As others from the area point out, these guys have a track record of big dream-can't implement. "Lawrence Freenet", "Community Wireless Corp", "Wicked", etc. Spotty customer service record at best. Several different schemes to try to beg money out of city hall.
The reason this rinky-dink stuff keeps working? The town is desperate. Highly educated, highly tech-savvy. But, the local cable provider was owned for years by the local newspaper. They had bandwidth caps in place 15 years ago! And not a 'throttle' if you went over. A 'holy crap $300 bill' if you went over. The cable company got sold a few years back, but it's historically been bad enough to make you wish TWC/Cox/Comcast would take over. AT&T is the incumbent telco, but only pulled U-Verse to a couple neighborhoods before stopping.
I put in my $10, expecting that it's a scam and I won't see anything as a result. Consider it my sign of complaint. But, I used a one-time credit card number to send the $10... that's how little I trust these guys.
Perhaps the problem is that everyone wants experienced engineers at a good price, but nobody wants to train them. They sit through four years of terrible college curriculum that will be lucky to have them design and produce even one project (that might not even be genuinely practical or profitable) and then we all wonder why there just aren't any good X, or Y, or Z left in the field.
Hint... the college curriculum was *always terrible* in that sense. Do you think your typical 1967 ME/EE grad from Oklahoma State was designing or producing something practical or profitable in school? 'Project-based learning' wasn't even a thing.
He got hired anyway by Honeywell or General Dynamics or Bendix or TI or whoever. And, not uncommonly, retired from them (or their successor firms) a few years ago.
This was an inevitable step once we went down the path of allowing OTA broadcasters to start demanding payments for retransmission on cable (originally "Community Antenna TV"). That was a stupid step to begin with... you're sending an unencrypted signal into my house... why do you care how I get it or if I let a middleman bring it to me? It is also inevitable once the broadcasters started getting bought by pay-TV companies (Disney, Comcast, etc).
For FOX, though, I don't think their #1 TV property (a little thing called the NFL) is going to be real happy at all with them becoming 'yet another cable station'.
Any of us with a/. UID under 15,000 or so were here before logins (since there were that many of us who signed up the first few days).
What makes me feel old is that I'm working on the same floor of the same building I was in 1998, back when I first saw Slashdot and happiness was a warm DEC Alphastation.
I'll believe the "10 hour battery life and 1 month of standby" line once real independent reviewers have had them in their hands for a couple of weeks/months. I've lived through enough decades of oversold battery promises, from Apple and everyone else, to buy it from the press release.
Cursive writing, as we know it, is an artifact of now mostly gone writing technologies. The fountain pen, dip pen, and even split-nib quill, had certain technical limitations. For an even line, you needed to avoid unnecessary starts and stops. These pens also wrote almost entirely with downstrokes.
If you have cursive training deep in your subconscious, take out a fountain pen and start writing for a few minutes. Cursive is almost inevitable. And, it's a lot of fun. But, without the technical restriction, it's not necessarily a natural development.
If it had been possible to find a broadband adapter for less than I paid for the console (on closeout), I'd probably still have it hooked up as a hacktoy.
I'm certainly a smaller town person at heart. Any smaller town of decent size has some IT jobs (hospital, school district, governments, whatever the major employers are).
The problem is that there isn't some vast pool of IT jobs available. You can't necessarily get exactly what you want, and if you do go unemployed for a while, there may not be an IT job at all for a while. Oh, yeah, and the pay is crap compared to big city wages.
On the flip side, houses in some smaller towns are coastal-jaw-droppingly cheap (quite functional houses go for $50k, sometimes less, in my part of Kansas).
With the low cost of living, if you save up well in the good years, you can live on near-minimum-wage jobs for a year or two looking for the next rare opportunity.
People certainly had the idea by the end of that generation. Apple's ADB standard for mice, keyboards, and supposedly other I/O was rolling by the late 80s. Texas Instruments, one of the worst offenders on the list (although most TI-99s either had no expansions or the expansion box) had a remarkably USB-like bus called HexBus lined up for the next generation of desktops they were working on when they pulled the plug on the home computer line in '84.
The point is to learn how to use programming to accomplish a task on a set of numbers (most likely some big comma-separated text document) and output some other set of numbers.
I want the students to get to the point that they have the numbers read and writable on the first day.
Perl or Python. Suck it in, split on commas, and it's in a 2D array. 3 lines. Bob's your uncle. Write it out in a preformatted template. Boom.
I coded some things with my undergrad science major friends (atmo sci roommate). The FORTRAN students not only devoted pages of code to the trivia, they spent hours debugging it. The code part was simple for any of them. Our Perl scripts were seriously 10 lines long to their pages, and better looking output to boot.
Any of these sound okay to me. As long as I'm just about never working more than 40 hours a week (30-35 preferred) with some time off besides (doesn't even have to be paid time off), decently-paid (not that much, really, by urban standards), and don't have to move out of low-cost smaller-town middle America? I'm game. Low levels of office politics and irrelevant meetings would be bonus points.
I know rail and buses aren't terribly popular in the US. But, I'd be a lot more willing to consider slightly slower travel, particularly in the sub-500-mile range (Dallas-SanAntonio-Houston triangle, Chicago to MSP/STL/DET, Northeast corridor, LA/SF/Vegas) if I had power and consistent WiFi.
Look, if you're like me, and been primarily Linux-using since the a.out days (see Slashdot ID), you'll check every component and buy based on "what works great with Linux", and even "who's directly advancing open-source software, not being buttheads".
Problem is, I, and much of the Linux community, want to be able to give an Ubuntu LiveCD to my friend Joe who just recently heard about this 'Linux thing". And have it work.
I don't want to say "so, what kind of video chipset did eMachines put in your Walmart box", "what network", "what sound".
Sure. There are *lots* of considerations beyond speed to want SSDs.
First is battery life. Batteries suck. Laptops pulling 5 or 6 watts total make that suck more bearable. SSDs are part of that.
There's also noise. Hard drives have gotten much quieter. But in a dead-silent conference room, I want dead-silence.
Even form-factor is an issue. a 2.5" cylinder is a notable chunk of a small notebook. 1.8" drives are, generally, quite slow. SSDs can be worked into design.
Re:Where there some dells that had bad caps that b
on
When Servers Explode
·
· Score: 1
Sure there were. I had some PowerEdge 1Us do that (1650??). BANG and smokesmell (not much actual smoke) is *never* your friend in the server room.
The problem with reliance on advertising is how badly it really works.
Businesses always suspected they were wasting a lot of money on advertising. But, it was a black box. Designed, by the admen, to be hard to judge whether it was effective or not.
But, in the early internet, the advertisers went straight to the geeks, with little 'Madison Avenue' in between. The geeks said, "sure, we can give you click-through and dwell-time and all the numbers you want". And the businesses got the numbers and said "holy Jeesh, internet advertising sucks in cost-effectiveness". All ads sucked, we just measure it better online.
I wouldn't quite go that far. The U.S. was known as the king of protectionism from Alexander Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures" to the late Nixon administration. So much so that moderate protectionism (i.e., Smoot-Hawley was indeed too far) was known as the "American School of Economics". Henry Carey? Friedrich List? The 'National System'? Have history classes completely been turned over to "America always worshipped Adam Smith" revisionism?
We currently are the least protectionist we've ever been in our history, and are far less protectionist than most of our "free-trade partners".
We moved from colonial backwater to walking-on-the-moon superpower on protectionism. It didn't work?
AT&T offers "DSL Direct Basic" (768/384) for $19.95 a month (no taxes). Skype for $5.50 a month (near-unlimited US/Canada, plus an incoming number). Already cheaper than a dialtone, let alone a dialtone with even the cheapest dialup provider.
You can go to http://qwest.com/dsl and click on "Internet without Local Phone" on the side. Unfortunately, it looks more expensive ($40 a month) than what we can get in AT&T/SBC regions.
I'm a dire cheapskate (part-timer in a small town). SBC's "DSL Direct" is perfect. $20 a month (no taxes) for 768/384 DSL. $5.50 Skype for unlimited US/Canada and an incoming number. Plus $100 a year in prepaid cellphone (not totally necessary). That's cheaper, all told, than a dialtone and the cheapest $6 dialup service I can find.
I am pretty strongly in favor of the latter (lowering entry level barriers). Or, at least, encouraging more nurse practitioners, PAs, etc. Seven years of hell, massive debts, vindictive residencies, etc, for small-town family practice wages? Of course there's going to be a shortage.
Tort reform and licensing-board reform are also needed, which would help with things like maternity wards. Sometimes things aren't perfect in this world.
My employer (a school district) has a fairly helpful health plan for part-timers. I pay more premium than a full-timer. Helps that my wife and I are fairly young, healthy, and have savings, so get by with high-deductible.
You're right, though, in that I think I'm pretty productive with my 25-30 hours a week of sysadminning. Compared to having worked full-time-plus, I spend less time goofing off online. I have plenty of time to do that (like Slashdot) at home.
I wonder if this will become more common in countries with socialized medical care (which, as you might guess, would benefit me). Of course, to also allow physicians to benefit from 30-hour-weeks, we'll need to convince a lot more people to become physicians.
Japan's 'lost decade' (and continuing) also has a lot to do with lack of population growth. Sadly, interest-based capitalism goes hand-in-hand with growth. Japan has gone into negative population growth territory. Much of the west will follow in our lifetimes. From a green or even moderately sane perspective, the cessation of growth and consumption is a blessed and long-hoped-for event. But, economics as we know it stagnates. People get money, but they don't lend it. They don't because lending entails some risk, but, whatever you might invest in is unlikely to grow in a steady or shrinking economy.
You are correct. That's why they're called *marginal* tax rates. This lack of understanding, along with the inability to understand that businesses are taxed on net profit, not revenue, is why Joe The Plumber was such a target of mocking, and such a totem of economically-illiterate America.
There is no doubt that, cutting back to necessities (as the country may finally be lurching toward), we have a surplus of working capacity. If people *really, really* cut back to needs (rice, beans, 100 warm square feet), we'd have 75%+ unemployment. Tech, mech, and automation meant that we had enough surplus to have more hairdressers and marketers than farmers. The flip side is that we don't need more farmers, even if millions wanted to go back to it.
As for me, I'm lucky as hell. I'd found the ability to work 30 hours or so a week, with some vacation flexibility, in my nice cheap midwest small town, for slightly under $30k a year. Lucky as all hell to have it, for now. With my degrees and training, I 'should' make $80k or maybe $100k+ on the coasts. Instead, I get time to garden, volunteer, cook, and jam with friends. Awesome and a half. But, of course, it's far less efficient for most companies. Hiring 6 people and pushing them 50 or 60 hours a week is, sadly, much more efficient than having 10 people work 30 to 35. Perhaps shifting certain fixed costs (health care) off the employer might help this become an option for more people?
The trick to getting a discrimination lawsuit is to prove that it's A, irrelevant, and B, damaging to a protected class. Geeks aren't such a class. Women, on the other hand, are.
It gets squirrely. Businesses would *really* like to give you an IQ test. Might even be relevant. But they will avoid it due to Griggs v Duke Power.
Slashdot Mirror
As others from the area point out, these guys have a track record of big dream-can't implement. "Lawrence Freenet", "Community Wireless Corp", "Wicked", etc. Spotty customer service record at best. Several different schemes to try to beg money out of city hall.
The reason this rinky-dink stuff keeps working? The town is desperate. Highly educated, highly tech-savvy. But, the local cable provider was owned for years by the local newspaper. They had bandwidth caps in place 15 years ago! And not a 'throttle' if you went over. A 'holy crap $300 bill' if you went over. The cable company got sold a few years back, but it's historically been bad enough to make you wish TWC/Cox/Comcast would take over. AT&T is the incumbent telco, but only pulled U-Verse to a couple neighborhoods before stopping.
I put in my $10, expecting that it's a scam and I won't see anything as a result. Consider it my sign of complaint. But, I used a one-time credit card number to send the $10... that's how little I trust these guys.
Perhaps the problem is that everyone wants experienced engineers at a good price, but nobody wants to train them. They sit through four years of terrible college curriculum that will be lucky to have them design and produce even one project (that might not even be genuinely practical or profitable) and then we all wonder why there just aren't any good X, or Y, or Z left in the field.
Hint... the college curriculum was *always terrible* in that sense. Do you think your typical 1967 ME/EE grad from Oklahoma State was designing or producing something practical or profitable in school? 'Project-based learning' wasn't even a thing.
He got hired anyway by Honeywell or General Dynamics or Bendix or TI or whoever. And, not uncommonly, retired from them (or their successor firms) a few years ago.
This was an inevitable step once we went down the path of allowing OTA broadcasters to start demanding payments for retransmission on cable (originally "Community Antenna TV"). That was a stupid step to begin with... you're sending an unencrypted signal into my house... why do you care how I get it or if I let a middleman bring it to me? It is also inevitable once the broadcasters started getting bought by pay-TV companies (Disney, Comcast, etc).
For FOX, though, I don't think their #1 TV property (a little thing called the NFL) is going to be real happy at all with them becoming 'yet another cable station'.
Any of us with a /. UID under 15,000 or so were here before logins (since there were that many of us who signed up the first few days).
What makes me feel old is that I'm working on the same floor of the same building I was in 1998, back when I first saw Slashdot and happiness was a warm DEC Alphastation.
I'll believe the "10 hour battery life and 1 month of standby" line once real independent reviewers have had them in their hands for a couple of weeks/months. I've lived through enough decades of oversold battery promises, from Apple and everyone else, to buy it from the press release.
Cursive writing, as we know it, is an artifact of now mostly gone writing technologies. The fountain pen, dip pen, and even split-nib quill, had certain technical limitations. For an even line, you needed to avoid unnecessary starts and stops. These pens also wrote almost entirely with downstrokes.
If you have cursive training deep in your subconscious, take out a fountain pen and start writing for a few minutes. Cursive is almost inevitable. And, it's a lot of fun. But, without the technical restriction, it's not necessarily a natural development.
If it had been possible to find a broadband adapter for less than I paid for the console (on closeout), I'd probably still have it hooked up as a hacktoy.
I'm certainly a smaller town person at heart. Any smaller town of decent size has some IT jobs (hospital, school district, governments, whatever the major employers are).
The problem is that there isn't some vast pool of IT jobs available. You can't necessarily get exactly what you want, and if you do go unemployed for a while, there may not be an IT job at all for a while. Oh, yeah, and the pay is crap compared to big city wages.
On the flip side, houses in some smaller towns are coastal-jaw-droppingly cheap (quite functional houses go for $50k, sometimes less, in my part of Kansas).
With the low cost of living, if you save up well in the good years, you can live on near-minimum-wage jobs for a year or two looking for the next rare opportunity.
People certainly had the idea by the end of that generation. Apple's ADB standard for mice, keyboards, and supposedly other I/O was rolling by the late 80s. Texas Instruments, one of the worst offenders on the list (although most TI-99s either had no expansions or the expansion box) had a remarkably USB-like bus called HexBus lined up for the next generation of desktops they were working on when they pulled the plug on the home computer line in '84.
The point is to learn how to use programming to accomplish a task on a set of numbers (most likely some big comma-separated text document) and output some other set of numbers.
I want the students to get to the point that they have the numbers read and writable on the first day.
Perl or Python. Suck it in, split on commas, and it's in a 2D array. 3 lines. Bob's your uncle. Write it out in a preformatted template. Boom.
I coded some things with my undergrad science major friends (atmo sci roommate). The FORTRAN students not only devoted pages of code to the trivia, they spent hours debugging it. The code part was simple for any of them. Our Perl scripts were seriously 10 lines long to their pages, and better looking output to boot.
Any of these sound okay to me. As long as I'm just about never working more than 40 hours a week (30-35 preferred) with some time off besides (doesn't even have to be paid time off), decently-paid (not that much, really, by urban standards), and don't have to move out of low-cost smaller-town middle America? I'm game. Low levels of office politics and irrelevant meetings would be bonus points.
I know rail and buses aren't terribly popular in the US. But, I'd be a lot more willing to consider slightly slower travel, particularly in the sub-500-mile range (Dallas-SanAntonio-Houston triangle, Chicago to MSP/STL/DET, Northeast corridor, LA/SF/Vegas) if I had power and consistent WiFi.
There's the evangelism perspective.
Look, if you're like me, and been primarily Linux-using since the a.out days (see Slashdot ID), you'll check every component and buy based on "what works great with Linux", and even "who's directly advancing open-source software, not being buttheads".
Problem is, I, and much of the Linux community, want to be able to give an Ubuntu LiveCD to my friend Joe who just recently heard about this 'Linux thing". And have it work.
I don't want to say "so, what kind of video chipset did eMachines put in your Walmart box", "what network", "what sound".
Sure. There are *lots* of considerations beyond speed to want SSDs.
First is battery life. Batteries suck. Laptops pulling 5 or 6 watts total make that suck more bearable. SSDs are part of that.
There's also noise. Hard drives have gotten much quieter. But in a dead-silent conference room, I want dead-silence.
Even form-factor is an issue. a 2.5" cylinder is a notable chunk of a small notebook. 1.8" drives are, generally, quite slow. SSDs can be worked into design.
Sure there were. I had some PowerEdge 1Us do that (1650??). BANG and smokesmell (not much actual smoke) is *never* your friend in the server room.
The problem with reliance on advertising is how badly it really works.
Businesses always suspected they were wasting a lot of money on advertising. But, it was a black box. Designed, by the admen, to be hard to judge whether it was effective or not.
But, in the early internet, the advertisers went straight to the geeks, with little 'Madison Avenue' in between. The geeks said, "sure, we can give you click-through and dwell-time and all the numbers you want". And the businesses got the numbers and said "holy Jeesh, internet advertising sucks in cost-effectiveness". All ads sucked, we just measure it better online.
protectionism never works
I wouldn't quite go that far. The U.S. was known as the king of protectionism from Alexander Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures" to the late Nixon administration. So much so that moderate protectionism (i.e., Smoot-Hawley was indeed too far) was known as the "American School of Economics". Henry Carey? Friedrich List? The 'National System'? Have history classes completely been turned over to "America always worshipped Adam Smith" revisionism?
We currently are the least protectionist we've ever been in our history, and are far less protectionist than most of our "free-trade partners".
We moved from colonial backwater to walking-on-the-moon superpower on protectionism. It didn't work?
AT&T offers "DSL Direct Basic" (768/384) for $19.95 a month (no taxes). Skype for $5.50 a month (near-unlimited US/Canada, plus an incoming number). Already cheaper than a dialtone, let alone a dialtone with even the cheapest dialup provider.
You can go to http://qwest.com/dsl and click on "Internet without Local Phone" on the side. Unfortunately, it looks more expensive ($40 a month) than what we can get in AT&T/SBC regions.
I'm a dire cheapskate (part-timer in a small town). SBC's "DSL Direct" is perfect. $20 a month (no taxes) for 768/384 DSL. $5.50 Skype for unlimited US/Canada and an incoming number. Plus $100 a year in prepaid cellphone (not totally necessary). That's cheaper, all told, than a dialtone and the cheapest $6 dialup service I can find.
I am pretty strongly in favor of the latter (lowering entry level barriers). Or, at least, encouraging more nurse practitioners, PAs, etc. Seven years of hell, massive debts, vindictive residencies, etc, for small-town family practice wages? Of course there's going to be a shortage.
Tort reform and licensing-board reform are also needed, which would help with things like maternity wards. Sometimes things aren't perfect in this world.
My employer (a school district) has a fairly helpful health plan for part-timers. I pay more premium than a full-timer. Helps that my wife and I are fairly young, healthy, and have savings, so get by with high-deductible.
You're right, though, in that I think I'm pretty productive with my 25-30 hours a week of sysadminning. Compared to having worked full-time-plus, I spend less time goofing off online. I have plenty of time to do that (like Slashdot) at home.
I wonder if this will become more common in countries with socialized medical care (which, as you might guess, would benefit me). Of course, to also allow physicians to benefit from 30-hour-weeks, we'll need to convince a lot more people to become physicians.
Japan's 'lost decade' (and continuing) also has a lot to do with lack of population growth. Sadly, interest-based capitalism goes hand-in-hand with growth. Japan has gone into negative population growth territory. Much of the west will follow in our lifetimes. From a green or even moderately sane perspective, the cessation of growth and consumption is a blessed and long-hoped-for event. But, economics as we know it stagnates. People get money, but they don't lend it. They don't because lending entails some risk, but, whatever you might invest in is unlikely to grow in a steady or shrinking economy.
You are correct. That's why they're called *marginal* tax rates. This lack of understanding, along with the inability to understand that businesses are taxed on net profit, not revenue, is why Joe The Plumber was such a target of mocking, and such a totem of economically-illiterate America.
There is no doubt that, cutting back to necessities (as the country may finally be lurching toward), we have a surplus of working capacity. If people *really, really* cut back to needs (rice, beans, 100 warm square feet), we'd have 75%+ unemployment. Tech, mech, and automation meant that we had enough surplus to have more hairdressers and marketers than farmers. The flip side is that we don't need more farmers, even if millions wanted to go back to it.
As for me, I'm lucky as hell. I'd found the ability to work 30 hours or so a week, with some vacation flexibility, in my nice cheap midwest small town, for slightly under $30k a year. Lucky as all hell to have it, for now. With my degrees and training, I 'should' make $80k or maybe $100k+ on the coasts. Instead, I get time to garden, volunteer, cook, and jam with friends. Awesome and a half. But, of course, it's far less efficient for most companies. Hiring 6 people and pushing them 50 or 60 hours a week is, sadly, much more efficient than having 10 people work 30 to 35. Perhaps shifting certain fixed costs (health care) off the employer might help this become an option for more people?
The trick to getting a discrimination lawsuit is to prove that it's A, irrelevant, and B, damaging to a protected class. Geeks aren't such a class. Women, on the other hand, are.
It gets squirrely. Businesses would *really* like to give you an IQ test. Might even be relevant. But they will avoid it due to Griggs v Duke Power.