First off, everyone's different. What makes some people happy makes other people miserable. You need to figure out which makes you happier.
People say, money can't buy happiness. I don't know whether that's true or not -- but money sure helps a lot of problems go away. And it helps buy peace of mind. For me, peace of mind is the first step to happiness.
Take mortgages, for example. Or car loans. Or anything else you wish you didn't have to spend exorbitant amounts of money on, but end up having to anyway. Depending on whether a mortgage or a big loan is in your plans (or maybe already is part of your life), being able to pay it off sooner may help give you peace of mind sooner. That's my main goal for the immediate future, for example. As soon as I get it over with, I'll be able to breathe a sigh of relief and have one major worry off my back. After that, all I need to do is make enough to pay for maintenance, which ends up being a lot less than a mortgage. Which means I might even consider a lower-paying job with fewer responsibilities for the upside of having even fewer worries. Of course I probably won't (or if I do it won't be for very long), because there's retirement to save up for and kids to send to college and such. But at least for a moment I'll be able to enjoy my life a little more, spend more time with the kids, have time to read a relaxing book (you know, like a "How to become an expert DBA in 21 days"), watch some DVDs I bought and never had time to play...
Why not expected? SCO is a bully, they want to take on someone with whom they have a chance of winning, not someone who'll pound them into the ground. Going against a tech-savvy company would mean suicide for SCO.
Now, AutoZone's technology supplier is IBM. Let's see how this one plays out.
...people who don't particularly care about what you're selling, but can be buffaloed into buying it anyway...
Hey! That's not nice! I don't like you using terms like that! And it's not that I don't care about what you're selling, I just... ...oh? it comes with a choice of free toppings? and I don't have to pay for it for 3 months?
uhh... o'tay... I guess I can buy that from you... but only if you promise not to call me ever again!... or at least not in the next couple of weeks... ok... yeah, hold on a sec, lemme get my credit card number...
Except that HP is giving away this "insurance" for nothing. If they were trying to get people to pay extra for SCO-proofing then your argument would make sense.
Not necessarily. Think of it as a promotion: "Hey, buy your linux computers from us, and get SCO indemnification for free!". It's a marketing gimmick. It's peace of mind to those clueless IT managers out there who've bowed into pressure from their techs to go linux and are now shitting their pants because they fear those same pants will get sued off of them by SCO. Those clueless managers don't know any better, so they think they're getting a great deal:
- they keep their systems running linux, so they save money (as compared to changing platforms) - they get great tech support from HP, so they save money (as compared to outsourcing to someone else or hiring their own) - they get support of HP lawyers in case the SCO claims pan out, so they save even more money - they get to keep their job (which probably isn't in much jeopardy anyway, unless they themselves have clueless superiors)
Now, *we* know that none of the above points need to be true. But they don't, and HP would prefer it that way, I'm sure.
Bottom line is, I think you're underestimating the cluelessness of a lot of high-rank management out there -- management, who is in position to make decisions like "let's switch to HP"
what if i decided to create a big, flat container, paint it black, fill it fulla water, hook up some pipes to it and put it outside... then run those pipes into a turbine... no solar panels, no harmful ingredients, closed, self-contained system...
remember: that's how power plants work... create steam (by whatever means) and use it to power turbines...
How can HP saying "we are sufficiently confident of the weakness of SCO's case that we are willing to assume the supposed liability for free" possibly strengthen SCO's case?
Because you don't go insuring yourself against things that have a negligible probability of occurrence. Offering such a service to your customers implies you believe the probability is no longer negligible and gives credence to statements by other parties on the issue.
Now, personally, I'm not going to buy into such a move, just like I won't buy insurance against planes/meteorites hitting my home because I don't believe such an incident is likely to happen to me. Nevertheless there are people out there who will reason that a service wouldn't be offered "just because", and will infer that SCO might have a case after all. You don't sit on a sidewalk selling umbrellas unless you think it's going to rain (or unless you're trying to pray on the uneducated, uninformed masses who don't know any better). Right now we don't know what HP knows, so we don't know which one it is. Time will tell.
OK, here's a slightly better translation (my own):
"It needs to be stressed that the link created here was a typical ground-based connection, as opposed to the link created at the end of 2002 in Sweden which used a stratospheric baloon"
For details of that accomplishment, go here (this link was posted already in this thread here by wherley).
Essentially, the Swedish ground-to-air link was aided by a 6Watt amp and achieved a distance of over 300km. In comparison, the Polish link was ground-to-ground (i.e. subject to much more interference, be it EMI or air pollution), reached about 1/3rd of the distance while using 1/12th the power.
# Piotr Kroplewski - owner of INTERLINE, who supplied the antennae # Wieslaw Karpowicz - production manager # Maciej Kaminski - director of technology dept. # Krzysztof Mularczyk - wireless networks expert # Krzysztof Juszczyszyn - tech dept.
you have to get your antennas substantially off the ground... which is what they did. One of the antennas was on top of a 10-story apartment building, the other was on the side of a mountain, 1400 meters above sea level (which is around 4800ft) with hardly anything in between (see map).
The weather balloon reached a maximum height of 29.7 km and drifted steadily. It finally touched down east of Sodankyla in the northern part of Finland, having travelled approximately 315 Km.
On the balloon, the BreezeNET DS.11 unit was connected to a high-power amplifier with 6 watts power output, a camera and a server.
Impressive though the achievement is, it has no bearing on how WiFi networks are allowed to work on Planet Earth. Down here, you're restricted to much lower power outputs and much smaller antenna gain.
So, they used a much more powerful amplifier, through much less polluted air (I assume), and do not mention data speeds achieved (i.e. were they at all useful)?
Still cool, but let's not burst the polish baloon just yet:)
Initially they didn't use an amp, and were getting 20% thruput, which allowed for a 1Mbps link to be established. That link kept going down every few seconds, tho, so they put in the amp. This boosted their RSS readings from 8 to 28, which meant 80% thruput. Having reached that, they tried to ftp a file and although they don't say how big it was, it was copied over at 40kBps, or around 0.5Mbps.
I don't know about you, but seeing ping replies in the single digits and low teens while ~70miles away makes my spine tingle.
The article claims the experiment used off-the-shelf, commercially available, unmodified components (1.1m / 3.5ft parabolic antenna and a 500mW amplifier). Experiment was conducted in a mountainous region in southwestern Poland.
So this isn't all that bad... considering the average laptop wireless card puts out, what, 20mW? 50mW? using a 500mW amp to achieve a much greater distance is pretty sweet. By comparison, the article quotes a Swedish experiment which used stratospheric baloons and a 6W amp, but they don't mention the distance achieved.
Mind you, rules about how much power certain appliances / transmitters can put out with or without a permit vary across the globe, and I'm not sure whether 500mW is legal for private unlicensed use in Poland or not. But if it is, more power to them.
Let's see how long they stay in everyone's favorite game of Global Thermonuclear Slashdotting...:)
They seem to be holding up pretty well so far!
We use a multi-platform, multi-client solution...
on
How Do You Punch In?
·
· Score: 1
... called IRC. Everyone coming into work makes their presence known on a certain predetermined channel, their signs of presence get logged with a timestamp... everyone knows where everyone else is... Works great, unless your server is lagged to Jupiter and back.
Watched the news last night... Anchorman said "But this sort of thing won't happen here -- worst you can expect is an instant message from the gov't saying that 'file sharing is bad and increases the cost of music to those who don't use it'".
Not always, sad to say. The precursors to the x-series, the 4000R and 4500R machines, being first-generation machines, weren't anywhere near perfect. Motherboards on the 4500R's in particular have been known to blow out VRMs and take down a CPU with them -- happened to 80% of machines I have. True, they'll usually replace them fairly quickly, but I'd much rather have hardware that works in the first place:) Having said that, the x-series is a much better product than the 1st-gen stuff, and so far no complaints here -- but even the Big Blue will make mistakes sometimes.
If you let people plug random machines into your network, you, to all intents and purposes, don't have a firewall. Laptops which visit the outside world need to be treated as external machines, not internal ones.
Amen to that. Additionally, all laptops (or other devices one takes home / connects to other 'foreign' networks) should be segmented into their own separate subnet at work and firewalled accordingly. For the people that take their hard drives home instead, their work machines should have a virus check thoroughly scan the drive every time they bring it back.
I know, these are lofty ideas, but at some point dealing with reactive stuff gets annoying and tedious enough that there is no other way.
From what I've heard on the news last night, the power companies aren't having as much problem with the virus as Air Canada's computer systems do. And not just in Ontario, but across Canada (someone mentioned Vancouver for a change).
I'm glad I don't live in Ontario right about now.
Eh, it's not all that bad. If anything, I'd say I'm glad I'm not flying Air Canada right about now. As for electricity, we've dodged the supply/demand bullet yesterday, with Ontario supplying 20 GW of juice, and us using up 19.180 GW at 5pm. Today's weather forecast calls for higher temps and humidity levels. Worse come to worst, it'll be another opportunity to pop open a warm bottle of Labatt's/Canadian and chat with the neigh)$(@#&*(#*%&()*&#$@(*& +++ NO CARRIER
Because I want to. Because I can. Because it's easier than trying to nail up some IPSEC tunnel between my Win box and someone else's.
Until you educate the clueless masses out there (you could start with the ones sharing your ISP), guess what -- you're SOL. You're a minority. Most of your neighbors don't know that they're sharing their printer with the world -- and if they did, they probably wouldn't want to.
It's connectivity, that's all.
Precisely. And if my neighbor's cluelessness leads me to having NO connectivity because he's infested with two dozen viruses and trojans, YOU BET I'm gonna have them dealt with. Even if it means having ports firewalled off by my ISP. The benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Remember, it's all about security. Treat this the same way you'd treat your linux/windows box: you only run services you need, not everything the OS comes with. Why? Because to do otherwise is a waste. Because to do otherwise is irresponsible and careless. Like driving and yakking on a cellphone. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Home: ISP: Cogeco Cable: No interruptions Power: NiagaraMohawk: No interruptions (I kid you not. My neighborhood hasn't lost power for a second during the outage). Phone (both landline and cellphone): No interruptions
Work: ISP: RoncoNet: No interruptions Power: unsure (prolly NiMo + generators): No interruptions
Slashdot Mirror
First off, everyone's different. What makes some people happy makes other people miserable. You need to figure out which makes you happier.
People say, money can't buy happiness. I don't know whether that's true or not -- but money sure helps a lot of problems go away. And it helps buy peace of mind. For me, peace of mind is the first step to happiness.
Take mortgages, for example. Or car loans. Or anything else you wish you didn't have to spend exorbitant amounts of money on, but end up having to anyway. Depending on whether a mortgage or a big loan is in your plans (or maybe already is part of your life), being able to pay it off sooner may help give you peace of mind sooner. That's my main goal for the immediate future, for example. As soon as I get it over with, I'll be able to breathe a sigh of relief and have one major worry off my back. After that, all I need to do is make enough to pay for maintenance, which ends up being a lot less than a mortgage. Which means I might even consider a lower-paying job with fewer responsibilities for the upside of having even fewer worries. Of course I probably won't (or if I do it won't be for very long), because there's retirement to save up for and kids to send to college and such. But at least for a moment I'll be able to enjoy my life a little more, spend more time with the kids, have time to read a relaxing book (you know, like a "How to become an expert DBA in 21 days"), watch some DVDs I bought and never had time to play...
Why not expected? SCO is a bully, they want to take on someone with whom they have a chance of winning, not someone who'll pound them into the ground. Going against a tech-savvy company would mean suicide for SCO.
Now, AutoZone's technology supplier is IBM. Let's see how this one plays out.
...people who don't particularly care about what you're selling, but can be buffaloed into buying it anyway...
...oh? it comes with a choice of free toppings? and I don't have to pay for it for 3 months?
... or at least not in the next couple of weeks... ok... yeah, hold on a sec, lemme get my credit card number...
Hey! That's not nice! I don't like you using terms like that!
And it's not that I don't care about what you're selling, I just...
uhh... o'tay... I guess I can buy that from you... but only if you promise not to call me ever again!
That's all I've got to say, since I don't have mod points...
Except that HP is giving away this "insurance" for nothing. If they were trying to get people to pay extra for SCO-proofing then your argument would make sense.
Not necessarily. Think of it as a promotion: "Hey, buy your linux computers from us, and get SCO indemnification for free!". It's a marketing gimmick. It's peace of mind to those clueless IT managers out there who've bowed into pressure from their techs to go linux and are now shitting their pants because they fear those same pants will get sued off of them by SCO. Those clueless managers don't know any better, so they think they're getting a great deal:
- they keep their systems running linux, so they save money (as compared to changing platforms)
- they get great tech support from HP, so they save money (as compared to outsourcing to someone else or hiring their own)
- they get support of HP lawyers in case the SCO claims pan out, so they save even more money
- they get to keep their job (which probably isn't in much jeopardy anyway, unless they themselves have clueless superiors)
Now, *we* know that none of the above points need to be true. But they don't, and HP would prefer it that way, I'm sure.
Bottom line is, I think you're underestimating the cluelessness of a lot of high-rank management out there -- management, who is in position to make decisions like "let's switch to HP"
that's assuming i'd be using solar panels...
what if i decided to create a big, flat container, paint it black, fill it fulla water, hook up some pipes to it and put it outside... then run those pipes into a turbine... no solar panels, no harmful ingredients, closed, self-contained system...
remember: that's how power plants work... create steam (by whatever means) and use it to power turbines...
The unfortunate thing is that no source of electricity that I have seen is purely "clean".
Even solar?
How can HP saying "we are sufficiently confident of the weakness of SCO's case that we are willing to assume the supposed liability for free" possibly strengthen SCO's case?
Because you don't go insuring yourself against things that have a negligible probability of occurrence.
Offering such a service to your customers implies you believe the probability is no longer negligible and gives credence to statements by other parties on the issue.
Now, personally, I'm not going to buy into such a move, just like I won't buy insurance against planes/meteorites hitting my home because I don't believe such an incident is likely to happen to me. Nevertheless there are people out there who will reason that a service wouldn't be offered "just because", and will infer that SCO might have a case after all. You don't sit on a sidewalk selling umbrellas unless you think it's going to rain (or unless you're trying to pray on the uneducated, uninformed masses who don't know any better). Right now we don't know what HP knows, so we don't know which one it is. Time will tell.
OK, here's a slightly better translation (my own):
"It needs to be stressed that the link created here was a typical ground-based connection, as opposed to the link created at the end of 2002 in Sweden which used a stratospheric baloon"
For details of that accomplishment, go here (this link was posted already in this thread here by wherley).
Essentially, the Swedish ground-to-air link was aided by a 6Watt amp and achieved a distance of over 300km. In comparison, the Polish link was ground-to-ground (i.e. subject to much more interference, be it EMI or air pollution), reached about 1/3rd of the distance while using 1/12th the power.
In this case, five :)
# Piotr Kroplewski - owner of INTERLINE, who supplied the antennae
# Wieslaw Karpowicz - production manager
# Maciej Kaminski - director of technology dept.
# Krzysztof Mularczyk - wireless networks expert
# Krzysztof Juszczyszyn - tech dept.
you have to get your antennas substantially off the ground ... which is what they did. One of the antennas was on top of a 10-story apartment building, the other was on the side of a mountain, 1400 meters above sea level (which is around 4800ft) with hardly anything in between (see map).
The weather balloon reached a maximum height of 29.7 km and drifted steadily. It finally touched down east of Sodankyla in the northern part of Finland, having travelled approximately 315 Km.
:)
On the balloon, the BreezeNET DS.11 unit was connected to a high-power amplifier with 6 watts power output, a camera and a server.
Impressive though the achievement is, it has no bearing on how WiFi networks are allowed to work on Planet Earth. Down here, you're restricted to much lower power outputs and much smaller antenna gain.
So, they used a much more powerful amplifier, through much less polluted air (I assume), and do not mention data speeds achieved (i.e. were they at all useful)?
Still cool, but let's not burst the polish baloon just yet
Few more notes...
Initially they didn't use an amp, and were getting 20% thruput, which allowed for a 1Mbps link to be established. That link kept going down every few seconds, tho, so they put in the amp. This boosted their RSS readings from 8 to 28, which meant 80% thruput. Having reached that, they tried to ftp a file and although they don't say how big it was, it was copied over at 40kBps, or around 0.5Mbps.
I don't know about you, but seeing ping replies in the single digits and low teens while ~70miles away makes my spine tingle.
see "Some details" further down.
I didn't translate, but I summarized the most important bits.
Here's the equipment they used (which I didn't include in my other post):
# Antennae - Interline PARABOLIC maxi, 27 dBi
# Access Points - INTEL Pro/Wireless 2011 Access Point, made by SYBMOL
# Cables and connectors - BELDEN H-1000, H-155, RG-316, VITELEC connectors
# Wireless cards - Lucent ORiNOCO PC Card Silver/chipset Agere, ZCom XI-300/chipset Intersil
# Amplifier - 2.4 GHz, 500 mW
The article claims the experiment used off-the-shelf, commercially available, unmodified components (1.1m / 3.5ft parabolic antenna and a 500mW amplifier). Experiment was conducted in a mountainous region in southwestern Poland.
:)
So this isn't all that bad... considering the average laptop wireless card puts out, what, 20mW? 50mW? using a 500mW amp to achieve a much greater distance is pretty sweet. By comparison, the article quotes a Swedish experiment which used stratospheric baloons and a 6W amp, but they don't mention the distance achieved.
Mind you, rules about how much power certain appliances / transmitters can put out with or without a permit vary across the globe, and I'm not sure whether 500mW is legal for private unlicensed use in Poland or not. But if it is, more power to them.
Now, where can I get mine??
Let's see how long they stay in everyone's favorite game of Global Thermonuclear Slashdotting... :)
They seem to be holding up pretty well so far!
... called IRC. Everyone coming into work makes their presence known on a certain predetermined
channel, their signs of presence get logged with a timestamp... everyone knows where everyone else
is... Works great, unless your server is lagged to Jupiter and back.
Three words... cross-border shopping...
:)
Ooops... I didn't just say that, did I...
Watched the news last night... Anchorman said "But this sort of thing won't happen here -- worst you can expect is an instant message from the gov't saying that 'file sharing is bad and increases the cost of music to those who don't use it'".
Gotta love this country. Share on!
For such a device to be really practical for disabled elderly, it needs to be able to balance on its own.
I think the producers of Segway have just found another niche market
IBM doesn't do things half-assed.
:) Having said that, the x-series is a much better product than the 1st-gen stuff, and so far no complaints here -- but even the Big Blue will make mistakes sometimes.
Not always, sad to say. The precursors to the x-series, the 4000R and 4500R machines, being first-generation machines, weren't anywhere near perfect. Motherboards on the 4500R's in particular have been known to blow out VRMs and take down a CPU with them -- happened to 80% of machines I have. True, they'll usually replace them fairly quickly, but I'd much rather have hardware that works in the first place
If you let people plug random machines into your network, you, to all intents and purposes, don't have a firewall.
Laptops which visit the outside world need to be treated as external machines, not internal ones.
Amen to that. Additionally, all laptops (or other devices one takes home / connects to other 'foreign' networks) should be segmented into their own separate subnet at work and firewalled accordingly. For the people that take their hard drives home instead, their work machines should have a virus check thoroughly scan the drive every time they bring it back.
I know, these are lofty ideas, but at some point dealing with reactive stuff gets annoying and tedious enough that there is no other way.
From what I've heard on the news last night, the power companies aren't having as much problem with the virus as Air Canada's computer systems do. And not just in Ontario, but across Canada (someone mentioned Vancouver for a change).
I'm glad I don't live in Ontario right about now.
Eh, it's not all that bad. If anything, I'd say I'm glad I'm not flying Air Canada right about now. As for electricity, we've dodged the supply/demand bullet yesterday, with Ontario supplying 20 GW of juice, and us using up 19.180 GW at 5pm. Today's weather forecast calls for higher temps and humidity levels. Worse come to worst, it'll be another opportunity to pop open a warm bottle of Labatt's/Canadian and chat with the neigh)$(@#&*(#*%&()*&#$@(*& +++ NO CARRIER
Because I want to.
Because I can.
Because it's easier than trying to nail up some IPSEC tunnel between my Win box and someone else's.
Until you educate the clueless masses out there (you could start with the ones sharing your ISP), guess what -- you're SOL. You're a minority. Most of your neighbors don't know that they're sharing their printer with the world -- and if they did, they probably wouldn't want to.
It's connectivity, that's all.
Precisely. And if my neighbor's cluelessness leads me to having NO connectivity because he's infested with two dozen viruses and trojans, YOU BET I'm gonna have them dealt with. Even if it means having ports firewalled off by my ISP. The benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Remember, it's all about security. Treat this the same way you'd treat your linux/windows box: you only run services you need, not everything the OS comes with. Why? Because to do otherwise is a waste. Because to do otherwise is irresponsible and careless. Like driving and yakking on a cellphone. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Home:
ISP: Cogeco Cable: No interruptions
Power: NiagaraMohawk: No interruptions (I kid you not. My neighborhood hasn't lost power for a second during the outage).
Phone (both landline and cellphone): No interruptions
Work:
ISP: RoncoNet: No interruptions
Power: unsure (prolly NiMo + generators): No interruptions