Seriously, ssh -D is your friend:

My prior job required me to travel to China for a few weeks every 2-3 months & I found it invaluable. Fire it open on the command line, and set your browser to use that local port as a SOCKS proxy.

(Note, however, this will not help you deal with shitty bandwidth to sites outside china. On that front, you're pretty much just fucked until you leave China. Even "off hours" don't help that much.)

was or is?

Not only that, but I had no idea if I should count a five disc distro (as common when Red Hat was king) as one ISO or five?

-Bill

timothy is one of the reasons I rarely come to slashdot anymore.

Bing Video Search?

An honest question, I haven't been able to find the answer to online:

How do we know these models are correct?

Of course, what's also in my mind are the models of Wall Street . I understand it's not apple-to-apples, but I think given the collapse we've seen in the financial sector due to incorrect models, it seems a fair question.

-Bill

What surprising is they don't use it for Bing.

Put the crackpipe down!

I was an altavista user. A die-hard one, for most of the mid/late-nineties. In fact, I remember the day I finally convinced my boss to switch from Altavista to Google, because he had worked on Altavista.

Today's results completely blow away the search engines of 10 years ago. In fact, any of the major players -- Yahoo, Microsoft, even Ask & co. -- would blow away the search engines of 10 years ago.

(Add to the fact that the number of documents on the web that they need to crawl & rank have exploded.)

Your comment that "the resultant pile of URLs for any given keyword is utterly worthless" is itself hyperbolic nonsense. If that were true, nobody would use them.

Oh the irony of this comment & the story editor being timothy...

Interesting. The business has never asked your IT group to help reduce the bottom land?

What a fanciful company you must work for.

-Bill

Agreed, I thought the same. The most telling was using low-latency as an indication that he should be seeing high bandwidth. Not necessarily the case.

-Bill

You know that part where you quote something he said in his blog? Yeah, a link would have been nice there.

Gnome: easy.
OS X: easy.
Vista: Fuck if I know.

-Bill

I can't speak to consulting, but being granted equity is fairly common in tech. Some initial points:

* Four years is much more common than five.

* Make sure you understand the vesting schedule. You could suggest a 1 year cliff, followed by monthly after that. If they push to yearly, compromise at quarterly.

Next, as it's a consulting business, ask what happens to profits. Are they distributed to the owners? (I.e., you?) If so, how often & are the books validated by an outside firm? How would the payout of unvested equity work? E.g., say they make $1,000 profit in the first year. Do you get $100 (10%), $25 (10% / 4 year vesting), or $0 (nothing was vested).

Then you need some sense of what that equity is worth. This is where understanding the above will be key, along with looking at past performance and some forecasting of future profit.

If it looks like your salary + the equity would be significantly above what you would make as a salaryman elsewhere, you should consider.

One thing to keep in mind, is that once you sign the deal, they may be less welling to increase your base compensation (e.g., annual salary), thinking that the equity may be golden handcuffs of a sort.

Either way, good luck with your decision! As stressful as it is, this is a Good Problem to have. :)

-Bill