Network engineers and wiremen are two very seperate types of people, please don't confuse the two, I am actually neither (Broadcast Engineer) but work with wiremen on a regular basis on installs. This has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with reliability which we have to have as downtime on television chanels rungs into thousands every minute. If you had done your research you would know that wiremen are expensive to say the least but do the job properly. I would quite agree that 99.9% of the IT industry can't make patch cables, my industry is converging with yours but please do not confuse the two professions and their abilities on this front.
Equally what you term as the solution persons in my profession would term the problem, unnumbered and overlength cables cost more time when fault finding kit.
A decent wireman will actually be able to get a cable coming out of a loom at the same spot as it went in which does actually make tracing cables a lot easier than going through a maze of cables. Also if cables are tied back properly then the chance of them failing is substantially reduced. In my experience properly installed cables just don't fail, its the ones which aren't put in properly which fail. When the looms are installed a couple of spares are also put in to allow for the one or two which won't work from the start (broken pairs during wiring etc) and after that point it just doesn't happen. All cables have unique numbers across the facility meaning finding the two ends of a cable is a doddle.
If someone knocked a cable out while installing something else is going to cost the company several thousand a minute then yes it is worthwhile.
In terms of hard wiring, having patch panels allows you to deal with the unknown scenarios, when you put the equipment in of course you know what has to connect to what but if circumstances change down the line as well as for equipment fault finding life for all is made much easier.
again Yes!
Like others have said, if you work in an enviroment where you have to deal with machine faults etc (I'm actually a broadcaster but its increasingly server based now and the same principles apply) it makes it so much quicker and easier if the rack is wired neatly and in such a manner that you can trace cables (numbering helps too!). Unfortunatly what I've found when Broadcast and IT kit start to combine is people can't be bothered to make CAT5 cables and so the premade patch cables get used, for a temporary bodge this is fine however on permenant installations having cables the correct length and with appropriate numbering makes life so much easier!
I disagree, others are being encouraged to do the same seeing the success of Rutan. Take the press release the other day of the Cambridge University students who have just used a ballon to take pictures of the earth from 32Km for £1000 (approx $1879). Now this doesn't sound like very much and in the grand scheme of things it isn't but its their long term goals are which are important. The project intends in future launches to use ballons to push that first 30Km with a rocket then taking over to take the payload to the 100Km mark and potentially higher at a fraction of the cost. Although NASA have attempted things like this before it will be interesting to see how they do.
Quite, this is unfortunatly Google's big problem and one which is increasingly annoying about them as a company from a user perspective. It seems they simply cannot finish a product and instead get bored and go off and start another one. G-Mail, three odd years old and still in beta. While they maintain this attitude there are unlikely to be any enterprise customers for a while!
MySpace is a communication tool, no more, no less. It doesn't create these incidents, they have been there all along. Perhaps they have changed with time, perhaps not. That however is fairly irrelevant, I'm sure we've all done things in our time which we'd prefer not to be published on the internet. For me, perhaps fortunatly, the internet had not caught on to social networking during my teens in quite the same way as it has now. All MySpace does, in the same way that other similar sites do is create a little more transparancy in the system and is could be likened to having a delayed CCTV system from the camps piped into the parents home. MySpace is not to blame, should not be held responsible etc for any actions that happen at the camps, it simply puts practices and actions which have happened in the camps more into the public domain. 'What happens at camp stays at camp' is no longer such an easy oath to keep, is this the fault of MySpace, no, this is part of growing up, everyone makes mistakes, most I would like to believe learn from these. We all have experiences that have shaped our current position in life for better or for worse, MySpace does not alter this it simply treads the path where mainstream news cannot easily reach.
I can't really comment on american shows but people get the same impression here in the UK, however the audio level actually stays the same, the audio is compressed to enhance the volume of the commercials. It has now become common practice to boost the sound level of quieter passages so there is more sound power in the frequency range where the ear is sensitive. Because most TV programs do not use audio compression in the same manner, the result is that commercials are often perceived as louder. In actual decibel range, there is no measurable difference between the programs and the commercials. There are (at least in the UK) strict quality controls placed on transmission material which a programme or advert must comply with before it is transmitted. The ITU have written guidelines and specifications for this although unfortunatly these are only available for subscribers to view. Essentially the material should average a PPM reading of 4.
When he's talking about a hand moving across the screen I think we should probably assume that he's actually talking about a mouse pointer and this is infact mentioned in the video at one point. That said, I agree with most of what has been said already here that there is a fair helping of BS. The transcript of the interview doesn't match up very well with the video but when watching this he is overly vague at a lot of times. As others have said, it seems strange that he was doing all of this via Remotely Anywhere especially when he had a limited 56k connection rather than using a console.
I am still amazed that admin password were left blank, even my university can employ IT teams competent enough to set passwords on admin accounts and their security is not exacly high.
I'm going to have to jump on this one as well. I've used many laptops over the years but since going with IBM have never looked back. The X series laptops are incredibly light and well built machines. I've never bothered with special bags, the X21 I own is robust enough to take a few knocks and has been the most reliable laptop I've had, I'm using it now to write this on the train at the moment and with a larger laptop with padded bag etc I wouldn't have bothered taking it with me. I've never had a problem with the keyboard even when touchtyping and I happen to think the X series laptops look fairly good as well, this said, for me the machine is a tool not a style icon so I'm not too bothered, I use it beacuse its reliable, compact and does the job I need it to.
Leaving aside the fact that this is still a bad thing and I will probably write a letter to Skype to complain (not that it'll have any impact). How many of you actually hold conference calls of more than 5 people? The most I have ever done is 4 and thats not that common an occurance, I suppose for those of you involved in large software projects it may be a different matter. Just wondering...
There is unfortunatly reason to care, while you, I and most of/. will run antivirus and not download stupid things on our computers most users won't. While Microsoft will have anti-competition issues if they bundle antivirus software it would at least move some way to making the internet a safer place. Microsoft must do a real campaign around the launch of Vista to pursuade users to install and keep up to date antivirus definitions and windows updates.
Time and time again I see people on laptops clicking cancel on updates on their computers beacuse they either a) don't know what the window is asking them for and just instinctively went for the cancel button b) don't see the issue and so can't be bothered with it. I actually keep a credit card CD in my wallet to install McAfee with beacuse I have to deal with peoples lack of understanding so often.
I'm fortunate enough to work somewhere which has an ultrasonic cleaner, keyboard gets unplugged (laptop one as well), put in the cleaner then dried by hanging in front of an aircon unit for a few hours. Works wonders (also fantastic for cleaning nipples on IBM thinkpads!).
I don't get spam, period. I have 3 active mail accounts (Gmail, Hotmail and College), and they're all clear. Prehaps not giving out our email addresses unless we trust the source might solve a lot of peoples problems. If you need an email address to use for a signup might I suggest Mailinator. You don't need to sign up or waste any time like that, all you do is use (anything)@mailinator.com as your signup address and then go to their site to check it. For the majority of boards I use this is how I signup to them, they don't need to know who I am, for many of them I have them on an aggregator or I check them periodically anyway so its not a problem.
Re:At least it has one key feature......
on
The USB Wristband
·
· Score: 1
I have no idea if we even have an emergency broadcast channel or radio station.
Speaking to someone who worked at the BBC for some years there is (or at least there was!) an underground bunker designed for transmitting emergency announcments. Much more than this I don't know!
lol, the BBC actually has a seperate server farm in NY partly beacuse of the number of visitors to its worldwide news site from the USA (also for disaster recovery). I don't think the BBC does too badly, 24m page impressions a day isn't bad. Alexa traffic details for CNN put it at 27m so the 'brits' are doing quite well for a small country!
When you talk about the BBC as a government news organisation, it is paid for by the British tax payer but maintains editorial and commisioning independence in all its publications.
try this if your still having problems:
http://windowsupdate.62nds.com/
Claims to work with Firefox although I havnt tested it!
Re:Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?
on
Google to Buy Opera?
·
· Score: 1
Yes, Google puts out a product, and AFAIK they do no advertising. Not even hardly on their front page, but yet they get instant exposure to millions by word of mouth like the parent said.
Now it might just be me but speaking to less 'web savvy' computer users and seeing the way they interact with the internet most use "www.google.com" But, they don't use "www.google.com/ig" or many of the other services available. Again speaking only from experience here but I don't know anyone who uses Google Talk, why would they MSN Messenger has voice and video, why do they care if they're using a Google system?
Google from where I'm sitting acheives penetration to Bloggers,/. readers, and other technically versed people but the average joe doesn't know and quite often doesn't seem to care.
Google is not going to 'beat' microsoft for quite sometime, Google does Information (primarily) and Microsoft does what most people see and use when they turn on their computer (software/bloatware). I must say, I belive (IMHO) in many ways the best thing Google could do is to produce a Linux distro suitable for the average user with all their products embedded into it plus suitable open source word processing, internet apps etc.
Just my thoughts...
In the same way that robots have taken over roles on earth in various industries this is a sensible and more effective method of transporting materials to the ISS. The additional costs of life supporting systems and of course the payload space for humans are surely not warranted for this sort of mission. The ATV is one of a number of projects coming out of Europe although there is admittedly a smaller budget over here for space projects than NASA have!
Slashdot Mirror
whoa, what happened to christmas? didn't realise it was april fools day already!
Network engineers and wiremen are two very seperate types of people, please don't confuse the two, I am actually neither (Broadcast Engineer) but work with wiremen on a regular basis on installs. This has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with reliability which we have to have as downtime on television chanels rungs into thousands every minute. If you had done your research you would know that wiremen are expensive to say the least but do the job properly. I would quite agree that 99.9% of the IT industry can't make patch cables, my industry is converging with yours but please do not confuse the two professions and their abilities on this front. Equally what you term as the solution persons in my profession would term the problem, unnumbered and overlength cables cost more time when fault finding kit.
A decent wireman will actually be able to get a cable coming out of a loom at the same spot as it went in which does actually make tracing cables a lot easier than going through a maze of cables. Also if cables are tied back properly then the chance of them failing is substantially reduced. In my experience properly installed cables just don't fail, its the ones which aren't put in properly which fail. When the looms are installed a couple of spares are also put in to allow for the one or two which won't work from the start (broken pairs during wiring etc) and after that point it just doesn't happen. All cables have unique numbers across the facility meaning finding the two ends of a cable is a doddle. If someone knocked a cable out while installing something else is going to cost the company several thousand a minute then yes it is worthwhile. In terms of hard wiring, having patch panels allows you to deal with the unknown scenarios, when you put the equipment in of course you know what has to connect to what but if circumstances change down the line as well as for equipment fault finding life for all is made much easier.
again Yes! Like others have said, if you work in an enviroment where you have to deal with machine faults etc (I'm actually a broadcaster but its increasingly server based now and the same principles apply) it makes it so much quicker and easier if the rack is wired neatly and in such a manner that you can trace cables (numbering helps too!). Unfortunatly what I've found when Broadcast and IT kit start to combine is people can't be bothered to make CAT5 cables and so the premade patch cables get used, for a temporary bodge this is fine however on permenant installations having cables the correct length and with appropriate numbering makes life so much easier!
I disagree, others are being encouraged to do the same seeing the success of Rutan. Take the press release the other day of the Cambridge University students who have just used a ballon to take pictures of the earth from 32Km for £1000 (approx $1879). Now this doesn't sound like very much and in the grand scheme of things it isn't but its their long term goals are which are important. The project intends in future launches to use ballons to push that first 30Km with a rocket then taking over to take the payload to the 100Km mark and potentially higher at a fraction of the cost. Although NASA have attempted things like this before it will be interesting to see how they do.
Quite, this is unfortunatly Google's big problem and one which is increasingly annoying about them as a company from a user perspective. It seems they simply cannot finish a product and instead get bored and go off and start another one. G-Mail, three odd years old and still in beta. While they maintain this attitude there are unlikely to be any enterprise customers for a while!
MySpace is a communication tool, no more, no less. It doesn't create these incidents, they have been there all along. Perhaps they have changed with time, perhaps not. That however is fairly irrelevant, I'm sure we've all done things in our time which we'd prefer not to be published on the internet. For me, perhaps fortunatly, the internet had not caught on to social networking during my teens in quite the same way as it has now. All MySpace does, in the same way that other similar sites do is create a little more transparancy in the system and is could be likened to having a delayed CCTV system from the camps piped into the parents home. MySpace is not to blame, should not be held responsible etc for any actions that happen at the camps, it simply puts practices and actions which have happened in the camps more into the public domain. 'What happens at camp stays at camp' is no longer such an easy oath to keep, is this the fault of MySpace, no, this is part of growing up, everyone makes mistakes, most I would like to believe learn from these. We all have experiences that have shaped our current position in life for better or for worse, MySpace does not alter this it simply treads the path where mainstream news cannot easily reach.
I can't really comment on american shows but people get the same impression here in the UK, however the audio level actually stays the same, the audio is compressed to enhance the volume of the commercials. It has now become common practice to boost the sound level of quieter passages so there is more sound power in the frequency range where the ear is sensitive. Because most TV programs do not use audio compression in the same manner, the result is that commercials are often perceived as louder. In actual decibel range, there is no measurable difference between the programs and the commercials. There are (at least in the UK) strict quality controls placed on transmission material which a programme or advert must comply with before it is transmitted. The ITU have written guidelines and specifications for this although unfortunatly these are only available for subscribers to view. Essentially the material should average a PPM reading of 4.
When he's talking about a hand moving across the screen I think we should probably assume that he's actually talking about a mouse pointer and this is infact mentioned in the video at one point. That said, I agree with most of what has been said already here that there is a fair helping of BS. The transcript of the interview doesn't match up very well with the video but when watching this he is overly vague at a lot of times. As others have said, it seems strange that he was doing all of this via Remotely Anywhere especially when he had a limited 56k connection rather than using a console.
I am still amazed that admin password were left blank, even my university can employ IT teams competent enough to set passwords on admin accounts and their security is not exacly high.
I'm going to have to jump on this one as well. I've used many laptops over the years but since going with IBM have never looked back. The X series laptops are incredibly light and well built machines. I've never bothered with special bags, the X21 I own is robust enough to take a few knocks and has been the most reliable laptop I've had, I'm using it now to write this on the train at the moment and with a larger laptop with padded bag etc I wouldn't have bothered taking it with me. I've never had a problem with the keyboard even when touchtyping and I happen to think the X series laptops look fairly good as well, this said, for me the machine is a tool not a style icon so I'm not too bothered, I use it beacuse its reliable, compact and does the job I need it to.
Leaving aside the fact that this is still a bad thing and I will probably write a letter to Skype to complain (not that it'll have any impact). How many of you actually hold conference calls of more than 5 people? The most I have ever done is 4 and thats not that common an occurance, I suppose for those of you involved in large software projects it may be a different matter. Just wondering...
There is unfortunatly reason to care, while you, I and most of /. will run antivirus and not download stupid things on our computers most users won't. While Microsoft will have anti-competition issues if they bundle antivirus software it would at least move some way to making the internet a safer place. Microsoft must do a real campaign around the launch of Vista to pursuade users to install and keep up to date antivirus definitions and windows updates.
Time and time again I see people on laptops clicking cancel on updates on their computers beacuse they either a) don't know what the window is asking them for and just instinctively went for the cancel button b) don't see the issue and so can't be bothered with it. I actually keep a credit card CD in my wallet to install McAfee with beacuse I have to deal with peoples lack of understanding so often.
I'm fortunate enough to work somewhere which has an ultrasonic cleaner, keyboard gets unplugged (laptop one as well), put in the cleaner then dried by hanging in front of an aircon unit for a few hours. Works wonders (also fantastic for cleaning nipples on IBM thinkpads!).
I don't get spam, period. I have 3 active mail accounts (Gmail, Hotmail and College), and they're all clear. Prehaps not giving out our email addresses unless we trust the source might solve a lot of peoples problems. If you need an email address to use for a signup might I suggest Mailinator. You don't need to sign up or waste any time like that, all you do is use (anything)@mailinator.com as your signup address and then go to their site to check it. For the majority of boards I use this is how I signup to them, they don't need to know who I am, for many of them I have them on an aggregator or I check them periodically anyway so its not a problem.
Portable OS/Software?
Seen this yet?
If I had the spare cash I'd have one now.
I have no idea if we even have an emergency broadcast channel or radio station.
Speaking to someone who worked at the BBC for some years there is (or at least there was!) an underground bunker designed for transmitting emergency announcments. Much more than this I don't know!
lol, the BBC actually has a seperate server farm in NY partly beacuse of the number of visitors to its worldwide news site from the USA (also for disaster recovery). I don't think the BBC does too badly, 24m page impressions a day isn't bad. Alexa traffic details for CNN put it at 27m so the 'brits' are doing quite well for a small country! When you talk about the BBC as a government news organisation, it is paid for by the British tax payer but maintains editorial and commisioning independence in all its publications.
try this if your still having problems: http://windowsupdate.62nds.com/ Claims to work with Firefox although I havnt tested it!
Yes, Google puts out a product, and AFAIK they do no advertising. Not even hardly on their front page, but yet they get instant exposure to millions by word of mouth like the parent said. Now it might just be me but speaking to less 'web savvy' computer users and seeing the way they interact with the internet most use "www.google.com" But, they don't use "www.google.com/ig" or many of the other services available. Again speaking only from experience here but I don't know anyone who uses Google Talk, why would they MSN Messenger has voice and video, why do they care if they're using a Google system? Google from where I'm sitting acheives penetration to Bloggers, /. readers, and other technically versed people but the average joe doesn't know and quite often doesn't seem to care.
Google is not going to 'beat' microsoft for quite sometime, Google does Information (primarily) and Microsoft does what most people see and use when they turn on their computer (software/bloatware). I must say, I belive (IMHO) in many ways the best thing Google could do is to produce a Linux distro suitable for the average user with all their products embedded into it plus suitable open source word processing, internet apps etc.
Just my thoughts...
They have just released a beta of what they belive will be an "Enhanced and improved" Hotmail. Looks pretty horrible but here it is anyway Mailbeta
In the same way that robots have taken over roles on earth in various industries this is a sensible and more effective method of transporting materials to the ISS. The additional costs of life supporting systems and of course the payload space for humans are surely not warranted for this sort of mission. The ATV is one of a number of projects coming out of Europe although there is admittedly a smaller budget over here for space projects than NASA have!