The big issue is that it can get huge. They designed the filesystem so that it can handle an obscene amount of drive space and filesizes that make my mind feel a bit odd to comprehend. It is designed to hold up to moores law for another thirty years. Most Everything is 128 bit addressing. To put 128 bit addressing into some sort of perspective you could digitize the positions of all the protons/neutrons/electrons in your body to a unreasonably tight tolerance 10^-9 ang with vector data included, pump that much information down a wire every second, and not max out the filesystem in your lifetime.
The issue that needs to be addressed is small files. The problem is that there are more and more small files in a system.. This becomes less efficient as drived attain higher throughput, as seek times are still kinda slow. assume a seek time of 4 ms, in order to read a file, the head must seek the filesystem ( a few times), find the file offset and seek the file start. so with just seek time youve used 8-32 ms to get a file. A one MB file takes 16ms to transfer on a common drive (Maxtor 320 SataII $79 60MB/s) so 500K files spend half of the time seeking at a minimum.
However there are huge chunks of files that are 0-150k on a drive these still take the 8ms to access. Copying 50 thousand of these small files across a network is a monster, tarring them is a monster, even though you might only have a couple gigs of data. Reiser4 had a cute solution of putting small files directly into the file-system to reduce the seek time. My cute solution was to use a usb stick to hold the small files. But most file systems dont have a good solution yet. So small files become the inefficient moster of the server room.
Have you actually tried doing this? Or are you just mouthing off with no experience? If you ever want to scale up beyond specialized dedicated clusters, there are whole new classes of problem that have to be addressed. (For example, security becomes suddenly all encompassing, and many of the cheap hacks like SSL and VPNs either don't really apply or need a lot of enhancements.) Of course, there are people working on dealing with these problems; there's at least 4 different standards bodies dealing with various aspects. Some you will even have heard of (IETF, W3C)...
Well I did have dedicated clusters so I was able to mitigate the security issues. I had all of the source to all of the engines that were being used, so that the engines would deflate as needed, and delay inflation as needed. it was cludgy but workable.
Oh noes! Software doesn't get churned out immediately upon the suggestion of parallel programming! Programmers might actually be debugging their own code!
There's nothing new here: just somebody being impatient. Parallel code is getting written. It is not difficult, nor are the tools inadequate. What we have is non-programmers not understanding that it takes a while to write new code.
If anything, that the world hasn't exploded with massive amounts of parallel code is a good thing: it means that proper engineering practice is being used to develop sound programs, and the jonny-come-lately programmers aren't able to fake their way into the marketplace with crappy code, like they did 10 years ago.
1. Parallel code is being written, agreed, but it is specialty engines that are getting it. General purpose parallel code isnt out there.. we just have pet projects that include parallelism but for the most part are ported serial code
2. Parallel code is a monster to write. I'm not talking simple scatter-gather data spreaders. Imaging Adobe photoshop running across a 400 machine cluster, handling hundreds of users at a time. The data concurency issues, data residence, locking, message handling, message reordering Total bloody nightmare...., If youve parallelized a markov model it doesn't really compare.
3. The tools arent adequate. tracing a data race, or deadlock in a cluster is a beast. MPI and PVM are nice but are really narrow in the scope that they handle problems.
4. It isnt just non-programmers.. Parallel is a whole different scale of complexity... Almost everything I see is a "parallelize the brute zones of a specialty engine once it works in serial"..... Its an important baby step and it really blows non-programmers for a loop. But we are a far sight from having an implicitly parallel version of MS-word.
5. Parallel isnt new, dual cpu boxes have been in userspace since the late 90's, it has been mostly ignored by applications. The use of network resources is horribly behind the times. The ability to aggregate resources on the fly is a total joke compared to where it should be.
My take is role play them through senarios. Because a gruff boss can be good or bad, same with a pleasant boss. You want to know when there is a looming deadline what your boss is going to say about you staying home with your sick kid. Or if the new co-worker has a bad case of body odor/bad attitude/offensive personality. Or if the higher ups are cranky about a change that was made by the employee for various reasons (managers insistance/ legal/ policy change). And how the manager handles higher level employees who are violating policy. What the manager considers priorities when hiring a new employee, and what the manager does to remove those employees from his/her workgroup (transfer/fire/make it a living hell so they quit/write them up over dinky violations until HR fires them.).
With most managment your looking for someone who is keeping an eye on whats about to spill all over their reports, and nudges them out of the way. Watch out for the managers who take advantage of the more "agreeable" employees, when it becomes time to reciprocate "agreeable" employees feel betrayed when their vacations get "bumped" or time off requests are rejected.
Should you be one of the souls up at a reasonable hour of the day you may notice that people are twitching from some form of legal stimulants. Chocolate has many caffeine, and dextromorphan.. mmmm.. Anyway its WAY bigger than that. The whole thing is a request from the industry to call "alternate make foods" the real deal.. So Barbeque beef doesnt need to be heated over coals anymore. Country Style ham doesnt need to sit in brine for the prescribed number of hours. Twinkies could even be filled with a biodegradable substance. Pretty much as long as its safe and "close enough" to the real thing they want to be able to use common moniker.
So protien powder, vegetable powder, binders and colouring could be called cheddar cheese. Without actual milk product. or maybe just whey protein. Basically its happened to most food already, now they just want to knock down the last bastion which is "standardized food"
Unfortunatly, that peanut butter has been changed too. Peanut oil is expensive, so it is removed from peanut butter and replaced with soy/corn/canola/motor oil (oops motor oil is too expensive.)
so try and replace peanut butter with Peanut-Vegetable Margarine and then try to stomach it..double points if both use olestra.
I am a bigger is better fan, so 30inches isnt too big by any measure.. but I'll take a couple 22inchers any day for the same price.. add a couple articulated arms so that you can adjust to needs. Having a 16x9 turned to 9x16 for word is fantastic.. Then dual pages work really nice if theyre both flipped.. for games having a super wide field of view is advantageous. For coding having a run window that shows graphics in 16x9 and a code window thats 9x16 is the way to go.
> Animals deserve rights when they can specifically ask for them. The moment a chimp makes a sign on its own asking for equal treatment, I say we give it to them. Until then, it's monkey brains for dinner...
Exactly! And the same applies to human babies. I say human rights starts at age 2. It certainly shuts up those anti-abortionists.
Exactly! And the same applies to the French. It certainly shuts up Quebec.
There are quite a few Flying spaghetti monster believers out there.... and If you know anything about the religion, it rejects evolution. Most of the proponents of the religion arent blind to the ways of science.. And debating their stance is harder to do with classical logic, as their model for Intelligent Design is quite sound. Where as other sects your best bet is to talk louder.
They did say 800k pages not documents.. which was my first basis. the second is that it fit on one hard drive. So it gets down under one TB of data. so the pages could be up to 1.2 mb/page and still fit on a commercial hard drive.
Id skip on the DVD backup, sounds like a mistake waiting to happen. Backing this up to a network drive over Gig-E is still going to be a mess, but it should be a few hours of slacktime.. (yes in theory you could manage 240 gigs in roughly 35 minutes over gig-E, but you couldnt pull off enough seeks in that time via the hard drive (800k seeks * 8 ms/seek= 6400s ~= 106 minutes).
Welcome to open source. Finding a 360 degree altruist is a bugger of a problem, finding one who can code is even worse, finding one who can code and can write an intelligible reply and your down to a handful. If those handfull arent so busy as to be able to handle some newbie question, thats a bloody miracle.
So dont look a gift horse in the mouth, or complain about the color of a free bike shed. If you need something that badly pay for it, or build it yourself. If someone was kind enough to build something for free that doesnt work for you, badmouthing them is just bad form. If they dont want to spend time coding, its not their problem.
As much as I hate to say it, companies and government need to lock down the desktops. If you have the ability for users to move from machine to machine, it becomes more important.
Which leads me into a story. At one time we had an employee that was surfing some pretty raunchy porn in a cubicle farm. While we had some evidence, we realized that we didnt know for sure who was really doing it. The problem was that we had unlocked the clock on the toolbar. So we didnt know when the violations were really taking place. The timestamp on the files didnt match up with the phone logs, or system logs. No one was logged in as far as they were concerned.
So we secured the clock and heard people throw a fit for a few weeks about our powermongering ways. But the HR department was happy that we could track who was doing what on our machines.
Anyway the crux of the matter is that one you get to the point where you have too many employees to trust the whole lot to behave. You need some lockdown ability that can be centrally adjusted. Just getting the machines "right the first time" never flies because there is always another disaster waiting in the wings. Some peice of software that needs to be installed yesterday, that needs to have some security disabled just a bit. Anyway getting applications to run right on a box thats unsecured is a whole lot easier than having software work where the user is thoroughly locked-down.
So I get why your IT is loathe to support it in an official capacity.
You have a nice start, but it has some weird consequences.
1. Sending email gets infuriating as your machine slows to a crawl anytime someone hasnt whitelisted you.
2. Maintaining a Taint Free Whitelist gets to be a bit tricky.
3. How is this going to work for services like Gmail and Yahoo? A minute of chug time on a machine is expensive if your offering it for free. If you whitelist them it doesnt do much good because then spammers just use those accounts
4. How does this work for people in poor areas of the world using some antique machine (like a Pentium 200 mmx) where email would take 30 minutes a peice to send.
Counter Proposal---
0) No white list, however a digital signature (spam score/service type) from trusted trackers (like spamhouse, etc).
1) A proposed challenge is sent for (CLASS1 Trusted)
2) The client will either accept or decline the challenge to drop to the next level (CLASS2 Trusted) which would be a lighter challenge, but sorted accordingly.
3) After negotiating the terms of transmittal then the problem would be solved, and tagged appropriatly. With standard sendmail at the very bottom..
_________
some of the kickers...
The spam score is a monster again.. as you need to have both a "start date" and a "most recent date" to classify the longevity of the account, and that it hasnt been used for spam lately. As well as having a "Diversity" score that keeps spammers from farming accounts for later use. The spam score keeps people from having to endure the longer wait. It also allows for the free-email systems to track individual accounts without so much work.
As far as the challenge goes I would go with an AES key that needs the last X digits solved.. But hash collision seems fine to me.
It is still a pretty weak solution for the people with low computer power..
Ok, first off, programming for someone else is really a test of patience. While programing on its own is a great endeavour, having someone tell you how it should work will be as bad as whatever you're dealing with as an electrical engineer.
That being said, if you love code, then delve into open source, find something that you want to fix and fix it. It will feel great. If you really enjoy programming you can just keep going. If you need to find some spare cash, then you can point to your hobby work that is in the current distro of Centos or Ubuntu. And wind up with a survivable paycheck, or you can marry the feilds you know and wind up with a big ole paycheck. It is relativly hard to find a programmer with masters level domain knowlege in two fields. Ok its not that hard, if flash more than $50/hour
The Problem is that if I get a new computer, it doesnt "just work" even as someone with a reasonably computer saavy background. As such I am used to the garbage that needs to be done to make a machine work..
So With a new machine I might try and open up a pdf off the internet But then I get the message that Adobe isnt installed. But I know that Acorobat is a piece of Garbage, so I download Foxit to view PDF's.. But Microsoft has made it bloody impossible to view a pdf mwith an alternative viewer through IE, so I still download Acrobat anyway, and set foxit to be the readed for offline documents. Because acrobat takes 15 seconds to open a big pdf, and is responds like a slug.
Then I want to click on some quicktime peice of junk.. so it forces me to download the latest version of quicktime. Quicktime likes to have some quickloaded hanging out in memory that seems to chew clock cycles at random.. And while I would like to turn it off, VLC doesnt do a nice job of playing in-webpage-window movies.
Then there are those pages that dont show an address bar, the f-11 doesnt seem to work and so then you cant easily find some jacked popup without going through the bizarre path of ctrl-n, f-11 and then you can see and copy the address bar. Which is a total joke, because a popup should never have that level of control over a window.
The kicker is that I can get into a brand new car and have it work as well as I want it to work in 5 minutes. With a computer it takes it days to get it to a point where its comfortable.
Nope... it was listed as "almost" all on his own time. as soon as he crosses that line and types in jack to that code as a regular employee on the clock he has crossed a line. The code now becomes property of the department.
He is now in the whole "work for hire" category. If he has adequatly spepeated out the code he did at work, from the code that was done at home, he may be able to give them a partial load. But I'm assuming that the effort was less formal than that.
The source code agreement isnt needed in most cases, but is nice to have just so there is no legal way for the coder to hold back a resource file that was coded at home.
You sir, are a retard. If you blame the inability to type on the IT department. If you want IT to drop everything for you, but you can't drop everything for IT. If you blame a completely seperate companies problem on your own companies IT department. If you think that it is okay for an employee to blame an unrelated issue on them being late. There are certain minor things that it is necessary to be able to do yourself. Such as check the gas on your car, unless you expect the manufacturer to come by and check that for you. The same goes with minor office work, being able to check the printer or copier to make sure it has enough paper for what you want to print/copy is one of those things. Same thing with being able to double check your own spelling. How about a little of your own advice. Stop being a problem.
1. It isnt the Inability to type, Its that email software isnt validating jack in the "TO:" field.. having software that changes the line background from red (invalid address) to Yellow (possibly Valid) to green (known good site) to white (known good site & sender) would make the problem obvious from the get-go.. there are a bunch of solutions for this, but really the software blows.
2. The reciprocation of customer service, come on, They need to get their jobs done, and they dont care whats on your plate. Just like when you walk up to payroll and ask WTF is up with my paycheck being $220.14 for two weeks, you dont care what theyre up to, you want that fixed now. Scheduling people is an art and takes real practice.
3. Its not fine for an employee to blame something un-related on being late. However the opportunity shouldnt be there for the employee in the first place. If an IT issue can be valid excuse then it will be abused. Its not right, but its a fact of life.
4. As far as the printer goes, you shouldn't need to walk over to the printer(s) and figure out if there is enough paper to get your job done. It needs to be right there when you press print, it should give you a pretty legit idea of what the paper forecast is. Sure it might have 200 pages left, but is part way through a 500 page job, so really your going to need to submit and wait. Checking the printer is a waste of time, having a paper sensor is a no-brainer.
5. Double checking your own spelling.... since you brought that one up "seperate"
Once you stop whining about the users you might be able to help them.
Really you dont want to alienate applicants. The dumb ones may very well move up the mangerial chain somewhere else.
They will have control over spending, wondering if your product suits them.
Anyway since their application, resume, and references were adequate for them to get to the interview, it would be a good time to figure out what they actually know, and how they wound up confused about the requirements for the job (Even if you know theyre just lying). Sometimes when 8 usd/hr is mentioned the applicant expects near zero experience to do the job. Five extra minutes of good PR time can help the image of your company/department.
Here is the gig on the patent... it isnt about the resistors it is about converting the signal from 5 volts down to an arbitrary lower amount.
However this peice still isnt really that big of a deal, because motherboards still need to do a pretty similar trick for the rest of the 5 volt parts out there (keyboard and mouse ports). This patent moves the problem around a bit, and might be a little cheaper in hardware implemantation, but its pretty far from being non-obvious. Anyway, this wasnt a problem back when the CPU was running at 5 volts, just when they dropped down to 3.3.. or 3.465 for the history nerdistas..
Yea, people want both.. I know that I want both. While messing with Unix might be my hobby, I dont want fight that sort of thing when someone is breathing down my neck for a quick solution. Remember BeOS? If you put in a supported card it would just work. Sure it's support base was a bit weak, but the boot time was under 10 seconds.
The Autodetect shouldn't take more than a second to determine that no new devices have been added. Something lame is going on in the background of windows, it's loading a bunch of config files, and parsing them to figure out what to load up next. so a whole fun cascade occurs during each boot where all of these loads are trying to occur with some semblance of organization. But really it's a traffic jam filled with kludges to make sure that some peices can break the gridlock.
It is straight up absurd.
Reasonably with a decent set of hardware, a windows xp box should spend about 5 seconds (from the post completion) getting to the login screen..25 seconds to rule out new hardware, and then 2.5 - 4.0 seconds loading up 256Meg of system image, and another.75 seconds initilizing the IO systems. The user authentication should come up in a flash, as it would be part of the boot image.
Unfortunatly to get it right they would need to have a major shift in the way they do what they do, and they have too much inertia to really change direction now.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue that needs to be addressed is small files. The problem is that there are more and more small files in a system.. This becomes less efficient as drived attain higher throughput, as seek times are still kinda slow. assume a seek time of 4 ms, in order to read a file, the head must seek the filesystem ( a few times), find the file offset and seek the file start. so with just seek time youve used 8-32 ms to get a file. A one MB file takes 16ms to transfer on a common drive (Maxtor 320 SataII $79 60MB/s) so 500K files spend half of the time seeking at a minimum.
However there are huge chunks of files that are 0-150k on a drive these still take the 8ms to access. Copying 50 thousand of these small files across a network is a monster, tarring them is a monster, even though you might only have a couple gigs of data. Reiser4 had a cute solution of putting small files directly into the file-system to reduce the seek time. My cute solution was to use a usb stick to hold the small files. But most file systems dont have a good solution yet. So small files become the inefficient moster of the server room.
Storm
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2. Parallel code is a monster to write. I'm not talking simple scatter-gather data spreaders. Imaging Adobe photoshop running across a 400 machine cluster, handling hundreds of users at a time. The data concurency issues, data residence, locking, message handling, message reordering Total bloody nightmare...., If youve parallelized a markov model it doesn't really compare.
3. The tools arent adequate. tracing a data race, or deadlock in a cluster is a beast. MPI and PVM are nice but are really narrow in the scope that they handle problems.
4. It isnt just non-programmers.. Parallel is a whole different scale of complexity... Almost everything I see is a "parallelize the brute zones of a specialty engine once it works in serial"..... Its an important baby step and it really blows non-programmers for a loop. But we are a far sight from having an implicitly parallel version of MS-word.
5. Parallel isnt new, dual cpu boxes have been in userspace since the late 90's, it has been mostly ignored by applications. The use of network resources is horribly behind the times. The ability to aggregate resources on the fly is a total joke compared to where it should be.
Storm
1990 Trespassing Federal Property, Langley, Virginia
1992 Impersonating a Federal Agent, Washington, DC
1993 Installation of Automated Record Cleanser, Buffalo, New York
1993 Unauthorized Deployment of Federal Agents, Waco, Texas.
Then they pull up a blank record, proof of working code.. Profit
Storm
My take is role play them through senarios. Because a gruff boss can be good or bad, same with a pleasant boss. You want to know when there is a looming deadline what your boss is going to say about you staying home with your sick kid. Or if the new co-worker has a bad case of body odor/bad attitude/offensive personality. Or if the higher ups are cranky about a change that was made by the employee for various reasons (managers insistance/ legal/ policy change). And how the manager handles higher level employees who are violating policy. What the manager considers priorities when hiring a new employee, and what the manager does to remove those employees from his/her workgroup (transfer/fire/make it a living hell so they quit/write them up over dinky violations until HR fires them.).
With most managment your looking for someone who is keeping an eye on whats about to spill all over their reports, and nudges them out of the way. Watch out for the managers who take advantage of the more "agreeable" employees, when it becomes time to reciprocate "agreeable" employees feel betrayed when their vacations get "bumped" or time off requests are rejected.
Anyway just my $.02
Storm
So protien powder, vegetable powder, binders and colouring could be called cheddar cheese. Without actual milk product. or maybe just whey protein. Basically its happened to most food already, now they just want to knock down the last bastion which is "standardized food"
Storm
so try and replace peanut butter with Peanut-Vegetable Margarine and then try to stomach it..double points if both use olestra.
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mmm articulated arms... 2 30inchers...wow.
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Id skip on the DVD backup, sounds like a mistake waiting to happen. Backing this up to a network drive over Gig-E is still going to be a mess, but it should be a few hours of slacktime.. (yes in theory you could manage 240 gigs in roughly 35 minutes over gig-E, but you couldnt pull off enough seeks in that time via the hard drive (800k seeks * 8 ms/seek= 6400s ~= 106 minutes).
Storm
I am totally hoping she gets nailed.. wow.
Storm
Um you broke her copywrite by talking about the colors.. expect a summons.. :P
So dont look a gift horse in the mouth, or complain about the color of a free bike shed. If you need something that badly pay for it, or build it yourself. If someone was kind enough to build something for free that doesnt work for you, badmouthing them is just bad form. If they dont want to spend time coding, its not their problem.
Which leads me into a story. At one time we had an employee that was surfing some pretty raunchy porn in a cubicle farm. While we had some evidence, we realized that we didnt know for sure who was really doing it. The problem was that we had unlocked the clock on the toolbar. So we didnt know when the violations were really taking place. The timestamp on the files didnt match up with the phone logs, or system logs. No one was logged in as far as they were concerned.
So we secured the clock and heard people throw a fit for a few weeks about our powermongering ways. But the HR department was happy that we could track who was doing what on our machines.
Anyway the crux of the matter is that one you get to the point where you have too many employees to trust the whole lot to behave. You need some lockdown ability that can be centrally adjusted. Just getting the machines "right the first time" never flies because there is always another disaster waiting in the wings. Some peice of software that needs to be installed yesterday, that needs to have some security disabled just a bit. Anyway getting applications to run right on a box thats unsecured is a whole lot easier than having software work where the user is thoroughly locked-down.
So I get why your IT is loathe to support it in an official capacity.
Storm
1. Sending email gets infuriating as your machine slows to a crawl anytime someone hasnt whitelisted you.
2. Maintaining a Taint Free Whitelist gets to be a bit tricky.
3. How is this going to work for services like Gmail and Yahoo? A minute of chug time on a machine is expensive if your offering it for free. If you whitelist them it doesnt do much good because then spammers just use those accounts
4. How does this work for people in poor areas of the world using some antique machine (like a Pentium 200 mmx) where email would take 30 minutes a peice to send. Counter Proposal--- 0) No white list, however a digital signature (spam score/service type) from trusted trackers (like spamhouse, etc). 1) A proposed challenge is sent for (CLASS1 Trusted) 2) The client will either accept or decline the challenge to drop to the next level (CLASS2 Trusted) which would be a lighter challenge, but sorted accordingly. 3) After negotiating the terms of transmittal then the problem would be solved, and tagged appropriatly. With standard sendmail at the very bottom.. _________ some of the kickers... The spam score is a monster again.. as you need to have both a "start date" and a "most recent date" to classify the longevity of the account, and that it hasnt been used for spam lately. As well as having a "Diversity" score that keeps spammers from farming accounts for later use. The spam score keeps people from having to endure the longer wait. It also allows for the free-email systems to track individual accounts without so much work.
As far as the challenge goes I would go with an AES key that needs the last X digits solved.. But hash collision seems fine to me.
It is still a pretty weak solution for the people with low computer power..
Storm
That being said, if you love code, then delve into open source, find something that you want to fix and fix it. It will feel great. If you really enjoy programming you can just keep going. If you need to find some spare cash, then you can point to your hobby work that is in the current distro of Centos or Ubuntu. And wind up with a survivable paycheck, or you can marry the feilds you know and wind up with a big ole paycheck. It is relativly hard to find a programmer with masters level domain knowlege in two fields. Ok its not that hard, if flash more than $50/hour
Good luck
Storm
So With a new machine I might try and open up a pdf off the internet But then I get the message that Adobe isnt installed. But I know that Acorobat is a piece of Garbage, so I download Foxit to view PDF's.. But Microsoft has made it bloody impossible to view a pdf mwith an alternative viewer through IE, so I still download Acrobat anyway, and set foxit to be the readed for offline documents. Because acrobat takes 15 seconds to open a big pdf, and is responds like a slug.
Then I want to click on some quicktime peice of junk.. so it forces me to download the latest version of quicktime. Quicktime likes to have some quickloaded hanging out in memory that seems to chew clock cycles at random.. And while I would like to turn it off, VLC doesnt do a nice job of playing in-webpage-window movies.
Then there are those pages that dont show an address bar, the f-11 doesnt seem to work and so then you cant easily find some jacked popup without going through the bizarre path of ctrl-n, f-11 and then you can see and copy the address bar. Which is a total joke, because a popup should never have that level of control over a window.
The kicker is that I can get into a brand new car and have it work as well as I want it to work in 5 minutes. With a computer it takes it days to get it to a point where its comfortable.
Storm
He is now in the whole "work for hire" category. If he has adequatly spepeated out the code he did at work, from the code that was done at home, he may be able to give them a partial load. But I'm assuming that the effort was less formal than that.
The source code agreement isnt needed in most cases, but is nice to have just so there is no legal way for the coder to hold back a resource file that was coded at home.
Storm
2. The reciprocation of customer service, come on, They need to get their jobs done, and they dont care whats on your plate. Just like when you walk up to payroll and ask WTF is up with my paycheck being $220.14 for two weeks, you dont care what theyre up to, you want that fixed now. Scheduling people is an art and takes real practice.
3. Its not fine for an employee to blame something un-related on being late. However the opportunity shouldnt be there for the employee in the first place. If an IT issue can be valid excuse then it will be abused. Its not right, but its a fact of life.
4. As far as the printer goes, you shouldn't need to walk over to the printer(s) and figure out if there is enough paper to get your job done. It needs to be right there when you press print, it should give you a pretty legit idea of what the paper forecast is. Sure it might have 200 pages left, but is part way through a 500 page job, so really your going to need to submit and wait. Checking the printer is a waste of time, having a paper sensor is a no-brainer.
5. Double checking your own spelling.... since you brought that one up "seperate"
Once you stop whining about the users you might be able to help them.
Storm
Anyway since their application, resume, and references were adequate for them to get to the interview, it would be a good time to figure out what they actually know, and how they wound up confused about the requirements for the job (Even if you know theyre just lying). Sometimes when 8 usd/hr is mentioned the applicant expects near zero experience to do the job. Five extra minutes of good PR time can help the image of your company /department.
Storm
However this peice still isnt really that big of a deal, because motherboards still need to do a pretty similar trick for the rest of the 5 volt parts out there (keyboard and mouse ports). This patent moves the problem around a bit, and might be a little cheaper in hardware implemantation, but its pretty far from being non-obvious. Anyway, this wasnt a problem back when the CPU was running at 5 volts, just when they dropped down to 3.3.. or 3.465 for the history nerdistas..
Storm
The next obvious source of protien is eggs and dairy... much to the dismay of the vegans out there.
The Autodetect shouldn't take more than a second to determine that no new devices have been added. Something lame is going on in the background of windows, it's loading a bunch of config files, and parsing them to figure out what to load up next. so a whole fun cascade occurs during each boot where all of these loads are trying to occur with some semblance of organization. But really it's a traffic jam filled with kludges to make sure that some peices can break the gridlock.
It is straight up absurd.
Reasonably with a decent set of hardware, a windows xp box should spend about 5 seconds (from the post completion) getting to the login screen. .25 seconds to rule out new hardware, and then 2.5 - 4.0 seconds loading up 256Meg of system image, and another .75 seconds initilizing the IO systems. The user authentication should come up in a flash, as it would be part of the boot image.
Unfortunatly to get it right they would need to have a major shift in the way they do what they do, and they have too much inertia to really change direction now.
Storm