One well-adopted "standard" (which isn't a standard at all) is ID3 (and its successor, ID3V2), the standard for tagging files with metadata.
The interesting thing here is that it is as standard proposed and written in the spirit of Open Source -- its development is moderated by a core group of loosely-knit volunteers, and anyone can contribute to the discussion.
It has been adopted by practically every developer -- commercial, open source, Joe-in-Basement, etc. -- of multimedia software, even Microsoft.
No standards body (IEEE, IETF, ISO, NIST, W3C, IANA, etc.) has accepted it as a standard; to my knowledge it has never been submitted to any organization as a proposed standard.
By community involvement and acceptance, it has become a de facto standard, and for the most part everyone plays by the rules.
There are "developers of color" all over the world. Look at India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Russia...
Just because there aren't many "African-Americans" or "Hispanics" in the United States that develop code doesn't mean there aren't any elsewhere in the world. The number of "white" (read: Anglo-Saxon) coders in the nations I've mentioned is probably a similarly small percentage as "colored" coders in the US.
Everyone should travel to a foreign land at least once in a lifetime. It's the only way to gain a true understanding and appreciation for other cultures.
I have installed a few of these units at customers' sites. In the U.S. they require a dedicated 120V 30A circuit -- something you most likely will NOT have in your house; such a circuit would need to be installed by a qualified person.
While you could replace the plug on the cord to fit in your present outlet, you must consider the following:
1) Your existing circuit will either be rated 15A or 20A
2) There will be other things on the circuit "upstream" of the UPS, and therefore the available capacity for the UPS will be diminished
3) The existing outlets will most likely be 15A rated outlets (in the U.S. it's legal to wire a 15A outlet in a 20A ciruit). It's generally NOT acceptable to wire a 15A plug on a device which can draw more than 15A.
4) The continuous load on a circuit may not exceed 80% of the circuit's rating. On a 120V 20A circuit, this would be 18A, or 2160VA/2160W. Your UPS will have two ratings: VA and W. (In this case, 3000VA and 2250W.) When sizing the circuit, you must consider the LARGER of these two numbers, which results in the need for a 30A circuit.
C'mon! A true Slashdotter might build a Faraday cage, not to protect him from potentially harmful electromagnetic fields, but to protect him from p***ed off neighbors when he fires up his Tesla coil and screws up their TV reception on Super Bowl Sunday.
I think the illegality that the poster is referring to is that to install conduit as suggested can cause fire/gases to be conducted from one area of the building to another, spreading the fire or poisonous gases thereby reducing the occupants' safety.
This can be resolved -- and in fact is generally required -- by sealing the conduit with some sort of firestopping material after cables are pulled. You may wish to use a material which may be removed to facilitate expansion.
And this, I might point out, is the realm of the electrical inspector, not the building inspector.
Have you checked the obvious? Many routers and firewalls also serve NTP. Try polling NTP on the firewall. It just might work.
If that doesn't work, try polling the local router. Try polling a remote router that's still inside the firewall.
A customer of mine has several sites, and the sites are linked through frame relay (or is it T-1?). The firewall blocks port 123, so NTP with the outside world is (generally) out of the question. However, the frame provider is MCI, who also happens to manage the routers for the customer, and the routers poll NTP from MCI's network, and serve NTP to the local network. Rather handy.
How exactly would this work? If they're blocking UDP/123, why wouldn't they also be blocking UDP/80?
A friend of mine wrote a userspace application that allowed him shell access to a remote system when he was behind a gestapo firewall that not only restricted you to TCP/80, but it also further restricted you to HTTP.
He "simply" tunneled the shell commands and response thru HTTP packets. He figured he could forward just about anything else similarly.
According to Epson, some of their inkjet printers use all colors of ink, even when printing only black pages, ostensibly to keep the heads clear. Even if you only print black pages, your color cartridges will eventually be depleted. Incidentally, Epson printers will refuse to print if any of the cartridges are missing or empty.
There's three possible reasons for this:
1.) They genuinely are concerned about keeping the heads clear
2.) They want to make sure you have to buy expensive ink tanks even if you don't use them
3.) They are really printing microdots that can be traced back to the printer.
I've been thinking of some possible countermeasures to protect you in the occasional episode of civil disobedience
1) Insert a random scattering of microdots in the document prior to printing
2) Include a yellow background in the document(doesn't really work for counterfeiting)
3) Overprint the same document using multiple identical printers, rendering the pattern of dots undecipherable
Without knowing the technical details of how the microdots are inserted, I see a potential problem: if the microdots are overlaid on another color, it may not be possible to obscure them because the RIP (Raster Image Processor) may create color separations which do not overlay colors. It's been reported that the encoding happens "just before the laser" which indicates that it is post-RIP processing. In this case, it would certainly be possible to overlay colors, even if the RIP doesn't do it. If, however, the RIP does allow overlays, then it shouldn't be a problem. (I may just have given Big Brother a new idea here. Hope not.)
Option 3 isn't immune to the above either, as layered encoding could be deciphered by sorting the layers.
There must be SOME way to obscure that bomb threat, ransom note, or anonymous source.
I can't speak in terms of Canada's constitution, but constitutions in general are written to define the powers of government and not individuals, enterprises, not-for-profits, or other non-governmental organizations. A constutition SHOULD place strict and severe limits on the powers of goverments and their subordinate organizations, and grant all rights of freedom to its people -- including the right to step on the freedoms of fellow citizens.
In America, our Constitution conatains this nifty little clause, popularly known as the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
You'll notice that this applies to CONGRESS (and, by extension, other governmental organizations), not to individuals. This means that I don't have to listen to your Radical Islamist Tripe (I can go elsewhere), and you don't have to listen to me evangelize my Christian beliefs (You, too, can go elsewhere). Likewise, I don't have to print your propaganda in my newspaper, and Al Jazeera doesn't have to repeat my preaching. Nevertheless, the idea that you don't have to listen to me doesn't extend to say that you can supress my speech in a public venue (In the United States, newspapers, ISPs, television, and radio are NOT public venues).
Part of freedom...of the press is the right to refuse to print articles, or in this case, to refuse access to content to a subscriber.
I do not know if Telus is a private enterprise, a public entity, or an authorized private monopoly. Nevertheless, I believe a private enterprise which wishes to censor content within its organization or on its infrastructure should have every right to do so. If, however, Telus is an authorized monopoly then perhaps they should be regulated by a different rulebook.
It may be that Microsoft uses an XML file format, which technically could be read by any other application (since it's a text file), but where it really counts is in the interpretation.
Just because OpenOffice or WordPerfect or Ole's Word Processor (tm) can open a Microsoft document and display all the content doesn't mean it will be laid out the same. If Microsoft doesn't release *these* specs, then it's still a proprietary format.
So, 29 bucks to install RAM, a "5 minute job." You did the math, and it came to $348/hour.
What about idle time?
Sure, maybe it only takes 5 minutes. But it might be 25 minutes before the next 5 minute job comes along. You still have to pay the tech for the 25 minutes they are standing around. You might only be grossing $60/hour, you're paying your tech $20, plus about $10 for benefits, leaving you with $30 to cover the overhead for the store: electricity, water, lease, furnishings, property tax, cashier, bookkeeper, inventory clerks, mailroom staff, etc. ad infinitum. Plus you gotta have a little for profit.
"Well, they just make up all that overhead in the products they sell." Um, you've never been in retail, esp. in computer retail. It's very competitive; the margins on hardware are very, very small. If they didn't provide the services, they'd be out of business in a heartbeat.
To emphasize the point of the post just above mine, that's all fine and dandy if it's your home computer and you've got several evenings to spend rebuilding your system when you'd otherwise be drinking beer and watching football.
When it comes to business, though, time is money and so is information. To pay one of your employees a day or two labor to reinstall everything on a new system not only takes them away from revenue-generating work, but also makes potentially important data unavailable for the duration. Not only that, since it's not your employee's regular job, the replacement system may not be configured optimally and therefore cuts productivity.
You could bring a tech in that spends 4 hours at $125 per, so it might cost you $500 plus parts, but your employee whose job it is to do something else is still generating revnue, and your data will be accessible much sooner.
Why are "geek squads" rising? Because the quality of telephone tech support has gone down the toilet. People just don't want to talk to someone in Sri Lanka that they can't understand and can't understand them. People don't want to have to walk thru a script of things they've already tried just to make the tech's computer happy.
People want someone who can look at the computer, know what's wrong, and fix it. They don't want to click on X, Y and Z then get Q and try to explain to the person on the other end of the line what they are seeing.
Simply put, to speak to tech support on the phone, you need to be somewhat tech savvy yourself. Then if you're a tech like me, it's frustrating to be led thru all the things you've already tried. ("I've already cleared the printer queue. I've reinstalled the driver. I've replaced the cable. For the fifteenth time, the printer's internal test page doesn't print when I use the front panel buttons!!!")
In business especially, it's not worth the time to spend hours on a tech support call when a phone call to the local computer geek results in same-day service with minimal loss of productivity. Instead of tying up an employee on the phone, that employee can be doing non-computer productive work, which just may pay for the tech's time.
Looks like you've caught me in the black hole of a logic trap.
But no, I have not clicked on THAT link. I have read enough on/. to know that it is an image I would be better off not seeing, and those who have, are worse for it. Therefore, I will not click THAT link, nor will I type it into my address bar to avoid clicking on THAT link.
Slashdot Mirror
One well-adopted "standard" (which isn't a standard at all) is ID3 (and its successor, ID3V2), the standard for tagging files with metadata.
The interesting thing here is that it is as standard proposed and written in the spirit of Open Source -- its development is moderated by a core group of loosely-knit volunteers, and anyone can contribute to the discussion.
It has been adopted by practically every developer -- commercial, open source, Joe-in-Basement, etc. -- of multimedia software, even Microsoft.
No standards body (IEEE, IETF, ISO, NIST, W3C, IANA, etc.) has accepted it as a standard; to my knowledge it has never been submitted to any organization as a proposed standard.
By community involvement and acceptance, it has become a de facto standard, and for the most part everyone plays by the rules.
There are "developers of color" all over the world. Look at India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Russia...
Just because there aren't many "African-Americans" or "Hispanics" in the United States that develop code doesn't mean there aren't any elsewhere in the world. The number of "white" (read: Anglo-Saxon) coders in the nations I've mentioned is probably a similarly small percentage as "colored" coders in the US.
Everyone should travel to a foreign land at least once in a lifetime. It's the only way to gain a true understanding and appreciation for other cultures.
Why, my pacemaker has been running for 12 yNO CARRIER
You could always shackle a leg to the desk.
As long as they don't wear prosthetics.
I have installed a few of these units at customers' sites. In the U.S. they require a dedicated 120V 30A circuit -- something you most likely will NOT have in your house; such a circuit would need to be installed by a qualified person.
While you could replace the plug on the cord to fit in your present outlet, you must consider the following:
1) Your existing circuit will either be rated 15A or 20A
2) There will be other things on the circuit "upstream" of the UPS, and therefore the available capacity for the UPS will be diminished
3) The existing outlets will most likely be 15A rated outlets (in the U.S. it's legal to wire a 15A outlet in a 20A ciruit). It's generally NOT acceptable to wire a 15A plug on a device which can draw more than 15A.
4) The continuous load on a circuit may not exceed 80% of the circuit's rating. On a 120V 20A circuit, this would be 18A, or 2160VA/2160W. Your UPS will have two ratings: VA and W. (In this case, 3000VA and 2250W.) When sizing the circuit, you must consider the LARGER of these two numbers, which results in the need for a 30A circuit.
C'mon! A true Slashdotter might build a Faraday cage, not to protect him from potentially harmful electromagnetic fields, but to protect him from p***ed off neighbors when he fires up his Tesla coil and screws up their TV reception on Super Bowl Sunday.
I think the illegality that the poster is referring to is that to install conduit as suggested can cause fire/gases to be conducted from one area of the building to another, spreading the fire or poisonous gases thereby reducing the occupants' safety.
This can be resolved -- and in fact is generally required -- by sealing the conduit with some sort of firestopping material after cables are pulled. You may wish to use a material which may be removed to facilitate expansion.
And this, I might point out, is the realm of the electrical inspector, not the building inspector.
Have you checked the obvious? Many routers and firewalls also serve NTP. Try polling NTP on the firewall. It just might work.
If that doesn't work, try polling the local router. Try polling a remote router that's still inside the firewall.
A customer of mine has several sites, and the sites are linked through frame relay (or is it T-1?). The firewall blocks port 123, so NTP with the outside world is (generally) out of the question. However, the frame provider is MCI, who also happens to manage the routers for the customer, and the routers poll NTP from MCI's network, and serve NTP to the local network. Rather handy.
How exactly would this work? If they're blocking UDP/123, why wouldn't they also be blocking UDP/80?
A friend of mine wrote a userspace application that allowed him shell access to a remote system when he was behind a gestapo firewall that not only restricted you to TCP/80, but it also further restricted you to HTTP.
He "simply" tunneled the shell commands and response thru HTTP packets. He figured he could forward just about anything else similarly.
According to Epson, some of their inkjet printers use all colors of ink, even when printing only black pages, ostensibly to keep the heads clear. Even if you only print black pages, your color cartridges will eventually be depleted. Incidentally, Epson printers will refuse to print if any of the cartridges are missing or empty.
There's three possible reasons for this:
1.) They genuinely are concerned about keeping the heads clear
2.) They want to make sure you have to buy expensive ink tanks even if you don't use them
3.) They are really printing microdots that can be traced back to the printer.
I've been thinking of some possible countermeasures to protect you in the occasional episode of civil disobedience
1) Insert a random scattering of microdots in the document prior to printing
2) Include a yellow background in the document(doesn't really work for counterfeiting)
3) Overprint the same document using multiple identical printers, rendering the pattern of dots undecipherable
Without knowing the technical details of how the microdots are inserted, I see a potential problem: if the microdots are overlaid on another color, it may not be possible to obscure them because the RIP (Raster Image Processor) may create color separations which do not overlay colors. It's been reported that the encoding happens "just before the laser" which indicates that it is post-RIP processing. In this case, it would certainly be possible to overlay colors, even if the RIP doesn't do it. If, however, the RIP does allow overlays, then it shouldn't be a problem. (I may just have given Big Brother a new idea here. Hope not.)
Option 3 isn't immune to the above either, as layered encoding could be deciphered by sorting the layers.
There must be SOME way to obscure that bomb threat, ransom note, or anonymous source.
In America, our Constitution conatains this nifty little clause, popularly known as the First Amendment:
You'll notice that this applies to CONGRESS (and, by extension, other governmental organizations), not to individuals. This means that I don't have to listen to your Radical Islamist Tripe (I can go elsewhere), and you don't have to listen to me evangelize my Christian beliefs (You, too, can go elsewhere). Likewise, I don't have to print your propaganda in my newspaper, and Al Jazeera doesn't have to repeat my preaching. Nevertheless, the idea that you don't have to listen to me doesn't extend to say that you can supress my speech in a public venue (In the United States, newspapers, ISPs, television, and radio are NOT public venues).
Part of freedom...of the press is the right to refuse to print articles, or in this case, to refuse access to content to a subscriber.
I do not know if Telus is a private enterprise, a public entity, or an authorized private monopoly. Nevertheless, I believe a private enterprise which wishes to censor content within its organization or on its infrastructure should have every right to do so. If, however, Telus is an authorized monopoly then perhaps they should be regulated by a different rulebook.
You know what they say about paradigms...
"Shift Happens."
It may be that Microsoft uses an XML file format, which technically could be read by any other application (since it's a text file), but where it really counts is in the interpretation.
Just because OpenOffice or WordPerfect or Ole's Word Processor (tm) can open a Microsoft document and display all the content doesn't mean it will be laid out the same. If Microsoft doesn't release *these* specs, then it's still a proprietary format.
Duplo is Lego.
What about...
- Erector
- Tinkertoys
- Lincoln Logs
- K*Nex
Hey, that would make a good poll: "Favorite building toy?"
Being a bachelor as I am, a good, home-cooked meal is worth far more than after-hours income at the expense of a friendship.
Whoever modded you -1 didn't get the joke.
I'm a professional on-site support tech. I work for a small company (4 techs); we do almost only business computers.
I don't do after-hours jobs anymore, except for a very few select friends and relatives. And I only charge them a meal and a good visit.
Mixing friendship and professionalism doesn't work.
So, 29 bucks to install RAM, a "5 minute job." You did the math, and it came to $348/hour.
What about idle time?
Sure, maybe it only takes 5 minutes. But it might be 25 minutes before the next 5 minute job comes along. You still have to pay the tech for the 25 minutes they are standing around. You might only be grossing $60/hour, you're paying your tech $20, plus about $10 for benefits, leaving you with $30 to cover the overhead for the store: electricity, water, lease, furnishings, property tax, cashier, bookkeeper, inventory clerks, mailroom staff, etc. ad infinitum. Plus you gotta have a little for profit.
"Well, they just make up all that overhead in the products they sell." Um, you've never been in retail, esp. in computer retail. It's very competitive; the margins on hardware are very, very small. If they didn't provide the services, they'd be out of business in a heartbeat.
To emphasize the point of the post just above mine, that's all fine and dandy if it's your home computer and you've got several evenings to spend rebuilding your system when you'd otherwise be drinking beer and watching football.
When it comes to business, though, time is money and so is information. To pay one of your employees a day or two labor to reinstall everything on a new system not only takes them away from revenue-generating work, but also makes potentially important data unavailable for the duration. Not only that, since it's not your employee's regular job, the replacement system may not be configured optimally and therefore cuts productivity.
You could bring a tech in that spends 4 hours at $125 per, so it might cost you $500 plus parts, but your employee whose job it is to do something else is still generating revnue, and your data will be accessible much sooner.
Why are "geek squads" rising? Because the quality of telephone tech support has gone down the toilet. People just don't want to talk to someone in Sri Lanka that they can't understand and can't understand them. People don't want to have to walk thru a script of things they've already tried just to make the tech's computer happy.
People want someone who can look at the computer, know what's wrong, and fix it. They don't want to click on X, Y and Z then get Q and try to explain to the person on the other end of the line what they are seeing.
Simply put, to speak to tech support on the phone, you need to be somewhat tech savvy yourself. Then if you're a tech like me, it's frustrating to be led thru all the things you've already tried. ("I've already cleared the printer queue. I've reinstalled the driver. I've replaced the cable. For the fifteenth time, the printer's internal test page doesn't print when I use the front panel buttons!!!")
In business especially, it's not worth the time to spend hours on a tech support call when a phone call to the local computer geek results in same-day service with minimal loss of productivity. Instead of tying up an employee on the phone, that employee can be doing non-computer productive work, which just may pay for the tech's time.
The one in my car starts playing exactly where it left off.
Only if you leave the CD in there. If you take it out, oh, to listen to some other CD, then put it back in, it's going to start over at the beginning.
Uh, oh.
/. to know that it is an image I would be better off not seeing, and those who have, are worse for it. Therefore, I will not click THAT link, nor will I type it into my address bar to avoid clicking on THAT link.
Looks like you've caught me in the black hole of a logic trap.
But no, I have not clicked on THAT link. I have read enough on
I must be the only one.
You mean like this?