What I was refering to was the fact that the missiles did not appear to be moving in a straight line, rather, they launched straight out from the Cylon ship then started arcing to their destinations. As has been said many times before by greater minds than mine, there's nothing to bank against in space.
I am working from memory regarding the arcing, but that was the impression I had when I was watching it.
I'd LOVE to see the cableTV companies compete like the phone companies. I guarantee that prices would come down, services would increase, and the cableTV companies would actually do something to retain you as a customer.
Case in point: I live in a suburb of St. Louis, Maryland Heights, which has competition. There's the local "Cable America" outlet, and there's Charter. Charter recently tried to buy out Cable America because "it would be good for the local economy" but we voted them down. Anyway, cable bills run around $10-$15 cheaper than surrounding communities, we were a test market for cable delivered HDTV and they just rolled out HDTV service for the price of renting a box ($5/month).
Of course, I got DirecTV when I didn't live here and keep getting myself stuck in their contracts.
Nowadays you would need an enormous amount of tape(s) to fully back up 300GB of data.
Well, as you mentioned, there are 80GB (compressed) tapes out there, so theoreticaly it would only take four. However, in practice, it would probably take as many as 8, assuming that the data was already compressed. There are probably larger tapes and drives out there by now too. Even so, it wouldn't help the average consumer much.
The real problem is price. I have an HP surestore DLT autoloader that uses 40/80 tapes and it cost us a buttload of money. There's no way the average consumer could afford it. A DVD burner would be OK, but only to get your word processing documents and whatnot off, you couldn't realisticly perform a full restore from DVD -- well, some of us did do stuff like that on floppies, but that's why we have bodies in our basements today. Larger companies employ backup operators simply to swap out tapes. I don't know about most people, but I certainly can't afford to hire someone to back up my pr0n-and-southpark collection.
About the only thing you could do is buy a couple extra 300GB drives and put them in some sort of external case.
I'm all for innovation, but seriously, who needs a 300GB hard disks except for pr0n c0lLeCt0R5, warez d00ds and RAID junkies?
Well, I'd like to put one in my Tivo. I'm building up quite a collection of concerts off of Direct TV's free channel.
Also, I don't have one, but an HDTV recorder uses up around 10GB/hr, so even at 300GB, that's only 30 hours or so.
To say nothing about data archival and whatnot (I've got a document imaging database that's well over 50GB that's been in use for less than a year, and we're just now ramping up to full speed on it. I'll need one of these puppies soon.)
I do agree, however, that if you're relying on it for any sort of "serious" work, you'd be better off mirroring, at least.
I don't know if I would rely on a free service for a business. You don't have any uptime gaurantees, and you don't know that it's going to be there tomorrow. If you don't absolutely have to have Internet access you could get away with it, but if you rely on it at all for income you may be setting yourself up for a huge disapointment.
Some of our closing docs are delivered via SwiftView. I appreciate the tip, but I've got beefs with SwiftView too (I have to have a special print driver set up & tweaked just for SwiftView.)
If I were an IT manager, this is exactly what I would do.
I am an IT manager, and it's not as easy as you think. First, you have core applications, the things that run your business. If you have a development staff, great! However, for the rest of the smaller guys out there we rely on a third party for our core software.
I work for a mortgage broker. I've got our infrastructure running on Linux, but we have to have Windows on the desktop so that our loan origination software will run. (I recently found out that they're switching their software to a.Net platform, so I can't even use Linux on the server if I stick with this software. The sales drone was all uppity about it "you're the only one that hasn't been excited about that." Yeah, I'm the only one who has to drop a few tens of thousands of dollars on an MS infrastructure....)
Anyway, back to my point. This is a wonderful move for Ford, and hopefully will add a little more weight to the cause, but not everybody can do it, unfortunately.
personally, I like to stick to my Lexus LX470 Luxury SUV.. it makes people driving those pathetic little hybrids pretty pissed off when I zoom by them and cut them off..
I used to have a "Are you fit for a Lexus?" quiz on my personal page.
You can't seriously claim to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and at the same time reject applicants based on where they used to work. I know there's not a law but come on, that's the spirit of EOE.
Sean McMullen wrote a trilogy about a post-apocalyptic future where electricity is verbotten. To compensate, they use people trained in mathmatics as slave labor in a human powered device called a "calculor". It was ok. The first book is called Souls in the Great Machine if you're interested. Even though I know you were joking...
Excuse me? The toilets wouldn't flush? My toilets have always worked just fine during power outages.
A lot of people still draw their water from wells, not from a city supplied source. So when the power goes out, so do their pumps. So, yeah, you can flush once but after that you're sort of out of luck.
811493. That's a number I'll never forget. I used to use the Auto Update feature too, until that patch came out.
When my machines applied that patch, the very next day they slowed to a crawl. Unusable crawl. Clicking start & Run would take literaly 5 minutes. It turns out that there was an incompatibility between that patch and our antivirus software. It took them a couple of days to figure that out, even though I told them that was the case as soon as we got it.
Anyway, don't automaticaly install updates. Stay up on the patches, sure. Deploy them in some other way (I use the domain log on scripts) when you're sure they won't screw anything up. Do your testing as quickly as possible.
I'm thinking that that was sarcasm, but I'm not sure so I'll say this:
Before I got this gig as a permanent systems administrator (and one man IT department) I was a traveling engineer for a systems integrator. Oh, the things I'd see. Mostly small shops (less than 50 people) would be like this, some guy who happened to be "good at computers" (whatever the hell that means) got the job of admin. This would usually mean one of two things: he was a tinkerer and would get himself in trouble or he did nothing at all (and get himself in trouble.) There was never any security plan. No DRP. No AUP. Everything was willy-nilly. I would come in and try to explain the necessity of doing things The Right Way[tm] and would get blank stares in return.
Oh well. I've got my own network now that's proactively maintained. Of course, since I'm not running around trying to patch and upgrade today it probably seems like I'm not doing my job, even though all of that had been taken care of before it became a problem. Sigh. There'll be some guy out there today who gets a raise because he "worked hard" to patch machines that should have been patched in July. Those of us who did could laugh, but it's too damn sad.
It's not so much that they employ unskilled people to do it, it's simply that Joe is wicked-mad-skilled with the AutoCAD so, well, Joe is now the admin.
When a properly trained administrator comes along and wants a job at more than Joe is getting, to do something that "Joe can do in a few minutes a day." Well, there's your problem.
Then Blaster happens, they call in a contractor at $175/hr to clean it up and Joe goes back to showing people how to install Webshots. It's not really Joe's fault.
Of course, then there are those who are hired to be admins, and when you give them a courtesy call because you're getting probed by their exchange box they explain it can't possibly be from them because Norton was installed when they set up the system. Four years ago. And they haven't touched it since.
Then the system would look for the file that was requested on lemmings2:. If it couldn't find it, it would return the equivilent of "file not found" or whatever.
Without regressing to my comp.sys.amiga.advocacy days, the biggest difference was ejecting. With the Mac you had to use "special->eject disk" or something, which was useless when the computer crashed. The Amiga, on the other hand, had an eject button (for when it, too, crashed). Also, the ability to have up to 4 drives in a chain was a plus, especially with disk based games that had a lot of floppies.
Otherwise, there's not much difference. But we weren't talking about the Mac, now were we?:)
Re:Parent point valid despite foul language
on
Worst Linux Annoyances?
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· Score: 2, Informative
You have to remember when this was. The Amiga was released in 1985. At the time, you were lucky to get a 16 color CGA card in you PC and Windows wasn't out yet (the Amiga shipped in September 1985, Windows 1.0 November 1985 -- damn I'm a geek), and hard drives were expensive and notoriously unreliable. The fact that you could pop a floppy in the drive and have it come up on your desktop (you had a desktop! in 1985!) with no user intervention was a big thing.
Now, in regards to how the Amiga handled it versus the "Windows Way[tm]" is that, as another poster pointed out, you could put the floppy in any drive and reference it by a name, not a drive letter. So a program would look for lemmings2: and you could put it in any drive and find it. This is something you *still* can't do today with Windows (or Linux for that matter). My daughters Sims can't function if I don't put it in the optical drive it was installed from.
Slashdot Mirror
As an aside to my first post:
Are there minor laws of physics that are OK to break?
Yes, officer, I am aware I was creating matter out of nothing. No sir, I won't do it again.
What I was refering to was the fact that the missiles did not appear to be moving in a straight line, rather, they launched straight out from the Cylon ship then started arcing to their destinations. As has been said many times before by greater minds than mine, there's nothing to bank against in space.
I am working from memory regarding the arcing, but that was the impression I had when I was watching it.
but they zoom WAY too much...as if there's a camcorder out in space shooting everything.
That's the effect they were going for. They wanted a "documentary" feel to the direction.
I saw a "making of" or whatever it was. My Tivo recorded it. Stop looking at me like that.
no major laws of physics were broken except maybe FTL travel
Um, how about those arcing missiles the Cylons shot out? Looked great, definately impossible.
I'm sure there are others, that's just the first one that came to mind.
Just make a tin foil Yamaka and claim your Jewish.
Ok, I want that one.
I'd LOVE to see the cableTV companies compete like the phone companies. I guarantee that prices would come down, services would increase, and the cableTV companies would actually do something to retain you as a customer.
Case in point: I live in a suburb of St. Louis, Maryland Heights, which has competition. There's the local "Cable America" outlet, and there's Charter. Charter recently tried to buy out Cable America because "it would be good for the local economy" but we voted them down. Anyway, cable bills run around $10-$15 cheaper than surrounding communities, we were a test market for cable delivered HDTV and they just rolled out HDTV service for the price of renting a box ($5/month).
Of course, I got DirecTV when I didn't live here and keep getting myself stuck in their contracts.
Nowadays you would need an enormous amount of tape(s) to fully back up 300GB of data.
Well, as you mentioned, there are 80GB (compressed) tapes out there, so theoreticaly it would only take four. However, in practice, it would probably take as many as 8, assuming that the data was already compressed. There are probably larger tapes and drives out there by now too. Even so, it wouldn't help the average consumer much.
The real problem is price. I have an HP surestore DLT autoloader that uses 40/80 tapes and it cost us a buttload of money. There's no way the average consumer could afford it. A DVD burner would be OK, but only to get your word processing documents and whatnot off, you couldn't realisticly perform a full restore from DVD -- well, some of us did do stuff like that on floppies, but that's why we have bodies in our basements today. Larger companies employ backup operators simply to swap out tapes. I don't know about most people, but I certainly can't afford to hire someone to back up my pr0n-and-southpark collection.
About the only thing you could do is buy a couple extra 300GB drives and put them in some sort of external case.
I'm all for innovation, but seriously, who needs a 300GB hard disks except for pr0n c0lLeCt0R5, warez d00ds and RAID junkies?
Well, I'd like to put one in my Tivo. I'm building up quite a collection of concerts off of Direct TV's free channel.
Also, I don't have one, but an HDTV recorder uses up around 10GB/hr, so even at 300GB, that's only 30 hours or so.
To say nothing about data archival and whatnot (I've got a document imaging database that's well over 50GB that's been in use for less than a year, and we're just now ramping up to full speed on it. I'll need one of these puppies soon.)
I do agree, however, that if you're relying on it for any sort of "serious" work, you'd be better off mirroring, at least.
This is Slashdot, if you wanna find B1FF!!!11 read comments at -1. He's been here all along.
I don't know if I would rely on a free service for a business. You don't have any uptime gaurantees, and you don't know that it's going to be there tomorrow. If you don't absolutely have to have Internet access you could get away with it, but if you rely on it at all for income you may be setting yourself up for a huge disapointment.
Good luck with your business though, seriously.
I can't say it's helped draw in business yet, but it's here.
Some of our closing docs are delivered via SwiftView. I appreciate the tip, but I've got beefs with SwiftView too (I have to have a special print driver set up & tweaked just for SwiftView.)
Seriously, thanks though.
If I were an IT manager, this is exactly what I would do.
.Net platform, so I can't even use Linux on the server if I stick with this software. The sales drone was all uppity about it "you're the only one that hasn't been excited about that." Yeah, I'm the only one who has to drop a few tens of thousands of dollars on an MS infrastructure....)
I am an IT manager, and it's not as easy as you think. First, you have core applications, the things that run your business. If you have a development staff, great! However, for the rest of the smaller guys out there we rely on a third party for our core software.
I work for a mortgage broker. I've got our infrastructure running on Linux, but we have to have Windows on the desktop so that our loan origination software will run. (I recently found out that they're switching their software to a
Anyway, back to my point. This is a wonderful move for Ford, and hopefully will add a little more weight to the cause, but not everybody can do it, unfortunately.
personally, I like to stick to my Lexus LX470 Luxury SUV.. it makes people driving those pathetic little hybrids pretty pissed off when I zoom by them and cut them off..
I used to have a "Are you fit for a Lexus?" quiz on my personal page.
Typical question: do you smile when babies cry?
Hey Chrisd,
You can't seriously claim to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and at the same time reject applicants based on where they used to work. I know there's not a law but come on, that's the spirit of EOE.
[about a beowulf of abacuses]
Sean McMullen wrote a trilogy about a post-apocalyptic future where electricity is verbotten. To compensate, they use people trained in mathmatics as slave labor in a human powered device called a "calculor". It was ok. The first book is called Souls in the Great Machine if you're interested. Even though I know you were joking...
(Mods: this isn't off topic. It's a really geeky joke.)
Excuse me? The toilets wouldn't flush? My toilets have always worked just fine during power outages.
A lot of people still draw their water from wells, not from a city supplied source. So when the power goes out, so do their pumps. So, yeah, you can flush once but after that you're sort of out of luck.
811493. That's a number I'll never forget. I used to use the Auto Update feature too, until that patch came out.
When my machines applied that patch, the very next day they slowed to a crawl. Unusable crawl. Clicking start & Run would take literaly 5 minutes. It turns out that there was an incompatibility between that patch and our antivirus software. It took them a couple of days to figure that out, even though I told them that was the case as soon as we got it.
Anyway, don't automaticaly install updates. Stay up on the patches, sure. Deploy them in some other way (I use the domain log on scripts) when you're sure they won't screw anything up. Do your testing as quickly as possible.
I'm thinking that that was sarcasm, but I'm not sure so I'll say this:
Before I got this gig as a permanent systems administrator (and one man IT department) I was a traveling engineer for a systems integrator. Oh, the things I'd see. Mostly small shops (less than 50 people) would be like this, some guy who happened to be "good at computers" (whatever the hell that means) got the job of admin. This would usually mean one of two things: he was a tinkerer and would get himself in trouble or he did nothing at all (and get himself in trouble.) There was never any security plan. No DRP. No AUP. Everything was willy-nilly. I would come in and try to explain the necessity of doing things The Right Way[tm] and would get blank stares in return.
Oh well. I've got my own network now that's proactively maintained. Of course, since I'm not running around trying to patch and upgrade today it probably seems like I'm not doing my job, even though all of that had been taken care of before it became a problem. Sigh. There'll be some guy out there today who gets a raise because he "worked hard" to patch machines that should have been patched in July. Those of us who did could laugh, but it's too damn sad.
It's not so much that they employ unskilled people to do it, it's simply that Joe is wicked-mad-skilled with the AutoCAD so, well, Joe is now the admin.
When a properly trained administrator comes along and wants a job at more than Joe is getting, to do something that "Joe can do in a few minutes a day." Well, there's your problem.
Then Blaster happens, they call in a contractor at $175/hr to clean it up and Joe goes back to showing people how to install Webshots. It's not really Joe's fault.
Of course, then there are those who are hired to be admins, and when you give them a courtesy call because you're getting probed by their exchange box they explain it can't possibly be from them because Norton was installed when they set up the system. Four years ago. And they haven't touched it since.
Then the system would look for the file that was requested on lemmings2:. If it couldn't find it, it would return the equivilent of "file not found" or whatever.
That has been accomplished in experimental patches to Linux.
Cool. You don't happen to have a link for those (if they still exist) would you?
I can think of quite a few ways to use that, even if it doesn't make it into the mainstream kernel...
Without regressing to my comp.sys.amiga.advocacy days, the biggest difference was ejecting. With the Mac you had to use "special->eject disk" or something, which was useless when the computer crashed. The Amiga, on the other hand, had an eject button (for when it, too, crashed). Also, the ability to have up to 4 drives in a chain was a plus, especially with disk based games that had a lot of floppies.
:)
Otherwise, there's not much difference. But we weren't talking about the Mac, now were we?
You have to remember when this was. The Amiga was released in 1985. At the time, you were lucky to get a 16 color CGA card in you PC and Windows wasn't out yet (the Amiga shipped in September 1985, Windows 1.0 November 1985 -- damn I'm a geek), and hard drives were expensive and notoriously unreliable. The fact that you could pop a floppy in the drive and have it come up on your desktop (you had a desktop! in 1985!) with no user intervention was a big thing.
Now, in regards to how the Amiga handled it versus the "Windows Way[tm]" is that, as another poster pointed out, you could put the floppy in any drive and reference it by a name, not a drive letter. So a program would look for lemmings2: and you could put it in any drive and find it. This is something you *still* can't do today with Windows (or Linux for that matter). My daughters Sims can't function if I don't put it in the optical drive it was installed from.