If you have one RAID5 box, just build another one that replicates it. Use that for your "hot backup". Then back that up to tape, if you must.
Storage is so cheap these days (especially if you don't need super-fast speeds and can use regular SATA drives), that you might as well just go crazy with mirroring/replicating all your drives all over the place for fault-tolerance and disaster-recovery.
It's not that Comcast is setting bandwidth caps. It's that they have no choice. Now that you can get high-speed internet service via the cellphone network, AND Verizon is rolling out FiOS everywhere, how can they compete?
Remember, the internet runs over the *phone* network. The big cellphone/telecommunications providers own most of that. AT&T and Verizon are both Tier 1 providers with huge networks. It's almost *guaranteed* the Comcast is paying AT&T and/or Verizon for bandwidth and/or transit. And yet, Verizon and AT&T are competing with them.
And the same is true for most of the other cable TV providers in the United States. They have been offering phone and internet service for the past 5 years or so, but only because the telcos weren't doing it. They are now. The cable companies are FUCKED.
Well, help desk technicians are worth about $12/hour, honestly.
"Help Desk" is the low-end of the IT totem pole. It's a job that requires few qualifications beyond "Knows how to install software and update drivers".
I think the bigger fear that people with IT careers (myself included) is the inevitable deployment of high-speed fiber networks. For MANY businesses, having nothing but "terminals" that run apps on remote servers (which would probably be running under VMs) would be a huge cost savings, and probably more reliable, too.
It costs a lot of money to have a really reliable network, and the staff to maintain it. Why not pay some other company to do all that, and enjoy the economies of scale that they can offer?
OS/2 has all kinds of really neat features. In many ways, it's still a signpost of things to come. Unfortunately, it's all built on top of a kernel that incorporates all the mistakes/oversights of early 80s programming techniques.
Who is gonna pay for these? Not only are they overpriced for *downloads*, they'd be overpriced for actual physical DVDs.
This thing is doomed.
What really worries me is that this is the future. The MPAA would *love* it if they could do away with physical media, and instead sell us (at full price, of course) DRM'd downloads that we can't tranfer to another machine without paying a fee. I mean, that's their wet dream. Well, it's Stage 1 of the wet dream, anyway. Stage 2 is a full-on pay-per-view system for everything. You would never own any movies. You'd pay a fee each time you wanted to watch it. Stage 3 is sensors on your TV that detect how many eyeballs are staring at the TV, and making you pay for every person who watches.
Those big antenna towers are VERY sensitive. That's why your crappy little cell phone antenna works. The big towers can detect a very weak incoming signal, and send out a very strong outgoing signal. Your phone can do neither.
Seriously. As thumbdrives get cheaper and cheaper, this makes sense. DVDs (and Blu-Ray discs) are just too fragile A USB drive is durable as hell. Plus, and most importantly, USB ports are *dirt cheap* and *small*. Imagine how many USB ports you could have on your "USB Movie Player" device. 20? That would mean 20 movies available instantly, all the time. Hell, screw movie players- imagine having console that used nothing but high-capacity USB drives! You could keep all your games plugged in all the time, and the load times would be fantastic.
Is that as good as downloading movies? No. But let's fact it, we just don't have the bandwidth in this country to support millions of people downloading HD content all the time.
The reason is, "No More Heroes" wasn't a big hit. Which is unfortunate, because it's one of the top 3 games on the Wii, in my opinion. It's fun, it's raunchy (but not TOO raunchy) and it's hilarious.
But Sega makes horrible games these days
on
The Evolution of Sega
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Seriously. With the exception of the various 2D Gameboy Advance and DS versions of "Sonic the Hedgehog" (which are fun, but nothing very new), their games are horrible. The 3D versions of Sonic for the big consoles have been mostly terrible, and never better than mediocre. They even managed to screw up the Nights sequel.
I guess there is the Virtua Fighter series, which is still well-done. But who plays that anymore?
Basically, Sega churns out junk based on their (formerly) popular franchises.
We just don't need them anymore. We have better missiles, and better drones.
The only thing we need actualy piloted aircraft for are close-in ground support, where things are too crowded/messy for computers to do a good job. And even then, remotely-piloted drones are taking over.
Mostly cost. Games aren't worth $50 or $60 dollars. They just aren't. There's not enough entertainment value in them. Luckily, if you are patient, you can wait for the price to drop to something more reasonable, like $30 or less.
Add to that that the pirated/cracked version is EASIER TO DEAL WITH. The original Xbox really demonstrated this. Soft-mod your Xbox, and you can rip all your games to the hard drive, and never have to deal with load times or scratched disks again. On the PC side, cracked games don't require the CD in the drive.
I understand that games are expensive to produce. But so what? Movies are more expensive to produce, and yet, even brand-new, "triple A" movies costs $25 when they get released on DVD. Yeah, they sell more copies than games, which lets them price them cheaper, but again, so what? Make games that more people want to play. Sell them for $30. Leave all the copy protection off. Watch profits soar.
I'm sure that the various game publishers have done the math on all this and determined that they are charging the optimal price for their software, but I think they're wrong. Make it cheaper, and people will pay for it. Right now, software of almost all kinds is too expensive to fall into the "impulse buy" category, and that HAS to limit sales.
Nobody cares how good your document looks. In the age of the Web, so-called "proper" typsetting is completely obsolete. And that's a GOOD thing.
Seriously. Quit worrying about how your papers look and spend more time on the actual CONTENT. I understand that the "powers that be" in academia are very snooty when it comes to these things, but fuck them. If your paper says something worthwhile, that's all that matters.
Or is the problem in academia that hardly anyone does any work of real interest, and instead try to make up for it with "pretty papers"?
It gets very elaborate, very fast. And there are TONS of security issues, and you will miss most of them. Not to mention that usability is a major concern, and will take a lot of time to get right.
Bite-the-bullet and pay one of the companies that specializes in e-commerce to do this for you. They have already worked out all kinds of issues that you don't even know exist. You and your customers will be MUCH happier.
Yeah, I know. I forgot to put in the breaks. I do that a lot. I'm used to EVERY OTHER FORUM SOFTWARE IN THE WORLD, where the breaks are inserted for you.
Satellite internet service has latency issues that will NEVER go away. It's the speed of light that is the limiting factor. I'm surprised you were able to use VoIP at all, honestly.
You simply aren't going to get good performance out of a satellite internet service. It might be acceptable for simply web-browsing and e-mail, but for a business? Forget it. It's strictly a "we have no other choice" option.
You're screwed, basically. If you want a good internet connection, you need something that is based on a good ol' cable, whether it be copper or fiber. If you don't have those available, then you need to build them. If you are really in the boondocks of Canada, then expect to pay millions to lay your own fiber.
"Until we convert to completely non-combustive and non-fissile energy production..."
Why would we phase out fissile energy? We should be using that for everything. Nuclear power is the best thing we have.
"Besides, the vehicles will still probably depend on petroleum-based products for lubricants."
Not so much, actually. If you have a 100% electrically-powered car, you simply put an electric motor on every wheel. Electric motors don't need much lubrication.
Use shortcuts instead of mapped drive letters. Shortcuts are MUCH better solution, anyway. You can give them decent names. Use GPO to put a shortcut to a folder containing shortcuts to network locations into the "My Places" bar in Open/Save dialogs. br.
Your users really shouldn't have to know the name of any server, anyway. That's what shortcuts and mapped drives are for (pushed down via login scripts/GPOs).
Name the servers with logical names based on their function, and maybe an extra number to distinguish servers with the same function. Put all of the REAL info into database. Trying to put lots of config/location details into the DNS name is a waste of time. There no reason to have names like FILESERVER-CHICAGO-02-2003RT when FILESERVER2 would suffice.
What I'm saying is, if you are going to work for a TECH company, you should probably understand the tech. And if you are going to manage technical projects, you better have a *really good* understanding of the technology.
And no, I don't think Bezos and Jobs and Ellison have any real technical skills. But they *aren't in charge of technical projects*. Not in any real way. They have "vision" and all that. That's what CEOs are for. But would you put Steve Jobs directly in charge of the OS X development team? What does he know about programming? Very very little.
Most companies have problems with promoting people to "management" as a reward, without considering if they should BE management.
There SHOULD be a "glass ceiling" for Marketing and Sales guys. If they want to advance, they should have to learn some technical skills.
Good marketing and sales guys have one skill, and that is "schmoozing" (also know as "people skills"). I don't consider that a skill worthy of big promotions. Raises, surely, but not promotions. It's not a skill that makes one an effective manager. The opposite is probably true, actually. Most marketing/sales people, the good ones anyway, live in their own little magical world where the normal rules of logic don't really apply. They should be kept FAR AWAY from any kind of technical positions, and should NEVER be allowed to manage technical projects.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have one RAID5 box, just build another one that replicates it. Use that for your "hot backup". Then back that up to tape, if you must.
Storage is so cheap these days (especially if you don't need super-fast speeds and can use regular SATA drives), that you might as well just go crazy with mirroring/replicating all your drives all over the place for fault-tolerance and disaster-recovery.
It's not that Comcast is setting bandwidth caps. It's that they have no choice. Now that you can get high-speed internet service via the cellphone network, AND Verizon is rolling out FiOS everywhere, how can they compete?
Remember, the internet runs over the *phone* network. The big cellphone/telecommunications providers own most of that. AT&T and Verizon are both Tier 1 providers with huge networks. It's almost *guaranteed* the Comcast is paying AT&T and/or Verizon for bandwidth and/or transit. And yet, Verizon and AT&T are competing with them.
And the same is true for most of the other cable TV providers in the United States. They have been offering phone and internet service for the past 5 years or so, but only because the telcos weren't doing it. They are now. The cable companies are FUCKED.
Well, help desk technicians are worth about $12/hour, honestly.
"Help Desk" is the low-end of the IT totem pole. It's a job that requires few qualifications beyond "Knows how to install software and update drivers".
I think the bigger fear that people with IT careers (myself included) is the inevitable deployment of high-speed fiber networks. For MANY businesses, having nothing but "terminals" that run apps on remote servers (which would probably be running under VMs) would be a huge cost savings, and probably more reliable, too.
It costs a lot of money to have a really reliable network, and the staff to maintain it. Why not pay some other company to do all that, and enjoy the economies of scale that they can offer?
What the fuck is heppa?
It's HEPA. It's an acronym. High-Efficiency Particulate Air.
Exactly. OS/2 is dead, guys. Where have you been?
OS/2 has all kinds of really neat features. In many ways, it's still a signpost of things to come. Unfortunately, it's all built on top of a kernel that incorporates all the mistakes/oversights of early 80s programming techniques.
Who is gonna pay for these? Not only are they overpriced for *downloads*, they'd be overpriced for actual physical DVDs.
This thing is doomed.
What really worries me is that this is the future. The MPAA would *love* it if they could do away with physical media, and instead sell us (at full price, of course) DRM'd downloads that we can't tranfer to another machine without paying a fee. I mean, that's their wet dream. Well, it's Stage 1 of the wet dream, anyway. Stage 2 is a full-on pay-per-view system for everything. You would never own any movies. You'd pay a fee each time you wanted to watch it. Stage 3 is sensors on your TV that detect how many eyeballs are staring at the TV, and making you pay for every person who watches.
The antenna on your cell phone sucks.
Those big antenna towers are VERY sensitive. That's why your crappy little cell phone antenna works. The big towers can detect a very weak incoming signal, and send out a very strong outgoing signal. Your phone can do neither.
Seriously. As thumbdrives get cheaper and cheaper, this makes sense. DVDs (and Blu-Ray discs) are just too fragile A USB drive is durable as hell. Plus, and most importantly, USB ports are *dirt cheap* and *small*. Imagine how many USB ports you could have on your "USB Movie Player" device. 20? That would mean 20 movies available instantly, all the time. Hell, screw movie players- imagine having console that used nothing but high-capacity USB drives! You could keep all your games plugged in all the time, and the load times would be fantastic.
Is that as good as downloading movies? No. But let's fact it, we just don't have the bandwidth in this country to support millions of people downloading HD content all the time.
Exactly.
The reason is, "No More Heroes" wasn't a big hit. Which is unfortunate, because it's one of the top 3 games on the Wii, in my opinion. It's fun, it's raunchy (but not TOO raunchy) and it's hilarious.
Seriously. With the exception of the various 2D Gameboy Advance and DS versions of "Sonic the Hedgehog" (which are fun, but nothing very new), their games are horrible. The 3D versions of Sonic for the big consoles have been mostly terrible, and never better than mediocre. They even managed to screw up the Nights sequel.
I guess there is the Virtua Fighter series, which is still well-done. But who plays that anymore?
Basically, Sega churns out junk based on their (formerly) popular franchises.
We just don't need them anymore. We have better missiles, and better drones.
The only thing we need actualy piloted aircraft for are close-in ground support, where things are too crowded/messy for computers to do a good job. And even then, remotely-piloted drones are taking over.
Mostly cost. Games aren't worth $50 or $60 dollars. They just aren't. There's not enough entertainment value in them. Luckily, if you are patient, you can wait for the price to drop to something more reasonable, like $30 or less.
Add to that that the pirated/cracked version is EASIER TO DEAL WITH. The original Xbox really demonstrated this. Soft-mod your Xbox, and you can rip all your games to the hard drive, and never have to deal with load times or scratched disks again. On the PC side, cracked games don't require the CD in the drive.
I understand that games are expensive to produce. But so what? Movies are more expensive to produce, and yet, even brand-new, "triple A" movies costs $25 when they get released on DVD. Yeah, they sell more copies than games, which lets them price them cheaper, but again, so what? Make games that more people want to play. Sell them for $30. Leave all the copy protection off. Watch profits soar.
I'm sure that the various game publishers have done the math on all this and determined that they are charging the optimal price for their software, but I think they're wrong. Make it cheaper, and people will pay for it. Right now, software of almost all kinds is too expensive to fall into the "impulse buy" category, and that HAS to limit sales.
I'm going to come right out and say it:
Nobody cares how good your document looks. In the age of the Web, so-called "proper" typsetting is completely obsolete. And that's a GOOD thing.
Seriously. Quit worrying about how your papers look and spend more time on the actual CONTENT. I understand that the "powers that be" in academia are very snooty when it comes to these things, but fuck them. If your paper says something worthwhile, that's all that matters.
Or is the problem in academia that hardly anyone does any work of real interest, and instead try to make up for it with "pretty papers"?
My children ARE porn stars, you insensitive clod!
Love,
Chris Matthews
It gets very elaborate, very fast. And there are TONS of security issues, and you will miss most of them. Not to mention that usability is a major concern, and will take a lot of time to get right.
Bite-the-bullet and pay one of the companies that specializes in e-commerce to do this for you. They have already worked out all kinds of issues that you don't even know exist. You and your customers will be MUCH happier.
Yeah, I know. I forgot to put in the breaks. I do that a lot. I'm used to EVERY OTHER FORUM SOFTWARE IN THE WORLD, where the breaks are inserted for you.
Slashdot: Remember, Subby, when I promised to kill you last? Subby: That's right, Slashdot. You did. Slashdot: I lied.
No, I meant the speed of light. The signals to/from the satellite travel at the *speed of light*.
In other words, you're a fucking idiot.
Satellite internet service has latency issues that will NEVER go away. It's the speed of light that is the limiting factor. I'm surprised you were able to use VoIP at all, honestly.
You simply aren't going to get good performance out of a satellite internet service. It might be acceptable for simply web-browsing and e-mail, but for a business? Forget it. It's strictly a "we have no other choice" option.
You're screwed, basically. If you want a good internet connection, you need something that is based on a good ol' cable, whether it be copper or fiber. If you don't have those available, then you need to build them. If you are really in the boondocks of Canada, then expect to pay millions to lay your own fiber.
What he meant by "nobody will notice" is that Gnome is lacking so many features *already*.
I don't exactly agree with that, but that's the joke.
"Until we convert to completely non-combustive and non-fissile energy production..."
Why would we phase out fissile energy? We should be using that for everything. Nuclear power is the best thing we have.
"Besides, the vehicles will still probably depend on petroleum-based products for lubricants."
Not so much, actually. If you have a 100% electrically-powered car, you simply put an electric motor on every wheel. Electric motors don't need much lubrication.
Use shortcuts instead of mapped drive letters. Shortcuts are MUCH better solution, anyway. You can give them decent names. Use GPO to put a shortcut to a folder containing shortcuts to network locations into the "My Places" bar in Open/Save dialogs.
br.
Your users really shouldn't have to know the name of any server, anyway. That's what shortcuts and mapped drives are for (pushed down via login scripts/GPOs).
Name the servers with logical names based on their function, and maybe an extra number to distinguish servers with the same function. Put all of the REAL info into database. Trying to put lots of config/location details into the DNS name is a waste of time. There no reason to have names like FILESERVER-CHICAGO-02-2003RT when FILESERVER2 would suffice.
What I'm saying is, if you are going to work for a TECH company, you should probably understand the tech. And if you are going to manage technical projects, you better have a *really good* understanding of the technology.
And no, I don't think Bezos and Jobs and Ellison have any real technical skills. But they *aren't in charge of technical projects*. Not in any real way. They have "vision" and all that. That's what CEOs are for. But would you put Steve Jobs directly in charge of the OS X development team? What does he know about programming? Very very little.
Most companies have problems with promoting people to "management" as a reward, without considering if they should BE management.
There SHOULD be a "glass ceiling" for Marketing and Sales guys. If they want to advance, they should have to learn some technical skills.
Good marketing and sales guys have one skill, and that is "schmoozing" (also know as "people skills"). I don't consider that a skill worthy of big promotions. Raises, surely, but not promotions. It's not a skill that makes one an effective manager. The opposite is probably true, actually. Most marketing/sales people, the good ones anyway, live in their own little magical world where the normal rules of logic don't really apply. They should be kept FAR AWAY from any kind of technical positions, and should NEVER be allowed to manage technical projects.