This highlights a fundamental problem with email -- many people pass documents as attachments, or in the body of the email, instead of using email as a sort of metadata describing their works in progress. Documents shouldn't be passed around in email; they should be stored on a network share, where proper controls for mutual exclusion and such can be employed.
Another thumbs-up for Vonage. I had my number ported over within two weeks (from Comcast) and the installation of the Motorola access device was really braindead. I was up and running inside of five minutes. The *only* thing I notice is that call quality degrades slightly if I'm concurrently pulling down a large ISO or something like that. I'll get crackles and pops. But that just takes tweaking the QOS parameters. Bravo, Vonage!
I live in Richmond, VA, and have Sprint PCS. I have been totally nonplussed with their service. I get no coverage anywhere near my home, and I drop calls consistently. I've had my phone diagnosed, had the latest firmware installed, et cetera. Sprint reps keep telling me they don't have to guarantee coverage in any one location -- they just have to provide coverage/somewhere/ within their total coverage area.
I was at the end of a year-long contract doing technical support and earning $14/hr when, by chance, a friend of a friend dropped the name of a company I'd never even heard of and mentioned that they were looking for a sysadmin. Long story short, I'm now working there and making $19/hr, and the gig is permanent. So it's like with romance: the best things come from being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people. You're probably not going to get that dream job trolling the postings on Monster.
You know, I'm so fucking sick of hearing people bitch and complain about all of the jobs flowing overseas. You know what? Get over it! The United States encompasses less than FIVE PERCENT of the world's population. Do we have a God-given entitlement to jobs? Fuck no! Why should 80% of the world live in squalour whilst we drive around in our two-mile-per-gallon Humvees and gorge ourselves on Mickey D's supersized value meals? Short answer: they shouldn't. If offshoring means raising the standard of living for the 4/5 of humanity who have to worry about an empty belly at the end of the day, I say let it happen. I will survive.
People decry the loss of marginal/niche channels if cable co's go to a la carte pricing. My retort: who cares? This is the beauty of the markets. If people really want Animal Planet, they'll pay for it. Otherwise, the market will vote with its collective wallet and give a thumbs-down. Why should I subsidise some beer-swilling redneck's desire to watch Speedvision when I could care less about this? If he cares so much, he should be willing to pay $10/mo for Speedvision a la carte. Plus, a la carte pricing opens up all kinds of innovations. You could have a pay-per-view option. Let's say you don't feel like paying $10/mo for Univision month in and month out, but there's one movie with some hot busty Latina that you want to view. No problem -- you pay $2-3 for that one movie and then have no further commitments beyond that.
Wrong-o. Peter Jackson shot thirty THOUSAND (yes, you read that correctly) hours of footage. There is no shortage of material they can release. I've heard the rumour floated around that the ueber-boxset will include 15-20 disks and a several-hundred-page hardcover book, and cost $200-300.
What about replacements?
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What if my Chameleon Card is lost or stolen? With conventional plastic, I can call the issuer, report the card lost/stolen, and have a replacement sent within a couple of days for free (be wary of those companies that would charge you for this service). What is my recourse with Chameleon? Ponying up another $200? Also, what if I destroyed my original cards when transferring their data to the Chameleon device? Is there an online backup somewhere? Or am I shit out of luck?
Whilst this may be a boon for experienced guitarists, it's a disaster for those just starting out. Learning to tune your own guitar teaches you pitch and trains your ears. Any musician worth his/her salt can quickly tune an instrument using the grey matter betwixt the ears and nothing else.
I started to read ANKOS and was turned off by what I viewed as mental masturbation. Every other sentence seemed to include the mantra 'with my new kind of science'. This vacuous tome serves as Wolfram's shrine to himself -- visions of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias' come to mind.
To quote Thomas Jefferson: 'Let an aristocracy of achievement arise from a democracy of opportunity.' I agree whole-heartedly. The phenomenon of which you speak is alive and well in the US, too. Ever since the 1960's, universities have really drastically lowered the requirements for admittance, with the result that college degrees these days have become relatively worthless -- over a quarter of all adults have one. Since secondary schools don't do fuck-all to educate students these days, colleges have to pick up the slack, with the result that many students entering college and university have to take remedial coursework to compensate for their inability to read or do basic mathematics. It's a sad state of affairs.
My advice? Stick with medicine. IT is a sunset industry, that is, unless you want to move to a developing country. With all the baby boomers retiring and getting old, medicine is poised for huge growth. If you really must choose another field, pick something with more growth potential than IT.
After Roddenberry's death, the franchise has lost sight of its roots and been focussing more on merchandising and flash and glitz than a good story. While the various series are episodic rather than epic (a la Babylon 5), at least they used to have a pretence of a story. Now they simply rehash old ideas and repackage them into the series du jour. I started to watch Enterprise a couple of years ago because I was stoked about Scott Bakula (I loved his work on Quantum Leap), but quite frankly, his superb acting ability is hampered by shitty writing. So if Enterprise goes, I will shed not a tear -- I haven't watched the bloody thing in two years.
Arthur C. Clarke posited a statement that has come to be known as Clarke's Law: 'We tend to OVERestimate short-term changes and UNDERestimate long-term changes.' If you look at sci-fi from the 1950's, you see starships that travel faster than light, but all of the astrogation and calculation of co-ordinates being done by teams of humans. They simply didn't foresee 50 years ago that computing power would become too cheap to measure. My Sprint PDA phone has an embedded processor with more computing power than a 50's-era mainframe. This would be simply unfathomable to someone from back then. The problem with foreseeing the future is that most people simply extrapolate from the present, and are unable to anticipate second-, third-, and nth-order effects. That's not how the real world works.
I built a computer custom with the following specs:
Athlon mobo w/ Nvidia chipset
Athlon XP 2500+
350w PSU
512MB PC2100 DDR RAM
40GB Maxtor 7200rpm drive
ATI 128MB video card..all for $450. These specs blow away the ones of the 'mini-server'. Why would I pay 3x as much for wimpier h/w?
The answer is to forget passwords altogether and adopt biometrics. Biometric security devices are coming down in price to the point where they're practical for widespread use. I saw a USB thumbprint scanner for $200 about a year ago, and I'm sure it's come down since then. I work at a bank doing tech support, and well over half the calls we receive regard forgotten passwords. If my company spent $200 per computer, the ROI would be very quick. Someone in my office calculated that each password call costs the company $15. $15 x 500 calls a day adds up to a LOT of money. With an installed base of around 25K computers, installing these scanners would pay for itself in about a week, and be a fair bit more secure than the conventional eight-character password.
The only solution is for Madison Avenue to get more sophisticated and target me as a unique consumer. When all I see are adverts for denture cream, feminine hygiene products, diapers, et cetera -- none of which apply to me in the least -- of course I'm going to skip said advert. Maybe if they started advertising geek gadgets and things I actually cared about, well then yeah, maybe I'd be inclined to pay more attention.
Slashdot Mirror
This highlights a fundamental problem with email -- many people pass documents as attachments, or in the body of the email, instead of using email as a sort of metadata describing their works in progress. Documents shouldn't be passed around in email; they should be stored on a network share, where proper controls for mutual exclusion and such can be employed.
The subject says it all...
Another thumbs-up for Vonage. I had my number ported over within two weeks (from Comcast) and the installation of the Motorola access device was really braindead. I was up and running inside of five minutes. The *only* thing I notice is that call quality degrades slightly if I'm concurrently pulling down a large ISO or something like that. I'll get crackles and pops. But that just takes tweaking the QOS parameters. Bravo, Vonage!
Now all they have to do is develop a full-fledged GIS version of the map.
The ghost of Benito Mussolini rears his ugly head!
I live in Richmond, VA, and have Sprint PCS. I have been totally nonplussed with their service. I get no coverage anywhere near my home, and I drop calls consistently. I've had my phone diagnosed, had the latest firmware installed, et cetera. Sprint reps keep telling me they don't have to guarantee coverage in any one location -- they just have to provide coverage /somewhere/ within their total coverage area.
Is /. getting Alzheimer's?
I was at the end of a year-long contract doing technical support and earning $14/hr when, by chance, a friend of a friend dropped the name of a company I'd never even heard of and mentioned that they were looking for a sysadmin. Long story short, I'm now working there and making $19/hr, and the gig is permanent. So it's like with romance: the best things come from being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people. You're probably not going to get that dream job trolling the postings on Monster.
'In other news, Google announced the buy-out of Gigablast. The newly-formed company will be called Giggle.'
You know, I'm so fucking sick of hearing people bitch and complain about all of the jobs flowing overseas. You know what? Get over it! The United States encompasses less than FIVE PERCENT of the world's population. Do we have a God-given entitlement to jobs? Fuck no! Why should 80% of the world live in squalour whilst we drive around in our two-mile-per-gallon Humvees and gorge ourselves on Mickey D's supersized value meals? Short answer: they shouldn't. If offshoring means raising the standard of living for the 4/5 of humanity who have to worry about an empty belly at the end of the day, I say let it happen. I will survive.
People decry the loss of marginal/niche channels if cable co's go to a la carte pricing. My retort: who cares? This is the beauty of the markets. If people really want Animal Planet, they'll pay for it. Otherwise, the market will vote with its collective wallet and give a thumbs-down. Why should I subsidise some beer-swilling redneck's desire to watch Speedvision when I could care less about this? If he cares so much, he should be willing to pay $10/mo for Speedvision a la carte. Plus, a la carte pricing opens up all kinds of innovations. You could have a pay-per-view option. Let's say you don't feel like paying $10/mo for Univision month in and month out, but there's one movie with some hot busty Latina that you want to view. No problem -- you pay $2-3 for that one movie and then have no further commitments beyond that.
Wrong-o. Peter Jackson shot thirty THOUSAND (yes, you read that correctly) hours of footage. There is no shortage of material they can release. I've heard the rumour floated around that the ueber-boxset will include 15-20 disks and a several-hundred-page hardcover book, and cost $200-300.
What if my Chameleon Card is lost or stolen? With conventional plastic, I can call the issuer, report the card lost/stolen, and have a replacement sent within a couple of days for free (be wary of those companies that would charge you for this service). What is my recourse with Chameleon? Ponying up another $200? Also, what if I destroyed my original cards when transferring their data to the Chameleon device? Is there an online backup somewhere? Or am I shit out of luck?
Whilst this may be a boon for experienced guitarists, it's a disaster for those just starting out. Learning to tune your own guitar teaches you pitch and trains your ears. Any musician worth his/her salt can quickly tune an instrument using the grey matter betwixt the ears and nothing else.
I'm glad Reed Hundt has a clue. Too bad his successor, Michael Powell, has repeatedly missed the clue-train.
I started to read ANKOS and was turned off by what I viewed as mental masturbation. Every other sentence seemed to include the mantra 'with my new kind of science'. This vacuous tome serves as Wolfram's shrine to himself -- visions of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias' come to mind.
To quote Thomas Jefferson: 'Let an aristocracy of achievement arise from a democracy of opportunity.' I agree whole-heartedly. The phenomenon of which you speak is alive and well in the US, too. Ever since the 1960's, universities have really drastically lowered the requirements for admittance, with the result that college degrees these days have become relatively worthless -- over a quarter of all adults have one. Since secondary schools don't do fuck-all to educate students these days, colleges have to pick up the slack, with the result that many students entering college and university have to take remedial coursework to compensate for their inability to read or do basic mathematics. It's a sad state of affairs.
My advice? Stick with medicine. IT is a sunset industry, that is, unless you want to move to a developing country. With all the baby boomers retiring and getting old, medicine is poised for huge growth. If you really must choose another field, pick something with more growth potential than IT.
After Roddenberry's death, the franchise has lost sight of its roots and been focussing more on merchandising and flash and glitz than a good story. While the various series are episodic rather than epic (a la Babylon 5), at least they used to have a pretence of a story. Now they simply rehash old ideas and repackage them into the series du jour. I started to watch Enterprise a couple of years ago because I was stoked about Scott Bakula (I loved his work on Quantum Leap), but quite frankly, his superb acting ability is hampered by shitty writing. So if Enterprise goes, I will shed not a tear -- I haven't watched the bloody thing in two years.
What next? Makeshift prisons where bootleggers are strapped down and forced to listen to Barry Manilow for hours on end?
Arthur C. Clarke posited a statement that has come to be known as Clarke's Law: 'We tend to OVERestimate short-term changes and UNDERestimate long-term changes.' If you look at sci-fi from the 1950's, you see starships that travel faster than light, but all of the astrogation and calculation of co-ordinates being done by teams of humans. They simply didn't foresee 50 years ago that computing power would become too cheap to measure. My Sprint PDA phone has an embedded processor with more computing power than a 50's-era mainframe. This would be simply unfathomable to someone from back then. The problem with foreseeing the future is that most people simply extrapolate from the present, and are unable to anticipate second-, third-, and nth-order effects. That's not how the real world works.
I built a computer custom with the following specs: Athlon mobo w/ Nvidia chipset Athlon XP 2500+ 350w PSU 512MB PC2100 DDR RAM 40GB Maxtor 7200rpm drive ATI 128MB video card ..all for $450. These specs blow away the ones of the 'mini-server'. Why would I pay 3x as much for wimpier h/w?
Nope, I agree with you fully. I think for the most part that Mandrake and SuSE are probably the best distros out there.
The answer is to forget passwords altogether and adopt biometrics. Biometric security devices are coming down in price to the point where they're practical for widespread use. I saw a USB thumbprint scanner for $200 about a year ago, and I'm sure it's come down since then. I work at a bank doing tech support, and well over half the calls we receive regard forgotten passwords. If my company spent $200 per computer, the ROI would be very quick. Someone in my office calculated that each password call costs the company $15. $15 x 500 calls a day adds up to a LOT of money. With an installed base of around 25K computers, installing these scanners would pay for itself in about a week, and be a fair bit more secure than the conventional eight-character password.
The only solution is for Madison Avenue to get more sophisticated and target me as a unique consumer. When all I see are adverts for denture cream, feminine hygiene products, diapers, et cetera -- none of which apply to me in the least -- of course I'm going to skip said advert. Maybe if they started advertising geek gadgets and things I actually cared about, well then yeah, maybe I'd be inclined to pay more attention.