Why does Amazon need an exclusive ISP? What does that mean anyway? It seems hardly likely that Amazon would reject book orders that didn't come in over AOL.
if you drop to zero vis (which can happen from blue sky to zero in about 5 min or less!) you will find out just how badly you want your GPS.
Good point. I hike w/map & compass, and know how to use them, so I've never bothered to cough up the extra $$$ for a GPS. Your comment about zero visibility is the first time anyone's given me a reason to change my mind and consider GPS.
And besides, do you really want to relearn how to type so you can be 3wpm faster in theory?
Speed's not the only issue, nor is it the major issue as far as I'm concerned. I have RSI problems. Using Dvorak results in noticably less pain in my hands. It's not a miracle cure, but it does make a big difference for me. Someday you may develop RSI problems, and then perhaps you won't be so scornful.
Yes. Remote subscriber terminals are what my local phone company (Hiawatha Telecommunications) plans to use to roll out DSL to customers outside of Munising. They run fiber to a remote station, which in the town of Christmas, Michigan ends up being some large, green metal boxes on a wooden platform by the side of the highway. From those boxes, it's copper to all the houses. Currently the company runs fiber to within 12,000 feet of almost all their customers, and by fall they expect to pretty much have universal DSL availability.
BTW, if you're interested in some photos of the backroom equipment, go to http://www.oreilly.com/news/dsl_0501.html. Unfortunately, that article doesn't include a phote of the remote station that I mentioned.
I corresponded (by email) with someone in Melbourne once to test the assertion that water goes down the drain differently in the southern hemisphere. The result was simply that it did not. I got different swirling patterns just going around to different drains in my house, and so did my cohort in Australia. The coriolis force might affect hurricanes, but nothing as small as a sink or toilet drain.
If your company tells you to kill someone, you'll get arrested.
I agree, but it's also very obvious that killing someone is illegal. I submit that it's much less obvious that drawing chalk designs on a sidewalk is illegal. The employee doing the actual grunt work might well have assumed (and reasonably so given that he works for a "responsible" company such as IBM) that his company had obtained any necessary permissions from the city. Heck, he probably never gave the matter a second thought. It's the people higher up who should suffer, not the guy with the chalk in his hand.
Re:IT Unions not all bad
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
Then the realization hit me. No matter how hard I worked I was not going to get much based on merit. Every year every employee gets the same percentage raise and the same perks.
What you just said is what I see as one downside to unions. Everyone moves in lockstep. I want the opportunity for a big leap. As a result, I gravitate towards jobs where there's a potential for me to earn significantly more money by working smarter and/or harder than everyone else.
I think the issue is that some cable companies won't support Linux, so you need to have a Windoze machine for them to install into. You can configure Linux after they leave. FWIW, I run both Windows and Linux systems in my house, all connected through a home gateway (router) to a cable modem. The local cable company techs know about and they not only don't care that I do all this, they've even shown interest in how I set it all up.
As far as running Apache goes, I tried that and I discovered that my cable company blocks port 80. I ran Apache on port 88 for awhile, and had no problems. I only served up a few pages per day though. I'm sure they would have complained had I used a noticable amount of bandwidth.
As for the problem of shared bandwidth, its real and its a problem in Buffalo. Adelphia cannot handle all the problems that they are having with shared bandwidth.
But this was my point in my original query. Your logic here is that since you are having bandwidth problems, and because you are using cable, that the source of your problems must be cable's shared bandwidth. That's not a very convincing argument, in my opinion.
Several posts have mentioned the "problem" of shared bandwidth when using a cable Internet connection. I'm skeptical about how real this problem is. It seems to me that the only issue is how soon sharing occurs as you move away from your house. With cable, I share bandwidth with all neighbors on the same node (there are multiple "nodes" in my town). With DSL, I have a dedicated line four blocks to the phone company, but certainly from that point onwards my neighbors and I must all share the same set of T1 lines, or whatever type of line the phone company uses to get Internet in the first place. It seems to me that this "sharing" issue is really a red-herring. If it's really a problem, I'd love to see a sound technical explanation of why that is so.
What pisses me off.. is if he would have just slugged the kid he probally would have gotten a few days supsension for fighting and that would have been all
You are no doubt correct. One of my neighbor's kids recently slugged someone who teased him, and his punishment (for hitting) was only three days suspension.
Seems only the Private schools got the pull (or cash) to get the.edu
Pull maybe, but I didn't think it was worth the trouble to get one. When I helped my daughter's school get a domain, we got a.org because it took all of 10 minutes to do so at Dotster. No one wanted to bother with the delay and the process involved with getting an edu. In truth, people are so used to.com, that having the.org is a bit of a problem. Having a.edu extension would probably be worse.
I concur. And it's not only a problem when installing onto 100+ boxes. Sometimes when you're faced with an annoying feature, you don't even realize that the option to turn it off exists. Or you spend 30 minutes hunting around all the different options dialogs. And Microsoft has a habit of moving those little checkboxes around from one release to the next. I remember when I moved from Word 95 to 97 (or was it 98), there were several options that I suddenly couldn't find. In general, I hate anything "automatic" in my word processing software. Autocorrect is another Word feature that I'm quick to turn off.
There's no point in getting fired up about Utah. That's just a specific case illustrating a more general issue. The real issue here is that people have career preferences, location preferences, social preferences, and so forth. Anytime you move to take a new job, you need to weigh all these factors. Everyone does this, whether consciously or not.
To the extent that you are a company located in an area where people do not want to live (for whatever reason), you are going to have some difficulty recruiting. I once worked for a big company in a small town, and the smallness of the town and the corresponding lack of other alternatives presented a real problem for recruiters. They just had to deal with it by finding people like me who like small towns. Likewise, some people like warm weather, and tend to gravitate towards Miami and other places south. I like winter, so here I am up north on the shore of Lake Superior.
Every time I've moved to take a new job, it's been a matter of finding a balance. If I didn't like the location very much, was the job itself good enough to outweigh my location preference? Was the job so-so, but the location really good? Did the job pay well enough that I could travel more in order to compensate for a suboptimal location? In the end, it's important to have a wholistic understanding of your own goals and desires and how they play off against each other.
So what exactly are you implying here? All I see in that photograph is a man sitting in front of a computer talking to some teenagers. From that we are supposed to deduce that Draper is some kind of wacko? That's a serious accusation to make without any evidence to back it up.
I don't know Draper myself. Never heard of him before today. Maybe he is what you say. Maybe he is not. But from where I sit, your post looks to be nothing more than a smear campaign.
Years ago I heard from a postal worker about having to deliver mail to "The third house on the left past the gas station on route 101", and it actually got through!
Yes. The USPS is surprisingly accomodating about addresses like that, especially if your destination is a small town where the postal clerks know everyone by name.
Sending back what they sent you for ads (i.e., credit cards upsells, etc.) is a MUST.
I've never thought of doing anything like this, but I must admit there's a certain logic to it. I pay $1.25 per bag for trash pickup. I realize most Slashdot readers probably have garbage pickup at a flat rate that's factored into their taxes somehow, but I actually need to go out and buy a sticker for each garbage bag. So junk mail does cost me, and maybe it's only fair to ask the senders to throw out their own garbage.
If I couldn't do it from school, then I'll do it from home. As long as there is a way of getting non-filtered material.
Sure, but if the gov't has it's way, you'll have fewer and fewer ways of getting non-filtered material. The next step is to force ISPs that cater to the public to install filtering software. Then what will you do?
jmorzins makes some good points. Think about it from their point of view for a moment. You are a church that believes porn is sinful. You are going to offer Internet service, and you realize that a great deal of Internet content is sinful in nature. So you suddenly find yourself delivering the very material that you should be fighting against. You can bet there were a lot of backroom discussions on how best to handle this whole issue. To censor, or not to censor? The compromise they came up with was to censor by default. It's not the choice I would make, but given the nature of the organization, it's completely understandable. It's commendable actually, that they allow you to opt out of being censored.
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Why does Amazon need an exclusive ISP? What does that mean anyway? It seems hardly likely that Amazon would reject book orders that didn't come in over AOL.
Good point. I hike w/map & compass, and know how to use them, so I've never bothered to cough up the extra $$$ for a GPS. Your comment about zero visibility is the first time anyone's given me a reason to change my mind and consider GPS.
Speed's not the only issue, nor is it the major issue as far as I'm concerned. I have RSI problems. Using Dvorak results in noticably less pain in my hands. It's not a miracle cure, but it does make a big difference for me. Someday you may develop RSI problems, and then perhaps you won't be so scornful.
And besides, do you really want to relearn how to type so you can be 3wpm faster in theory?
BTW, if you're interested in some photos of the backroom equipment, go to http://www.oreilly.com/news/dsl_0501.html. Unfortunately, that article doesn't include a phote of the remote station that I mentioned.
I corresponded (by email) with someone in Melbourne once to test the assertion that water goes down the drain differently in the southern hemisphere. The result was simply that it did not. I got different swirling patterns just going around to different drains in my house, and so did my cohort in Australia. The coriolis force might affect hurricanes, but nothing as small as a sink or toilet drain.
I agree, but it's also very obvious that killing someone is illegal. I submit that it's much less obvious that drawing chalk designs on a sidewalk is illegal. The employee doing the actual grunt work might well have assumed (and reasonably so given that he works for a "responsible" company such as IBM) that his company had obtained any necessary permissions from the city. Heck, he probably never gave the matter a second thought. It's the people higher up who should suffer, not the guy with the chalk in his hand.
What you just said is what I see as one downside to unions. Everyone moves in lockstep. I want the opportunity for a big leap. As a result, I gravitate towards jobs where there's a potential for me to earn significantly more money by working smarter and/or harder than everyone else.
I think the issue is that some cable companies won't support Linux, so you need to have a Windoze machine for them to install into. You can configure Linux after they leave. FWIW, I run both Windows and Linux systems in my house, all connected through a home gateway (router) to a cable modem. The local cable company techs know about and they not only don't care that I do all this, they've even shown interest in how I set it all up.
As far as running Apache goes, I tried that and I discovered that my cable company blocks port 80. I ran Apache on port 88 for awhile, and had no problems. I only served up a few pages per day though. I'm sure they would have complained had I used a noticable amount of bandwidth.
But this was my point in my original query. Your logic here is that since you are having bandwidth problems, and because you are using cable, that the source of your problems must be cable's shared bandwidth. That's not a very convincing argument, in my opinion.
your cable company might be a good provider
They seem to be so far (knocking on wood :)).
Several posts have mentioned the "problem" of shared bandwidth when using a cable Internet connection. I'm skeptical about how real this problem is. It seems to me that the only issue is how soon sharing occurs as you move away from your house. With cable, I share bandwidth with all neighbors on the same node (there are multiple "nodes" in my town). With DSL, I have a dedicated line four blocks to the phone company, but certainly from that point onwards my neighbors and I must all share the same set of T1 lines, or whatever type of line the phone company uses to get Internet in the first place. It seems to me that this "sharing" issue is really a red-herring. If it's really a problem, I'd love to see a sound technical explanation of why that is so.
What pisses me off.. is if he would have just slugged the kid he probally would have gotten a few days supsension for fighting and that would have been all You are no doubt correct. One of my neighbor's kids recently slugged someone who teased him, and his punishment (for hitting) was only three days suspension.
I concur. And it's not only a problem when installing onto 100+ boxes. Sometimes when you're faced with an annoying feature, you don't even realize that the option to turn it off exists. Or you spend 30 minutes hunting around all the different options dialogs. And Microsoft has a habit of moving those little checkboxes around from one release to the next. I remember when I moved from Word 95 to 97 (or was it 98), there were several options that I suddenly couldn't find. In general, I hate anything "automatic" in my word processing software. Autocorrect is another Word feature that I'm quick to turn off.
I just ran a quick test from Munising, MI using DSLreports, and it came back with 611 kbps down and 247 kbps up.
I agree. This is how killer bees got started.
I'm not so sure we should be modifying the creatures on earth like that. Its sure to backfire on us. I agree. This is how killer bees got started.
There's no point in getting fired up about Utah. That's just a specific case illustrating a more general issue. The real issue here is that people have career preferences, location preferences, social preferences, and so forth. Anytime you move to take a new job, you need to weigh all these factors. Everyone does this, whether consciously or not.
To the extent that you are a company located in an area where people do not want to live (for whatever reason), you are going to have some difficulty recruiting. I once worked for a big company in a small town, and the smallness of the town and the corresponding lack of other alternatives presented a real problem for recruiters. They just had to deal with it by finding people like me who like small towns. Likewise, some people like warm weather, and tend to gravitate towards Miami and other places south. I like winter, so here I am up north on the shore of Lake Superior.
Every time I've moved to take a new job, it's been a matter of finding a balance. If I didn't like the location very much, was the job itself good enough to outweigh my location preference? Was the job so-so, but the location really good? Did the job pay well enough that I could travel more in order to compensate for a suboptimal location? In the end, it's important to have a wholistic understanding of your own goals and desires and how they play off against each other.
Oh. Well, maybe it's just as well that I don't know the guy.
So what exactly are you implying here? All I see in that photograph is a man sitting in front of a computer talking to some teenagers. From that we are supposed to deduce that Draper is some kind of wacko? That's a serious accusation to make without any evidence to back it up.
I don't know Draper myself. Never heard of him before today. Maybe he is what you say. Maybe he is not. But from where I sit, your post looks to be nothing more than a smear campaign.
Years ago I heard from a postal worker about having to deliver mail to "The third house on the left past the gas station on route 101", and it actually got through!
Yes. The USPS is surprisingly accomodating about addresses like that, especially if your destination is a small town where the postal clerks know everyone by name.
I've never thought of doing anything like this, but I must admit there's a certain logic to it. I pay $1.25 per bag for trash pickup. I realize most Slashdot readers probably have garbage pickup at a flat rate that's factored into their taxes somehow, but I actually need to go out and buy a sticker for each garbage bag. So junk mail does cost me, and maybe it's only fair to ask the senders to throw out their own garbage.
Sure, but if the gov't has it's way, you'll have fewer and fewer ways of getting non-filtered material. The next step is to force ISPs that cater to the public to install filtering software. Then what will you do?
jmorzins makes some good points. Think about it from their point of view for a moment. You are a church that believes porn is sinful. You are going to offer Internet service, and you realize that a great deal of Internet content is sinful in nature. So you suddenly find yourself delivering the very material that you should be fighting against. You can bet there were a lot of backroom discussions on how best to handle this whole issue. To censor, or not to censor? The compromise they came up with was to censor by default. It's not the choice I would make, but given the nature of the organization, it's completely understandable. It's commendable actually, that they allow you to opt out of being censored.