So, I was thinking of seeing if I could get one of those InfoGlobe Caller ID Display things and hacking it to display whatever I want from my server... Slashdot Headlines, weather report, new e-mails waiting, etc... Sorta like an LCD display, but much more visible.
Of course, I'm hardware challenged, so I have no clue how I'd go about it. Too little experience to go ahead, plunk down money, and void the warrenty, and assume I can get the thing to work somehow.
Anyone play with these things? Any easy way to figure out how to pervert one?
Heh... considering on the two or three accounts with Yahoo I created, I always set my address to be someplace in Albania or some even more out of the way place, I suspect Yahoo will opt-out of sending my accounts snail mail spam on their own.
Silly Yahoo, real addresses are for lusers.
I got this e-mail as well, and it handily had a link that said "this e-mail address is not associate with a yahoo account." When Yahoo started their whole "Oh, we're gonna change your 'marketing preferences' for you because we know better' bullshit, I scrambled the info in my main Yahoo account, since I couldn't delete it. (I couldn't delete it because Yahoo claimed my account's password too short for their current standards, and their software couldn't change the password after they upped the minimum number of characters required). So, now that account will be free of Yahoo spam, as well.
Actually, to get DVD playing to work, I had to use a totally different set of packages. I believe they were RPM's made for Red Hat. The PLF ones, at least according to the reports I saw, are totally borked. I've never gotten DVD's to work with the PLF stuff before, so I was happy to find another solution.
Here's the article I read over on alt.os.linux.mandrake with instructions on how to get DVDs playing. The instructions are slightly confusing, since he sends you through the ogle site, where you then have to follow links to the freshRPMs site. You have to force one of the library packages to install, since it overwrites one of the native ones from a Mandrake package. Probably not for the weak of heart... and likely to make future upgrades a pain. But I gots me DVD's playing! w00t!
PLF is good for other packages, though... the DVD ones are the only ones that ever gave me problems.
...But yes, it is LG's fault. The current news is that it was triggered by
the
addition of packet-writing code to the 2.4.22-rc2q5 kernel on Aug.
15, no news on how that determination was made. One must suspect that
querying the drive for the format of the disk or its capabilities
somehow triggers a firmware self-destruct bug in the CRD-84xx models.
So, I guess if you tend to use bleeding edge kernels, beware. Mandrake sometime tosses in non-"Linus blessed" things, I believe, so this might have been something you'd only get if you went looking for it.
I've installed 9.2, and it's been a mess. The missing kernel source package in the download version ws a major pain in the ass. Since I'm a silver Mandrake Club member, I was able to get the PowerPack edition as a download as well, but that kept messing up when trying to install. The checksums all checked out, so I have no clue why I got the various problems I did. I've finally gotten it stable, and able to do a few things I haven't been able to get working in the past, like DVD viewing (no, not through the stock Mandrake stuff... only through additional non-Mandrake packages).
Sad to say, Mandrake messed up this release big time. It just wasn't soup yet. It's really too bad, since I've had pretty good luck with them in the past.
That's the Big Lie Microsoft keeps telling over and over again, and not even Cringley called them on it: Open Source developers are "enthusiasts" who write software as a hobby after coming home from their 9-to-5 jobs at McBurgerBucks.
I saw a survey a long, long, time ago (5 years? more?) that showed that most contributors to Linux (or was it BSD... or some other project...? I've forgotten the specifics) were computer professionals in their mid 20's to 30's, who had full-time jobs. A lot, but not all, were software ocntractors... others were involved in IT, etc. But these weren't burger flippers or bored undergrads. I couldn't find it after a quick Google... and I haven't seen anything similar since. But my gut tells me this is fairly accurate.
So, why would anyone want to write software and give it away, especially if they depend on writing software for a living? Well... why do many lawyers do pro-bono work? Why do doctors sometimes volunteer their skills in times of emergency, or at free health clinics?
Simple: they realize that it benefits society. It's along the same lines as any volunteer work. Why does anyone do anything without getting paid for it? Because there's something other than a monetary award. They also realize that it helpds themselves... it gives them a chance to perhaps use their skills in ways they don't in their day-to-day job.
In the case of developers, giving back to the community directly helps them. If you write a piece of Open Source software, and someone, somewhere wants that software extended somehow, to fit their own needs... they can often be convinced to hire you to do the work. If you're applying for a job or contract, how much of an advantage do you think you'll have over other candidates if you can show the company they already rely on software you wrote?
Just look at Linus. Is he flipping burgers? Nope. Sure, he was an undergrad when he started Linux, but since then he's worked for Transmeta, and now he's working for (umm... I forget who... Red Hat?) on Linux full time.
He's number 142453? Man, The Village must have been getting pretty crowded over the last few decades...
"I'm not a number! I am a free man!"
"Ah-hahahahahaha!"
Er... do you have a domain already that's mapped to your home server? IF so, then you'll just have to publish your home IP as the proper one for your domain.
If not, well, maybe free DNS services (such as Dyndns) will be set up so that they'll maintain a list of authorized IP's. Of course, this could be troublesome, since that would make these DNS services instantly targets of spammers who want to set up their own spamming systems.
If neither of those two options work... what's wrong with using the SMTP of your ISP? You could still recieve mail... you'd just have to set up your outgoing mail to relay through the approved SMTP.
Hmm.... so the hypothesis is, since we're suddenly hearing about these things more often, obviously there's an increase in the frequency of meteor impacts and near misses...
So how would you account for the following in your calculations?
Telecommunications now reaches even remote aeas of the world, such that reports of meteor strikes in obscure corners of the world are much more likely to make it to the international press.
Astronomers are now actually looking for asteroids that could impact the earth, which until the "asteroid did it" theory of dinosaur extinction, wasn't really the case. Also, we have increasingly sensitive instruments in the nads of even amateur astronomers, compared to the past. 20 years ago, probably no one would have noticed this 10-meter wide asteroid zipping by.
The proliferation of camcorders and digital cameras in recent years (and more portable camera equipment in general over the few last decades) has meant that far more people are likely to capture images of unusual phenomena taking place in the sky.
Humans are still an expanding species, and we're pushing into more corners of the planet that were once uninhabited.
The likelihood that since asteroid impacts have entered the popular consciousness, that the press is more likely to report on them than they had been before. Also, consider how likely it would have been for a meteor strike in, say, the Ukraine, to have been reported in the western press 50 years ago, compared to today.
So, how would you factor all of that into your statistics?
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -- A major European chip maker said this week it had discovered new ways to produce solar cells which will generate electricity twenty times cheaper than today's solar panels.
So, the question is, did Reuters screw up, or is there an announcement that didn't make it to the STMicroelectronics page that was linked to in the body?
Well, depending on your work environment, I doubt restricting access to source code is going to be practical. I suppose defense contractors manage to do it somehow... but most software firms want to give people as much flexibility as possible... who doesn't want to let an employee hack from home late at night if they want to?
In the closing the barn doors after the horse has escaped department, it might be possible to track down whoever released the source code, based on the state of the source at the moment the snapshot was taken. Assuming that people are checking in changes all of the time (which is a factor of how closely developers and content creation people are working together, and how many of them there are) the source tree will only be in the same state as the snapshot for a short period of time. If the source control system logs when people do updates, you could narrow down who possibly could have leaked the source, by looking at when the code was in the state shown in the leaked code, and who did checkouts before the next checkin took place.
There's a lot of problems with this, naturally. Often, you'll have a simple directory someplace that's a view onto the source code repository... or if someone leaves their own sandbox directory shared, someone could snarf the source from there, and the finger gets pointed at the poor schmuck who owns the sandbox. Depending on the company, it's likely that the source code won't change very much during some periods of time (such as a codefreeze) while veryone will likely be updating their sandboxes regularly... But assuming that whoever leaked your code is one of your own, and they didn't do it very cleverly, they could be nailed.
Stenogrophy is an interesting idea, but in practice, using random variable names would be a nightmare for the developer. One clever way of doing it might be inserting some spaces at the end of some lines of some files. This would only work if it's a secret method, because a simple Perl script could be used to scrub the stenography from the files. Perhaps a few slight alterations to comments (transpose a few letters here and there in certain words... no one is going to notice a few more 'teh's in the comments than usual).
All of these measures could act as a deterrent. If someone is able to prove you just gave away the crown jewels, it's likely your career is screwed, especially in a subset of IT like game programming. There's also the likelihood being sued back into the stoneage that would make any of the possible benefits of leaking source code intentionally seem pale by comparison.
'Feel bad' was about all we could come up with. 'Laugh' was another, but we didn't think she'd like that.
The problem with developers are they are all so fucking lazy.
Don't you have an undo function? Does the undo function not actually undo what she did? If not, why not?
I am often amused by developers who spend one half of their time bitching at how users are so fucking stupid, and the other half of the time bitching that Microsoft sucks so bad because their APIs are a mess, their tools often fuck up, and the error messages they generate are useless. I.e. exactly what their own customers are saying about their own products.
Not necessarily. Most web hosting companies that I have seen will give you X (or unlimited) number of e-mail accounts for your domain. They also have the option of creating a "default" account, where all e-mail sent to the domain goes, if it didn't end up in one of the mailboxes that you explicetely created. This can be useful, since you can just give out random account names at your domain on a whim, and know that all of the e-mail sent there will end up in the same place. It also acts as a backstop to prevent some customer of yours having their e-mail bounce because they got the account name wrong. No e-mail to your domain will ever bounce. It also means you don't have to set up all the default e-mail addresses that people take for granted as being active in a domain (root, webmaster, postmaster, abuse, etc.)
The downside of this is that if a spammer spoofs a totally random e-mail address within the victim's domain, the bounce messages and pissed off replies will end up in one big heap in the victim's default e-mail account. I suspect that's what happened in this case, because there was no evidence that the spammer was pissed at the guy to begin with.
Default e-mail is also a big pain in the ass when a spammer tries a dictionary attack on a domain in order to find valid e-mail addresses. That's when the spammer sends e-mail to a@yourdomain.com, aa@yourdomain,com, aaa@yourdomain.com, ad nauseum. If you have a default e-mail address, *all* of these spams will be delivered. Say goodbye to your disk quota!
Well, partially, I'd say 'Duh.' These people make money by placing people. That's how they put food on the table... its to be expected that they are more concerned with that than either of the two parties.
In most cases I've seen, the headhunters are conerned for themselves first, the company second (after all, the company is paying them), and the candidates last.
Generally, I've tried avoiding recruiters from agencies. At my previous job, I was hired by a recruiter who was on retainer from the company, and I worked with a recruiter while there when we were hiring more people. They seemed to actually care about the company. They also seemed to care a bit about the candidates, since most of them realized that lying to someone just to get them through the door would result in an unhappy employee who was likely to jump ship, which would make them look bad in the eyes of management.
Personally, if I were at a company and needed to hire, I'd just hire a recruiter, and put them on a bonus schedule... if the employee remains for 6 months, they get a bonus... if the employee is still there after a year, another bonus. That would make the recruiter care about the whole equation, since it is in his/her best interest.
Oh, and the only time i can actually verify that I was flat-out lied to in order to get me through the door? No recruiter was involved... it was the doing of a VP and my manager.
They better be careful; the list is poisoned. My state (Massachusetts) added all of the people on its DNC list to the national one. If the telemarketers blindly start calling numbers from that list, they'll get nailed by Massachusetts, at least, if any member of the state DNC list gets called.
I suspect this is the case with many states that established DNC lists.
This ruling has no effect on the state's own DNC lists, as far as I know.
I'm not a novelist, but rather a technical writer, so the formatting and so forth of text isn't such a distraction for me (it's just part of the job). The best tool, hands down, for this is FrameMaker. It gets out of your way, but still lets you quickly format text. If you apply styles as you go along (which is very quick... F9, start typing the style name, hit return, and your paragraph is formatted, unlike Word which requires you to choose a unique key combo for each paragraph style shortcut).
For just plain text, I like the Joe text editor (which someone else has already recommended). Of course, I was a bit biased since my college roomate wrote the thing in the first place. I've written a few shorter pieces, and when I find myself on Linux and needing just a simple bit of text, I'll run Joe and whip it together, then import the text wherever it needs to go.
The only fancy-shcmancy feature in modern wordprocessors I really find useful is autotext. I make the same typos over and over again... having a system I can get to fix them for my automatically would be ideal, if it retained the simplicty of, say, Joe. Even spellchecking on the fly, which I usually leave on, can distract from teh flow of words. Having the computer make fixes to obvious typos can help, and not get too under my skin. I would love to see a version of Joe that had just autotext added. That would bump it back up on my list of text editing.
My biggest distrction these days is... well, everything *else* on the computer. The Web (nothing as tempting to a writer than doing a little quick research... but being able to research every single paragraph you are writing at the drop of a hat is a Really Bad Thing). Email. MP3s, etc. Nigh infinite distractions.
This is why I've been thinking of getting an AlphaSmart Dana It's like a laptop specifically aimed at writing. Really long battery life, some flexibility, but still some limitations on what it can do, as far as internet access and whatnot. I've found with laptops, that I'm always keeping an eye on the battery gauge (I;ve never had a laptop that could last over 2 hours or so on a charge, and I get nervous when they get under 50% full. The Dana seems to match the long life of a Palm with a good keyboard...
Why is it we have everyone questioning why the parents let the kids have access to a video game, and no one asking why they had access to a fucking gun with which to kill people!?
I mean, jesus... the kids didn't use the video game to kill that guy, they used a gun. If your kids are free to wander around with rifles, you're going to be surprised when they shoot someone with them?
Worry less about unsupervised access to video games... I'd worry more about unsupervised access to guns.
Really? Go to a shell prompt and type dmesg. Do you see what I see?
ReiserFS core development sponsored by SuSE Labs (suse.com). Journaling
sponsored by MP3.com
"sponsered by"!? OMFG! An ad! OMFG! An ad in teh kernel!
It's not like Mandrake is going to have popup ads showing up on your desktop, or have permenant banner ads, like ala Opera. It'll take a grand total of 1 minute to eliminate the ads. No big deal.
But if you say that the GPL is not a valid license (which precisely what SCO is saying), you are therefore incapable of agreeing to it. You cannot distribute GPL'ed software without agreeing to the GPL license.
To quote from the GPL:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.
These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.
...keeping their code under wraps until they're in court seems to be a reasonable strategy to me. Their success depends on convincing the court, not the open source community.
I don't follow this reasoning. There's no reason to hold back identifying the infringing code, aside from hiding the fact they have nothing, or that the code that was "duplicated" actually made its way into the kernel through legal channels (i.e. SCO employees contributing the code).
SCO's management has in the past claimed that "telling you what is infringing will mean that people will take the code out of the kernel." This lays bare SCO's purpose... money. They hope to perpetually reap the benefits of claiming infringement, rather than letting the community clean up any leakage of propretary IP into Linux. Furthermore they are bullshitting that it would affect their case. All they would have to do is bring in a Red Hat CD with the source code for the infringing kernel, and show the offending code. The fact that the current kernel wouldn't have the infringing code is irrelevant to SCO's suit. They can still claim that the past infringement damaged their IP and hurt their business.
I still see copies of Chiliware's stuff floating around MicroCenter's bargin bin shelves from time to time, for the princely sum of $1 or somethine like it. I suspect they are just selling old used copies, and not newly made ones. They even still have some Loki games still in stock (the Quake 3 boxes had little stickers on them telling you how you could download the Windows version to work with the datafiles from the Linux version, even:).
I'm sure, in addition to the whole whirring blades thing, that atheletes will be thrilled to have a noisy, fast-moving distraction hovering right on the edge of their vision for the whole race.
However, for futher out shots, RC helicopters are certainly a cheaper alternative to a full-size helicopter. You can have a perfectly good camera these days in a light enough package for a small RC copter... Heck, I'm sure you could mount several on the thing, one dedicated to the pilot, and another on a swivel that produces the pictures seen by the audience.
A) You can bet your bottom dollar that Amazon, CD Now, etc. al. have an agreement in place with RIAA (or the individual recording companies) that governs those clips on their site. Likely, there's a limit to the length, and there's a limit to what they can take from a song (i.e. first 20 seconds, etc.), and a limit on the sound quality (most places I've been too usually have low-quality clips, some even in mono). Many of the clips I hear also fade in and out, which would make them useless for "cobbling together" a full version of the music.
Actually, I would be surprised if Amazon and others do the sampling themselves. Most likely, they are supplied with the samples by the record companies themselves. Check out several web sites. Are the images, audio samples, and even copy about the albums any different from one site to another?
B) Intent also enters into sampleing under fair use. If I write a review of the new Harry Potter book that quotes from the scene when a certain character dies, and uses a quote to reveal the ending of a book, I could be sued if it seemed my intent was to get people not to buy the book. Extracting material from a work for the expressed purpose of damaging the commercial viability of the work is not allowed.
Now, do you want to face a judge and explain why you and your friends were hosting random 20 second perfect quality samples of music in light of the fact that a system exists that would recombine them into a perfect copy? What compelling 'fair use' intent could you claim? Throwing up your hands and saying "lordy! the law lets us use samples as fair use" isn't going to cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I was thinking of seeing if I could get one of those InfoGlobe Caller ID Display things and hacking it to display whatever I want from my server... Slashdot Headlines, weather report, new e-mails waiting, etc... Sorta like an LCD display, but much more visible.
Of course, I'm hardware challenged, so I have no clue how I'd go about it. Too little experience to go ahead, plunk down money, and void the warrenty, and assume I can get the thing to work somehow.
Anyone play with these things? Any easy way to figure out how to pervert one?
Obviously the happy medium is to read the review *while* seeing the movie. People always bitch at me for bringing in that reading lamp, though.
Heh... considering on the two or three accounts with Yahoo I created, I always set my address to be someplace in Albania or some even more out of the way place, I suspect Yahoo will opt-out of sending my accounts snail mail spam on their own.
Silly Yahoo, real addresses are for lusers.
I got this e-mail as well, and it handily had a link that said "this e-mail address is not associate with a yahoo account." When Yahoo started their whole "Oh, we're gonna change your 'marketing preferences' for you because we know better' bullshit, I scrambled the info in my main Yahoo account, since I couldn't delete it. (I couldn't delete it because Yahoo claimed my account's password too short for their current standards, and their software couldn't change the password after they upped the minimum number of characters required). So, now that account will be free of Yahoo spam, as well.
Actually, to get DVD playing to work, I had to use a totally different set of packages. I believe they were RPM's made for Red Hat. The PLF ones, at least according to the reports I saw, are totally borked. I've never gotten DVD's to work with the PLF stuff before, so I was happy to find another solution.
Here's the article I read over on alt.os.linux.mandrake with instructions on how to get DVDs playing. The instructions are slightly confusing, since he sends you through the ogle site, where you then have to follow links to the freshRPMs site. You have to force one of the library packages to install, since it overwrites one of the native ones from a Mandrake package. Probably not for the weak of heart... and likely to make future upgrades a pain. But I gots me DVD's playing! w00t!
PLF is good for other packages, though... the DVD ones are the only ones that ever gave me problems.
Well, after RTFT, I came across this:
So, I guess if you tend to use bleeding edge kernels, beware. Mandrake sometime tosses in non-"Linus blessed" things, I believe, so this might have been something you'd only get if you went looking for it.
I've installed 9.2, and it's been a mess. The missing kernel source package in the download version ws a major pain in the ass. Since I'm a silver Mandrake Club member, I was able to get the PowerPack edition as a download as well, but that kept messing up when trying to install. The checksums all checked out, so I have no clue why I got the various problems I did. I've finally gotten it stable, and able to do a few things I haven't been able to get working in the past, like DVD viewing (no, not through the stock Mandrake stuff... only through additional non-Mandrake packages).
Sad to say, Mandrake messed up this release big time. It just wasn't soup yet. It's really too bad, since I've had pretty good luck with them in the past.
That's the Big Lie Microsoft keeps telling over and over again, and not even Cringley called them on it: Open Source developers are "enthusiasts" who write software as a hobby after coming home from their 9-to-5 jobs at McBurgerBucks.
I saw a survey a long, long, time ago (5 years? more?) that showed that most contributors to Linux (or was it BSD... or some other project...? I've forgotten the specifics) were computer professionals in their mid 20's to 30's, who had full-time jobs. A lot, but not all, were software ocntractors... others were involved in IT, etc. But these weren't burger flippers or bored undergrads. I couldn't find it after a quick Google... and I haven't seen anything similar since. But my gut tells me this is fairly accurate.
So, why would anyone want to write software and give it away, especially if they depend on writing software for a living? Well... why do many lawyers do pro-bono work? Why do doctors sometimes volunteer their skills in times of emergency, or at free health clinics?
Simple: they realize that it benefits society. It's along the same lines as any volunteer work. Why does anyone do anything without getting paid for it? Because there's something other than a monetary award. They also realize that it helpds themselves... it gives them a chance to perhaps use their skills in ways they don't in their day-to-day job.
In the case of developers, giving back to the community directly helps them. If you write a piece of Open Source software, and someone, somewhere wants that software extended somehow, to fit their own needs... they can often be convinced to hire you to do the work. If you're applying for a job or contract, how much of an advantage do you think you'll have over other candidates if you can show the company they already rely on software you wrote?
Just look at Linus. Is he flipping burgers? Nope. Sure, he was an undergrad when he started Linux, but since then he's worked for Transmeta, and now he's working for (umm... I forget who... Red Hat?) on Linux full time.
He's number 142453? Man, The Village must have been getting pretty crowded over the last few decades... "I'm not a number! I am a free man!" "Ah-hahahahahaha!"
Er... do you have a domain already that's mapped to your home server? IF so, then you'll just have to publish your home IP as the proper one for your domain. If not, well, maybe free DNS services (such as Dyndns) will be set up so that they'll maintain a list of authorized IP's. Of course, this could be troublesome, since that would make these DNS services instantly targets of spammers who want to set up their own spamming systems. If neither of those two options work... what's wrong with using the SMTP of your ISP? You could still recieve mail... you'd just have to set up your outgoing mail to relay through the approved SMTP.
Hmm.... so the hypothesis is, since we're suddenly hearing about these things more often, obviously there's an increase in the frequency of meteor impacts and near misses...
So how would you account for the following in your calculations?
So, how would you factor all of that into your statistics?
To quote the CNN Article:
So, the question is, did Reuters screw up, or is there an announcement that didn't make it to the STMicroelectronics page that was linked to in the body?
Well, depending on your work environment, I doubt restricting access to source code is going to be practical. I suppose defense contractors manage to do it somehow... but most software firms want to give people as much flexibility as possible... who doesn't want to let an employee hack from home late at night if they want to?
In the closing the barn doors after the horse has escaped department, it might be possible to track down whoever released the source code, based on the state of the source at the moment the snapshot was taken. Assuming that people are checking in changes all of the time (which is a factor of how closely developers and content creation people are working together, and how many of them there are) the source tree will only be in the same state as the snapshot for a short period of time. If the source control system logs when people do updates, you could narrow down who possibly could have leaked the source, by looking at when the code was in the state shown in the leaked code, and who did checkouts before the next checkin took place.
There's a lot of problems with this, naturally. Often, you'll have a simple directory someplace that's a view onto the source code repository... or if someone leaves their own sandbox directory shared, someone could snarf the source from there, and the finger gets pointed at the poor schmuck who owns the sandbox. Depending on the company, it's likely that the source code won't change very much during some periods of time (such as a codefreeze) while veryone will likely be updating their sandboxes regularly... But assuming that whoever leaked your code is one of your own, and they didn't do it very cleverly, they could be nailed.
Stenogrophy is an interesting idea, but in practice, using random variable names would be a nightmare for the developer. One clever way of doing it might be inserting some spaces at the end of some lines of some files. This would only work if it's a secret method, because a simple Perl script could be used to scrub the stenography from the files. Perhaps a few slight alterations to comments (transpose a few letters here and there in certain words... no one is going to notice a few more 'teh's in the comments than usual).
All of these measures could act as a deterrent. If someone is able to prove you just gave away the crown jewels, it's likely your career is screwed, especially in a subset of IT like game programming. There's also the likelihood being sued back into the stoneage that would make any of the possible benefits of leaking source code intentionally seem pale by comparison.
The problem with developers are they are all so fucking lazy.
Don't you have an undo function? Does the undo function not actually undo what she did? If not, why not?
I am often amused by developers who spend one half of their time bitching at how users are so fucking stupid, and the other half of the time bitching that Microsoft sucks so bad because their APIs are a mess, their tools often fuck up, and the error messages they generate are useless. I.e. exactly what their own customers are saying about their own products.
Not necessarily. Most web hosting companies that I have seen will give you X (or unlimited) number of e-mail accounts for your domain. They also have the option of creating a "default" account, where all e-mail sent to the domain goes, if it didn't end up in one of the mailboxes that you explicetely created. This can be useful, since you can just give out random account names at your domain on a whim, and know that all of the e-mail sent there will end up in the same place. It also acts as a backstop to prevent some customer of yours having their e-mail bounce because they got the account name wrong. No e-mail to your domain will ever bounce. It also means you don't have to set up all the default e-mail addresses that people take for granted as being active in a domain (root, webmaster, postmaster, abuse, etc.)
The downside of this is that if a spammer spoofs a totally random e-mail address within the victim's domain, the bounce messages and pissed off replies will end up in one big heap in the victim's default e-mail account. I suspect that's what happened in this case, because there was no evidence that the spammer was pissed at the guy to begin with.
Default e-mail is also a big pain in the ass when a spammer tries a dictionary attack on a domain in order to find valid e-mail addresses. That's when the spammer sends e-mail to a@yourdomain.com, aa@yourdomain,com, aaa@yourdomain.com, ad nauseum. If you have a default e-mail address, *all* of these spams will be delivered. Say goodbye to your disk quota!
Well, partially, I'd say 'Duh.' These people make money by placing people. That's how they put food on the table... its to be expected that they are more concerned with that than either of the two parties.
In most cases I've seen, the headhunters are conerned for themselves first, the company second (after all, the company is paying them), and the candidates last.
Generally, I've tried avoiding recruiters from agencies. At my previous job, I was hired by a recruiter who was on retainer from the company, and I worked with a recruiter while there when we were hiring more people. They seemed to actually care about the company. They also seemed to care a bit about the candidates, since most of them realized that lying to someone just to get them through the door would result in an unhappy employee who was likely to jump ship, which would make them look bad in the eyes of management.
Personally, if I were at a company and needed to hire, I'd just hire a recruiter, and put them on a bonus schedule... if the employee remains for 6 months, they get a bonus... if the employee is still there after a year, another bonus. That would make the recruiter care about the whole equation, since it is in his/her best interest.
Oh, and the only time i can actually verify that I was flat-out lied to in order to get me through the door? No recruiter was involved... it was the doing of a VP and my manager.
Wha? Will AOL not do as a stand-in for SCO, or have they been rehabilitated?
They better be careful; the list is poisoned. My state (Massachusetts) added all of the people on its DNC list to the national one. If the telemarketers blindly start calling numbers from that list, they'll get nailed by Massachusetts, at least, if any member of the state DNC list gets called.
I suspect this is the case with many states that established DNC lists.
This ruling has no effect on the state's own DNC lists, as far as I know.
I'm not a novelist, but rather a technical writer, so the formatting and so forth of text isn't such a distraction for me (it's just part of the job). The best tool, hands down, for this is FrameMaker. It gets out of your way, but still lets you quickly format text. If you apply styles as you go along (which is very quick... F9, start typing the style name, hit return, and your paragraph is formatted, unlike Word which requires you to choose a unique key combo for each paragraph style shortcut).
For just plain text, I like the Joe text editor (which someone else has already recommended). Of course, I was a bit biased since my college roomate wrote the thing in the first place. I've written a few shorter pieces, and when I find myself on Linux and needing just a simple bit of text, I'll run Joe and whip it together, then import the text wherever it needs to go.
The only fancy-shcmancy feature in modern wordprocessors I really find useful is autotext. I make the same typos over and over again... having a system I can get to fix them for my automatically would be ideal, if it retained the simplicty of, say, Joe. Even spellchecking on the fly, which I usually leave on, can distract from teh flow of words. Having the computer make fixes to obvious typos can help, and not get too under my skin. I would love to see a version of Joe that had just autotext added. That would bump it back up on my list of text editing.
My biggest distrction these days is... well, everything *else* on the computer. The Web (nothing as tempting to a writer than doing a little quick research... but being able to research every single paragraph you are writing at the drop of a hat is a Really Bad Thing). Email. MP3s, etc. Nigh infinite distractions.
This is why I've been thinking of getting an AlphaSmart Dana It's like a laptop specifically aimed at writing. Really long battery life, some flexibility, but still some limitations on what it can do, as far as internet access and whatnot. I've found with laptops, that I'm always keeping an eye on the battery gauge (I;ve never had a laptop that could last over 2 hours or so on a charge, and I get nervous when they get under 50% full. The Dana seems to match the long life of a Palm with a good keyboard...
Why is it we have everyone questioning why the parents let the kids have access to a video game, and no one asking why they had access to a fucking gun with which to kill people!?
I mean, jesus... the kids didn't use the video game to kill that guy, they used a gun. If your kids are free to wander around with rifles, you're going to be surprised when they shoot someone with them?
Worry less about unsupervised access to video games... I'd worry more about unsupervised access to guns.
Really? Go to a shell prompt and type dmesg. Do you see what I see?
"sponsered by"!? OMFG! An ad! OMFG! An ad in teh kernel! It's not like Mandrake is going to have popup ads showing up on your desktop, or have permenant banner ads, like ala Opera. It'll take a grand total of 1 minute to eliminate the ads. No big deal.I paused reading for a moment at the words "puddle of ham" and thought... wow... that sounds pretty psychadelic.
Nice name for a 60's rock group fronted by Homer Simpson.
But if you say that the GPL is not a valid license (which precisely what SCO is saying), you are therefore incapable of agreeing to it. You cannot distribute GPL'ed software without agreeing to the GPL license.
To quote from the GPL:
Boom.
I don't follow this reasoning. There's no reason to hold back identifying the infringing code, aside from hiding the fact they have nothing, or that the code that was "duplicated" actually made its way into the kernel through legal channels (i.e. SCO employees contributing the code).
SCO's management has in the past claimed that "telling you what is infringing will mean that people will take the code out of the kernel." This lays bare SCO's purpose... money. They hope to perpetually reap the benefits of claiming infringement, rather than letting the community clean up any leakage of propretary IP into Linux. Furthermore they are bullshitting that it would affect their case. All they would have to do is bring in a Red Hat CD with the source code for the infringing kernel, and show the offending code. The fact that the current kernel wouldn't have the infringing code is irrelevant to SCO's suit. They can still claim that the past infringement damaged their IP and hurt their business.
I still see copies of Chiliware's stuff floating around MicroCenter's bargin bin shelves from time to time, for the princely sum of $1 or somethine like it. I suspect they are just selling old used copies, and not newly made ones. They even still have some Loki games still in stock (the Quake 3 boxes had little stickers on them telling you how you could download the Windows version to work with the datafiles from the Linux version, even :).
I'm sure, in addition to the whole whirring blades thing, that atheletes will be thrilled to have a noisy, fast-moving distraction hovering right on the edge of their vision for the whole race.
However, for futher out shots, RC helicopters are certainly a cheaper alternative to a full-size helicopter. You can have a perfectly good camera these days in a light enough package for a small RC copter... Heck, I'm sure you could mount several on the thing, one dedicated to the pilot, and another on a swivel that produces the pictures seen by the audience.
A) You can bet your bottom dollar that Amazon, CD Now, etc. al. have an agreement in place with RIAA (or the individual recording companies) that governs those clips on their site. Likely, there's a limit to the length, and there's a limit to what they can take from a song (i.e. first 20 seconds, etc.), and a limit on the sound quality (most places I've been too usually have low-quality clips, some even in mono). Many of the clips I hear also fade in and out, which would make them useless for "cobbling together" a full version of the music.
Actually, I would be surprised if Amazon and others do the sampling themselves. Most likely, they are supplied with the samples by the record companies themselves. Check out several web sites. Are the images, audio samples, and even copy about the albums any different from one site to another?
B) Intent also enters into sampleing under fair use. If I write a review of the new Harry Potter book that quotes from the scene when a certain character dies, and uses a quote to reveal the ending of a book, I could be sued if it seemed my intent was to get people not to buy the book. Extracting material from a work for the expressed purpose of damaging the commercial viability of the work is not allowed.
Now, do you want to face a judge and explain why you and your friends were hosting random 20 second perfect quality samples of music in light of the fact that a system exists that would recombine them into a perfect copy? What compelling 'fair use' intent could you claim? Throwing up your hands and saying "lordy! the law lets us use samples as fair use" isn't going to cut it.