I am astounded they would be orienting runways according to the magnetic poles and not the "true" cardinal directions.
Maybe because a magnetic compass will (almost) always work when the more advanced instruments don't?
How do you propose that pilots figure out what the "true" cardinal direction is as they approach the airport? While working through their landing checklist, monitoring other air traffic, weather, and everything else that has to happen before the wheels touch down?
I guarantee they don't have time to do a star-sighting.
Everybody plays WoW because everybody else plays WoW.
Not really. Maybe a small fraction of the player base, but probably less then half already knew a WoW player.
WoW wins because they take existing concepts, polish them up to take off the rough edges, and then continually iterate upon the concept. Very little of what is in WoW is original, but what is there is generally refined with an eye towards challenging without being frustrating. They don't get everything right, but they get it about 90% right and mostly bug free.
Plus, with their talent tree design, most classes can be played a minimum of two distinct ways - without having to reroll a new class from scratch. Don't like healing as a holy priest? Switch to a shadow specialization and become DPS. And with dual-specialization available for cheap at level 30 (current level limit is 85), you can use one spec for questing and a different spec for grouping / raiding / PvP. Which, once again, leverages the time that you've already invested into learning the class and allows you to try out a secondary role without a big time investment (other then gear).
Isn't it true that the WoW hype was at it's pinnacle back in 2006 - 2007 or so? Sure, an expansion pack has been released recently, but it appears to be lacking the whole hype. In fact, where I live, Blizzard seems to be promoting the expansion pack pretty aggressively, something I have never seen them do before.
I guess you have forgotten the whole "Ozzy vs Lich King" commercial. Or the "I'm a night elf mohawk" or William Shatner doing the "I'm a shaman" commercial from 2 years ago. Or maybe this commercial for Wrath.
Do you like that? I find it quite annoying, because it's transparent that I'm not actually having an effect, and that other users aren't seeing what I'm seeing.
Well, it's not always done in a proper manner, but it mostly works.
The big issue is that the designers over-did the phasing and made the phased areas too small and out in the open where it's obvious that there is phasing happening. There's a place in Mount Hyjal where you take 2 steps one direction and suddenly you are surrounded by ogres, step back 2 paces and everything vanishes again.
Which is just badly done.
When the designers stick to putting phasing boundaries that work with natural boundaries (corners in caves, a ridge line, a building exterior where the player is inside when the phase change takes place), it works very well.
I blame it on "designers with a shiny new toy" syndrome.
What really makes me excited about that is the smaller chunks of RAIDed disk. Recovery by hot spare has always made me nervous due to the length of time it takes to repair a 1-2 TB hole in your redundancy.
Depends on the RAID type.
RAID 5 (and 6?) rebuild/recovery windows tend to scale linearly with the number of drives in the array. So a very large array with very large drives can takes hours/days to rebuild.
RAID 1 and RAID 10 rebuild/recovery windows scale with the size of an individual spindle, not the number of drives. So a drive failure in a RAID-10 array generally results in a very short recovery window, determined by the size/speed of a single drive within the array. Even on bigger 10-20 disk RAID-10 arrays, replacing a failed drive is only an hour or two of resync.
(I much prefer the predictability of RAID-10 rebuild times.)
Music to my ears, someone who "gets" what MSAccess is good at.
The other thing that it's good at is dealing with small ad-hoc databases for a non-technical group of users who just want to be able to run a few queries, create new tables, etc. Without having to deal with a central server. Which, if you do a lot of short 1-2 week projects where every data set is different except for a few key similarities, is handy. Heck, some of these projects only live 3-4 days from start to finish.
Not to mention all the nice import/export features. Having everything in a single file (which is good/bad...). Being able to copy/paste tables or queries to make a quick backup. Or being able to restore from a "oops" without bugging IT for backup tapes (as long as you did that copy/paste step). Near seamless copy/paste between Excel and MSAccess for times when it's faster to setup, transform or analyze the data in Excel.
I'm not holding my breath that OOBase or LibreBase will catch up. I've been waiting for the Base developers to grasp the concept of MSAccess for almost 10 years now, and it hasn't happened.
Seen a few people say they use Adblock and all, which is fine, but if you recognize that an ad-server can be compromised, then why not any other web server you visit? How many things are you going to block before it makes the web safe? So many all websites are useless? That's why I found NoScript more annoying than not. Too often I was just saying yes to so much it wasn't really that much more secure.
It's called limiting your exposure.
Scenario A: Default install, runs every scrap of Flash / JavaScript / Java / Shockwave that it runs across as you browse the web. This might number in the hundreds of sites, or thousands over the course of a month. Only *one* of those sites has to serve up malicious script in order for your PC to be infected.
Scenario B: NoScript/FlashBlock or AdBlock with a whitelist of only 100 sites. You're still pulling in content from hundreds or thousands of sites each moonth, but unless the attacker infects one of the sites in your whitelist, nothing bad happens. So it's still possible to be infected, but you've cut your risk factor by 1-3 orders of magnitude.
Which is generally limited enough that you're not going to see many (if any) infections. Whitelisting works.
Hell I'm running a 925 quad and can easily see myself getting another 4 to 5 years out of it, by simply upgrading the GPU occasionally.
Exactly. My AMD Phenom 9850 quad is going on 2 years old. I dropped a new GTX 460 in there this year. Next year I'll hopefully drop a 256GB SSD in.
Although the 10k RPM SATA Western Digital drive has been holding up very well. The box definitely feels snappier then other 7200 RPM SATA systems that I've also been using. Still, I've used a SSD-based laptop one too many times in the past two years and every time I walk away going "ooooh, that was nice".
Someone needs to poke Intel with a stick and tell them to get their SSDs down to the $1/GB range. (Their 25nm stuff is supposed to ship in Jan/Feb 2011.)
Never buy cheap motherboards. My rule of thumb is two-fold.
And more importantly, never buy a cheap PSU.
(Having a voltage stabilized UPS unit helps as well, but the APC Smart-UPS aren't cheap and replacing the battery every 3 years sets you back $30-$60/yr depending on size.)
Apparently there's already talk from Sony about doing something similar to EQ2 for similar reasons.
If they were to do this, and get rid of the zone lines and make the world much more interconnected, I'd actually be interested. One of the things that drove me away from EQ2 in the first place was the tiny zones connected by tiny doorways that made WoW's Azeroth look huge. I got tired of taking bells everywhere instead of being able to actually walk or swim from zone to zone.
It's also the reason I finally gave up on AoC and went back to WoW. A big, zoneless world with no obvious zone lines except for dungeons (where it makes sense because you're going from a shared world into a private instance) draws me in a lot more and it's fun to just go out and explore.
I do wish Azeroth was about 50-80% larger in land mass, there are quite a few spots in the old world that feel tiny. And old-world flying is going to make that feel even smaller. But it still feels larger then AoC or EQ2 zones.
I had this pipe dream of an MMO that interconnected everything so what you did mattered
Go live in null-sec (or 0.0) space in EVE Online.
It's not as dynamic as it could be, but all those null-sec systems generally started out as nothing more then planets, moons, and asteroid belts with only stargates. Nearly everything in null-sec is player driven.
(That being said, I found EVE to be too invasive to my schedule. If you weren't grinding 20-30 hours per week, you'd never really get anywhere or be able to afford flying battleships regularly. Or you had to be ready to login at a moment's notice and help defend your system / structures from attack. I played for 6-8 months again earlier this year, made 10B ISK and got back out.)
But the grind no longer interestes me. I want goals and good social atmosphere with no drama and immature people.
Shop around. You can get some of that in the better guilds. Our guild has a "nobody under age 25" rule and we're pretty strict on the maturity / language. Guilds like that tend to be the smaller ones, not the big mega guilds that will invite anyone. You're still stuck dealing with the rest of the kids on the server, but that also varies by server/faction and turning off "General" and "Trade" chat makes a big difference.
After 9 years playing MMOs, the grind is what you make of it. At least in WoW, you can get things done in an hour or so of gameplay per session and there's not much grind left. I look at gear or whatever and decide whether or not the grind is worth it. If I'm not having fun, I stop chasing a particular goal and go do something else.
And sometimes, the best way to stop grinding is to slow down, read the quest text, talk to random NPCs, look at the scenery, and stop trying to finish quests in record time.
The funny thing about those cardboard pallets: If it came FedEx Ground, the terminals have no rabbit jacks or fork trucks. They have flat carts, and conveyors, and people. That's it. Sometimes the difference is as simple as the mindset in your local FedEx Ground terminal compared to UPS, or vice versa.
Yep, UPS doesn't have forklifts or rabbit jacks either.
Whenever I see a cardboard pallet arrive via a package delivery service, I know the shipper is being a cheap-skate instead of using a LTL company.
Way back in the late 80's the company I worked for had a piece of computerized rest equipment shipped back to the company via UPS. apparently a forklift blade sliced right into the shipping box, through a tape drive slot and into the VME backplane.
Which is a neat trick, because UPS in the 80s and 90s never uses forklifts to move items around. They didn't (don't) do pallet freight, which is where you see forklifts used. Everything moves through the facility on conveyor belts or roller lines.
More likely, some other item in the truck / tractor trailer, such as an "irregular" package probably impacted your package. Irregular packages are things that aren't boxes, which are too weird shaped, too heavy, or too fragile to travel the conveyor belts in the sorting facility. They tend to get loaded on carts and towed/moved around from the inbound to the outbound.
It will depend entirely on the area from which the local hub/center can pull its workforce. If it's a decent town with hard working folks, your workers tend to be decent folks.
Local standards can also vary depending on "how far the nearest authority is". If the district or divisional manager never visits except once a month or once a quarter, things can get *very* lax. On the flip side, sometimes the larger hubs can have more problems because it's easier to hide misconduct in the chaos.
UPS pay is quite decent. The main problem is that you will spend *years* as a part-time employee while you wait for your seniority to build and for a full-time job to open up. And when it does open-up, top-seniority employees get first choice. Remember, it's a union shop, with all sorts of fun union rules. Which also means that you can get stuck paying for a non-performing worker if the shop steward protects them from being disciplined.
But before you cry a river for UPS, that it has to put up with union workers... UPS management deserves every bit of grief given to them by the union.
Ugh, the flying missions. And the driving course missions (which are probably doable on a console controller, not so much on a keyboard).
I just downloaded a mod that makes those insta-complete after you start them, then removed the mod until I ran into another one that wasn't worth the effort.
Personally I'd love if there was at least an option for completely unfiltered access (perhaps even proper reverse lookup to deal with the idiots who think reverse lookup is a good way to deal with spam (hint: it's not, way too many legit companies have multiple hostnames on their mail servers or use a third party's mail relay for this to work well, it just gimps email)).
Yes, it's called a business class account with a static IP. Or a dedicated line like a T1/etc. With those, you can do whatever you want and I've never had an ISP filter ports or care about how much bandwidth I'm using.
The ship of "I should be able to do whatever I want on a residential IP address" has sailed. And been sunk. Then covered over with sediment and very small rocks that don't float. It's a dead concept and unless you start up your own ISP, you have to live with it. Your friends and neighbors have destroyed that with their desire to click on shiny things that show up in their inbox. As a result, alot of admins have pretty much decided that 99.99% of what comes from residential/dynamic IPs to be garbage (because it is).
Move on, get a virtual private server or a co-lo or a dedicated server in a data center with a clean IP range. Or take a risk with a business class account with static IP. Or just farm your SMTP/IMAP work out to a 3rd party ($10/mo easily gets you a few dozen GB worth of mail storage on an IMAP server).
** Yes I know I could just change my ssh port and much of this would go away. But I find it amusing and I have bandwidth to burn.
Do you also have your daily/weekly log reports set to separate the chaff from the wheat so you can distinguish between worrisome attempts and the background noise?
The biggest reason to move the port - it cuts down on the message log spam, which often drowns out more important information. If I see attempts on my custom port #, I know I need to take a closer look.
(Second biggest reason to move the port - just in case some clueless admin, myself included, manages to change SSH to allow login via passwords by accident.)
Yeah, repository corruption was a silent killer. Not to mention the whole "you must give write access to the entire repository directory" to VSS clients. (Note: I haven't used VSS since about 2004.)
However, it was actually functional if you put it behind a SourceOffSite server and only used the SOS client to talk to the SOS server (which then talked to the local VSS repository directory on the disk). The SOS server, since it was on the same machine, was able to isolate the VSS repository from a lot of the stupidities that would cause corruption. Having a network error between the SOS client and SOS server no longer caused corruption issues in the VSS repository.
Ultimately, I got tired of paying the licensing costs and having to track licenses for SOS, so we switched away to SVN back in '04 or '05.
This makes it feasibly easy to use source control in places I never would have with SVN - such as admin scripts buried in/usr/local, or all the system settings in/etc...
For a SVN shop, you would use FSVS in that situation.
(I've been versioning our Linux boxes for quite a few years now with FSVS. It's wonderful for wondering "what the heck did I change last June"? Plus, since the backend is a SVN repository that can be anywhere, I can point my client-side SVN tools at the repository and use GUI tools like TortoiseSVN to browse the change log. I wish there was an equivalent, free, tool for my Windows servers.)
VSS - works fine for groups up to a dozen or so, but the repository is easily corrupted. However, putting it behind a SourceOffSite server made it a lot more reliable. Downside is it's pricey, proprietary, and works on a lock/modify/unlock workflow. The lock/unlock sucked hard because you had to constantly hound developers to check things back in or unlock files that they forgot about.
SVN - It does have the concept of "reserve" marks, but only as advisories. You can easily break the locks if needed, no more waiting for Joe to get back from lunch. Definite step up from VSS/SOS installs. The only big issue I've had over the last half-decade of use is training developers away from the lock/unlock mindset and towards the "update / modify / commit" mindset. Once they finally drilled it into their heads that they always have to update before changing anything, the main issues went away.
(We use SVN all the time with binary files that can't be merged. The only downside is the extra storage space required for the pristine copy kept in the meta directory. Other then that it works fine for images, binary files and source code.)
It becomes really ugly when you start refactoring code. Renamed and moved files are killer to merge. Even in 1.6, I'm afraid...
Yeah, one of the big things I wish SVN would have done from the start would have been to allow some sort of unique-identifier as an alternative way to identify a particular file/folder. So you could say svn://myserver/myrepos/UUID as a shortcut for referring to a file deep down inside some directory tree. From my cursory inspection of GIT, it's something that GIT seems to get right?
This issue also comes around to bite you when you're using svn:externals and need to refactor the file names or folder names that the externals are pointing at. You'll end up breaking everything that pointed at the old location names.
Renames/Moves are supposed to eventually become first-class citizens in the repository of SVN. Not done as "delete/add" behind the scenes. But I don't know if that will make 1.7 or some future version. It still won't fix the unique ID issue though.
I don't know why this one piece of software evokes such illogical responses. Oh well.
Well, unless you're completely insane, you don't change SCMs more then once a decade. Entire processes get built around the current SCM (QA, deployment, development, archival, etc) and that's not something easily changed.
So it's never as simple as swapping one command for another. The thought processes are slightly different, everyone has to update their workflow or custom-written glue tools and you may lose version history.
(Distributed SCMs are almost worth the effort, if I actually needed that feature more then once a year.)
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I am astounded they would be orienting runways according to the magnetic poles and not the "true" cardinal directions.
Maybe because a magnetic compass will (almost) always work when the more advanced instruments don't?
How do you propose that pilots figure out what the "true" cardinal direction is as they approach the airport? While working through their landing checklist, monitoring other air traffic, weather, and everything else that has to happen before the wheels touch down?
I guarantee they don't have time to do a star-sighting.
Everybody plays WoW because everybody else plays WoW.
Not really. Maybe a small fraction of the player base, but probably less then half already knew a WoW player.
WoW wins because they take existing concepts, polish them up to take off the rough edges, and then continually iterate upon the concept. Very little of what is in WoW is original, but what is there is generally refined with an eye towards challenging without being frustrating. They don't get everything right, but they get it about 90% right and mostly bug free.
Plus, with their talent tree design, most classes can be played a minimum of two distinct ways - without having to reroll a new class from scratch. Don't like healing as a holy priest? Switch to a shadow specialization and become DPS. And with dual-specialization available for cheap at level 30 (current level limit is 85), you can use one spec for questing and a different spec for grouping / raiding / PvP. Which, once again, leverages the time that you've already invested into learning the class and allows you to try out a secondary role without a big time investment (other then gear).
Isn't it true that the WoW hype was at it's pinnacle back in 2006 - 2007 or so? Sure, an expansion pack has been released recently, but it appears to be lacking the whole hype. In fact, where I live, Blizzard seems to be promoting the expansion pack pretty aggressively, something I have never seen them do before.
I guess you have forgotten the whole "Ozzy vs Lich King" commercial. Or the "I'm a night elf mohawk" or William Shatner doing the "I'm a shaman" commercial from 2 years ago. Or maybe this commercial for Wrath.
Do you like that? I find it quite annoying, because it's transparent that I'm not actually having an effect, and that other users aren't seeing what I'm seeing.
Well, it's not always done in a proper manner, but it mostly works.
The big issue is that the designers over-did the phasing and made the phased areas too small and out in the open where it's obvious that there is phasing happening. There's a place in Mount Hyjal where you take 2 steps one direction and suddenly you are surrounded by ogres, step back 2 paces and everything vanishes again.
Which is just badly done.
When the designers stick to putting phasing boundaries that work with natural boundaries (corners in caves, a ridge line, a building exterior where the player is inside when the phase change takes place), it works very well.
I blame it on "designers with a shiny new toy" syndrome.
(a.k.a. "when all you have is a hammer...")
You can also get PCI cards that have 4 to 8 SATA ports on them. You just need to be sure that your PSU can handle them/has SATA power ports for them.
A better choice now would be PCIe (generally PCIe 4x) SAS SCSI cards, easily available in 8-port designs for under $300, then use Linux Software RAID.
RAID-10 with a hot-spare works extremely well.
What really makes me excited about that is the smaller chunks of RAIDed disk. Recovery by hot spare has always made me nervous due to the length of time it takes to repair a 1-2 TB hole in your redundancy.
Depends on the RAID type.
RAID 5 (and 6?) rebuild/recovery windows tend to scale linearly with the number of drives in the array. So a very large array with very large drives can takes hours/days to rebuild.
RAID 1 and RAID 10 rebuild/recovery windows scale with the size of an individual spindle, not the number of drives. So a drive failure in a RAID-10 array generally results in a very short recovery window, determined by the size/speed of a single drive within the array. Even on bigger 10-20 disk RAID-10 arrays, replacing a failed drive is only an hour or two of resync.
(I much prefer the predictability of RAID-10 rebuild times.)
Music to my ears, someone who "gets" what MSAccess is good at.
The other thing that it's good at is dealing with small ad-hoc databases for a non-technical group of users who just want to be able to run a few queries, create new tables, etc. Without having to deal with a central server. Which, if you do a lot of short 1-2 week projects where every data set is different except for a few key similarities, is handy. Heck, some of these projects only live 3-4 days from start to finish.
Not to mention all the nice import/export features. Having everything in a single file (which is good/bad...). Being able to copy/paste tables or queries to make a quick backup. Or being able to restore from a "oops" without bugging IT for backup tapes (as long as you did that copy/paste step). Near seamless copy/paste between Excel and MSAccess for times when it's faster to setup, transform or analyze the data in Excel.
I'm not holding my breath that OOBase or LibreBase will catch up. I've been waiting for the Base developers to grasp the concept of MSAccess for almost 10 years now, and it hasn't happened.
Seen a few people say they use Adblock and all, which is fine, but if you recognize that an ad-server can be compromised, then why not any other web server you visit? How many things are you going to block before it makes the web safe? So many all websites are useless? That's why I found NoScript more annoying than not. Too often I was just saying yes to so much it wasn't really that much more secure.
It's called limiting your exposure.
Scenario A: Default install, runs every scrap of Flash / JavaScript / Java / Shockwave that it runs across as you browse the web. This might number in the hundreds of sites, or thousands over the course of a month. Only *one* of those sites has to serve up malicious script in order for your PC to be infected.
Scenario B: NoScript/FlashBlock or AdBlock with a whitelist of only 100 sites. You're still pulling in content from hundreds or thousands of sites each moonth, but unless the attacker infects one of the sites in your whitelist, nothing bad happens. So it's still possible to be infected, but you've cut your risk factor by 1-3 orders of magnitude.
Which is generally limited enough that you're not going to see many (if any) infections. Whitelisting works.
Hell I'm running a 925 quad and can easily see myself getting another 4 to 5 years out of it, by simply upgrading the GPU occasionally.
Exactly. My AMD Phenom 9850 quad is going on 2 years old. I dropped a new GTX 460 in there this year. Next year I'll hopefully drop a 256GB SSD in.
Although the 10k RPM SATA Western Digital drive has been holding up very well. The box definitely feels snappier then other 7200 RPM SATA systems that I've also been using. Still, I've used a SSD-based laptop one too many times in the past two years and every time I walk away going "ooooh, that was nice".
Someone needs to poke Intel with a stick and tell them to get their SSDs down to the $1/GB range. (Their 25nm stuff is supposed to ship in Jan/Feb 2011.)
Never buy cheap motherboards. My rule of thumb is two-fold.
And more importantly, never buy a cheap PSU.
(Having a voltage stabilized UPS unit helps as well, but the APC Smart-UPS aren't cheap and replacing the battery every 3 years sets you back $30-$60/yr depending on size.)
Apparently there's already talk from Sony about doing something similar to EQ2 for similar reasons.
If they were to do this, and get rid of the zone lines and make the world much more interconnected, I'd actually be interested. One of the things that drove me away from EQ2 in the first place was the tiny zones connected by tiny doorways that made WoW's Azeroth look huge. I got tired of taking bells everywhere instead of being able to actually walk or swim from zone to zone.
It's also the reason I finally gave up on AoC and went back to WoW. A big, zoneless world with no obvious zone lines except for dungeons (where it makes sense because you're going from a shared world into a private instance) draws me in a lot more and it's fun to just go out and explore.
I do wish Azeroth was about 50-80% larger in land mass, there are quite a few spots in the old world that feel tiny. And old-world flying is going to make that feel even smaller. But it still feels larger then AoC or EQ2 zones.
I had this pipe dream of an MMO that interconnected everything so what you did mattered
Go live in null-sec (or 0.0) space in EVE Online.
It's not as dynamic as it could be, but all those null-sec systems generally started out as nothing more then planets, moons, and asteroid belts with only stargates. Nearly everything in null-sec is player driven.
(That being said, I found EVE to be too invasive to my schedule. If you weren't grinding 20-30 hours per week, you'd never really get anywhere or be able to afford flying battleships regularly. Or you had to be ready to login at a moment's notice and help defend your system / structures from attack. I played for 6-8 months again earlier this year, made 10B ISK and got back out.)
But the grind no longer interestes me. I want goals and good social atmosphere with no drama and immature people.
Shop around. You can get some of that in the better guilds. Our guild has a "nobody under age 25" rule and we're pretty strict on the maturity / language. Guilds like that tend to be the smaller ones, not the big mega guilds that will invite anyone. You're still stuck dealing with the rest of the kids on the server, but that also varies by server/faction and turning off "General" and "Trade" chat makes a big difference.
After 9 years playing MMOs, the grind is what you make of it. At least in WoW, you can get things done in an hour or so of gameplay per session and there's not much grind left. I look at gear or whatever and decide whether or not the grind is worth it. If I'm not having fun, I stop chasing a particular goal and go do something else.
And sometimes, the best way to stop grinding is to slow down, read the quest text, talk to random NPCs, look at the scenery, and stop trying to finish quests in record time.
The funny thing about those cardboard pallets: If it came FedEx Ground, the terminals have no rabbit jacks or fork trucks. They have flat carts, and conveyors, and people. That's it. Sometimes the difference is as simple as the mindset in your local FedEx Ground terminal compared to UPS, or vice versa.
Yep, UPS doesn't have forklifts or rabbit jacks either.
Whenever I see a cardboard pallet arrive via a package delivery service, I know the shipper is being a cheap-skate instead of using a LTL company.
Way back in the late 80's the company I worked for had a piece of computerized rest equipment shipped back to the company via UPS. apparently a forklift blade sliced right into the shipping box, through a tape drive slot and into the VME backplane.
Which is a neat trick, because UPS in the 80s and 90s never uses forklifts to move items around. They didn't (don't) do pallet freight, which is where you see forklifts used. Everything moves through the facility on conveyor belts or roller lines.
More likely, some other item in the truck / tractor trailer, such as an "irregular" package probably impacted your package. Irregular packages are things that aren't boxes, which are too weird shaped, too heavy, or too fragile to travel the conveyor belts in the sorting facility. They tend to get loaded on carts and towed/moved around from the inbound to the outbound.
It will depend entirely on the area from which the local hub/center can pull its workforce. If it's a decent town with hard working folks, your workers tend to be decent folks.
Local standards can also vary depending on "how far the nearest authority is". If the district or divisional manager never visits except once a month or once a quarter, things can get *very* lax. On the flip side, sometimes the larger hubs can have more problems because it's easier to hide misconduct in the chaos.
UPS pay is quite decent. The main problem is that you will spend *years* as a part-time employee while you wait for your seniority to build and for a full-time job to open up. And when it does open-up, top-seniority employees get first choice. Remember, it's a union shop, with all sorts of fun union rules. Which also means that you can get stuck paying for a non-performing worker if the shop steward protects them from being disciplined.
But before you cry a river for UPS, that it has to put up with union workers... UPS management deserves every bit of grief given to them by the union.
GTA San Andreas was like that.
Ugh, the flying missions. And the driving course missions (which are probably doable on a console controller, not so much on a keyboard).
I just downloaded a mod that makes those insta-complete after you start them, then removed the mod until I ran into another one that wasn't worth the effort.
1U servers lack space for enough HDDs very often, only 3x3½" can ultimately be had. I haven't seen 4x2½" cases neither.
Look here. SDR-S1803-T04 has room for (4) 3.5" disks in a 1U server. Or SDR-S1000-T08 which lets you put (8) 2.5" drives in a 1U space.
Personally I'd love if there was at least an option for completely unfiltered access (perhaps even proper reverse lookup to deal with the idiots who think reverse lookup is a good way to deal with spam (hint: it's not, way too many legit companies have multiple hostnames on their mail servers or use a third party's mail relay for this to work well, it just gimps email)).
Yes, it's called a business class account with a static IP. Or a dedicated line like a T1/etc. With those, you can do whatever you want and I've never had an ISP filter ports or care about how much bandwidth I'm using.
The ship of "I should be able to do whatever I want on a residential IP address" has sailed. And been sunk. Then covered over with sediment and very small rocks that don't float. It's a dead concept and unless you start up your own ISP, you have to live with it. Your friends and neighbors have destroyed that with their desire to click on shiny things that show up in their inbox. As a result, alot of admins have pretty much decided that 99.99% of what comes from residential/dynamic IPs to be garbage (because it is).
Move on, get a virtual private server or a co-lo or a dedicated server in a data center with a clean IP range. Or take a risk with a business class account with static IP. Or just farm your SMTP/IMAP work out to a 3rd party ($10/mo easily gets you a few dozen GB worth of mail storage on an IMAP server).
** Yes I know I could just change my ssh port and much of this would go away. But I find it amusing and I have bandwidth to burn.
Do you also have your daily/weekly log reports set to separate the chaff from the wheat so you can distinguish between worrisome attempts and the background noise?
The biggest reason to move the port - it cuts down on the message log spam, which often drowns out more important information. If I see attempts on my custom port #, I know I need to take a closer look.
(Second biggest reason to move the port - just in case some clueless admin, myself included, manages to change SSH to allow login via passwords by accident.)
Yeah, repository corruption was a silent killer. Not to mention the whole "you must give write access to the entire repository directory" to VSS clients. (Note: I haven't used VSS since about 2004.)
However, it was actually functional if you put it behind a SourceOffSite server and only used the SOS client to talk to the SOS server (which then talked to the local VSS repository directory on the disk). The SOS server, since it was on the same machine, was able to isolate the VSS repository from a lot of the stupidities that would cause corruption. Having a network error between the SOS client and SOS server no longer caused corruption issues in the VSS repository.
Ultimately, I got tired of paying the licensing costs and having to track licenses for SOS, so we switched away to SVN back in '04 or '05.
This makes it feasibly easy to use source control in places I never would have with SVN - such as admin scripts buried in /usr/local, or all the system settings in /etc...
For a SVN shop, you would use FSVS in that situation.
(I've been versioning our Linux boxes for quite a few years now with FSVS. It's wonderful for wondering "what the heck did I change last June"? Plus, since the backend is a SVN repository that can be anywhere, I can point my client-side SVN tools at the repository and use GUI tools like TortoiseSVN to browse the change log. I wish there was an equivalent, free, tool for my Windows servers.)
I'll have to keep Mercurial in mind though.
VSS - works fine for groups up to a dozen or so, but the repository is easily corrupted. However, putting it behind a SourceOffSite server made it a lot more reliable. Downside is it's pricey, proprietary, and works on a lock/modify/unlock workflow. The lock/unlock sucked hard because you had to constantly hound developers to check things back in or unlock files that they forgot about.
SVN - It does have the concept of "reserve" marks, but only as advisories. You can easily break the locks if needed, no more waiting for Joe to get back from lunch. Definite step up from VSS/SOS installs. The only big issue I've had over the last half-decade of use is training developers away from the lock/unlock mindset and towards the "update / modify / commit" mindset. Once they finally drilled it into their heads that they always have to update before changing anything, the main issues went away.
(We use SVN all the time with binary files that can't be merged. The only downside is the extra storage space required for the pristine copy kept in the meta directory. Other then that it works fine for images, binary files and source code.)
It becomes really ugly when you start refactoring code. Renamed and moved files are killer to merge. Even in 1.6, I'm afraid...
Yeah, one of the big things I wish SVN would have done from the start would have been to allow some sort of unique-identifier as an alternative way to identify a particular file/folder. So you could say svn://myserver/myrepos/UUID as a shortcut for referring to a file deep down inside some directory tree. From my cursory inspection of GIT, it's something that GIT seems to get right?
This issue also comes around to bite you when you're using svn:externals and need to refactor the file names or folder names that the externals are pointing at. You'll end up breaking everything that pointed at the old location names.
Renames/Moves are supposed to eventually become first-class citizens in the repository of SVN. Not done as "delete/add" behind the scenes. But I don't know if that will make 1.7 or some future version. It still won't fix the unique ID issue though.
I don't know why this one piece of software evokes such illogical responses. Oh well.
Well, unless you're completely insane, you don't change SCMs more then once a decade. Entire processes get built around the current SCM (QA, deployment, development, archival, etc) and that's not something easily changed.
So it's never as simple as swapping one command for another. The thought processes are slightly different, everyone has to update their workflow or custom-written glue tools and you may lose version history.
(Distributed SCMs are almost worth the effort, if I actually needed that feature more then once a year.)