Get a second processor. For making life easier and making the GUI more responsive when something is bogging down, it's well worth it if you can. At the very least, you can web surf while a process takes up 100% of one of the processors. My dual Celeron 500 would be more responsive than the 1+ghz machines I was working on, and recently I invested $300 to put together a dual Athlon machine (no need for a space heater this winter!)
Actually, it's even better for Apple. Instead of having customers make one or two purchases at a time, and having card processing fees eat into that, they have people purchasing maybe $15 or $20 worth of gift certificates at a time. The relative amount taken out by fees is much less, meaning more of the gross is retained by Apple.
All they need to do now is offically enable recording on the iPod (I'm not doing the left/right/left/right/a/b/a/b thing to enable it) and they'll have me for a new customer.
I'd rather just launch a big-ass lab with a good machine shop, a crew of engineers, plenty of consumables, and enough fuel for them to get to a Lagrange point. Let them build the equipment we'll need, and have robot ships grab asteroids for materials. Humankind has to get a toe-hold outside of the gravity well for us to get anywhere. And no, orbiting in LEO (especially with only a 3 man housekeeping crew) is not good enough.
On another slightly related note: Anyone know where I can buy a 802.11b frequency jammer?
I think they're called Microwave Ovens. You'll probably have to mod it to remove some safety features, but it should have the desired effect when turned on in the vicinity of any 802.11b receivers. You might want to invest in a pair of shielded briefs and a grounded tin-foil hat though...
Why pay USF to incumbent carriers to string more monopoly copper pair (even at a discount to low-income, educational/library and rural users) when new upstarts can deliver equivalent tech for even cheaper than that to everyone?
The one thing telecos can deliver on is reliability (big-ass banks of batteries power COs during outages) but even that can be shifted to local co-ops who can repackage service from wireless/voip carriers along with local copper pair or self-contained boxes with a big battery, wireless router, and VOIP to POTS converter inside.
With a huge population, and the political will power to commit lots of state resources to a search, this might just be a case where there was enough genetic diversity to serve up a couple of dozen candidates for "superior" swimming. No genetic enhancement needed - just lots and lots of screening, and a lot of money to train the potentials... which is essentially what everyone else does, only the Chinese have a bigger potential pool of applicants, so to speak.
Good lord, you've just described the "welcome to the system" messages that sysadmins used to post for new users. Too bad more ISPs don't hold their users to any kind of social standard, or maybe we could have avoided the worst of the problems since the Internet was commercialized...
So the linux boxes are cheap. What about the interconnect equipment? Can a guy off the street spend a few hundred and build his own phone network, or is the marginal cost still significant?
Hell, if it's cheap enough, I'll start my own wireless phone company:)
You seem to be ignoring something. If you subscribe to dedicated DSL you're already paying USF on the copper pair going to your house. If I'm going to get VOIP over those copper wires, why should I pay USF twice?
Think about it. Your argument could easily be applied to wireless - if you let everyone use 802.11b, they should have to pay USF because they might concievably drive established carriers out of business, thus driving down the amount available to fund phone service for schools, libraries, rural and disadvantaged residents, etc.
I'd rather use these new technologies to provide cost-effective service to everybody, rather than taxing it (and there by limiting its competitiveness) just because an established monopoly is a source of cheap revenue.
It's pretty clear that the politicians and the political parties are relying on passage of the Do Not Call list as one of their accomplishments to trump for the upcoming election season. They probably already had pre-written speeches and events planned for next week when the FTC list went into effect. Having a bought judge derail that probably pissed off a very large number of party handlers, especially when they already made clear to the telemarketing industry that this was a dead issue.
Color e-paper, great for display devices, able to replace LCDs, etc. Now when do these things go into mass production? I'd love to have flexible solar cells at pennies per yard, but I can't get those yet either.
I think that setting up VoIP in lieu of a traditional campus-based PSTN is genius. You consolidate your switching structure (everything ends up as ethernet packets), you enable cheap long-distance (these are college students, they're going to call home), and extremely scalable local communications (build a new dorm, put in cat-5 and hook them up to the campus backbone.)
The only problems I see are possible quality of service issues if the network is saturated with traffic... like that generated from filesharing.
The more they cut prices in order to stave off linux, the more evident it is how overpriced their list prices are. Instead of trying to compete on price, they should be trying to compete on features such as easy management, and security...
Unfortunately for Microsoft, security isn't exactly their strength, and neither is easy management now that Linux has matured so much.
I know at least of yesterday, UCLA was blocking that IP. Ruined a perfectly good demo to the guys at work about how evil Verisign is.:) However, (again, as of yesterday) UCLA was still passing wildcard DNS records in response to queries - we're just blocking access to the verisign site to generate a timeout, the bad DNS records ( with 64.94.110.11) are still coming through.
Thanks for the link. I'm sending an e-mail to Speakeasy to suggest that they switch over. I'll also talk to a few of the network gurus at work and see if we can come to a consensus as to what to do about VeriSign's sabotage.
Definitely, I'm setting up a local DNS at home and have it talk to the OpenNIC root until Speakeasy gets an OpenNIC box up and running.
In the meantime, 64.94.110.11 is blocked on my NAT - it takes a hell of a long time to time out, but it does the trick for now.
A blockbuster movie costs a lot of money to make, but it also has a much larger market to make its money back. After US theatre distribution there are foreign markets, pay-per-view, cable/satellite, DVD/Video, and syndication. Not to mention spin-offs like books, comics, television, sequels, and of course, the movie soundtrack. Eveything is synergistic - the movie drives book and album sales, album and music video drive (theoretically) more ticket sales, etc.
A band releasing a CD has a much more limited market to make their money back. Not to mention, that most of them aren't worth the money spent on promotion and all the payola, and their shelf life is at most a year or two.
This of course doesn't change the essential fact: most DVDs have more content than the average CD for about the same price, and are cheaper on that basis alone. And secondly, even if you do spend most of your time listening to music, most people do it from MP3s because they are more portable and easier to manage, so CDs (and having to go to a store, or get physical product mailed to you) are just an extra cost and inconvenience for many people with lots of disposable income. What's easier to manage? A 10 disc CD changer, or a hard drive with your entire CD collection on MP3?
I'd love to tell them to add me to their do-not-call list (which they are required to honor, by law.) Problem is, the assholes are using automated dialers and pre-recorded messages, so I have to wait until their 2min spiel is over before I have a chance to quickly copy down a 800 number. And they're doing this several times a week. AND these damn pieces of phone spam are clogging up my voicemail!
What causes more economic instability? Getting a bank of automated machines turned off (no live people in the phone spam I'm getting), or disrupting the work of a professional programmer working on medical image analysis software?
Re:Bullhoey(energy conversion rates)
on
Solar Window Panes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My bullshit meter pegged at the 100% claim also. You notice there's absolutely no discussion as to how those miraculous little window shades are wired together, or at what voltage they're running at. Are they all in series? If so, do they suffer from the traditional "shade one cell, knock out the whole string" problem?
Multi-junction tech is a cool idea for making existing designs more efficient. However, this whole revolutionizing building technology sounds like grant-related PR to me.
I'm assuming the original poster does shows. For shows you need amps, boards, cables, mics, and of course, the musical insturments themselves, all packed in oversized cases to make sure that your equipment survives airports, baggage handlers, and stage hands who have to set up and tear down. If you want to lug all that gear on the road yourself, you need a truck, or a SUV.
Of course, maybe he plays cello for the local chamber orchestra, and carpools with a few other cello players...
Would you care to enlighten us to the kind of project and segment of the industry? The dev teams I work with are all fairly small, and the overhead of coordinating a project with an overseas subcontractor would add a lot of cost. I'm guessing your project must be damn huge for them to need so many coders? How big is your QA section?
Depends on which phone companies you're talking about. The incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) make their money by charging customers outrageous monthly fees, and by charging long distance companies for terminating their calls at the local subscriber's telephone. They hate VOIP.
Carriers like AT&T, which sell primarily long distance, like VOIP since it saves them money, and could eventually allow them to bypass the ILECs entirely, since it turns voice calls into another internet data stream. They like VOIP.
Re:Can't work there? Why are they here?
on
No Americans Need Apply
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Get used to it. US workers cannot get jobs in Canada, Europe, Australia, etc. without first applying, and getting necessary work visas. To get a work visa, you must have an employer who has applied to get you in, and has demonstrated that there isn't local talent who could do the job you're being hired for.
Funny enough, that's pretty much the situation here (except for the illegal immigrants that is.) If you really want to work overseas, start applying for foreign citizenship/work permits.
Paper logs are important too. You don't want to be in a position where you have to read 50 pieces of archive media to find one file from a particular date/study. Ideally you want to keep track of where things are with some sort of database, but what if your machine gets wiped out?
Print out some sort of documentation, keep it in an accessible place, so that if your electronic recordkeeping gets screwed up, you can still make sense of your archives without having to reindex the whole thing from scratch.
If it can funnel cash into the hands of the municipality, it WILL be used.
The nasty thing about technology is that it makes taxing minority groups easier. No, not racial minorities (although it could do that.) I'm talking about the select population that uses X (substitue tobacco, alcohol, computer books, high speed processors, etc.) that when pissed off by a law or politician, is not big enough to threaten that politician's power. Find enough small groups to tax, and you can appear to be benevolent to the majority of taxpayers, and thus remain in power.
Why don't they do that now? In many cases the cost of implementing and enforcing taxes on small groups outweighs the potential revenues. However, it doesn't stop the politicians from dreaming up new ways of treating taxpayers like their own piggy bank (witness Florida and the proposed "asset tax" on network infrastructure...)
It's scary, but the libertarians aren't completely off the mark when it comes to the unchecked excesses of government...
Slashdot Mirror
Get a second processor. For making life easier and making the GUI more responsive when something is bogging down, it's well worth it if you can. At the very least, you can web surf while a process takes up 100% of one of the processors. My dual Celeron 500 would be more responsive than the 1+ghz machines I was working on, and recently I invested $300 to put together a dual Athlon machine (no need for a space heater this winter!)
Actually, it's even better for Apple. Instead of having customers make one or two purchases at a time, and having card processing fees eat into that, they have people purchasing maybe $15 or $20 worth of gift certificates at a time. The relative amount taken out by fees is much less, meaning more of the gross is retained by Apple.
All they need to do now is offically enable recording on the iPod (I'm not doing the left/right/left/right/a/b/a/b thing to enable it) and they'll have me for a new customer.
I'd rather just launch a big-ass lab with a good machine shop, a crew of engineers, plenty of consumables, and enough fuel for them to get to a Lagrange point. Let them build the equipment we'll need, and have robot ships grab asteroids for materials. Humankind has to get a toe-hold outside of the gravity well for us to get anywhere. And no, orbiting in LEO (especially with only a 3 man housekeeping crew) is not good enough.
On another slightly related note: Anyone know where I can buy a 802.11b frequency jammer?
I think they're called Microwave Ovens. You'll probably have to mod it to remove some safety features, but it should have the desired effect when turned on in the vicinity of any 802.11b receivers. You might want to invest in a pair of shielded briefs and a grounded tin-foil hat though...
Why pay USF to incumbent carriers to string more monopoly copper pair (even at a discount to low-income, educational/library and rural users) when new upstarts can deliver equivalent tech for even cheaper than that to everyone?
The one thing telecos can deliver on is reliability (big-ass banks of batteries power COs during outages) but even that can be shifted to local co-ops who can repackage service from wireless/voip carriers along with local copper pair or self-contained boxes with a big battery, wireless router, and VOIP to POTS converter inside.
I take it case-hardening a soft tooling die wouldn't help, due to the high pressures when stamping?
With a huge population, and the political will power to commit lots of state resources to a search, this might just be a case where there was enough genetic diversity to serve up a couple of dozen candidates for "superior" swimming. No genetic enhancement needed - just lots and lots of screening, and a lot of money to train the potentials... which is essentially what everyone else does, only the Chinese have a bigger potential pool of applicants, so to speak.
Good lord, you've just described the "welcome to the system" messages that sysadmins used to post for new users. Too bad more ISPs don't hold their users to any kind of social standard, or maybe we could have avoided the worst of the problems since the Internet was commercialized...
So the linux boxes are cheap. What about the interconnect equipment? Can a guy off the street spend a few hundred and build his own phone network, or is the marginal cost still significant?
:)
Hell, if it's cheap enough, I'll start my own wireless phone company
You seem to be ignoring something. If you subscribe to dedicated DSL you're already paying USF on the copper pair going to your house. If I'm going to get VOIP over those copper wires, why should I pay USF twice?
Think about it. Your argument could easily be applied to wireless - if you let everyone use 802.11b, they should have to pay USF because they might concievably drive established carriers out of business, thus driving down the amount available to fund phone service for schools, libraries, rural and disadvantaged residents, etc.
I'd rather use these new technologies to provide cost-effective service to everybody, rather than taxing it (and there by limiting its competitiveness) just because an established monopoly is a source of cheap revenue.
It's pretty clear that the politicians and the political parties are relying on passage of the Do Not Call list as one of their accomplishments to trump for the upcoming election season. They probably already had pre-written speeches and events planned for next week when the FTC list went into effect. Having a bought judge derail that probably pissed off a very large number of party handlers, especially when they already made clear to the telemarketing industry that this was a dead issue.
Color e-paper, great for display devices, able to replace LCDs, etc. Now when do these things go into mass production? I'd love to have flexible solar cells at pennies per yard, but I can't get those yet either.
I think that setting up VoIP in lieu of a traditional campus-based PSTN is genius. You consolidate your switching structure (everything ends up as ethernet packets), you enable cheap long-distance (these are college students, they're going to call home), and extremely scalable local communications (build a new dorm, put in cat-5 and hook them up to the campus backbone.)
The only problems I see are possible quality of service issues if the network is saturated with traffic... like that generated from filesharing.
The more they cut prices in order to stave off linux, the more evident it is how overpriced their list prices are. Instead of trying to compete on price, they should be trying to compete on features such as easy management, and security...
Unfortunately for Microsoft, security isn't exactly their strength, and neither is easy management now that Linux has matured so much.
I know at least of yesterday, UCLA was blocking that IP. Ruined a perfectly good demo to the guys at work about how evil Verisign is. :) However, (again, as of yesterday) UCLA was still passing wildcard DNS records in response to queries - we're just blocking access to the verisign site to generate a timeout, the bad DNS records ( with 64.94.110.11) are still coming through.
Thanks for the link. I'm sending an e-mail to Speakeasy to suggest that they switch over. I'll also talk to a few of the network gurus at work and see if we can come to a consensus as to what to do about VeriSign's sabotage.
Definitely, I'm setting up a local DNS at home and have it talk to the OpenNIC root until Speakeasy gets an OpenNIC box up and running.
In the meantime, 64.94.110.11 is blocked on my NAT - it takes a hell of a long time to time out, but it does the trick for now.
A blockbuster movie costs a lot of money to make, but it also has a much larger market to make its money back. After US theatre distribution there are foreign markets, pay-per-view, cable/satellite, DVD/Video, and syndication. Not to mention spin-offs like books, comics, television, sequels, and of course, the movie soundtrack. Eveything is synergistic - the movie drives book and album sales, album and music video drive (theoretically) more ticket sales, etc.
A band releasing a CD has a much more limited market to make their money back. Not to mention, that most of them aren't worth the money spent on promotion and all the payola, and their shelf life is at most a year or two.
This of course doesn't change the essential fact: most DVDs have more content than the average CD for about the same price, and are cheaper on that basis alone. And secondly, even if you do spend most of your time listening to music, most people do it from MP3s because they are more portable and easier to manage, so CDs (and having to go to a store, or get physical product mailed to you) are just an extra cost and inconvenience for many people with lots of disposable income. What's easier to manage? A 10 disc CD changer, or a hard drive with your entire CD collection on MP3?
I'd love to tell them to add me to their do-not-call list (which they are required to honor, by law.) Problem is, the assholes are using automated dialers and pre-recorded messages, so I have to wait until their 2min spiel is over before I have a chance to quickly copy down a 800 number. And they're doing this several times a week. AND these damn pieces of phone spam are clogging up my voicemail!
What causes more economic instability? Getting a bank of automated machines turned off (no live people in the phone spam I'm getting), or disrupting the work of a professional programmer working on medical image analysis software?
My bullshit meter pegged at the 100% claim also. You notice there's absolutely no discussion as to how those miraculous little window shades are wired together, or at what voltage they're running at. Are they all in series? If so, do they suffer from the traditional "shade one cell, knock out the whole string" problem?
Multi-junction tech is a cool idea for making existing designs more efficient. However, this whole revolutionizing building technology sounds like grant-related PR to me.
I'm assuming the original poster does shows. For shows you need amps, boards, cables, mics, and of course, the musical insturments themselves, all packed in oversized cases to make sure that your equipment survives airports, baggage handlers, and stage hands who have to set up and tear down. If you want to lug all that gear on the road yourself, you need a truck, or a SUV.
Of course, maybe he plays cello for the local chamber orchestra, and carpools with a few other cello players...
Would you care to enlighten us to the kind of project and segment of the industry? The dev teams I work with are all fairly small, and the overhead of coordinating a project with an overseas subcontractor would add a lot of cost. I'm guessing your project must be damn huge for them to need so many coders? How big is your QA section?
Depends on which phone companies you're talking about. The incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) make their money by charging customers outrageous monthly fees, and by charging long distance companies for terminating their calls at the local subscriber's telephone. They hate VOIP.
Carriers like AT&T, which sell primarily long distance, like VOIP since it saves them money, and could eventually allow them to bypass the ILECs entirely, since it turns voice calls into another internet data stream. They like VOIP.
Get used to it. US workers cannot get jobs in Canada, Europe, Australia, etc. without first applying, and getting necessary work visas. To get a work visa, you must have an employer who has applied to get you in, and has demonstrated that there isn't local talent who could do the job you're being hired for.
Funny enough, that's pretty much the situation here (except for the illegal immigrants that is.) If you really want to work overseas, start applying for foreign citizenship/work permits.
Paper logs are important too. You don't want to be in a position where you have to read 50 pieces of archive media to find one file from a particular date/study. Ideally you want to keep track of where things are with some sort of database, but what if your machine gets wiped out?
Print out some sort of documentation, keep it in an accessible place, so that if your electronic recordkeeping gets screwed up, you can still make sense of your archives without having to reindex the whole thing from scratch.
If it can funnel cash into the hands of the municipality, it WILL be used.
The nasty thing about technology is that it makes taxing minority groups easier. No, not racial minorities (although it could do that.) I'm talking about the select population that uses X (substitue tobacco, alcohol, computer books, high speed processors, etc.) that when pissed off by a law or politician, is not big enough to threaten that politician's power. Find enough small groups to tax, and you can appear to be benevolent to the majority of taxpayers, and thus remain in power.
Why don't they do that now? In many cases the cost of implementing and enforcing taxes on small groups outweighs the potential revenues. However, it doesn't stop the politicians from dreaming up new ways of treating taxpayers like their own piggy bank (witness Florida and the proposed "asset tax" on network infrastructure...)
It's scary, but the libertarians aren't completely off the mark when it comes to the unchecked excesses of government...