How a site is coded is often driven by the Customer Service department. If a page is compliant with the W3C standard, but SomeBrowser doesn't render the page correctly or pukes, Customer Service (NOT the web development dept.) will get a call saying "your site is broken." Customer Service isn't about to say "SomeBrowser that 79% of the world uses is broken" because that will be seen as insulting the customer, so the developer will be told "make it work with SomeBrowser," not "make it 100% W3C standards compliant."
It's all about PERCEPTION. ROI has nothing to do with it.
I wouldn't go so far as to ask for sex, but start asking for personal advice. Every time you talk to the person, start lamenting about what a hell-hole your life has become. Start asking for advice on relationships, housecleaning, child-rearing, etc.
Hey, if he can ask YOU for advice on stuff he has no clue, you can certainly turn the tables and do the same to HIM.
After a while, he just won't want to talk to you any more.
"The best strategy on those fronts is a habitual reading of clearly-formatted texts..."
I think that musings found on Slashdot are not prime examples of clearly-formatted texts.
Really, you must understand that literature in the classical sense of the word accounts for a small percentage of the media that is consumed by a majority of people in the age group you are addressing. It is an entertainment-oriented lot, who find themselves visually stimulated by the products of others' imaginations -- from television to video games to sites like stupidvideos.com -- and have not been brought up in an environment that fosters active imagination. What they have read is by and large a literate nightmare: sites like Slashdot and the 5th grade english teacher's nemesis, the Blog.
Writing is learned by imitation of other writers -- and you can't imitate the style of an author you've never read. To become a good writer, one must read. One must be stimulated in imagination such that the visual imagery is crafted in the mind of the reader. The good writer writes in such a way as to capitalize on the experiences of the reader; the writer needs only give a minimal amount of description to suggest what the reader must imagine. The reader then fills in the details.
If your pupils haven't read already, then I'm afraid you have a Quixotian task. If you make them writers in a matter of months when they have no foundation of literature to guide them, it will be a miracle.
In the sale of products and services, there are 4 elements that must exist to create a profitable enterprise:
Provider: This is the individual or corporation intending to make a profit on the distribution of the product or service. Customer: The entity that pays money to the Provider in expectation of receiving something beneficial (the "Product") in return. Product: The product or service being sold by the Provider to the Customer Means of Delivery: How the Product is delivered by the Provider to the Customer.
First, we'll look at a simple example: milk. The Provider is the dairy. The dairy has a Product, Milk, that they Deliver to you, the Customer via trucks, bottling plants, and stores.
Secondly, we'll look at a service: monitored backups. The Provider is the monitoring service, the Customer is the business with the data, the Product is the monitoring service, and the Means of Delivery is the monitored backup system.
Now, let's consider TV. The Provider (obviously) is the television studio. The studio's main objective is to PROFIT. What is the studio's source of revenue? THE ADVERTISER. This makes the advertiser -- not Joe Public -- the Customer. What is the studio selling the advertiser? Not attractive programming, no, they are selling eyeballs. The eyeballs of Joe Public. This makes Joe Public the Product. And how is the Product (Joe Public) delivered to the Customer (the advertiser)? Not by the medium of television, but by the attractive programming. It is the attractive programming that is the Means of Delivery. The medium of television is the infrastructure (roads and highways) that allows the Means of Delivery (trucks) to do the job.
"Guess what? they are catching on via the computer."
Among pr0n strz. The rest of us don't want to see Aunt Judy in curlers before she's had her Sunday morning cigarette.
Really, there is little benefit to video conferencing other than the "coolness" factor. It's helpful when you have a large group of people having a meeting, because then it's easier to tell who's talking -- for one on one it doesn't provide much benefit. About the only 1-1 scenario where a video phone would help is if you are showing off your body (most "webcams" that are pointed at people seem to be pointed at teenagers and perverts). It also provides context in movies so the viewer doesn't get confused -- but that's not real life.
Most people would rather have a real face-to-face meeting than a virtual one. They also like the freedom a voice-only phone gives them to move about the room or drive down the street -- multitasking. They don't like being chained to a desk where the camera is. I think that no matter how cheap it becomes (and it has become cheap), it will forever be relegated to the fringe element and the boardroom and never be a mainstream household appliance.
But this is off topic, and probably will be moderated so.
In consumer electronics, there are two factors that generally direct which format becomes standard: time-to-market and licensing.
The first-to-market standards proposal has a good shot at winning, because by the time other competing proposals get to market, the first one has so much market penetration that nobody wants the second for fear of incompatibility.
Licensing models that are less restrictive and more open also tend to find favor among consumers. The less cost and hassle the consumer experiences wins product loyalty in the marketplace.
Consider a few examples:
VHS vs. Betamax: Sony was first-to-market with Betamax in 1975, followed in 1976 by JVC with the VHS format. Based on time, Betamax should have become the standard for magnetic recording of video. However, Sony made a mistake with licensing: only Sony would produce Betamax tapes and devices. JVC opened up their technology to licensed manufacturers, allowing for competition in the marketplace which drove the prices of VHS far enough below that of Betamax (and increased the features) to influence the marketplace to invest in VHS technology. Because at the time Betamax devices were still expensive, there was little market penetration for JVC to overcome. In summary, the open standard won.
DVD vs. Divx (not the codec): Does anyone remember this debate? Those who do, remember that these two competing CD-like digital video distribution technologies were in a little war for the consumer's pocketbook. Both technologies came out about the same time, so time-to-market wasn't an issue. The issue was Divx pay-per-view licensing model: instead of buying a video once and wathing it an infinite number of times (as with DVD), the consumer would buy the Divx video fairly cheaply but then pay something every time it is watched. Needless to say, this went over like a fart in church. DVD won based on its superior licensing model.
AM Stereo: I'm not up on the licensing models or time frame of the competing AM stereo technologies, but they were both late-to-market in relation to standard AM radio. There was already HUGE market penetration of standard AM broadcast equipment and receivers; few people saw benefit in replacing that equipment. Had there been just one proposal for AM Stereo, and had it been completely open, it is still doubtful it would have ever caught on.
Microsoft vs. Linux (Gates vs. Torvalds):consumer but it poses problems for developers who, for economic reasons, wish to maintain security over their intellectual property. It is for this reason that many hardware manufacturers do not support Linux: their legal departments cannot confidently say that their intellectual property will be protected if they provide Linux drivers for their products. In this regard, Microsoft's licensing model is superior to Linux's for the developer.
So in the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD debate, who will win? Which proposed standard will be first-to-market? Which will have the less-restrictive licensing model? What about the third factor, technical superiority? What about the fourth factor -- does the public even want it (think DAT or video phones)?
There's a common fallacy when it comes to saving energy: that shutting things off will reduce your home's total energy consumption.
This is only true when the outside ambient temperature is greater than the inside ambient temperature, and you are wish to maintain the inside temperature.
Let's consider the light bulb in the stairway that the kids left on. It's probably a 60 watt bulb, maybe there are two of them. So that's 120 watts, but to make the math easier let's assume it's 100 watts. We all agree that incandescent light bulbs are mighty inefficient, maybe 1% light and 99% heat. So really, only 1 watt of electricity is going to provide light, and the other 99% are wasted.
But wait! Those other 99 watts aren't wasted after all. They are providing heat to your home, meaning your furnace need provide 99 watts less power to maintain the temperature of your home. Because the light is on, the furnace runs less often. The fact that the light bulb is on has ZERO impact on the total energy consumption of the household during the heating season.
(As a side note, we are really getting 100 watts of heat out of the 100 watt light bulb, because that other 1 watt of visible light decays to infrared energy and therefore becomes heat.)
Now, it just may be that one watt of heat energy is a lot cheaper to buy in gas form than electric form. If that's the case, then by all means turn stuff off. You won't be saving energy, but you might be saving money. And if it's the summer season, turn stuff off so the house stays cooler and the AC doesn't have to work as hard.
TURNING STUFF OFF ONLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE IN THE SUMMER.
"...it's like suing the maker of a handgun because you were careless with it..."
Or like saying that Microsoft Windows is insecure because you clicked on the HotBabes.jpg.exe attachment in your email and it trashed your computer and sent itself to everyone in your address book fifty times.
"Take responsibility for your actions people... if you are too stupid to know the difference between a legitimate email and a scam, then deal with the consequences of your stupidity."
I don't know if you RTA or not, but the printout of credit card information was unintentional in both cases -- they had no reason to print it out and they knew it.
The real problem is that the discarded printouts were not properly disposed of.
The real solution is to add safeguards to prevent accidental printout of personal financial information.
Re:Obesity comes from a simple condition...
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Obesity Contagious?
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'...it's called "intaking more calories than you output."'
If you are taking in more calories than you use in your daily life, you will continue to gain weight until the energy required to move you around equals your intake. If you have the intake of a hyperactive person and you are sedentary, you will gain weight until your energy use is equal to that of the hyperactive person. To put it another way, it takes twice as much energy for a 160 kg (350lb) person to climb a set of stairs as it does an 80 kg (180 lb) person. If the 80 kg person climbs the stairs twice as often as the 160 kg person, then the smaller person is more likely to maintain that weight.
On the other hand, if you need to lose weight, you must either decrease your caloric intake to somewhat less than what you require for daily life, or increase your activity so that your requirements are greater than your intake. As a result, your body will start to consume itself. That's right, a diet and exercise program designed to induce weight loss mean that you ARE STARVING.
Now that sounds pretty bad, to be starving. It is bad, if you don't exercise, too, because your body finds it easier to consume muscle tissue than fatty tissues. I think there's a survival thing, where the body reserves the fat stores for lean times. If you exercise, though, the increased stress on the muscle tissues forces your body to maintain them, overriding the "lean times" survival instinct with a "stress-work" survival instinct and thereby causing consumption of fat.
So you can modify your diet, or you can increase your activity level, but you'll probably have the best success (and feel a lot better) by doing both. As for modifying the diet, you don't necessarily have to give up chocolate cake and Pepsi; just consume less of it.
My recommendation for those who want to lose weight? You'll need to gradually change your habits. If you do it all at once, you'll get discouraged and fall off the wagon. Instead, increase your activity. If there's a hill near your house, walk up it once a day (don't run, don't jog), then back down. Don't worry about how long it takes; the benefit is the same whether it takes you ten minutes or an hour. Vertical gain is many times more effective at improving fitness than walking along the flat. After a few weeks, hit the hill twice a day. Gradually increase your activity until you are walking 6-10km (4-6 miles) per day.
Decrease your intake. Don't give up the pie and ice cream; just skip seconds at dinner. Have a smaller slice of pie, and only one scoop of ice cream. The pleasure is in the flavor, not the filling; savor each bite. It takes a while for your stomach to realize it's full, so by eating slower you'll get that signal before you're stuffed. Stuffing yourself isn't fun, it's painful. Why should you eat 'til it hurts? Over time, by eating less, your stomach will actually shrink, to where you fill 'er up much sooner.
If you really want to, you can change your snacking habits. Instead of chips or candy, try carrot sticks or fruit slices. (A real orange tastes a thousand times better than those nasty sugar-coated "orange slices" in the candy section of the supermarket.) For a special occasion, go ahead and eat the chocolate bar, but don't waste your money on the cheap stuff. Buy some high quality candy and share it with someone special in a romantic setting. The memories you make from the time you spend will last far longer than the momentary pleasure from a bitter bar of sludge made in Pennsylvania.
I agree about the tapes. You don't have to worry about mechanical failure of the tapes.
I'd recommend looking into Exabyte's VXA-320 (VXA-3) tapes. They promise 500 writes (as compared to an average of 50 writes with DAT), their "packet technology" provides for error correction and does not depend on a continuous stream of data to efficiently write to tape, and the quality of construction of Exabyte's VXA drives appears to be very high.
The cost of VXA is very reasonable, especially when compared to technologies like LTO. (With LTO, the cost per gigabyte for the media can be higher than for hard drives.) If reliability is a concern, you're probably comparing to Travan systems, which were just plain evil. (Travail is more like it.) Exabyte claims that you can dunk the tape in coffee, dry it out, and re-read it just fine.
But I'm not just repeating what's on their website; I have actually used the hardware and like it.
Sprint has standardized the power connectors for every phone they cell, independent of manufacturer. I, for one, am glad to see an end to the "you-must-buy-our-overpriced-accessory" extortion.
We need to standardize the selection of voltages to increments of 1.5 volts (the nominal voltage of a standard battery), then you would have "only" 16 different voltages to deal with between 1.5 and 24V. Then you standardize to ONLY use DC voltage (no low-voltage AC power supplies), then you standardize the power plugs to a single, unique connector for each voltage.
This leaves us with 16 different power connectors, which seems like a lot, but is far less than the countless proprietary connectors that are out there. If we further standardized to about 6 different voltages (say: 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, and 24 volts) then it would be manageable. It would be great to have ONE power supply on my desk that would work with my cell phone, pager, Palm, headset, toothbrush, shaver, router, switch, camera, etc.
While dd WILL make a perfect clone of a system, it is not the ideal solution for cloning systems (especially Windows) BECAUSE it makes perfect clones.
The problem lies in that for every user, machine, account, group, domain, ENTITY in a Windows environment, there is a globally unique identifier known as a SID. When you clone a machine, you also clone the SID. When you've got two or more machines with the same SID on a network, you WILL have problems. Renaming the machine does not change the machine SID, and Windows knows things more by the SID than by the name. (Think about having two users in your Linux/etc/passwd file with the same UID.)
Secondly, dd is not ideal because it does a bitwise copy. If you are cloning a badly fragmented disk, your clone will be badly fragmented. You'll also get all the cruft left behind from deleted files. Ghost can do a dd-like bitwise copy, but in its primary mode it only copies the extant files. If you've got a 120GB disk with only 5GB used, dd will copy 120GB of bits whereas Ghost will copy 5GB of files. Think of the time involved. If your new drive/partition is not the same as the old one, you can't reliably use dd.
That being said, there are utilities available for changing the machine SID.
Write your comments first, then code to match the comments. This way, you are forced to clearly define the input, output, variables and algorithms that will be used in the code BEFORE you start coding. When it's clear in your mind, the coding becomes easier and less confusing; and you have an outline to follow to make sure you don't forget something.
If you write the code first, then annotate, you fall into two traps: "What the heck was that variable for?" forgetfulness, and "It works so stop messing with it" laziness.
That's nothing, I had a customer plug a UPS into a power strip, then plug the power strip into the UPS and then wonder why the system went down after a few minutes.
One customer had a thinnet coax network. Connections were going bad, and the network was frequently down. We advised the customer to upgrade the network to CAT5 ethernet (this was in 2001 so the cost was reasonable). Customer didn't want to spend any money on the network until it was working properly.
Another customer had installed CAT5 cabling. No jacks; he terminated it with plugs. NICs would link up, you could ping anything all day long, but as soon as you tried to do anything that put a load on the network it would all puke out. I inspected the cabling and discovered that while each end was pinned out the same (as it should be), they were not paired properly. This allowed connectivity, but it also allowed signal loss and interference. I reterminated them properly, and everything was fine.
We had a network interface with a Realtek chipset in our mail server. It would lock up randomly, requiring a power cycle of the server. Eventually I discovered I could consistently lock it up by sending out a message with particular (but not malicious) content. Immediately replaced the NIC. (I know of software vendors who refuse to support an installation where a Realtek NIC is present.)
Install anything made by TrendNet.
Install a router/firewall with a DHCP server that doesn't retain its lease database thru reboots and power cycles.
Run your network cable where you can run over it with your chair, underneath a chair mat with those pointy things, or smash it in a door jamb.
Attempt to connect an early-90s 3com hub or switch to any other hub or switch. They don't like to autonegotiate with other autonegotiate devices.
Change the IP address of your mail server, then ask your DNS host to change the MX record... but their policy requires they send you an email requiring your response to confirm the change BEFORE they will change it.
Register your domain name using an email address in that domain.
Misplace a period in a DNS zone file. On a real, live DNS server at an ISP. Watch the phone melt down.
No, we can't see it in 3D when we look out the window. The reason is that our interocular distance - the spacing between our eyes, about 60-70 mm - is too narrow in relation to the distance involved. I don't recall the practical limit of this ratio, but beyond a certain range all objects appear to lie in the same plane. When you look at the moon, shading is your only clue that it is not a flat disk. (Does a single-image photograph of the moon have any less appearance of depth than when you look at the moon directly?) This is also why we can't tell just by looking how far away each star is. We can only tell by observing the stars at opposite ends of Earth's orbit -- effectively making the interocular distance millions of miles.
I have to wonder if you don't mean three-factor authentication. After all, most systems already have two-factor authentication:
- Username - Password
A system that simply lets walk-up users enter with no regard to who it is uses no authentication (think of a Windows system that boots to the desktop with no password prompt). A system where you have to identify yourself (username) but not verify the identity (password) uses one-factor authentication (think of a Windows system where there's a password prompt, so you have to type in a username, but that user has not been assigned a password). After all, you can say "If someone comes along and says his name is Sam, let him in the building. But don't let anybody named Joe in." Or, you can say "Let Joe in only if he says the secret code, and let Sam in only if his eyes are orange (but he doesn't need to know the secret code)."
To add biometrics, one-time-pad, SecureID, etc. to username and password would be to add a third-factor for authentication. You could say "Let Joe in only if he says the secret code AND his eyes are orange."
The first step in troubleshooting is in knowing the network topology. How are network segments separated? How are the connected? Where are routers, hubs, switches, etc.? Which switches are managed, and how are the VLANs set up on them? Where are the DHCP servers, and what do they serve? Where are all your network drops?
Do your network segments have multiple subnets attached to them?
Is everything subnetted properly?
The first set of questions are ones YOU should be able to answer. After all, it's YOUR network, and YOU should know how it's set up. The last two are harder to deal with, because these settings may be on computers not in your control.
Answer the first questions first, then when you are looking at packet traces, TCP/IP dumps, logs, etc. and you see a problem, you'll have a better idea where the problem is physically located, saving much time and energy.
And then there's the "dumb questions" I shouldn't have to ask: Do you have a loop? Are your cables wired to T568A or T568B standards? Are all your cables in good repair?
"...Finding a 5cc syringe legally is going to be tough. Well, finding ANY syring 100% legally will be tough..."
Yes, it will be tough if you go to the neighborhood drug store. You'll have to ask the pharmacist. You see, they've had so many heroin addicts shoplifting them, they've had to put them under lock and key.
Thankfully, the heroin addicts aren't smart enough to figure out that the local farm supply store has them on the shelf, out in the open, any size you want. Needles, too. No questions asked.
Slashdot Mirror
So... does this spell the death ofNO CARRIER
"What kind of laptop bag do you have that can just barely carry a 19" wide server?"
Have you seen some of the laptops they are making these days? The size of these things, you might as well be carrying a 19" wide server.
How a site is coded is often driven by the Customer Service department. If a page is compliant with the W3C standard, but SomeBrowser doesn't render the page correctly or pukes, Customer Service (NOT the web development dept.) will get a call saying "your site is broken." Customer Service isn't about to say "SomeBrowser that 79% of the world uses is broken" because that will be seen as insulting the customer, so the developer will be told "make it work with SomeBrowser," not "make it 100% W3C standards compliant."
It's all about PERCEPTION. ROI has nothing to do with it.
You're on to something there.
I wouldn't go so far as to ask for sex, but start asking for personal advice. Every time you talk to the person, start lamenting about what a hell-hole your life has become. Start asking for advice on relationships, housecleaning, child-rearing, etc.
Hey, if he can ask YOU for advice on stuff he has no clue, you can certainly turn the tables and do the same to HIM.
After a while, he just won't want to talk to you any more.
"The best strategy on those fronts is a habitual reading of clearly-formatted texts..."
I think that musings found on Slashdot are not prime examples of clearly-formatted texts.
Really, you must understand that literature in the classical sense of the word accounts for a small percentage of the media that is consumed by a majority of people in the age group you are addressing. It is an entertainment-oriented lot, who find themselves visually stimulated by the products of others' imaginations -- from television to video games to sites like stupidvideos.com -- and have not been brought up in an environment that fosters active imagination. What they have read is by and large a literate nightmare: sites like Slashdot and the 5th grade english teacher's nemesis, the Blog.
Writing is learned by imitation of other writers -- and you can't imitate the style of an author you've never read. To become a good writer, one must read. One must be stimulated in imagination such that the visual imagery is crafted in the mind of the reader. The good writer writes in such a way as to capitalize on the experiences of the reader; the writer needs only give a minimal amount of description to suggest what the reader must imagine. The reader then fills in the details.
If your pupils haven't read already, then I'm afraid you have a Quixotian task. If you make them writers in a matter of months when they have no foundation of literature to guide them, it will be a miracle.
I'll summarize what you just said.
In the sale of products and services, there are 4 elements that must exist to create a profitable enterprise:
Provider: This is the individual or corporation intending to make a profit on the distribution of the product or service.
Customer: The entity that pays money to the Provider in expectation of receiving something beneficial (the "Product") in return.
Product: The product or service being sold by the Provider to the Customer
Means of Delivery: How the Product is delivered by the Provider to the Customer.
First, we'll look at a simple example: milk. The Provider is the dairy. The dairy has a Product, Milk, that they Deliver to you, the Customer via trucks, bottling plants, and stores.
Secondly, we'll look at a service: monitored backups. The Provider is the monitoring service, the Customer is the business with the data, the Product is the monitoring service, and the Means of Delivery is the monitored backup system.
Now, let's consider TV. The Provider (obviously) is the television studio. The studio's main objective is to PROFIT. What is the studio's source of revenue? THE ADVERTISER. This makes the advertiser -- not Joe Public -- the Customer. What is the studio selling the advertiser? Not attractive programming, no, they are selling eyeballs. The eyeballs of Joe Public. This makes Joe Public the Product. And how is the Product (Joe Public) delivered to the Customer (the advertiser)? Not by the medium of television, but by the attractive programming. It is the attractive programming that is the Means of Delivery. The medium of television is the infrastructure (roads and highways) that allows the Means of Delivery (trucks) to do the job.
"Guess what? they are catching on via the computer."
Among pr0n strz. The rest of us don't want to see Aunt Judy in curlers before she's had her Sunday morning cigarette.
Really, there is little benefit to video conferencing other than the "coolness" factor. It's helpful when you have a large group of people having a meeting, because then it's easier to tell who's talking -- for one on one it doesn't provide much benefit. About the only 1-1 scenario where a video phone would help is if you are showing off your body (most "webcams" that are pointed at people seem to be pointed at teenagers and perverts). It also provides context in movies so the viewer doesn't get confused -- but that's not real life.
Most people would rather have a real face-to-face meeting than a virtual one. They also like the freedom a voice-only phone gives them to move about the room or drive down the street -- multitasking. They don't like being chained to a desk where the camera is. I think that no matter how cheap it becomes (and it has become cheap), it will forever be relegated to the fringe element and the boardroom and never be a mainstream household appliance.
But this is off topic, and probably will be moderated so.
In consumer electronics, there are two factors that generally direct which format becomes standard: time-to-market and licensing.
The first-to-market standards proposal has a good shot at winning, because by the time other competing proposals get to market, the first one has so much market penetration that nobody wants the second for fear of incompatibility.
Licensing models that are less restrictive and more open also tend to find favor among consumers. The less cost and hassle the consumer experiences wins product loyalty in the marketplace.
Consider a few examples:
VHS vs. Betamax: Sony was first-to-market with Betamax in 1975, followed in 1976 by JVC with the VHS format. Based on time, Betamax should have become the standard for magnetic recording of video. However, Sony made a mistake with licensing: only Sony would produce Betamax tapes and devices. JVC opened up their technology to licensed manufacturers, allowing for competition in the marketplace which drove the prices of VHS far enough below that of Betamax (and increased the features) to influence the marketplace to invest in VHS technology. Because at the time Betamax devices were still expensive, there was little market penetration for JVC to overcome. In summary, the open standard won.
DVD vs. Divx (not the codec): Does anyone remember this debate? Those who do, remember that these two competing CD-like digital video distribution technologies were in a little war for the consumer's pocketbook. Both technologies came out about the same time, so time-to-market wasn't an issue. The issue was Divx pay-per-view licensing model: instead of buying a video once and wathing it an infinite number of times (as with DVD), the consumer would buy the Divx video fairly cheaply but then pay something every time it is watched. Needless to say, this went over like a fart in church. DVD won based on its superior licensing model.
AM Stereo: I'm not up on the licensing models or time frame of the competing AM stereo technologies, but they were both late-to-market in relation to standard AM radio. There was already HUGE market penetration of standard AM broadcast equipment and receivers; few people saw benefit in replacing that equipment. Had there been just one proposal for AM Stereo, and had it been completely open, it is still doubtful it would have ever caught on.
Microsoft vs. Linux (Gates vs. Torvalds):consumer but it poses problems for developers who, for economic reasons, wish to maintain security over their intellectual property. It is for this reason that many hardware manufacturers do not support Linux: their legal departments cannot confidently say that their intellectual property will be protected if they provide Linux drivers for their products. In this regard, Microsoft's licensing model is superior to Linux's for the developer.
So in the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD debate, who will win? Which proposed standard will be first-to-market? Which will have the less-restrictive licensing model? What about the third factor, technical superiority? What about the fourth factor -- does the public even want it (think DAT or video phones)?
~Jon
"There are dependancies you wouldn't imagine..."
You mean like in Redhat or Fedora?
There's a common fallacy when it comes to saving energy: that shutting things off will reduce your home's total energy consumption.
This is only true when the outside ambient temperature is greater than the inside ambient temperature, and you are wish to maintain the inside temperature.
Let's consider the light bulb in the stairway that the kids left on. It's probably a 60 watt bulb, maybe there are two of them. So that's 120 watts, but to make the math easier let's assume it's 100 watts. We all agree that incandescent light bulbs are mighty inefficient, maybe 1% light and 99% heat. So really, only 1 watt of electricity is going to provide light, and the other 99% are wasted.
But wait! Those other 99 watts aren't wasted after all. They are providing heat to your home, meaning your furnace need provide 99 watts less power to maintain the temperature of your home. Because the light is on, the furnace runs less often. The fact that the light bulb is on has ZERO impact on the total energy consumption of the household during the heating season.
(As a side note, we are really getting 100 watts of heat out of the 100 watt light bulb, because that other 1 watt of visible light decays to infrared energy and therefore becomes heat.)
Now, it just may be that one watt of heat energy is a lot cheaper to buy in gas form than electric form. If that's the case, then by all means turn stuff off. You won't be saving energy, but you might be saving money. And if it's the summer season, turn stuff off so the house stays cooler and the AC doesn't have to work as hard.
TURNING STUFF OFF ONLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE IN THE SUMMER.
"...it's like suing the maker of a handgun because you were careless with it..."
Or like saying that Microsoft Windows is insecure because you clicked on the HotBabes.jpg.exe attachment in your email and it trashed your computer and sent itself to everyone in your address book fifty times.
"Take responsibility for your actions people... if you are too stupid to know the difference between a legitimate email and a scam, then deal with the consequences of your stupidity."
I don't know if you RTA or not, but the printout of credit card information was unintentional in both cases -- they had no reason to print it out and they knew it.
The real problem is that the discarded printouts were not properly disposed of.
The real solution is to add safeguards to prevent accidental printout of personal financial information.
'...it's called "intaking more calories than you output."'
If you are taking in more calories than you use in your daily life, you will continue to gain weight until the energy required to move you around equals your intake. If you have the intake of a hyperactive person and you are sedentary, you will gain weight until your energy use is equal to that of the hyperactive person. To put it another way, it takes twice as much energy for a 160 kg (350lb) person to climb a set of stairs as it does an 80 kg (180 lb) person. If the 80 kg person climbs the stairs twice as often as the 160 kg person, then the smaller person is more likely to maintain that weight.
On the other hand, if you need to lose weight, you must either decrease your caloric intake to somewhat less than what you require for daily life, or increase your activity so that your requirements are greater than your intake. As a result, your body will start to consume itself. That's right, a diet and exercise program designed to induce weight loss mean that you ARE STARVING.
Now that sounds pretty bad, to be starving. It is bad, if you don't exercise, too, because your body finds it easier to consume muscle tissue than fatty tissues. I think there's a survival thing, where the body reserves the fat stores for lean times. If you exercise, though, the increased stress on the muscle tissues forces your body to maintain them, overriding the "lean times" survival instinct with a "stress-work" survival instinct and thereby causing consumption of fat.
So you can modify your diet, or you can increase your activity level, but you'll probably have the best success (and feel a lot better) by doing both. As for modifying the diet, you don't necessarily have to give up chocolate cake and Pepsi; just consume less of it.
My recommendation for those who want to lose weight? You'll need to gradually change your habits. If you do it all at once, you'll get discouraged and fall off the wagon. Instead, increase your activity. If there's a hill near your house, walk up it once a day (don't run, don't jog), then back down. Don't worry about how long it takes; the benefit is the same whether it takes you ten minutes or an hour. Vertical gain is many times more effective at improving fitness than walking along the flat. After a few weeks, hit the hill twice a day. Gradually increase your activity until you are walking 6-10km (4-6 miles) per day.
Decrease your intake. Don't give up the pie and ice cream; just skip seconds at dinner. Have a smaller slice of pie, and only one scoop of ice cream. The pleasure is in the flavor, not the filling; savor each bite. It takes a while for your stomach to realize it's full, so by eating slower you'll get that signal before you're stuffed. Stuffing yourself isn't fun, it's painful. Why should you eat 'til it hurts? Over time, by eating less, your stomach will actually shrink, to where you fill 'er up much sooner.
If you really want to, you can change your snacking habits. Instead of chips or candy, try carrot sticks or fruit slices. (A real orange tastes a thousand times better than those nasty sugar-coated "orange slices" in the candy section of the supermarket.) For a special occasion, go ahead and eat the chocolate bar, but don't waste your money on the cheap stuff. Buy some high quality candy and share it with someone special in a romantic setting. The memories you make from the time you spend will last far longer than the momentary pleasure from a bitter bar of sludge made in Pennsylvania.
I agree about the tapes. You don't have to worry about mechanical failure of the tapes.
I'd recommend looking into Exabyte's VXA-320 (VXA-3) tapes. They promise 500 writes (as compared to an average of 50 writes with DAT), their "packet technology" provides for error correction and does not depend on a continuous stream of data to efficiently write to tape, and the quality of construction of Exabyte's VXA drives appears to be very high.
The cost of VXA is very reasonable, especially when compared to technologies like LTO. (With LTO, the cost per gigabyte for the media can be higher than for hard drives.) If reliability is a concern, you're probably comparing to Travan systems, which were just plain evil. (Travail is more like it.) Exabyte claims that you can dunk the tape in coffee, dry it out, and re-read it just fine.
But I'm not just repeating what's on their website; I have actually used the hardware and like it.
"...group members said they plan to turn their attention to looking for similar flaws at another large social-networking site..."
Is Slashdot next?
...of course, "you-must-buy-sprint's-overpriced-accessory", but it IS a step in the right direction.
When my phone dies, I don't have to throw the cord out with it; I can use the cord on the next phone.
Sprint has standardized the power connectors for every phone they cell, independent of manufacturer. I, for one, am glad to see an end to the "you-must-buy-our-overpriced-accessory" extortion.
We need to standardize the selection of voltages to increments of 1.5 volts (the nominal voltage of a standard battery), then you would have "only" 16 different voltages to deal with between 1.5 and 24V. Then you standardize to ONLY use DC voltage (no low-voltage AC power supplies), then you standardize the power plugs to a single, unique connector for each voltage.
This leaves us with 16 different power connectors, which seems like a lot, but is far less than the countless proprietary connectors that are out there. If we further standardized to about 6 different voltages (say: 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, and 24 volts) then it would be manageable. It would be great to have ONE power supply on my desk that would work with my cell phone, pager, Palm, headset, toothbrush, shaver, router, switch, camera, etc.
While dd WILL make a perfect clone of a system, it is not the ideal solution for cloning systems (especially Windows) BECAUSE it makes perfect clones.
/etc/passwd file with the same UID.)
The problem lies in that for every user, machine, account, group, domain, ENTITY in a Windows environment, there is a globally unique identifier known as a SID. When you clone a machine, you also clone the SID. When you've got two or more machines with the same SID on a network, you WILL have problems. Renaming the machine does not change the machine SID, and Windows knows things more by the SID than by the name. (Think about having two users in your Linux
Secondly, dd is not ideal because it does a bitwise copy. If you are cloning a badly fragmented disk, your clone will be badly fragmented. You'll also get all the cruft left behind from deleted files. Ghost can do a dd-like bitwise copy, but in its primary mode it only copies the extant files. If you've got a 120GB disk with only 5GB used, dd will copy 120GB of bits whereas Ghost will copy 5GB of files. Think of the time involved. If your new drive/partition is not the same as the old one, you can't reliably use dd.
That being said, there are utilities available for changing the machine SID.
Write your comments first, then code to match the comments. This way, you are forced to clearly define the input, output, variables and algorithms that will be used in the code BEFORE you start coding. When it's clear in your mind, the coding becomes easier and less confusing; and you have an outline to follow to make sure you don't forget something.
If you write the code first, then annotate, you fall into two traps: "What the heck was that variable for?" forgetfulness, and "It works so stop messing with it" laziness.
That's nothing, I had a customer plug a UPS into a power strip, then plug the power strip into the UPS and then wonder why the system went down after a few minutes.
One customer had a thinnet coax network. Connections were going bad, and the network was frequently down. We advised the customer to upgrade the network to CAT5 ethernet (this was in 2001 so the cost was reasonable). Customer didn't want to spend any money on the network until it was working properly.
Another customer had installed CAT5 cabling. No jacks; he terminated it with plugs. NICs would link up, you could ping anything all day long, but as soon as you tried to do anything that put a load on the network it would all puke out. I inspected the cabling and discovered that while each end was pinned out the same (as it should be), they were not paired properly. This allowed connectivity, but it also allowed signal loss and interference. I reterminated them properly, and everything was fine.
We had a network interface with a Realtek chipset in our mail server. It would lock up randomly, requiring a power cycle of the server. Eventually I discovered I could consistently lock it up by sending out a message with particular (but not malicious) content. Immediately replaced the NIC. (I know of software vendors who refuse to support an installation where a Realtek NIC is present.)
Install anything made by TrendNet.
Install a router/firewall with a DHCP server that doesn't retain its lease database thru reboots and power cycles.
Run your network cable where you can run over it with your chair, underneath a chair mat with those pointy things, or smash it in a door jamb.
Attempt to connect an early-90s 3com hub or switch to any other hub or switch. They don't like to autonegotiate with other autonegotiate devices.
Change the IP address of your mail server, then ask your DNS host to change the MX record... but their policy requires they send you an email requiring your response to confirm the change BEFORE they will change it.
Register your domain name using an email address in that domain.
Misplace a period in a DNS zone file. On a real, live DNS server at an ISP. Watch the phone melt down.
No, we can't see it in 3D when we look out the window. The reason is that our interocular distance - the spacing between our eyes, about 60-70 mm - is too narrow in relation to the distance involved. I don't recall the practical limit of this ratio, but beyond a certain range all objects appear to lie in the same plane. When you look at the moon, shading is your only clue that it is not a flat disk. (Does a single-image photograph of the moon have any less appearance of depth than when you look at the moon directly?) This is also why we can't tell just by looking how far away each star is. We can only tell by observing the stars at opposite ends of Earth's orbit -- effectively making the interocular distance millions of miles.
I have to wonder if you don't mean three-factor authentication. After all, most systems already have two-factor authentication:
- Username
- Password
A system that simply lets walk-up users enter with no regard to who it is uses no authentication (think of a Windows system that boots to the desktop with no password prompt). A system where you have to identify yourself (username) but not verify the identity (password) uses one-factor authentication (think of a Windows system where there's a password prompt, so you have to type in a username, but that user has not been assigned a password). After all, you can say "If someone comes along and says his name is Sam, let him in the building. But don't let anybody named Joe in." Or, you can say "Let Joe in only if he says the secret code, and let Sam in only if his eyes are orange (but he doesn't need to know the secret code)."
To add biometrics, one-time-pad, SecureID, etc. to username and password would be to add a third-factor for authentication. You could say "Let Joe in only if he says the secret code AND his eyes are orange."
The first step in troubleshooting is in knowing the network topology. How are network segments separated? How are the connected? Where are routers, hubs, switches, etc.? Which switches are managed, and how are the VLANs set up on them? Where are the DHCP servers, and what do they serve? Where are all your network drops?
Do your network segments have multiple subnets attached to them?
Is everything subnetted properly?
The first set of questions are ones YOU should be able to answer. After all, it's YOUR network, and YOU should know how it's set up. The last two are harder to deal with, because these settings may be on computers not in your control.
Answer the first questions first, then when you are looking at packet traces, TCP/IP dumps, logs, etc. and you see a problem, you'll have a better idea where the problem is physically located, saving much time and energy.
And then there's the "dumb questions" I shouldn't have to ask: Do you have a loop? Are your cables wired to T568A or T568B standards? Are all your cables in good repair?
"...Finding a 5cc syringe legally is going to be tough. Well, finding ANY syring 100% legally will be tough..."
Yes, it will be tough if you go to the neighborhood drug store. You'll have to ask the pharmacist. You see, they've had so many heroin addicts shoplifting them, they've had to put them under lock and key.
Thankfully, the heroin addicts aren't smart enough to figure out that the local farm supply store has them on the shelf, out in the open, any size you want. Needles, too. No questions asked.