Fezmid

I'm not hiring anyone who is obsessed about the weather. As an employer, I can do that. (for those who don't get it, it's in reference to the company that fired all of the smokers, citing insurance increases). CW

A word of warning - someone posted on here that DirecTV is raising their monthly price by $2-$3/month starting in March. If you sign up now, you'll probably be able to lock in the current rate for a year. If you're planning on switching anyway, it might be worth it. If you like negotiating, try calling and asking for "customer retention." They might be able to give you a free TiVo receiver or something for staying on and subscribing to a higher package. I've found that CR is very giving with the free goodies. CW

We're migrating stuff (like documentation) over to Sharepoint. It's a peice of crap. CW

In Minnesota, the tickets are roughly that much for the lower bowl Wild games. The upper deck tickets were about $35 if I remember correctly. They sell out every game here. As far as football, the Vikings charge around $60 for the nosebleed seats... No idea how much the lower bowl stuff is here. That's why I was more than happy to pay around $80 for 4th row, 20 yardline tickets at the Ralph for the season opener. Compared to what I pay when the Bills visit Minnesota, it was a steal. CW

Even the uploading thing is a money grab though -- if you read the TOS, you're not allowed to have a server in your house. The reason is that they want to charge you more for a "business account." CW

Yeah, I definately agree with you there; it's probably especially considering it's Superbowl week, I'm sure it's probably a case of the reporter trying to get a good headline... ...and apparantly it worked. CW

Come on AD, Culpepper should've made some statement when he handed it over. He was obviously trying to get some positive press by "giving" the jewelry to the kid. He could've easily qualified it by saying, "Sure kid, take it for the rest of the press conference." But he didn't. The kid asked for the jewelry, Culpepper gave him the jewelry. Then afterwards, he took it back. Assuming that's really how it went down (and that the article isn't slanting anything), I'd bet that the kid actually has a *legal* leg to stand on. If I ask you for $20 and you give it to me, I don't have to give it back unless you clarify that it's a loan. Granted $75,000 is more than $20, but again, Culpepper should've clarified. Then again, athletes aren't always known for their intelligence I guess... I'm not saying the kid deserves to get the stuff by any stretch of the imagination; but Culpepper was definately an idiot. CW

Oh god, why? I'd rather watch SB25-28 for an entire day... At least we're the ones who screwed ourselves there... CW

Because Jobs thinks that makes things too confusing. And with general Joe Blow, that's actually true. Ask someone to right click and drag some files, and they have no idea what you're talking about... You can buy a two-button mouse and it works; it's just not as full featured as it is in Windows. If I remember correctly (from my limited Mac knowledge), pressing the command key and clicking is the same as a right click. A Mac-person can confirm this though. CW

Actually, I have to agree with Rico on this one; they don't care what you download. If they did, they wouldn't offer binary USENET groups (for example). CW

I'll bump it once myself for all you early-morning people. CW

I agree, however I'm not quite as outraged as some. He *definately* should've made it clear that the kid was only getting it during the press conference. Something like, "Sure kid, you can wear it during the press conference and we'll talk afterwards" would've made this a non-story. However, there may be a reason (other than money) why Culpepper wanted his necklaces back. Maybe they were the first things he bought as a pro, or have some other sentimental value to him. I know that I still have the first baubal I bough when I got my first paycheck (from K-Mart no less. ). Regardless, he handled it really badly... CW

I've had both cable and DSL and (aside from Comcast's crappy customer service), both have worked very well. Cable gives you higher theoretical maximum speeds. In reality, you'll rarely be able to get that highanyway unless you're downloading large CD/DVD images from multiple locations. The reason is that the servers you're hitting have a maximum upload speed of their own. If they can upload a maximum of 50 megabytes/second, and you can download at 1 megabyte/second, what happens when when 100 people hit the site? You're not getting your full 1MB/s anymore. Also, cable is a shared segment. That means if all of your neighbors jump online at the same time as you, your throughput will be MUCH lower than if you're on by yourself. With DSL, you have your own direct circuit to the CO, so even if everyone in the neighborhood is using the internet at the same time, you won't notice. I never had problems playing online games with DSL; BigAl was mostly right -- you need low network LATENCY for games; speed really isn't an issue at all. Based on his ping times, I'd say there were probably other issues -- either his stuff wasn't configured right, the DSL provider wasn't configured properly, he lived on the fringe of the CO, the CO had old hardware that needed replacing, etc. (CO = central office, the location where you DSL connection is setup; you need to be within X miles of a CO to get service. That's why a lot of people can't get DSL). One thing I will say is that your DSL service provider is MUCH more important than anything else. In Minnesota, I highly recommend Visi.com. You get your physical DSL line from Qwest, but you tell them that you want Visi as your ISP. Frequent drops, slow speeds, etc, are generally a result of a crappy ISP. I had DirecTV and DSL at the same time; with DSL, you'll need to install line filters at every phone (either that or the phone company can install a filter where the phone line comes in; I lived in an apartment, so that wasn't an option). Basically, I'd go with whatever is cheaper; I have cable now, and do notice the speed difference when downloading the latest release of OpenBSD or something like that, but 99% of the time you won't notice. It's up to you to decide if paying $20-$30/month more is worth the occasional speed increase when downloading. Hope that helps. EDIT: This was like a FFS post, except for internet access instead of football! CW

I have the feeling that you don't actually work in the industry. Linux is taking over small Windows servers here and there, that's true. But it's *not* a replacement for "real" servers in the datacenter. You're ignoring *scaling* -- I can't get a lot of CPUs for any Intel box, Windows or Linux. I don't care how fast they are, if I'm stuck at 4 CPUs there's not much I can do to increase that. Plus, the Intel/AMD architecture in general is poor. CPUs may be fast, but what about the backplane? AMD is starting to get it with its NUMA architecture, but they still have a long way to go. Most people think that a computer's speed is solely based on clock speed. In reality, that's one of the least important aspects nowadays. We looked at one of these as a fileserver replacement (along with an XRaid). Looked impressive, although the Apple guy giving the demo was very GUI-oritented and couldn't answer most of my CLI questions. After all was said and done, we ended up buying a Windows solution (with ExtremeZ-IP), but the only reason was because we don't want to support yet another platform. Otherwise, price/performance wise I think the XServer looked pretty good. (not as good as a Dell DJ though ). CW

I didn't see the address. However, it IS true that a lot of people abuse health care. There are people my wife and I work with who go to the doctor because they have a headache. And then there's people who are on public assistance who go to the ER because they have a hangnail. What do they care, it's free for them. CW

There's more to chip architecture than clock speed. All in all, clock speed actually isn't that important at all. For example, an AMD Opteron running at 2.4GHz (with 32bit apps) can outperform Intel chips running at 3.6Ghz or higher in everything but video rendering. PA-RISC chips (HP) are only running at 1Ghz, but they kick the crap out of AMD, Intel AND Sun. Intel is going to have to solve its lack of scaling if it wants to compete in the server market. High end servers need more than 4 CPUs. I'd guess that Intel is at least a decade away from being able to provide that. CW

SPARC is *far* more advanced than either Intel or AMD. Not only have they been 64-bit for years, they're also RISC, have dual-core processor technology, and scale to levels that Wintel can only dream of. The same goes for PA-RISC processors from HP. Intel and AMD are kids toys by comparison. CW

No, I couldn't... And I accidentally changed the channel so I can't rewind CW

641 for me(Fox Sports North) Thanks. I just turned it on (it's a commercial right now) EDIT: Wow, Kelly still has an arm... Even if they were only foam footballs. CW

What channel is that on? CW

Heh, nothing like the ringing endorsements of satisfied employees, errrr, customers! I thank you. My DVD burner, on the other hand, does not. CW

I was just giving Gina a hard time. UNIX isn't open source; Free/Net/OpenBSD is (and I think OSX is FreeBSD underneath, but Gina can correct me if I'm wrong), but there are plenty of UNIX implementations that aren't - Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, SCO, etc. I knew what you meant, but thought I'd clarify for those who didn't. UNIX has a GUI too BTW -- XWindows. There's even people currently working on making an OSX skin for X which is kinda cool. It's pretty functional too from what I can tell. I still just use CDE though... Cos I havn't been motivated enough to change. CW

Good answer! Seriously though, I'd probably consider a Mac if not for three issues: 1) I already bought video editing software for my PC. 2) I need a PC to connect via VPN to my company 3) They're more stable, but they cost more... However, if I have some extra money later in the year, I might spring for a Mac Mini to tinker around with. I know that I'm the target market for those things, Jobs just trying to lure people to his side. CW

Actually, that flip-flops between him and Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle, and Peoplesoft now too I suppose). It all depends on whose stock is doing better at the time. Havn't checked in awhile, but it's probably Gates now. Yeah, Apple had to go steal from a REAL OS. UNIX all the way. (you just *knew* I was going to say *something,* right? ). CW

The problem is that, in many cases, it's true that sites do look better or have more features in IE. That's because they don't follow the standards and invent their own stuff. And then the developers code to the MS-specific things. CW