I'm the network engineer for a company considering setting up an engineering / design shop in India. I just got pricing for a DS3 Internet circuit there. HOLY SPANDEX, BATMAN!
A straight E1 circuit (2Mbps) to the Internet is about $4000/month, and about $3000 to install. (All prices in US dollars) Not cheap, but not bad.
A 2xE1 (4Mbps) jumps to over $10,000 per month.
Once you hit DS-3 which is scalable in the sense that once you have the circuit installed ($17,000 one-time fee), you can go from 0-3 Mbps to start all the way up to 45Mbps, your rates go from $16,000/month for the 3Mbps up to over $80,000 PER MONTH for the 45Mbps.
Depending on what you're doing there, the straight E1 isn't that bad, but you really can't pump that much data through it. The ds3 prices are through the roof. Plus, I've been told that the infrastructure there is so bad that shit fails/constantly/, so you'd better plan on two of everthing for redundancy.
Now if you're truly outsourcing all of this and therefore feel that you don't eed to worry about the sunk costs, fine, but when you pick the cheapest-of-the cheap bid, that most likely means that they have a crappy DSL out to the 'net that goes down at least once a week for 24 hours at a stretch. "sorry, couldn't {manage your network | take your callcenter calls | upload those CAD files you REALLY REALLY needed by 8AM the next morning} because our local loop was down because some dude running a backhoe trying to upgrade our highway system just yanked our a thousand strands of fiber."
Oh yeah, there's also the problem that India gov't managed-monolopy telcomm says that you can't terminate out-of-country VoIP calls into the Indian PSTN. So now you need either two phones on every desk, or softphones, or ??. Again, two infrastructures for them to manage. (If, of course, they feel that their wageslaves^H^H^H^H^H employees need to be able to call locally while at work.)
My guess is that as these hidden 'costs' start to surface, and as the cost of labor increases in India, people will start to move on to the next cheap area. Lather, rinse, repeat, wait a few years, and everything balances out (or so the economists in the group would say??)
The only drive on the list that I thought would have any value (other than, aww heck I'll say it, the "Wierd"-ness factor) was the iDisk, and only then for its small footprint. Specifically, I thought its size would allow it to be easily inserted into a system, left there for a few days to collect data, and then recovered without anyone being the wiser. You'd need some time of AutoRun / rootkit to install a keystroke logger onto the host system, or perhaps a version of DSniff to capture interesting passwords going across the NICs. I see PCs in big retail stores dedicated employee-use that would be perfect candidates for this type of hack.
Now, of course I'm NOT advocating this at all. Heck I'm a Security/Network admin, but these are the types of backdoors that bite you in the ass if you don't properly plan for them. My guess is that systems like this that have some type of management access but are not physically secure should have USB disabled via default (i.e. Group Policy), but that would be in bigger shops with a large-ish IT staff and at least some sembelence of a security policy. My bet is that your doctor's office DOESN'T, and that with a device like this you'd be able to accomplish a suprising amount of data collection without anyone knowing. Anyone out there in the SecAdmin side (or even BlackHat side) like to chime in?
Ok, sure! (And sorry in advance to Break.com, formerly known as big-boys.com, for the/.'ing. Its a great site with video clips of random, guy-type things.)
I used to work in a scrum-based web development shop.
Meetings went something like this: Go around the room, and say #1 - what am i going to do today, #2 - whats in my way of getting #1 done. One two people were allowed to talk, the person who's turn it was, and the manager in charge of the meeting. If another person in the meeting was the cause of someone's #2, the manager would turn to them, give them (and only them) them the chance to respond. Lather rinse repeat.
There was no "I did this yesterday" because a) we supposedly heard about that the day before, b) the assumption was that you got it done.
Even with at least three different projects going on, and maybe 15-20 people in the room, we were out of there in 30-45 minutes. Any major issues were taken offline so that the rest of us could get back to work.
We usually had only one meeting a day, sometimes two. I found it worked extremely well with a minimal amount of thrashing. We might have been using a modified version of scrum; can't remember - those were dotcom days, everything's still a blur.
I have to totally agree with the parent. First off, I'm definitely 'old school' - I played PacMan, Defender, Galaga, etc, when I was 5 years old in the ARCADE folks. (Yes, kids, people used to congregate in places and all play video games in the same room, because at that time home consoles weren't even invented yet. The Atari 2600 was like a godsend "you mean I can play games, AT HOME?!?" I'll never forget the Sunday morning, while playing what must have been my hundredth hour of ADVENTURE, when I found the Magic Dot, and revealed the secret room.)
But I digress. I've played Quake, Quake II, all versions of Doom, face it I'm a FPS junkie, and NOTHING has come close to RTCW multiplayer. Its a combination of really good maps, great action, and an even balance in those maps that doesn't favor one team over another. I played the single-player version at least 3 times all the way through, just because the overall combination of visuals, music, and gameplay really made it an enjoyable experience. The level of detail (at the time it was released) was incredibly impressive, and dammit it was just fun to play. Multiplayer maps are rotate quickly, have fun yet challenging objectives, and I freaking LOVE the scripted taunts "The Enemy is weakenedt!" and "Jahvol!"
I know a lot of people bash Doom3, but I've enjoyed playing that too, if for nothing else but the eye candy. Yeah, I hate it as much as the next guy when a newly cleared room has an enemy spawn out of nowhere, but you have to admit that the HELL level is bar none unparalleled from ANY game out there. Its SICK and love it. I play it nowadays with the cheat mode ON, so I can just play it and enjoy the graphics and ultra-darkness of it all, without worring about dying. I've you're into FPS, Doom3 and RTCW are probably the two best out there.
My experience with the first release of 1.5 was good overall, with the exception of one bug that forced me to roll back to the stable 1.0.7.
For some reason, some hyperlinks would 'crash' a tab and the page on that tab would be all grey, nothing else. I couldn't close out the tab and it just stayed there until I finally closed out the entire browser window. I could continue to open other tabs and work, but I usually keep Firefox going for a week+ with all of the websites I've been visiting in tabbed windows, and having 'dead' tabs got really frustrating. (not to mention that, if I really wanted to get to that website, I had to open up *shudder* IE.)
anyone else have this problem (and/or do you know if it was addressed in RC1? I didn't see anything specific in the release notes.
I read somewhere on the Internet that, if while you're reading a book on Intelligent Design, you start Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" CD on EXACTLY the 3rd page, like, all these different things synch up and the WHOLE THING makes sense.
I find the $$ savings by using the card can be significant, especially if you use the discounts to stock up on regularly used products. I usually 'save' $10 - $20 on an $100 - $125 per week grocery bill.
What I do to foil those data-mining bastards is this: get SEVERAL of the cards, put down fake addresses, swap cards with friends (so one week your buying habits are tofu, green tea, and soy milk, the next week (when you friend has the card) its nothing but Coke, Doritos, and frozen pepperoni pizzas.)
You get the $, keep your purchasing habits (somewhat) private, and drive some poor intern crazy trying to decipher what the $!*%! is WRONG with this person?!:-)
The attitude toward a land line is that it's for old people and businesses.
And for, d'oh!, anyone with a home fire-alarm / security system that's tied into a central office. I'm sure you can get it to work, but does it really pass the WAF*?
Slashdot Mirror
No, but they are pining for the Fjord's.
You mean there are Lord of the Rings books?!?
I'm the network engineer for a company considering setting up an engineering / design shop in India. I just got pricing for a DS3 Internet circuit there. HOLY SPANDEX, BATMAN!
/constantly/, so you'd better plan on two of everthing for redundancy.
A straight E1 circuit (2Mbps) to the Internet is about $4000/month, and about $3000 to install. (All prices in US dollars) Not cheap, but not bad.
A 2xE1 (4Mbps) jumps to over $10,000 per month.
Once you hit DS-3 which is scalable in the sense that once you have the circuit installed ($17,000 one-time fee), you can go from 0-3 Mbps to start all the way up to 45Mbps, your rates go from $16,000/month for the 3Mbps up to over $80,000 PER MONTH for the 45Mbps.
Depending on what you're doing there, the straight E1 isn't that bad, but you really can't pump that much data through it. The ds3 prices are through the roof. Plus, I've been told that the infrastructure there is so bad that shit fails
Now if you're truly outsourcing all of this and therefore feel that you don't eed to worry about the sunk costs, fine, but when you pick the cheapest-of-the cheap bid, that most likely means that they have a crappy DSL out to the 'net that goes down at least once a week for 24 hours at a stretch. "sorry, couldn't {manage your network | take your callcenter calls | upload those CAD files you REALLY REALLY needed by 8AM the next morning} because our local loop was down because some dude running a backhoe trying to upgrade our highway system just yanked our a thousand strands of fiber."
Oh yeah, there's also the problem that India gov't managed-monolopy telcomm says that you can't terminate out-of-country VoIP calls into the Indian PSTN. So now you need either two phones on every desk, or softphones, or ??. Again, two infrastructures for them to manage. (If, of course, they feel that their wageslaves^H^H^H^H^H employees need to be able to call locally while at work.)
My guess is that as these hidden 'costs' start to surface, and as the cost of labor increases in India, people will start to move on to the next cheap area. Lather, rinse, repeat, wait a few years, and everything balances out (or so the economists in the group would say??)
The only drive on the list that I thought would have any value (other than, aww heck I'll say it, the "Wierd"-ness factor) was the iDisk, and only then for its small footprint. Specifically, I thought its size would allow it to be easily inserted into a system, left there for a few days to collect data, and then recovered without anyone being the wiser. You'd need some time of AutoRun / rootkit to install a keystroke logger onto the host system, or perhaps a version of DSniff to capture interesting passwords going across the NICs. I see PCs in big retail stores dedicated employee-use that would be perfect candidates for this type of hack.
Now, of course I'm NOT advocating this at all. Heck I'm a Security/Network admin, but these are the types of backdoors that bite you in the ass if you don't properly plan for them. My guess is that systems like this that have some type of management access but are not physically secure should have USB disabled via default (i.e. Group Policy), but that would be in bigger shops with a large-ish IT staff and at least some sembelence of a security policy. My bet is that your doctor's office DOESN'T, and that with a device like this you'd be able to accomplish a suprising amount of data collection without anyone knowing. Anyone out there in the SecAdmin side (or even BlackHat side) like to chime in?
Q: How do you get an old lady to say 'FUCK'? A: Yell "Bingo!"
Ok, sure! (And sorry in advance to Break.com, formerly known as big-boys.com, for the /.'ing. Its a great site with video clips of random, guy-type things.)
Fat guy breaks copier:
http://www.break.com/articles/copybusted.html
Hot Chick. 'nuff said.
http://www.break.com/articles/copierup.html
That might mean being 'outed' that you like Celine Dion. Thats a risk I'm just not ready to take.
You mean John Cleese's lemmings?
So I guess what you're saying is that american ISP's are So-So Net.
I used to work in a scrum-based web development shop.
Meetings went something like this:
Go around the room, and say #1 - what am i going to do today, #2 - whats in my way of getting #1 done. One two people were allowed to talk, the person who's turn it was, and the manager in charge of the meeting. If another person in the meeting was the cause of someone's #2, the manager would turn to them, give them (and only them) them the chance to respond. Lather rinse repeat.
There was no "I did this yesterday" because a) we supposedly heard about that the day before, b) the assumption was that you got it done.
Even with at least three different projects going on, and maybe 15-20 people in the room, we were out of there in 30-45 minutes. Any major issues were taken offline so that the rest of us could get back to work.
We usually had only one meeting a day, sometimes two. I found it worked extremely well with a minimal amount of thrashing. We might have been using a modified version of scrum; can't remember - those were dotcom days, everything's still a blur.
I have to totally agree with the parent. First off, I'm definitely 'old school' - I played PacMan, Defender, Galaga, etc, when I was 5 years old in the ARCADE folks. (Yes, kids, people used to congregate in places and all play video games in the same room, because at that time home consoles weren't even invented yet. The Atari 2600 was like a godsend "you mean I can play games, AT HOME?!?" I'll never forget the Sunday morning, while playing what must have been my hundredth hour of ADVENTURE, when I found the Magic Dot, and revealed the secret room.) But I digress. I've played Quake, Quake II, all versions of Doom, face it I'm a FPS junkie, and NOTHING has come close to RTCW multiplayer. Its a combination of really good maps, great action, and an even balance in those maps that doesn't favor one team over another. I played the single-player version at least 3 times all the way through, just because the overall combination of visuals, music, and gameplay really made it an enjoyable experience. The level of detail (at the time it was released) was incredibly impressive, and dammit it was just fun to play. Multiplayer maps are rotate quickly, have fun yet challenging objectives, and I freaking LOVE the scripted taunts "The Enemy is weakenedt!" and "Jahvol!" I know a lot of people bash Doom3, but I've enjoyed playing that too, if for nothing else but the eye candy. Yeah, I hate it as much as the next guy when a newly cleared room has an enemy spawn out of nowhere, but you have to admit that the HELL level is bar none unparalleled from ANY game out there. Its SICK and love it. I play it nowadays with the cheat mode ON, so I can just play it and enjoy the graphics and ultra-darkness of it all, without worring about dying. I've you're into FPS, Doom3 and RTCW are probably the two best out there.
I've told you a million times - DON'T EXAGGERATE!
My experience with the first release of 1.5 was good overall, with the exception of one bug that forced me to roll back to the stable 1.0.7. For some reason, some hyperlinks would 'crash' a tab and the page on that tab would be all grey, nothing else. I couldn't close out the tab and it just stayed there until I finally closed out the entire browser window. I could continue to open other tabs and work, but I usually keep Firefox going for a week+ with all of the websites I've been visiting in tabbed windows, and having 'dead' tabs got really frustrating. (not to mention that, if I really wanted to get to that website, I had to open up *shudder* IE.) anyone else have this problem (and/or do you know if it was addressed in RC1? I didn't see anything specific in the release notes.
So anyone who gets infected automatically qualifies for this t-shirt
I read somewhere on the Internet that, if while you're reading a book on Intelligent Design, you start Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" CD on EXACTLY the 3rd page, like, all these different things synch up and the WHOLE THING makes sense.
He infected /himself/? I thought that was what TA's and Post-grads were for.
"If you're bored then you're boring."
I've found this to be a pretty good assessment of people.
Slashdot, Contributing the to Deliquency of Deliquents. News for Deliquents, stuff that kinda sorta sorta but not-really matters.
From "Pretty Woman": "I miss keys" - Richard Gere's character
What I do to foil those data-mining bastards is this: get SEVERAL of the cards, put down fake addresses, swap cards with friends (so one week your buying habits are tofu, green tea, and soy milk, the next week (when you friend has the card) its nothing but Coke, Doritos, and frozen pepperoni pizzas.)
You get the $, keep your purchasing habits (somewhat) private, and drive some poor intern crazy trying to decipher what the $!*%! is WRONG with this person?!
**thunk**
I think somebody at O'Reilly had a different implemtation for it.
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
And then they make it sport.
And for, d'oh!, anyone with a home fire-alarm / security system that's tied into a central office. I'm sure you can get it to work, but does it really pass the WAF*?
* Wife Acceptance Factor
You mean the stench of evil, foreboding soundtrack, and psycho-esque "scree!scree!scree!" doesn't give it away?