It's all about speed. How quickly do you want your refund? Well, since 8 million people waited to efile until the last day, I'd guess it doesn't really matter to them, no?
efile + direct deposit means a refund in (usually) 72 hours or less. It's almost instant money.
mailed + direct deposit means a refund in 2-3 weeks. Very acceptable, and if you're cheap like me it's a great option. If you're getting back so much money that the 11 days are worth $30 in opportunity cost, you've got to work on giving less of a free loan to the government.
On further reflection, I suppose that if you don't have a printer this efile thing could make sense.
I'll also admit that I find the federal system absurd because my state (virginia) lets you file online for free. Too many lobbyists for the CPA jobs program at the federal level.
Am I really the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to pay intuit $30 to send my return electronically (which actually is cheaper for the IRS to process) rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it in the mailbox on the way to work? What am I missing here?
The other thing that amazes me is that we have a gigantic impossible to miss bright yellow sign in the middle of the building announcing where the tax forms are and most of these people still make the trek to the circulation desk to ask where the forms are. My library puts the forms between the inner and outer doors, so you have to trip over them on the way in. Probably cuts the number of questions in half.:-D
You are correct that someone who really wanted to get into a classroom can kick the doors in. And that some students were safe because they found rooms that they could lock themselves into. No, they were safe because the guy didn't really try. In other cases people held the door closed with their feet. The point is that people got killed at random by a crazy dude who was having fun shooting people at random. There is no practical security measure that would prevent that, regardless of how much you might wish there were.
What that prof seems to be saying is that he has no control over the classroom environment and no set system to communicate with the outside world in case of a "lockdown." I guess what I am wondering is if his concerns could be addressed in schools (I don't know if his school is typical). I find it pretty much impossible to believe that in the 21st century in the US there'd be a classroom in which nobody had a cellphone.
Bullshit. A lockdown is something for elementary school kids only if you don't give them enough information before hand because you don't think it's in their best interests. If everyone was notified then they would be able to leave on their own (to go to a safe place) and then the building locked down so that the perpetrator wouldn't have a place to go, I would consider that a good lockdown procedure. Well, sure, if you define "lockdown" to be something completely different from what was being discussed, I'm sure it would be implemented differently. The context of this thread is a suggestion that the whole campus should have been locked down to protect people, which implies a shelter-in-place kind of lockdown. I am curious how your sort of lockdown would be at all effective, since the perp could simply leave with everybody else. It's kind of hard to pat down 30k+ people as they all run away on their own ("to go to a safe place"), no?
Lockdowns are used at Middle and High Schools as well. In Arizona the procedures for a lockdown are: Lock classroom doors. Cover windows of classrooms. Have everyone get down on the floor. Allow no one outside of classrooms until the Incident Commander gives the all-clear signal.
I think it is used most often when there is a shooting near a school and police are still chasing the person. While public schools are different from the open campuses that colleges have, there are still some things to think about. I stand by my original analysis: the lockdown is to control the students, not the perp. If you think the average classroom door is going to withstand more than a couple of kicks from someone who wants to get in, you're mistaken. Again, the primary intent is to keep curious kids from wandering around, not to prevent a determined attacker from getting to them.
This statement from a professor posting on metafilter made me think:
And yet, the first thing that came to mind when I heard about this was that the building at the university I teach at is unsecured 16 hours a day. The building and 95% of the classrooms in the building (except the computer labs) are not securable by anyone other than custodial staff and campus police. These rooms also do not have phones or a call system in them or accessible to them. In the event of a "lockdown," my students and I would literally be holding the door shut with our feet, waiting for help to find us.
What, exactly, did it make you think about? You realize, don't you, that a lot of VT students locked themselves in offices and such and were found when the police kicked down the doors?
While Vonage was doing all that work, they should have performed one more task. They should have had someone do a patent check.
Its not totally Verizon's fault. Hahahahaha. Have you actually ever done a patent search? Go ahead, list for us the patents that might affect a voice over IP business. That's why the system is stupid--there are so many patents that are so broadly written that it is easier to reinvent the wheel than to find it in the patent system. It is absolutely certain that any non-trivial product has implemented some patented ideas, but it would cost more than the product is worth to find them all.
I know it's not really the point of your story, but in case it comes up again, the main reason that most of our buildings are generally rectangular is because it's much easier(read: cheaper) to build them that way. And because efficiently fitting square furniture into a round room is a bitch.
Before anyone suggests making the furniture round, consider that you'd need custom furniture for every size of room.
Having actually gone to VT, 2600 acres includes the FARM that's attached to the school. The main campus rings the drill field. Locking down the buildings would have been trivial, and everyone in the dorms could have been notified. I can only imagine the press if they had managed to lock the shooter into a building with a bunch of students...
A lockdown is something you do with elementary school kids so they don't wander off before their parents show up. It's a measure to control the students, not a perpetrator.
IPv6 routers do not perform as well as IPv4 (I'm talking about big iron ala Cisco et al). Routing tables are implemented in CAMs. Switching to 128b addresses makes those CAMs prohibitively large, power-hungry, and comparatively slow. This is a real problem. No, it's not a real problem except insofar as cisco hasn't even tried to implement IPv6 support well because nobody has asked for it. Yes, the addresses are bigger, but the overall header isn't that much bigger because other things have been stripped out. The minimum packet size is also larger, which tends to make the overall flow more efficient. And the routing is so much more efficient that you end up needing much much smaller routing tables. There are no technical reasons for IPv6 to be slow, only marketing/resource issues.
I think the same sort of thing is going on with IP addresses. You have entire countries coming online at unprecedented rates. But when the market saturates, well, there's only so many billion people on the planet. And thank God they don't, like, "fork" or something.
Even if the whole world comes online (6,525,170,264 people to date), and an average of one IP per person (very rough estimate considering NAT and dynamic ip reduce the numbers, but waste and multiple computers inflate the number), that's 6,525,170,264 * 70% = 4,567,619,184. With the entire world online.
Or, in other words, it could feasibly be possible to never upgrade to IPV6. Sure, if you completely disregard things like broadcast addresses, routing, and other issues that make 100% utilization of the IP space a practical impossibility.
- Cable MODEM - always on - Hardware Firewall - always on
With a DHCP lease lasting 24 hours, I pretty well HAVE a static IP address.
Of course this is not good enough to run a business, but I have never had to change my FTP target address to get at my home machine. Mine is always on also. Yet the ISP periodically changes the IPs. I don't know how much of that is to account for a lot of growth (the changes are fairly dramatic, and suggest routing changes) and how much is to make people pay extra for a static.
I'd wager a guess that all the ISPs distributing 2-5 IP address for each residential service will only get 1 IP address before IPv6 adoption will happen. I'd love to have that ISP. For me to get a static IP (let alone multiple static IPs) would cost double what I'm currently paying. I think extra cost for IPs is far more common than ISPs handing out extra IPs to people who don't want them.
Well, while native support might be nice, you dont actually need it. 6to4 works nicely. Well, it works, but I wouldn't call it "nice". It actually kinda sucks if you have a fast connection because IME the speeds through the tunnel are comparatively lousey (which is expected given all the extra hops your packets have to take--not a slam on the tunnel providers as much as the lazy ISPs who won't give me a native route).
There should be enough IP's out there for everyone, but the '/8 should be enough for the average company' idea from the 80's-early 90's screwed us all up. There are over 6 billion people in the world and about 4 billion available IP addresses (completely disregarding issues like routing, which make far less than 4 billion usable). Once again, the class A space does not have a signficant impact on the fundamental problem that there are not enough IPs for everyone. The "screw up" was two-fold: first, in not forseeing that there'd be an expectation that a signficant fraction of 6 billion people would want to use IP and second, not realizing that we'd still be using IPv4 (a research project at the time) to try to do it.
The point is: there's so much address space that's wasted/unused. So wouldn't it make more sense to recover it? No. The article even touched on this. Allocation is currently at the rate of 170M/year. Going through a lot of effort to recover class A blocks (about a month's worth of allocation for who knows how many man-years of effort) is pointless. At most you'd push the drop-dead date back a year or two; you wouldn't fundamentally alter the outcome. From a strategic standpoint it makes far more sense to push for the IPv6 transition now (with the understanding that it will take a long time) than to spend effort prolonging IPv4 (which will eventually need to be replaced anyway).
But sooner or later you have to expand the infrastructure, the same goes for the electrical grid.
Or, you use something like biodiesel which wouldn't require millions of kilometers of new natural gas pipelines.
true energy savings in transportation would take a re-thinking of housing and commuting patterns, which might take decades to happen, or a sustained large increase in gasoline prices. If you lived really close to the stores, your friends and your workplace what do you need cars for?
Dreams that involve everyone leaving the suburbs to move back to the cities are, frankly, a waste of time. A lot of people live in areas where the settlement patterns evolved hundreds or even thousands of years ago and the settlements have survived remodeling, urban planning, invasions, etc. In places where there are big fires and floods, people tend to put their houses back in the same spots. Human nature is that once you have a house, you don't often just leave it. Beyond that, do you realize how high gasoline prices (and every other alternative) would have to get before someone could justify walking away from several hundred thousand dollars in real estate? That's not a couple of decades of greener thinking, that's a complete collapse of civilization. It's just not worth talking or thinking about, because if that kind of change happens your major concern will be finding another day's worth of food--it doesn't matter how close the store is if it's empty.
You are forgetting that natural gas can be replaced by gas made from decomposing organic matter (i.e. trash), which is renewable (although the CO2 emmisions are still there, but it's the same with biodiesel). Natural gas from trash is nothing more than a novelty; there is no way you're going to fill a significant fraction of the world's energy needs from trash gas.
Adapting a regular gasoline car to natural gas, costs around U$S 700 in Argentina. The equipment pays itself after a year or so. Apples and oranges. There are less than one million CNG cars in Argentina, compared to about 240 million cars in the US. There's something on the order of 10k km of natural gas pipeline in Argentina, compared to 330k km in the US. And Argentina's population density is such that those 10k km of pipeline cover the population better than the 300k km of (oversubscribed) pipeline in the US. The major natural gas reserves in the US are in Alaska, and there is no pipeline there at all. And, the economics in Argentina are influenced by the taxes on petroleum fuel which favor domestic natural gas for national security reasons. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is important to note that the CNG car costs significantly more than the gasoline car unless influenced by policy--and I have yet to see a good reason to push CNG by policy on a global basis. (E.g., the energy security argument is a good one for AR, but the US is projected to be a CNG importer in a decade or two...)
Sounds like a good idea to me. Sounds like an idiotic idea to me. Natural gas was billed as a cheap, clean fuel years ago. So people started using it, for houses, electricity generation, industry, etc. Now natural gas is an overused resource, with oversubscribed pipelines, severe seasonal price shocks, etc. Why on earth would we start converting cars to use an energy source that's already overutilized? It's going to be a lot easier to deploy a more sensible alternative vehicle fuel (e.g., biodiesel) than to convert tens of millions of furnaces, power plants, and other durable consumers to use something else because the natural gas distribution network can't cope with the demand of a bunch of new cars trying to use it also.
In retrospect, I don't even know when and why the "bathtub" myth even started. The bathtub distribution was originally for stuff like electronic components, without moving parts. For something with mechanical wear and tear like a hard drive, who the heck came up with the idea that the same curve must apply? Shouldn't it have been common sense all along that it linearly gets more wear and tear?
It makes intuitive sense to me that something that is shock-sensitive (in both senses) will have more failures just after being installed than it will for a while sitting in a rack.
I'm just talking about standardizing on the form factor, not using current rackmounts as DVRs. Well, you said "I can't help but wonder why 1U and 2U rack server designs haven't been repurposed into cheap, consumer-level DVRs", and I kind of assumed that meant the design (which includes, and is driven almost entirely by, the cooling system). If you don't count the cooling system and you don't count the cpu or mainboard when you talk about repurposing rack server designs then I guess you're talking about just the empty shell. In that case, we don't use them for DVRs because they'd be ugly and would be far too long to fit into the AV cabinet or under the TV in most people's homes.
I can't help but wonder why 1U and 2U rack server designs haven't been repurposed into cheap, consumer-level DVRs. Because rack servers typically generate way too much heat for their volume and compensate by having at least a half dozen tiny fans that force a huge volume of air through the system. Most people don't want a turbojet in the room when they're trying to watch TV; racks and DVRs are completely different market segments.
So you end up having usb 2, ethernet, etc, all fighting for that same bandwidth.
Sure, assuming that your machine has only one bus. Even low-end desktops at least have seperate busses for video, integrated peripherals, and add-in cards. (You seemed to have missed that part of the email you replied to.)
Also, the 133MB/s is peak bandwidth. In reality, the sustained bandwidth is quite a bit less, depending on how well the southbridge chipset is designed (early VIA chipsets often had problems here).
133MB/s is the peak bandwidth for an absolute bottom end PCI implementation. Faster stuff has been available for almost a decade now. It seems really silly to compare the original bottom-end PCI implementation to PCI-e, no? If anything, the fact that you can put a new card into an old slot if you want to (and are willing to accept reduced performance) is a strength of PCI. For PCI-e you're screwed if you want to put multiple fast cards (e.g., if you need multiple ports and aren't worried about the aggregate bandwidth) in a system and you don't have enough slots with the appropriate physical interface.
The Pci bus has been overwhelmed by modern video cards (which led to the AGP hack, which fortunately worked fairly well), scsi and raid controllers, ethernet cards (pci cant even give a single gig nic enough bandwidth), usb 2.0, firewire 400 and 800, etc etc etc. Pci-X was complex, expensive, and not widely available. It also ate up too much of the motherboard real estate.
PCI-X is PCI, just clocked a little higher, and it is fairly common on server hardware where the increased bandwidth is actually useful. Actually, one of the reasons that PCI-E has taken so long to get adopted is that there aren't that many things that need it. On the desktop side, only graphics do (and that's what's really pushing adoption now). On the server side (where you'll find 64 bit slots) PCI hasn't been the bottleneck for any of the things you mention--especially since decent servers have multiple busses. 1GBE is only 125MB/s, which is far less than even the practical limits for PCI. USB2 is 60MB/s and FW800 is only 100MB/s. PCI's base bandwidth is 133MB/s, 66MHz PCI is 266MB/s, 66MHz/64bit PCI is 533MB/s, etc.--the stuff you named isn't bottlenecked on PCI (and is often on a dedicated channel integrated into the motherboard chipset and isn't even competing with add-in cards). 10GBE is where PCI really starts to hit the wall, as well as some of the newest RAID controllers (that have multiple fast disk channels on a single card).
Now, another way to look at it from the Cable company. These "special" features that the box you buy. Why would they support these features? Why would they? My device's features are between me and the manufacturer. All I want from the cable company is a feed.
Would the software "at" the cable company work with features of say box, a b and c box? I don't care/want it to. I just want a feed.
The software at these cable companies is specialized. I should know, I work in tech support at one. There is now way in hell that they will support a box they do not provide unless the manufacturer of said box releases the information required. Simple. You'd think it would be simple, but the cable companies don't seem to understand that I don't want their lousy software or their lousy support. All I want is a feed.
The customer will get referred to the manufacturer. I wish I had that option. That's really all I'm looking for--the possibility of buying a better product than the one the cable company is pushing, that comes with better support.
Another thing, say you spend $300 on a box and spill coffee in it. You buy a new one. If you had OUR box, it gets replaced, free. Same as the cable modem.. you're takes a crap, you buy another one, we will replace it free. I really don't see any cost savings here. First, what the hell do you do to your equipment? I have never spilled coffee on my TV. Never. Not once. Nobody in my family has. Ever. I'm willing to risk it, if the cable company wasn't so determined to gouge me and would actually give me that option. If you don't see the cost savings over owning versus buying you need to go back to school. (If I was getting regular upgrades to the hardware for my monthly fee maybe there'd be a better argument for renting--but we all know that an STB with extra functionality is also going to have a higher fee associated with it. And lets face it--if people were really destroying their STBs on a regular basis the monthly fee would simply be high enough to ensure that they pay for the boxes faster than they break; the cable companies are making quite a healthy profit, and can do the math easily enough to know that this "breakage insurance" isn't happening enough to actually cost them anything significant.)
Plus feature wise, you'll lose out.. at least as far as our VOD and such. (video on demand) I don't want your lousy VOD. I haven't wanted it for the last 15 years that the cable company has been trying to foist it on me. All I want is a feed; my interest is in watching TV, not in improving your profit margin. (sorry) My solution, after I got fed up with overpriced, low quality, lousy service was to just cancel my cable subscription--but I'm lucky enough to actually be able to get a decent OTA signal; I pity the people who can only get TV though the cablecos.
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mailed + direct deposit means a refund in 2-3 weeks. Very acceptable, and if you're cheap like me it's a great option. If you're getting back so much money that the 11 days are worth $30 in opportunity cost, you've got to work on giving less of a free loan to the government.
On further reflection, I suppose that if you don't have a printer this efile thing could make sense.
I'll also admit that I find the federal system absurd because my state (virginia) lets you file online for free. Too many lobbyists for the CPA jobs program at the federal level.
Am I really the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to pay intuit $30 to send my return electronically (which actually is cheaper for the IRS to process) rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it in the mailbox on the way to work? What am I missing here?
addressed in schools (I don't know if his school is typical). I find it pretty much impossible to believe that in the 21st century in the US there'd be a classroom in which nobody had a cellphone.
I think it is used most often when there is a shooting near a school and police are still chasing the person. While public schools are different from the open campuses that colleges have, there are still some things to think about. I stand by my original analysis: the lockdown is to control the students, not the perp. If you think the average classroom door is going to withstand more than a couple of kicks from someone who wants to get in, you're mistaken. Again, the primary intent is to keep curious kids from wandering around, not to prevent a determined attacker from getting to them. This statement from a professor posting on metafilter made me think: What, exactly, did it make you think about? You realize, don't you, that a lot of VT students locked themselves in offices and such and were found when the police kicked down the doors?
Its not totally Verizon's fault. Hahahahaha. Have you actually ever done a patent search? Go ahead, list for us the patents that might affect a voice over IP business. That's why the system is stupid--there are so many patents that are so broadly written that it is easier to reinvent the wheel than to find it in the patent system. It is absolutely certain that any non-trivial product has implemented some patented ideas, but it would cost more than the product is worth to find them all.
Before anyone suggests making the furniture round, consider that you'd need custom furniture for every size of room.
A lockdown is something you do with elementary school kids so they don't wander off before their parents show up. It's a measure to control the students, not a perpetrator.
Or, in other words, it could feasibly be possible to never upgrade to IPV6. Sure, if you completely disregard things like broadcast addresses, routing, and other issues that make 100% utilization of the IP space a practical impossibility.
- Cable MODEM - always on
- Hardware Firewall - always on
With a DHCP lease lasting 24 hours, I pretty well HAVE a static IP address.
Of course this is not good enough to run a business, but I have never had to change my FTP target address to get at my home machine. Mine is always on also. Yet the ISP periodically changes the IPs. I don't know how much of that is to account for a lot of growth (the changes are fairly dramatic, and suggest routing changes) and how much is to make people pay extra for a static.
Or, you use something like biodiesel which wouldn't require millions of kilometers of new natural gas pipelines.
Dreams that involve everyone leaving the suburbs to move back to the cities are, frankly, a waste of time. A lot of people live in areas where the settlement patterns evolved hundreds or even thousands of years ago and the settlements have survived remodeling, urban planning, invasions, etc. In places where there are big fires and floods, people tend to put their houses back in the same spots. Human nature is that once you have a house, you don't often just leave it. Beyond that, do you realize how high gasoline prices (and every other alternative) would have to get before someone could justify walking away from several hundred thousand dollars in real estate? That's not a couple of decades of greener thinking, that's a complete collapse of civilization. It's just not worth talking or thinking about, because if that kind of change happens your major concern will be finding another day's worth of food--it doesn't matter how close the store is if it's empty.
It makes intuitive sense to me that something that is shock-sensitive (in both senses) will have more failures just after being installed than it will for a while sitting in a rack.
thank you, I do know that
Sure, assuming that your machine has only one bus. Even low-end desktops at least have seperate busses for video, integrated peripherals, and add-in cards. (You seemed to have missed that part of the email you replied to.)
133MB/s is the peak bandwidth for an absolute bottom end PCI implementation. Faster stuff has been available for almost a decade now. It seems really silly to compare the original bottom-end PCI implementation to PCI-e, no? If anything, the fact that you can put a new card into an old slot if you want to (and are willing to accept reduced performance) is a strength of PCI. For PCI-e you're screwed if you want to put multiple fast cards (e.g., if you need multiple ports and aren't worried about the aggregate bandwidth) in a system and you don't have enough slots with the appropriate physical interface.
PCI-X is PCI, just clocked a little higher, and it is fairly common on server hardware where the increased bandwidth is actually useful. Actually, one of the reasons that PCI-E has taken so long to get adopted is that there aren't that many things that need it. On the desktop side, only graphics do (and that's what's really pushing adoption now). On the server side (where you'll find 64 bit slots) PCI hasn't been the bottleneck for any of the things you mention--especially since decent servers have multiple busses. 1GBE is only 125MB/s, which is far less than even the practical limits for PCI. USB2 is 60MB/s and FW800 is only 100MB/s. PCI's base bandwidth is 133MB/s, 66MHz PCI is 266MB/s, 66MHz/64bit PCI is 533MB/s, etc.--the stuff you named isn't bottlenecked on PCI (and is often on a dedicated channel integrated into the motherboard chipset and isn't even competing with add-in cards). 10GBE is where PCI really starts to hit the wall, as well as some of the newest RAID controllers (that have multiple fast disk channels on a single card).