Those articles don't include nearly enough question marks. Allow me to suggest the following:
"Are citizens not on Facebook hurting the economy?" "Is $nation's policy of linking a facebook account to their passport a good thing?" "Did terrorist suspects falsify Facebook profile information?" "Is lack of access to Facebook driving people to terrorism?" "Does $terrorist's Facebook account legitimise social networking?"
Bam! Way more page hits and way less work for the editors.
The core problem, of course, is that many workplaces (particularly offices) have no adequate way to measure employee productivity and thus use "time spent staring at your desk at a VDU" or similar as a surrogate indicator of performance.
The most productive people I know are the ones who regularly take short breaks. Even when we're in the middle of a crisis, our bosses will insist on us taking short breaks, and as an ex-smoker I still take fag breaks - you'd be amazed how many eureka* moments you can get whilst standing outside the office looking at a flower bed or waiting in line for a coffee wondering what the difference between two roasts is.
Just like too much coffee can ruin your concentration, staying on the same problem for too long frequently makes you blind to the actual solution.
* itself, of course, a term coined when the frustrated Archimedes took a break from trying to solve his problem.
Swap files may grow, but the speed of hard drives doesn't scale along with everything else. Take a good platter-based drive and you're lucky to see reads/writes of 20MB/s assuming little to no HDD contention, especially since swap is typically highly random non-sequential 4k access. RAID that up or us an SSD and you might get 50MB/s. Lets say you have a 512MB swap, as I do, it'll take 10s to read the whole thing. Take a 512GB swap (like one poor server I found at work - someone was following the appallingly stone-aged adage about swap=mem*2) and all of a sudden it's going to take you 3 hours to read back all that virtual memory.
Compare that with some old memory, say some DDR-333, which has a transfer rate of over 2GB/s. Compare with the DDR3 in my workstation, capable of 12GB/s.
Back when we were limited to miniscule amount of memory, lots of swap made sense because memory was horrifically expensive and it didn't take *that* long to read/write to, because the total amount of memory was still fairly small in comparison. But these days you're looking at wait times of 30 minutes or more if you want your entire swap space to be double your memory and to be used by the OS.
Stick with a small swap file and not much crap ever gets written to disc, saving you the horror of having to reset a server for the umpteenth time when it's been grinding on its system disc for five minutes trying to page in the OOM killer.
Any denizen of slashdot worth their salt should be able to turn their blu ray into a red ray just by reversing the polarity and re-routing the power for the laser array through the optical matrix.
They've been playing classical music at Brixton tube station for at least two or three years, on and off, and only in the evening I think.
Unfortunately, the PA system is so uniformly shitty that it doesn't sound much better than the tinny music coming out of kids mobiles. Would be much nicer if they could give the lady violinist with dreadlocks who I often see at Stockwell a permanent spot.
Working in a company that ditched the last of its mainframes just as I arrived (and was lucky enough to get to talk to some of the awesome IBM techs who were decommissioning the hardware), this lovely excerpt from The Cryptonomicon is just as apropos for mainframes as it is for bandsaws and Vickers machine guns:
Now when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, heâ(TM)d been slotted into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain amount of his time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces of wood or metal into smaller pieces. Numerous saws were available in the shop for that purpose, some better than others. A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand saw would be accomplished with a power saw. Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and therefore called for larger power saws. But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind of stress on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply of blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure. It was the size of a car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight-spoked things that looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives. Its blades had to be manufactured from long rolls of blade-stuff by unreeling about half a mile of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends together into a loop. When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually commingled with other industrial-accident anecdotes. Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didnâ(TM)t seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasnâ(TM)t even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down. Never heated up.
In Shaftoeâ(TM)s post-high-school experience he had found that guns had much in common with saws. Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually. They could fire bullets in other words, but it was a big deal for them, it placed a certain amount of stress on them, and they could not take that stress forever. But the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was to other saws. The Vickers was water-cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure, just like the bandsaw, and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for days as long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition. After Private Mikulski opened fire with the Vickers, some of the other Detachment 2702 men, eager to pitch in and do their bit, took potshots at those Germans with their rifles, but doing so made them feel so small and pathetic that they soon gave up and just took cover in the ditch and lit up cigarettes and watched the slow progress of the Vickersâ(TM) bullet-stream across the roadblock. Mikulski hosed down all of the German vehicles for a while, yawing the Vickers back and forth like a man playing a fire extinguisher against the b
Same here - I used to get all my computer components from scan.co.uk but their customer service was appalling. Negotiating a replacement took a battery of emails and phone calls and paying my own postage ending with a "the item is fine, we're charging you £xyz for costing our time" and I'd either get back the same item still faulty, or a silently-replaced (diff. serial number) functional item. Before I shopped at scan, I used aria.co.uk who refused to ship me an order I never received, despite having no tracking information for the parcel. Had to take those fuckers to the small claims court.
With amazon, I say "it's broken, I want a refund", I get a refund. When I got a DOA NAS unit, the replacement was there the next day along with the "here's a DHL coupon thing, let them know when you're ready to send the original back and they'll pick it up from your door. Coupon is valid for weekend pickups too!". As with you, if the cost of the postage is too much (as with a lot of DVD's) they'll say "just keep it or throw it away".
And yes, I frequently pay above the odds (they're usually 2-3% more expensive than the "cheapest" online from a reputable dealer) simply for the peace of mind.
You forgot the mandatory "After spending literally seconds looking at your responses to my pointless questions about video drivers, I decree that it's almost certainly due to you having a virus rather than being a bug, as such I'm now closing this ticket and ignoring any future bug reports from you".
Same here - central London and just moved into a house without a phone line and a virgin 50Mb pipe. We got rid of Virgin when we noticed that pings to most servers in europe were 100-150ms and that sites like iPlayer and youtube appeared to be throttled down to 1-2Mb/s download. The Virgin-supplied hardware was also complete and utter dross (two or three reboots a day if you used wireless, and you weren't allowed to replace it with your own kit). People I know on BT have the exact same experience.
Switched to ADSL via BeThere, "only" 24Mb/s (line actually syncs at about 21Mb/s) but pings are in the 20-30ms range and there's no capping going on so it feels much faster.
In summary, people aren't going for these "fast" connections because most people tech-savvy enough to utilise a >25Mb/s pipe are also tech savvy enough to know that service through BT or Virgin is going to be piss-poor throttled arsebiscuits. As soon as the fibre is leased out to competent providers you'll start to see more of a groundswell.
Does this make anyone else...
on
Ubuntu Turns 7
·
· Score: 1
...feel incredibly old?! My first experience with ubuntu was when the girlfriend at the time asked me to install it for her cos she thought it looked cool, sometime back in 2005/2006. Of course, I'm back with Debian now...
...for my needs anyway, so hopefully I can add something to the discussion. I'm one of those traitors who traded a homemade linux NAS for an off-the-shelf model and went through quite a few models before I found one I was happy with.
My initial file server was built into a cheap 4U rackmount and a couple of 3ware cards and provided sterling service. However, it was exceptionally loud and very heavy, and sucked up a fair amount of power. When you've moved house as often as I have, you start to think about whether you really need a 40kg server just to put 8 hard drives in (and another server to back up to).
Once I could afford it (don't get me wrong - NAS units are colossally overpriced for what they are) I got myself a NAS chassis. I'd bought a Synology DS410 for a client before and it was reasonably nice kit (PPC processor and four non-hot-swap bays) and the synology OS was OK... but adding third-party apps to it was a bitch (you needed to hack the bootloader) and the shell was gimped. I returned the DS410 I bought for myself as a test (was planning to donate it so my sister as an engagement present once I'd evaluated the OS) and bought a QNAP TS-419P - also four bays but run on a 1GHz ARM processor.
The ARM processor was, sadly, anaemic. The QNAP OS didn't allow RAID10 at the time (you could set it up on the command line using conventional mdadm commands but then couldn't manage the volume from the web GUI) since QNAP were under the delusion that "RAID6 is just as fast and more reliable!" - wrong. Thankfully they've now seen the error of their ways. Hence volume creation and write speed was limited by the processor (it was on the Synology too, but less so since the PPC was more powerful). I think I could get writes over CIFS at about 20MB/s on a good day, considerably less if I used SSH or rsync (which I use all the time). So, not good enough. Which is a shame since as a British geek who grew up on a school Acorn Archimedes (and had a former colleague of Sophie [Roger] Wilson's as a flatmate before he drank himself to death) I'm naturally a fan of ARM processors. The only other real difference between the DS410 and the TS-419P was that the QNAP was noticeably quieter than the Synology, despite the fact the spec sheet led me to beleive the opposite would be true. I think the latest model in the 419 line has a 2GHz ARM processor so should be considerably faster.
So I looked at the x86 range. As much as I hate the Atom, for a NAS they're adequate. I sent the TS-419P up to my sister and bought a TS-859 Pro+ which uses a 1.6GHz dual-core + SMT Atom D525 and a 1GB SODIMM (which I later upgraded to 2GB) and the experience was instantly better. Across a six-disc RAID5 I got CIFS writes of about 100MB/s, and now that it's got eight drives in RAID10 (i.e. much less CPU overhead for RAID) I can get that up to 150MB/s with the two bonded gigabit ethernet ports; the bottleneck here appears to be smbd itself since with multiple transfers I can max out both interfaces at about 220MB/s. I figure there's something single-threaded in samba (or at least QNAP's version of it) that'll bottleneck the speed of a single transfer, but 150MB/s is easily fast enough for me at home. Amongst other things I use it as an iSCSI baby SAN for my ESX testbed. Noise-wise, the 859 i
The brother of my ex is actually implementing a thing like this for his village (~500 people) in northern Germany at the moment; he's been running a small biogas plant for a few years now. But reading into the subsidies law, he saw he could get higher subsidies if he also found a use for the waste products as well - one of the big ones of course being heat. Cow shit > methane > engine > exhaust heat.
So he hit upon piping the waste heat from the engines into houses to supplement heating systems. Running waste heat along a mile of pipe from the farm would be wasteful, so instead they're just pumping the methane into a new engine installed within the village and piping the heat out from that. As a bonus he's also installing fibre-optic cables at the same time as laying the pipes in order to run a municipal high-speed village internet. Rather a neat system all told.
Cygwin + openSSH + minTTY is an utter godsend on windows; minTTY is the best terminal emulator I've used on windows by a long shot and IMHO knocks the one included with putty into a cocked hat.
Why MS chose to use the same god-awful terminal for their all-singing all-dancing powershell is beyond me.
90% of users who don't do video encoding or demand to play the latest games at the highest resolution available would be much better served by buying the AMD system and spending that spare $100 on a 60GB SSD to use as a boot drive. For most workloads, that'll make the system feel five times "faster".
No, I'm in the UK. Just been looking through some of the wikipedia pages on US employment law and... it's sometimes scary what your employers seem to be able to get away with... I always wondered why the characters in Office Space didn't just say "Fuck off! I'm going to have a lie-in and a wank!" to Lumbergh when he asked them to come and work over the weekend. Is there an equivalent law to constructive dismissal in the US?
Can admittedly be a double-edged sword; termination laws are quite strict so companies/employees need to amass a lot of evidence to get rid of someone who's, say, rascist or incompetent without having a massive court case over it; the gf had to manage one particularly obtuse individual that refused to take orders from a woman and getting rid of him has taken the company about 8 months because he claimed he was being picked on because of his race.
Back on topic, I work with a lot of aussies (London is full of antipodeans - because of our shared cultural history it's an ideal springboard for them to visit europe) and employment laws there are more or less comparable to here. I was actually quite surprised to hear such tales of software development woe coming from a dev house outside the US.
Seconded. I took my first employer to the small claims court for constructive dismissal after he withheld a months pay after I decided to work to rule after his twattish behaviour caused me to nearly bust a gasket (dumping an "urgent" jobs on my doorstep at 8pm on a friday evening, giving disgruntled clients my personal phone number and home address, being persistently late with payment). Got the two grand pay and two grand in damages via a CCJ all with a few forms from the citizens advice bureau (no legal team needed) and the ensuing stink about my lack of payslips caused HMRC to investigate WTF was going on with the companies pay setup. Turned out he wasn't paying inland revenue but was still deducting the money from my paycheque. Fucker got nailed to the wall and was declared bankrupt almost immediately.
If people fuck you up and you continue to let it happen, they'll keep doing it again and again and again to everyone else they meet until they think it's normal to treat humans like disposable cattle. Don't let them get that far. There's a hundred laws to protect workers from abusive bosses; use them.
Slashdot Mirror
It was the same thing with jetpacks when they were released in the UK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDIojhOkV4w
I read this oddball and rather fascinating tongue-in-cheek article about the same subject a few years back:
http://qntm.org/destroy
It goes from the sublime to the ridiculous; hopefully this research will be just as entertaining!
Hate to be pedantic, but I'm Mr. Nemesis.
GNOME isn't shooting for the bleeding edge either! Instead, it's taking aim at its own foot... ;)
Those articles don't include nearly enough question marks. Allow me to suggest the following:
"Are citizens not on Facebook hurting the economy?"
"Is $nation's policy of linking a facebook account to their passport a good thing?"
"Did terrorist suspects falsify Facebook profile information?"
"Is lack of access to Facebook driving people to terrorism?"
"Does $terrorist's Facebook account legitimise social networking?"
Bam! Way more page hits and way less work for the editors.
The core problem, of course, is that many workplaces (particularly offices) have no adequate way to measure employee productivity and thus use "time spent staring at your desk at a VDU" or similar as a surrogate indicator of performance.
The most productive people I know are the ones who regularly take short breaks. Even when we're in the middle of a crisis, our bosses will insist on us taking short breaks, and as an ex-smoker I still take fag breaks - you'd be amazed how many eureka* moments you can get whilst standing outside the office looking at a flower bed or waiting in line for a coffee wondering what the difference between two roasts is.
Just like too much coffee can ruin your concentration, staying on the same problem for too long frequently makes you blind to the actual solution.
* itself, of course, a term coined when the frustrated Archimedes took a break from trying to solve his problem.
There are even services that allow you to hire stupid people on your behalf in order to win arguments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n677ZbzC24
"Thick people are very good at winning arguments because... they're too thick to realise that they've lost."
Swap files may grow, but the speed of hard drives doesn't scale along with everything else. Take a good platter-based drive and you're lucky to see reads/writes of 20MB/s assuming little to no HDD contention, especially since swap is typically highly random non-sequential 4k access. RAID that up or us an SSD and you might get 50MB/s. Lets say you have a 512MB swap, as I do, it'll take 10s to read the whole thing. Take a 512GB swap (like one poor server I found at work - someone was following the appallingly stone-aged adage about swap=mem*2) and all of a sudden it's going to take you 3 hours to read back all that virtual memory.
Compare that with some old memory, say some DDR-333, which has a transfer rate of over 2GB/s. Compare with the DDR3 in my workstation, capable of 12GB/s.
Back when we were limited to miniscule amount of memory, lots of swap made sense because memory was horrifically expensive and it didn't take *that* long to read/write to, because the total amount of memory was still fairly small in comparison. But these days you're looking at wait times of 30 minutes or more if you want your entire swap space to be double your memory and to be used by the OS.
Stick with a small swap file and not much crap ever gets written to disc, saving you the horror of having to reset a server for the umpteenth time when it's been grinding on its system disc for five minutes trying to page in the OOM killer.
To be effective, it usually needs to be combined with aquamarine quartz.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
The main site appears to be down, but I've always found Rod's take on the Star Trek film reboot spot on the money:
http://www.the-editing-room.com/star-trek.html
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dMzpqZM75DoJ:www.the-editing-room.com/star-trek.html+editing+room+star+trek+abridged+cached&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-a
Any denizen of slashdot worth their salt should be able to turn their blu ray into a red ray just by reversing the polarity and re-routing the power for the laser array through the optical matrix.
They've been playing classical music at Brixton tube station for at least two or three years, on and off, and only in the evening I think.
Unfortunately, the PA system is so uniformly shitty that it doesn't sound much better than the tinny music coming out of kids mobiles. Would be much nicer if they could give the lady violinist with dreadlocks who I often see at Stockwell a permanent spot.
Working in a company that ditched the last of its mainframes just as I arrived (and was lucky enough to get to talk to some of the awesome IBM techs who were decommissioning the hardware), this lovely excerpt from The Cryptonomicon is just as apropos for mainframes as it is for bandsaws and Vickers machine guns:
Same here - I used to get all my computer components from scan.co.uk but their customer service was appalling. Negotiating a replacement took a battery of emails and phone calls and paying my own postage ending with a "the item is fine, we're charging you £xyz for costing our time" and I'd either get back the same item still faulty, or a silently-replaced (diff. serial number) functional item. Before I shopped at scan, I used aria.co.uk who refused to ship me an order I never received, despite having no tracking information for the parcel. Had to take those fuckers to the small claims court.
With amazon, I say "it's broken, I want a refund", I get a refund. When I got a DOA NAS unit, the replacement was there the next day along with the "here's a DHL coupon thing, let them know when you're ready to send the original back and they'll pick it up from your door. Coupon is valid for weekend pickups too!". As with you, if the cost of the postage is too much (as with a lot of DVD's) they'll say "just keep it or throw it away".
And yes, I frequently pay above the odds (they're usually 2-3% more expensive than the "cheapest" online from a reputable dealer) simply for the peace of mind.
You forgot the mandatory "After spending literally seconds looking at your responses to my pointless questions about video drivers, I decree that it's almost certainly due to you having a virus rather than being a bug, as such I'm now closing this ticket and ignoring any future bug reports from you".
Have a nice day!
Same here - central London and just moved into a house without a phone line and a virgin 50Mb pipe. We got rid of Virgin when we noticed that pings to most servers in europe were 100-150ms and that sites like iPlayer and youtube appeared to be throttled down to 1-2Mb/s download. The Virgin-supplied hardware was also complete and utter dross (two or three reboots a day if you used wireless, and you weren't allowed to replace it with your own kit). People I know on BT have the exact same experience.
Switched to ADSL via BeThere, "only" 24Mb/s (line actually syncs at about 21Mb/s) but pings are in the 20-30ms range and there's no capping going on so it feels much faster.
In summary, people aren't going for these "fast" connections because most people tech-savvy enough to utilise a >25Mb/s pipe are also tech savvy enough to know that service through BT or Virgin is going to be piss-poor throttled arsebiscuits. As soon as the fibre is leased out to competent providers you'll start to see more of a groundswell.
...feel incredibly old?! My first experience with ubuntu was when the girlfriend at the time asked me to install it for her cos she thought it looked cool, sometime back in 2005/2006. Of course, I'm back with Debian now...
...for my needs anyway, so hopefully I can add something to the discussion. I'm one of those traitors who traded a homemade linux NAS for an off-the-shelf model and went through quite a few models before I found one I was happy with.
My initial file server was built into a cheap 4U rackmount and a couple of 3ware cards and provided sterling service. However, it was exceptionally loud and very heavy, and sucked up a fair amount of power. When you've moved house as often as I have, you start to think about whether you really need a 40kg server just to put 8 hard drives in (and another server to back up to).
So cue me looking for a smaller case that I could cram a mATX or mITX mobo into, and rely on linux softraid; there aren't really any that aren't rackmount. A couple of nice ones have come out recently like the Lian Li V354 (six bays and available in a very fetching red as well as black and silver) and the Chenbro ES34169 (four bays w/ hot-swap caddies) but I needed eight bays... so I started to look at the NAS market.
http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_1591.html
http://www.xcase.co.uk/Chenbro-ES34169-Compact-size-chassis-w-4-Hotswap-p/case-chenbro-es34169.htm
Once I could afford it (don't get me wrong - NAS units are colossally overpriced for what they are) I got myself a NAS chassis. I'd bought a Synology DS410 for a client before and it was reasonably nice kit (PPC processor and four non-hot-swap bays) and the synology OS was OK... but adding third-party apps to it was a bitch (you needed to hack the bootloader) and the shell was gimped. I returned the DS410 I bought for myself as a test (was planning to donate it so my sister as an engagement present once I'd evaluated the OS) and bought a QNAP TS-419P - also four bays but run on a 1GHz ARM processor.
The ARM processor was, sadly, anaemic. The QNAP OS didn't allow RAID10 at the time (you could set it up on the command line using conventional mdadm commands but then couldn't manage the volume from the web GUI) since QNAP were under the delusion that "RAID6 is just as fast and more reliable!" - wrong. Thankfully they've now seen the error of their ways. Hence volume creation and write speed was limited by the processor (it was on the Synology too, but less so since the PPC was more powerful). I think I could get writes over CIFS at about 20MB/s on a good day, considerably less if I used SSH or rsync (which I use all the time). So, not good enough. Which is a shame since as a British geek who grew up on a school Acorn Archimedes (and had a former colleague of Sophie [Roger] Wilson's as a flatmate before he drank himself to death) I'm naturally a fan of ARM processors. The only other real difference between the DS410 and the TS-419P was that the QNAP was noticeably quieter than the Synology, despite the fact the spec sheet led me to beleive the opposite would be true. I think the latest model in the 419 line has a 2GHz ARM processor so should be considerably faster.
So I looked at the x86 range. As much as I hate the Atom, for a NAS they're adequate. I sent the TS-419P up to my sister and bought a TS-859 Pro+ which uses a 1.6GHz dual-core + SMT Atom D525 and a 1GB SODIMM (which I later upgraded to 2GB) and the experience was instantly better. Across a six-disc RAID5 I got CIFS writes of about 100MB/s, and now that it's got eight drives in RAID10 (i.e. much less CPU overhead for RAID) I can get that up to 150MB/s with the two bonded gigabit ethernet ports; the bottleneck here appears to be smbd itself since with multiple transfers I can max out both interfaces at about 220MB/s. I figure there's something single-threaded in samba (or at least QNAP's version of it) that'll bottleneck the speed of a single transfer, but 150MB/s is easily fast enough for me at home. Amongst other things I use it as an iSCSI baby SAN for my ESX testbed. Noise-wise, the 859 i
I think you're getting confused with the speed of sea.
The brother of my ex is actually implementing a thing like this for his village (~500 people) in northern Germany at the moment; he's been running a small biogas plant for a few years now. But reading into the subsidies law, he saw he could get higher subsidies if he also found a use for the waste products as well - one of the big ones of course being heat. Cow shit > methane > engine > exhaust heat.
So he hit upon piping the waste heat from the engines into houses to supplement heating systems. Running waste heat along a mile of pipe from the farm would be wasteful, so instead they're just pumping the methane into a new engine installed within the village and piping the heat out from that. As a bonus he's also installing fibre-optic cables at the same time as laying the pipes in order to run a municipal high-speed village internet. Rather a neat system all told.
Cygwin + openSSH + minTTY is an utter godsend on windows; minTTY is the best terminal emulator I've used on windows by a long shot and IMHO knocks the one included with putty into a cocked hat.
Why MS chose to use the same god-awful terminal for their all-singing all-dancing powershell is beyond me.
http://code.google.com/p/mintty/
What are you talking about?! Tetris: The Movie was shown on british TV way back in 1999.
http://www.tvgohome.com/121199.html (NSFW)
90% of users who don't do video encoding or demand to play the latest games at the highest resolution available would be much better served by buying the AMD system and spending that spare $100 on a 60GB SSD to use as a boot drive. For most workloads, that'll make the system feel five times "faster".
No, I'm in the UK. Just been looking through some of the wikipedia pages on US employment law and... it's sometimes scary what your employers seem to be able to get away with... I always wondered why the characters in Office Space didn't just say "Fuck off! I'm going to have a lie-in and a wank!" to Lumbergh when he asked them to come and work over the weekend. Is there an equivalent law to constructive dismissal in the US?
Can admittedly be a double-edged sword; termination laws are quite strict so companies/employees need to amass a lot of evidence to get rid of someone who's, say, rascist or incompetent without having a massive court case over it; the gf had to manage one particularly obtuse individual that refused to take orders from a woman and getting rid of him has taken the company about 8 months because he claimed he was being picked on because of his race.
Back on topic, I work with a lot of aussies (London is full of antipodeans - because of our shared cultural history it's an ideal springboard for them to visit europe) and employment laws there are more or less comparable to here. I was actually quite surprised to hear such tales of software development woe coming from a dev house outside the US.
Seconded. I took my first employer to the small claims court for constructive dismissal after he withheld a months pay after I decided to work to rule after his twattish behaviour caused me to nearly bust a gasket (dumping an "urgent" jobs on my doorstep at 8pm on a friday evening, giving disgruntled clients my personal phone number and home address, being persistently late with payment). Got the two grand pay and two grand in damages via a CCJ all with a few forms from the citizens advice bureau (no legal team needed) and the ensuing stink about my lack of payslips caused HMRC to investigate WTF was going on with the companies pay setup. Turned out he wasn't paying inland revenue but was still deducting the money from my paycheque. Fucker got nailed to the wall and was declared bankrupt almost immediately.
If people fuck you up and you continue to let it happen, they'll keep doing it again and again and again to everyone else they meet until they think it's normal to treat humans like disposable cattle. Don't let them get that far. There's a hundred laws to protect workers from abusive bosses; use them.