Given the popularity of Vampire: the Masquerade and similar games gone live-action on nearby campuses, I can envision these adapted to enhance reality for less aggressive, slower-twitch games. And once people are used to walking around campus in a cape as a flag to other players they're someone to talk to in character, a headset kind of thing isn't any bother. It'd be useful for flagging the invisible players instead of having them have to walk around with their arms crossed over their chest and saying "You can't see me!", thereby breaking the whole mood/suspension of disbelief thing.... d
Y'know, you're absolutely right: I was imprecise in my comment. Even if Microsoft was a customer buying keywords from RealNames, I was intending to comment on their vendor relationship to RealNames. Thanks. How's this? "I think it's a bad idea to depend exclusively on a single source for the access to serve your customers."
Uh? Yes. Depending on a single source of income is generally a bad business plan (there are of course exceptions out there). One possible example is if they'd designed themselves to hook into AOL in a way similar to the AOL keyword search strategy. If they had AOL as a customer, they would still have money after Microsoft decided to stop.
If he wanted to not have Microsoft control his coporate survival, he should have found someone else to be a customer. Depending on a single client as your sole revenue stream is a trap that has severely hurt at least one former employer of mine.
Oh, right, I forgot to mention certifications in my initial post. I think of them like specific degrees from technical colleges and community colleges and trade schools: they're great to do exactly that stuff, but they're not a general degree. Certifications also go bad when software does, or faster. Try to find a valid new cert in Netware 3.x or even Windows NT now. I'd only go for a cert in his position now if a) I was skipping college or b) was working part time as a sysad and the employer offered to pay for it. a
1) You may think you want to be a sysadmin. You may be certain of it, even - NOW. Part of what college does is expose you to other things, other ideas, other people. You might be happier doing something else with your life. I don't just mean in your caree r or day job, I mean everything you do. 2) As it is now, it's a tight job market in the tech industry. I'd recommend going to college instead of trying to compete with people with more experience, many of whom have degrees. Several people I know have had such difficult times finding jobs that they've gone back to college to finish the degrees they might have started but never completed. 3) Especially when times are tight, companies will use a degree as a screening criterion to thin the pile of resumes they get for a job. Some positions, especially many in government or academia (surprise) require a degree. Part of HR's justification for this is that starting *and finishing* college shows a quality of responsibility that companies like: they don't like (in general, with anecdotal variations everywhere) people who jobhop as much as they like people who are willing to complete a project. I know for a fact that two positions I've had in the past were offered to me precisely because I had a degree (I know be cause in those two cases my hiring manager told me so, later, after I accepted the jobs. Might have mattered in other positions I've had, but those two were directly told to me by the person making the hiring decision). 4) If you care about money, the salary in almost every single field is significantly lower without a degree, at almost every level of experience, and really flattens out fast after a couple of years. I'm not saying don't work part-time as a sysadmin, that's an excellent way to learn that area of knowledge. But go to college. Ât
If this isn't this year's cold fusion, I see lots of options for use: 1) computers, especially where silence is useful. Ever been inside a software-based recording studio? 2) The refrigerator has already been brought up. 3) Tankless water heaters are a really obvious use here. 4) 80% is amazingly better than my heat pump. I have an older, large house. Mount a set of these as a single windowpane in each room, use bluetooth (too far, actually)/802.11b/X10 (although from their popup ads I really don't want to use X10 gear) wireless to control individual rooms and zones, with the old HVAC unit primarily relegated to air circulation in the house, smoothing out the pointsource effect. 5) heating & air conditioning on cars is noisy and a load on the engine, and therefore costly in gas mileage and engine life. Ever see those solar-powered fans that mount in your rear car windows, to ventilate your car when it's sitting in the summer sun? Mount some of the ultracoolerchips like that as a retrofit to every car out there. For newer or custom cars, you can remove the heater/AC unit from the dashboard entirely..
And if I'm not running an enccrypted filesystem on a hard drive, and someone steals the hard drive out of that computer, they can read the data. Now I consider this article's significance to be just another reminder that physical security is important. (quoting from the linked article) "The Pentagon (news - web sites) has armed soldiers with smart cards for online identity and physical access...Some of the information stored in the card is in the form of a number composed of ones and zeros that cryptographers refer to as a "private key." That key is part of a two-key system that is used to encode and decode information. The security of such systems is compromised if the private key is revealed. Typically, after the card holder authenticates the card by supplying a pin number, the private key will then be used to encrypt any sort of transaction using the card."
I wonder what I would do with $40 billion?"
Buy microsoft and open source the entire codebase maybe? Better samba compatibility, fix TCP/IP stack problem, not to mention the bugfix/security issue patches. Just a thought. i
Carl Sagan's _The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark_. Here's links to two differentreviews .
Stephen Jay Gould, almost everything he's ever written but particularly The Mismeasure of Man.
Then there's the classic, much older but still frequently cited Charles Mackay's _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ online.
(entire text available courtesy of Gutenberg) part 1 part 2 part 3
The article, coward, reads "Version 3.0 is not a drastic update, primarily designed to sync the code base between older models and the new Series2 TiVo" which I paraphrased as "not wanting to branch the OS development tree".
It probably simply means that the ethernet support will be unused for first and second gen hardware, and that TiVo didn't feel a need to branch the OS development tree. That's a pure guess on my part, but it's a plausible (to me at least) one.
Reason 1: YKINMK(="Your Kink Is Not My Kink", old Usenet acronym.) Define sensible. What's sensible to you is a complete waste of irrelevant time to others. Reason 2: Because it's an interesting intellectual exercise. People can learn by trying to do somewhat silly or unreasonable things, either about the limits of the technology being used, or how they use the tools at hand. Why not ask your dad to quit doing crossword puzzles and your mom to quit watching television in their leisure time and help you out? Or more seriously, come out from your anonymous cowardice and let us know what you're trying to do you think is worthwhile. People might agree with you.
VPC becomes reasonable when you need several Windows boxes, such as in website browser testing. The Windows instances start up in literally seconds, and if they crash you do not have to power-cycle the box. The big issue with webtesting is that MS Internet Explorer doesn't let you have more than one version of MSIE installed at any given time. If you are in a web development shop like I was and are required to test a website versus [Win95/98/98sp2/NT3.5/NT4serverNT4wkstation/2000se rver/2000professional/XP] and MSIE 3.0 - 6.0 (I am not exaggerating this in the least), you can see that quickly expands to close to twenty Windows systems. Twenty Windows boxes, inexpensive as you mention, with OS licenses still cost more than 1 Mac + VPC + Windows licenses. Installing a multiboot system still requires reboots, plus switching between the OS&IE versions requires rebooting instead of switching between Windows instances in different (small w) windows on the same monitor. We had neither the money nor the space for twenty Windows systems in the office. Vmware on linux is a similar way to get one machine to fake being twenty, too. Since the webdevelopers had Macs, we had an older Mac I bought an external firewire drive for and set up VPC for them. I hope this makes some sense. VPC isn't the best answer for all situations, but I believe for some situations it really is the best answer.
Virtual PC does support Linux. VPC is a hardware platform emulator. You install Windows, if you choose to. You can also install RedHatLinux, debian linux, slackware linux, BSD, Solaris x86, OS/2, and pretty much anything else that will install on a given Intel-based stack of hardware. (With the exception of BeOS, I seem to recall, and I'm not sure why it was described as "won't install").
Ok, I can accept that argument (and also apologize for misspelling "musenki": my excuse was I didn't have the article open, and used the title of the slashdot story for reference). So how does the feature set of the proposed $500 M-3 compare to a $500 Cisco AP? I'm curious.
The features seem good, but... "Quantity one pricing for the M-1 (including 802.11b NIC, antenna, power supply, etc) will be $300, and the M-3 (similarly configured) will be $500, with quantity discounts available. Beta units of the M-1 will go out on Monday, April 15th. Beta shipments of the M-3 are planned by the beginning of May. General availability of both should be by the end of June." $300 or $500. And people complain Apple Airport Base Stations are overpriced at $300 MSRP, $270 or less (for quantity one pricing). The Musenski seems to be very cool, but with Linksys 802.11b access points at, what, $170 being touted as reasons to not but Airports, I can only hope they aren't priced higher than the market will bear.
Received the letter in question today from Verisign billing me for a domain I have registered through register.com that expires at the end of May. Funny thing is the letter showed up in my mailbox less than an hour after I'd renewed the domain through register's website (got a second email reminder from register over the weekend, decided to get it off my todo list today).
I routinely get this kind of argument, most notably from at least two previous employers. They argue IDE is so much cheaper per gig than SCSI and it's as fast as SCSI for file transfers, and it's just as good and they'll never buy SCSI. Then they buy cheap drives from lowballers on pricewatch and put them in servers to run core company needs on. Then the drives fail and we get to play "restore files from tape" if we're lucky. Your suggestion about the RAID-1 has merit, but in my experience people cheap enough to insist IDE is equal or better than SCSI in every way are also too cheap to buy an extra drive for mirroring because "we've got a tape backup". Sigh.
Add some light sources that interfere with the signal to be decoded. Get some strobe lights, some Intellibeams. Get a lava lamp or two. Get a mirrorball. Live, work, and code in a dance club.
Or just turn on a particular kind of CRT called a television with the sound off, not in your field of vision but lighting up the room, especially if it's aimed towards the windows. Leave it on any active channel.
David Drake's already shown this in his writings
on
David Brin on Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Dave Drake's Lacey and His Friends (paperback, get it whereever you like to shop is a set of three novellas about a world where cameras and surveillance are everywhere by law, in every room larger than roughly a public bathroom stall. They're very dystopian SF. Nicely done, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the popularity of Vampire: the Masquerade and similar games gone live-action on nearby campuses, I can envision these adapted to enhance reality for less aggressive, slower-twitch games. And once people are used to walking around campus in a cape as a flag to other players they're someone to talk to in character, a headset kind of thing isn't any bother. It'd be useful for flagging the invisible players instead of having them have to walk around with their arms crossed over their chest and saying "You can't see me!", thereby breaking the whole mood/suspension of disbelief thing.... d
Y'know, you're absolutely right: I was imprecise in my comment. Even if Microsoft was a customer buying keywords from RealNames, I was intending to comment on their vendor relationship to RealNames. Thanks.
How's this? "I think it's a bad idea to depend exclusively on a single source for the access to serve your customers."
Uh? Yes.
Depending on a single source of income is generally a bad business plan (there are of course exceptions out there). One possible example is if they'd designed themselves to hook into AOL in a way similar to the AOL keyword search strategy. If they had AOL as a customer, they would still have money after Microsoft decided to stop.
If he wanted to not have Microsoft control his coporate survival, he should have found someone else to be a customer. Depending on a single client as your sole revenue stream is a trap that has severely hurt at least one former employer of mine.
Oh, right, I forgot to mention certifications in my initial post. I think of them like specific degrees from technical colleges and community colleges and trade schools: they're great to do exactly that stuff, but they're not a general degree. Certifications also go bad when software does, or faster. Try to find a valid new cert in Netware 3.x or even Windows NT now. I'd only go for a cert in his position now if a) I was skipping college or b) was working part time as a sysad and the employer offered to pay for it. a
1) You may think you want to be a sysadmin. You may be certain of it, even - NOW. Part of what college does is expose you to other things, other ideas, other people. You might be happier doing something else with your life. I don't just mean in your caree r or day job, I mean everything you do.
2) As it is now, it's a tight job market in the tech industry. I'd recommend going to college instead of trying to compete with people with more experience, many of whom have degrees. Several people I know have had such difficult times finding jobs that they've gone back to college to finish the degrees they might have started but never completed.
3) Especially when times are tight, companies will use a degree as a screening criterion to thin the pile of resumes they get for a job. Some positions, especially many in government or academia (surprise) require a degree. Part of HR's justification for this is that starting *and finishing* college shows a quality of responsibility that companies like: they don't like (in general, with anecdotal variations everywhere) people who jobhop as much as they like people who are willing to complete a project. I know for a fact that two positions I've had in the past were offered to me precisely because I had a degree (I know be cause in those two cases my hiring manager told me so, later, after I accepted the jobs. Might have mattered in other positions I've had, but those two were directly told to me by the person making the hiring decision).
4) If you care about money, the salary in almost every single field is significantly lower without a degree, at almost every level of experience, and really flattens out fast after a couple of years.
I'm not saying don't work part-time as a sysadmin, that's an excellent way to learn that area of knowledge. But go to college. Ât
If this isn't this year's cold fusion, I see lots of options for use:
1) computers, especially where silence is useful. Ever been inside a software-based recording studio?
2) The refrigerator has already been brought up.
3) Tankless water heaters are a really obvious use here.
4) 80% is amazingly better than my heat pump. I have an older, large house. Mount a set of these as a single windowpane in each room, use bluetooth (too far, actually)/802.11b/X10 (although from their popup ads I really don't want to use X10 gear) wireless to control individual rooms and zones, with the old HVAC unit primarily relegated to air circulation in the house, smoothing out the pointsource effect.
5) heating & air conditioning on cars is noisy and a load on the engine, and therefore costly in gas mileage and engine life. Ever see those solar-powered fans that mount in your rear car windows, to ventilate your car when it's sitting in the summer sun? Mount some of the ultracoolerchips like that as a retrofit to every car out there. For newer or custom cars, you can remove the heater/AC unit from the dashboard entirely..
And if I'm not running an enccrypted filesystem on a hard drive, and someone steals the hard drive out of that computer, they can read the data. Now I consider this article's significance to be just another reminder that physical security is important.
(quoting from the linked article)
"The Pentagon (news - web sites) has armed soldiers with smart cards for online identity and physical access...Some of the information stored in the card is in the form of a number composed of ones and zeros that cryptographers refer to as a "private key." That key is part of a two-key system that is used to encode and decode information. The security of such systems is compromised if the private key is revealed. Typically, after the card holder authenticates the card by supplying a pin number, the private key will then be used to encrypt any sort of transaction using the card."
I know, I was just being facetious. You're right of course.
I wonder what I would do with $40 billion?"
Buy microsoft and open source the entire codebase maybe? Better samba compatibility, fix TCP/IP stack problem, not to mention the bugfix/security issue patches. Just a thought. i
Stephen Jay Gould, almost everything he's ever written but particularly The Mismeasure of Man.
Then there's the classic, much older but still frequently cited Charles Mackay's _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ online.
(entire text available courtesy of Gutenberg)
part 1
part 2
part 3
That is cool. Thanks for the links, I have an original TiVo and your informative reply helps.
The article, coward, reads "Version 3.0 is not a drastic update, primarily designed to sync the code base between older models and the new Series2 TiVo" which I paraphrased as "not wanting to branch the OS development tree".
It probably simply means that the ethernet support will be unused for first and second gen hardware, and that TiVo didn't feel a need to branch the OS development tree. That's a pure guess on my part, but it's a plausible (to me at least) one.
Did you perhaps mean "medium" and not "median"? If you meant median then I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean.
Reason 1: YKINMK(="Your Kink Is Not My Kink", old Usenet acronym.)
Define sensible. What's sensible to you is a complete waste of irrelevant time to others.
Reason 2: Because it's an interesting intellectual exercise. People can learn by trying to do somewhat silly or unreasonable things, either about the limits of the technology being used, or how they use the tools at hand.
Why not ask your dad to quit doing crossword puzzles and your mom to quit watching television in their leisure time and help you out?
Or more seriously, come out from your anonymous cowardice and let us know what you're trying to do you think is worthwhile. People might agree with you.
VPC becomes reasonable when you need several Windows boxes, such as in website browser testing. The Windows instances start up in literally seconds, and if they crash you do not have to power-cycle the box. The big issue with webtesting is that MS Internet Explorer doesn't let you have more than one version of MSIE installed at any given time. If you are in a web development shop like I was and are required to test a website versus [Win95/98/98sp2/NT3.5/NT4serverNT4wkstation/2000se rver/2000professional/XP] and MSIE 3.0 - 6.0 (I am not exaggerating this in the least), you can see that quickly expands to close to twenty Windows systems. Twenty Windows boxes, inexpensive as you mention, with OS licenses still cost more than 1 Mac + VPC + Windows licenses. Installing a multiboot system still requires reboots, plus switching between the OS&IE versions requires rebooting instead of switching between Windows instances in different (small w) windows on the same monitor. We had neither the money nor the space for twenty Windows systems in the office. Vmware on linux is a similar way to get one machine to fake being twenty, too. Since the webdevelopers had Macs, we had an older Mac I bought an external firewire drive for and set up VPC for them. I hope this makes some sense. VPC isn't the best answer for all situations, but I believe for some situations it really is the best answer.
Virtual PC does support Linux. VPC is a hardware platform emulator. You install Windows, if you choose to. You can also install RedHatLinux, debian linux, slackware linux, BSD, Solaris x86, OS/2, and pretty much anything else that will install on a given Intel-based stack of hardware. (With the exception of BeOS, I seem to recall, and I'm not sure why it was described as "won't install").
Ok, I can accept that argument (and also apologize for misspelling "musenki": my excuse was I didn't have the article open, and used the title of the slashdot story for reference). So how does the feature set of the proposed $500 M-3 compare to a $500 Cisco AP? I'm curious.
The features seem good, but...
"Quantity one pricing for the M-1 (including 802.11b NIC, antenna, power supply, etc) will be $300, and the M-3 (similarly configured) will be $500, with quantity discounts available.
Beta units of the M-1 will go out on Monday, April 15th. Beta shipments of the M-3 are planned by the beginning of May. General availability of both should be by the end of June."
$300 or $500. And people complain Apple Airport Base Stations are overpriced at $300 MSRP, $270 or less (for quantity one pricing). The Musenski seems to be very cool, but with Linksys 802.11b access points at, what, $170 being touted as reasons to not but Airports, I can only hope they aren't priced higher than the market will bear.
Received the letter in question today from Verisign billing me for a domain I have registered through register.com that expires at the end of May. Funny thing is the letter showed up in my mailbox less than an hour after I'd renewed the domain through register's website (got a second email reminder from register over the weekend, decided to get it off my todo list today).
I routinely get this kind of argument, most notably from at least two previous employers. They argue IDE is so much cheaper per gig than SCSI and it's as fast as SCSI for file transfers, and it's just as good and they'll never buy SCSI. Then they buy cheap drives from lowballers on pricewatch and put them in servers to run core company needs on. Then the drives fail and we get to play "restore files from tape" if we're lucky. Your suggestion about the RAID-1 has merit, but in my experience people cheap enough to insist IDE is equal or better than SCSI in every way are also too cheap to buy an extra drive for mirroring because "we've got a tape backup". Sigh.
Exactly!
Add some light sources that interfere with the signal to be decoded. Get some strobe lights, some Intellibeams. Get a lava lamp or two. Get a mirrorball. Live, work, and code in a dance club.
Or just turn on a particular kind of CRT called a television with the sound off, not in your field of vision but lighting up the room, especially if it's aimed towards the windows. Leave it on any active channel.
Dave Drake's Lacey and His Friends (paperback, get it whereever you like to shop is a set of three novellas about a world where cameras and surveillance are everywhere by law, in every room larger than roughly a public bathroom stall. They're very dystopian SF. Nicely done, though.