I really didn't think I was special...
on
The Dirty Jobs of IT
·
· Score: 3, Funny
...but I've had 5 of these jobs in my career.
No, I haven't had #1, but the wet end of a paper making machine is very close. It's amazing what will grow in warm pulp, if you leave it there a while. And how your shoes literally fall apart when you walk through the stuff they use to clean it off. Literally. In minutes. Leather is no match for DuStrip.
Cat Herder is the worst of them. Being a rebootnik isn't quite as much fun as a third-party field tech, driving back and forto from the airport 3 miles away in a driving snowstorm to get *another* part to make that ^&*) Alpha server run again, so people can rent porn. Yeah./.'s will get the incredible irony of that.
Absolutely. My brother is a master electrician by trade, but is one of the foremost technical experts in HVAC DDC and process controllers. His employer doesn't just love him, they treat him better than the licensed engineers that infest the place. He's the single most important man on any project, 'cause he makes it all all work. And he's the troubleshooter, going into other projects to fix what was done by the second string.
If I knew then what I know now, I'd be a master electrician, and pour myself into these emerging technologies. Screw network administration.
On another note, we just lost a developer here to another outfit. The way he described the interview, they had him do a small coding job. Another friend of mine took a job there as a web developer, and they gave him a small task to accomplish. He described their response when he was done as sheer exctacy. He could actually *DO* something, without taking all day, without handholding, and without leaving it unfinished, almost working. In a week, he was the 'go-to' guy, answering questions from all the developers in his team, especially the senior developer, who was his boss. Yes, he's the senior dev now, having earned his boss a promotion... And he does not yet aspire to a higher position. Just higher pay for doing more than they expect. He'll get it.
How very true that skills are in short supply. Of course, no one wants to speak the truth, that for many specialties, a college degree shoudl get you into an apprenticeship position, with a mentor/trainer to guide you into learning the real-world skills that leverage your 'knowledge'. If we taught artists this way, many wouldn't pick up a brush until their 5th semester. And many wouldn't finish a canvas until grad school, since the block sketches would be enough to demonstrate mastery of the concept... bahahaha....
Mildenhall is the site of an RAF base, actually now a USAF base. Not totally random sending it to this recipient, where I could see them somehow mistaking one Mildenhall for another. But still dumb as a blade of grass.
Maybe they need a new mail server? FC7 should do, or something from IBM, all wrapped up in a pretty $MM mainframe?
But we flew to Manchester from Phoenix last summer, and the plane out was LOUD. Heavy harmonics, and we were in row 5. The plane back was noticeably quieter. Same thing in the fall, I flew over to Orlando, and the plane out was again very loud, harmonics and something in the 600hz band that drove me crazy. The one back was much better, none of the harmonics.
Sorry about mixing up 737s and 767s. After a while, the 7x7s all sound like moo...
Hmm... I fly Southwest with my wife a few times a year now. Their boarding used to suck majorly.
First, they boarded first-come. Ok, I get the A boarding, and I show up early and take my place 5th or 6th, with my wife whining about sitting on the floor with me.
About 30 minutes before boarding, up to a dozen people show up to join their buds ahead of me in the A line. I'm trying to not be too ungracious and call them out. What will I get, Mace or Security? Ok, I'm basically screwed again.
At boarding, I know they'll board familes with small children and those needing assistance. Ok, so the kids get the choice seats up front, fine. BTW, 767s can be very noisy over the wings. If you get a loud, pulsing engine noise, you just got a lousy plane,. Some are tolerable.
But the last time I flew, it seemed like a LOT of people 'need assistance' boarding. Some are in wheelchairs, and I can't begrudge that. Some are on canes, and the last time 4 needed crutches. Then another half-dozen just needed 'assistance'.
I was there early, first group, had 6 people in front of me 90 minutes before boarding. My wife and I boarded to row 22. Pus.
Sadly, Southwest is too good a deal.
But, I cannot imagine it gets any better with groups of 5. "Now boarding families with small children and those needing assistance". Plan on row 22.
The NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, etc all have physically demanding jobs that pay very well, thank you.
And I know what you meant. 'physically demanding jobs' would mean 'manual labor'.
Somehow, oil rigs are a good place to find physically demanding work that pays well. The key is that the product or output is valuable...
We don't want to spend as much on our landscaping as we do on our SAP implementation, because the 'product' of our landscaper is not as valuable. That never will change. And productivity of landscapers is not the issue. The value of the product is.
So answer me this,/.'rs...
In Downeast Maine, blueberries used to be picked by the Mic Mac Indians from Canada and Maine. recently, however, the growers started importing migrant and illegal workers from 'wherever', and most were indeed Mexican. Other workes such as high school kids and a fair amount of regulars used to pick as well. I could make $600 a week back in the 60s, which was a darned good sumemr job save for the literally backbreaking work of raking berries out of bushes a foot high at most. bending over, carrying the boxes to the truck, etc was hard, but damn the money was good for a few weeks. But no more, the growers claimed a labor shortage. Truth is, the illegals are even cheaper than the Mic Macs, which is cheap indeed.
This is not about our 'value' of labor, so much as it is the profit to be gained by reducing cost further.
Remember Sen. John McCain, also known down here in Arizona as "Senator Lettuce"? He spouted off a couple of years ago (2006?) about how we 'couldn't' do the jobs Mexican immigrants did. In particular he made this statement:
"If I offered you a job picking lettuce in Yuma for fifty dollars an hour, you couldn't do it, my friend".
The next day, more than a handful of people showed up with resumes in hand, looking for the $50 an hour lettuce picking job. They were ready. Of course there are no jobs like that. Lettuce isn't worth that much.
One of the lies is that this is about wages. It is about profits.
Nobody has a dog in this immigraiton fight except the ordinary citizen:
- Big Business likes cheaper labor, it equals both profits and lower costs of healthcare and such. - Federal government doesn't want to rile Business. - Democrats see Mexican immigrants as future Democrats. - Republicans dare not offend them, lest they become Democrats. - Labor unions see them as future members. Sooner or later. - State governments don't want Business to move to another state or overseas, which they will do anyways.
Don't be surprised that the 'virtual fence' doesn't work. Ineffective measures will be a key component in the federal government's war on immigration. Reagan's '86 (or was it '87?) immigration reform had three main features:
- Amnesty. This worked, mostly. - Securing the borders. No money, no securing the borders. This worked famously. - Deportation of undesirables and future illegals. No money. This also worked famously.
The current plans will be more of the same. Amnesty is crucial, as it bring the Democratic Party new members, aids the labor unions, and gives Business the same workers at pretty much the same pay. Failing to secure the borders ensures continuing supplies of cheaper labor. Deportation is of course pointless if the border isn't secured. In fact, deportation is a free trip home to visit family and educate others on how to 'do it' in the U.S.
We need change, alright. Arizona's employer law is a start. But I'm not hopeful. We need to vote out the scoundrels. Sadly, all of our Presidential candidates seem to be drinking the same Kool-aid on this issue.
We also need to stop rewarding moving jobs offshore. We don't need to offer incentives for keeping jobs here, just not incentives for sending them overseas...
Well, then, damn! I oughta get a bunch of guys together and wrangle up a rover of our own.
The frame and propulsion doesn't worry me. Guts out of any cheap digital camera, with a USB bus for everything, and just a hardened RS6000 would do. I know a guy who could mod an OS for us. He'll learn all the lessons from the Mars rover project, let me tell you.
Now all we need is a 65,000 liter Coke bottle.
Seriously, we aren't that far from DIY exploration, are we? The hardest part seems the radio back to Earth. And getting it out there, of course.
ps- you didn't work on the ISS toilets, did you? That stuff is sick.
Since helicopters use atmospheric resistance to maneuver, those tactics don't apply to the Moon, with virtually no atmosphere to use for the tail rotor to counteract tourque. Bzzzt! Wrong answer!
Firing pitons into the Moon to hold the rover down for drilling makes sense except for two points:
- Drilling operations will be limited by how many pitons you carry, and how the firing mechanism works. This also adds weight and defeats the 'lightweight' requirement.
- the mechanism to fire a piton, hold onto it, and then let go adds too much complexity. Not good.
Now you know we you and I aren't working on this project.
I might think the auger idea works, but will the auger bite into rock? What happens with loose debris?
And I have no doubt that a clever drill design will come up. Probably a combination of auger and slow-speed drilling, with more time taken instead of trying to do it too quickly and bouncing the rover around.
Then again, they could lock a wheel and drag it around like a trenching tool.. works on Mars....
Secretly, I'm proud of the Onion gang. They succeed at being seen as legit, relevant, newsworthy, true (!), and just plain really neato. The best TV news is still the Jon Stewart stuff. Life goes on.
Glad also to see someone else gets duped. I haven't been taken by The Onion ever, but the Washington Post has caught me a few times...
And since when has it been a wast of OUR time to revel in the delightful agony of a fellow/.'r getting completely fooled, or fooling us in the bargain?
You presume the US military did not plan for an 'effective replacement'.
Something like complaining about why your favorite NFL quarterback didn't throw the pass to the *OPEN* receiver, instead of the guy that was covered. Or your favorite striker not bending the ball around the keeper, but instead drilling into his belly...
In hindsight, much seems flawed. At the moment, either the military chose wrong options in the heat of the moment (example the first, above) or simply did not execute or choose the right plan (example the second, above, not knowing whether it was failure or choice).
You can hold the opinion that the US military was incompetent in either planning or execution in Iraq, and that's your perogative, to have an opinion. I disagree with your assessment. Given the options available at the time, the US military seems to have taken what is arguably an until recently ineffective strategy, which for those who had to make the decisions at the time no doubt seemed the best option, given resources, goals, and constraints of politics and diplomacy.
Probably the variable with the most impact on all of the Iraq operations is the failure of the reconstituted Iraqi government to resolve their religious and political differences and develop consensus. My fear is that we will leave Iraq in three or more pieces. That would be a terrible failure. Second only to unification via genocide, which is still a distinct possibility. But ultimately, the Iraqi people need to have the opportunity to resolve their differences. We cannot.
"All Baghdad needed from the outset was police on the ground to prevent it from degenerating into the Sunni/Shi'a/USA clusterfuck it is today. In 2003, US troops were not prepared for that job, nor were their bosses prepared for that eventuality, even though many people had accurately predicted what was going to happen."
It sounds as if you're stating that all Baghdad needed back then was some police.
Which police force would you have put in place back then? Saddam's gang? The Iraqi Army? which one?
Our Army isn't really such a great police force, granted, but in the absence of anything else, it's what we got.
ps- domestic terrorism in the USA is pretty rare. Lately, the biggest terrorism event in the USA, back in 2001, was actually carried out by foreigners, not even US citizens. Foreign terrorism. They managed to actually act here.
All it does is get the high-volume users to be more active at the beginning of their billing cycle, which will STILL impact 'the network'. It will just impact it for a shorter period of time. And if billing cycles are staggered, there will always be some BitTorrent users sucking up gobs of bandwidth, causing trouble, you know their drill.
Volume caps are a lie. The sad truth is that Comcast is acting as if they can't actually deliver what they say they can - all the Internet you can ask for. The truth is that no network has an infinite capacity, not even the South Korean and Japanese 'wonders'. It's just that Comcastand others have not kept up with demand.
Imagine if the cable companies had to carry full-bandwidth HDTVfor every channel, and I mean 1080p, not the MP4 dreck they foist on us now. This would cut their channel capacity by 50-75%. And no one would tolerate it. Same price for a quarter the content? And just because theh didn't have big enough pipes? We would correctly tell them to make the pipes, and then they can charge us.
As it is, throttling Internet bandwidth isn't even giving those who would the chance to pay even more.
In most BF games, defending a point is useful. I don't mind sometimes spawning into a contentious point just to force the enemy to keep killng me. Eventually, if 2 or three of us are spawning in, we can tie up a larger force trying to take 'our' point. Meanwhile, ther est of the team is holding enough to drive their tickets down. I get massive deaths, but hey, the team wins.
Sometimes, though, spawn camping is just spawn camping. I'll entertain one now and then just to see if they are sharp, while the rest of their team gazes in awe at the kills they are piling up. When I'm tired, I'll have one of my buddies go nail them.
And yes, sniper is my favorite role. Snipers are sort of the h@xrs of the battlefield. Silent, unexpected death, paralyzing a much larger force, and clogging pinch points. Not to mention that in some games, snipers avoid the FPS penalty for having a lame rig. Now if only they would upgrade to the M82A1 to the M107, or the M82A1A, and let it shoot through brick, stop jeeps, and kill through a standard Humvee. It does in real lif... oh, nevermind.
A $B+ aircraft out of a 21-plane fleet is not what you use for 'kamikaze' attacks. And I'm willing to bet a small cup of coffee that no bomber driver thinks of their mission as 'kamikaze' today. That thinking went out with the B-52D, alert bunkers, and the Cold War.
You are talking out of something below the waist, sir.
The ultimate offense is when the weezil newbies scout out the blogs and make these game-rapers by the hundreds. Not only do they ever get the thrill of figuring out how to play with reasonable chars, but any newbs that start with a simple char get crucified. Bleagh.
No wonder I don't play any of these things. Hard enough on a level playing field. Getting gang-raped by the n00bs is what I bought BF2 for.
.. use a 'pronouncable' password gizmo. Would this help?
For instance, 'carrot' becomes 'C@550t' Being pronouncable lets her use a word (please don't let it be Hannah) that she can remember, though the abstract symbols might challenge her.
Or let her tattoo it on her neck. Just kidding. I'm a troublemaker, you know.
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...but I've had 5 of these jobs in my career.
/.'s will get the incredible irony of that.
No, I haven't had #1, but the wet end of a paper making machine is very close. It's amazing what will grow in warm pulp, if you leave it there a while. And how your shoes literally fall apart when you walk through the stuff they use to clean it off. Literally. In minutes. Leather is no match for DuStrip.
Cat Herder is the worst of them. Being a rebootnik isn't quite as much fun as a third-party field tech, driving back and forto from the airport 3 miles away in a driving snowstorm to get *another* part to make that ^&*) Alpha server run again, so people can rent porn. Yeah.
Absolutely. My brother is a master electrician by trade, but is one of the foremost technical experts in HVAC DDC and process controllers. His employer doesn't just love him, they treat him better than the licensed engineers that infest the place. He's the single most important man on any project, 'cause he makes it all all work. And he's the troubleshooter, going into other projects to fix what was done by the second string.
If I knew then what I know now, I'd be a master electrician, and pour myself into these emerging technologies. Screw network administration.
On another note, we just lost a developer here to another outfit. The way he described the interview, they had him do a small coding job. Another friend of mine took a job there as a web developer, and they gave him a small task to accomplish. He described their response when he was done as sheer exctacy. He could actually *DO* something, without taking all day, without handholding, and without leaving it unfinished, almost working. In a week, he was the 'go-to' guy, answering questions from all the developers in his team, especially the senior developer, who was his boss. Yes, he's the senior dev now, having earned his boss a promotion... And he does not yet aspire to a higher position. Just higher pay for doing more than they expect. He'll get it.
How very true that skills are in short supply. Of course, no one wants to speak the truth, that for many specialties, a college degree shoudl get you into an apprenticeship position, with a mentor/trainer to guide you into learning the real-world skills that leverage your 'knowledge'. If we taught artists this way, many wouldn't pick up a brush until their 5th semester. And many wouldn't finish a canvas until grad school, since the block sketches would be enough to demonstrate mastery of the concept... bahahaha....
I don't see any foot icon...
The idea that this would work in the U.S anywhere besides 'big cities' is funnier than a rubber crutch. We can't even bury utilities.
Mod post funny.
Mildenhall is the site of an RAF base, actually now a USAF base. Not totally random sending it to this recipient, where I could see them somehow mistaking one Mildenhall for another. But still dumb as a blade of grass.
Maybe they need a new mail server? FC7 should do, or something from IBM, all wrapped up in a pretty $MM mainframe?
sheesh...
Damn, I mix up the model #s all the time.
But we flew to Manchester from Phoenix last summer, and the plane out was LOUD. Heavy harmonics, and we were in row 5. The plane back was noticeably quieter. Same thing in the fall, I flew over to Orlando, and the plane out was again very loud, harmonics and something in the 600hz band that drove me crazy. The one back was much better, none of the harmonics.
Sorry about mixing up 737s and 767s. After a while, the 7x7s all sound like moo...
Must we read of this again? And again?
Been there, done that, got the scrapes, tired of the research. Get these people off the road.
Hmm... I fly Southwest with my wife a few times a year now. Their boarding used to suck majorly.
First, they boarded first-come. Ok, I get the A boarding, and I show up early and take my place 5th or 6th, with my wife whining about sitting on the floor with me.
About 30 minutes before boarding, up to a dozen people show up to join their buds ahead of me in the A line. I'm trying to not be too ungracious and call them out. What will I get, Mace or Security? Ok, I'm basically screwed again.
At boarding, I know they'll board familes with small children and those needing assistance. Ok, so the kids get the choice seats up front, fine. BTW, 767s can be very noisy over the wings. If you get a loud, pulsing engine noise, you just got a lousy plane,. Some are tolerable.
But the last time I flew, it seemed like a LOT of people 'need assistance' boarding. Some are in wheelchairs, and I can't begrudge that. Some are on canes, and the last time 4 needed crutches. Then another half-dozen just needed 'assistance'.
I was there early, first group, had 6 people in front of me 90 minutes before boarding. My wife and I boarded to row 22. Pus.
Sadly, Southwest is too good a deal.
But, I cannot imagine it gets any better with groups of 5. "Now boarding families with small children and those needing assistance". Plan on row 22.
Hmm... Can I shield a consumer mainboard sufficiently to survive space?
The U.S. for one.
/.'rs...
The NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, etc all have physically demanding jobs that pay very well, thank you.
And I know what you meant. 'physically demanding jobs' would mean 'manual labor'.
Somehow, oil rigs are a good place to find physically demanding work that pays well. The key is that the product or output is valuable...
We don't want to spend as much on our landscaping as we do on our SAP implementation, because the 'product' of our landscaper is not as valuable. That never will change. And productivity of landscapers is not the issue. The value of the product is.
So answer me this,
In Downeast Maine, blueberries used to be picked by the Mic Mac Indians from Canada and Maine. recently, however, the growers started importing migrant and illegal workers from 'wherever', and most were indeed Mexican. Other workes such as high school kids and a fair amount of regulars used to pick as well. I could make $600 a week back in the 60s, which was a darned good sumemr job save for the literally backbreaking work of raking berries out of bushes a foot high at most. bending over, carrying the boxes to the truck, etc was hard, but damn the money was good for a few weeks. But no more, the growers claimed a labor shortage. Truth is, the illegals are even cheaper than the Mic Macs, which is cheap indeed.
This is not about our 'value' of labor, so much as it is the profit to be gained by reducing cost further.
Remember Sen. John McCain, also known down here in Arizona as "Senator Lettuce"? He spouted off a couple of years ago (2006?) about how we 'couldn't' do the jobs Mexican immigrants did. In particular he made this statement:
"If I offered you a job picking lettuce in Yuma for fifty dollars an hour, you couldn't do it, my friend".
The next day, more than a handful of people showed up with resumes in hand, looking for the $50 an hour lettuce picking job. They were ready. Of course there are no jobs like that. Lettuce isn't worth that much.
One of the lies is that this is about wages. It is about profits.
Nobody has a dog in this immigraiton fight except the ordinary citizen:
- Big Business likes cheaper labor, it equals both profits and lower costs of healthcare and such.
- Federal government doesn't want to rile Business.
- Democrats see Mexican immigrants as future Democrats.
- Republicans dare not offend them, lest they become Democrats.
- Labor unions see them as future members. Sooner or later.
- State governments don't want Business to move to another state or overseas, which they will do anyways.
Don't be surprised that the 'virtual fence' doesn't work. Ineffective measures will be a key component in the federal government's war on immigration. Reagan's '86 (or was it '87?) immigration reform had three main features:
- Amnesty. This worked, mostly.
- Securing the borders. No money, no securing the borders. This worked famously.
- Deportation of undesirables and future illegals. No money. This also worked famously.
The current plans will be more of the same. Amnesty is crucial, as it bring the Democratic Party new members, aids the labor unions, and gives Business the same workers at pretty much the same pay. Failing to secure the borders ensures continuing supplies of cheaper labor. Deportation is of course pointless if the border isn't secured. In fact, deportation is a free trip home to visit family and educate others on how to 'do it' in the U.S.
We need change, alright. Arizona's employer law is a start. But I'm not hopeful. We need to vote out the scoundrels. Sadly, all of our Presidential candidates seem to be drinking the same Kool-aid on this issue.
We also need to stop rewarding moving jobs offshore. We don't need to offer incentives for keeping jobs here, just not incentives for sending them overseas...
Well, then, damn! I oughta get a bunch of guys together and wrangle up a rover of our own.
The frame and propulsion doesn't worry me. Guts out of any cheap digital camera, with a USB bus for everything, and just a hardened RS6000 would do. I know a guy who could mod an OS for us. He'll learn all the lessons from the Mars rover project, let me tell you.
Now all we need is a 65,000 liter Coke bottle.
Seriously, we aren't that far from DIY exploration, are we? The hardest part seems the radio back to Earth. And getting it out there, of course.
ps- you didn't work on the ISS toilets, did you? That stuff is sick.
Any chance Bob's patents on Ethernet are expiring? Don't need no steenking standards, mon. Need new ways, we do! My ways! My Money! MY MONEY!
ps- all you hotshot engineers; rotsa ruck beating the real thing.
Absolutely...
Since helicopters use atmospheric resistance to maneuver, those tactics don't apply to the Moon, with virtually no atmosphere to use for the tail rotor to counteract tourque. Bzzzt! Wrong answer!
Firing pitons into the Moon to hold the rover down for drilling makes sense except for two points:
- Drilling operations will be limited by how many pitons you carry, and how the firing mechanism works. This also adds weight and defeats the 'lightweight' requirement.
- the mechanism to fire a piton, hold onto it, and then let go adds too much complexity. Not good.
Now you know we you and I aren't working on this project.
I might think the auger idea works, but will the auger bite into rock? What happens with loose debris?
And I have no doubt that a clever drill design will come up. Probably a combination of auger and slow-speed drilling, with more time taken instead of trying to do it too quickly and bouncing the rover around.
Then again, they could lock a wheel and drag it around like a trenching tool.. works on Mars....
This is as close to making it up as Physics has gotten in a while. Feh.
Really, I'm waiting for the face they find on one of the sheets.
Would somebody please mod this up? Just cause they beat me to it, no reason the reply should suffer...
/. is pretty flushed down the toilet.
/.'r getting completely fooled, or fooling us in the bargain?
Secretly, I'm proud of the Onion gang. They succeed at being seen as legit, relevant, newsworthy, true (!), and just plain really neato. The best TV news is still the Jon Stewart stuff. Life goes on.
Glad also to see someone else gets duped. I haven't been taken by The Onion ever, but the Washington Post has caught me a few times...
And since when has it been a wast of OUR time to revel in the delightful agony of a fellow
You presume the US military did not plan for an 'effective replacement'.
Something like complaining about why your favorite NFL quarterback didn't throw the pass to the *OPEN* receiver, instead of the guy that was covered. Or your favorite striker not bending the ball around the keeper, but instead drilling into his belly...
In hindsight, much seems flawed. At the moment, either the military chose wrong options in the heat of the moment (example the first, above) or simply did not execute or choose the right plan (example the second, above, not knowing whether it was failure or choice).
You can hold the opinion that the US military was incompetent in either planning or execution in Iraq, and that's your perogative, to have an opinion. I disagree with your assessment. Given the options available at the time, the US military seems to have taken what is arguably an until recently ineffective strategy, which for those who had to make the decisions at the time no doubt seemed the best option, given resources, goals, and constraints of politics and diplomacy.
Probably the variable with the most impact on all of the Iraq operations is the failure of the reconstituted Iraqi government to resolve their religious and political differences and develop consensus. My fear is that we will leave Iraq in three or more pieces. That would be a terrible failure. Second only to unification via genocide, which is still a distinct possibility. But ultimately, the Iraqi people need to have the opportunity to resolve their differences. We cannot.
"All Baghdad needed from the outset was police on the ground to prevent it from degenerating into the Sunni/Shi'a/USA clusterfuck it is today. In 2003, US troops were not prepared for that job, nor were their bosses prepared for that eventuality, even though many people had accurately predicted what was going to happen."
It sounds as if you're stating that all Baghdad needed back then was some police.
Which police force would you have put in place back then? Saddam's gang? The Iraqi Army? which one?
Our Army isn't really such a great police force, granted, but in the absence of anything else, it's what we got.
ps- domestic terrorism in the USA is pretty rare. Lately, the biggest terrorism event in the USA, back in 2001, was actually carried out by foreigners, not even US citizens. Foreign terrorism. They managed to actually act here.
All it does is get the high-volume users to be more active at the beginning of their billing cycle, which will STILL impact 'the network'. It will just impact it for a shorter period of time. And if billing cycles are staggered, there will always be some BitTorrent users sucking up gobs of bandwidth, causing trouble, you know their drill.
Volume caps are a lie. The sad truth is that Comcast is acting as if they can't actually deliver what they say they can - all the Internet you can ask for. The truth is that no network has an infinite capacity, not even the South Korean and Japanese 'wonders'. It's just that Comcastand others have not kept up with demand.
Imagine if the cable companies had to carry full-bandwidth HDTVfor every channel, and I mean 1080p, not the MP4 dreck they foist on us now. This would cut their channel capacity by 50-75%. And no one would tolerate it. Same price for a quarter the content? And just because theh didn't have big enough pipes? We would correctly tell them to make the pipes, and then they can charge us.
As it is, throttling Internet bandwidth isn't even giving those who would the chance to pay even more.
Comcast is so out on a limb here.
If they haven't redirected the school's DNS to their own servers, they aren't pranking hard enough.
THAT's when it gets interesting.
In most BF games, defending a point is useful. I don't mind sometimes spawning into a contentious point just to force the enemy to keep killng me. Eventually, if 2 or three of us are spawning in, we can tie up a larger force trying to take 'our' point. Meanwhile, ther est of the team is holding enough to drive their tickets down. I get massive deaths, but hey, the team wins.
Sometimes, though, spawn camping is just spawn camping. I'll entertain one now and then just to see if they are sharp, while the rest of their team gazes in awe at the kills they are piling up. When I'm tired, I'll have one of my buddies go nail them.
And yes, sniper is my favorite role. Snipers are sort of the h@xrs of the battlefield. Silent, unexpected death, paralyzing a much larger force, and clogging pinch points. Not to mention that in some games, snipers avoid the FPS penalty for having a lame rig. Now if only they would upgrade to the M82A1 to the M107, or the M82A1A, and let it shoot through brick, stop jeeps, and kill through a standard Humvee. It does in real lif... oh, nevermind.
Perhaps you should try being funny. Humor usually requires that.
Or more plainly, funny to you ain't necssarily funny to anyone else. You should know that if you come here often.
"I've read they even have kamikaze units now".
Read where? Citation or retraction, please.
A $B+ aircraft out of a 21-plane fleet is not what you use for 'kamikaze' attacks. And I'm willing to bet a small cup of coffee that no bomber driver thinks of their mission as 'kamikaze' today. That thinking went out with the B-52D, alert bunkers, and the Cold War.
You are talking out of something below the waist, sir.
The ultimate offense is when the weezil newbies scout out the blogs and make these game-rapers by the hundreds. Not only do they ever get the thrill of figuring out how to play with reasonable chars, but any newbs that start with a simple char get crucified. Bleagh.
No wonder I don't play any of these things. Hard enough on a level playing field. Getting gang-raped by the n00bs is what I bought BF2 for.
.. use a 'pronouncable' password gizmo. Would this help?
For instance, 'carrot' becomes 'C@550t' Being pronouncable lets her use a word (please don't let it be Hannah) that she can remember, though the abstract symbols might challenge her.
Or let her tattoo it on her neck. Just kidding. I'm a troublemaker, you know.
Then you'll need 'SecurRAM', which detects the desocketing and clears the contents.
Oh, hell, let's just cut off the hands of anyone caught messing with your machine, ok?