It's not looking good here in the Midwest, either. About 80% of the counties here in Iowa have been declared disaster areas due to the floods. Driving around the state, I can tell you firsthand that the damage to this years corn and soybean crops has been absolutely devastating. I've seen many, many acres of land that are still under water, and it's now too late in the year to plant.
On top of that, the heavy rains this spring that caused the flooding kept farmers out of the fields, so a large portion of the crops that did get planted, got planted late and won't yield nearly the bushels/acre that they normally do.
Then you have the fuel prices for running the farm machinery and trucks to transport the crops....
Let's just say that this is going to be a very, very bad year for anyone who depends on cheap corn.
but they don't have a way of disabeling them coming in
Not true. One of our employees was racking up around $50.00 a month from unsolicited incoming text messages. Just took me a simple phone call to AT&T to get them completely blocked from his phone.
We've always had incoming calls deducted from our monthly allowance of minutes. There are some exceptions: Free mobile-to-mobile (calls to another cell phone on the same carrier are free), free nights and weekends, "friends and family" plans, etc...
But, the standard deal is that if you're talking on the phone, you're burning up your monthly minutes, regardless of which end dialed the call. It's so common that the one company I know of here that actually doesn't charge for incoming calls, U.S. Cellular, makes a HUGE marketing point of it.
My main problem with nearly every space tourism idea that I've seen floated is that they all want to offer you a few minutes of zero g, and charge the price of a new car, or more.
Maybe if I had a Bill Gates caliber bank account, I'd consider it. But for an average person, 4 minutes of ANYTHING, no matter how cool, just isn't worth the kind of money they're wanting to charge. Even if they throw in a smokin' hot hooker to be your seat-mate.
They need some sort of a "space hotel" to make it worthwhile. If they can't get the costs down, and it seems likely that they won't be able to, then they need to offer a substantial amount of time in space before any of these plans begin to look enticing.
but then I found out that the feature I used most was synch'ng my bookmarks,
I seem to be in the minority on this, but that's the one part of GBS that I cared the least about.
What I relied upon it for was keeping browser sessions synced between PCs. Very handy to be able to shut down Firefox at work, go home, and have all the same web pages show up. Saved me countless hours of redoing google searches in the time I used the plug-in. Sadly, I've not found a replacement that offers this functionality. (Weave sounds promising, but I just installed the update that is supposed to include this and haven't had a chance to test it from another computer yet.)
FreeNAS is ok, I've used it for a few applications.
Lately, for home use, I've been extremely happy with Windows Home Server. Since I work with servers for my job all day long, the last thing I want to do when I get home is more of my job, and WHS is simple as pie to administer. Adding and removing disks is as simple as I've seen on any storage device.
I installed it on an old P1 box that doesn't use much power, and haven't noticed any change in my electric bill.
Unlike you, I'm generally very anti-MS, but I have to admit that WHS has been a great product. Even the beta I was running was stable as hell, and administration, as I said, is a breeze.
If there's room to carry extra batteries, why not just have them permanently wired in and increase the range of the vehicle?
Besides, at some point your cargo space is full, and you run out of spares. What about the service technicians for my company who routinely put on over 1000 miles a day? You can't carry that many spare batteries, and multi-hour recharge times would mean they don't get to come home to their families at night.
There's no way around it, you can't go with pure electric cars until recharge times can be brought down to be in the same ballpark as what it currently takes to pump a tank of gas.
Maybe that will mean just driving a car with a 200 mile range fr a while,
Entirely unrealistic. Just a quick example off the top of my head: My fiance's ex-husband lives 150 miles from us. Are you really suggesting that when we pick up or drop off the kids, we hang out at his house for 4 hours while the car recharges? Gotta tell ya, I'd rather pay $50 a gallon for gas than hang out with that douchebag for 4 hours.
And then there are people who rely on the ability to travel for their livelihood...
Pure electric cars won't be a realistic option until recharge times can be brought into the 5 to 10 minute range, for many, many reasons.
Of course. But that doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Hook a sniffer up to a cable or DSL modem and I think you'd be amazed at the amount of random, unsolicited traffic that gets thrown down your pipe.
Do spammers call you and ask how much bandwidth you'd be willing to let them consume tomorrow morning when they hammer your mail server? Nope. If you want rock solid VOIP, you need to get cooperation from your ISP.
I would expect to spend about $1,000 for something worthy of attempting P2P traffic shaping.
I just installed a bonded DSL setup for a customer using a used 2621XM and a pair of ADSL WICs. Ran right at $700. With proper QoS on that router and the ISPs router, they're getting excellent VOIP performance with 10-15 simultaneous calls plus heavy data traffic.
well, there is one thing you can do at your side: sacrifice half your incoming bandwidth.
Sadly, in many cases that's not even an option. There's nothing much you can do at your end about traffic that you didn't initiate: worms, spam attempts, etc...
I don't do VOIP at home, we just use our cell phones. I install VOIP systems for businesses, in settings where good performance 99% of the time is unacceptable, I have to deliver 100%. My clients bitch up a storm if they hear one or two garbled words over the course of an entire day.
I've seen several installations where it took nothing more than the spam attempts coming into the mail server to kill the VOIP quality, even with NO locally initiated traffic going on.
I've been doing VOIP for quite a few years now, and believe me, I've done my research. I've implemented and tested every idea I've seen mentioned in this discussion. Many of them aren't bad, and will produce "pretty good" results. Probably good enough for home use.
But in real world application where you're expected to deliver telco quality service, you simply must have the ability to do something about inbound traffic before it traverses your internet connection.
I'm very fortunate in that I have a strong relationship with a locally owned ISP who is willing to put some QoS at their end for my customers. My method has allowed me to provide call quality that exceeds landlines, even on completely saturated connections. Everything else only gets you about 95% of the way there.
Most gaming routers allow for this kind of functionality. In fact the first search result on google for 'gaming router' brought me to a product from dlink that provided exactly that. Not exactly true. Sure, it might be a bullet point on their feature list, but in practice it doesn't really work.
I've installed many VOIP systems in small to medium sized companies, and back when I first started doing it I learned a valuable lesson:
Your router can only control what it sees.
Seems obvious, but let's consider the implications.... Your router cannot do anything of meaning about incoming data. By the time your router sees it, it's already traversed your cable or DSL line and the damage has been done. Something like bittorent is throwing a ton of incoming bandwidth at you, and there's not much a consumer grade router can do about it.
The way I approach it is to use a small, but fully functional Cisco router at the client side, and work with a mom & pop ISP who will also throw some QoS on their router for that link. I won't accept a job installing a VOIP system for a client who isn't willing to go that route.
You have to give the *incoming* VOIP priority over the incoming torrent traffic, and for good results, this must be done at the ISP, before it has already clogged up your personal "last mile" link.
If you want to run bittorrent and VOIP on the same connection, you need a *real* router, and a cooperative ISP.
Torrents kill VOIP. The method I outlined is the only way, after several years of trying every idea and product out there, that actually produces reliably stable results.
Whether you support Bush or not, the fact of the matter is that simply telling a lie is not a criminal act. Purjury, on the other hand, is.
If I were to commit perjury, the judge would throw my ass in jail so fast I wouldn't have time to finish the sentence. But when Bill Clinton committed perjury? He stood a slight risk of maybe losing his job, but in the end got off scot-free.
And yet the liberals want to complain about the "justice of it all".....
I do find it odd though that such a well designed system can have a single point of failure like that) You make a good point. See my reply to afidel above.
Basically, it's the human factor. The tapes for the monthly off-site backup weren't removed at the scheduled time, the operator in question feared for his job and failed to take action in time, the tapes got overwritten the following Monday, and the people responsible for verifying his action also feared for their jobs and helped in the attempt to cover up the mistake.
It would have all gone unnoticed if the tapes in question hadn't been needed that month.
Well, the operator who forgot to get the tapes out of the autochanger was the root cause, but obviously there was more of a breakdown in the system than that. All attributable to the human factor.
Basically, the people that were responsible for having verified that he had done his job turned around and helped him cover up his mistake.
The lost data was not customer data, but the work product of several departments. It would have gone unnoticed if a raid array hadn't failed necessitating the use of the (now overwritten) monthly backup tapes. The end result was one entire department having to repeat an entire month's work.
The one flaw in the backup system was the human factor, but I'm not sure how you can eliminate that when tapes need to be physically delivered to off-site storage.
The company does now have much more rigorous procedures in place regarding verification that the tapes have been changed at appropriate times, but the fact remains that nothing is foolproof when you have humans involved in the process.
Funny you should mention telecom, I was thinking the same thing.
I currently work for a very small (~15 employees) telecom company, and even we fall victim to crap like this. Of course, much of that comes from the fact that the president (who can barely remember from day to day how to forward an email in Outlook) thinks that his "help" in highly complex technical projects will speed things along.
Luckily, he's approaching retirement, and spends much of his time pursuing his other interests (that new 64" plasma tv isn't going to watch itself, after all) so the impact is minimal. But on the days he comes into the office, I've reached the point where I just spend the day browsing the web, or firing up WoW to pass the time while I wait for the inevitable "assistance" and "pep talks".
The closest I've ever come to getting fired was the day he asked me why a (smallish) project was taking so long, and I had to explain to him that, while I'm sure it made him feel useful, every time I had to spend 3 days planning and strategizing with him at his desk, that was 3 days that I wasn't free to actually GET SOME FUCKING WORK DONE. (and yes, I put it to him exactly like that.)
Yeah, I second this. 20 years ago I fit all my shit in a sea bag. Now I have dogs, a mortgage, bills, and more stuff than I can pack myself. I am happy, but I feel encumbered. I know the feeling. I've worked very hard for a lot of years to build the life that I have today, and I wouldn't trade it. But there are times when I get a bit nostalgic for the freedom of youth. Like when I woke up one morning to find my water heater dead, and realized that there was no landlord responsible for replacing it. Or when I'm hungover on a Saturday morning, and the dogs insist that 6:30 AM is playtime. Or like yesterday, when I was mowing my lawn and noticed about $500 worth of storm damage to my roof, and now have to figure out how to pay for that and still take my family on the vacation I've promised them next week. Still, it's a very rich and fulfilling life, and I wouldn't go back to being 20 years old again for anything. But "encumbered"? Yeah, I can definitely relate.
Some simple advice to you younger folks out there. Work hard to get where you want to go in life, but don't forget to also take time to really, truly appreciate where you ARE in life. No matter how great your life is in 20 years, there are things from your life today that you're going to miss.
Back when I was still bodybuilding, the BMI charts classified me as not just overweight, but obese.
Yet my body fat % (professionally measured) never exceeded 3%. It often dipped to levels that are actually considered unsafe, all while still registering as obese on the BMI charts.
My reason for supporting a measure like this is simple. Fat people are nasty to look at. It annoys me to have them around.
If I have to accept laws that prevent me from enjoying a cigarette in a bar because the smoke bothers other people, then I will fully support laws that punish people who annoy me. Starting with fat fucks seems like a good idea. Tax those fat bastards so much that they can't afford the food to maintain their huge, ugly, disgusting body weights.
Then, once that's done, I want bans on Harley Davidsons and cats.
You're exactly right. I used to work for one of the largest banks in the country, large enough that I can say with confidence that every American, and probably 75% of the people in the world, have heard of them. Our backup system was amazingly well designed. A lot of very smart people drew very large salaries for a very long time just to design it, not to mention the millions of dollars in hardware, and gigantic fees to hardened facilities for offsite storage.
They had a major data loss once because some douchebag forgot to change the backup tapes when he was supposed to.
The best laid plans and so on.....
(I'll throw in that, while working for the same company, I learned that no amount of money spent on ultra high end UPS systems and backup generators can protect you from an incompetent technician replacing a battery without following proper procedures.)
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I don't know if this idea has come up in your conversations or not, but...
A good first step might be to cut back on the conversations with your buddies, and go out and talk to some girls.
Just sayin'.......
You might find this interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLRuGUPkyh4
It's not looking good here in the Midwest, either. About 80% of the counties here in Iowa have been declared disaster areas due to the floods. Driving around the state, I can tell you firsthand that the damage to this years corn and soybean crops has been absolutely devastating. I've seen many, many acres of land that are still under water, and it's now too late in the year to plant.
On top of that, the heavy rains this spring that caused the flooding kept farmers out of the fields, so a large portion of the crops that did get planted, got planted late and won't yield nearly the bushels/acre that they normally do.
Then you have the fuel prices for running the farm machinery and trucks to transport the crops....
Let's just say that this is going to be a very, very bad year for anyone who depends on cheap corn.
but they don't have a way of disabeling them coming in
Not true. One of our employees was racking up around $50.00 a month from unsolicited incoming text messages. Just took me a simple phone call to AT&T to get them completely blocked from his phone.
Next?
We've always had incoming calls deducted from our monthly allowance of minutes. There are some exceptions: Free mobile-to-mobile (calls to another cell phone on the same carrier are free), free nights and weekends, "friends and family" plans, etc...
But, the standard deal is that if you're talking on the phone, you're burning up your monthly minutes, regardless of which end dialed the call. It's so common that the one company I know of here that actually doesn't charge for incoming calls, U.S. Cellular, makes a HUGE marketing point of it.
Excellent point.
My main problem with nearly every space tourism idea that I've seen floated is that they all want to offer you a few minutes of zero g, and charge the price of a new car, or more.
Maybe if I had a Bill Gates caliber bank account, I'd consider it. But for an average person, 4 minutes of ANYTHING, no matter how cool, just isn't worth the kind of money they're wanting to charge. Even if they throw in a smokin' hot hooker to be your seat-mate.
They need some sort of a "space hotel" to make it worthwhile. If they can't get the costs down, and it seems likely that they won't be able to, then they need to offer a substantial amount of time in space before any of these plans begin to look enticing.
but then I found out that the feature I used most was synch'ng my bookmarks,
I seem to be in the minority on this, but that's the one part of GBS that I cared the least about.
What I relied upon it for was keeping browser sessions synced between PCs. Very handy to be able to shut down Firefox at work, go home, and have all the same web pages show up. Saved me countless hours of redoing google searches in the time I used the plug-in. Sadly, I've not found a replacement that offers this functionality. (Weave sounds promising, but I just installed the update that is supposed to include this and haven't had a chance to test it from another computer yet.)
FreeNAS is ok, I've used it for a few applications.
Lately, for home use, I've been extremely happy with Windows Home Server. Since I work with servers for my job all day long, the last thing I want to do when I get home is more of my job, and WHS is simple as pie to administer. Adding and removing disks is as simple as I've seen on any storage device.
I installed it on an old P1 box that doesn't use much power, and haven't noticed any change in my electric bill.
Unlike you, I'm generally very anti-MS, but I have to admit that WHS has been a great product. Even the beta I was running was stable as hell, and administration, as I said, is a breeze.
If there's room to carry extra batteries, why not just have them permanently wired in and increase the range of the vehicle?
Besides, at some point your cargo space is full, and you run out of spares. What about the service technicians for my company who routinely put on over 1000 miles a day? You can't carry that many spare batteries, and multi-hour recharge times would mean they don't get to come home to their families at night.
There's no way around it, you can't go with pure electric cars until recharge times can be brought down to be in the same ballpark as what it currently takes to pump a tank of gas.
Maybe that will mean just driving a car with a 200 mile range fr a while,
Entirely unrealistic. Just a quick example off the top of my head: My fiance's ex-husband lives 150 miles from us. Are you really suggesting that when we pick up or drop off the kids, we hang out at his house for 4 hours while the car recharges? Gotta tell ya, I'd rather pay $50 a gallon for gas than hang out with that douchebag for 4 hours.
And then there are people who rely on the ability to travel for their livelihood...
Pure electric cars won't be a realistic option until recharge times can be brought into the 5 to 10 minute range, for many, many reasons.
Of course. But that doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Hook a sniffer up to a cable or DSL modem and I think you'd be amazed at the amount of random, unsolicited traffic that gets thrown down your pipe.
Do spammers call you and ask how much bandwidth you'd be willing to let them consume tomorrow morning when they hammer your mail server? Nope. If you want rock solid VOIP, you need to get cooperation from your ISP.
I would expect to spend about $1,000 for something worthy of attempting P2P traffic shaping.
I just installed a bonded DSL setup for a customer using a used 2621XM and a pair of ADSL WICs. Ran right at $700. With proper QoS on that router and the ISPs router, they're getting excellent VOIP performance with 10-15 simultaneous calls plus heavy data traffic.
well, there is one thing you can do at your side: sacrifice half your incoming bandwidth.
Sadly, in many cases that's not even an option. There's nothing much you can do at your end about traffic that you didn't initiate: worms, spam attempts, etc...
I don't do VOIP at home, we just use our cell phones. I install VOIP systems for businesses, in settings where good performance 99% of the time is unacceptable, I have to deliver 100%. My clients bitch up a storm if they hear one or two garbled words over the course of an entire day.
I've seen several installations where it took nothing more than the spam attempts coming into the mail server to kill the VOIP quality, even with NO locally initiated traffic going on.
I've been doing VOIP for quite a few years now, and believe me, I've done my research. I've implemented and tested every idea I've seen mentioned in this discussion. Many of them aren't bad, and will produce "pretty good" results. Probably good enough for home use.
But in real world application where you're expected to deliver telco quality service, you simply must have the ability to do something about inbound traffic before it traverses your internet connection.
I'm very fortunate in that I have a strong relationship with a locally owned ISP who is willing to put some QoS at their end for my customers. My method has allowed me to provide call quality that exceeds landlines, even on completely saturated connections. Everything else only gets you about 95% of the way there.
I've installed many VOIP systems in small to medium sized companies, and back when I first started doing it I learned a valuable lesson:
Your router can only control what it sees.
Seems obvious, but let's consider the implications.... Your router cannot do anything of meaning about incoming data. By the time your router sees it, it's already traversed your cable or DSL line and the damage has been done. Something like bittorent is throwing a ton of incoming bandwidth at you, and there's not much a consumer grade router can do about it.
The way I approach it is to use a small, but fully functional Cisco router at the client side, and work with a mom & pop ISP who will also throw some QoS on their router for that link. I won't accept a job installing a VOIP system for a client who isn't willing to go that route.
You have to give the *incoming* VOIP priority over the incoming torrent traffic, and for good results, this must be done at the ISP, before it has already clogged up your personal "last mile" link.
If you want to run bittorrent and VOIP on the same connection, you need a *real* router, and a cooperative ISP.
Torrents kill VOIP. The method I outlined is the only way, after several years of trying every idea and product out there, that actually produces reliably stable results.
Careful. If you start littering the discussion with facts, you might make the enviro-whacko's heads explode.
I'd normally be all for that, but it sure sounds messy.
Exactly.
Whether you support Bush or not, the fact of the matter is that simply telling a lie is not a criminal act. Purjury, on the other hand, is.
If I were to commit perjury, the judge would throw my ass in jail so fast I wouldn't have time to finish the sentence. But when Bill Clinton committed perjury? He stood a slight risk of maybe losing his job, but in the end got off scot-free.
And yet the liberals want to complain about the "justice of it all".....
Basically, it's the human factor. The tapes for the monthly off-site backup weren't removed at the scheduled time, the operator in question feared for his job and failed to take action in time, the tapes got overwritten the following Monday, and the people responsible for verifying his action also feared for their jobs and helped in the attempt to cover up the mistake.
It would have all gone unnoticed if the tapes in question hadn't been needed that month.
Well, the operator who forgot to get the tapes out of the autochanger was the root cause, but obviously there was more of a breakdown in the system than that. All attributable to the human factor.
Basically, the people that were responsible for having verified that he had done his job turned around and helped him cover up his mistake.
The lost data was not customer data, but the work product of several departments. It would have gone unnoticed if a raid array hadn't failed necessitating the use of the (now overwritten) monthly backup tapes. The end result was one entire department having to repeat an entire month's work.
The one flaw in the backup system was the human factor, but I'm not sure how you can eliminate that when tapes need to be physically delivered to off-site storage.
The company does now have much more rigorous procedures in place regarding verification that the tapes have been changed at appropriate times, but the fact remains that nothing is foolproof when you have humans involved in the process.
Funny you should mention telecom, I was thinking the same thing.
I currently work for a very small (~15 employees) telecom company, and even we fall victim to crap like this. Of course, much of that comes from the fact that the president (who can barely remember from day to day how to forward an email in Outlook) thinks that his "help" in highly complex technical projects will speed things along.
Luckily, he's approaching retirement, and spends much of his time pursuing his other interests (that new 64" plasma tv isn't going to watch itself, after all) so the impact is minimal. But on the days he comes into the office, I've reached the point where I just spend the day browsing the web, or firing up WoW to pass the time while I wait for the inevitable "assistance" and "pep talks".
The closest I've ever come to getting fired was the day he asked me why a (smallish) project was taking so long, and I had to explain to him that, while I'm sure it made him feel useful, every time I had to spend 3 days planning and strategizing with him at his desk, that was 3 days that I wasn't free to actually GET SOME FUCKING WORK DONE. (and yes, I put it to him exactly like that.)
Some simple advice to you younger folks out there. Work hard to get where you want to go in life, but don't forget to also take time to really, truly appreciate where you ARE in life. No matter how great your life is in 20 years, there are things from your life today that you're going to miss.
Enjoy them while they're here.
Back when I was still bodybuilding, the BMI charts classified me as not just overweight, but obese.
Yet my body fat % (professionally measured) never exceeded 3%. It often dipped to levels that are actually considered unsafe, all while still registering as obese on the BMI charts.
I don't really care if they cost me more or not.
My reason for supporting a measure like this is simple. Fat people are nasty to look at. It annoys me to have them around.
If I have to accept laws that prevent me from enjoying a cigarette in a bar because the smoke bothers other people, then I will fully support laws that punish people who annoy me. Starting with fat fucks seems like a good idea. Tax those fat bastards so much that they can't afford the food to maintain their huge, ugly, disgusting body weights.
Then, once that's done, I want bans on Harley Davidsons and cats.
By virtue of being slower, it is automatically also less effective, since it has a limited amount of time to operate.
Um.... I believe the word you're looking for is "coincidental".
You're exactly right. I used to work for one of the largest banks in the country, large enough that I can say with confidence that every American, and probably 75% of the people in the world, have heard of them. Our backup system was amazingly well designed. A lot of very smart people drew very large salaries for a very long time just to design it, not to mention the millions of dollars in hardware, and gigantic fees to hardened facilities for offsite storage.
They had a major data loss once because some douchebag forgot to change the backup tapes when he was supposed to.
The best laid plans and so on.....
(I'll throw in that, while working for the same company, I learned that no amount of money spent on ultra high end UPS systems and backup generators can protect you from an incompetent technician replacing a battery without following proper procedures.)