Every time I go to a big box store (the blue and yellow one in particular) I am accosted by the helpful staff. When I wander from one department to another, I am accosted by that department's staff. I usually get three offers to help me within 5 minutes of entering the store.
I'm looking for something that catches my eye, or interests me at the moment, or is just different. I asked one staffer once, 'I'm not really looking for anything in particular. I just came in to browse". He left me alone.
His manager, however, with the big nametag compelled him to also accost me. Well, I gave the same speech. In a rare display of initiative, he helpfully offered that if I didn't actually know what I was looking for, I should not be surprised if his staff couldn't help me.
I answered in the affirmative. He seemed to be a little angry at this. I started looking around for the hot blonde and secret agents coming from the roof.
I don't like shopping there any more. It's like going to a chain restaurant, except you don't get dessert.
Yup. I image all my personal machines. It's the only way to be sure.
At work, I keep backups in two different places and a DVD. They re-image for any reason, and I have to rebuild in a hurry, so I document my own machine better than our devs document our apps.
Microsoft ENCOURAGES the practice. 'Forced' upgrades, the perception of reduced piracy, less counterfeiting, this is all to Microsoft's benefit.
Buying an new anything, especially a notebook computer, do your due diligence and get physical recovery media. And prefer vendors that can provide them with less trouble.
IBM and Lenovo uses to be pretty good about this with Thinkpads. I got a set for $50 for a used X41T I bought, and worth it just to clear up the problems with base XP installs. But I could afford it.
And while it may not have been dialup in the fashion you're thinking of, every game I played on NovaNET was dialup until Cyber1 came along. Avatar, Spacewar, wow.
"NO ONE will tell me what I can or can't do with my possessions"
Actually, you're right.
You can in fact drive your M3 down the Pima Freeway at 120+ on a Friday night. Of course, the police may put out the spike strips and tow your M3 to the impound lot.
You can, in fact, shoot someone with your gun. Getting caught will prove that the government can do whatever they want with you if you actually break the law.
But we're really focused on stuff, like iPhones and microwave ovens, right?
Hey, they didn't take down ALL the cameras on the 101, so be careful out there. Doing what you want is haszerdous to your freedom, if taken too far.
Actually, I had to root my G1 to change the software. Now I'm running a 2x radio, DangerSPL, and CM6RC2.
But it had to be rooted, which is 7331 slang for jailbreaking. As do most all Android phones, except DEV phones, which are, wait, they had to be rooted too.
Now slick is to root the HD2 and run Android on it. Ultimate bugfix.
And you all jumped to the wrong conclusion, if you think the game is the problem...
The scene does run your card just as fast as it can. This is just exposing the true state of your system - can it cool your cards, etc., at max utilization? If not, you suffer failure.
I wonder how many high-end graphics cards have inadequate on-board cooling for real-world applications. Do they test them in adverse environments? Dust? Interrupted or blocked airflow? I know, that's not really their problem, but imagine you buy tires for your daily driver that were only tested to the limits of smooth highway at 65MPH, on a nice 80 degree summer day. Take these out for a quick spin from Phoenix to Tuscon this Friday when it should be 106, and I-10 is washboard or worse for some stretches of 75MPH. Yeah, you'll be disappointed if they blow off the rim, huh? It happens anyways, cause people run them underinflated or past their useful life. But if graphics card manufacturers don't test somewhere near a worst-case environment, well, this result we're reading about should be no surprise.
And TFA shows a picture of a rig with some dust bunnies in it. Ha! My regular rig gets a LOT more than that in 3 months, and I get to go in and vacuum up all that, and the filters. It's dusty in the desert. I clean filters a lot, all over the house. I keep a scientific experiment running at work to see how much dust will accumulate on my one mostly-empty letter tray before the cleaning crew wipes it. 4mm is the maximum so far, and that took 6 months. It looks like the HVAC here is not filtering very well.
A non-story, but interesting. I usually (well, always) run WinPrime on a new rig for 18-24 hours after I build it, just to heat stress the components. Now I have a test for the graphics card. I'm happy. And I'll be buying more fans I guess.
Orchestra minimums have been a point of contention for a long time, at least since 1998. 'Canned' music is also an issue for at least as long. On tours, this is a big hassle, since every single person you bring along means expenses and troubles. On Broadway, musicals are expected to include live music, but that's also expensive, especially for rehearsals, and every show that closes in one night is a sinkhole of expenses. A lot do.
And in the end, successful shows tend to make a LOT of money, and it seems a shame to not bring the live performance in all its glory.
I saw them in concert in 73 at Oxford and Preston (shiat venue, BTW), and they were at least as wrecked as the audience, which is a little scary.
They couldn't deliver anything that sounded remorely like the album(s) except for the covers from the first album. Some they gave incredibly interesting live versions of, but some was just indecipherable. I was NOT high at the time, and beer doesn't deaden comprehension the same way, AND I was an American, so I was enthralled by the studio work and disappointed in the live stuff, save for a version of Immigrant Song that was truly inspired, despite the lack of the female vocalist - she was there, but inaudible. I think the micer was wrecked too.
20 minute drum solos gave me a chance to pee and get another can of lager.
They got a little too metaphysical in concert for me, but I was mostly too tame for that.
I got to see Pink Floyd once in England, at some old place in London, completely by accident. They did Dark Side of the Moon in entirety, and it was stunning. Of course I bought the album, and literally wore it out in 2 years. That made me buy a reel-to-reel and spare my albums. All gone now, I prefer CDs.
Zep could hardly bring an album experience, unless you listened to the albums so loud and so blitzed it didn't matter. Pink Floyd delivered.
"not especially dangerous when you have an entire planet's atmosphere to dilute the leaks."
Apparently you've never been in a ice rink with an ammonia leak , or even a suspected one. Panic evacuation is the first response. Not enough atmosphere where the ammonia is actually used to dilute it sufficiently.
Well, in defense of the poorly-worded posting, most POP bands lip-synch. Especially the teeny stuff. Do the Stones sync? Doubt it. Does Pink Sync? Like it rhymes, baby. Does Riahnna sync? I would not be surprised. Does Britney sync? As if we can even ask. MOST sync.
For TV appearances, they sure sync, since it's all studio anyways. Many sync just to avoid sounding normal. Once you start ujsing Autotune, it hardly matters any more. The artists I respect the most in this area are die-hard rockers and most rappers. And I could be fooled by rap.
Deal with it. The studio is where you craft the performance after many, many takes, and then they take it and modify it into something even more compelling to the audience. Concerts are way more difficult, but synching is probably common among pop bands, less so for some other genres. Some artists have a following based on their real voices and performances. Others, it's just contrived. Both oare genuine art, but if you claim to be a singer, you could at least be able to SING what you sang, eh?
ps - Led Zepellin and Pink Floyd in particular stand out as bands that had a hard time bringing the album to life, but they did.
Except that, generally, the system is cued by someone. People on stage are not yet so reliably timed that you can just start the sequencer and it will stay in time. Whbich also afflicts the orchesteral automation - TFA points out that composers can control timing and tempo of the synthesizer(s).
Of course, we don't mind how they get the lighting on cue. We hardly notice, and having people backstage yanking on levers and throwing switches won't enhance the performance one iota. I'm not yet sure about live v recorded orchestra, but that's another item.
My wife is not amused, being both a musician and actress. But she sees it as inevitable, having played plenty of string pads to enhance the meager orchestra at community theater. Broadway is just the last bastion of live orchestra, and costs are always an issue. We should see a union strike soon enough.
2) When you have a workable method for sending a postcard to every IP address, let me know. Mapping IP address to street address is a neat trick if you can pull it off. Just don't rely on WHOIS, for obvious reasons.
The common internal cumbustion engine is not exactly rocket science. If I sent my CRX engine over to the wiz kids ahd had it rebuilt I would EXPECT them to re-check the oil, timing, etc, crank it over a few times without fire to make sure nothing clanks inside, and have the oil pressure gauge hooked up when it is fired off for the first time just to make sure nothng was forgotten or missed. Some shops even do compression tests just to spot obvious problems.
So I'm entirely pleased that JPL gave this new Rover a cautious and careful initial drive. Why destroy a motor or break something else just because you 'know what you're doing'?
Now, sadly, we have to deal with the fear that this Rover will get to Mars, drive off the landing pad, and lurch to a halt 12 meters away just because of something no one thought of. I'd rather we make a dozen copies of Opportunity. that rover design seems to have stood the test. Make a few and land them as a MIRV'd mission. Or maybe update the power system with the nuclear option. We'll be pretty disappointed if this fancy new Rover grinds to a halt for something either stupid or unknown.
I work for a 'big' company, one that just announced huge earnings. My wife says out loud "Honey, they just made (fill in blank with obscene number), they can afford to give you a raise". How sweet, always thinking of me.
And I occasionally do something that by itself saves the company enough to actually be measured on the quarterly report. As in, "Gee, we made 1.245whatever last quarter. If I hadn't fixed blah, we would havw only made 1.44498whatever. Wow."
Oh yea, I'm important, in a lower-case kinda way.
First, these programmers ought to be told that their jobs don't exist except in the broker world, where millisecond trades are practical.
Second, does anyone pay the network admins real money? Ping and latency are crucial for these systems. You don't just go out and buy a gaming router and the business package from Time-Warner to run that sort of software. I bet the netadmins make just enough to keep them from taking bribes to snoop on traffic.
Third, and for me most important, do these programmers think through what they do for a living? Millisecond trading is the epitome of arbitrage, and even more so because it is by its design limited to the big players. The Insiders. The corporate weasels. Nice. The more you learn about HF trading, the more you want to ban it outright. At least slow it down to full seconds. Is there any real value in letting the machines dominate the way they are?
All the more reason I look for investments OUTSIDE the stock market. Wall Street is a cartel.
These whining programmers should consider their position as pretty damned good. But Wall Street is the new Silicon Valley, and programmers like these are basically doing the Valley Shuffle, from one side of the Street to another, jacking their pay each time. Nice work if you can get it, but the dot-com lesson is that sooner or later you are bound by reality. Soon enough, these guys will be happy to get a job coding PHP for the Next Insanely Great Thing, and taking the stock options knowing full well they just got toilet paper for compensation. They will beg for paid parking and a second vending machine. Don't go out and buy that condo quite yet, boys.
"It would be like searching the beach in Fiji, looking for a particular 1957 nickel."
By that analogy, how do fishermen around Fiji actually catch fish? Chase one around with a net until they get the advantage? No, they cast the net, catch what is there, and throw back the rest.
Who sent a satellite to capture comet dust? Oh yeah, us. "Stardust'. Aerogel as a capture mechanism for comet material.
Why not try sending some aerogel into LEO and use a similar method? Send it through debris fields, verify useful capture, and then throw it into Earth to either burn up or land somewhere 'safe'. Pick it up and throw it in a landfill, or send it off to be autopsied.
I know there are challenges - a maneuverable spacecraft, fuel, coordinating the orbits, where to land the debris, who gets it back. But this seems obvious to me. Aerogel is uniquely suited to this.
Alternatively, there are other ways to catch debris if you don;t much care what shape it is in when you catch it. A few layers of metal and some intervening goo, for instance. But aerogel is so light that it's cheaper to send up, it captured comet debris adequately, so it would probably be great to catch a lot of small stuff. Larger items may need a bigger or better 'net'.
It's about the money, and what to do with the more interesting pieces of junk. Russia may want their satellite stuff back.
And of course, if we do this, we just encourage China to keep on testing space weapons. Is this good?
" And so it goes with most jobs: you get paid for the work you do. With information, you get paid for all time for having done some work at some point in the past."
At my job, I get paid for work I did in the past, as recent as it was. I don't get paid daily.
Does it matter how often you get paid, or when? If intellectual property has value for multiple uses, why shouldn't the creator get paid each time it is used? Actually how ELSE would you pay a photographer, other than EVERY TIME you use one of the images they created? Would the first purchaser pay for all potential or possible use? Does the last purchaser pay less because the photographer has already gained other revenue? Who decides who is last? And if an image is valuable, and inspires multiple uses, why shouldn't the photographer receive more compensation?
"The system of artificial scarcity we call intellectual property rights was created because, unlike roofs, information is cheap and easy to duplicate"
Um, if roofs are so cheap and easy to duplicate, why not do it yourself? Answers:
- Your time doing other things is more valuable to you. So it is with photographs.
- You are not, in fact, able to do the work as well as the professional roofer. So it is with photographers.
- You are not, in fact, able to do it as cheaply with the same results as the professional. So it is with photographers.
"It's a bit of a paradox. Users don't seem to be willing to spend the money to see what they have,"
I think he meant users don't seem willing to spend the money to MANAGE what they have.
As many have pointed out, you need 'excess' capacity to avoid failing for unusual or unexpected processes. How often has the DBA team asked for a copy of a database? And when that file is a substantial portion of storage on a volume, woopsie, out of space messages can happen. Of course they should be copying it to a non-production volume. Mistakes happen. Having a spare TB of space means never having to say 'you're sorry'.
Aside from the obvious problems of keeping volumes too low on free space, there was a time when you could recover deleted files. Too little free space pretty much guarantees you won't be recovering deleted files much older than, sometimes, 15 minutes ago. In the old days, NetWare servers would let you recover anything not overwritten. I saved users from file deletions over the span of YEARS, in those halcyon days when storage became relatively cheap and a small office server could never fill a 120MB array. Those days are gone, but without free space, recovery is futile, even over the span of a week. Windows servers, of course, present greater challenges.
'Online' backups rely on delta files or some other scheme that involves either duplicating a file so it can be written intact, or saving changes so they can be rolled in after the process. More free space here means you actually get the backup to complete. Not wasted space at all.
Many of the SANs I've had the pleasure of working with had largely poor management implementations. Trying to manage dynamic volumes and overcommits had to wait for Microsoft to get its act together. Linux had a small lead in this, but unless your SAN lets you do automatic allocation and volume expansion, you might as well instrument the server and use SNMP to warn you of volume space, and be prepared for the nighttime alerts. Does your SAN allow you to let it increase volume space based on low free space, and then reclaim it later when the free space exceeds threshold? Do you get this for less than six figures? Seven? I don't know, I've been blessed with not having to do SAN management for about 5 years. I sleep much better, thanks.
Free space is precisely like empty parking lots. When business picks up, the lot is full. This is good.
I had the pleasure of flying more in the 70s and 80s, when you could get some service. Many a Friday was spend hustling to LaGuardia (and then JFK) to catch the shuttle to Boston, then being driven across the airport to catch the last Delta flight to Bangor. I missed it every 3rd or 4th time. Stayed in the Airport Hilton on their nickel (rack rooms, no real money), ate the free downstairs breakfast, and on the 7:05 to BGR. My luggage never made it, they called me Monday and I was happy to drive over.
And the stretch where I had to fly from PWM to GSO. Ah, Continental lost my luggage 4 times in 6 trips. And found it a week later. Now you can't really carry toiletries, not to mention a Micra which is such a handy tool for so many reasons, so I would be gate checking and doing without some stuff. Nice.
But the big airlines got cheap in the wrong places. And fuel prices crushed them. And deregulation means we are probably travelling somewhat cheaper, much more often, and much less comfortably then we might. I try not to whine about the seating or the 'food'. I'd just as soon pick up a $8 sandwich as eat whatever they call food today.
Now to work out how to afford business class to avoid the cattle drives.
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The only difference is, the Government makes the rules any way they want to.
And that's the only difference that matters.
Every time I go to a big box store (the blue and yellow one in particular) I am accosted by the helpful staff. When I wander from one department to another, I am accosted by that department's staff. I usually get three offers to help me within 5 minutes of entering the store.
I'm looking for something that catches my eye, or interests me at the moment, or is just different. I asked one staffer once, 'I'm not really looking for anything in particular. I just came in to browse". He left me alone.
His manager, however, with the big nametag compelled him to also accost me. Well, I gave the same speech. In a rare display of initiative, he helpfully offered that if I didn't actually know what I was looking for, I should not be surprised if his staff couldn't help me.
I answered in the affirmative. He seemed to be a little angry at this. I started looking around for the hot blonde and secret agents coming from the roof.
I don't like shopping there any more. It's like going to a chain restaurant, except you don't get dessert.
Yup. I image all my personal machines. It's the only way to be sure.
At work, I keep backups in two different places and a DVD. They re-image for any reason, and I have to rebuild in a hurry, so I document my own machine better than our devs document our apps.
"Of course, that tool only runs on a real operating system ... linux."
More helpful advice from the Linux community.
You could also advise the poster to try LAME, which runs fine on Linux and Windows, and rips fine too. But you wouldn't know about that, would you?
Great swing, pitch was a strike, situation dictated you hit, not strike out.
Sadly, you fouled it into the mitt. Strike three. Looked good, though. The scouts still think you have a great swing, just can't execute all the time.
Pity. Back to the minor leagues for you.
Microsoft ENCOURAGES the practice. 'Forced' upgrades, the perception of reduced piracy, less counterfeiting, this is all to Microsoft's benefit.
Buying an new anything, especially a notebook computer, do your due diligence and get physical recovery media. And prefer vendors that can provide them with less trouble.
IBM and Lenovo uses to be pretty good about this with Thinkpads. I got a set for $50 for a used X41T I bought, and worth it just to clear up the problems with base XP installs. But I could afford it.
Did ANYONE else ever play Balance of Power?
And while it may not have been dialup in the fashion you're thinking of, every game I played on NovaNET was dialup until Cyber1 came along. Avatar, Spacewar, wow.
"NO ONE will tell me what I can or can't do with my possessions"
Actually, you're right.
You can in fact drive your M3 down the Pima Freeway at 120+ on a Friday night. Of course, the police may put out the spike strips and tow your M3 to the impound lot.
You can, in fact, shoot someone with your gun. Getting caught will prove that the government can do whatever they want with you if you actually break the law.
But we're really focused on stuff, like iPhones and microwave ovens, right?
Hey, they didn't take down ALL the cameras on the 101, so be careful out there. Doing what you want is haszerdous to your freedom, if taken too far.
Actually, I had to root my G1 to change the software. Now I'm running a 2x radio, DangerSPL, and CM6RC2.
But it had to be rooted, which is 7331 slang for jailbreaking. As do most all Android phones, except DEV phones, which are, wait, they had to be rooted too.
Now slick is to root the HD2 and run Android on it. Ultimate bugfix.
And you all jumped to the wrong conclusion, if you think the game is the problem...
The scene does run your card just as fast as it can. This is just exposing the true state of your system - can it cool your cards, etc., at max utilization? If not, you suffer failure.
I wonder how many high-end graphics cards have inadequate on-board cooling for real-world applications. Do they test them in adverse environments? Dust? Interrupted or blocked airflow? I know, that's not really their problem, but imagine you buy tires for your daily driver that were only tested to the limits of smooth highway at 65MPH, on a nice 80 degree summer day. Take these out for a quick spin from Phoenix to Tuscon this Friday when it should be 106, and I-10 is washboard or worse for some stretches of 75MPH. Yeah, you'll be disappointed if they blow off the rim, huh? It happens anyways, cause people run them underinflated or past their useful life. But if graphics card manufacturers don't test somewhere near a worst-case environment, well, this result we're reading about should be no surprise.
And TFA shows a picture of a rig with some dust bunnies in it. Ha! My regular rig gets a LOT more than that in 3 months, and I get to go in and vacuum up all that, and the filters. It's dusty in the desert. I clean filters a lot, all over the house. I keep a scientific experiment running at work to see how much dust will accumulate on my one mostly-empty letter tray before the cleaning crew wipes it. 4mm is the maximum so far, and that took 6 months. It looks like the HVAC here is not filtering very well.
A non-story, but interesting. I usually (well, always) run WinPrime on a new rig for 18-24 hours after I build it, just to heat stress the components. Now I have a test for the graphics card. I'm happy. And I'll be buying more fans I guess.
They struck in 2003, and largely lost.
Orchestra minimums have been a point of contention for a long time, at least since 1998. 'Canned' music is also an issue for at least as long. On tours, this is a big hassle, since every single person you bring along means expenses and troubles. On Broadway, musicals are expected to include live music, but that's also expensive, especially for rehearsals, and every show that closes in one night is a sinkhole of expenses. A lot do.
And in the end, successful shows tend to make a LOT of money, and it seems a shame to not bring the live performance in all its glory.
I saw them in concert in 73 at Oxford and Preston (shiat venue, BTW), and they were at least as wrecked as the audience, which is a little scary.
They couldn't deliver anything that sounded remorely like the album(s) except for the covers from the first album. Some they gave incredibly interesting live versions of, but some was just indecipherable. I was NOT high at the time, and beer doesn't deaden comprehension the same way, AND I was an American, so I was enthralled by the studio work and disappointed in the live stuff, save for a version of Immigrant Song that was truly inspired, despite the lack of the female vocalist - she was there, but inaudible. I think the micer was wrecked too.
20 minute drum solos gave me a chance to pee and get another can of lager.
They got a little too metaphysical in concert for me, but I was mostly too tame for that.
I got to see Pink Floyd once in England, at some old place in London, completely by accident. They did Dark Side of the Moon in entirety, and it was stunning. Of course I bought the album, and literally wore it out in 2 years. That made me buy a reel-to-reel and spare my albums. All gone now, I prefer CDs.
Zep could hardly bring an album experience, unless you listened to the albums so loud and so blitzed it didn't matter. Pink Floyd delivered.
"not especially dangerous when you have an entire planet's atmosphere to dilute the leaks."
Apparently you've never been in a ice rink with an ammonia leak , or even a suspected one. Panic evacuation is the first response. Not enough atmosphere where the ammonia is actually used to dilute it sufficiently.
Yeah, that cost both of you 15 seconds of your life.
Well, in defense of the poorly-worded posting, most POP bands lip-synch. Especially the teeny stuff. Do the Stones sync? Doubt it. Does Pink Sync? Like it rhymes, baby. Does Riahnna sync? I would not be surprised. Does Britney sync? As if we can even ask. MOST sync.
For TV appearances, they sure sync, since it's all studio anyways. Many sync just to avoid sounding normal. Once you start ujsing Autotune, it hardly matters any more. The artists I respect the most in this area are die-hard rockers and most rappers. And I could be fooled by rap.
Deal with it. The studio is where you craft the performance after many, many takes, and then they take it and modify it into something even more compelling to the audience. Concerts are way more difficult, but synching is probably common among pop bands, less so for some other genres. Some artists have a following based on their real voices and performances. Others, it's just contrived. Both oare genuine art, but if you claim to be a singer, you could at least be able to SING what you sang, eh?
ps - Led Zepellin and Pink Floyd in particular stand out as bands that had a hard time bringing the album to life, but they did.
Most theatrical lighting IS computer-controlled.
Except that, generally, the system is cued by someone. People on stage are not yet so reliably timed that you can just start the sequencer and it will stay in time. Whbich also afflicts the orchesteral automation - TFA points out that composers can control timing and tempo of the synthesizer(s).
Of course, we don't mind how they get the lighting on cue. We hardly notice, and having people backstage yanking on levers and throwing switches won't enhance the performance one iota. I'm not yet sure about live v recorded orchestra, but that's another item.
My wife is not amused, being both a musician and actress. But she sees it as inevitable, having played plenty of string pads to enhance the meager orchestra at community theater. Broadway is just the last bastion of live orchestra, and costs are always an issue. We should see a union strike soon enough.
1) Yes, you could.
2) When you have a workable method for sending a postcard to every IP address, let me know. Mapping IP address to street address is a neat trick if you can pull it off. Just don't rely on WHOIS, for obvious reasons.
The common internal cumbustion engine is not exactly rocket science. If I sent my CRX engine over to the wiz kids ahd had it rebuilt I would EXPECT them to re-check the oil, timing, etc, crank it over a few times without fire to make sure nothing clanks inside, and have the oil pressure gauge hooked up when it is fired off for the first time just to make sure nothng was forgotten or missed. Some shops even do compression tests just to spot obvious problems.
So I'm entirely pleased that JPL gave this new Rover a cautious and careful initial drive. Why destroy a motor or break something else just because you 'know what you're doing'?
Now, sadly, we have to deal with the fear that this Rover will get to Mars, drive off the landing pad, and lurch to a halt 12 meters away just because of something no one thought of. I'd rather we make a dozen copies of Opportunity. that rover design seems to have stood the test. Make a few and land them as a MIRV'd mission. Or maybe update the power system with the nuclear option. We'll be pretty disappointed if this fancy new Rover grinds to a halt for something either stupid or unknown.
And she sent the laptop?
Sad. She should have called the police. And the police should have called Dell.
Me? Sure, I would send a laptop. What the heck. Does India charge customs fees for incoming gifts?
And it ain't just trying to get along with Puck.
I work for a 'big' company, one that just announced huge earnings. My wife says out loud "Honey, they just made (fill in blank with obscene number), they can afford to give you a raise". How sweet, always thinking of me.
And I occasionally do something that by itself saves the company enough to actually be measured on the quarterly report. As in, "Gee, we made 1.245whatever last quarter. If I hadn't fixed blah, we would havw only made 1.44498whatever. Wow."
Oh yea, I'm important, in a lower-case kinda way.
First, these programmers ought to be told that their jobs don't exist except in the broker world, where millisecond trades are practical.
Second, does anyone pay the network admins real money? Ping and latency are crucial for these systems. You don't just go out and buy a gaming router and the business package from Time-Warner to run that sort of software. I bet the netadmins make just enough to keep them from taking bribes to snoop on traffic.
Third, and for me most important, do these programmers think through what they do for a living? Millisecond trading is the epitome of arbitrage, and even more so because it is by its design limited to the big players. The Insiders. The corporate weasels. Nice. The more you learn about HF trading, the more you want to ban it outright. At least slow it down to full seconds. Is there any real value in letting the machines dominate the way they are?
All the more reason I look for investments OUTSIDE the stock market. Wall Street is a cartel.
These whining programmers should consider their position as pretty damned good. But Wall Street is the new Silicon Valley, and programmers like these are basically doing the Valley Shuffle, from one side of the Street to another, jacking their pay each time. Nice work if you can get it, but the dot-com lesson is that sooner or later you are bound by reality. Soon enough, these guys will be happy to get a job coding PHP for the Next Insanely Great Thing, and taking the stock options knowing full well they just got toilet paper for compensation. They will beg for paid parking and a second vending machine. Don't go out and buy that condo quite yet, boys.
"It would be like searching the beach in Fiji, looking for a particular 1957 nickel."
By that analogy, how do fishermen around Fiji actually catch fish? Chase one around with a net until they get the advantage? No, they cast the net, catch what is there, and throw back the rest.
Who sent a satellite to capture comet dust? Oh yeah, us. "Stardust'. Aerogel as a capture mechanism for comet material.
Why not try sending some aerogel into LEO and use a similar method? Send it through debris fields, verify useful capture, and then throw it into Earth to either burn up or land somewhere 'safe'. Pick it up and throw it in a landfill, or send it off to be autopsied.
I know there are challenges - a maneuverable spacecraft, fuel, coordinating the orbits, where to land the debris, who gets it back. But this seems obvious to me. Aerogel is uniquely suited to this.
Alternatively, there are other ways to catch debris if you don;t much care what shape it is in when you catch it. A few layers of metal and some intervening goo, for instance. But aerogel is so light that it's cheaper to send up, it captured comet debris adequately, so it would probably be great to catch a lot of small stuff. Larger items may need a bigger or better 'net'.
It's about the money, and what to do with the more interesting pieces of junk. Russia may want their satellite stuff back.
And of course, if we do this, we just encourage China to keep on testing space weapons. Is this good?
It has begun.
" And so it goes with most jobs: you get paid for the work you do. With information, you get paid for all time for having done some work at some point in the past."
At my job, I get paid for work I did in the past, as recent as it was. I don't get paid daily.
Does it matter how often you get paid, or when? If intellectual property has value for multiple uses, why shouldn't the creator get paid each time it is used? Actually how ELSE would you pay a photographer, other than EVERY TIME you use one of the images they created? Would the first purchaser pay for all potential or possible use? Does the last purchaser pay less because the photographer has already gained other revenue? Who decides who is last? And if an image is valuable, and inspires multiple uses, why shouldn't the photographer receive more compensation?
"The system of artificial scarcity we call intellectual property rights was created because, unlike roofs, information is cheap and easy to duplicate"
Um, if roofs are so cheap and easy to duplicate, why not do it yourself? Answers:
- Your time doing other things is more valuable to you. So it is with photographs.
- You are not, in fact, able to do the work as well as the professional roofer. So it is with photographers.
- You are not, in fact, able to do it as cheaply with the same results as the professional. So it is with photographers.
Not a very good analogy.
"It's a bit of a paradox. Users don't seem to be willing to spend the money to see what they have,"
I think he meant users don't seem willing to spend the money to MANAGE what they have.
As many have pointed out, you need 'excess' capacity to avoid failing for unusual or unexpected processes. How often has the DBA team asked for a copy of a database? And when that file is a substantial portion of storage on a volume, woopsie, out of space messages can happen. Of course they should be copying it to a non-production volume. Mistakes happen. Having a spare TB of space means never having to say 'you're sorry'.
Aside from the obvious problems of keeping volumes too low on free space, there was a time when you could recover deleted files. Too little free space pretty much guarantees you won't be recovering deleted files much older than, sometimes, 15 minutes ago. In the old days, NetWare servers would let you recover anything not overwritten. I saved users from file deletions over the span of YEARS, in those halcyon days when storage became relatively cheap and a small office server could never fill a 120MB array. Those days are gone, but without free space, recovery is futile, even over the span of a week. Windows servers, of course, present greater challenges.
'Online' backups rely on delta files or some other scheme that involves either duplicating a file so it can be written intact, or saving changes so they can be rolled in after the process. More free space here means you actually get the backup to complete. Not wasted space at all.
Many of the SANs I've had the pleasure of working with had largely poor management implementations. Trying to manage dynamic volumes and overcommits had to wait for Microsoft to get its act together. Linux had a small lead in this, but unless your SAN lets you do automatic allocation and volume expansion, you might as well instrument the server and use SNMP to warn you of volume space, and be prepared for the nighttime alerts. Does your SAN allow you to let it increase volume space based on low free space, and then reclaim it later when the free space exceeds threshold? Do you get this for less than six figures? Seven? I don't know, I've been blessed with not having to do SAN management for about 5 years. I sleep much better, thanks.
Free space is precisely like empty parking lots. When business picks up, the lot is full. This is good.
I had the pleasure of flying more in the 70s and 80s, when you could get some service. Many a Friday was spend hustling to LaGuardia (and then JFK) to catch the shuttle to Boston, then being driven across the airport to catch the last Delta flight to Bangor. I missed it every 3rd or 4th time. Stayed in the Airport Hilton on their nickel (rack rooms, no real money), ate the free downstairs breakfast, and on the 7:05 to BGR. My luggage never made it, they called me Monday and I was happy to drive over.
And the stretch where I had to fly from PWM to GSO. Ah, Continental lost my luggage 4 times in 6 trips. And found it a week later. Now you can't really carry toiletries, not to mention a Micra which is such a handy tool for so many reasons, so I would be gate checking and doing without some stuff. Nice.
But the big airlines got cheap in the wrong places. And fuel prices crushed them. And deregulation means we are probably travelling somewhat cheaper, much more often, and much less comfortably then we might. I try not to whine about the seating or the 'food'. I'd just as soon pick up a $8 sandwich as eat whatever they call food today.
Now to work out how to afford business class to avoid the cattle drives.