Some banks charge a nominal fee (USD$3) to cash these types of checks if you do not have an account when you present them a check issued from their own bank. This can also be challenging in some cases where the bank name has changed in recent M&A activity and companies or private individuals are still using the older check stock. My bank has changed names several times in the past 11 years I've been a "working stiff". My requirements for paying with a check have gone down significantly recently as has my need for stamps. It makes my life generally easier because I spend less time paying bills, but instead of doing them all at once, i spend more time in interrupt mode handling them as they come in.
This is nothing new nor shocking. People will donate money to all sorts of causes that they consider valuable. For people here, it may be open source projects. For other slices of society it may be sports. The sad state of this situation is that people will donate millions of dollars for projects like improving stadiums but finding a similar donation to a library or technology funds are not as easy to come by.
It's easy to see that your team is winning by having the best technology and edging out another school with every advantage that you can get. Investing in the students themselves is always a complicated situation and the results tend to be poor.
What you should do is go to the public comment period of your next school board meeting and ask if matching funds were put into classroom improvement for each dollar spent on improvement of the sports program, and are they willing to stipulate some sort of matching dollars ratio for classroom improvement in the future. Don't expect 1:1, but if you even had 5:1 (sports:classroom) I suspect the improvement would be significant. There's also a sustainability aspect. If I write a check for $1m to my local school for a new stadium, they may already have the budget for maintence of it set aside. The operation expenses, training, etc.. for a new computer lab is not insignificant, think about the power consumption of all the lightbulbs in a classroom compared to 25 computers with 400w power supplies, a few laser printers, etc.. The electric bill may surprise you.
But honestly, this is an excercise in your civic duties (you can even get extra credit if you're taking a government class), attend the meetings, as booring as they may seem, you may be able to create some impact. You may be able to convince those that do attend the meetings and vote for your local school board that these things have value to them as well and see things change, perhaps not while you're still there but for others.
Speaking as someone who has been involved in the IT-SCC that was created as part of HSPD-7, I've had several occasions to talk and meet with Greg. This doesn't mean that we always agree, that is natural, but he does "get it" with things in this space. There are significant challenges when any department is charged with protecting infrastructure that is privately owned. Who "owns" the internet? Well, nobody, there are large networks that are operated by various companies/carriers that put things together, and their mutual private agreements are what makes your packets reach/. and other places that you deem of value.
Now, If you're on the public sector side and attempting to protect national interests and understand the global scope of the infrastructure involved, how do you go about that? I would argue that it's hard even under the best conspiracy-theory/tinfoil-hat environment. You have to first get people to show up and without legislation forcing people to show up (read: industry regulation), it is hard to be completely effective.
I think he'll do the best job he can under the circumstances, which is challenging to say the least. These people who work in DC doing these jobs have incredible stamina to put up with challenges that i suspect 99% of people reading this would be unwilling to stand at their job. To get simple things done sometimes can literally take an act of congress. And you thought your boss was slow and intrusive, think about having the GAO coming in and interviewing you every few weeks about how your job is going and what you've done recently on topics X, Y and Z.
While there are those people that I think are truly "evil" in this space, people who take public sector jobs like this are rarely the type. Just think, next virus outbreak or internet worm everyone is gonna be clammoring at you for what's going on. Starting from the tech savvy Senator Stevens(R-AK) asking about his e-mail to those that actually "get-it". I don't envy him this job/work but I do wish him the best of luck. I will point him to this discussion and conversation just to make everyone here happy though;)
sure, i find power outages to be my biggest challenge.
What I'm honestly wondering is if MS has done something to improve the need to reboot for everything in Vista. I know it got better in 2k and XP, but after having just installed acrobat on my sons machine last night, it wanted me to reboot. It's not like it's a core driver of the system (Although adobe may want me to think so). It's just unprofessional to require a reboot after installing your software/package. Even to install XP/Vista to have to reboot more than once is a joke IMHO. Any clues if they made this any better?
I generally would like a rating system for commercials and ads (including online)... compare original text author now;)
If I've stopped using vonage (in my case i did) and no longer want their services because i'm aware of their offerings, i'd rather not see their ads. they're not of value to me. sign up for yahoo/google mail, it's the bestest!!!! naah, i run my own mail server. now cheap 1U server colocation with 1+tb SATA raid backup solutions for $20/mo, that's something that I just may need. The reality is that i'd rather hear about things that would solve my problems, similar to the ads at the top of my searches (eg: need a 802.11 repeater) and have a bit more context/knowledge of them. If they're a windows based thing, they're not for me, and slowly build that around the responses I see. Now when i search for the cheapest place for XP upgrade to use on my win95 hosts, sure that would change my bias towards windows up.
These are things that computers are good at learning and since places like TiVo are already aggregating the data, (and i've opted my preferences with them accordingly) i'd love to see more ala-carte programming (No, I really don't need HSN, SHOP, etc.., but I do need my [as]). Would I pay the same cost for less channels and no commercials? Sure.
Awesome! I have started really using the unlimited GPRS plan from my provider, if you're paying for 5M or similar, it's about $5USD/mo more to go unlimited and you get free text/picture msgs (not that i use the pictures) with my provider.
What you want is to convert your home line to ISDN and use an old motorola BitSurfr device. You hand the calls over to the POTS ports on the device, and you can program it with AT commands. I think you can only set a small number of blacklist caller-id, or whitelist caller-id (i think 10) but it will serve as a nice filter. This will do what you want, and they can get dumped or a busy before the phone even rings.
You need to understand a bunch of things to solve your problem, and we need some more data too
1) Where are you located? Changing from a fractional T1 to DSL is usually a downgrade, unless it's some sort of SDSL if you're inside the US.
2) Do you have any latency/packet reordering requirements? Bad things happen when packets are out of order, and modern routers avoid reordering like the plague to keep bad things(tm) from happening.
3) What resources do you not need onsite, perhaps some reasonbly priced colo is a better solution for your more resource intensive solutions
4) What are your true bandwith requirements? Most major cities you can get metro-ethernet or various flavors of dark/dim to lit fiber for cheap.
Multiple geographically diverse OC48's are not for most people, are you sure this applies to your requirements?
Actually, I can get ~70k/sec when I do not have an index on the table but that means I have to sequentially scan the table every time I do a select/search.
Here's the keys to it:
Increase src/include/pg_config_manual.h BLCKSZ to the max (32768)
Use COPY not INSERT (faster than transactions for the inserts too)
Postgres isn't threaded so even though it's a dual proc dual core 252, I am still cpu bound. I really need some sort of lazy index/index chunker that can run in parallel to utilize the multiple processors more efficently so I can have more than a single index on the table.
Not faster, (for my application). I currently insert about 35k rows per second, mysql just can't handle that last I tried. For the inserts of the raw data that I have (about 250 mil rows a day, and i only save every 1:10k) these opteron 252's are just too slow with the one index. I'd like to be able to index more than a single column.
If someone wants to try and help me with this problem, let me know, but I had trouble getting mysql to insert (actually doing COPY since it's about 10x faster) anywhere near what I can get with PG8.
1) Terresterially based (or reasonable fascimilie, ie: cell/fixed wireless to semi-local site)
2) Reasonable Latency (for all your VoIP and other streaming media apps)
3) Bidirectional (yes, cable and sat solved this awhile ago, but it's still popular since the internet is all download, right? nobody ever publishes content)
I have a similar problem, I am planning on making another call (now that it's been about 1-1.5 yrs since i spoke to the local construction manager) to the cable company to see if there are any plans to cover this area. Otherwise my next call is to a directional boring company to go under the street (it's a private road) to some neighbors property with the 100m fiber that I have. This way I can extend my wireless footprint to cover several other homes, covering closer to 60% of the street.
For those of you that suggest doing wireless for this, I've tried that, i'm too cheap to buy some expensive all-weather radios and the el-cheapo linksys(and others) i've had some serious quality issues with. I've even gone the Soekris route with only limited success. The only thing I don't have currently is the conduit in the ground, I already have all the transcievers, etc.
Yeah, it's not like people who have performed wonderful equestrian related activities will end up in charge of places like FEMA either;)
I'm glad that it's someone that at minimum has experience in the industry, it may not be the experience that people want/desire (esp here at/.) but at least it's not someone who has no clue what tech is. i've seen that far too often in the front office of various orgs and it weighs on their tech operations/direction. At least there is some level of clue in the field, now the true test is does someone in this role pick the correct path.
> OK, so I can't download ISOs at 1GB/s
1GB* 8 bits = 8Gb/s
I kinda doubt you have 10GE at your home, but I could be wrong, last I checked the cards for it were still $3k each;)
Ameritech^WSBC^WAT&T are working on their "fiber to the node" project, but this basically provides the ability for them to dump IPTV and other things over their existing infrastructure. Most people who have run/worked at an isp that does DSL knows that it's basically ATM (not the type you get money from, even if you're an ISP) at the endpoint with lots of VC (virtual circuits) that end up being terminated on your device.
Depending on where the DSLAM is, and if you have control over it, you can provide some measure of QoS (quality of service) over your network to insure things like VoIP and your video get dedicated bandwidth (eg: a 1Mb VC [internet] plus a 15Mb VC [video]) allows a lot of room for fun.
The challenge is it costs lots of money for a large company to do any of these delopyments. It costs comcast a lot of money to trench every linear foot because they want things in conduit where it's harder to dig it up. Putting it on a pole has a cost as well, they have to lease the pole space from the pole owner. (In some cases, you as an individual or business can purchase pole space).
Even if the fiber is only a penny a foot, someone wants to be paid $25-50/hr+(include the employer side of taxes, any 401k match, pension, health care, etc..) to do the work. It costs money to do this as a business. Then again if you have a market cap of a few billion and lots of rights of way and other things, it kinda makes sense to start tossing that fiber in the ground and getting places quickly.
Comcast and ATT should start delivering their television service to anyone over their existing IP/Internet that wants it. if i have a T1 at home, that's enough to get a mpeg stream down for a channel. it's a way to decouple the connection to the home from the services that can be offered over it.
As for the providers, time to keep upgrading those edge networks (always the slowest and most painful part to deal with) and push the higher bandwidth services out. If I can get 1MB/s (8Mb/s) in my hotel room while i'm in Tokyo over their VDSL setup, there's no reason I can't get 1Mbit here where my house is. I'd rather ditch my ISDN that i'm using (yes, i really do have and use ISDN here in Michigan Bell^W^WAT&T land). it's the new world, AT&T Disconnected.
A static page that has a meta refresh in it for every few minutes isn't that big of a deal to leave up on the other (left) monitor when i'm working in another window. Now that they've added the moving images/text, i'm less likely to use the website all the time. It may help my productivity and/or be a blessing in disguise.
So, I love Yahoo news as it's a good source for the AP/Reuters feeds, but the recent addition of the auto-scrolling/cycling articles is making me reconsider it. I'm tired of web designers thinking that just because i visit their page (and leave it set for their auto-refresh interval) that it's the only thing on my desktop (1600x1200 dual mon (3200x1200)). I don't need their thing to constantly suck my cpu (yes, i use flashblock to prevent that as well) and provide a distraction from the real work i'm doing as well.
It's seriously making me reconsider setting up my own RSS fed news website for my own news gateway/needs. The local thing is kinda nice, but the scrolling highlight articles make me want to find a way to turn off javascript. (anything that does that like flashblock?)
Slashdot Mirror
Since *BSD is dying and there are no good looking geek women, last chance to view BSD vs Linux.
Some banks charge a nominal fee (USD$3) to cash these types of checks if you do not have an account when you present them a check issued from their own bank. This can also be challenging in some cases where the bank name has changed in recent M&A activity and companies or private individuals are still using the older check stock. My bank has changed names several times in the past 11 years I've been a "working stiff". My requirements for paying with a check have gone down significantly recently as has my need for stamps. It makes my life generally easier because I spend less time paying bills, but instead of doing them all at once, i spend more time in interrupt mode handling them as they come in.
It's easy to see that your team is winning by having the best technology and edging out another school with every advantage that you can get. Investing in the students themselves is always a complicated situation and the results tend to be poor.
What you should do is go to the public comment period of your next school board meeting and ask if matching funds were put into classroom improvement for each dollar spent on improvement of the sports program, and are they willing to stipulate some sort of matching dollars ratio for classroom improvement in the future. Don't expect 1:1, but if you even had 5:1 (sports:classroom) I suspect the improvement would be significant. There's also a sustainability aspect. If I write a check for $1m to my local school for a new stadium, they may already have the budget for maintence of it set aside. The operation expenses, training, etc.. for a new computer lab is not insignificant, think about the power consumption of all the lightbulbs in a classroom compared to 25 computers with 400w power supplies, a few laser printers, etc.. The electric bill may surprise you.
But honestly, this is an excercise in your civic duties (you can even get extra credit if you're taking a government class), attend the meetings, as booring as they may seem, you may be able to create some impact. You may be able to convince those that do attend the meetings and vote for your local school board that these things have value to them as well and see things change, perhaps not while you're still there but for others.
Now, If you're on the public sector side and attempting to protect national interests and understand the global scope of the infrastructure involved, how do you go about that? I would argue that it's hard even under the best conspiracy-theory/tinfoil-hat environment. You have to first get people to show up and without legislation forcing people to show up (read: industry regulation), it is hard to be completely effective.
I think he'll do the best job he can under the circumstances, which is challenging to say the least. These people who work in DC doing these jobs have incredible stamina to put up with challenges that i suspect 99% of people reading this would be unwilling to stand at their job. To get simple things done sometimes can literally take an act of congress. And you thought your boss was slow and intrusive, think about having the GAO coming in and interviewing you every few weeks about how your job is going and what you've done recently on topics X, Y and Z.
While there are those people that I think are truly "evil" in this space, people who take public sector jobs like this are rarely the type. Just think, next virus outbreak or internet worm everyone is gonna be clammoring at you for what's going on. Starting from the tech savvy Senator Stevens(R-AK) asking about his e-mail to those that actually "get-it". I don't envy him this job/work but I do wish him the best of luck. I will point him to this discussion and conversation just to make everyone here happy though ;)
I suspect this may not continue much long if all goes well.
Because the plastic tube they were in was so long (i ordered 20) it arrived in a box that was 12"x12"x48".
here
If someone can email me a tgz or similar i'll put the mirror up.
If I've stopped using vonage (in my case i did) and no longer want their services because i'm aware of their offerings, i'd rather not see their ads. they're not of value to me. sign up for yahoo/google mail, it's the bestest!!!! naah, i run my own mail server. now cheap 1U server colocation with 1+tb SATA raid backup solutions for $20/mo, that's something that I just may need. The reality is that i'd rather hear about things that would solve my problems, similar to the ads at the top of my searches (eg: need a 802.11 repeater) and have a bit more context/knowledge of them. If they're a windows based thing, they're not for me, and slowly build that around the responses I see. Now when i search for the cheapest place for XP upgrade to use on my win95 hosts, sure that would change my bias towards windows up.
These are things that computers are good at learning and since places like TiVo are already aggregating the data, (and i've opted my preferences with them accordingly) i'd love to see more ala-carte programming (No, I really don't need HSN, SHOP, etc.., but I do need my [as]). Would I pay the same cost for less channels and no commercials? Sure.
Awesome! I have started really using the unlimited GPRS plan from my provider, if you're paying for 5M or similar, it's about $5USD/mo more to go unlimited and you get free text/picture msgs (not that i use the pictures) with my provider.
This just sounds like part of the recent Executive Order on Emergency Alert System updates. Will they now interrupt your tivo realtime? Is this a bad thing?
What you want is to convert your home line to ISDN and use an old motorola BitSurfr device. You hand the calls over to the POTS ports on the device, and you can program it with AT commands. I think you can only set a small number of blacklist caller-id, or whitelist caller-id (i think 10) but it will serve as a nice filter. This will do what you want, and they can get dumped or a busy before the phone even rings.
1) Where are you located? Changing from a fractional T1 to DSL is usually a downgrade, unless it's some sort of SDSL if you're inside the US.
2) Do you have any latency/packet reordering requirements? Bad things happen when packets are out of order, and modern routers avoid reordering like the plague to keep bad things(tm) from happening.
3) What resources do you not need onsite, perhaps some reasonbly priced colo is a better solution for your more resource intensive solutions
4) What are your true bandwith requirements? Most major cities you can get metro-ethernet or various flavors of dark/dim to lit fiber for cheap.
Multiple geographically diverse OC48's are not for most people, are you sure this applies to your requirements?
Here's the keys to it:
Increase src/include/pg_config_manual.h BLCKSZ to the max (32768)
Use COPY not INSERT (faster than transactions for the inserts too)
Postgres isn't threaded so even though it's a dual proc dual core 252, I am still cpu bound. I really need some sort of lazy index/index chunker that can run in parallel to utilize the multiple processors more efficently so I can have more than a single index on the table.
If someone wants to try and help me with this problem, let me know, but I had trouble getting mysql to insert (actually doing COPY since it's about 10x faster) anywhere near what I can get with PG8.
1) Terresterially based (or reasonable fascimilie, ie: cell/fixed wireless to semi-local site)
2) Reasonable Latency (for all your VoIP and other streaming media apps)
3) Bidirectional (yes, cable and sat solved this awhile ago, but it's still popular since the internet is all download, right? nobody ever publishes content)
I have a similar problem, I am planning on making another call (now that it's been about 1-1.5 yrs since i spoke to the local construction manager) to the cable company to see if there are any plans to cover this area. Otherwise my next call is to a directional boring company to go under the street (it's a private road) to some neighbors property with the 100m fiber that I have. This way I can extend my wireless footprint to cover several other homes, covering closer to 60% of the street.
For those of you that suggest doing wireless for this, I've tried that, i'm too cheap to buy some expensive all-weather radios and the el-cheapo linksys(and others) i've had some serious quality issues with. I've even gone the Soekris route with only limited success. The only thing I don't have currently is the conduit in the ground, I already have all the transcievers, etc.
I've had similar problems when visiting our offices in Tokyo.
I also wonder if the streaming media will be sufficently available for people to watch on their microsoft mce or myth/freevo boxes.
I'm glad that it's someone that at minimum has experience in the industry, it may not be the experience that people want/desire (esp here at /.) but at least it's not someone who has no clue what tech is. i've seen that far too often in the front office of various orgs and it weighs on their tech operations/direction. At least there is some level of clue in the field, now the true test is does someone in this role pick the correct path.
Also, filtering the packets may see an increased volume of traffic as it will not get a response and keep retrying.
> OK, so I can't download ISOs at 1GB/s 1GB* 8 bits = 8Gb/s I kinda doubt you have 10GE at your home, but I could be wrong, last I checked the cards for it were still $3k each ;)
Ameritech^WSBC^WAT&T are working on their "fiber to the node" project, but this basically provides the ability for them to dump IPTV and other things over their existing infrastructure. Most people who have run/worked at an isp that does DSL knows that it's basically ATM (not the type you get money from, even if you're an ISP) at the endpoint with lots of VC (virtual circuits) that end up being terminated on your device.
Depending on where the DSLAM is, and if you have control over it, you can provide some measure of QoS (quality of service) over your network to insure things like VoIP and your video get dedicated bandwidth (eg: a 1Mb VC [internet] plus a 15Mb VC [video]) allows a lot of room for fun.
The challenge is it costs lots of money for a large company to do any of these delopyments. It costs comcast a lot of money to trench every linear foot because they want things in conduit where it's harder to dig it up. Putting it on a pole has a cost as well, they have to lease the pole space from the pole owner. (In some cases, you as an individual or business can purchase pole space).
Even if the fiber is only a penny a foot, someone wants to be paid $25-50/hr+(include the employer side of taxes, any 401k match, pension, health care, etc..) to do the work. It costs money to do this as a business. Then again if you have a market cap of a few billion and lots of rights of way and other things, it kinda makes sense to start tossing that fiber in the ground and getting places quickly.
Comcast and ATT should start delivering their television service to anyone over their existing IP/Internet that wants it. if i have a T1 at home, that's enough to get a mpeg stream down for a channel. it's a way to decouple the connection to the home from the services that can be offered over it.
As for the providers, time to keep upgrading those edge networks (always the slowest and most painful part to deal with) and push the higher bandwidth services out. If I can get 1MB/s (8Mb/s) in my hotel room while i'm in Tokyo over their VDSL setup, there's no reason I can't get 1Mbit here where my house is. I'd rather ditch my ISDN that i'm using (yes, i really do have and use ISDN here in Michigan Bell^W^WAT&T land). it's the new world, AT&T Disconnected.
I think you mean Hypnotoad
A static page that has a meta refresh in it for every few minutes isn't that big of a deal to leave up on the other (left) monitor when i'm working in another window. Now that they've added the moving images/text, i'm less likely to use the website all the time. It may help my productivity and/or be a blessing in disguise.
It's seriously making me reconsider setting up my own RSS fed news website for my own news gateway/needs. The local thing is kinda nice, but the scrolling highlight articles make me want to find a way to turn off javascript. (anything that does that like flashblock?)