if you didn't keep working on the non-programming problems while your FORTRAN was compiling on a 386, you didn't stand a chance at finishing on time].
These days, computers in the classroom are more and more prevalent, although I may have a flawed sense coming from formerly engineering, and now programming background.
Cold Fusion may be great for rapid prototyping, but it's lacking many features needed for an enterprise level service. I haven't used MX, so I don't know if this has changed, however, their security model assumes that you have one distinct set of users PER server. From what I've seen of PHP's file uploading in the past, it's not much better.
And well, from my past experience, CF's proven to be rather unreliable in an enterprise situation. [an average of one unrecoverable crash per day, in which an admin has to manually intervene to bring it back up]. I understand that CF is more stable under Windows, however, we run a Solaris shop as we don't like rebooting the entire machine on that regular of a basis.
There's plenty of test pre-processors out there that all do mostly the same thing, and you just have to balance what reliability, scalability, functionality and security are best for your purpose. I wouldn't rank ColdFusion above average on 3 of those 4 categories.
That's not to say that it doesn't serve its purpose in proof of concept, rapid prototyping, or other low usage sites, but I'd definately think about replacing it before it gets heavy usage.
There's the good teachers, and the bad ones.
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Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 3, Interesting
First off, I always attended classes, whenever possible, as it's the teacher who writes the test, not the book -- If the teacher says something 4 times, even if the book only mentioned it once, you better right it down, because odds are, it's going to be on the test.
That being said, I slept in class. I don't know what it is about classes, but unless the teacher made it interesting, I couldn't stay awake. There was only one class that I did particularly poorly on [not an A or B] in college -- Fluid Dynamics [mind you, I got an A the semester before in Hydraulics, which I had to get the pre-req of Fluid Dynamics waved for].
I feel strongly that it had to do with the teaching style -- the teacher wouldn't even let you take notes in his class, because 'if you were writing, you weren't listening, and if you're not listening, you're not learning'. To make matters worse, I found the teacher to be particularly boring. He read from the book. That was the class -- him reading from the book, putting a few problems up on the overhead, and you sitting there, bored out of your skull. [Oh, and he wrote the book, too, so it's not like he added stuff that wasn't in the book, or could read the book for a slightly different explaination].
Now, I did my best to not be a distraction for people in class. Although I had a Richochet modem, I didn't make a feature out of the fact that I wasn't paying attention to the class. I took an Oracle DBA certificate program last year, and there were three people sitting in the second row, who kept looking at web pages, talking to each other, taking cell phone calls while the teacher was talking, etc.
I don't believe that you need absolute undivided attention. [ie, if you got the concept right off, and the teacher's explaining it to a few people who needed some clarification, okay, I'd glance over at my screen], but the teacher should be your primary focus for the class, and if you become a distraction, I think you should be removed from the class so you don't impact other people's education.
[Oh -- and in the course last summer -- those same three people installed AIM, and were using they joys of networking to cheat on tests... one more strike against technology in the classroom].
Personally, I find that I pay the most attention in class when I can understand how the material affects me. Of course, everyone has different experience, and finding how to make the material relate to each of the students can be a difficult task. [I view the 'meet the students' first day one of the most important days of class... especially if the teacher asks what you're expecting to get out of the class]
If a problem's taking 45 minutes, that's more than 1/2 of the class. College classes don't give classwork, which is used to pad the teacher's time, and to make up for the students who don't do their homework when in high school.
The only time that difficult of a problem will be assigned during the class would be for a test. And I'm guessing that the teacher wouldn't want communication going on at that time.
Oh...and in those cases, it'd be a one problem test -- and the test would normally be subdivided into many sections, as it would show many different things that were covered in the class. (for example, it might be a complex fluid dynamica problem, to determine how flow at an inlet might affect the flow at multiple outlets in a complex system... or the deformation of a structure under load when it's not composed of simply supported beams).
Can anyone explain to me why so many people buy full tower cases, and then only fill 2-3 bays? I mean, hell, even at home, I don't think I have a machine that has more than 4 bays full. [game machine has a CD-R/DVD/2xHD, and a server with a CD-ROM and 3 hard drives].
I mean, I've got a K6-233 computer at home, and with this, I can make it so people at least think I have a fast computer.
Seriously, can anyone explain it to me why people fork out as much cash as they do to give a facelift to something crappy, rather than just saving up, and buying a better model? I mean, for well less than $100, I could pick up a crappy video card, and a 9" monitor to display status messages.
I can't find anyone selling the 9" POS monitors I have at home [640x480], but a 1024x768 one is about the same cost as the 4x20 char display.
With Home Depot talking about upgrading their cash registers in the coming year, the old ones they have might go on the market -- check computer shows and sellers of refurbished hardware.
I mean, if they build this into an iPod, and I apply a hack to change the color along with the music [Think 'visualization', on some MP3 software], do I run the risk of causing epiletic seizures if people look at it?
Except for the fact that you're paying for it, I didn't see any part of the rant that couldn't have applied to a text mud a decade ago.
I guess the only difference there was that anyone who was on 'em was normally a college student or researcher (or you didn't have internet access) which changed the overall mindset of the population, and we weren't paying, so there was no reason to feel compelled to play to make the most of our subscription -- some people would take a long hiatus (ie, on academic suspension after gaming too much and having to take a semester off), or there'd be those of us who would just hang out and talk to people, maybe game a little on the side.
Oh...and the fact that the coders didn't get paid. Normally meant that most of the people who wrote the game also played it regularly, and would fix whatever it was they thought was broken.
The more than something costs, the more practical refining lower quality ore or synthetics becomes. You do it on too large of a scale, however, and you flood the market, and you can't make a profit, so it's a fairly delicate balance.
There may also be advances in detection technology, collection, or other factors that'll result in more expense, but with it, greater abundance.
I mean, think about it... scientists and environmentalists keep talking about how we're going to run out of fossil fuels, but they always seem to keep extending out the critical date... It most likely will run out sooner or later, but the oil companies will keep finding a way to prolong it to make a profit as long as they can.
The problem lies in just how complex you want to make everything. I mean, it's relatively simple, in that everything inherits properties, and you just have to code the properties. But well, you add some new super-cool property, and well, you then have to go back and re-do all of the inheritables. This isn't so bad, if you come up with a good organizational library system, but you also need to develop concepts of material types [ie, a glass object doesn't degrade when hit by something with acidic properties, but you'd want to file things by object type, not by material type, or it'd be a bitch to deal with] or whatever other groupings of properties you'd want to deal with.
Anyway, about 6-7 years ago, a few folks that I knew started working on a mud, with the basic concept that there were two types of people who wrote for muds -- the ones who were creative, and had no idea how to code, and the coders, who couldn't come up with something artistic to save their life. Our goal was to come up with basic system that would accept templates and configuration files so that the artistic folks would never have to write any real code. [eg, I want an orc, a bit bigger than normal, barehanded, and generate the armour randomly]
The only way to ensure that everything would work well down the road was for everything to inherit correctly, and to do that, you'd have to figure out how you were going to organize your generic objects so they could be maintained in the long run. But well, we didn't have all of the properties that we were going to use in place, as I was in the process of rewriting the combat system, so no armour/weapons/attacks could be written, and got sidetracked from work and nothing ever happened.
I still think it's a good idea, but it's a major undertaking [and hell, we weren't even dealing with graphics back in those days]. You'd need to keep the back end fairly tightly controled, so that you don't cause odd interactions when people make new properties. I'd think that you'd gain the most benefit by keeping the core engine tightly controlled, having a screening process for the inclusion of new inheritables, and releating it to the public for creating worlds (basically, collections of objects). Otherwise, you'd end up with 'well, this object only works if you use Bob's distribution, and apply the patches from Dave and John' situations, which makes it very difficult to support in the long run.
Oh...and after taking 4 years of civil engineering courses, I can tell you that sand is most definately not a liquid, although it can behave like a fluid in times of liquefaction, as can all soils with a high enough moisture content and sudden shock. I'd also say that sand is a property of desert (sandy, rocky or ice composition), and viscosity is a property of fluids. This is part of the difficulty in modeling how items inherit properties, and why you need to worry about it before you get too far into the project
The article specifically says that the company was founded in 1990, and was based off the Asimov book.
If you all think to 1990, Apple didn't have any 'i' products. I mean, the Mac II line was the top of the crop back then. [68030, in the IIfx]. You don't get to any 'i' products until after you go through the 68040 [Centris, Quadra, Performa (3 digit)] lines, the 60x series [PowerMac, Performa (4 digit)]. Nothing was named with an 'i' until 1998, with the first iMac, which was almost a year after the first (beige) G3.
So, I'd have to say that there is no possible way that the name 'iRobot' has anything to do with apple, and that the original contributor of the story (although the story was very interesting), was just confused on the whole matter.
Coldfusion is great for rapid prototyping, however, from the system administration side (ie, production support), it crashes just a little too often for my tastes. Yes, many times, it'll bring itself back up, so there will just be a 2-3 minute service interuption...
Now take into consideration that this is happening NIGHTLY. And it doesn't always come back up on its own. Due to the poor model that we have (ie, no one watches the systems save for 7am-7pm weekdays), this has resulted in multi-day outages on the weekends. Luckily, I'm not the one getting the 2am phone calls anymore, but when I hear that they want to put more and more things over on Coldfusion, I'd prefer it they had a stable system first.
Oh -- and I don't like their security model...I heard it's not so server-centric in MX, but well, before that, if someone with access to one directory knew the datasource name used by someone else on that system, they could muck with someone else's data. I'd prefer to see some sort of chrooting for the CFFILE commands, and access restrictions by directory, not for the system as a whole.
[And a daemon that doesn't keep crashing... but well, I'm off on another project, so someone else has had to be the one talking to Macromedia support on a regular basis.]
Supposedly, ColdFusion doesn't have these problems under windows [we're using Solaris], but then I've got to deal with Windows crashing, too.
Anti-WAP = (Can be) More Profitable
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802.11 RF Amp
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As someone who has worked for an ISP, I can tell you that the majority of the traffic comes from a minority of the customers. I haven't worked for an ISP that's had DSL service, and so, I see it from the point of view of dial up. In fact, I'm going to assume that the AUPs in question stem from dialup related problems.
You see, the issue is that phone lines cost money. For us, it was costing us almost $70/month, [business lines are more expensive than residential lines, and well, they were PRIs], plus the cost of hardware (modems, servers) and other costs (staffing, office space, internet connection). The only way to make a profit off of modems is to NOT have someone sitting on 'em 24hrs a day.
Although we didn't get picky when a whole family was using their connection, we would start asking questions when someone was on more than 500hrs in a month (as well, we expect people to sleep once in a while). Sometimes, you get more than one person in the house who's an addict, and they're working different shifts... normally, it's someone who has their mail program set to check every 5 minutes, and they've got dial-on-demand set up.
So, to make up for this, and so you didn't have to completely kick people out, there were normally additional tiers of service. Many times, they were just listed as 'business' and 'residential', or they might have some other name for an always-on-connection, or where it was okay to be sharing out the line -- because the more computers using the line, the more likely it was to be up all the time.
Now, with DSL, the model has completely changed, so that doesn't entirely fit, but have the ISPs changed their AUP? Doubtful. And if they did, they'd probably have to have one for broadband connections, and one for dialup, and then you've got to have seperate tracking of users, etc. Of course, your bottleneck problem now isn't busy modems, but your connection to the internet -- so people downloading every mp3 they can find, divx movies, etc, start cutting into your bottom line. [And well, you've either got to lose money on each individual that's doing it, or get rid of 'em so they don't adversely affect every other customer.]
Oh, and for those wondering...I am a speakeasy customer...only outage I've had was when they changed my IP address. [and they even called me the day before to remind me it was going to be happening... but I wasn't at home, and forgot to write down my new IP, and I had it saved in e-mail, so I had to go to the local library the next day, and check my mail from there to get my new IP]
Um...I think we did Warcraft II over the christmas break of um...1996?
Although the need for only one CD per 3 people was nice, it's only useful if you can organize all people joining in at the same time. [It's been a while, so I can't remember what happens when someone leaves, however].
Warcraft II also had a problem that it'd take people fairly long to get used to all of the subtlety of the game (don't turn sappers invis or they blow up, etc)
The real problem is when one person gets taken out, and they have to wait for everyone else to finish to start a new game...you end up with lots of people getting frustrated, starting up lots of 2 player games, etc, which defeats the whole purpose.
The only real game of that genre that we found worked for larger numbers was C&C...played with the highest tech level, and the speed cranked all the way up. [Someone would be launching nukes within minutes....games never lasted more than 15..and that was in the days of a P200 being top of the line]
Another options is having everyone gang up against a team of computer players (AoE supported group victory and 8 players, but you'd need space for computers), so every human player normally gets done at about the same time. [Once in a while, someone woud get rubbed out by the computer early on, but it's still better than waiting for those last two humans to finally finish].
The FPS genre might be your best bet, so long as you don't have anyone who gets motion sickness, just because someone can just sit dead as they answer phone calls, or have to run to the john, without screwing up everyone else.
Washington DC has a combined sewer system. Basically, this means that there are not seperate sanitary (ie, toilets) and storm sewers. When there hasn't been rain in a while, leaves and other assorted trash will collect up in the storm sewers. When a hard rain comes, it will back up the storm sewers, and there's always a questions of exactly what else might have floated up from the drains.
Our machine room just happens to be in a basement. [Until a couple of years back, there was a glass wall to the outside, too, so it obviously wasn't well planned] I think it was late 2000 (maybe early 2001), when we had a sewer backup on the same block our building was. There was an inch or so of standing water on the ground floor. There was sewage leaking from the ceiling above into our machine room, onto the machines, and into flooring [raised floor, so of course, all of the power runs through the floor].
Needless to say, the smell was not so wonderful, although anything chunky was filtered out by the seeping through the concrete floor/ceiling. It did manage to cause the ceiling tiles in the machine room to crumble, and they had to replace anything that couldn't be easily disinfected in another room on that floor (chairs, cubicle walls, etc).
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I've actually been talking about this sort of thing with friends for years --
some radar detectors claim they can alert you to 'emergency' vehicles (trains crossing, ambulances, some even claim school buses). I have yet to see one work, but I would love if they did, especially with today's cars, if you have your windows up, you can barely hear a siren...and if your stereo's on, there's no chance in hell.
It'd also be great for alerting that there's construction ahead, or an exit's closed, etc.
I would prefer that this band be liscensed for specific services, or that everyone be required to send some sort of a signature that we could block on, or even a 'type' so we could single out restaurants, tourism, etc.
This may be a semantic point to most people, but a reservior is usually for storing (relatively) clean water. Lagoons are used for anaerobic digestion of sludge.
Basically, once you get rid of the big stuff (flitering, letting it settle out, or grinding it in), the oil and scum (skimmed off the top), and the stuff that clumps together (floculation and letting it settle), you have two things -- relatively clear water, which is decanted off, and sludge.
If you take the sludge, and let it sit in an oxygen less environment, it'll break down further, but it produces methane as a byproduct. Sometimes, a lagoon is used, other times, they just warn it up in a controled environment.
Oh -- and for drinking water, there might be some de-hardening/de-ionizing done (depends on the source), some biological filtering, and some form of sanitizing (ozone or chlorine).
Now, I admit that this doesn't mention if the 'Magic' system is providing power, or receiving power, but well, something's getting power over the cable. I don't know how you're going to pull that off with wireless.
I really find it hard to believe that someone would have gone to this much trouble just to play Richard and Alan's Escape From Hell or Hillsfar.
But as for your suggestion for using an Atari or Calico -- there was no Bard's Tale for the Calicovision, nor Space Quest. For DOS, however, we had Wing Commander, and a whole series of Leisure Suit Larry. By 1991, we had the original BattleTech and BattleTech II, not that wierd MechWarrior similator thing.
Hmm...I wonder what I did with the scratch and sniff card from Leather Goddesses of Phobos?
Hmm...it's times like this when I'm glad there's places like emulation.net so I can find something interesting to play with.
(yes, this is partly sarcasm...it's up to you to determine what part)
It's typically refered to as 'self-signing', which normally happens when you first install your webserver.
And yes, it will complain that it's coming from an untrusted source, but it can be usefull for test boxes and intranets, where you have a limited number of people whom you can control accessing the system.
You gain the benefits of encryption, but because a certificate authority hasn't approved it, you'll get the 'untrusted' box popping up when people connect.
It's like putting up a fence when you're trying to keep out solicitors. Although you only push the solicitors back to the fence, you can walk around your front yard now without anyone harrassing you.
So although you won't be preventing any infections of your system, you will keep out the traffic caused by external infections from adversely flooding your internal networks. You may take a slight penalty at the border router, as it will have an extra rule in it, of course.
No..however, when you try to use it to pry something up, and the pen breaks, and leaks all over your hand, yes.
I've had them dry up, and you can still see there's ink in there, too. Which makes me wonder if they actually fill them with 1/2 the amount of ink, and the rest is some lower cost filler that they use, if the manufacturers just assume that you'd lose it before you actually run out.
(yeah, yeah, this is offtopic, that's why I'm posting without my karma bonus, okay?)
Personally, I liked Good Omens, but then again, I also like British comedy in general. If you aren't a fan of that genre, I can see how some people might not have cared for it. [personally, I think it still ranks as my favorite book to date, but then again, I also love MPFC, Red Dwarf and the like].
[not directly a reply to you, but to some of the others in this thread]
As for Neverwhere, the problem is that you read the book. This is one of those cases where the book didn't come first. [ie, it's like reading the book adaptation of a movie... it's going to suck, so don't bother]. It was decent, but it wasn't nearly as good as the BBC mini series, that Neil Gaimen did with Lenny Henry [whom most Americans would only recognize from Chef! if their PBS station carried it]. The current anticipated release date for it in the US is June 2003. [See the Jan 17th entry]
It was shown in the US, however, as a promotion through the release of the book in the US by Borders, which is when I saw it. [Personally, I know it's sick, but I liked the frog scene]. Oh...and although it was done 6 years ago, and US standards were low, it had that gritty 'Dr. Who' production budget feel to it, but it was still good TV.
Personally, the thing that interests me the most is that the mention of bundling ROMS with it, which would suggest [assuming it's legal], that some of the original companies are willing to liscense them out.
The other major difference is the price. The arcade in a box (full version), is over US$1k, and this new article is talking about a US$300 price.
You also start looking at theoretical [HanaHo] vs. already done [Arcade in a Box]. Then there's controls...Arcade in a Box comes with the arcade-like buttons, etc, while it sounds like HanaHo's thinking about USB support, and you'd plug whatever gamepad/joystick/etc it can support, but it'd be seperate from the box.
Although I haven't used the latest version of PHP (sorry, don't do web development these days, mostly system and database administration), but it would upload all files into one directory, and then move the files into the directory that you requested.
So, if you have multiple users with access to the system, they have to make sure that they don't ever have a file uploading at the same time with the same name, even if it's being written to a different directory. [Because, well, it was intended for a single user to be used, not a multiuser system]. In my environment (a university), this model just isn't sound. It may work for a long time, but it'll be a bitch to debug when it finally does happen.
Actually, I've had quite a few classes over the years where computers were allowed.
When I took Statistics for Engineers, we were allowed anything provided it wasn't a communication device. [so well, you load all the data into a spreadsheet, click a button, and hope you got the right answer... although in 1996, I didn't see anyone else with a portable during the final but me]. I've also had programming classes where the teachers allow access to computers [although, if you didn't keep working on the non-programming problems while your FORTRAN was compiling on a 386, you didn't stand a chance at finishing on time].
These days, computers in the classroom are more and more prevalent, although I may have a flawed sense coming from formerly engineering, and now programming background.
Cold Fusion may be great for rapid prototyping, but it's lacking many features needed for an enterprise level service. I haven't used MX, so I don't know if this has changed, however, their security model assumes that you have one distinct set of users PER server. From what I've seen of PHP's file uploading in the past, it's not much better.
And well, from my past experience, CF's proven to be rather unreliable in an enterprise situation. [an average of one unrecoverable crash per day, in which an admin has to manually intervene to bring it back up]. I understand that CF is more stable under Windows, however, we run a Solaris shop as we don't like rebooting the entire machine on that regular of a basis.
There's plenty of test pre-processors out there that all do mostly the same thing, and you just have to balance what reliability, scalability, functionality and security are best for your purpose. I wouldn't rank ColdFusion above average on 3 of those 4 categories.
That's not to say that it doesn't serve its purpose in proof of concept, rapid prototyping, or other low usage sites, but I'd definately think about replacing it before it gets heavy usage.
First off, I always attended classes, whenever possible, as it's the teacher who writes the test, not the book -- If the teacher says something 4 times, even if the book only mentioned it once, you better right it down, because odds are, it's going to be on the test.
That being said, I slept in class. I don't know what it is about classes, but unless the teacher made it interesting, I couldn't stay awake. There was only one class that I did particularly poorly on [not an A or B] in college -- Fluid Dynamics [mind you, I got an A the semester before in Hydraulics, which I had to get the pre-req of Fluid Dynamics waved for].
I feel strongly that it had to do with the teaching style -- the teacher wouldn't even let you take notes in his class, because 'if you were writing, you weren't listening, and if you're not listening, you're not learning'. To make matters worse, I found the teacher to be particularly boring. He read from the book. That was the class -- him reading from the book, putting a few problems up on the overhead, and you sitting there, bored out of your skull. [Oh, and he wrote the book, too, so it's not like he added stuff that wasn't in the book, or could read the book for a slightly different explaination].
Now, I did my best to not be a distraction for people in class. Although I had a Richochet modem, I didn't make a feature out of the fact that I wasn't paying attention to the class. I took an Oracle DBA certificate program last year, and there were three people sitting in the second row, who kept looking at web pages, talking to each other, taking cell phone calls while the teacher was talking, etc.
I don't believe that you need absolute undivided attention. [ie, if you got the concept right off, and the teacher's explaining it to a few people who needed some clarification, okay, I'd glance over at my screen], but the teacher should be your primary focus for the class, and if you become a distraction, I think you should be removed from the class so you don't impact other people's education.
[Oh -- and in the course last summer -- those same three people installed AIM, and were using they joys of networking to cheat on tests... one more strike against technology in the classroom].
Personally, I find that I pay the most attention in class when I can understand how the material affects me. Of course, everyone has different experience, and finding how to make the material relate to each of the students can be a difficult task. [I view the 'meet the students' first day one of the most important days of class... especially if the teacher asks what you're expecting to get out of the class]
If a problem's taking 45 minutes, that's more than 1/2 of the class. College classes don't give classwork, which is used to pad the teacher's time, and to make up for the students who don't do their homework when in high school.
The only time that difficult of a problem will be assigned during the class would be for a test. And I'm guessing that the teacher wouldn't want communication going on at that time.
Oh...and in those cases, it'd be a one problem test -- and the test would normally be subdivided into many sections, as it would show many different things that were covered in the class. (for example, it might be a complex fluid dynamica problem, to determine how flow at an inlet might affect the flow at multiple outlets in a complex system... or the deformation of a structure under load when it's not composed of simply supported beams).
I'd rather get a smaller computer if space is the issue.
Can anyone explain to me why so many people buy full tower cases, and then only fill 2-3 bays? I mean, hell, even at home, I don't think I have a machine that has more than 4 bays full. [game machine has a CD-R/DVD/2xHD, and a server with a CD-ROM and 3 hard drives].
I mean, I've got a K6-233 computer at home, and with this, I can make it so people at least think I have a fast computer.
Seriously, can anyone explain it to me why people fork out as much cash as they do to give a facelift to something crappy, rather than just saving up, and buying a better model? I mean, for well less than $100, I could pick up a crappy video card, and a 9" monitor to display status messages.
I can't find anyone selling the 9" POS monitors I have at home [640x480], but a 1024x768 one is about the same cost as the 4x20 char display.
With Home Depot talking about upgrading their cash registers in the coming year, the old ones they have might go on the market -- check computer shows and sellers of refurbished hardware.
I mean, if they build this into an iPod, and I apply a hack to change the color along with the music [Think 'visualization', on some MP3 software], do I run the risk of causing epiletic seizures if people look at it?
Except for the fact that you're paying for it, I didn't see any part of the rant that couldn't have applied to a text mud a decade ago.
I guess the only difference there was that anyone who was on 'em was normally a college student or researcher (or you didn't have internet access) which changed the overall mindset of the population, and we weren't paying, so there was no reason to feel compelled to play to make the most of our subscription -- some people would take a long hiatus (ie, on academic suspension after gaming too much and having to take a semester off), or there'd be those of us who would just hang out and talk to people, maybe game a little on the side.
Oh...and the fact that the coders didn't get paid. Normally meant that most of the people who wrote the game also played it regularly, and would fix whatever it was they thought was broken.
The more than something costs, the more practical refining lower quality ore or synthetics becomes. You do it on too large of a scale, however, and you flood the market, and you can't make a profit, so it's a fairly delicate balance.
There may also be advances in detection technology, collection, or other factors that'll result in more expense, but with it, greater abundance.
I mean, think about it... scientists and environmentalists keep talking about how we're going to run out of fossil fuels, but they always seem to keep extending out the critical date... It most likely will run out sooner or later, but the oil companies will keep finding a way to prolong it to make a profit as long as they can.
The problem lies in just how complex you want to make everything. I mean, it's relatively simple, in that everything inherits properties, and you just have to code the properties. But well, you add some new super-cool property, and well, you then have to go back and re-do all of the inheritables. This isn't so bad, if you come up with a good organizational library system, but you also need to develop concepts of material types [ie, a glass object doesn't degrade when hit by something with acidic properties, but you'd want to file things by object type, not by material type, or it'd be a bitch to deal with] or whatever other groupings of properties you'd want to deal with.
Anyway, about 6-7 years ago, a few folks that I knew started working on a mud, with the basic concept that there were two types of people who wrote for muds -- the ones who were creative, and had no idea how to code, and the coders, who couldn't come up with something artistic to save their life. Our goal was to come up with basic system that would accept templates and configuration files so that the artistic folks would never have to write any real code. [eg, I want an orc, a bit bigger than normal, barehanded, and generate the armour randomly]
The only way to ensure that everything would work well down the road was for everything to inherit correctly, and to do that, you'd have to figure out how you were going to organize your generic objects so they could be maintained in the long run. But well, we didn't have all of the properties that we were going to use in place, as I was in the process of rewriting the combat system, so no armour/weapons/attacks could be written, and got sidetracked from work and nothing ever happened.
I still think it's a good idea, but it's a major undertaking [and hell, we weren't even dealing with graphics back in those days]. You'd need to keep the back end fairly tightly controled, so that you don't cause odd interactions when people make new properties. I'd think that you'd gain the most benefit by keeping the core engine tightly controlled, having a screening process for the inclusion of new inheritables, and releating it to the public for creating worlds (basically, collections of objects). Otherwise, you'd end up with 'well, this object only works if you use Bob's distribution, and apply the patches from Dave and John' situations, which makes it very difficult to support in the long run.
Oh...and after taking 4 years of civil engineering courses, I can tell you that sand is most definately not a liquid, although it can behave like a fluid in times of liquefaction, as can all soils with a high enough moisture content and sudden shock. I'd also say that sand is a property of desert (sandy, rocky or ice composition), and viscosity is a property of fluids. This is part of the difficulty in modeling how items inherit properties, and why you need to worry about it before you get too far into the project
The article specifically says that the company was founded in 1990, and was based off the Asimov book.
If you all think to 1990, Apple didn't have any 'i' products. I mean, the Mac II line was the top of the crop back then. [68030, in the IIfx]. You don't get to any 'i' products until after you go through the 68040 [Centris, Quadra, Performa (3 digit)] lines, the 60x series [PowerMac, Performa (4 digit)]. Nothing was named with an 'i' until 1998, with the first iMac, which was almost a year after the first (beige) G3.
So, I'd have to say that there is no possible way that the name 'iRobot' has anything to do with apple, and that the original contributor of the story (although the story was very interesting), was just confused on the whole matter.
Coldfusion is great for rapid prototyping, however, from the system administration side (ie, production support), it crashes just a little too often for my tastes. Yes, many times, it'll bring itself back up, so there will just be a 2-3 minute service interuption...
Now take into consideration that this is happening NIGHTLY. And it doesn't always come back up on its own. Due to the poor model that we have (ie, no one watches the systems save for 7am-7pm weekdays), this has resulted in multi-day outages on the weekends. Luckily, I'm not the one getting the 2am phone calls anymore, but when I hear that they want to put more and more things over on Coldfusion, I'd prefer it they had a stable system first.
Oh -- and I don't like their security model...I heard it's not so server-centric in MX, but well, before that, if someone with access to one directory knew the datasource name used by someone else on that system, they could muck with someone else's data. I'd prefer to see some sort of chrooting for the CFFILE commands, and access restrictions by directory, not for the system as a whole.
[And a daemon that doesn't keep crashing... but well, I'm off on another project, so someone else has had to be the one talking to Macromedia support on a regular basis.]
Supposedly, ColdFusion doesn't have these problems under windows [we're using Solaris], but then I've got to deal with Windows crashing, too.
As someone who has worked for an ISP, I can tell you that the majority of the traffic comes from a minority of the customers. I haven't worked for an ISP that's had DSL service, and so, I see it from the point of view of dial up. In fact, I'm going to assume that the AUPs in question stem from dialup related problems.
You see, the issue is that phone lines cost money. For us, it was costing us almost $70/month, [business lines are more expensive than residential lines, and well, they were PRIs], plus the cost of hardware (modems, servers) and other costs (staffing, office space, internet connection). The only way to make a profit off of modems is to NOT have someone sitting on 'em 24hrs a day.
Although we didn't get picky when a whole family was using their connection, we would start asking questions when someone was on more than 500hrs in a month (as well, we expect people to sleep once in a while). Sometimes, you get more than one person in the house who's an addict, and they're working different shifts... normally, it's someone who has their mail program set to check every 5 minutes, and they've got dial-on-demand set up.
So, to make up for this, and so you didn't have to completely kick people out, there were normally additional tiers of service. Many times, they were just listed as 'business' and 'residential', or they might have some other name for an always-on-connection, or where it was okay to be sharing out the line -- because the more computers using the line, the more likely it was to be up all the time.
Now, with DSL, the model has completely changed, so that doesn't entirely fit, but have the ISPs changed their AUP? Doubtful. And if they did, they'd probably have to have one for broadband connections, and one for dialup, and then you've got to have seperate tracking of users, etc. Of course, your bottleneck problem now isn't busy modems, but your connection to the internet -- so people downloading every mp3 they can find, divx movies, etc, start cutting into your bottom line. [And well, you've either got to lose money on each individual that's doing it, or get rid of 'em so they don't adversely affect every other customer.]
Oh, and for those wondering...I am a speakeasy customer...only outage I've had was when they changed my IP address. [and they even called me the day before to remind me it was going to be happening... but I wasn't at home, and forgot to write down my new IP, and I had it saved in e-mail, so I had to go to the local library the next day, and check my mail from there to get my new IP]
Um...I think we did Warcraft II over the christmas break of um...1996?
Although the need for only one CD per 3 people was nice, it's only useful if you can organize all people joining in at the same time. [It's been a while, so I can't remember what happens when someone leaves, however].
Warcraft II also had a problem that it'd take people fairly long to get used to all of the subtlety of the game (don't turn sappers invis or they blow up, etc)
The real problem is when one person gets taken out, and they have to wait for everyone else to finish to start a new game...you end up with lots of people getting frustrated, starting up lots of 2 player games, etc, which defeats the whole purpose.
The only real game of that genre that we found worked for larger numbers was C&C...played with the highest tech level, and the speed cranked all the way up. [Someone would be launching nukes within minutes....games never lasted more than 15..and that was in the days of a P200 being top of the line]
Another options is having everyone gang up against a team of computer players (AoE supported group victory and 8 players, but you'd need space for computers), so every human player normally gets done at about the same time. [Once in a while, someone woud get rubbed out by the computer early on, but it's still better than waiting for those last two humans to finally finish].
The FPS genre might be your best bet, so long as you don't have anyone who gets motion sickness, just because someone can just sit dead as they answer phone calls, or have to run to the john, without screwing up everyone else.
Washington DC has a combined sewer system. Basically, this means that there are not seperate sanitary (ie, toilets) and storm sewers. When there hasn't been rain in a while, leaves and other assorted trash will collect up in the storm sewers. When a hard rain comes, it will back up the storm sewers, and there's always a questions of exactly what else might have floated up from the drains.
Our machine room just happens to be in a basement. [Until a couple of years back, there was a glass wall to the outside, too, so it obviously wasn't well planned] I think it was late 2000 (maybe early 2001), when we had a sewer backup on the same block our building was. There was an inch or so of standing water on the ground floor. There was sewage leaking from the ceiling above into our machine room, onto the machines, and into flooring [raised floor, so of course, all of the power runs through the floor].
Needless to say, the smell was not so wonderful, although anything chunky was filtered out by the seeping through the concrete floor/ceiling. It did manage to cause the ceiling tiles in the machine room to crumble, and they had to replace anything that couldn't be easily disinfected in another room on that floor (chairs, cubicle walls, etc).