The jacket is a cool idea, but unless all of the devices worn on it are bulletproof (which would be pretty slick) I'll pass. As it is, I had an Ipaq as well as several other PDAs before. They where just to fragile for me to consider carrying them that close to me all the time. About the only thing I feel comfortable carrying on my person would be my cellphone and pager - everything else would have me trying to constantly remember things like "Ok, PDA in pocket X, make sure I don't sit/do jumping jacks/box/etc etc".
the 1 device per channel for SATA. Most motherboards that have onboard SATA usually have only 2 SATA channels + the usual PATA. A lot of those onboard SATA have built in RAID controllers. Right now mainly power users are buying SATA stuff. And buying 2 and RAIDing them. So if they made an optical drive that used SATA, it wouldn't sell very well right now. You'll probably see them once they throw more then the usual 2 SATA channels on the board and it becomes a bit more mainstream then it is right now. Seems like a simple supply vs demand thing.
Amen man. Same here - only I didn't go to college. I rose through the ranks and rode the dot.com wave. Been out of IT 2 years now, except for the occasional consulting work. Back to college I go!
Can someone please explain to me...
on
No More Leap Second?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Exactly how do they figure out where the Earth is supposed to be down to a given second?
I understand Atomic clocks and how they work - but I don't understand how scientists can deduce where the earth should be to the exact second and correct it as such.
In defense of the Texan accent thing - you'd be surprised! I moved to Dallas back in the mid-90's and had major preconceived notions about what it was going to be like.
Coming from Chicago, I wrongly assumed I'd run into big belt buckles, cowboy hats, beat up pickup trucks and glistening acres of trailer homes.
Boy, was I wrong. Very wrong.
Overall, the majority of the people in the DFW metroplex where transplants like me. People from the north heading down to the South to help support a part of the state that was booming - with more jobs then people.
I encountered very subtle accents (For example, I called the closest UHaul center and was told it was off of "beltlawn" drive. I couldn't find beltlawn, but I found beltline - a subtle accent which I quickly grew accustomed to), very few beat up trucks and big belt buckles. What I did find though was a COL immensely less then Chicago even though the pay remained closely the same (I had a 2000 SQFT 2 bedroom apartment there for $900/month. Fireplace, whirpool tub, seperate shower, huge patio, vaulted 15' ceilings, private garage, etc) and a refreshing moderness. Everything in Dallas and Fort Worth was, for the most part, built in the last 20 years.
I worked for a Dell call center, and ran into few Texas natives there. Most where people like me!
I know this is will probably be modded as off-topic, but I like to let people know that their notions of Texas (At least the Dallas area) are way offbase. Living all over the US & Canada, I've had tons of prejudices happily smashed and it allows me to look at things now with a quite open mind!
Weather duck is a neat little gadget made by ITWatchdogs. It's listed at $179 on their site, and seems like a pretty cool little device. Monitors Temperature, Humidity, Air Flow, Light Level, Door open/closed (I/O ports) internally plus it has a bunch of external sensors you can hook up to it. Even says: "With the supplied software, you can receive e-mail alerts or be paged when temperature or any of the other values is exceeded. View the data on the web. Log in Excel spreadsheets. Add a $40 Web Cam and the software attaches a picture to the web page."
Ever since I've gotten out of IT my desire to play with things in the house has increased - so I've been looking into little gadgets like this. It might not be a home brewed solution, but for under $200 it's cheap enough for me! For added protection, pick up the liquid sensor and put it in a low spot on the basement - if a pipe bursts, it'll email you and let you know.
(The usual note: I don't work for them. I just think it's a neat product and I haven't seen anything near it's price range that does the same stuff)
First, go pick up this CD organizer. Holds 100 CDs/DVDs and runs $50. Connects via USB. Now run out and spend $20 or so on a slotload DVD-Rom. Now all you have to do is work a little hack magic to place the slotload DVD-ROM where the CD/DVD ejects, and there's your jukebox. It's slow, not very hightech, but it'll get the job done and run you $70 or so each. I have planned on doing this for quite some time, just haven't had the time to sit and devote to it yet. Be a nice little hack though.
I think the reason the US as a whole doesn't invest more in trains is the fact that the country is A. Pretty big and B. Pretty Empty. There's a lot less people per square mile here then in Japan and the like. Personally, I love the Chicago transit authority. I've lived as far away as Milwaukee and still commuted into Chicago every day (in fact, living in Milwaukee the commute was shorter then a lot of other train lines - the train made 2 stops and went 80mph most of the way there, about 45 min commute). And that's just the suburban rail, the inner city railway (CTA) is pretty efficient as well, though I have less experience with it.
I've lived all over the US, and every big city runs more or less this way. Because in that case it makes sense. More people in less area. But I can't see a Maglev from Chicago to LA being setup because for the most part this 300MPH train would run through empty land.. Small towns, few people, etc. It would have a huge maintenence cost associated with it to, as they'd have to train people all over the country or have people roaming around ensuring the rails are fine.
I want Navtech to team up with a couple of the large carriers, like Schneider National, Werner Enterprises, JB Hunt and the other large trucking companies. These 3 companies, and many more, already have GPS transponders in the truck that track their locations and report back in realtime via Satellite. Now, when a driver sees major road construction, etc, on major interstates they simply hit a button on their QualComm OmniTracs unit marking it as such. After so many drivers have done this, it marks the area as being under construction, with a little bit of info about what's going on (resurfacing, 3 lanes closed westbound from 9pm-4am at milemarker 139 to 177 until 12/16/03) and mapquest inturns adds that data to it's routing database. This would be an excellent way for mapquest to add a pay-for service that I for one would definately use.
Just because you can afford 1500$/employee doesn't mean you have to give it to them.
If it was up to me, I'd give them 750$~ or so and a 3 or 4day weekend for each of them when time allows.
I only suggest this because the company I used to work, everyone got a $5000 bonus every year (or more). Then one year it ended up being 3000$, even though the company did better then ever, and we were all bummed out. I know I know, flame me for bitching about a 3k bonus instead of 5, but when you come to expect it for bills and such and it doesn't happen, it's a blow to moral. So just start em out small, make sure you can afford it. Remember, even though a bonus is basically a "thanks!" your employees will get used to it, and when you hit a bad year (if) and can't give out bonuses, it'll be a slam to their moral. So start out small, make sure you can cover things, then slowly increase it.
1. Thanks for the info - I didn't really stop to think about those implications.
2. It's not a typo, it's the internal sensor reading though. The drive is all by it's lonesome in a well ventilated case away from all other heat generating hear, so that probably has a big deal to do with it.
That's the reason I can't trust a majority of the review sites out there - just to many "what if's" (Not to mention the worthless benchmarks.... A FPS Game demo on a toughbook? What?)
In a perfect world reviewers would be able to pay for the items they review without letting the manufacturer know. But unless your reviewing technology that's 5 years old the price is just to insane. Not to mention that most review sites online aren't anywhere near a real "money maker" and plaster ads everywhere trying to make a buck.
The first review site that does a "Car and Driver" type review is the one that I'll go to exclusively. Review the hardware now, a month from now, 6 months from now, and a year. Let us know that that dual amd board can handle being a DB server for a year straight, etc. Test the customer support, driver support, etc. I'd even pay for the extended tests.
I hate purchasing machines for work, be they DNS, PDC, SQL, etc, and having to stick with a big vendor because we know how they will work down the road. I'd much rather save some money and go with someone else, or even a homebuilt. There's just not enough support info or testing on others to be found to warrant it. It's a shame too.
It's real asnine - but it's a money maker as a majority of the public don't give a damn about the printer or ink costs or quality as long as they can print full color pictures of the grandkids. I'm still using an old HP Deskjet 710C from 1997 - I keep looking at upgrading, but all the new printers seem so cheap now.
I think a few people have actually said it, but it's almost cheaper (and some times a lot cheaper) to go out and buy 3-4 lexmark printers from Officemax when they come with rebates - use em until the ink runs out, donate it to the Goodwill, and open a new one.
Speaking of goodwill, check em out when you can. Me and the wife went to the one by the house last weekend - I shit you not when I say I found over 40 printers sitting there for sale. No lasers (damn it!) but I did almost pickup an HP Deskjet CSE870 professional - a nice printer.
I think my next *new* printer will be a laser, and the rest I'll buy secondhand - I just don't have that much use for color these days.
Alas, I knew of the wonders of SpeakEasy at one time - but no more. Where I currently live the most they can give me is 384k SDSL, which sucks. So I'm toughing it out with good ole Time Warner cable. To tell the honest truth, of all the places I've lived and all the cable modem services I've used, Time Warner out of Milwaukee seems to be the best. They just bumped up my DL, so now I'm getting a consistent 3100/365. Upload sucks, but oh well. They don't block any ports and it has gone down on me.
I'd still rather go for SpeakEasy again, but I'll have to wait until I move closer to a CO to get them again.
I've seen somewhere on the web a nifty little hdd enclosure that suspended the hard drive in an elastic web. Think of it as a hard drive being suspended with rubber bands on all sides - from what I can recall about it the enclosure almost eliminated all the noise, as the hard drive was acoustically isolated from the chassis by the rubber bands. That's the big reason you hear the noise, it's being amplified by the case itself.
But if it helps at all, try Samsung drives - I have a Spinpoint 80Gb drive in this PC and it's absolutely silent. I can't hear it at all - even though it's directly connected to the case. It also happens to run quite cool to, especially for a 7200RPM drive. Running a S.M.A.R.T. monitor the highest I've seen the drive temp has been about 17C.
Damn it - all this work to obfuscate my email address ( bob AT hottroutmail DOT com), the hours and hours of research, the black/grey/whitelists, the spamassassin configs - all to no avail as some smart guy posts my email on the "Email Account O Rama" that is/.! ALL WASTED!
Seriously though, on a side note - I used to do the easy obfuscating, the user(AT)domain(DOT)com, the user@no-spamdomain.com, etc etc but then I started thinking...
I know if *I* were to plan an email harvesting bot, I'd definately add things like "(AT)", "(DOT)", "NO-Spam", "RemoveTHis", "Remove-This", etc etc as keywords to email addresses. Odds are I'd get even more valid addresses that way, since it's so common place. You could even do it via a Google search of "NOSPAM" +COM -"nospam.com" and variations of it. Sure, there's a lot of things that pop up that DON'T have to do with an email address, but click next a few times and look, it'll pull things up. I'm almost attempted to write a little script with the google api to see how many valid addresses I could pull up like this.
It's because of this reason that (except for Slashdot's obfuscating) I don't do anything except try to run the best anti-spam setup I can.
Scuzzy and Ida! Excellent! I now have possible names for the next cat that I don't have to explain the meaning off to the wife, just let her think it's a non computer thing.
The reason I named my cat "Cat 5" was an old UserFriendly cartoon. I hit up the archives looking for it, but a quick search didn't pull up the 'toon.
I'll second that - I've used DomainMonger since 2000 or 2001 and haven't had a single problem with em. They aren't the cheapest at 15$ or so, but they offer services I like, it's a nice clean interface, and the price is low enough to handle.
Though I probably stick with them more for the familiarity of it then anything else. Always wanted to give godaddy a try, but just never got around to it.
Slashdot Mirror
The jacket is a cool idea, but unless all of the devices worn on it are bulletproof (which would be pretty slick) I'll pass.
As it is, I had an Ipaq as well as several other PDAs before. They where just to fragile for me to consider carrying them that close to me all the time.
About the only thing I feel comfortable carrying on my person would be my cellphone and pager - everything else would have me trying to constantly remember things like "Ok, PDA in pocket X, make sure I don't sit/do jumping jacks/box/etc etc".
hich may manifest itself as Microsoft Word being very slow to start
So I take it this has been a problem with Word for the past 10 years or so? Or did you mean "Microsoft Word being even SLOWER to start"?
the 1 device per channel for SATA.
Most motherboards that have onboard SATA usually have only 2 SATA channels + the usual PATA. A lot of those onboard SATA have built in RAID controllers. Right now mainly power users are buying SATA stuff. And buying 2 and RAIDing them.
So if they made an optical drive that used SATA, it wouldn't sell very well right now. You'll probably see them once they throw more then the usual 2 SATA channels on the board and it becomes a bit more mainstream then it is right now. Seems like a simple supply vs demand thing.
Amen man. Same here - only I didn't go to college. I rose through the ranks and rode the dot.com wave. Been out of IT 2 years now, except for the occasional consulting work. Back to college I go!
Exactly how do they figure out where the Earth is supposed to be down to a given second?
I understand Atomic clocks and how they work - but I don't understand how scientists can deduce where the earth should be to the exact second and correct it as such.
In defense of the Texan accent thing - you'd be surprised! I moved to Dallas back in the mid-90's and had major preconceived notions about what it was going to be like.
Coming from Chicago, I wrongly assumed I'd run into big belt buckles, cowboy hats, beat up pickup trucks and glistening acres of trailer homes.
Boy, was I wrong. Very wrong.
Overall, the majority of the people in the DFW metroplex where transplants like me. People from the north heading down to the South to help support a part of the state that was booming - with more jobs then people.
I encountered very subtle accents (For example, I called the closest UHaul center and was told it was off of "beltlawn" drive. I couldn't find beltlawn, but I found beltline - a subtle accent which I quickly grew accustomed to), very few beat up trucks and big belt buckles. What I did find though was a COL immensely less then Chicago even though the pay remained closely the same (I had a 2000 SQFT 2 bedroom apartment there for $900/month. Fireplace, whirpool tub, seperate shower, huge patio, vaulted 15' ceilings, private garage, etc) and a refreshing moderness. Everything in Dallas and Fort Worth was, for the most part, built in the last 20 years.
I worked for a Dell call center, and ran into few Texas natives there. Most where people like me!
I know this is will probably be modded as off-topic, but I like to let people know that their notions of Texas (At least the Dallas area) are way offbase. Living all over the US & Canada, I've had tons of prejudices happily smashed and it allows me to look at things now with a quite open mind!
So that's where Peewee Herman ended up, working for the BBC.
Let's hope he doesn't any movie reviews!
Weather duck is a neat little gadget made by ITWatchdogs. It's listed at $179 on their site, and seems like a pretty cool little device.
Monitors Temperature, Humidity, Air Flow, Light Level, Door open/closed (I/O ports) internally plus it has a bunch of external sensors you can hook up to it.
Even says:
"With the supplied software, you can receive e-mail alerts or be paged when temperature or any of the other values is exceeded. View the data on the web. Log in Excel spreadsheets. Add a $40 Web Cam and the software attaches a picture to the web page."
Ever since I've gotten out of IT my desire to play with things in the house has increased - so I've been looking into little gadgets like this.
It might not be a home brewed solution, but for under $200 it's cheap enough for me!
For added protection, pick up the liquid sensor and put it in a low spot on the basement - if a pipe bursts, it'll email you and let you know.
(The usual note: I don't work for them. I just think it's a neat product and I haven't seen anything near it's price range that does the same stuff)
First, go pick up this CD organizer. Holds 100 CDs/DVDs and runs $50. Connects via USB.
Now run out and spend $20 or so on a slotload DVD-Rom. Now all you have to do is work a little hack magic to place the slotload DVD-ROM where the CD/DVD ejects, and there's your jukebox.
It's slow, not very hightech, but it'll get the job done and run you $70 or so each.
I have planned on doing this for quite some time, just haven't had the time to sit and devote to it yet. Be a nice little hack though.
I think the reason the US as a whole doesn't invest more in trains is the fact that the country is A. Pretty big and B. Pretty Empty.
There's a lot less people per square mile here then in Japan and the like.
Personally, I love the Chicago transit authority. I've lived as far away as Milwaukee and still commuted into Chicago every day (in fact, living in Milwaukee the commute was shorter then a lot of other train lines - the train made 2 stops and went 80mph most of the way there, about 45 min commute). And that's just the suburban rail, the inner city railway (CTA) is pretty efficient as well, though I have less experience with it.
I've lived all over the US, and every big city runs more or less this way. Because in that case it makes sense. More people in less area. But I can't see a Maglev from Chicago to LA being setup because for the most part this 300MPH train would run through empty land.. Small towns, few people, etc. It would have a huge maintenence cost associated with it to, as they'd have to train people all over the country or have people roaming around ensuring the rails are fine.
I want Navtech to team up with a couple of the large carriers, like Schneider National, Werner Enterprises, JB Hunt and the other large trucking companies. These 3 companies, and many more, already have GPS transponders in the truck that track their locations and report back in realtime via Satellite.
Now, when a driver sees major road construction, etc, on major interstates they simply hit a button on their QualComm OmniTracs unit marking it as such. After so many drivers have done this, it marks the area as being under construction, with a little bit of info about what's going on (resurfacing, 3 lanes closed westbound from 9pm-4am at milemarker 139 to 177 until 12/16/03) and mapquest inturns adds that data to it's routing database.
This would be an excellent way for mapquest to add a pay-for service that I for one would definately use.
Just watch out for those versions of Drake that like to eat CD-ROM drives hehe
Just because you can afford 1500$/employee doesn't mean you have to give it to them.
If it was up to me, I'd give them 750$~ or so and a 3 or 4day weekend for each of them when time allows.
I only suggest this because the company I used to work, everyone got a $5000 bonus every year (or more). Then one year it ended up being 3000$, even though the company did better then ever, and we were all bummed out. I know I know, flame me for bitching about a 3k bonus instead of 5, but when you come to expect it for bills and such and it doesn't happen, it's a blow to moral. So just start em out small, make sure you can afford it. Remember, even though a bonus is basically a "thanks!" your employees will get used to it, and when you hit a bad year (if) and can't give out bonuses, it'll be a slam to their moral. So start out small, make sure you can cover things, then slowly increase it.
Well, think about it. Unemployed geek + broadband + DV Camera + Insomnia = 800 gb of fat geek love!
ermmm, maybe it's best to forget I wrote that.
That's a lot of porn. Though I think their stats are off a bit, as I have 800gb of porn, not mb. Oh well, better luck next year!
1. Thanks for the info - I didn't really stop to think about those implications.
2. It's not a typo, it's the internal sensor reading though. The drive is all by it's lonesome in a well ventilated case away from all other heat generating hear, so that probably has a big deal to do with it.
That's the reason I can't trust a majority of the review sites out there - just to many "what if's" (Not to mention the worthless benchmarks.... A FPS Game demo on a toughbook? What?)
In a perfect world reviewers would be able to pay for the items they review without letting the manufacturer know. But unless your reviewing technology that's 5 years old the price is just to insane. Not to mention that most review sites online aren't anywhere near a real "money maker" and plaster ads everywhere trying to make a buck.
The first review site that does a "Car and Driver" type review is the one that I'll go to exclusively. Review the hardware now, a month from now, 6 months from now, and a year. Let us know that that dual amd board can handle being a DB server for a year straight, etc. Test the customer support, driver support, etc. I'd even pay for the extended tests.
I hate purchasing machines for work, be they DNS, PDC, SQL, etc, and having to stick with a big vendor because we know how they will work down the road. I'd much rather save some money and go with someone else, or even a homebuilt. There's just not enough support info or testing on others to be found to warrant it. It's a shame too.
It's real asnine - but it's a money maker as a majority of the public don't give a damn about the printer or ink costs or quality as long as they can print full color pictures of the grandkids.
I'm still using an old HP Deskjet 710C from 1997 - I keep looking at upgrading, but all the new printers seem so cheap now.
I think a few people have actually said it, but it's almost cheaper (and some times a lot cheaper) to go out and buy 3-4 lexmark printers from Officemax when they come with rebates - use em until the ink runs out, donate it to the Goodwill, and open a new one.
Speaking of goodwill, check em out when you can. Me and the wife went to the one by the house last weekend - I shit you not when I say I found over 40 printers sitting there for sale. No lasers (damn it!) but I did almost pickup an HP Deskjet CSE870 professional - a nice printer.
I think my next *new* printer will be a laser, and the rest I'll buy secondhand - I just don't have that much use for color these days.
Alas, I knew of the wonders of SpeakEasy at one time - but no more. Where I currently live the most they can give me is 384k SDSL, which sucks. So I'm toughing it out with good ole Time Warner cable. To tell the honest truth, of all the places I've lived and all the cable modem services I've used, Time Warner out of Milwaukee seems to be the best. They just bumped up my DL, so now I'm getting a consistent 3100/365. Upload sucks, but oh well. They don't block any ports and it has gone down on me.
I'd still rather go for SpeakEasy again, but I'll have to wait until I move closer to a CO to get them again.
I've seen somewhere on the web a nifty little hdd enclosure that suspended the hard drive in an elastic web. Think of it as a hard drive being suspended with rubber bands on all sides - from what I can recall about it the enclosure almost eliminated all the noise, as the hard drive was acoustically isolated from the chassis by the rubber bands. That's the big reason you hear the noise, it's being amplified by the case itself.
But if it helps at all, try Samsung drives - I have a Spinpoint 80Gb drive in this PC and it's absolutely silent. I can't hear it at all - even though it's directly connected to the case. It also happens to run quite cool to, especially for a 7200RPM drive. Running a S.M.A.R.T. monitor the highest I've seen the drive temp has been about 17C.
Damn it - all this work to obfuscate my email address ( bob AT hottroutmail DOT com), the hours and hours of research, the black/grey/whitelists, the spamassassin configs - all to no avail as some smart guy posts my email on the "Email Account O Rama" that is /.! ALL WASTED!
Seriously though, on a side note - I used to do the easy obfuscating, the user(AT)domain(DOT)com, the user@no-spamdomain.com, etc etc but then I started thinking...
I know if *I* were to plan an email harvesting bot, I'd definately add things like "(AT)", "(DOT)", "NO-Spam", "RemoveTHis", "Remove-This", etc etc as keywords to email addresses. Odds are I'd get even more valid addresses that way, since it's so common place. You could even do it via a Google search of "NOSPAM" +COM -"nospam.com" and variations of it. Sure, there's a lot of things that pop up that DON'T have to do with an email address, but click next a few times and look, it'll pull things up. I'm almost attempted to write a little script with the google api to see how many valid addresses I could pull up like this.
It's because of this reason that (except for Slashdot's obfuscating) I don't do anything except try to run the best anti-spam setup I can.
Scuzzy and Ida! Excellent! I now have possible names for the next cat that I don't have to explain the meaning off to the wife, just let her think it's a non computer thing.
The reason I named my cat "Cat 5" was an old UserFriendly cartoon. I hit up the archives looking for it, but a quick search didn't pull up the 'toon.
Any cats owned must be named after cabling specifications
As geeky as it sounds, I did this. My wife didn't mind "Cat 5", but she really hates the other one I named "Cat 5e".
lol! I sure as hell hope that's a typo and they really meant to write AMP meter
I'll second that - I've used DomainMonger since 2000 or 2001 and haven't had a single problem with em. They aren't the cheapest at 15$ or so, but they offer services I like, it's a nice clean interface, and the price is low enough to handle.
Though I probably stick with them more for the familiarity of it then anything else. Always wanted to give godaddy a try, but just never got around to it.