I recently tried to load a few old CD-Rs that had been lying around for a while... nothing. Errors all over the place. Will this thing be useful for archiving stuff or only for same-year viewing?
The solution for this (if you don't want to burn everything twice) is to put additional recovery data on the disk. Current, the best program is QuickPar.
The idea is that you collect 600MB of data for archival onto a CD-R, then you generate another 95MB of recovery data that will protect the original 600MB. As long as the disc never suffers more then 95MB worth of damage to the data blocks, you can recover from any scratches or other damage. Adjust the amount of recovery data up/down depending on your paranoia level (I prefer 5-15%).
Caveats: Only works for data CDs. Works well for video DVDs (e.g. to protect the content of the VIDEO_TS folder). Does not understand sub-folders (yet), so it works best if all files are in a single folder (e.g. the root folder). Creating a recovery set for a DVD-R takes 30-90 minutes on modern PCs. Creating a PAR2 recovery set for one of these 50GB monsters will take a few hours.
I'm in the middle of downloading 30 GB of data from one of the SOHO instruments; it will take 3 days to get it over our T1.
External firewire/USB drive that is around 40-60GB probably only costs $100-$125. Add in $30 for overnight shipping.
Heck, you could buy and ship two if you're worried about one of the being lost in transit.
Transfer rates are around 10-20MB/s for a good unit (maybe higher), so you're talking less then an hour on each end to copy the data to/from the drive.
And as a bonus! You'll have a backup copy of the data on said portable drive.
Put them all in the box and get a RAID running on them and USE THE ERROR CORRECTION modes (R1 or R5 depending on whether you want to keep the most speed or space).
You'll never have to "back up" again, because your data is backed up automatically with every read or write.
Ha ha ha ha!
RAID is not a backup solution.
If you're not backing up data stored on a RAID, then you will lose it sooner or later. Either via multiple drives failing before the hot spare can be rebuilt or the operating system (or other malware) will decide to scramble the disk itself.
The primary purpose of RAID is so that your system keeps going, even if a drive fails. (IOW, downtime is more expensive then the cost of the additional hardware.)
Not to be contentious, but these drives are going to start at what, $700-$800 for at least the first year they're out? Media's probably going to be a minimum $6-$10 per disc for the short to medium term.
Prices that I saw for the Sony Blu-Ray drive a month or three ago was $3500 for the drive, $30 for the media. Makes DLT look reasonable.
However, the big advantage of putting your data on multiple pieces of media is the same as not putting all of your eggs in one basket. (Nothing beats a 3 or 4 generational backup of course.)
I have about 750GB of data, it's in a RAID5 for redundancy, with no backup other than that.
Which means that you're guaranteed to lose the entire array at some point. Either two drives will fail at the same time (or within your recovery window) or the O/S will decide to trash the drive.
It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.
Get some 5400rpm 300GB drives in external USB/firewire cases and start backing it up.
That raises another interesting question, then - isn't this display at or past the limit of resolution high enough for the human eye?
Considering that the original (IBM) 200dpi displays were built for medical imaging (e.g. X-Rays), no. Think back to how a doctor interacts with an X-Ray in the office. They need to be able to see the entire image all at once, yet have the ability to look closer at a suspicious spot. If the resolution is too low (e.g. 100dpi), suspicious spots won't show up clear enough to be spotted. And panning around a zoomed image is a slow and error-prone method.
Now for the real-world... I have a 125dpi LCD laptop display. It is a lot crisper then a 96dpi LCD would be. A 200dpi LCD would be rock-solid and extremely easy on the eyes for reading large blocks of text. The ultimate limit is probably somewhere around 300-400dpi.
3Dlabs just announced the WildCat REALIZM 800, a PCIe card with DVI-dual link and 640 MB of on board GDDR3!
Good grief... and I thought 256MB of RAM on a video card was crazy. (Actually, I thought that back when we first hit 32MB on a video card and one of my machines only had 32MB.)
Of course, given the fact that they put 640MB on the card, we can now cue the "nobody will ever need more then 640MB" jokesters.
It's good to see that manufacturers are finally shipping higher resolution stand-alone LCD displays - until now, most high res displays were limited to laptops. For example, my roommate's Dell laptop had a 16:9 screen (something else you won't see in desktop monitors) and a ridiculously sharp screen, something on the order of 1400 horizontal pixels on a 17" screen.
Toshiba Tecras can be bought with a 124dpi 4:3 ratio screen that is 1400x1050.
Set the DPI setting in Windows to 120dpi and switch to slightly larger fonts and text gets quite crisp. The downside is that there are lot of websites that specify text size in pixels, which means that you'll be writing a lot of nasty notes to webmasters.
A 200dpi laptop or desktop display would be extremely sweet. With the advantage that scaling up a 800x600 display setting would look a whole lot better then trying to scale that up on existing LCD screens.
I subscribed to PCMagazine for close to a decade back in the 1990s. Used to always have 2 or 3 back issues of Computer Shopper laying around as well. Computer Shopper was the only way to shop for PC parts. PCMag was one of the few places that would test a dozen products at the same time and give you a nice grid comparing features.
But ever since the world wide web hit mainstream and you could order PC parts online or get technical news online, I haven't seen much need to subscribe to any (paid) tech rags. Heck, by the time tech news hits the pages of PC Magazine, it's already been discussed to death 2 months before on the various online forums. Worse, with a print magazine, you're stuck with the author's view/slant.
The only subscriptions that I've had in the past few years are either business-related (BusinessWeek is a must-read), regular news (US News & World Report, etc.), or hobby related.
I prefer an in-dash MP3 CD player myself as well over connecting up an iPod to the audio-in connector. The MP3 CD player gets me some of the advantages of the iPod (8-10 hours at a go, random access), but without having to reach over and fiddle with a device setting on the passenger seat when I want to change up music or flip to the next song. (In-dash MP3 players are almost always better located for eyes-on-the-road musch changing.) Changing discs by feel (with only a quick glance at the visor to pick the new disc) is easier/safer then hunting playlists on a tiny screen.
What might be acceptable would be if there was a dash-mount accessory that holds the iPod just below eye-level on the dash. Still has the issue that you have to spend lots of eye-time to find a new playlist.
The downsides of having a bunch of MP3 CDs, however, is the management of all those discs. OTOH, if I lose a disc, I haven't lost all of my music collection. But if I want to carry 6 different types of music, that almost guarantees that I have to carry 6 CDs because most MP3 players don't understand playlists. (Which makes doing a random shuffle of only half the songs on the disc an exercise in frustration.)
The big advantage of the iPod is it's size and portability. Even mini-CD players (I have one... it's okay, but a mini iPod would be better) are big and bulky. However, for jogging or other types of exercise, a 128MB or 256MB flash-based unit is going to be better / lighter.
(For the record, I have a in-dash car MP3 CD player, a portable mini MP3 CD player, a regular sized portable MP3 CD player, and a boombox that reads MP3 CDs... an iPod would definitely work replace the two portable players.)
The real trick is convincing both companies (A and B) that it's in their best interest to provide this non-proprietary interface.
And there-in lies the rub. It is simply not in a company's best interest to play nicely with competitors or adhere to standards that make it easy to replace company A's product with company B's product. The only way that it happens is if an external agency (usually the gov't, rarely the market) forces all of the players to abide by a standard.
Sometimes, companies will adhere to open-standards, but only if they don't have vested interests in the other side of the interface. (IOW, they don't stand to profit if they manage to lock the customer into a proprietary interface.)
All of which is why I chuckle every time the idea of interchangeable data standards comes around. (e.g. EDI, XML, web services)
Whoever paid for the computer is the only one who is allowed to install software on it. So unless the University paid for the machine, their fingers aren't allowed on the keyboard (even virtually).
Scanning the machine for vulnerabilities, or turning off the network port due to outbound virus/worm/spam traffic, OTOH, is within their purview as the owner of the network. MAC-address blocking is also a good idea for cases where you can't control the port (e.g. wireless) or if you think the machine will simply be moved to another port on the network. (MAC-address blocking, while not perfect, at least raises the bar. In fact, if the user changes the MAC address, it can be grounds for discipline. Moving a system to a different network port can be defended as "I wasn't sure if the cable/port was working". Changing the MAC is less likely to occur to an end-user.)
A smart university would also setup a computer repair shop on campus utlizing interns paid minimum wage. That way, there's someplace affordable for the virus-infested masses to take their machines, while not completely eliminating the lesson to be learned that letting your machine get infected costs money.
University networks need to get smarter and stop treating desktop/laptop machines as "trusted".
Prior to the late 1990's, it was common practice to write the year as just two digits. And no, I'm not talking about in computer programs. I mean in documents and handwriting. You could write a check and give it a date like 1/2/85 and that would be accepted. Everyone did this. If you are writing a log of an activity, you used a two digit date. If you are keeping a ledger, you used a two digit date.
I suspect, once we get into the 2010s and 2020s, that the practice of only using 2-digit years as a shortcut will come back into vogue. During the "zeros" (or "oughts"), it doesn't scan very well.
The paradigm of storing data on punch cards is largely responsible for why dates were stored as individual columns. (Punch cards don't do binary-encoded numbers... you're lucky if you could do packed decimal.) And when storing data on punch cards, once you overflow that 80 column limit for your data set, you've just doubled the number of cards that you have to keep track of. So saving 2-digits here or there makes a whole lot of sense.
Things got better when storage moved to tape, but the punch card thinking still permeated (putting data into column 81 required an additional 80 columns of storage for the 2nd "record").
I'll second that "A Wind Called Amnesia" was an avoid. The plot was thin and non-existent (sorta like the Final Fantasy movie). The whole "I feel pity for you so I'll sleep with you" at the end was more of a "teen's wet dream" bit then anything to do with the plot. It's been too long since I watched it, or I'd tear into it in more detail.
AWCA ranks up there with "SIN" and "Gundress" as avoids. Both also looked good in the previews, but were seriously lacking in the story/character element. You really didn't give a rip whether or not the hero in "SiN" lives or dies, the scene where he supposedly builds rapport with the child was junk, and the sister-of-the-tech bent on revenge was old-n-tired. Gundress was simply a few skimpily-dressed ladies in fun-looking mechs with some emotionally-dead dialogue thrown in so that you can feel the artificial-tension between the team members.
While Dr. Mockapetris believes that de-numberizing the way we remember/contact people is the way of the future, I believe this does nothing to further help the much needed cause of finding people, places, things. THAT, I believe, is the way of the future, and "doing away with phone numbers" simply does not help that.
Why am I suddenly reminded of LDAP?
DNS is great for finding servers, and with SRV finding out what port your desired service is running on. I'm not convinced that it's going to be any good at being a general-purpose directory.
And then there was also the fact that Doom's enemies were actually able to navigate around corners, while Quake's monsters would just keep walking directly toward you, regardless of what was in the way.
DN3D's mobs were limited by whatever floor section they were standing on. I don't remember whether or not they would chase you off of "their" floor tile, but they definitely wouldn't notice you if you were on an adjacent tile. (e.g. climb up on some crates which are actually a different floor section, look down at the oblivious mobs)
I clearly remember when Quake came out like it was yesterday. I remember that at the office I was working at there was a big debate on what was the better game... Duke Nukem 3D or Quake. In the end Quake won, but not without some heated arguments in DN3D's favor.
Quake had the better models / better physics... but Duke had soul. I played DN3D a lot, but never found Quake to be that appealing.
(The enemy toons in DN3D were 2D animated sprites which were always rotated to face the player... so they looked 3D. If you got up on top of some boxes and looked down on them, it was pretty obvious. Level design in DN3D was pretty simple too, since the 3D model was so rudimentary.)
We're paying around $1200/mo for redundant T1s (1.544Mbps).
And that's because the competition came in and offered us that price. (Previously, we were paying more like $2000/mo for the two lines.) We only had to hint at switching in order to get the price break.
I used Thunderbird and the SpamBayes proxy concurrently for a while. SB kicks the crap out of the Thunderbird.
Definitely agree.
I use the SpamBayes MSOutlook plugin for my work e-mail and it is extremely good at discriminating spam from ham. I use Thunderbird for my non-corporate e-mail. SpamBayes has two additional (and rather important features) that Thunderbird/Mozilla just don't have:
1. SpamBayes (at least the Outlook plug-in) actually has (3) levels of classification... definite ham, maybe, and definite spam; and you can route the "maybe" and "definite spam" to two different folders. That means, instead of having to sift through 229 spam messages for false positives, I really only have to closely examine the 29 "maybes". The other 200 I can just give a cursory glance at.
2. SpamBayes keeps track of the folder where a spam message was found. Then, if you click the "you goof! that's ham!" button, SpamBayes is smart enough to put the message back into that folder. Moz's junk mail filter just turns off the junk flag and leaves the message to rot in the junk folder. Sounds like a small thing, but it's a big usability issue.
In my own history, I've seen lots of different office plans, from cube farms to private offices and lots of variations between. My favorite office layout had the team of seventeen (including development staff, QA staff, and the team lead in "quads". Each quad was a 20'x20' room with two walls covered with whiteboard, two others had bland office paint and some nice artwork. Four desks and a 4' round table easily fit in each quad. The five quads had staggered openings on a common hallway that led to one small conference room, one large conference room, a kitchen area, and the front door (on the other side of the common areas).
I'd agree with that. Our "quads" were a bit smaller, about 12x16 with 6' high divider walls. Not ideal, but it did at least isolate the nonsense a bit. A "tiny" table in the middle, with the primary workstations being in the (4) corners. Downside is that your back was to the opening, which can be unnerving to some folks.
Small whiteboard inside the quad, but we had a larger whiteboard out in the hallway.
The other problem was that they'd sometimes shoehorn another 3 people into the space. That's fine if the other (3) folks are normally off-site 4 out of 5 days, but a bit crowded otherwise. Worse, half the folks were working on different projects in the quad, which means double the cross-chatter.
Not to leave a good stone unturned... the next year, they switched us to a different office with the standard rows of desks with minimal 4' high partitions. Back-to-back in groups of 4. Getting out of your chair if you were back against the wall required the cooperation of your 3 neighbors.
Oh, did I mention that the upstairs bathroom was in the middle of our workspace and that you'd have a steady stream of "users" come walking through?
I left after 4 months in the new arrangement... and now happily telecommute to an office that is 5 hours away. (3 out of the 4 people in our group are full-time telecommuters... the 4th is low-man on the totem pole and is our on-site support.)
The article I saw specifically talked about doctors and other Iraqi professionals being targeted as "kidnapping for ransom" targets by the local gangs.
As usual, those who can leave a bad situation, will (mostly) leave a bad situation. A few patriots will stick it out until they too get targeted or end up paying protection monies.
when will you tech boys learn? I have dozens of pairs of earrings! Now supposing I switch to the earring phone: this means I have to buy dozens of phones!
And you think the cell companies won't want to sell you dozens of phones to go with all of your outfits?
Cookies are ok so long as your users are ok with you "tracking their browsing habits".
Or unless you're dealing with the goverment who won't even let you set a "session" cookie. (No matter how many times you try to explain that it goes away when they close the browser.)
They didn't include the cost of alienating customers or destroying their own brand image in the post mortem. But then again it would be a breath of fresh air to find a utility company that shows compassion or cares about its own image.
Since they're (likely) a monopoly, the executives really don't give a hoot about whether the customers feel alienated or not. In fact, the only people the utility company has to please is the local PUC (or whoever is in charge of power-company regulations). As long as the rabble aren't marching in the streets, they can get away with presenting a nice rosy view to the PUC.
That being said, the local power company where I live won't cut your power as soon as you're late on your first bill. The only customers who get zero slack in their due date are those with a chronic history of late payments or totally new customers with no payment history.
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He was reading mail sent by Amazon. You expect Amazon to start using PGP for every e-mail query?
Frankly, I wish they would start using PGP/GPG. It might start the ball rolling.
Heck, they could even sell it as a competitive advantage. Just login to your profile and paste your PGP/GPG public key into the text block.
I recently tried to load a few old CD-Rs that had been lying around for a while... nothing. Errors all over the place. Will this thing be useful for archiving stuff or only for same-year viewing?
The solution for this (if you don't want to burn everything twice) is to put additional recovery data on the disk. Current, the best program is QuickPar.
The idea is that you collect 600MB of data for archival onto a CD-R, then you generate another 95MB of recovery data that will protect the original 600MB. As long as the disc never suffers more then 95MB worth of damage to the data blocks, you can recover from any scratches or other damage. Adjust the amount of recovery data up/down depending on your paranoia level (I prefer 5-15%).
Caveats: Only works for data CDs. Works well for video DVDs (e.g. to protect the content of the VIDEO_TS folder). Does not understand sub-folders (yet), so it works best if all files are in a single folder (e.g. the root folder). Creating a recovery set for a DVD-R takes 30-90 minutes on modern PCs. Creating a PAR2 recovery set for one of these 50GB monsters will take a few hours.
I'm in the middle of downloading 30 GB of data from one of the SOHO instruments; it will take 3 days to get it over our T1.
External firewire/USB drive that is around 40-60GB probably only costs $100-$125. Add in $30 for overnight shipping.
Heck, you could buy and ship two if you're worried about one of the being lost in transit.
Transfer rates are around 10-20MB/s for a good unit (maybe higher), so you're talking less then an hour on each end to copy the data to/from the drive.
And as a bonus! You'll have a backup copy of the data on said portable drive.
Put them all in the box and get a RAID running on them and USE THE ERROR CORRECTION modes (R1 or R5 depending on whether you want to keep the most speed or space).
You'll never have to "back up" again, because your data is backed up automatically with every read or write.
Ha ha ha ha!
RAID is not a backup solution.
If you're not backing up data stored on a RAID, then you will lose it sooner or later. Either via multiple drives failing before the hot spare can be rebuilt or the operating system (or other malware) will decide to scramble the disk itself.
The primary purpose of RAID is so that your system keeps going, even if a drive fails. (IOW, downtime is more expensive then the cost of the additional hardware.)
Not to be contentious, but these drives are going to start at what, $700-$800 for at least the first year they're out? Media's probably going to be a minimum $6-$10 per disc for the short to medium term.
Prices that I saw for the Sony Blu-Ray drive a month or three ago was $3500 for the drive, $30 for the media. Makes DLT look reasonable.
However, the big advantage of putting your data on multiple pieces of media is the same as not putting all of your eggs in one basket. (Nothing beats a 3 or 4 generational backup of course.)
I have about 750GB of data, it's in a RAID5 for redundancy, with no backup other than that.
Which means that you're guaranteed to lose the entire array at some point. Either two drives will fail at the same time (or within your recovery window) or the O/S will decide to trash the drive.
It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.
Get some 5400rpm 300GB drives in external USB/firewire cases and start backing it up.
That raises another interesting question, then - isn't this display at or past the limit of resolution high enough for the human eye?
Considering that the original (IBM) 200dpi displays were built for medical imaging (e.g. X-Rays), no. Think back to how a doctor interacts with an X-Ray in the office. They need to be able to see the entire image all at once, yet have the ability to look closer at a suspicious spot. If the resolution is too low (e.g. 100dpi), suspicious spots won't show up clear enough to be spotted. And panning around a zoomed image is a slow and error-prone method.
Now for the real-world... I have a 125dpi LCD laptop display. It is a lot crisper then a 96dpi LCD would be. A 200dpi LCD would be rock-solid and extremely easy on the eyes for reading large blocks of text. The ultimate limit is probably somewhere around 300-400dpi.
3Dlabs just announced the WildCat REALIZM 800, a PCIe card with DVI-dual link and 640 MB of on board GDDR3!
Good grief... and I thought 256MB of RAM on a video card was crazy. (Actually, I thought that back when we first hit 32MB on a video card and one of my machines only had 32MB.)
Of course, given the fact that they put 640MB on the card, we can now cue the "nobody will ever need more then 640MB" jokesters.
It's good to see that manufacturers are finally shipping higher resolution stand-alone LCD displays - until now, most high res displays were limited to laptops. For example, my roommate's Dell laptop had a 16:9 screen (something else you won't see in desktop monitors) and a ridiculously sharp screen, something on the order of 1400 horizontal pixels on a 17" screen.
Toshiba Tecras can be bought with a 124dpi 4:3 ratio screen that is 1400x1050.
Set the DPI setting in Windows to 120dpi and switch to slightly larger fonts and text gets quite crisp. The downside is that there are lot of websites that specify text size in pixels, which means that you'll be writing a lot of nasty notes to webmasters.
A 200dpi laptop or desktop display would be extremely sweet. With the advantage that scaling up a 800x600 display setting would look a whole lot better then trying to scale that up on existing LCD screens.
I subscribed to PCMagazine for close to a decade back in the 1990s. Used to always have 2 or 3 back issues of Computer Shopper laying around as well. Computer Shopper was the only way to shop for PC parts. PCMag was one of the few places that would test a dozen products at the same time and give you a nice grid comparing features.
But ever since the world wide web hit mainstream and you could order PC parts online or get technical news online, I haven't seen much need to subscribe to any (paid) tech rags. Heck, by the time tech news hits the pages of PC Magazine, it's already been discussed to death 2 months before on the various online forums. Worse, with a print magazine, you're stuck with the author's view/slant.
The only subscriptions that I've had in the past few years are either business-related (BusinessWeek is a must-read), regular news (US News & World Report, etc.), or hobby related.
I prefer an in-dash MP3 CD player myself as well over connecting up an iPod to the audio-in connector. The MP3 CD player gets me some of the advantages of the iPod (8-10 hours at a go, random access), but without having to reach over and fiddle with a device setting on the passenger seat when I want to change up music or flip to the next song. (In-dash MP3 players are almost always better located for eyes-on-the-road musch changing.) Changing discs by feel (with only a quick glance at the visor to pick the new disc) is easier/safer then hunting playlists on a tiny screen.
What might be acceptable would be if there was a dash-mount accessory that holds the iPod just below eye-level on the dash. Still has the issue that you have to spend lots of eye-time to find a new playlist.
The downsides of having a bunch of MP3 CDs, however, is the management of all those discs. OTOH, if I lose a disc, I haven't lost all of my music collection. But if I want to carry 6 different types of music, that almost guarantees that I have to carry 6 CDs because most MP3 players don't understand playlists. (Which makes doing a random shuffle of only half the songs on the disc an exercise in frustration.)
The big advantage of the iPod is it's size and portability. Even mini-CD players (I have one... it's okay, but a mini iPod would be better) are big and bulky. However, for jogging or other types of exercise, a 128MB or 256MB flash-based unit is going to be better / lighter.
(For the record, I have a in-dash car MP3 CD player, a portable mini MP3 CD player, a regular sized portable MP3 CD player, and a boombox that reads MP3 CDs... an iPod would definitely work replace the two portable players.)
The real trick is convincing both companies (A and B) that it's in their best interest to provide this non-proprietary interface.
And there-in lies the rub. It is simply not in a company's best interest to play nicely with competitors or adhere to standards that make it easy to replace company A's product with company B's product. The only way that it happens is if an external agency (usually the gov't, rarely the market) forces all of the players to abide by a standard.
Sometimes, companies will adhere to open-standards, but only if they don't have vested interests in the other side of the interface. (IOW, they don't stand to profit if they manage to lock the customer into a proprietary interface.)
All of which is why I chuckle every time the idea of interchangeable data standards comes around. (e.g. EDI, XML, web services)
Personally, I think the rule is simple.
Whoever paid for the computer is the only one who is allowed to install software on it. So unless the University paid for the machine, their fingers aren't allowed on the keyboard (even virtually).
Scanning the machine for vulnerabilities, or turning off the network port due to outbound virus/worm/spam traffic, OTOH, is within their purview as the owner of the network. MAC-address blocking is also a good idea for cases where you can't control the port (e.g. wireless) or if you think the machine will simply be moved to another port on the network. (MAC-address blocking, while not perfect, at least raises the bar. In fact, if the user changes the MAC address, it can be grounds for discipline. Moving a system to a different network port can be defended as "I wasn't sure if the cable/port was working". Changing the MAC is less likely to occur to an end-user.)
A smart university would also setup a computer repair shop on campus utlizing interns paid minimum wage. That way, there's someplace affordable for the virus-infested masses to take their machines, while not completely eliminating the lesson to be learned that letting your machine get infected costs money.
University networks need to get smarter and stop treating desktop/laptop machines as "trusted".
Prior to the late 1990's, it was common practice to write the year as just two digits. And no, I'm not talking about in computer programs. I mean in documents and handwriting. You could write a check and give it a date like 1/2/85 and that would be accepted. Everyone did this. If you are writing a log of an activity, you used a two digit date. If you are keeping a ledger, you used a two digit date.
I suspect, once we get into the 2010s and 2020s, that the practice of only using 2-digit years as a shortcut will come back into vogue. During the "zeros" (or "oughts"), it doesn't scan very well.
The paradigm of storing data on punch cards is largely responsible for why dates were stored as individual columns. (Punch cards don't do binary-encoded numbers... you're lucky if you could do packed decimal.) And when storing data on punch cards, once you overflow that 80 column limit for your data set, you've just doubled the number of cards that you have to keep track of. So saving 2-digits here or there makes a whole lot of sense.
Things got better when storage moved to tape, but the punch card thinking still permeated (putting data into column 81 required an additional 80 columns of storage for the 2nd "record").
I'll second that "A Wind Called Amnesia" was an avoid. The plot was thin and non-existent (sorta like the Final Fantasy movie). The whole "I feel pity for you so I'll sleep with you" at the end was more of a "teen's wet dream" bit then anything to do with the plot. It's been too long since I watched it, or I'd tear into it in more detail.
AWCA ranks up there with "SIN" and "Gundress" as avoids. Both also looked good in the previews, but were seriously lacking in the story/character element. You really didn't give a rip whether or not the hero in "SiN" lives or dies, the scene where he supposedly builds rapport with the child was junk, and the sister-of-the-tech bent on revenge was old-n-tired. Gundress was simply a few skimpily-dressed ladies in fun-looking mechs with some emotionally-dead dialogue thrown in so that you can feel the artificial-tension between the team members.
While Dr. Mockapetris believes that de-numberizing the way we remember/contact people is the way of the future, I believe this does nothing to further help the much needed cause of finding people, places, things. THAT, I believe, is the way of the future, and "doing away with phone numbers" simply does not help that.
Why am I suddenly reminded of LDAP?
DNS is great for finding servers, and with SRV finding out what port your desired service is running on. I'm not convinced that it's going to be any good at being a general-purpose directory.
And then there was also the fact that Doom's enemies were actually able to navigate around corners, while Quake's monsters would just keep walking directly toward you, regardless of what was in the way.
DN3D's mobs were limited by whatever floor section they were standing on. I don't remember whether or not they would chase you off of "their" floor tile, but they definitely wouldn't notice you if you were on an adjacent tile. (e.g. climb up on some crates which are actually a different floor section, look down at the oblivious mobs)
I clearly remember when Quake came out like it was yesterday. I remember that at the office I was working at there was a big debate on what was the better game... Duke Nukem 3D or Quake. In the end Quake won, but not without some heated arguments in DN3D's favor.
Quake had the better models / better physics... but Duke had soul. I played DN3D a lot, but never found Quake to be that appealing.
(The enemy toons in DN3D were 2D animated sprites which were always rotated to face the player... so they looked 3D. If you got up on top of some boxes and looked down on them, it was pretty obvious. Level design in DN3D was pretty simple too, since the 3D model was so rudimentary.)
We're paying around $1200/mo for redundant T1s (1.544Mbps).
And that's because the competition came in and offered us that price. (Previously, we were paying more like $2000/mo for the two lines.) We only had to hint at switching in order to get the price break.
I used Thunderbird and the SpamBayes proxy concurrently for a while. SB kicks the crap out of the Thunderbird.
Definitely agree.
I use the SpamBayes MSOutlook plugin for my work e-mail and it is extremely good at discriminating spam from ham. I use Thunderbird for my non-corporate e-mail. SpamBayes has two additional (and rather important features) that Thunderbird/Mozilla just don't have:
1. SpamBayes (at least the Outlook plug-in) actually has (3) levels of classification... definite ham, maybe, and definite spam; and you can route the "maybe" and "definite spam" to two different folders. That means, instead of having to sift through 229 spam messages for false positives, I really only have to closely examine the 29 "maybes". The other 200 I can just give a cursory glance at.
2. SpamBayes keeps track of the folder where a spam message was found. Then, if you click the "you goof! that's ham!" button, SpamBayes is smart enough to put the message back into that folder. Moz's junk mail filter just turns off the junk flag and leaves the message to rot in the junk folder. Sounds like a small thing, but it's a big usability issue.
In my own history, I've seen lots of different office plans, from cube farms to private offices and lots of variations between. My favorite office layout had the team of seventeen (including development staff, QA staff, and the team lead in "quads". Each quad was a 20'x20' room with two walls covered with whiteboard, two others had bland office paint and some nice artwork. Four desks and a 4' round table easily fit in each quad. The five quads had staggered openings on a common hallway that led to one small conference room, one large conference room, a kitchen area, and the front door (on the other side of the common areas).
I'd agree with that. Our "quads" were a bit smaller, about 12x16 with 6' high divider walls. Not ideal, but it did at least isolate the nonsense a bit. A "tiny" table in the middle, with the primary workstations being in the (4) corners. Downside is that your back was to the opening, which can be unnerving to some folks.
Small whiteboard inside the quad, but we had a larger whiteboard out in the hallway.
The other problem was that they'd sometimes shoehorn another 3 people into the space. That's fine if the other (3) folks are normally off-site 4 out of 5 days, but a bit crowded otherwise. Worse, half the folks were working on different projects in the quad, which means double the cross-chatter.
Not to leave a good stone unturned... the next year, they switched us to a different office with the standard rows of desks with minimal 4' high partitions. Back-to-back in groups of 4. Getting out of your chair if you were back against the wall required the cooperation of your 3 neighbors.
Oh, did I mention that the upstairs bathroom was in the middle of our workspace and that you'd have a steady stream of "users" come walking through?
I left after 4 months in the new arrangement... and now happily telecommute to an office that is 5 hours away. (3 out of the 4 people in our group are full-time telecommuters... the 4th is low-man on the totem pole and is our on-site support.)
Beat me to the punch.
The article I saw specifically talked about doctors and other Iraqi professionals being targeted as "kidnapping for ransom" targets by the local gangs.
As usual, those who can leave a bad situation, will (mostly) leave a bad situation. A few patriots will stick it out until they too get targeted or end up paying protection monies.
when will you tech boys learn? I have dozens of pairs of earrings! Now supposing I switch to the earring phone: this means I have to buy dozens of phones!
And you think the cell companies won't want to sell you dozens of phones to go with all of your outfits?
Congratz, you broke the code!
Cookies are ok so long as your users are ok with you "tracking their browsing habits".
Or unless you're dealing with the goverment who won't even let you set a "session" cookie. (No matter how many times you try to explain that it goes away when they close the browser.)
They didn't include the cost of alienating customers or destroying their own brand image in the post mortem. But then again it would be a breath of fresh air to find a utility company that shows compassion or cares about its own image.
Since they're (likely) a monopoly, the executives really don't give a hoot about whether the customers feel alienated or not. In fact, the only people the utility company has to please is the local PUC (or whoever is in charge of power-company regulations). As long as the rabble aren't marching in the streets, they can get away with presenting a nice rosy view to the PUC.
That being said, the local power company where I live won't cut your power as soon as you're late on your first bill. The only customers who get zero slack in their due date are those with a chronic history of late payments or totally new customers with no payment history.