I'm certainly not going to say "it definitely was the Chinese", it was just not an unreasonable thought. The only retort I have to offer to is a reminder that they ran the test at a tiny fraction of the power they originally intended to, and for a much shorter period of time. As you (obviously) very well know, a satellite in LEO usually offers about an 8 minute pass requiring very accurate tracking from the ground, particularly with a laser that was 2m wide. We hams don't have to worry so much when trying to hit AO-10 with a 70cm circularly polarlized beam.
Consider:
* Its been 7 years since the article said the Chinese were almost ready * We ran our test with minimal power * We had to hit a LEO satellite, not one in Geosync (i.e. we hit a more difficult target) * Space doesn't dissipate a laser (we bounce lasers off the moon to measure its distance.. its moving a quarter inch a day away from us) * We could have blown it apart over 7 years ago instead of just disabling it * The satellite in question has only suffered an unknown electrical anomaly and was not necessarily destroyed
I would be interested in knowing if the USAF used Haleakala to look for it at the time it was scheduled to pass to see if it's been destroyed or not. They do that all the time with satellites that unexpectedly go dark.
I stress that I respect your opinion and well-informed status. I just don't think its impossible to freak out a satellite with a laser, even at that distance. Especially one that never moves relative to the Earth.
You'd need an insanely powerful radio transmitter to fry a satellite. Read up on EMP.
A laser will do just fine. On October 17, 1997, we fired a laser from White Sands at an unused Air Force satellite. We originally intended to blow it to bits with a laser blast but other countries asked us not to out of fear of us littering the satellite belt with more garbage. We did this 7 1/2 years ago. Around Nov 28, 1998 a flurry of articles appeared indicating that China was readying an anti-satellite laser, so theories about China doing this may not be too far off.
So the reasonable solution is not to buy zillions of dollars worth of systems management cards but to buy machines with serial-capable BIOS.
With all due respect (to another old-timer) your $350 card gives you serial output of the POST, while my $600 card gives VNC-like true remote KVM, plus remote power up/down, virtual CD and floppy, forwarding of hardware and software alerts via SNMP, SMTP, even TAP paging via modem, and blue screen captures retained after automatic reboots.
As I said, your experience warrants respect, and you did point out a solution for white boxes, but you still need a terminal server to handle all that (slow) serial I/O to each box, and forget GUIs. I'm not so sure my full-bore solution isn't worth the extra $$. My services cost $1,000 a day (not my salary by a long shot.. just my costs). If a $600 option lets me monitor and manage servers from just about anywhere on Earth, its worth not doing it half-assed. But thanks for showing me how to get remote KVM for generic boxes on the cheap.
Typical Slashdot.... 99% of posts are unresponsive and off topic.
No, typical Slashdot is a bunch of kids answering a serious question before ever setting foot in an enterprise environment.
Two choices: first, an IP KVM installed in each rack. But you still have to address the power switch and media. Another poster mentioned PXE booting. It works, but takes effort to build all the different images you want to have handy, and what do you do for a hung box 1,000 miles away? Or once you address the power question, the NIC is bad?
Second: IBM (and others) offer remote systems management cards that not only give you full remote KVM on the server the card is installed in, but they also give you access to the system power and screen captures of blue screens that may have occured before the server rebooted itself to recover. They can also present virtual floppy and CD-ROM drives to their host servers. Finally, if you don't want to run 10/100 and do IP allocations for each management card, you can daisy chain up to 24 servers together over RS-485 and use any one of them as a gateway to the IP network.
One IP address. Full remote KVM access to up to 24 servers at a time. Access to the system power. Access to screenshots of blue screens that may have tripped a reboot. Full hardware and software alert forwarding directly handled by the gateway card or passed on to enterprise systems management environments via numerous methods. Virtual floppy and CD-ROM drives. If you still absolutely insist on going onsite to the box, you can sit at a desk in the corner and get an IP.
For christ's sake be a professional, dammit! I love all these answers about using distros configured to put the console on a serial tty when the submitter clearly described needing to be in the box before the POST splash is up. Another year of not having to worry about my job if this is the competition.
I'm looking for a way to use a bluetooth headset with my laptop to make voip calls both inside my house and from hotels with broadband. I'd like line 2 to ring at my laptop no matter where I am, and can run a Linux vmware guest on the laptop to fill any connectivity gaps. Can this be done with asterisk and a linejack card at home and some kind of utility on a linux vm guest?
I have never met anyone who uses a computer and doesn't realize the difference between left click, right click and double click
You haven't met my wife. Or my Mom. Or my sister. Or aunt.
For 10 years I've been saying, "okay, right click on the icon. Right click. No, right click. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough; CLICK the BUTTON on the RIGHT SIDE of the MOUSE. Your other right." Only to be followed later on by watching them double click hyperlinks on web pages.
"When you click on these links on web pages, you don't have to double click." "Oh, okay."
I was just going to say.. after that entire discussion on legit p2p, here we are again with a 100MB download from 50 different mirrors, and no torrent. Even if I don't want it, I'm willing to kick it off remotely at the house while I'm at work just to help with the distribution. They may not *need* my help, but we need to get people used to thinking this way. We CAN reverse the slashdot effect!
Why do you hate jigdo so much? I think all distro's should publish torrents and jigdo files & templates. Torrents save mirrors the network load and jigdo saves them the storage expenses. Of course, I heard about a 200GB drive for $90 today, so storage is getting awfully cheap.
More importantly, I think DistroWatch should add torrent enclosures to their RSS feeds. That would go a LONG way towards improving torrent d/l performance of Linux distros. Some are awesome, but others just bite from time to time.
Even azureus? Often the most popular project on sourceforge? That's worth a whole ROLL of tin foil! Works the same (and very well) in Windows and Linux. Even the plugins are cross platform.
From the title I was expecting an app that pulls down christmas music from usenet and automatically adds new tracks to a playlist as they come in. By the time the first track finishes playing, you'll already have a good dozen or two queued up.
I know this is a late reply, and you may never see this, but a lot of people are installing modded xboxes into cars, and don't want to carry a game library around with them. They want to play mp3s, movies, and some games all ripped from their legally purchased cd, dvd, and game collections.
If they're going to show me the ads, then they should charge less (or not at all).
Don't you realize the ads are *keeping* your ticket costs down? Do you honestly believe that movie theaters can play 16-track digital sound with seating upgrades every 5-10 years for just $10-$15 per adult? The ads are paying for the OTHER half of the cost of the ticket.
Just for that, tonight you will read pages 46 to 10,160 and there will be a pop quiz tomorrow.
Sorry, I grew up on that show. I don't know how that 856k+ userid remembers it, but I watched it *before*/.'s favorite Alanis was on it. With Moose, Lisa, Alistaire, and some other kids whose names escape me at the moment. Now at 34 and 32, my sister and I *still* ask, "what do you think's IN the burgers?" BTW, where would Nick be without slime?
I agree. When my wife and I were deciding on names for our new cat, we agreed that only if we get a dog, too, the cat would be named "Pentium" and the dog "286". No dog, so we settled on "Chairman Mousey Tongue".
her "math" is a complete ripoff of steve albini's breakdown:
Dangit! I'm usually the one who posts this link around here once or twice a year;) (Huge Big Black, Rapeman, Shellac and Wedding Present fan here, btw -- too old for the 2nd gen 'trenchcoat mafia') Nice to see someone else who's at least heard of Albini.
I'm about to cancel my service on my series 1 standalone TiVO and would love to completely replace the OS. I bought an old RS/6000 a year ago just to have a dev platform. I'm assuming the vidcap drivers are proprietary, however. Anyway, instead of ripping off TiVO and stealing their service, I'd have a grand old time turning the unit into some kind of outlet for experimental video blogs and watching tv shows or movies pulled down via bt.
Off the top of my head, would SIPRNET be one of the global networks he was referring to?
I really have no idea. He left it at the fact that there are some serious global networks out there, and what we call "The Internet" amounts to not much more than table scraps compared to the cutting edge networks out there. Kinda like when dubya has a working vacation at the ranch (or even on Air Force 1), and he talks about the vidcons he has with his cabinet and other high ranking officials.
One room that I saw was like a miniature version of the control center in Wargames, complete with a map of the US and live indicators for links connecting military bases and colored indicators representing the status of servers at each base. It was really a neat place to get a tour of.
Doesn't that mean there are not multiple internets?
I have a family member who worked for the defense contractor CSC for many years. Over lunch one day, he told me that there are at least five "global Internets" that he knows of.. and how the govt gave the worst one to the public to play with. He went on to describe how they have separate military and public computer and phone networks wired into the building and to each person's desk. And never the two shall meet. They call it the "dark side" and the "light side". I asked him what would happen if an email intended for the "light side" ever ended up in his "dark side" inbox. He replied that guys in dark sunglasses would probably be there a few minutes later.
I saw their kerberos keyserver.. he had to go through three swipe card doors to get back there, and I couldn't get within five feet of the console.
That is funny, because when I seen Finance struggling with pivot tables I can usually take their data, upload it into Oracle, query out the answer they need, and give them the results back for formatting in about 1/4 the time it would take them to calculate the answer in Excel.
What you see are people very poorly trained in the use of their basic office tools. Yes you can do it in 1/4 of the time it takes *them* to do it in Excel. That's not a limitation of Excel, however. They need to take a class.
So essentially, a pivot table is just a tool for putting data from a RDBMS into the spreadsheet form you know and love.
And allows you to choose any subset of the fields of the spreadsheet for display in a mini-spreadsheet, lets you choose any field you want to serve as a "grouping agent" and dynamically updates subtotals for you. Plus, the subtotals and totals field can be changed to a variety of formulae, including Sums, Averages, even just counts. And you can choose whether or not to show every record that contributed to that subtotal, or just the subtotal line, and make that choice for *each* group.
So, to continue your example, you could check to see what the average price was for a particular service, or count the number of times a particular procedure was performed during a particular month, or each month, whatever. You can twist and mold your data and get views into trends and summaries like never before. Well, perhaps you could get at it in the past, but not with this level of ease and thoroughness.
And whoever suggested using awk against a csv to achieve this is so far off-base, its laughable.
if you are doing that level of work in a spreadsheet, regardless of how good it is, you are using the wrong tool
Might be a liiiiitle too judgmental here. I'm working on a 7 country, 4,000+ server consolidation deal right now, and to help sell that deal, I extensively used PivotTables. When you have close to 5,000 rows, 50 columns, and executive standing over you, asking "how many Suns do they have? how many boxes are running AIX? how much total CPU power is in Intel? How about Intel servers older than 3 years in England? And how many of those old Intel servers are we projecting to go to VMWare? How many VMWare servers would they need to buy to those those sessions?" followed immediately by, "Okay, cool, can you make a bar chart showing the total number of old Intel servers in each country, and split each bar in half, showing how many are going to be refreshed and how many are going to VMWare?" PivotTables are your God (or at least your "Day Saver").
I was the architect analyzing the servers for utilization and type of workload, and decided on whether or not to recommend VMWare for each individual box (and now I'm executing the consolidation). If I can answer the questions on the fly in a few seconds each, and create a chart customized to the exec's specific requirements in less under 2 minutes, AND answer technical questions about each server, then I am worth more than one person's salary. And although I am now up to over 200 VM guests in ESX, and the customer just bought 200 RHEL licenses for the ongoing porting efforts, I can't go to OOo until something that works as well as PivotTables and PivotCharts shows up there. I drive around with the famous LINUX license plate on the front of my car, but I'm sorry.. PivotTables and PivotCharts are amazing.
My office is actually just over 1 mile short of the GWB. I'd have to drive past it to literally get to the toll plazas, and by then I've already executed the commute I'd be trying to replace. To do a mass transit commute, I'd have to take the train to NY Penn, the A to 178th, then a half hour bus ride from the GWB to the office, and walk the last 10 minutes.
don't want to be subject to the schedule of mass transit and be squeezed in amongst the poor or other undesirables
Its not even about the undesirables for some of us. I've commuted from Princeton and Bucks County, PA to the NY metro area off and on for 11 years. Up until last year, I did it by Amtrak. You can't get on the train unless you paid a minimum of $35 for a ticket, and during rush hour, the trains were packed with commuters, meaning we bought commuter passes for >$250.
To get from home to Midtown Manhattan, I'd drive 20 minutes to Trenton, wait 10 minutes for the Amtrak, ride for 50 minutes to New York Penn, take the A/C/E uptown to 53rd. Total travel time, 1hr 20mins unless the trains were screwed up, then all bets are off. At the end of the day, you get such hypertension knowing that you have to pack up by a certain time, get back to the subway, hope they're running, get back down to Penn, look for your train, and hope its on-time and that you didn't just miss it by 2 minutes. Sometimes you can get off the subway and find 2,000 people on the upper and lower concourse levels for Amtrak/NJ Transit. At any moment, without warning, your day could be ruined, or your evening could be ruined.. every single day of your commuting life.
When I drive, if someone stops me in the hall and talks for 30 seconds when every minute counts, I get to my car (and home) 30 seconds later, not 30 to 40 minutes later. You talk about not wanting to be 0wned by the train schedule, but it is SO TRUE. Right now, I'm driving 150 miles a day round-trip for my commute, and I got a rental car b/c I refuse to kill my Murano for a customer. 90 minutes each way, every day from Washington Crossing, PA to the George Washington Bridge. You just can't beat that with mass transit.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the excellent description of keps.
I'm certainly not going to say "it definitely was the Chinese", it was just not an unreasonable thought. The only retort I have to offer to is a reminder that they ran the test at a tiny fraction of the power they originally intended to, and for a much shorter period of time. As you (obviously) very well know, a satellite in LEO usually offers about an 8 minute pass requiring very accurate tracking from the ground, particularly with a laser that was 2m wide. We hams don't have to worry so much when trying to hit AO-10 with a 70cm circularly polarlized beam.
Consider:
* Its been 7 years since the article said the Chinese were almost ready
* We ran our test with minimal power
* We had to hit a LEO satellite, not one in Geosync (i.e. we hit a more difficult target)
* Space doesn't dissipate a laser (we bounce lasers off the moon to measure its distance.. its moving a quarter inch a day away from us)
* We could have blown it apart over 7 years ago instead of just disabling it
* The satellite in question has only suffered an unknown electrical anomaly and was not necessarily destroyed
I would be interested in knowing if the USAF used Haleakala to look for it at the time it was scheduled to pass to see if it's been destroyed or not. They do that all the time with satellites that unexpectedly go dark.
I stress that I respect your opinion and well-informed status. I just don't think its impossible to freak out a satellite with a laser, even at that distance. Especially one that never moves relative to the Earth.
Thanks for the chat.
You'd need an insanely powerful radio transmitter to fry a satellite. Read up on EMP.
A laser will do just fine. On October 17, 1997, we fired a laser from White Sands at an unused Air Force satellite. We originally intended to blow it to bits with a laser blast but other countries asked us not to out of fear of us littering the satellite belt with more garbage. We did this 7 1/2 years ago. Around Nov 28, 1998 a flurry of articles appeared indicating that China was readying an anti-satellite laser, so theories about China doing this may not be too far off.
So the reasonable solution is not to buy zillions of dollars worth of systems management cards but to buy machines with serial-capable BIOS.
With all due respect (to another old-timer) your $350 card gives you serial output of the POST, while my $600 card gives VNC-like true remote KVM, plus remote power up/down, virtual CD and floppy, forwarding of hardware and software alerts via SNMP, SMTP, even TAP paging via modem, and blue screen captures retained after automatic reboots.
As I said, your experience warrants respect, and you did point out a solution for white boxes, but you still need a terminal server to handle all that (slow) serial I/O to each box, and forget GUIs. I'm not so sure my full-bore solution isn't worth the extra $$. My services cost $1,000 a day (not my salary by a long shot.. just my costs). If a $600 option lets me monitor and manage servers from just about anywhere on Earth, its worth not doing it half-assed. But thanks for showing me how to get remote KVM for generic boxes on the cheap.
Typical Slashdot.... 99% of posts are unresponsive and off topic.
No, typical Slashdot is a bunch of kids answering a serious question before ever setting foot in an enterprise environment.
Two choices: first, an IP KVM installed in each rack. But you still have to address the power switch and media. Another poster mentioned PXE booting. It works, but takes effort to build all the different images you want to have handy, and what do you do for a hung box 1,000 miles away? Or once you address the power question, the NIC is bad?
Second: IBM (and others) offer remote systems management cards that not only give you full remote KVM on the server the card is installed in, but they also give you access to the system power and screen captures of blue screens that may have occured before the server rebooted itself to recover. They can also present virtual floppy and CD-ROM drives to their host servers. Finally, if you don't want to run 10/100 and do IP allocations for each management card, you can daisy chain up to 24 servers together over RS-485 and use any one of them as a gateway to the IP network.
One IP address. Full remote KVM access to up to 24 servers at a time. Access to the system power. Access to screenshots of blue screens that may have tripped a reboot. Full hardware and software alert forwarding directly handled by the gateway card or passed on to enterprise systems management environments via numerous methods. Virtual floppy and CD-ROM drives. If you still absolutely insist on going onsite to the box, you can sit at a desk in the corner and get an IP.
For christ's sake be a professional, dammit! I love all these answers about using distros configured to put the console on a serial tty when the submitter clearly described needing to be in the box before the POST splash is up. Another year of not having to worry about my job if this is the competition.
I'm looking for a way to use a bluetooth headset with my laptop to make voip calls both inside my house and from hotels with broadband. I'd like line 2 to ring at my laptop no matter where I am, and can run a Linux vmware guest on the laptop to fill any connectivity gaps. Can this be done with asterisk and a linejack card at home and some kind of utility on a linux vm guest?
I have never met anyone who uses a computer and doesn't realize the difference between left click, right click and double click
You haven't met my wife. Or my Mom. Or my sister. Or aunt.
For 10 years I've been saying, "okay, right click on the icon. Right click. No, right click. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough; CLICK the BUTTON on the RIGHT SIDE of the MOUSE. Your other right." Only to be followed later on by watching them double click hyperlinks on web pages.
"When you click on these links on web pages, you don't have to double click." "Oh, okay."
(double click)
Should the coder have picked MSN to get a longer lasting worm?
Is that a firmer, longer lasting worm?
"Any worms lasting longer than four hours require immediate medical attention."
I was just going to say.. after that entire discussion on legit p2p, here we are again with a 100MB download from 50 different mirrors, and no torrent. Even if I don't want it, I'm willing to kick it off remotely at the house while I'm at work just to help with the distribution. They may not *need* my help, but we need to get people used to thinking this way. We CAN reverse the slashdot effect!
I'll never touch jigdo
Here are your Debian torrents.
Why do you hate jigdo so much? I think all distro's should publish torrents and jigdo files & templates. Torrents save mirrors the network load and jigdo saves them the storage expenses. Of course, I heard about a 200GB drive for $90 today, so storage is getting awfully cheap.
More importantly, I think DistroWatch should add torrent enclosures to their RSS feeds. That would go a LONG way towards improving torrent d/l performance of Linux distros. Some are awesome, but others just bite from time to time.
Even azureus? Often the most popular project on sourceforge? That's worth a whole ROLL of tin foil! Works the same (and very well) in Windows and Linux. Even the plugins are cross platform.
From the title I was expecting an app that pulls down christmas music from usenet and automatically adds new tracks to a playlist as they come in. By the time the first track finishes playing, you'll already have a good dozen or two queued up.
Why would you buy games if you mod your console?
I know this is a late reply, and you may never see this, but a lot of people are installing modded xboxes into cars, and don't want to carry a game library around with them. They want to play mp3s, movies, and some games all ripped from their legally purchased cd, dvd, and game collections.
If they're going to show me the ads, then they should charge less (or not at all).
Don't you realize the ads are *keeping* your ticket costs down? Do you honestly believe that movie theaters can play 16-track digital sound with seating upgrades every 5-10 years for just $10-$15 per adult? The ads are paying for the OTHER half of the cost of the ticket.
duuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I heard that!
/.'s favorite Alanis was on it. With Moose, Lisa, Alistaire, and some other kids whose names escape me at the moment. Now at 34 and 32, my sister and I *still* ask, "what do you think's IN the burgers?" BTW, where would Nick be without slime?
Just for that, tonight you will read pages 46 to 10,160 and there will be a pop quiz tomorrow.
Sorry, I grew up on that show. I don't know how that 856k+ userid remembers it, but I watched it *before*
$69 for the chip, $75 for 120GB drive (still the max, right?), and $129 for the xbox. $275 total leaves $225 for games.
Can you get 15 games for $225? I buy 'em used for $14. $14*15 = $210. They could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by going legit.
I agree. When my wife and I were deciding on names for our new cat, we agreed that only if we get a dog, too, the cat would be named "Pentium" and the dog "286". No dog, so we settled on "Chairman Mousey Tongue".
her "math" is a complete ripoff of steve albini's breakdown:
;) (Huge Big Black, Rapeman, Shellac and Wedding Present fan here, btw -- too old for the 2nd gen 'trenchcoat mafia') Nice to see someone else who's at least heard of Albini.
Dangit! I'm usually the one who posts this link around here once or twice a year
I'm about to cancel my service on my series 1 standalone TiVO and would love to completely replace the OS. I bought an old RS/6000 a year ago just to have a dev platform. I'm assuming the vidcap drivers are proprietary, however. Anyway, instead of ripping off TiVO and stealing their service, I'd have a grand old time turning the unit into some kind of outlet for experimental video blogs and watching tv shows or movies pulled down via bt.
Off the top of my head, would SIPRNET be one of the global networks he was referring to?
I really have no idea. He left it at the fact that there are some serious global networks out there, and what we call "The Internet" amounts to not much more than table scraps compared to the cutting edge networks out there. Kinda like when dubya has a working vacation at the ranch (or even on Air Force 1), and he talks about the vidcons he has with his cabinet and other high ranking officials.
One room that I saw was like a miniature version of the control center in Wargames, complete with a map of the US and live indicators for links connecting military bases and colored indicators representing the status of servers at each base. It was really a neat place to get a tour of.
Doesn't that mean there are not multiple internets?
I have a family member who worked for the defense contractor CSC for many years. Over lunch one day, he told me that there are at least five "global Internets" that he knows of.. and how the govt gave the worst one to the public to play with. He went on to describe how they have separate military and public computer and phone networks wired into the building and to each person's desk. And never the two shall meet. They call it the "dark side" and the "light side". I asked him what would happen if an email intended for the "light side" ever ended up in his "dark side" inbox. He replied that guys in dark sunglasses would probably be there a few minutes later.
I saw their kerberos keyserver.. he had to go through three swipe card doors to get back there, and I couldn't get within five feet of the console.
That is funny, because when I seen Finance struggling with pivot tables I can usually take their data, upload it into Oracle, query out the answer they need, and give them the results back for formatting in about 1/4 the time it would take them to calculate the answer in Excel.
What you see are people very poorly trained in the use of their basic office tools. Yes you can do it in 1/4 of the time it takes *them* to do it in Excel. That's not a limitation of Excel, however. They need to take a class.
So essentially, a pivot table is just a tool for putting data from a RDBMS into the spreadsheet form you know and love.
And allows you to choose any subset of the fields of the spreadsheet for display in a mini-spreadsheet, lets you choose any field you want to serve as a "grouping agent" and dynamically updates subtotals for you. Plus, the subtotals and totals field can be changed to a variety of formulae, including Sums, Averages, even just counts. And you can choose whether or not to show every record that contributed to that subtotal, or just the subtotal line, and make that choice for *each* group.
So, to continue your example, you could check to see what the average price was for a particular service, or count the number of times a particular procedure was performed during a particular month, or each month, whatever. You can twist and mold your data and get views into trends and summaries like never before. Well, perhaps you could get at it in the past, but not with this level of ease and thoroughness.
And whoever suggested using awk against a csv to achieve this is so far off-base, its laughable.
if you are doing that level of work in a spreadsheet, regardless of how good it is, you are using the wrong tool
Might be a liiiiitle too judgmental here. I'm working on a 7 country, 4,000+ server consolidation deal right now, and to help sell that deal, I extensively used PivotTables. When you have close to 5,000 rows, 50 columns, and executive standing over you, asking "how many Suns do they have? how many boxes are running AIX? how much total CPU power is in Intel? How about Intel servers older than 3 years in England? And how many of those old Intel servers are we projecting to go to VMWare? How many VMWare servers would they need to buy to those those sessions?" followed immediately by, "Okay, cool, can you make a bar chart showing the total number of old Intel servers in each country, and split each bar in half, showing how many are going to be refreshed and how many are going to VMWare?" PivotTables are your God (or at least your "Day Saver").
I was the architect analyzing the servers for utilization and type of workload, and decided on whether or not to recommend VMWare for each individual box (and now I'm executing the consolidation). If I can answer the questions on the fly in a few seconds each, and create a chart customized to the exec's specific requirements in less under 2 minutes, AND answer technical questions about each server, then I am worth more than one person's salary. And although I am now up to over 200 VM guests in ESX, and the customer just bought 200 RHEL licenses for the ongoing porting efforts, I can't go to OOo until something that works as well as PivotTables and PivotCharts shows up there. I drive around with the famous LINUX license plate on the front of my car, but I'm sorry.. PivotTables and PivotCharts are amazing.
My office is actually just over 1 mile short of the GWB. I'd have to drive past it to literally get to the toll plazas, and by then I've already executed the commute I'd be trying to replace. To do a mass transit commute, I'd have to take the train to NY Penn, the A to 178th, then a half hour bus ride from the GWB to the office, and walk the last 10 minutes.
Hardly worth it, when I can drive it in 90 mins.
don't want to be subject to the schedule of mass transit and be squeezed in amongst the poor or other undesirables
Its not even about the undesirables for some of us. I've commuted from Princeton and Bucks County, PA to the NY metro area off and on for 11 years. Up until last year, I did it by Amtrak. You can't get on the train unless you paid a minimum of $35 for a ticket, and during rush hour, the trains were packed with commuters, meaning we bought commuter passes for >$250.
To get from home to Midtown Manhattan, I'd drive 20 minutes to Trenton, wait 10 minutes for the Amtrak, ride for 50 minutes to New York Penn, take the A/C/E uptown to 53rd. Total travel time, 1hr 20mins unless the trains were screwed up, then all bets are off. At the end of the day, you get such hypertension knowing that you have to pack up by a certain time, get back to the subway, hope they're running, get back down to Penn, look for your train, and hope its on-time and that you didn't just miss it by 2 minutes. Sometimes you can get off the subway and find 2,000 people on the upper and lower concourse levels for Amtrak/NJ Transit. At any moment, without warning, your day could be ruined, or your evening could be ruined.. every single day of your commuting life.
When I drive, if someone stops me in the hall and talks for 30 seconds when every minute counts, I get to my car (and home) 30 seconds later, not 30 to 40 minutes later. You talk about not wanting to be 0wned by the train schedule, but it is SO TRUE. Right now, I'm driving 150 miles a day round-trip for my commute, and I got a rental car b/c I refuse to kill my Murano for a customer. 90 minutes each way, every day from Washington Crossing, PA to the George Washington Bridge. You just can't beat that with mass transit.