I fourth this.
In demonstrating it to a colleague shortly after receiving it, I found a major bottleneck in our corporate portal which allowed a 20% performance increase - saving the cost of the license just in server hardware alone!
if you don't have a
and a fire suppresion system, a humongous UPS with a backup generator, a surly security guard who makes it impossible to have equipment delivered by courier because (s)he won't let courier past the main gate without 10 signatures, and a big box with loads of buttons in the corner which goes "ping" and yet noone knows what it does.
Lets say I buy a cheapo pci network card, whether from meatspace, ebay or online, and I plug it into a PC installed with cutting-edge-latest-drivers linux. There are three scenarios
If it works straight away, I am happy.
If it doesn't work straight away, but I get the right driver (and/or install the firmware for a wireless card), and it works, then I am satisfied but a tad frustrated. I might need quite a bit of help to do this.
If I am unable to get it working, then I would try and take it back
Now, here's the crunch: if I got it working, some time later I buy another card, of the same make and apparently an identical card. But the manufacturer is using a slightly later chipset, or even a totally different chipset, so there's no guarantee that the card will work.
There's a particular supplier in the UK called Ebuyer whose cheapo network cards can be a random selection from SiS900, Realtek [of at least three different types], TI, VIA and ADMTek chipsets. Even two cards ordered at the same time, arriving in identical boxes, can be different. Some have WOL, some not.
At least with VGA cards, they announce the chipset, and there's reasonable continuity of supply... but as for modems, wifi pci cards, usb wifi adaptors, bluetooth and ordinary 802.3 it's a random guess as to whats inside. So unless they're prepared to break the seal in the store and tell you the chipset, and let you look at the linux compatibility pages online, it's pure luck what you get!
When I first started using ebay ~6 years ago, I complained to them about the ability to snipe - there are even dedicated websites for helping you do so - and their reaction was, basically, if you wanted it, set a proxy bid, and there was no issue with sniping in their eyes.
Remember, ebay don't care too much about the final price, it doesn't affect their fees too much - what matters to them is getting as many auctions processed as possible, with the least amount of bandwidth and CPU cycles used to minimise their running costs.
Ebay have at various times been requested to add a "this is a scam" button, so that if enough independent people "vote" for it, they will act... but they don't care enough to do that sort of thing - you have to email scam@ebay.com or spoof@ebay.com to report bogus deals.
Basically you are just a loser. No one is stealing from you, they simply said they were willing to pay more, which the seller like. The sellers are the ones eBay wants to please. Please continue to stay away.By bidding too high, too early, you push the price higher than it needs to be. Sniping is a better strategy.
then, what you are effectively saying is that ebay might as well become a "sealed bid" auction, where the bids aren't posted and you don't know whether you won or lost until the end... the alternative is where the bidding continues until all but one has dropped out. Seems to me that ebay offers the worst of both worlds.
the mere act of "breaking into" a computer system should not be a violation of law.
if there was no security, are you actually breaking in? so, in which case, are you violating the law by attempting to discover if there is any security in place?
in meatspace, if you walked up to a building and try and open the door, but it's locked, as I understand it you've committed no crime. If the door is locked and you pick the lock without damaging it, you are committing a criminal offense of trespass. If you break the door down, you add criminal damage. But if the door was unlocked, what crime is it - surely a minor one provided no damage is down, nothing is touched or taken.
they are only taxing calls made to the PSTN, not internet only calls
so, lets turn it round... doesn't this actually give people an incentive to STOP internet users in the USA who have VOIP from using the PSTN altogether, and encouraging their friends to sign up too?
dude1: hey, man, it used to be cheap to call you, but it's now costing more. Why don't you sign up for $VOIP_PROVIDER, then our calls to each other will be free, and we can stop subsidising the old telcos.
dude2: [fx: clickety-click] ok, whatever, I've signed up, my new voip reference is $DUDE2VOIP. yeah, I'm glad not to be putting money into the pockets of greedy $TELCO and suffering random wiretaps.
dude1: don't forget to enable encryption, because otherwise George Bush listens in to every telephone conversation being made.
fx: telcos moaning about how their voice revenue just shrank some more.
So, here's YOUR chance to rally your friends and hammer another nail into the olde worlde telephony systems!
100% agree that SIP is the best way to go forwards, as it means you've then got a user authentication database to hang a VOIP telephony system off when you want to go that way.
also, whilst the other players might not like to inter-work too much with instant messaging, there's a slightly bigger chance of them doing SIP gateways for their voice chat.
this is great news... I can now not bother with exercise, healthy food, etc and eat what I like, drink what I like, safe in the knowledge that the DNA I put in the fridge can be used to clone me a new healthy body ready for a brain transplant when my current body wears out.
even better, I can ensure my new body/face is exceptionally good looking and thus I can be a film/rock star in my second "incarnation".
the only snag is I'm too lazy to earn the money to pay for it all, but with my new patent on "body replacement therapy", I should earn it!
So you're saying that they'll finally throw off the yoke of western cultural dominance and return to the way they were before Europeans arrived and screwed up their country?
not quite - instead of the gov't controlling everything, it will be corporations & their lawyers - so it will all be possible in the name of free enterprise + democracy rather than simply oppressive despotic rulers. However, I think despotic governments might be preferable to the RIAA/MPAA because at least nearly everyone is treated equally as mere peons.
summed up a very serious problem with the USA...perhaps China can soon fill this role of a worthy competitor
don't worry about China becoming a competitor - we're already getting them to sign up to DRM, and once the number of lawyers there achieves critical mass, their society will also stagnate due to massively overburdening corporations and governments with beaurocracy.
you see, you have to remember: the purpose of management, marketing, lawyers and government is not to serve, but to take control and expand... it's only when there's just one person left in the world doing real work and everyone else is either managing him/her or duking it out in court over whether that person is licensed to do the work, that we'll all wonder where it went wrong!
consider Israeli airlines... when was the last time they got hijacked or blown up? The Israelis take security very seriously, and a lot of it is not visible at the airport, it's behind the scenes... such as depressurizing baggage, well trained plain-clothes security on board... it costs a lot of money, much more than a few smartly dressed low-pay security guards at a screening desk.
contrast this with other airlines - it's all about making people feel confident.
similar, corporate employee welfare, security, customer service - it's about perception not reality - the winners are those who make people *think* they are being treated well as an employee, making customer's feel valued & safe.
there's a makedvd program to build a DVD iso from the CD images. I guess this is easier to manage than having two lots of images to download. It's pretty trivial to do, simply put the iso into a directory and run the script - just be sure to have sufficient disk space for the CD ISOs, the intermediate temp files and the final ISO!
download here.
I think you mean "at will" employment - basically, if you turn up for work, you deem to be accepting the terms of employment, and if you don't, it means you no longer want the job. Conversely, by letting you work or telling you not to, means whether you have a job to go to.
Disclaimer: I'm from the UK where permanent employees have a reasonable measure of protection and one-months notice period is common, and contractors usually have at least a week's notice. Such notice period is usually mutual and contractually binding. However, I have worked for Uk division of USA companies and been quite surprised by my overseas' colleagues' contracts!
I too immediately thought "Max Headroom" when I read the summary... you can still find the original programs on various torrent sites!
For the uninitiated, the pilot episode of Max Headroom told how new high-speed advertisements were overloading people's brains. Max was, well, kind of a cyborg, when a reporter suffering a terrible accident was recreated in a computer.
technical debate settled in the best way possible... with marketing... after all, it worked with VHS vs. Beta
the difference was that VHS was a MUCH cheaper system and thus it was possible, in a price war, for VHS to undercut beta for both players and tapes and still maintain the dealers' margins.
Then, not satisfied with the poor(er) quality of VHS they invented long play which really killed the quality. Unless a tape has something unique on it, I almost can't bear to watch it!
it's also a matter of spares availability. the no-name laptops come and go very quickly, making it hard to get spares even if the repair would be trivial. I had a cheapy laptop which developed a fault not too long after it went out of warranty: its LCD cable fractured where it was curled inside the hinge, and getting a spare was very difficult
contrast that with say IBM whose spares provision is brilliant - a quite old laptop needed a new LCD cable and calling their spares department they had one in stock. Whether this still applies now it's all done by Lenovo, I can't say.
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I fourth this. In demonstrating it to a colleague shortly after receiving it, I found a major bottleneck in our corporate portal which allowed a 20% performance increase - saving the cost of the license just in server hardware alone!
why should you waste effort watching an honest man when there are serious criminals on the loose?
if you don't have a
and a fire suppresion system, a humongous UPS with a backup generator, a surly security guard who makes it impossible to have equipment delivered by courier because (s)he won't let courier past the main gate without 10 signatures, and a big box with loads of buttons in the corner which goes "ping" and yet noone knows what it does.
Lets say I buy a cheapo pci network card, whether from meatspace, ebay or online, and I plug it into a PC installed with cutting-edge-latest-drivers linux. There are three scenarios
Now, here's the crunch: if I got it working, some time later I buy another card, of the same make and apparently an identical card. But the manufacturer is using a slightly later chipset, or even a totally different chipset, so there's no guarantee that the card will work.
There's a particular supplier in the UK called Ebuyer whose cheapo network cards can be a random selection from SiS900, Realtek [of at least three different types], TI, VIA and ADMTek chipsets. Even two cards ordered at the same time, arriving in identical boxes, can be different. Some have WOL, some not.
At least with VGA cards, they announce the chipset, and there's reasonable continuity of supply... but as for modems, wifi pci cards, usb wifi adaptors, bluetooth and ordinary 802.3 it's a random guess as to whats inside. So unless they're prepared to break the seal in the store and tell you the chipset, and let you look at the linux compatibility pages online, it's pure luck what you get!
Remember, ebay don't care too much about the final price, it doesn't affect their fees too much - what matters to them is getting as many auctions processed as possible, with the least amount of bandwidth and CPU cycles used to minimise their running costs.
Ebay have at various times been requested to add a "this is a scam" button, so that if enough independent people "vote" for it, they will act... but they don't care enough to do that sort of thing - you have to email scam@ebay.com or spoof@ebay.com to report bogus deals.
then, what you are effectively saying is that ebay might as well become a "sealed bid" auction, where the bids aren't posted and you don't know whether you won or lost until the end... the alternative is where the bidding continues until all but one has dropped out. Seems to me that ebay offers the worst of both worlds.
if there was no security, are you actually breaking in? so, in which case, are you violating the law by attempting to discover if there is any security in place?
in meatspace, if you walked up to a building and try and open the door, but it's locked, as I understand it you've committed no crime. If the door is locked and you pick the lock without damaging it, you are committing a criminal offense of trespass. If you break the door down, you add criminal damage. But if the door was unlocked, what crime is it - surely a minor one provided no damage is down, nothing is touched or taken.
so, lets turn it round... doesn't this actually give people an incentive to STOP internet users in the USA who have VOIP from using the PSTN altogether, and encouraging their friends to sign up too?
dude1: hey, man, it used to be cheap to call you, but it's now costing more. Why don't you sign up for $VOIP_PROVIDER, then our calls to each other will be free, and we can stop subsidising the old telcos.
dude2: [fx: clickety-click] ok, whatever, I've signed up, my new voip reference is $DUDE2VOIP. yeah, I'm glad not to be putting money into the pockets of greedy $TELCO and suffering random wiretaps.
dude1: don't forget to enable encryption, because otherwise George Bush listens in to every telephone conversation being made.
fx: telcos moaning about how their voice revenue just shrank some more.
So, here's YOUR chance to rally your friends and hammer another nail into the olde worlde telephony systems!
auto screen lock - if laptop is not moved for X seconds, lock the screen - analagous to someone using on their lap putting it down on a table
burglar alarm - if laptop is moved, send a distress call
intruder detector - if a beam of light shone onto light detector flickers, then intruder detected
100% agree that SIP is the best way to go forwards, as it means you've then got a user authentication database to hang a VOIP telephony system off when you want to go that way.
also, whilst the other players might not like to inter-work too much with instant messaging, there's a slightly bigger chance of them doing SIP gateways for their voice chat.
so, how do I get a big long tube so I can power my fuel-cell car off that thing?
the correct quote from the Marquis de Sade is that fetishism is when you use the chicken.
well, that will come - I saw it on Star Trek once, so it's bound to happen eventually!
Note to moderators... I wasn't being absolutely serious.
10 points for realising I wasn't being serious
even better, I can ensure my new body/face is exceptionally good looking and thus I can be a film/rock star in my second "incarnation".
the only snag is I'm too lazy to earn the money to pay for it all, but with my new patent on "body replacement therapy", I should earn it!
not quite - instead of the gov't controlling everything, it will be corporations & their lawyers - so it will all be possible in the name of free enterprise + democracy rather than simply oppressive despotic rulers. However, I think despotic governments might be preferable to the RIAA/MPAA because at least nearly everyone is treated equally as mere peons.
don't worry about China becoming a competitor - we're already getting them to sign up to DRM, and once the number of lawyers there achieves critical mass, their society will also stagnate due to massively overburdening corporations and governments with beaurocracy.
you see, you have to remember: the purpose of management, marketing, lawyers and government is not to serve, but to take control and expand... it's only when there's just one person left in the world doing real work and everyone else is either managing him/her or duking it out in court over whether that person is licensed to do the work, that we'll all wonder where it went wrong!
I agree - see DamnSmallLinux - www.damnsmalllinux.org - for a credit-card-cd live or installable linux
easy enough to find the ones in a vegetative state, just search slashdot for posters who persistently get scores of 0 or -1
consider Israeli airlines... when was the last time they got hijacked or blown up? The Israelis take security very seriously, and a lot of it is not visible at the airport, it's behind the scenes... such as depressurizing baggage, well trained plain-clothes security on board... it costs a lot of money, much more than a few smartly dressed low-pay security guards at a screening desk.
contrast this with other airlines - it's all about making people feel confident.
similar, corporate employee welfare, security, customer service - it's about perception not reality - the winners are those who make people *think* they are being treated well as an employee, making customer's feel valued & safe.
there's a makedvd program to build a DVD iso from the CD images. I guess this is easier to manage than having two lots of images to download. It's pretty trivial to do, simply put the iso into a directory and run the script - just be sure to have sufficient disk space for the CD ISOs, the intermediate temp files and the final ISO!
download here.
Disclaimer: I'm from the UK where permanent employees have a reasonable measure of protection and one-months notice period is common, and contractors usually have at least a week's notice. Such notice period is usually mutual and contractually binding. However, I have worked for Uk division of USA companies and been quite surprised by my overseas' colleagues' contracts!
For the uninitiated, the pilot episode of Max Headroom told how new high-speed advertisements were overloading people's brains. Max was, well, kind of a cyborg, when a reporter suffering a terrible accident was recreated in a computer.
For the full spoiler, read TV Museum
the difference was that VHS was a MUCH cheaper system and thus it was possible, in a price war, for VHS to undercut beta for both players and tapes and still maintain the dealers' margins.
Then, not satisfied with the poor(er) quality of VHS they invented long play which really killed the quality. Unless a tape has something unique on it, I almost can't bear to watch it!
contrast that with say IBM whose spares provision is brilliant - a quite old laptop needed a new LCD cable and calling their spares department they had one in stock. Whether this still applies now it's all done by Lenovo, I can't say.