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Comment Why not just use tunneled IPv6? (Score 2) 164

Teredo(IPv6 over UDP) is easy to set up - if your Windows is Vista or later, it works automatically. For Linux it depends on the distro. If you happen to be in a non-NATted environment for once, 6to4 works great too.

So just enjoy the IPv6.

If you have devices at home that don't support IPv6, you can set up a NAT64 within your home network.

Comment Re:Too hell with resigning. Make them fire you. (Score 1) 524

I'm not working for Yahoo (or in the US for that matter), but work from home 3 to 4 days a week on average (office is 170 km away). I have the telecommuting detailed in my contract. If you are a remote worker for Yahoo and the contract stipulates that your place of work is not at the office, can you really be fired with a just cause?

Comment Re:What did you pick? (Score 3, Informative) 316

What are you smoking?

I have a Canon 5D Mk II, with 35 mm CMOS, and I frequently use the camera with e.g. 50 mm lens and set it to f/1.4 to get plenty of bokeh. There's also a bulb setting. I use that every time I attach my camera to a telescope and do a few minutes of exposure. And of course you can set white balance to whatever you like, or what exactly do you mean by "3 color sliders"?

And plenty of places show that digital has long ago surpassed 35 mm film in quality, and also larger formats (with less margin though).

Comment Re:BD-RE discs (Score 1) 212

So do you re-read and burn anew your BDs a few times a year, or annually, or some other method? What's your strategy and experience?

I have two sets of discs, one offsite (stashed in a cabinet at my workplace), one local. I do incremental increases on the local, and occasionally (twice a year or so) swap the sets, and when this happens I do a full backup on the new local set. Upon writing, I do and instant verification on whether it's readable. I don't care if discs fail years from now, as long as the data lasts six months.

I've had two occasions of failed optical disc, ever (both DVD-RW's actually): One was where I received a disc that was marked with a permanent marker, so give a few years and it had basically dissolved those portions of the disc. I could still read most of the sectors though.. The other had been left outside it's jewel case on the desk for too long (so it got exposed to UV steadily). My first ever CD-R from 1992 is still reading out just fine.

Comment BD-RE discs (Score 1) 212

50 gigabytes for a rewritable BD-RE, and the media is actually durable. Drop your external HDD from the desk, and it's probably toast. Optical discs you can basically throw around and they are still readable. Only problem is that long exposure to UV radiation might do harm, but I'm not going to leave them lying into the sun anyway.

I have all my data on about 5 BD-REs (most of them photos, some videos, and full e-mail archive. Operating system configs and the like are just a drop in a bucket).

Comment Re:!good (Score 1) 236

Next up, let's put control of the toilet flush lever in someone else's hands while I'm showering.

Offtopic, but I always thought this meme was just something that happened in the movies. Is (American?) plumbing really that bad that when someone else opens a tap or flushes a toilet, you immediately get boiled in a shower? For real?

It's just that I've never encountered this effect anywhere. Sure, sometimes the hot water would be out due to a malfunctioning heater or something, but never had this effect of scalding hot burns right after someone else touches a tap..

Comment Demonstrate that you have feet in both camps (Score 4, Interesting) 232

There are several comments here stating that the PhD means that hiring managers are scared of those. They are - but only if it's a "pure" PhD. I've got a lots of friends in academia who haven't spent a day in the industry. They are scared witless on what happens if their grant money expires (and are without tenure), since industry is such a different world and hiring managers know that they'd be like fish out of water.

However, you seem to be in a very much similar situation as me. I completed my PhD last year. I happen to also have industry experience, including 9 years of working for an ISP, and a CCIE certificate. From my experience, it's a *very* attractive combination - to an emplyer, it means that you know what's going on in the real world and understand customers, and yet you can also look at the bleeding edge of research and maybe have some insight on how things at the horizon might affect your business in a few years - and maybe capitalize on those opportunities ahead of the curve. I know several people with similar backgrounds - in big companies they are usually located somewhere near CTOs office or similar positions, if not directly in R&D departments, but a few of them (myself included) deal with customers and their networks on a daily basis.

That pause in your resume doesn't really matter *if* you can demonstrate that you haven't been in the ivory tower of universities but can actually deal with real-world problems.

Comment Re:Ultima VII: look long and hard at that! (Score 2) 337

As someone who has completed all Ultimas from IV to VIII (including Serpent Isle and Ultima Underworlds), that's just nostalgy filter shining.

I don't count "believeable world" to be one where I have to guess keyword, and talk with "Name?", "Job?".

Granted, since U5 the NPCs started to actually have daily routines, but...well, ten years after U7, you had a RPG renaissance that started with Baldur's Gate. Have you tried it (with all the fan-made upgrades for todays computers)?

For more recent stuff, well, Skyrim actually is pretty damn good. I'll grant you that earlier Elder scrolls games (I played even Daggerfall) suffered exactly from that lack of immersion, but Skyrim finally feels good.

Then theres pretty much everything Bioware has made since Baldur days, Dragon Age I + Awakening (Dragon Age II suffers from sequelitis), Mass Effect being the recent entries.

And that doesn't even count all the stuff available from indie developers (Magicka!).

Comment Re:Desk phone stays on the desk when you go home (Score 1) 445

They can call. I don't need to answer. If I see someone from work calling, it's my discretion if I answer. If I'm just goofing off, I might as well answer. If I'm having a moment with family or especially if I'm on vacation, they can call all they want - I'm not responding.

I get paid extra when I'm booked for on-call duty outside of office hours. When that happens, sure, call away.

Comment Home office and videophone (Score 2) 445

Might be a rather specific use-case, but since there are so many telecommuters...I work from home, and I have a Cisco/Tandberg videophone (one of their "personal systems") on my desk. Although I'm practically never at the office, having the video there gives me that much more "presence" at the office than just being a voice (or writing off emails). The quality is much better than just having a webcam and a laptop + being a dedicated device, I never have to fight with whatever video conferencing software there might be. And of course, it has much better speakerphone capabilities than my cellphone.

I have been very happy with it for the last 2 years. Recently, there has been a bit of pressure to start using MS Lync - but the truth is, Lync is mostly still used as a corporate messenger and not for calls. Lync 2013 does provide for more standards-based approach - instead of MS's RTVideo codec, they are actually going to use H.264, so maybe that'll change things. Then again, you can get one of those Lync-aware phones from Polycom and keep using a dedicated phone.

Comment It's just FEC (Score 5, Interesting) 357

Forward error correction - there are different algorithms that are dime a dozen.

The one thing that *does* surprise me is that no such thing is built-in to the link layer of 802.11 spec. Physical layer does whatever it can to garner signal from the noise, but there is no redundant data at higher layers at all.

All this has of course resulted in a gazillion papers on that very topic, hoping to see practical application soon.

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