As yet another IT person who has been in this situation, I can say that BSA was pretty much worthless in my experience. When I was fired (mainly because of the noise I was making about unlicensed software) I tried to hand the company over to BSA on a silver platter and they were worthless. They just seemed totally incompentent and knew less about software licensing than the company I was working for. Of course that was a long time ago so I'm sure things are better these days.
The bigger issue is the big suprise during an audit when the company is going public or trying to be sold. One place I worked ended up paying about $50,000 for software licensing when they tried to go public. And they were not even trying to pirate on purpose.
If management really doesn't care about becoming legit, it's time to start looking for a new job. In my case, I ended up getting fired but I really should have started looking for a new job the day that they asked me to install the first unlicensed software. If that's the way they do business, they will take liberties with employees the same way they take liberties with software.
The funny part is all these people on Slashdot saying how easy it is to make sure a distribution disk contains the correct files.
Yet they can't even use a spell checker.
It's pretty easy to see how this got out.
MIT has their courseware all online.
I would start here:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/
And if you want to stay with dead trees, I have also found that O'Reilly is hands down the best publisher of computer books.
Also, one of the best books for UNIX is Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice J. Bach.
I get 3 year extended warranties for all the Dell laptops that I order. I think it's a great deal. Since I support several offices around the country, the cost of the extended warranties are about the same as round trip shipping charges that it takes for that laptop to get sent to me so I can fix it. Instead, I get next day on site repair service from Dell. And the warranty covers accidental breakage also. So, instead of paying almost a couple of hundred dollars in shipping plus my time for labor and additional cost for parts, the Dell tech shows up at the remote office the next day and fixes the computer. I end up saving at least a days worth of my time and users get their computers back in one day instead of at least three. Plus, I know that I can plan on that laptop being useful and in inventory for at least three years. What's not a good deal about that?
I always found Master Handbook of 1001 Practical Electronic Circuits to come in handy when I build projects. There are designs for all kinds of basic electronic circuits that you can chain together to come up with some usefull designs. The nice part about a book like this is that it gives you all the common chip numbers that many other manuals gloss over.
Rail guns do not generate recoil in the same way that conventional guns do. Recoil in a railgun is perpendicular to the direction of the projectiles travel. It tends to force the rails apart which causes arcing, rail ablation and a drop in current.
Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary.
Really? What happens when I am sampling so fast that I am recording the individual molecules passing by the needle? I must still be losing something on that vinyl disc.
You are missing something else here, the number of bits once you convert from analog to digital. This is what determines dynamic range, not just sample rate. Every piece of electronic equipment creates noise and one measurement of the quality of a recording is the signal to noise ratio. Once you get to the point where you are digitally encoding the noise, how exactly is an analog recording better?
It's not going to be a short lived problem. MP3's via email will continue to grow. Where I work, we are in the process of converting our phones to VoIP. One of the features we like is that the system can take your voice mail and email you an mp3 of that message. I'm sure once people here get this new feature they will wonder how they lived without it. Right now I know a couple of people who use VoIP systems and that's the only way voice mail works. You don't need a voice mail server for VoIP phones when all it needs to do is email you an mp3.
If I could get 7 down and 1 up for all my users, things would be fine. The problem is that I have 20 users in this building and 3 remote offices. If I could get service with reasonable upload speeds around here it would make our network much more usable. VPN would work great for our remote offices, I could host my own web and mail servers, video conferencing would eliminate some trips.
The problem is that cable companies still think of the internet like they think about TV. That it's for consuming media only and that nobody needs fast upload speeds.
I've been running Vista at home for a few month and haven't had any problems with a fresh install (never could get the upgrade to work). So I decided to take the plunge and get it on the latest laptop I had to order for work. Brand new Dell with 2 gig memory. After setting up the computer, when I went to install printers, they did install but it crashed explorer every single time. Makes you wonder how Vista ever got through beta testing.
The worst part is that the so called recall was only for the large retailers. I work in a friends shop that sells CD's. He still has these CD's sitting on the shelf. When I told my friend about this fiasco he talked to his CD distributor about the recall and they knew nothing.
"I'd expect the energy companies themselves to build storage systems and use them to store energy when demand was low and deliver it when it was high."
Actually, energy companies use this storage system all the time. It's called pumped storage and consists of two lakes, a hill and a pump/generator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_storage
I've been working at a friends record store to help him out over the holidays. I asked him if he had heard from Sony and told him abou the entire DRM fiasco and he know nothing about it. He talked to his distributor and the distributor has heard nothing about it. In the mean time, the broken disks are still on the shelf.
Nasa state an intention to return to the moon by 2018 - by which time some of the underlying Apollo technology will have been around for 50 years. I wonder how the Apollo astronauts would have reacted if the design of parts of their craft has been designed back in 1918?
Funny you mention 1918 because that was just about the time that Robert Goddard was designing the first liquid fueled rocket motor.
Wikipedia Which first flew in 1926. So, the basic design of parts of some Apollo era technology were from around 1918.
One other area where Blu-Ray is taking hits is durability. Blu-Ray has a much thinner coating than HD-DVD and will therefor scratch much easier. It seems to me that Blu-Rays only advantage is higher capacity but when you factor in everything else, HD-DVD is the technology that will win.
"You can hire windows admins on the cheap. To get Unix admins will cost more if you want someone that knows what they are doing."
Seems to me that getting Windows admins who know what they are doing costs just as much as *nix admins. If you want to risk your business on Windows admins who don't know what they are doing, well that usually costs more in the long run.
Even the satellite pager does not work everywhere. I had one for two years for a previous job and had problems getting pages in basements of buildings. I also ran into a few instances where my boss paged me but I never recieved it, then sometimes got it a day later.
Slashdot Mirror
If they do end up naming it after him, Colbert should do a 'better know a module' segment over the next year or so.
As yet another IT person who has been in this situation, I can say that BSA was pretty much worthless in my experience. When I was fired (mainly because of the noise I was making about unlicensed software) I tried to hand the company over to BSA on a silver platter and they were worthless. They just seemed totally incompentent and knew less about software licensing than the company I was working for. Of course that was a long time ago so I'm sure things are better these days. The bigger issue is the big suprise during an audit when the company is going public or trying to be sold. One place I worked ended up paying about $50,000 for software licensing when they tried to go public. And they were not even trying to pirate on purpose. If management really doesn't care about becoming legit, it's time to start looking for a new job. In my case, I ended up getting fired but I really should have started looking for a new job the day that they asked me to install the first unlicensed software. If that's the way they do business, they will take liberties with employees the same way they take liberties with software.
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Games/Arcade_Style_Games/Kye_Download.html
Having users that have no desire to install iTunes and all the Apple related crap on their work computers would make my life so much easier.
The funny part is all these people on Slashdot saying how easy it is to make sure a distribution disk contains the correct files. Yet they can't even use a spell checker. It's pretty easy to see how this got out.
MIT has their courseware all online. I would start here: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/ And if you want to stay with dead trees, I have also found that O'Reilly is hands down the best publisher of computer books. Also, one of the best books for UNIX is Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice J. Bach.
I get 3 year extended warranties for all the Dell laptops that I order. I think it's a great deal. Since I support several offices around the country, the cost of the extended warranties are about the same as round trip shipping charges that it takes for that laptop to get sent to me so I can fix it. Instead, I get next day on site repair service from Dell. And the warranty covers accidental breakage also. So, instead of paying almost a couple of hundred dollars in shipping plus my time for labor and additional cost for parts, the Dell tech shows up at the remote office the next day and fixes the computer. I end up saving at least a days worth of my time and users get their computers back in one day instead of at least three. Plus, I know that I can plan on that laptop being useful and in inventory for at least three years. What's not a good deal about that?
I always found Master Handbook of 1001 Practical Electronic Circuits to come in handy when I build projects. There are designs for all kinds of basic electronic circuits that you can chain together to come up with some usefull designs. The nice part about a book like this is that it gives you all the common chip numbers that many other manuals gloss over.
That and a Digikey catalog are all you need.
Rail guns do not generate recoil in the same way that conventional guns do. Recoil in a railgun is perpendicular to the direction of the projectiles travel. It tends to force the rails apart which causes arcing, rail ablation and a drop in current.
Did anybody get eaten by a small dog?
Really? What happens when I am sampling so fast that I am recording the individual molecules passing by the needle? I must still be losing something on that vinyl disc.
You are missing something else here, the number of bits once you convert from analog to digital. This is what determines dynamic range, not just sample rate. Every piece of electronic equipment creates noise and one measurement of the quality of a recording is the signal to noise ratio. Once you get to the point where you are digitally encoding the noise, how exactly is an analog recording better?
It's not going to be a short lived problem. MP3's via email will continue to grow. Where I work, we are in the process of converting our phones to VoIP. One of the features we like is that the system can take your voice mail and email you an mp3 of that message. I'm sure once people here get this new feature they will wonder how they lived without it. Right now I know a couple of people who use VoIP systems and that's the only way voice mail works. You don't need a voice mail server for VoIP phones when all it needs to do is email you an mp3.
If I could get 7 down and 1 up for all my users, things would be fine. The problem is that I have 20 users in this building and 3 remote offices. If I could get service with reasonable upload speeds around here it would make our network much more usable. VPN would work great for our remote offices, I could host my own web and mail servers, video conferencing would eliminate some trips.
The problem is that cable companies still think of the internet like they think about TV. That it's for consuming media only and that nobody needs fast upload speeds.
I've been running Vista at home for a few month and haven't had any problems with a fresh install (never could get the upgrade to work). So I decided to take the plunge and get it on the latest laptop I had to order for work. Brand new Dell with 2 gig memory. After setting up the computer, when I went to install printers, they did install but it crashed explorer every single time. Makes you wonder how Vista ever got through beta testing.
The worst part is that the so called recall was only for the large retailers. I work in a friends shop that sells CD's. He still has these CD's sitting on the shelf. When I told my friend about this fiasco he talked to his CD distributor about the recall and they knew nothing.
"I'd expect the energy companies themselves to build storage systems and use them to store energy when demand was low and deliver it when it was high."
Actually, energy companies use this storage system all the time. It's called pumped storage and consists of two lakes, a hill and a pump/generator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_storage
I've been working at a friends record store to help him out over the holidays. I asked him if he had heard from Sony and told him abou the entire DRM fiasco and he know nothing about it. He talked to his distributor and the distributor has heard nothing about it. In the mean time, the broken disks are still on the shelf.
Nasa state an intention to return to the moon by 2018 - by which time some of the underlying Apollo technology will have been around for 50 years. I wonder how the Apollo astronauts would have reacted if the design of parts of their craft has been designed back in 1918? Funny you mention 1918 because that was just about the time that Robert Goddard was designing the first liquid fueled rocket motor. Wikipedia Which first flew in 1926. So, the basic design of parts of some Apollo era technology were from around 1918.
One other area where Blu-Ray is taking hits is durability. Blu-Ray has a much thinner coating than HD-DVD and will therefor scratch much easier. It seems to me that Blu-Rays only advantage is higher capacity but when you factor in everything else, HD-DVD is the technology that will win.
Isn't that what sines and cosines are in the first place?
Yes, these days the spelling and grammar I see on the Internet are atrocious. But could we please add punctuation to that list?....
I already have one. My 15 year old keyboard has most of the letters worn off already. It's pretty funny when I watch someone else try to use it.
Uhhhmm, Daimler Chrysler is no longer a U.S. auto maker.
"You can hire windows admins on the cheap. To get Unix admins will cost more if you want someone that knows what they are doing."
Seems to me that getting Windows admins who know what they are doing costs just as much as *nix admins. If you want to risk your business on Windows admins who don't know what they are doing, well that usually costs more in the long run.
Even the satellite pager does not work everywhere. I had one for two years for a previous job and had problems getting pages in basements of buildings. I also ran into a few instances where my boss paged me but I never recieved it, then sometimes got it a day later.