Check various consumer or IT review sites. If you are paying $.05 each for a bulk house brand... probably not good. Paying more for stuff from an experienced maker would be better.
I have heard that the RW versions are more robust than the plain writable ones... there may be research to back that up.
"Why not pump hot water through tubes in a severed hand?"
The blood will coagulate within minutes, the molecular bonding changes, and the scan will no longer match. NIR is wierd: we could tell accurately how sticky tape was, and how thick the layers of plastic in a multi-layer trash bag were... just from a scan. You can also calibrate it to identify the area where of coffee, pot, or other plant material was grown.
"Why not pump hot water through tubes in a severed hand?"
FYI, that NIR scanner can also detect blood and oxygenation of the blood... hard to mimic that. Similar clip-on scanners are used to do a fast test of the O2 in blood... they clamp onto a fingertip.
Decades ago - and I mean DECADES - we built a little device for a trade show that could tell whether a person was right or left-handed, based on a NIR scan. The hand that was used the most had more muscle and blood in it.
"Biometrics sounds great, right up until the point you run into the desperate dude who is willing to take out your eyeball -- or in this case remove your hand "
The veins will collapse with loss of blood, the hand will not be able to trigger the scanner, and the assets will be safe. Same with retinal scans - the eye will not have the visible veining that retinal scanning uses.
Archive (make a copy and delete from the work area) is for files you might want someday. Backup is for files you KNOW you will need tomorrow or next week.
Your computer's own hard drives should keep only what you are actively working on. Get the rest of the stuff out of your way.
Buy GOOD DVDs... burn all the files you are not actively working with to these - two separate DVDs for each archive, of two different brands. Check for file integrity, label them well and store them in a convenient, off-site location, cool and dark. Delete the originals from the working drive. Check the archive disks fairly often for degradation and re-burn as needed. They are no more labile than negatives and videotape.
For the large files, buy removable drive bays and holders, and copy them onto large hard drives. REMOVE the drives and store them with the DVDs.
On your working system, continue to back up the data for the active projects. Consider getting a RAID 5 system for data integrity, because if you back up data from one drive to another you risk overwriting a good copy with a bad copy.
I used to sell on eBay, and just put the estimated shipping weight in the ad, with the methods of shipping (whatever the item qualified for) I was willing to consider. I only charged "packing and handling" if it was something odd or required special packing methods.
Some stuff went USPS first class, some went USPS media mail, but one guy was in a HUGE hurry to get a 30-lb appliance and forked over the $$$ for FEDEX next-day air.
It made the customers happy that I wasn't turning shipping into a profit center.
"What ebay needs to fix is SHIPPING COSTS. You have to carefully read every listing to have any idea what the bid amount really means, because it's useless until you add on the shipping!"
Shipping to WHERE? Unless the person uses a flat-rate service like USPS Expre$$ Mail, shipping increases with the distance.
Yes, it happens. It was not pleasant for the company. One programmer keeled over from cardiac arrest, he hadn't written much in the formal specs, and he was working alone on a small but important customer-related project.
I, a lousy programmer (I'm worse now), had to go through his code looking for comments and clues as to what he was trying to accomplish with his code, augment the comments where I could, and make an effort to identify the various modules and functions. Then I had to turn my results over to the dead guy's replacement... my work was to give the new programmer (a more expensive contractor) a head start on finishing the code.
It was a wasted effort for me: he had a lot of profane "venting", some pr0no fantasies, and little useful information to help decipher what each chunk of code did.
what I would love is a thermostat that runs both my swamp cooler and AC unit and can determine when to use one versus the other and switch automatically between them. Anybody know of such a device? Nope, and you won't find one. It's a fast way to kill your AC.
I had a tenant who manually switched between AC and evap every day, when we were in one of those "not quite dry enough for evap" months. Her theory was that in the PM, when the RH was low, she could use the evap, then use the AC the rest of the time. Then she called me because the AC was not working.
The first day or so of an AC switchover from evap is when the AC has to remove all that moisture left by the evap. The tenant had been switching often enough that the humidity removed made a sheet of ice on the coils and the AC died.
Because it wasn't cooling rapidly enough, she cranked the T-stat down as low as possible, which made the icing worse. Fortunately, there was no permanent damage ot the AC, but she had to swelter with no cooling until the ice caking the coils melted. She wasn't willing to pay the AC guy his hourly to stand there with a blow dryer and melt yhe ice.
It's not at all "environmentally friendly" because that ice maker or refrigerator uses just as much electricity and nasty ozone-hostile refrigerants as any AC unit ever did.
If he's using his refrigerator to make the ice, he's not being efficient at all. He's moving heat from the water to the room's air to make ice, then from the room's air to the water to cool off the room he heated up while making the ice.
If he's taking the ice from a common ice-making machine, he's being a parasite on the rest of the student housing population.
There is no time to "evolve"... it's either launch your products full grown and ready to compete or there will never be a Version 1.1 to correct the flaws. Your competitors will have you for lunch.
Yes, I do know the meaning of BETA, and at least in the company I work for, beta means FEATURE COMPLETE (buggy and slow, maybe, but the features should all be there). What I see in Beta is pretty much what marketing plans to ship.
If Mickysoft plans to compete with Adobe and Macromedia for the high end market, their product has to be feature complete and really smooth at launch.
If they plan on snarfing up the impecunious designer market, they'll have to compete with Corel's Paint Shop Pro (which has simple vector editing, if I have read the info correctly) and CorelDraw, the GIMP, and a host of other quite capable products.
Yes, I know Acrylic might be favorably compared to what PhotoShop WAS at V1.0, but when Adobe's products came out, there was nothing that could compare with their feature set. If Microsoft wants to enter the market with software that might have been competitive in the 1990s... it's their money to waste.
"SEVEN concurrent projects, four of which are blatantly busywork, and two of which are genuinely useful?"
If the projects and homework is assigned just so the teacher can say "Oh, yes, we do projects", with no thought to what learning comes from the project, you are rightfully angry. We all recognize "busywork"... the difference is that I am well-paid for busy work and get paide 150% for overtime busywork.
Teachers often assign large amounts of homework instead of carefully selecting smaller amounts of homework that will reinforce learning. If every teacher in a typical secnodary school assigns an hour of homework a night, that runs the student's day up to 10-12 hours of academics.
The large anount of homework is usually assigned because the teacher CAN... because they have the power to assign it. Few of them can justify the assignments, and few of them bother to do more than glance at it. I seldom saw homework that had been thoughtfully graded by a teacher... it was just checked off as done or not done.
I have had some teachers who couldn't teach... they piled homework onto us so they could say they were trying to get us to learn. We would have learned if they had been able to do more than parrot what they had learned.
A good teacher can explain a concept in several different ways... a bad teacher only knows the "One True Way".
"open source programmers are being treat more a subcontractors"
Where I am working, the open source programmers often ARE contractors. Highly paid contractors, just like the programmers worjking on Windows projects.
If you believe Rob Enderle's latest rant, Linux is a force that makes the press, big companies and even governments tremble before us. Now Villasants is worried we're being exploited.
Maybe Villasante should get together with Enderle and decide whose FUD to believe.
One place I worked used an astrology program to generate frequently changed access passwords for a terminal that could not be physically secured.
To retrieve the password, we used the ephemeris that was conveniently parked in the bookshelf near the computer, with a lot of boring references and some ancient magazines. Look up the date and time, enter the correct astrological data and the terminal let you complete the login process for the lab system.
It's bad enough with mobile phones... all I need is a commuter in a Huummer trying to merge onto the freeway while watching the sports channel to have something to gab about at the office.
Although watching a commuter in a Hummer, his mobile phone to his ear so it blocked his peripheral vision, try to occupy the same spot in the lane as the loaded gravel truck he failed to spot was entertaining...
"any company that is going to lose more than a few pennies from a reboot is going to have redundant servers in place already. It is not difficult to stagger the application of patches to server machines in a farm, which all but eliminates the cost of a reboot."
How about desk-bound employees and their patches? Don't we count?
I use a lot of non-MSFT apps, and if one of them fails to work with the patched Windows system, I'm goung to lose a lot of time. I've already had one "security patch" to something do wierd things to my system, making it impossible for me to see the hard drive password prompt. Multiple that by every laptop in the company and you have a lot of support calls.
Another "security patch" seems to have hosed the network finder so that it can't automatically pick up a new IP address from the LAN. I have to manually change the settings and..... guess what? REBOOT to force it to pick up the new IP address. Every time I have to log on from home, that's TWO reboots and two manual interventions to what should be automatically happening.
They also measure the increase in incoming links, because a steady increase indicates that the site continues to be of interest. Also, if the site has links from university Lit departments and other "high influence" sites, those links count heavily.
The only way for me to knock your friend's site out of the top 10 would be to put up a site with equally interesting content about poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, get equally high-quality links to it, and... that's too much work. I'd link to it rather than try to duplicate it.
Special interest sites, such as your friend's site, and sites selling a product they make themselves are easy to get high ranks for - in their niche. The sites that are scrambling for position are the ones re-selling Tahitian Noni juice and other common commodities.
"inserting very small text that's the same color as the background"
Puh-leeeeze! That trick became ineffective last century. It's very easy for the search engine to check background colors and FONT tags and penalize the page that uses text that is too close to the background color.
"If you are talking about a business (and 99% of sites using seo are there to make money) this actually will decide if it will survive or not."
The most important part of web promotion for a business is to make sure their URL is on all their print material: the ads, business cards, flyers, etc. That is assuming it's a real business with a real product, and not a Viagra seller. The SEOs get most of their customers from the ranks of the fools who are trying to sell MLM products or are in an overcrowded internet service business, like web design. Nothing can help them.
Reading this patent, I'm still amazed that the "Search Engine Optimization" consultants haven't realized that absolutely nothing can outrank a well-constructed site (hierarchical) with concise content-rich text about something interesting or informative. Real sites with real products have nothing to fear from these changes.
Maybe the SEOs do realize it, but can't resist the offer of easy money from the thousands of MLM and "me too" sites trying to sell useless crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, you are missing the sarcasm in my post.
I have heard that the RW versions are more robust than the plain writable ones ... there may be research to back that up.
The blood will coagulate within minutes, the molecular bonding changes, and the scan will no longer match. NIR is wierd: we could tell accurately how sticky tape was, and how thick the layers of plastic in a multi-layer trash bag were ... just from a scan. You can also calibrate it to identify the area where of coffee, pot, or other plant material was grown.
FYI, that NIR scanner can also detect blood and oxygenation of the blood ... hard to mimic that. Similar clip-on scanners are used to do a fast test of the O2 in blood ... they clamp onto a fingertip.
Decades ago - and I mean DECADES - we built a little device for a trade show that could tell whether a person was right or left-handed, based on a NIR scan. The hand that was used the most had more muscle and blood in it.
The veins will collapse with loss of blood, the hand will not be able to trigger the scanner, and the assets will be safe. Same with retinal scans - the eye will not have the visible veining that retinal scanning uses.
Your computer's own hard drives should keep only what you are actively working on. Get the rest of the stuff out of your way.
Buy GOOD DVDs ... burn all the files you are not actively working with to these - two separate DVDs for each archive, of two different brands. Check for file integrity, label them well and store them in a convenient, off-site location, cool and dark. Delete the originals from the working drive. Check the archive disks fairly often for degradation and re-burn as needed. They are no more labile than negatives and videotape.
For the large files, buy removable drive bays and holders, and copy them onto large hard drives. REMOVE the drives and store them with the DVDs.
On your working system, continue to back up the data for the active projects. Consider getting a RAID 5 system for data integrity, because if you back up data from one drive to another you risk overwriting a good copy with a bad copy.
Some stuff went USPS first class, some went USPS media mail, but one guy was in a HUGE hurry to get a 30-lb appliance and forked over the $$$ for FEDEX next-day air.
It made the customers happy that I wasn't turning shipping into a profit center.
Shipping to WHERE? Unless the person uses a flat-rate service like USPS Expre$$ Mail, shipping increases with the distance.
I, a lousy programmer (I'm worse now), had to go through his code looking for comments and clues as to what he was trying to accomplish with his code, augment the comments where I could, and make an effort to identify the various modules and functions. Then I had to turn my results over to the dead guy's replacement ... my work was to give the new programmer (a more expensive contractor) a head start on finishing the code.
It was a wasted effort for me: he had a lot of profane "venting", some pr0no fantasies, and little useful information to help decipher what each chunk of code did.
what I would love is a thermostat that runs both my swamp cooler and AC unit and can determine when to use one versus the other and switch automatically between them. Anybody know of such a device? Nope, and you won't find one. It's a fast way to kill your AC.
I had a tenant who manually switched between AC and evap every day, when we were in one of those "not quite dry enough for evap" months. Her theory was that in the PM, when the RH was low, she could use the evap, then use the AC the rest of the time. Then she called me because the AC was not working.
The first day or so of an AC switchover from evap is when the AC has to remove all that moisture left by the evap. The tenant had been switching often enough that the humidity removed made a sheet of ice on the coils and the AC died. Because it wasn't cooling rapidly enough, she cranked the T-stat down as low as possible, which made the icing worse. Fortunately, there was no permanent damage ot the AC, but she had to swelter with no cooling until the ice caking the coils melted. She wasn't willing to pay the AC guy his hourly to stand there with a blow dryer and melt yhe ice.
It's not at all "environmentally friendly" because that ice maker or refrigerator uses just as much electricity and nasty ozone-hostile refrigerants as any AC unit ever did.
If he's using his refrigerator to make the ice, he's not being efficient at all. He's moving heat from the water to the room's air to make ice, then from the room's air to the water to cool off the room he heated up while making the ice.
If he's taking the ice from a common ice-making machine, he's being a parasite on the rest of the student housing population.
Yes, I do know the meaning of BETA, and at least in the company I work for, beta means FEATURE COMPLETE (buggy and slow, maybe, but the features should all be there). What I see in Beta is pretty much what marketing plans to ship.
If Mickysoft plans to compete with Adobe and Macromedia for the high end market, their product has to be feature complete and really smooth at launch.
If they plan on snarfing up the impecunious designer market, they'll have to compete with Corel's Paint Shop Pro (which has simple vector editing, if I have read the info correctly) and CorelDraw, the GIMP, and a host of other quite capable products.
Yes, I know Acrylic might be favorably compared to what PhotoShop WAS at V1.0, but when Adobe's products came out, there was nothing that could compare with their feature set. If Microsoft wants to enter the market with software that might have been competitive in the 1990s ... it's their money to waste.
If the projects and homework is assigned just so the teacher can say "Oh, yes, we do projects", with no thought to what learning comes from the project, you are rightfully angry. We all recognize "busywork" ... the difference is that I am well-paid for busy work and get paide 150% for overtime busywork.
Teachers often assign large amounts of homework instead of carefully selecting smaller amounts of homework that will reinforce learning. If every teacher in a typical secnodary school assigns an hour of homework a night, that runs the student's day up to 10-12 hours of academics.
The large anount of homework is usually assigned because the teacher CAN ... because they have the power to assign it. Few of them can justify the assignments, and few of them bother to do more than glance at it. I seldom saw homework that had been thoughtfully graded by a teacher ... it was just checked off as done or not done.
A good teacher can explain a concept in several different ways ... a bad teacher only knows the "One True Way".
Where I am working, the open source programmers often ARE contractors. Highly paid contractors, just like the programmers worjking on Windows projects.
Others are EMPLOYEES.
Maybe Villasante should get together with Enderle and decide whose FUD to believe.
Excellent idea to have them write a product specification, than have to MEET the spec to get paid.
To retrieve the password, we used the ephemeris that was conveniently parked in the bookshelf near the computer, with a lot of boring references and some ancient magazines. Look up the date and time, enter the correct astrological data and the terminal let you complete the login process for the lab system.
Although watching a commuter in a Hummer, his mobile phone to his ear so it blocked his peripheral vision, try to occupy the same spot in the lane as the loaded gravel truck he failed to spot was entertaining ...
How about desk-bound employees and their patches? Don't we count?
I use a lot of non-MSFT apps, and if one of them fails to work with the patched Windows system, I'm goung to lose a lot of time. I've already had one "security patch" to something do wierd things to my system, making it impossible for me to see the hard drive password prompt. Multiple that by every laptop in the company and you have a lot of support calls.
Another "security patch" seems to have hosed the network finder so that it can't automatically pick up a new IP address from the LAN. I have to manually change the settings and ..... guess what? REBOOT to force it to pick up the new IP address. Every time I have to log on from home, that's TWO reboots and two manual interventions to what should be automatically happening.
They also measure the increase in incoming links, because a steady increase indicates that the site continues to be of interest. Also, if the site has links from university Lit departments and other "high influence" sites, those links count heavily.
The only way for me to knock your friend's site out of the top 10 would be to put up a site with equally interesting content about poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, get equally high-quality links to it, and ... that's too much work. I'd link to it rather than try to duplicate it.
Special interest sites, such as your friend's site, and sites selling a product they make themselves are easy to get high ranks for - in their niche. The sites that are scrambling for position are the ones re-selling Tahitian Noni juice and other common commodities.
Puh-leeeeze! That trick became ineffective last century. It's very easy for the search engine to check background colors and FONT tags and penalize the page that uses text that is too close to the background color.
The most important part of web promotion for a business is to make sure their URL is on all their print material: the ads, business cards, flyers, etc. That is assuming it's a real business with a real product, and not a Viagra seller. The SEOs get most of their customers from the ranks of the fools who are trying to sell MLM products or are in an overcrowded internet service business, like web design. Nothing can help them.
Maybe the SEOs do realize it, but can't resist the offer of easy money from the thousands of MLM and "me too" sites trying to sell useless crap.