I find it odd to find certain people flagged friend of a friend and foe of a friend at the same time, such as yourself.
Then again, I seem to fail at friend stuff on/. (namely, gaining many, but I don't actually post useless comments to everything either), c'est ma vie./OffTopic + Posted with No Karma Bonus
If you live in the Buffalo/Rochester areas, I live not very far away from you guys at all. To explain why you guys have Time Warner: Adelphia Cable went under and had to sell its assets. Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner bought the majority thereof. They then 'traded' off certain territories, mainly so that they would have congruous coverage areas and also to avoid the divestiture percentile cutoff number. I believe that is 33% coverage area in PA at least. They didn't want to be forced to sell-off their recently purchased stuff to a 3rd-party ISP or telco (by force of anti-monopoly laws).
Comcast had originally purchased all Adelphia properties in northwestern PA and western NY. They then re-sold them to Verizon and Time Warner in exchange for other territories closer to their own congruous territory blocks.
This behavior is quite common among the large telcos.
As for my choices: Atlantic Broadband cable ($64.99/month 8mbit/512kbit), crappy dial-up or Verizon DSL. No FIOS anywhere in sight. Only real option is Atlantic Broadband. The copper wiring in this town predates my birth by at least fifty years. You can just imagine how well the DSL works running on that crap. Only good news on the fiber front in the last year is that they are building a rather large fiber plant in a town about 15-20 miles away and running fiber out from there all over that county and into ours. Outside of that, there is no fiber internet access available unless you are the school district or the banks, and even then, that fiber was NOT provided by Verizon, who refuses to do anything around here.
If I lived about 30 minutes north in Jamestown, I would have the option of Time Warner, dial-up, Windstream, or several other smaller ISPs offering DSL.
Under the "right" conditions? Microsoft, Adobe, et al, claim in their EULAs that they can terminate your right to their "license" at any time for any reason.
They also make claims like being able to modify license terms, etc at any time, for any reason, without your notification.
I wonder why lawyers haven't jumped at those claims, as it seems to me they are fraudulent and abusive, amongst other things. These companies seem to think we should all treat their "licenses" like contracts. If that is true, then why can't we sue them for breach of contract when they change the terms or revoke the "contract" without proper notification, etc?
I still find it oddly amusing that people 'sell' or expect to be 'paid' for stuff made up of ones and zeros and try to treat it like a diamond ring on display at Zale's or Tiffany & Co.
Off-Topic: I wonder if it possible to write a program, that can examine various other programs, the user interfaces, etc at the bit level, and then proceed to write its own, better versions.
And hope to hell that your clients allow you to burn a dvd of it for them. Even in this day and age, most average OEM (talking desktop systems, mainly from HP/Compaq/Dell, and not Apple or Asus) systems still won't boot from a USB stick. USB Hard Disks, yes. USB thumb drives, no. This is intentional firmware crippling. The hardware can handle it, the OEMs however, payed the BIOS makers to disable the function in their custom firmware. They did this so that you'd have to pay for the high-end models to get this functionality, and let's face it, most run-of-the-mill clients don't buy the high-end.
Lovely eh?
(Example: Several MSI and Foxconn motherboards from Dell have this feature disabled, but if you buy the exact same board models as retail boards from say Newegg, the feature works. This is especially noticeable on the Dimension, Optiplex and Inspiron desktop lines.)
As far as telling them you don't know Windows? Good, more work for me:)
I know what you mean. I lived in that area for over 20 years, and am very familiar with how tv works there. You are basically stuck with OTA or Comcast. Neither choice is very appealing at times. There are smaller cablecos (I think Blue Mountain?), but really, the choices are limited. At least you get the Baltimore stations. Where I lived at in E-Town and Mannheim, we couldn't. In Harrisburg I got the Philly channels though.
Alienware, certain Dell XPS models, Falcon Systems machines. I've seen several that start higher than Apple. Granted, those machines are aimed at the suckers, er gamer market...
Or you can just go build the Ars Technica God Box for upwards of $10k USD easily:)
Actually...I would also put forth the idea that if The Big Decision was made without consideration for the long-term viability (profits + image/PR + stability + market/mind share) of the company, the shareholders should arrive post-haste with pitchforks, tar and feathers and head straight for the Board Room + CEO's office. So, it's not just profits, but good PR (Corporate Image), etc that these multi-nationals need worry about when making such decisions.
When Corporate Entities just focus on the profit bit, then you end up with fiascoes like Enron, Worldcom, and Countrywide (amongst many other recent examples). It remains to be seen if AMD/ATI and nVidia are also in this boat - neither entity is doing well lately.
Tab Mix Plus also causes memory leaks in Firefox. Has for years. Especially noticable if you run Flashblock, AdBlock or AdBlock+. Uninstalling TMP reverts Firefox back to "normal" memory usage. No idea why.
And now that outsourcing issue is starting to bite these giant conglomerates in the ass. These USA-trained IT specialists are starting competing companies back on their home turf and elsewhere, poaching prospective H1-B employees right from under the noses of IBM, MS, Apple, etc. I've personally met people (some of them with PhD's) who have decided to return home to either start their own competing companies or to go work for a company back on their home turf. Many of them because of the way they were treated here as employees and because the salaries they would earn back home would let them live like kings and take care of their extended families. They stuck around long enough to gain extra education and training/job experience and now they are gone.
It's why places like Bangalore and Mumbai are growing so rapidly compared to even ten years ago. The companies and employees there are catching up to the rest of the world very rapidly (and in some cases surpassing them, UK for example), and selling their services to countries we probably wouldn't. They can undercut any pricing offered by US or European companies, and even Chinese and Russian companies have been taking them up on the offer, where previously they only wanted to deal with US and European tech companies.
The H1-B program needs more carrot for the employees, and less stick if you ask me. Give them more incentive to keep their skills in-country, instead of taking off back home (ex. stop threatening to revoke their work visas over trifling shit, like changing addresses). If they pass security checks and everything else that goes along with it, keep them here, period. If anything, the corporate side needs more stick, and a good whacking with it. Stricter job advertisement rules, quotas, oversight, etc are all a good start.
Quite frankly, we aren't in a position to keep kicking them out, especially when it comes to engineers, doctors, and mathematicians. Anyone saying otherwise has lost touch with the reality of our situation.
Newegg.com is one such site. Never had any problems with them, including returning faulty items. If you are in the USA, I'd recommend using them. They don't ship to outside of the US, unfortunately.
* 7 percent of pancreas cancer cases are diagnosed while the cancer is still confined to the primary site (localized stage)
* 26 percent of pancreas cancer cases are diagnosed after the cancer has spread to regional lymph nodes or directly beyond the primary site
* 52 percent of pancreatic cancer cases are diagnosed after the cancer has already metastasized (distant stage)
* 14 percent of pancreatic cancer cases had staging information that was unknown.
The corresponding five-year relative pancreatic cancer survival rates were:
* 16.4 percent for localized * 7.0 percent for regional * 1.8 percent for distant * 4.3 percent for unstaged.
Info is only a few minor percentage points different now, according to the American Cancer Society.
I am sorry to say it folks, but he's either had a re-occurrence or it had already spread to his lymph nodes before he was treated the first time around. Seeing as 2004 was when he got treated, 2009 is the 5-year mark. 5% survival rate at five years isn't too great. The rapid weight loss is very common with this particular form of cancer. Patrick Swayze is going through the same thing.
I am just curious as to what business if any at all, do the administrative networks of hospitals, or any other important infrastructure network for instance, have being connected to the public internet?
Whomever made THAT decision should be shit-canned faster than you can say "Blaster". And that goes for any public infrastructure network. It. Does. Not. Belong. Connected. To. The. Public. Internet. Period.
Funny you should say that's not really a problem. One time in France, the unskilled did just that, and the aristocracy and royalty all met Madame Guillotine's acquaintance.
The "unskilled" shouldn't be so ignored maybe, as much as there should be serious attempts to bring them into the ranks of the "skilled". This is a world-wide issue, not just a local/regional/national one.
Too bad that will never work. Think before you type. All the spammers would have to do is swap to services (coloes, etc) outside of the USA. Sure, we have spam "kings" living here, but so does Canada, China, The Phillipines, Israel, Russia and many other nations. Many of whom contract with U.S. service providers currently for bandwidth and hosting services, often using false credentials and from behind shadow companies.
Actually, quite a few people are starting to run up against the ugly DRM wall.
Ergo the people pissed off @ MS and Apple because their purchases don't work on their Sansa or Creative player.
Also, it's more than common to hear of trouble with Blu-Ray as well. It really is a superior format, but it's also totally crippled to the point that various legit Blu-Ray discs refuse to play on the various players from major manufacturers.
It's quite silly that your disc will play on a Sony player but totally fail on one from Samsung or Panasonic for example.
But yes, the people are starting to wake up to the fact that they just spent X amount of $$$ on their media and can't play it due to DRM. And they are starting to get ticked off.
Google has an absurd amount of search results if you care to do a bit of research.
I wonder how long it will be before they ban the return of HD media like they have with video games (you know, because part of the way they crack the DRM is using data from the discs to retrieve keys)...
I think a better term would be 'consumers'. I offer that term because they want us to empty our wallets repeatedly for the same shit in a different format that they shoveled at us several years ago, and expect us to gobble it up.
I wouldn't call it reasonable, so much as an easy way for the Fed to circumvent the restrictions placed on them by the 4th Amendment. Explained in a time-honored/. manner:
Step 1. Setup quasi-government agency.
Step 2. Write a law that requires all passengers and luggage to be searched by quasi-government agency.
Step 3. ?
Step 4. Profit!
I had less trouble traveling in China and Russia than I do now in my own country, and nothing got stolen by any of their airport security screeners.
Apparently they can't, or else there wouldn't be legit copyright holders who can't stream their own songs over the internet or play them in a public venue without paying a ton of royalty fees to some RIAA-controlled muppet company named SoundExchange.
On average, they also don't have an average commute of 20-30 miles or more one-way like those in the USA do either.
All of this talk of fuel efficiency coming from Europeans who drive the equivalent of 20 miles per week because their country isn't much larger than Delaware. PFFFT.
When any of them start to navigate an area the size of Texas or Utah, I'll pay attention.
As for Diesel vs Gas (Petrol)? All I know is that I pay $3.61 per US gallon for gas. I'd pay US $5.95 per gallon for diesel. On a car that averages 35 mpg on a good day, you do the math. The diesel version of my vehicle gets 37 mpg average, btw, and that is using a manual transmission.
I wish we could use sugar cane ethanol. I've read several articles about small trucks like Dodge Rams reaching 75 mpg on that stuff over those jungle roads. Impressive. Too bad our House and Senate are controlled by the Corn Lobby on this matter, and that our own cane sugar growers collude to heavily tax imported cane sugar so they can continue to reap their subsidy benefits. I believe the import tax is above 75% the last I checked. There was something about sugar cane ethanol on PBS as well. Very interesting show that was. Eye-opening for sure.
The WoW updater uses a not-so-well modified Official BT client using the standard default BT ports like 6881 the last time I checked. Quite a few ISPs have totally squelched outgoing traffic on that port. Not to mention that the client itself isn't tweaked to the connection it's running on, etc. which can also kill the connection of end users.
It's also pretty safe to say that most players on there probably don't know how to configure their firewall or router either.
I think now you get the idea on why you get crappy rates on that thing.
It's why I just download any game patches from places like FileFront.
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I find it odd to find certain people flagged friend of a friend and foe of a friend at the same time, such as yourself.
Then again, I seem to fail at friend stuff on /. (namely, gaining many, but I don't actually post useless comments to everything either), c'est ma vie. /OffTopic + Posted with No Karma Bonus
If you live in the Buffalo/Rochester areas, I live not very far away from you guys at all. To explain why you guys have Time Warner: Adelphia Cable went under and had to sell its assets. Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner bought the majority thereof. They then 'traded' off certain territories, mainly so that they would have congruous coverage areas and also to avoid the divestiture percentile cutoff number. I believe that is 33% coverage area in PA at least. They didn't want to be forced to sell-off their recently purchased stuff to a 3rd-party ISP or telco (by force of anti-monopoly laws).
Comcast had originally purchased all Adelphia properties in northwestern PA and western NY. They then re-sold them to Verizon and Time Warner in exchange for other territories closer to their own congruous territory blocks.
This behavior is quite common among the large telcos.
As for my choices: Atlantic Broadband cable ($64.99/month 8mbit/512kbit), crappy dial-up or Verizon DSL. No FIOS anywhere in sight. Only real option is Atlantic Broadband. The copper wiring in this town predates my birth by at least fifty years. You can just imagine how well the DSL works running on that crap. Only good news on the fiber front in the last year is that they are building a rather large fiber plant in a town about 15-20 miles away and running fiber out from there all over that county and into ours. Outside of that, there is no fiber internet access available unless you are the school district or the banks, and even then, that fiber was NOT provided by Verizon, who refuses to do anything around here.
If I lived about 30 minutes north in Jamestown, I would have the option of Time Warner, dial-up, Windstream, or several other smaller ISPs offering DSL.
Under the "right" conditions? Microsoft, Adobe, et al, claim in their EULAs that they can terminate your right to their "license" at any time for any reason.
They also make claims like being able to modify license terms, etc at any time, for any reason, without your notification.
I wonder why lawyers haven't jumped at those claims, as it seems to me they are fraudulent and abusive, amongst other things. These companies seem to think we should all treat their "licenses" like contracts. If that is true, then why can't we sue them for breach of contract when they change the terms or revoke the "contract" without proper notification, etc?
I still find it oddly amusing that people 'sell' or expect to be 'paid' for stuff made up of ones and zeros and try to treat it like a diamond ring on display at Zale's or Tiffany & Co.
Off-Topic: I wonder if it possible to write a program, that can examine various other programs, the user interfaces, etc at the bit level, and then proceed to write its own, better versions.
Strange, at our Walmart, they sell Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, etc.
And hope to hell that your clients allow you to burn a dvd of it for them. Even in this day and age, most average OEM (talking desktop systems, mainly from HP/Compaq/Dell, and not Apple or Asus) systems still won't boot from a USB stick. USB Hard Disks, yes. USB thumb drives, no. This is intentional firmware crippling. The hardware can handle it, the OEMs however, payed the BIOS makers to disable the function in their custom firmware. They did this so that you'd have to pay for the high-end models to get this functionality, and let's face it, most run-of-the-mill clients don't buy the high-end.
Lovely eh?
(Example: Several MSI and Foxconn motherboards from Dell have this feature disabled, but if you buy the exact same board models as retail boards from say Newegg, the feature works. This is especially noticeable on the Dimension, Optiplex and Inspiron desktop lines.)
As far as telling them you don't know Windows? Good, more work for me :)
HINT: Ever since Vista was released, being a "Local Admin" does not necessarily give you the same "Local Admin" rights you are accustomed to using.
I know what you mean. I lived in that area for over 20 years, and am very familiar with how tv works there. You are basically stuck with OTA or Comcast. Neither choice is very appealing at times. There are smaller cablecos (I think Blue Mountain?), but really, the choices are limited. At least you get the Baltimore stations. Where I lived at in E-Town and Mannheim, we couldn't. In Harrisburg I got the Philly channels though.
Alienware, certain Dell XPS models, Falcon Systems machines. I've seen several that start higher than Apple. Granted, those machines are aimed at the suckers, er gamer market...
Or you can just go build the Ars Technica God Box for upwards of $10k USD easily :)
Actually...I would also put forth the idea that if The Big Decision was made without consideration for the long-term viability (profits + image/PR + stability + market/mind share) of the company, the shareholders should arrive post-haste with pitchforks, tar and feathers and head straight for the Board Room + CEO's office. So, it's not just profits, but good PR (Corporate Image), etc that these multi-nationals need worry about when making such decisions.
When Corporate Entities just focus on the profit bit, then you end up with fiascoes like Enron, Worldcom, and Countrywide (amongst many other recent examples). It remains to be seen if AMD/ATI and nVidia are also in this boat - neither entity is doing well lately.
Tab Mix Plus also causes memory leaks in Firefox. Has for years. Especially noticable if you run Flashblock, AdBlock or AdBlock+. Uninstalling TMP reverts Firefox back to "normal" memory usage. No idea why.
Tools > Options > Tabs > New Pages Should Be Opened: > Check: "In A New Tab". > Hit Ok.
It works for quite a few "pop-up" type events.
This has been an option in Firefox now for awhile (version 2.x at least).
And now that outsourcing issue is starting to bite these giant conglomerates in the ass. These USA-trained IT specialists are starting competing companies back on their home turf and elsewhere, poaching prospective H1-B employees right from under the noses of IBM, MS, Apple, etc. I've personally met people (some of them with PhD's) who have decided to return home to either start their own competing companies or to go work for a company back on their home turf. Many of them because of the way they were treated here as employees and because the salaries they would earn back home would let them live like kings and take care of their extended families. They stuck around long enough to gain extra education and training/job experience and now they are gone.
It's why places like Bangalore and Mumbai are growing so rapidly compared to even ten years ago. The companies and employees there are catching up to the rest of the world very rapidly (and in some cases surpassing them, UK for example), and selling their services to countries we probably wouldn't. They can undercut any pricing offered by US or European companies, and even Chinese and Russian companies have been taking them up on the offer, where previously they only wanted to deal with US and European tech companies.
The H1-B program needs more carrot for the employees, and less stick if you ask me. Give them more incentive to keep their skills in-country, instead of taking off back home (ex. stop threatening to revoke their work visas over trifling shit, like changing addresses). If they pass security checks and everything else that goes along with it, keep them here, period. If anything, the corporate side needs more stick, and a good whacking with it. Stricter job advertisement rules, quotas, oversight, etc are all a good start.
Quite frankly, we aren't in a position to keep kicking them out, especially when it comes to engineers, doctors, and mathematicians. Anyone saying otherwise has lost touch with the reality of our situation.
Newegg.com is one such site. Never had any problems with them, including returning faulty items. If you are in the USA, I'd recommend using them. They don't ship to outside of the US, unfortunately.
Honestly...if he's already been treated for pancreatic cancer, his chances of living much past this year are grim....
As of 1996-2001:
Info is only a few minor percentage points different now, according to the American Cancer Society.
I am sorry to say it folks, but he's either had a re-occurrence or it had already spread to his lymph nodes before he was treated the first time around. Seeing as 2004 was when he got treated, 2009 is the 5-year mark. 5% survival rate at five years isn't too great. The rapid weight loss is very common with this particular form of cancer. Patrick Swayze is going through the same thing.
I am just curious as to what business if any at all, do the administrative networks of hospitals, or any other important infrastructure network for instance, have being connected to the public internet?
Whomever made THAT decision should be shit-canned faster than you can say "Blaster". And that goes for any public infrastructure network. It. Does. Not. Belong. Connected. To. The. Public. Internet. Period.
Funny you should say that's not really a problem. One time in France, the unskilled did just that, and the aristocracy and royalty all met Madame Guillotine's acquaintance.
The "unskilled" shouldn't be so ignored maybe, as much as there should be serious attempts to bring them into the ranks of the "skilled". This is a world-wide issue, not just a local/regional/national one.
I don't think any of them use port 80. Guild Wars uses TCP/UDP port 6112 and UDP ports 33437-33440.
Live Free and Die Bolder?
Too bad that will never work. Think before you type. All the spammers would have to do is swap to services (coloes, etc) outside of the USA. Sure, we have spam "kings" living here, but so does Canada, China, The Phillipines, Israel, Russia and many other nations. Many of whom contract with U.S. service providers currently for bandwidth and hosting services, often using false credentials and from behind shadow companies.
So, all in all, your proposal fails. Miserably.
Actually, quite a few people are starting to run up against the ugly DRM wall.
Ergo the people pissed off @ MS and Apple because their purchases don't work on their Sansa or Creative player.
Also, it's more than common to hear of trouble with Blu-Ray as well. It really is a superior format, but it's also totally crippled to the point that various legit Blu-Ray discs refuse to play on the various players from major manufacturers.
It's quite silly that your disc will play on a Sony player but totally fail on one from Samsung or Panasonic for example.
But yes, the people are starting to wake up to the fact that they just spent X amount of $$$ on their media and can't play it due to DRM. And they are starting to get ticked off.
Google has an absurd amount of search results if you care to do a bit of research.
I wonder how long it will be before they ban the return of HD media like they have with video games (you know, because part of the way they crack the DRM is using data from the discs to retrieve keys)...
I think a better term would be 'consumers'. I offer that term because they want us to empty our wallets repeatedly for the same shit in a different format that they shoveled at us several years ago, and expect us to gobble it up.
Mmmm, tasty.
I wouldn't call it reasonable, so much as an easy way for the Fed to circumvent the restrictions placed on them by the 4th Amendment. Explained in a time-honored /. manner:
Step 1. Setup quasi-government agency.
Step 2. Write a law that requires all passengers and luggage to be searched by quasi-government agency.
Step 3. ?
Step 4. Profit!
I had less trouble traveling in China and Russia than I do now in my own country, and nothing got stolen by any of their airport security screeners.
Apparently they can't, or else there wouldn't be legit copyright holders who can't stream their own songs over the internet or play them in a public venue without paying a ton of royalty fees to some RIAA-controlled muppet company named SoundExchange.
On average, they also don't have an average commute of 20-30 miles or more one-way like those in the USA do either.
All of this talk of fuel efficiency coming from Europeans who drive the equivalent of 20 miles per week because their country isn't much larger than Delaware. PFFFT.
When any of them start to navigate an area the size of Texas or Utah, I'll pay attention.
As for Diesel vs Gas (Petrol)? All I know is that I pay $3.61 per US gallon for gas. I'd pay US $5.95 per gallon for diesel. On a car that averages 35 mpg on a good day, you do the math. The diesel version of my vehicle gets 37 mpg average, btw, and that is using a manual transmission.
I wish we could use sugar cane ethanol. I've read several articles about small trucks like Dodge Rams reaching 75 mpg on that stuff over those jungle roads. Impressive. Too bad our House and Senate are controlled by the Corn Lobby on this matter, and that our own cane sugar growers collude to heavily tax imported cane sugar so they can continue to reap their subsidy benefits. I believe the import tax is above 75% the last I checked. There was something about sugar cane ethanol on PBS as well. Very interesting show that was. Eye-opening for sure.
JMHO.
The WoW updater uses a not-so-well modified Official BT client using the standard default BT ports like 6881 the last time I checked. Quite a few ISPs have totally squelched outgoing traffic on that port. Not to mention that the client itself isn't tweaked to the connection it's running on, etc. which can also kill the connection of end users.
It's also pretty safe to say that most players on there probably don't know how to configure their firewall or router either.
I think now you get the idea on why you get crappy rates on that thing.
It's why I just download any game patches from places like FileFront.