While I try to respect my ISP's policies and abide by them... I've considered asking a neighbor who has DSL (I have cable) if we could leech off each other in case of outage - it would be very unusual for both to go down at the same time.
When I'm not geeking for work on my desktop machine (dual Xeon 2.6's), I do enjoy shooters like quake and unreal tournament.
Quake3 is unusual in that it actually does use SMP and runs flawlessly at 1600x1200x32. Other games don't use the second processor... but the nice thing about it is if you leave a dozen apps running, you won't suffer death by lag when you log onto UT2003.
Of course, there is a down side.. I have one less thing to blame when I get my butt kicked by a couple of 12-year-olds using worn-out P3 machines with dial-up connections. Ow.
I provide a mirror for a couple of largish open-source sites, and several of them specifically request that sites provide FTP service as preferred over HTTP. A couple of reasons:
1. Scripts which need to get a list of files before choosing which ones to download - automated installers and the like - are easier to implement with FTP.
2. FTP generally seems to chew up less CPU on the host. I can serve 12mb/s of traffic all day long on a P-II 450 box with only 256mb of memory.
3. "download recovery" (after losing connection, etc.) seems to work better in FTP than HTTP.
If you're an aspiring artist letting people download your music or other work, I salute you. But I also suggest you get a service that's intended for constant use.
I'll say it agsin: P2P networking and "personal servers" are exactly the reason that DSL and cable will soon offer a cheap service which uses a webTV type box with a closed, no-storage OS.... And another more expensive service for users who want to run windows or linux on a machine attached to the net.
Come to think of it.. Why should I pay the same flat fee to browse the web and play a couple games of Quake when my neighbor runs a VNC session that chews up 400kb/s 24x7?
I think the only way to reduce the growth of spam is to make email have an absolute, unavoidable cost to the sender, unless the sender is already known to the recipient.
The postal service would be the likely agency to administer and enforce this rule.
Before you fling rotten fruit, think about it. Would you pay $1 per month to avoid having your mailbox fill up with mortgage refinance offers and porn?
When you hire someone as an employee, you're taking a very big risk. Most of the time, people turn out to be pretty much as you expect them to be. Now and then, you get an ugly surprise: The guy who gets wild-eyed drunk three nights a week and calls in sick one day a week. Or the guy who signs vendor agreements without running them through the proper channels. Or the one who charges a room full of furniture on the corporate charge card you gave them so they could travel on business (yep, it's been done)
Is a credit report appropriate if you're hiring a day laborer? Probably not, and I would not expect to see a perfect credit score on anyone applying for that position.
Is a credit report appropriate when I'm hiring an IT guy who will be entrusted with 30% of my annual budget? For my two cents, it is. (Actually, it's a lot more than two cents. When I hire someone like that, I'm betting my company on their integrity. They turn out to be a screw-up, and I'm going to be explaning to my kids why we have to move out of the house and into an apartment.)
Without the ability to check some references or credit history, I would have to close a lot of good people out of positions like that, and only give them to established, financially secure people who I know have as much to lose as I do.
Frankly, I'd rather be able to hire someone who needs the job and will use it as an opportunity to grow and learn. A sick grandmother? I'm all ears and I'll help. Buying a corvette when you're 90 days late on your electric bill? Thanks, we'll call you.
Ditto. I think the last time I used a floppy was to do a bios upgrade on some dreadful machine that couldn't handle them right from the hard drive.
USB is pretty neat. Only caveat I've found is that if you have a webcam or a zip drive on a non-ver2 usb port, it chews up a lot of the bandwidth, and this may not be obvious to a non-technical user.
The USB technical spec itself is quite simple and elegant. Or maybe I'm just weird because I actually read things like that recreationally.
I'm somewhat familiar with how they are reviewed at a couple of good-sized companies. The credit score is looked at, and if it's unusually high or low, the rest of the report gets extra attention. In all cases, things such as liens, outstanding judgements, or recent write-offs are looked at.
I interviewed with a company, and when they checked my credit, an old loan showed up as having been defaulted. (it was paid, on time, and had been for several years)
When they saw it, they asked me about it. The credit report was only requested after they determined I was a possible fit for the job, and it was reviewed by someone in the HR department who could only approve or disapprove; the person I would be working for never saw it and never would.
I made two phone calls, got the bank to fax them a correction, and was offered the job. (in reflection, I shoulda taken it!)
Oh, the same bank pulled a similar screwup again about three years later - when the loan had been paid off for almost six years! Moral: do check your credit report once a year or so.
There is a good point there. Users don't always understand what they want, or can't think through the "unintended consequences" of a system change. They see the result, not the process.
But on the other hand, I know that us geeks have a tendency to read our own agenda into what we're asked to provide, and to ride hard on anyone who disagrees with our intepretation of "how it should be". We deliver a wonderful process, and if it has a good result, that's just icing on the cake.
I used to work with a group of professional architects, and I learned a lot from watching them take user input, question it, refine it, and try to turn it into a project. They spent a lot more time learning about the customer's personality, what sorts of things they liked and didn't like... and the ones who were consistently loved by customers were the ones who were the best listeners.
(A nickle to the first person to identify the person I quoted above!)
Re:Would have to agree.. -More-
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
I've got a friend who's a recovering EQ addict. When he waxes lyrical about MMORPG's, he gets pretty convincing.
Like most gamers, I have a ludicrously short attention span. I don't complete most walk-through shooters just because I get bored with them after an hour or two. Even a good turn-based RPG like Baldur's Gate, I have trouble playing for more than about 10 hours because the novelty wears off.
So if I buy two new games a month, that's $100. And I'm not going to spend that much for games. Just ain't gonna happen.
I'm currently playing Asheron's call 2. I can tell I'll probably get bored with it and cancel after a couple of months. (Despite it's absolutely incredible graphics, it's just killing rats and clicking "craft" buttons. Over and over.
So a good online game, at $13 a month, if I stay interested for maybe three months.. is not a bad deal, if it keeps me from having to buy one or two other games in the same period. Or, if like Earth and Beyond did, it makes me so disgusted with an entire genre of games that I simply refuse to buy ANYTHING for three months, I save several hundred bucks a year.
Hmm. Will it skew the test results if the researchers eat more than 50% of the sample?
Surprisingly, a big application for this is in video gear. Like in a projection TV, you want to have as little stray light bouncing around as possible, and what you can't control, you at least want to be as uniform as possible across the entire area.
Currently, the home theater equivalent of the overclocking crowd rips open RPTV's to line them with a black, light-absorbing cloth called "duvatyne" - I think it was originally designed for the theater industry for a similar purpose.
That's the expectation that the folks at Amazon had.. but they found out that the guy who drives the forklift and the delivery truck make a lot more than the kid who works the cash register... and you also lose a lot of impulse sales.
Very few people have an absolutely spotless credit record. When I checked mine a few months ago, it showed that I had once been 30 days late on my car loan. Any employer would look at this and assume, correctly, that it was a slip-up and not a problem where my finances were in jeopardy.
Having been on both sides of the hiring desk, I think the credit report is an excellent insight into how well a person manages business decisions, and what sort of judgement they have.
Would I expect someone who got laid off in a Worldcom-style collapse to have perfect credit? Hell no, I'd be amazed if they didn't have their house reposessed. And I'd probably still hire them if they did.
On the other hand, if I see someone who is in a job that they claim to be stable, but they're chronically 60 days late on all their bills.. I assume I am talking to an immature person with poor judgement.
They're not interested in the traffic between boxes on your network. They're concerned that when MSN messenger doesn't like your NAT box, you're going to tie up a support tech for half an hour. Or that you're going to install IIS on a "spare machine" and saturate your block's traffic on the next code red worm. Or that you're simply going to have two people using twice as much bandwidth.
The 2% of people that hang an open SMTP relay or MSSQL server off their home LAN cost a huge amount in bandwidth and support costs. A co-worker of mine forgot to patch a linux server at his house; the local cable company was actually polite when they called him at work and informed him that it had been rooted and was being used in a DDOS attack.
I'm of the opinion that in the near future, we'll have two types of internet service: The $20 home version, where you get to use a modified cable box/browser that has no storage and a closed OS, and a commercial serrvice where you get to attach whatever device you want.
Given the gaping holes in both Linux and Windows, and the number of idiots out there trying to hack them, I'm not entirely sure this would be a Bad Thing.
Several reasons. First is support; people with home networks tend to have more complex support problems (some apps get a little iffy with NAT)
Second is usage. ISP's stay in business by buying wholesale bandwidth and reselling it to users who only hit the caps on their modem usage maybe 2% of the time. People with more than one computer tend to run file sharing apps and others, which account for 70% of bandwidth costs. In order to avoid going to confusing and unpopular tiered usage plans, operators set ground rules which will encourage serious bandwidth consumers to use more appropriate services (like a T1)
I've had a long-running rivalry with a co-worker to show up at work wearing nothing but vendor-provided clothing. So far, we're both down to footwear; I've got some Lotus socks, and we both have heard that Novell has or had running shoes.
Of course, it's a bit harder to coax goodies out of vendors these days. It used to be standard practice to tell them what items we were short on before any meetings. ("Sure, we're very eager to look at your software. By the way, I only wear shirts with collars, and I don't want any of the cheap ones, either")
When I saw the headline, I tried to remember why I was underwhelmed by "Nemesis". Odd thing, I can't even remember the plot of the movie - only that I had commented that it seemed like the franchise was dead as I left the theater with a friend.
What was nemesis about, anyway? Was it really so awful that I forgot it this fast??
If anyone remembers Prodigy, they got in quite a bit of trouble because they DID review and select all user content before it was public. In a libel trial, the court opined that this gave them editorial control, and therefore, responsibility.
I've used ebay since it was relatively new. I always look at user feedback - but I always take it with a grain (or bucket) of salt.
Not that I'm a lawyer.. but his argument looks pretty weak. My guess is he threatened a suit, hoping they'd give him a small cash settlement as an anti-nuisance payment.
XM does use a satellite-based RF signal, as well as ground-based repeaters in metro areas. They have two birds up, which seems to keep the signal pretty solid (I never lose it when driving through heavily wooded areas, but if I get stuck under an overpass for more than about 5 seconds it blanks out) I'm not sure what about the satellite feed, but I think the ground repeaters are in the 2.5ghz area.
Radio is analog, but the signal in this case is digital. A receiver strips off the analog carrier and feeds the remaining digital stream to the tuner (which is probably not an appropriate name any more!)
Not free, I think it's $10 a month. I've had it since about dec. of 2001, and I really like it.
Look at it as simple ecomonics. Assuming you're employed, and you make even a modest salary - let's say $10 an hour. You watch less tv than the average adult -- maybe only one hour a day.
Having tivo gives you back 12 hours a month that you DON'T spen watching tampon and zit cream commercials.
Free TV is a very poor bargain. Unless your time is absolutely worthless - as in, you're a mindless vegerable being fed through a tube, you're giving Budweiser, Preparation H, and Bob's Used Cars the ONLY thing you can't get more of: Time. For the equivalent of less than the US federal minimum wage.
$12 a month to avoid ever having to listen to some wild-eyed freak pimping soap scum remover? Best bargain I've ever had.
Tivo already compresses (with user-selected options) regular TV. Their "best" setting hurts the image a little. The "basic" is something you'd want to use for talk shows where image quality and color are not the most important thing.
I'd imagine that some pretty smart engineers can still get a good HD image (maybe not quite up to my 65" set, but at least on the 40") while being able to compress reasonably.
CSI is the only network show that I actually know what time it's on, because I do like to watch it in HD. Everything else gets tivo'ed.
But, I don't really like watching truly gory stuff while the kids are still awake, so being able to time-shift it would be a great advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
While I try to respect my ISP's policies and abide by them... I've considered asking a neighbor who has DSL (I have cable) if we could leech off each other in case of outage - it would be very unusual for both to go down at the same time.
When I'm not geeking for work on my desktop machine (dual Xeon 2.6's), I do enjoy shooters like quake and unreal tournament.
Quake3 is unusual in that it actually does use SMP and runs flawlessly at 1600x1200x32. Other games don't use the second processor... but the nice thing about it is if you leave a dozen apps running, you won't suffer death by lag when you log onto UT2003.
Of course, there is a down side.. I have one less thing to blame when I get my butt kicked by a couple of 12-year-olds using worn-out P3 machines with dial-up connections. Ow.
I provide a mirror for a couple of largish open-source sites, and several of them specifically request that sites provide FTP service as preferred over HTTP. A couple of reasons:
1. Scripts which need to get a list of files before choosing which ones to download - automated installers and the like - are easier to implement with FTP.
2. FTP generally seems to chew up less CPU on the host. I can serve 12mb/s of traffic all day long on a P-II 450 box with only 256mb of memory.
3. "download recovery" (after losing connection, etc.) seems to work better in FTP than HTTP.
Popfile is wonderful. It even runs very nicely on a windows machine, and after a few days, it makes essentially zero mistakes.
If you're an aspiring artist letting people download your music or other work, I salute you. But I also suggest you get a service that's intended for constant use.
I'll say it agsin: P2P networking and "personal servers" are exactly the reason that DSL and cable will soon offer a cheap service which uses a webTV type box with a closed, no-storage OS.... And another more expensive service for users who want to run windows or linux on a machine attached to the net.
Come to think of it.. Why should I pay the same flat fee to browse the web and play a couple games of Quake when my neighbor runs a VNC session that chews up 400kb/s 24x7?
I think the only way to reduce the growth of spam is to make email have an absolute, unavoidable cost to the sender, unless the sender is already known to the recipient.
The postal service would be the likely agency to administer and enforce this rule.
Before you fling rotten fruit, think about it. Would you pay $1 per month to avoid having your mailbox fill up with mortgage refinance offers and porn?
Unfortunately, it is.
When you hire someone as an employee, you're taking a very big risk. Most of the time, people turn out to be pretty much as you expect them to be. Now and then, you get an ugly surprise: The guy who gets wild-eyed drunk three nights a week and calls in sick one day a week. Or the guy who signs vendor agreements without running them through the proper channels. Or the one who charges a room full of furniture on the corporate charge card you gave them so they could travel on business (yep, it's been done)
Is a credit report appropriate if you're hiring a day laborer? Probably not, and I would not expect to see a perfect credit score on anyone applying for that position.
Is a credit report appropriate when I'm hiring an IT guy who will be entrusted with 30% of my annual budget? For my two cents, it is. (Actually, it's a lot more than two cents. When I hire someone like that, I'm betting my company on their integrity. They turn out to be a screw-up, and I'm going to be explaning to my kids why we have to move out of the house and into an apartment.)
Without the ability to check some references or credit history, I would have to close a lot of good people out of positions like that, and only give them to established, financially secure people who I know have as much to lose as I do.
Frankly, I'd rather be able to hire someone who needs the job and will use it as an opportunity to grow and learn. A sick grandmother? I'm all ears and I'll help. Buying a corvette when you're 90 days late on your electric bill? Thanks, we'll call you.
I owe you one shiny nickle. :-)
Ditto. I think the last time I used a floppy was to do a bios upgrade on some dreadful machine that couldn't handle them right from the hard drive.
USB is pretty neat. Only caveat I've found is that if you have a webcam or a zip drive on a non-ver2 usb port, it chews up a lot of the bandwidth, and this may not be obvious to a non-technical user.
The USB technical spec itself is quite simple and elegant. Or maybe I'm just weird because I actually read things like that recreationally.
I'm somewhat familiar with how they are reviewed at a couple of good-sized companies. The credit score is looked at, and if it's unusually high or low, the rest of the report gets extra attention. In all cases, things such as liens, outstanding judgements, or recent write-offs are looked at.
I interviewed with a company, and when they checked my credit, an old loan showed up as having been defaulted. (it was paid, on time, and had been for several years)
When they saw it, they asked me about it. The credit report was only requested after they determined I was a possible fit for the job, and it was reviewed by someone in the HR department who could only approve or disapprove; the person I would be working for never saw it and never would.
I made two phone calls, got the bank to fax them a correction, and was offered the job. (in reflection, I shoulda taken it!)
Oh, the same bank pulled a similar screwup again about three years later - when the loan had been paid off for almost six years! Moral: do check your credit report once a year or so.
There is a good point there. Users don't always understand what they want, or can't think through the "unintended consequences" of a system change. They see the result, not the process.
But on the other hand, I know that us geeks have a tendency to read our own agenda into what we're asked to provide, and to ride hard on anyone who disagrees with our intepretation of "how it should be". We deliver a wonderful process, and if it has a good result, that's just icing on the cake.
I used to work with a group of professional architects, and I learned a lot from watching them take user input, question it, refine it, and try to turn it into a project. They spent a lot more time learning about the customer's personality, what sorts of things they liked and didn't like... and the ones who were consistently loved by customers were the ones who were the best listeners.
(A nickle to the first person to identify the person I quoted above!)
I've got a friend who's a recovering EQ addict. When he waxes lyrical about MMORPG's, he gets pretty convincing.
Like most gamers, I have a ludicrously short attention span. I don't complete most walk-through shooters just because I get bored with them after an hour or two. Even a good turn-based RPG like Baldur's Gate, I have trouble playing for more than about 10 hours because the novelty wears off.
So if I buy two new games a month, that's $100. And I'm not going to spend that much for games. Just ain't gonna happen.
I'm currently playing Asheron's call 2. I can tell I'll probably get bored with it and cancel after a couple of months. (Despite it's absolutely incredible graphics, it's just killing rats and clicking "craft" buttons. Over and over.
So a good online game, at $13 a month, if I stay interested for maybe three months.. is not a bad deal, if it keeps me from having to buy one or two other games in the same period. Or, if like Earth and Beyond did, it makes me so disgusted with an entire genre of games that I simply refuse to buy ANYTHING for three months, I save several hundred bucks a year.
Okay. I'll go back and take my medication now.
Hmm. Will it skew the test results if the researchers eat more than 50% of the sample?
Surprisingly, a big application for this is in video gear. Like in a projection TV, you want to have as little stray light bouncing around as possible, and what you can't control, you at least want to be as uniform as possible across the entire area.
Currently, the home theater equivalent of the overclocking crowd rips open RPTV's to line them with a black, light-absorbing cloth called "duvatyne" - I think it was originally designed for the theater industry for a similar purpose.
That's the expectation that the folks at Amazon had.. but they found out that the guy who drives the forklift and the delivery truck make a lot more than the kid who works the cash register... and you also lose a lot of impulse sales.
"You've got spam!"
Having this happen on foot would be annoying. Having it happen when driving would be simply dangerous.
This sounds like perhaps the best reason to be a luddite since the pop-up ad.
Very few people have an absolutely spotless credit record. When I checked mine a few months ago, it showed that I had once been 30 days late on my car loan. Any employer would look at this and assume, correctly, that it was a slip-up and not a problem where my finances were in jeopardy.
Having been on both sides of the hiring desk, I think the credit report is an excellent insight into how well a person manages business decisions, and what sort of judgement they have.
Would I expect someone who got laid off in a Worldcom-style collapse to have perfect credit? Hell no, I'd be amazed if they didn't have their house reposessed. And I'd probably still hire them if they did.
On the other hand, if I see someone who is in a job that they claim to be stable, but they're chronically 60 days late on all their bills.. I assume I am talking to an immature person with poor judgement.
They're not interested in the traffic between boxes on your network. They're concerned that when MSN messenger doesn't like your NAT box, you're going to tie up a support tech for half an hour. Or that you're going to install IIS on a "spare machine" and saturate your block's traffic on the next code red worm. Or that you're simply going to have two people using twice as much bandwidth.
The 2% of people that hang an open SMTP relay or MSSQL server off their home LAN cost a huge amount in bandwidth and support costs. A co-worker of mine forgot to patch a linux server at his house; the local cable company was actually polite when they called him at work and informed him that it had been rooted and was being used in a DDOS attack.
I'm of the opinion that in the near future, we'll have two types of internet service: The $20 home version, where you get to use a modified cable box/browser that has no storage and a closed OS, and a commercial serrvice where you get to attach whatever device you want.
Given the gaping holes in both Linux and Windows, and the number of idiots out there trying to hack them, I'm not entirely sure this would be a Bad Thing.
Several reasons. First is support; people with home networks tend to have more complex support problems (some apps get a little iffy with NAT)
Second is usage. ISP's stay in business by buying wholesale bandwidth and reselling it to users who only hit the caps on their modem usage maybe 2% of the time. People with more than one computer tend to run file sharing apps and others, which account for 70% of bandwidth costs. In order to avoid going to confusing and unpopular tiered usage plans, operators set ground rules which will encourage serious bandwidth consumers to use more appropriate services (like a T1)
If you don't like the terms you agreed to when you chose your ISP, feel free to choose a different one - or even better, start up your own.
I've had a long-running rivalry with a co-worker to show up at work wearing nothing but vendor-provided clothing. So far, we're both down to footwear; I've got some Lotus socks, and we both have heard that Novell has or had running shoes.
Of course, it's a bit harder to coax goodies out of vendors these days. It used to be standard practice to tell them what items we were short on before any meetings. ("Sure, we're very eager to look at your software. By the way, I only wear shirts with collars, and I don't want any of the cheap ones, either")
When I saw the headline, I tried to remember why I was underwhelmed by "Nemesis". Odd thing, I can't even remember the plot of the movie - only that I had commented that it seemed like the franchise was dead as I left the theater with a friend.
What was nemesis about, anyway? Was it really so awful that I forgot it this fast??
If anyone remembers Prodigy, they got in quite a bit of trouble because they DID review and select all user content before it was public. In a libel trial, the court opined that this gave them editorial control, and therefore, responsibility.
I've used ebay since it was relatively new. I always look at user feedback - but I always take it with a grain (or bucket) of salt.
Not that I'm a lawyer.. but his argument looks pretty weak. My guess is he threatened a suit, hoping they'd give him a small cash settlement as an anti-nuisance payment.
XM does use a satellite-based RF signal, as well as ground-based repeaters in metro areas. They have two birds up, which seems to keep the signal pretty solid (I never lose it when driving through heavily wooded areas, but if I get stuck under an overpass for more than about 5 seconds it blanks out) I'm not sure what about the satellite feed, but I think the ground repeaters are in the 2.5ghz area.
Radio is analog, but the signal in this case is digital. A receiver strips off the analog carrier and feeds the remaining digital stream to the tuner (which is probably not an appropriate name any more!)
Not free, I think it's $10 a month. I've had it since about dec. of 2001, and I really like it.
Look at it as simple ecomonics. Assuming you're employed, and you make even a modest salary - let's say $10 an hour. You watch less tv than the average adult -- maybe only one hour a day.
Having tivo gives you back 12 hours a month that you DON'T spen watching tampon and zit cream commercials.
Free TV is a very poor bargain. Unless your time is absolutely worthless - as in, you're a mindless vegerable being fed through a tube, you're giving Budweiser, Preparation H, and Bob's Used Cars the ONLY thing you can't get more of: Time. For the equivalent of less than the US federal minimum wage.
$12 a month to avoid ever having to listen to some wild-eyed freak pimping soap scum remover? Best bargain I've ever had.
Tivo already compresses (with user-selected options) regular TV. Their "best" setting hurts the image a little. The "basic" is something you'd want to use for talk shows where image quality and color are not the most important thing.
I'd imagine that some pretty smart engineers can still get a good HD image (maybe not quite up to my 65" set, but at least on the 40") while being able to compress reasonably.
CSI is the only network show that I actually know what time it's on, because I do like to watch it in HD. Everything else gets tivo'ed.
But, I don't really like watching truly gory stuff while the kids are still awake, so being able to time-shift it would be a great advantage.