I'm a lefty and I use my right hand for the mouse.. One benefit is this frees up your left hand so that if you need to scroll around the screen and make notes at the same time you can do that (came in very handy when I used to do tech support and was required to log calls on paper).
I even know some righties that use the mouse with their left hand so they can take notes with their right hand.. It's more useful than you might initally think.
Wow, that's a lot of FUD. To upgrade "these cards" to use some mild form of encryption, you have to upgrade every card station, gas pump, vending machine, ID verifier, payphone, ATM Machine, and any other magnetic strip reader in the world to support this new form of encryption. For what, to make it illegal for a few nerds with too much time on their hands from viewing data stored on a card in their own possession? Why? The companies shouldn't be storing anything on the card they don't want the consumer to know about, anyway.
And I'm curious, what are the other reasons NOT to use plastic?
I dunno, I have to defend google here. Yesterday I was working on revamping a small user management app used by our department on our intranet.. Since I wasn't under a deadline I decided as a learning experience to abandoned my normal table based layout (since I'm constantly hearing "using tables for layout is evil!") and implement the design in CSS. Well, after spending over 10 hours for what SHOULD have been a two hour design, I finally got something that looked halfway decent, but only after having to learn the particular rendering quirks of each specific browser I wanted to support.
What especially bit my ass was mozilla decides to be standards-compliant and render css boxes based on the width you specify and add padding and borders to that. Ok, fair enough. IE decides to be NOT standards complient and render boxes at the width you specify and deduct padding and borders from that. Ok, I can see that. So, to work around the issue you either implement other "container" boxes, or use a *non-standard* css element mozilla provides: -moz-box-sizing: border-box. WTF? They support the standard for rendering, but can't support the standard "box-sizing" attibute for changing the rendering behavior?
It's crap like this that makes folks like me that don't design high-profile cutting-edge sites everyday go back to the dark ages of table based layouts and crappy CSS hacks. My point is that CCS just isn't THERE yet. Blame microsoft if you want, but moz and other browsers have their share of CSS bugs, too. The best anyone can do TODAY is exploint rending hacks in various browsers.
I'm still baffled why people stick themselves with an MP3 player with internal memory.. Do what I did, get yourself an el cheapo Nex IIe player which uses compact flash. I got mine for $80 on ebay two years ago - current ones are going for $40. It doesn't have the "geek appeal" of owning an iPod, but hey, take the $300 you save and put it towards a Mac Mini. As a bonus my camera uses compact flash too, so I can mix and match cards as I need more memory in one device or the other. 512MB compact flash cards are cheap these days, and you CAN get the higher capacity microdrive ones, though they'll kill your battery life.
We have the direct promise from God, after the flood of Noah, that life on this Earth will continue about the same as it has since then, until the "End of the World":
Right, but where in the Bible does it say exactly when the "End of the World" will happen? It doesn't. For all we know it could be a massive asteriod impact next tuesday at 4:55pm Eastern Time. We just assume the end of the world is really far away, because no one wants to think about it happening during their lifetime.
Doing this will never get you any closer to the government you really want.
And holding on to some lofty ideal that by magic we are going to get a third party candidate from < 1% of the popular vote to > 50% will? I'm all for the idea of getting a third party candidate in office, but it's just that, an IDEA. Let me explain.
I looked around at my polling place this morning. I was one of two people who looked under 30. The other 50 or so people in my immediate view were easily 60 or older. The woman next to me literally was on a walker and required assistance to physically move herself to the voting booth. While I applaud her for actually getting out to vote, who do you think she's going to vote for? I live in the deep south, the heart of the bible belt. She will vote republican across the board.
My point is, for every one of us that is educated enough to realize the failures of a two-party system, there are 20 people that will vote republican or democrat because that's how they've always voted. They won't think about it, they'll just vote.
So what we are left with in the REAL WORLD is to either vote out the nutjob we know has screwed up the country (by voting for an almost-equally-bad candidate) or squander our vote away on a third party candidate. These are the options we have TODAY. The time to change the electoral system is in the 4 years leading up to election day, not on election day.
In btw, I am currently looking at the same jukebox question from a different perspective - to move the picturebook to the car and plug it into the AUX IN on the car stereo.
There are tons of resources on the web for doing just this. I did this with an old toshiba Libretto 100 (the one that's a P166 and about the size of a VCR tape, easily stashed under a seat). For driver-friendly control, use a parallel-port LCD display, like this, and a serial port IrMan with a credit card-sized universal remote. I built the whole thing for under $100, not counting laptop.
Just google for car mp3, or look at CAJUN to get started. If it helps I used ZipSlack as my linux distro, but any small distro will do.
Add the longer lines of people confused over whether they need to take off their shoes or take apart their laptops and flying is just not any fun anymore.
Seriously, what is the deal with that? I flew for the first time after 9/11 about a month ago and several jackasses kept holding up the line to take their shoes off and put them back on, though as far as I could tell no one ever asked them to..
The laptop thing is a royal PITA too. Why can't they just x-ray it in the case? The case I have is made of leather, surely the x-rays can penetrate it.
Reminds me of when I was flying back into the US from Cancun, pre-9/11. A customs agent wanted me to prove to her that my disposable camera was really a disposable camera by taking a picture with it, at which point I was almost arrested by another customs agent for taking pictures in the restricted access customs area. Security, my ass.
What prevents someone from hacking into a Seti network packet and make it seem like the signal meant something?!
Well, IANASetiExpert, but I'll take a stab at this. One, Seti does basic validity checks on the data blocks they receive back.. I don't know the full extent of the checks but I know they're meant to reject obviously fake work units, as well as work units from modified clients. Second reason is Seti sends each work unit out multiple times.. So if they get the unit back with 4 results saying one thing, and one result that's "interesting", they'll probably throw out the anomaly and stick with the 4 consistent results. Lastly, even if you fake an "interesting" work unit and they accept it, no one goes running around screaming "we found ET!". They simply flag the coordinates in the work unit and train the receiver in that direction again when they have time to take a closer look.
If you don't like the way I mod catch me in M2 and I'll stop getting points. As it stands I've been downmodding redundant jokes for over a year now and I get mod points about every 4 days. Someone must agree with the way I mod.
(intentionally posted non-AC, I've got plenty of karma to burn. mods do your worst)
Re:Broadband over power lines?
on
VoIP Questioned
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· Score: 1
This was a silly point of the article, IMHO. Of the people you know that still have POTS lines that would be a candidate for VoIP (i.e. your tech savvy friendd, not your grandma), how many of them still use wired (not cordless) phones? Everyone I know has one or more 2.4ghz phones plugged into their POTS lines with no "wired" backup phone. Guess what, cordless phones will not work in a power outage either! stupid cnet FUD-spreading article writer
Re:What a crock of...
on
VoIP Questioned
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Related issue: there really ought to be a way to test 911.
I agree there should be an automated way to test 911, as you described.. That said, I work for a large multi-city real estate company and we are deploying Cisco IP phones to every new office we complete.. We always test 911 service, because there was one time when we first deployed IP phones in our corporate office we had not tested it and found out the hard way it wasn't working (luckily we were still migrating from a legacy PBX, so there were still legacy phones around to dial 911 with).
We set our IP phones up so that 911 or 9911 will work (since people are so used to dialing a 9 first). We try each number and when the operator answers we start with "THIS IS NOT AN EMERGENCY CALL, we are testing a new phone system installation and need to know what number and address we are posting". Every one I've talked to has been happy to help and not acted put out in any way. They'd rather KNOW you have working 911 service than have to deal with answering emergency calls with the wrong phone number or address associated with the call.
Also, for those curious about how E911 is handled with VoIP in the enterprise market, cisco has a product called Cisco Emergency Responder that adds on to the Cisco Call Manager Infrastructure and can do intelligent E911 routing. If someone picks their phone up and moves to another office (happens all of the time with real estate agents) the Emergency Responder figures out where they are and intelligently routes their 911 calls appropriately. It can also send you emails or automatically call your building's security team when someone places a 911 call. It's just a matter of time before someone conquers this in the residential VoIP arena.
I usually tell whoever forwarded this to me (as it's usually someone who knows me) that if they keep doing it I'll be forced to block all mail from them.
I do the same. One thing I've found that helps before you block _all_ mail from them is block any thing that comes from their email address where the subject starts with "fw". This will catch "Fwd: make money fast!", "Fw: some joke", "Fw: Re: Fwd: Re: Fw: funny!". Most microsoft MUAs and common webmail systems I've seen handle forwards this way (prepending Fw: or Fwd:). Usually if it's just a FoaF I never get legit forwards from them anyway, and if they want to actually type me an email the chance of the subject starting with Fw is small.
Sometimes I find they remove the freaking subject altogether before forwarding it on.. If that happens I just block everything from them. Works for me so far.
Not even if it comes back with a list of streets that each possible answer would be on, like when you call directory assistance?
Quick, think of your best friend's name. Now, quickly, think of the name of the street your best friend lives on.. Couldn't do it? I didn't think so. I don't even know what steet my DAD lives on, and I visit him regularly. I know how to navigate to it but I've never paid attention to the name.
The only way this would work is if it comes back and says "John Smith, about 6 feet tall with brownish hair, a beard, and a wife named Jane? Or John Smith with short blonde hair and a boyfriend named Carl?". Yeah, that'll work.
You are talking about something I've seen two pieces of mail doing this week: sending a sign-up contract that looks like a bill, and when they pay it providing the service. If they don't pay, well you were only offering. If they do, you have a customer...
The big long distance players (well, some of them at least) use a variation on this. They send you a check for some small but meaningful amount ($2 to $10 US) and tell you it is a gift/rebate/etc. In the fine print on the back of the check just below where you endorse it you see that the act of endorsing and cashing that check signs you up for brand X long distance at a minimum rate of $14.95 per month or some such.
I frequently get legitimate random checks from my insurance companies, cell phone provider, etc for over payment, class action lawsuits and so on, so I'm used to signing and cashing without reading the fine print. I wonder how many people that don't pay attention get taken in by this?
Its another example of nonsense int he real world.. of course I *am* the intended recipient of every email I get, otherwise the sender would have sent it to someone else. Of course, you could say that you accidentally sent it to me instead of who you meant to send it to.. but how am I supposed to know that? I don't read minds.
I can guess, but that's hardly going to stand up in court, now is it?
Well, here's what I normally see.. Some moron at a bank or law office or whatever forwards a lame joke to like 20 of their buddies, with full legal disclaimer attached. The 20 recipients then go on to forward it to 1000 aol accounts and everyone else in their address books, and somewhere down the line a "friend" that I haven't talked to in 4 years but has me in his address book forwards it along to me and everyone else in his address book. I now have a lame joke about 6 generations removed from the original sender but the full disclaimer about how I'm not supposed to read the email still attached. Funny thing is, the disclaimer is at the BOTTOM of the email.. Tell me how I am supposed to UNREAD the lame joke after I see the disclaimer...
In a reasonable environment where your boss is right there and you work directly with other employees, bullshit like that is a bit harder to float.
While someone might float bullshit like this for a little while (remotely or in a "real" office), any competent boss will eventually see through it. We have an employee in my department that ALWAYS has some sort of crisis. His car won't start. His dog is sick. His alarm didn't go off. He has food poisoning. One of his buddies accidentally took off with his car keys at the bar last night (yes, he actually used this). To listen to his excuses of why he constantly can't make it to work you'd think he was the most unlucky person in the world. Eventually the boss will get tired of putting up with this and get rid of him.
Same would happen to your example of a person missing a deadline and claiming their hard drive crashed. Eventually the boss would get fed up with excuses for missed deadlines and sack them.
One bright spot here, I suppose, is that if you were really working from home 100% of the time, you could, with a little creative use of flex time, hold two jobs at once.
Wow, you call that a bright spot? Or did my sarcasm detector not go off?:)
Oh but it does. People spending all week day evenings nailed to the couch do not excercise, doubtfully eat very healthy. With national healthcare paid out of our taxes it becomes my problem. Just as your heroin consumption.
Eh, but it's not T.V.'s fault people are "nailed to the couch". Lazy people are lazy people, myself included. If you took away my TV instead of laying on the couch watching the tube I'd be laying on the couch reading a book. Or using my laptop to surf slashdot. Or sleeping. Just because there's suddenly not a TV in the room doesn't mean I'm going to go out and take up jogging.
Same with heroin. People who tend towards heroin addition generally have addictive personalities and are either trying to escape something (their present, their past), or simply love being "fucked up". But guess what? You take away their heroin and they'll move to oxycontin. Or Robitussen. Or alcohol. You get the idea. You can't change people by removing their access to a vice. This is why bans on gambling/smoking/drugs/drinking NEVER work.
There is a public consensus that lives lost in the process of doing something "necessary" are okay, as they died doing something worthwhile.. Whether it be building a highrise or fighting a war in iraq, the members of the public that think the highrise or war are necessary are willing to accept the cost of lives to reach a goal...
The public as a whole doesn't think space exploration is "necessary", therefore they deem any lives lost as a preventable trajedy.. Which is a shame. Those involved in space exploration know the risks and go into it voluntarily. Obviously every reasonable effort should be made to protect them, but there ARE going to be failures. If we can consider a soldier dying in iraq a hero who died fighting for what he believed in why can't we look as astronauts the same way?
Re:they don't need that much disk space
on
Speculating About Gmail
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Also, most headers are standard (From:, Subject:, etc) so they could be tokenized down to 1 byte.
Right, not only that, but since google IS a data management company, I suspect they'll break out your email into tokens and just store those tokens. Remember, just because it's an email service doesn't mean google is stuck using mbox, maildir, or any standard "on disk" format. They can easily tokenize your email and store it as references to tokens, to be reconstructed on the fly when you want to read it. The advantages are it reduces the disk space required, so what you see as 10GB may only exist as 10MB of token references, and several GB of shared tokens shared between all users. Also, they can massage the data any way they want for demographic info, trends, and of course, targeted ads.
How cool would it be to see an email zeitgeist? You'd find out things like "the most popular phrase in email the day after the super bowl was 'Janet Jackson'".
Changing subjects - I think the targeted ad thing has HUGE potential if implemented properly.. You email your dad asking if he wants to join you for a weekend of golf in Palm Springs, and when he opens the email there's an ad for a Palms Springs golf course. Or email your brother about finding a WiFi hotspot in Seattle, and when he replies you get an ad for a WiFi-enabled coffee shop in Seattle.. Lots of potential there.
Slashdot Mirror
I even know some righties that use the mouse with their left hand so they can take notes with their right hand.. It's more useful than you might initally think.
Wow, that's a lot of FUD. To upgrade "these cards" to use some mild form of encryption, you have to upgrade every card station, gas pump, vending machine, ID verifier, payphone, ATM Machine, and any other magnetic strip reader in the world to support this new form of encryption. For what, to make it illegal for a few nerds with too much time on their hands from viewing data stored on a card in their own possession? Why? The companies shouldn't be storing anything on the card they don't want the consumer to know about, anyway.
And I'm curious, what are the other reasons NOT to use plastic?
(think of C++)
What especially bit my ass was mozilla decides to be standards-compliant and render css boxes based on the width you specify and add padding and borders to that. Ok, fair enough. IE decides to be NOT standards complient and render boxes at the width you specify and deduct padding and borders from that. Ok, I can see that. So, to work around the issue you either implement other "container" boxes, or use a *non-standard* css element mozilla provides: -moz-box-sizing: border-box. WTF? They support the standard for rendering, but can't support the standard "box-sizing" attibute for changing the rendering behavior?
It's crap like this that makes folks like me that don't design high-profile cutting-edge sites everyday go back to the dark ages of table based layouts and crappy CSS hacks. My point is that CCS just isn't THERE yet. Blame microsoft if you want, but moz and other browsers have their share of CSS bugs, too. The best anyone can do TODAY is exploint rending hacks in various browsers.
I'm still baffled why people stick themselves with an MP3 player with internal memory.. Do what I did, get yourself an el cheapo Nex IIe player which uses compact flash. I got mine for $80 on ebay two years ago - current ones are going for $40. It doesn't have the "geek appeal" of owning an iPod, but hey, take the $300 you save and put it towards a Mac Mini. As a bonus my camera uses compact flash too, so I can mix and match cards as I need more memory in one device or the other. 512MB compact flash cards are cheap these days, and you CAN get the higher capacity microdrive ones, though they'll kill your battery life.
We have the direct promise from God, after the flood of Noah, that life on this Earth will continue about the same as it has since then, until the "End of the World":
Right, but where in the Bible does it say exactly when the "End of the World" will happen? It doesn't. For all we know it could be a massive asteriod impact next tuesday at 4:55pm Eastern Time. We just assume the end of the world is really far away, because no one wants to think about it happening during their lifetime.
And holding on to some lofty ideal that by magic we are going to get a third party candidate from < 1% of the popular vote to > 50% will? I'm all for the idea of getting a third party candidate in office, but it's just that, an IDEA. Let me explain.
I looked around at my polling place this morning. I was one of two people who looked under 30. The other 50 or so people in my immediate view were easily 60 or older. The woman next to me literally was on a walker and required assistance to physically move herself to the voting booth. While I applaud her for actually getting out to vote, who do you think she's going to vote for? I live in the deep south, the heart of the bible belt. She will vote republican across the board.
My point is, for every one of us that is educated enough to realize the failures of a two-party system, there are 20 people that will vote republican or democrat because that's how they've always voted. They won't think about it, they'll just vote.
So what we are left with in the REAL WORLD is to either vote out the nutjob we know has screwed up the country (by voting for an almost-equally-bad candidate) or squander our vote away on a third party candidate. These are the options we have TODAY. The time to change the electoral system is in the 4 years leading up to election day, not on election day.
There are tons of resources on the web for doing just this. I did this with an old toshiba Libretto 100 (the one that's a P166 and about the size of a VCR tape, easily stashed under a seat). For driver-friendly control, use a parallel-port LCD display, like this, and a serial port IrMan with a credit card-sized universal remote. I built the whole thing for under $100, not counting laptop.
Just google for car mp3, or look at CAJUN to get started. If it helps I used ZipSlack as my linux distro, but any small distro will do.
Add the longer lines of people confused over whether they need to take off their shoes or take apart their laptops and flying is just not any fun anymore.
Seriously, what is the deal with that? I flew for the first time after 9/11 about a month ago and several jackasses kept holding up the line to take their shoes off and put them back on, though as far as I could tell no one ever asked them to..
The laptop thing is a royal PITA too. Why can't they just x-ray it in the case? The case I have is made of leather, surely the x-rays can penetrate it.
Reminds me of when I was flying back into the US from Cancun, pre-9/11. A customs agent wanted me to prove to her that my disposable camera was really a disposable camera by taking a picture with it, at which point I was almost arrested by another customs agent for taking pictures in the restricted access customs area. Security, my ass.
What prevents someone from hacking into a Seti network packet and make it seem like the signal meant something?!
Well, IANASetiExpert, but I'll take a stab at this. One, Seti does basic validity checks on the data blocks they receive back.. I don't know the full extent of the checks but I know they're meant to reject obviously fake work units, as well as work units from modified clients. Second reason is Seti sends each work unit out multiple times.. So if they get the unit back with 4 results saying one thing, and one result that's "interesting", they'll probably throw out the anomaly and stick with the 4 consistent results. Lastly, even if you fake an "interesting" work unit and they accept it, no one goes running around screaming "we found ET!". They simply flag the coordinates in the work unit and train the receiver in that direction again when they have time to take a closer look.
(intentionally posted non-AC, I've got plenty of karma to burn. mods do your worst)
When I mod, they get bitchslapped. See my sig:
This was a silly point of the article, IMHO. Of the people you know that still have POTS lines that would be a candidate for VoIP (i.e. your tech savvy friendd, not your grandma), how many of them still use wired (not cordless) phones? Everyone I know has one or more 2.4ghz phones plugged into their POTS lines with no "wired" backup phone. Guess what, cordless phones will not work in a power outage either! stupid cnet FUD-spreading article writer
Related issue: there really ought to be a way to test 911.
I agree there should be an automated way to test 911, as you described.. That said, I work for a large multi-city real estate company and we are deploying Cisco IP phones to every new office we complete.. We always test 911 service, because there was one time when we first deployed IP phones in our corporate office we had not tested it and found out the hard way it wasn't working (luckily we were still migrating from a legacy PBX, so there were still legacy phones around to dial 911 with).
We set our IP phones up so that 911 or 9911 will work (since people are so used to dialing a 9 first). We try each number and when the operator answers we start with "THIS IS NOT AN EMERGENCY CALL, we are testing a new phone system installation and need to know what number and address we are posting". Every one I've talked to has been happy to help and not acted put out in any way. They'd rather KNOW you have working 911 service than have to deal with answering emergency calls with the wrong phone number or address associated with the call.
Also, for those curious about how E911 is handled with VoIP in the enterprise market, cisco has a product called Cisco Emergency Responder that adds on to the Cisco Call Manager Infrastructure and can do intelligent E911 routing. If someone picks their phone up and moves to another office (happens all of the time with real estate agents) the Emergency Responder figures out where they are and intelligently routes their 911 calls appropriately. It can also send you emails or automatically call your building's security team when someone places a 911 call. It's just a matter of time before someone conquers this in the residential VoIP arena.
I usually tell whoever forwarded this to me (as it's usually someone who knows me) that if they keep doing it I'll be forced to block all mail from them.
I do the same. One thing I've found that helps before you block _all_ mail from them is block any thing that comes from their email address where the subject starts with "fw". This will catch "Fwd: make money fast!", "Fw: some joke", "Fw: Re: Fwd: Re: Fw: funny!". Most microsoft MUAs and common webmail systems I've seen handle forwards this way (prepending Fw: or Fwd:). Usually if it's just a FoaF I never get legit forwards from them anyway, and if they want to actually type me an email the chance of the subject starting with Fw is small.
Sometimes I find they remove the freaking subject altogether before forwarding it on.. If that happens I just block everything from them. Works for me so far.
Not even if it comes back with a list of streets that each possible answer would be on, like when you call directory assistance?
Quick, think of your best friend's name. Now, quickly, think of the name of the street your best friend lives on.. Couldn't do it? I didn't think so. I don't even know what steet my DAD lives on, and I visit him regularly. I know how to navigate to it but I've never paid attention to the name.
The only way this would work is if it comes back and says "John Smith, about 6 feet tall with brownish hair, a beard, and a wife named Jane? Or John Smith with short blonde hair and a boyfriend named Carl?". Yeah, that'll work.
You are talking about something I've seen two pieces of mail doing this week: sending a sign-up contract that looks like a bill, and when they pay it providing the service. If they don't pay, well you were only offering. If they do, you have a customer...
The big long distance players (well, some of them at least) use a variation on this. They send you a check for some small but meaningful amount ($2 to $10 US) and tell you it is a gift/rebate/etc. In the fine print on the back of the check just below where you endorse it you see that the act of endorsing and cashing that check signs you up for brand X long distance at a minimum rate of $14.95 per month or some such.
I frequently get legitimate random checks from my insurance companies, cell phone provider, etc for over payment, class action lawsuits and so on, so I'm used to signing and cashing without reading the fine print. I wonder how many people that don't pay attention get taken in by this?
Its another example of nonsense int he real world.. of course I *am* the intended recipient of every email I get, otherwise the sender would have sent it to someone else. Of course, you could say that you accidentally sent it to me instead of who you meant to send it to.. but how am I supposed to know that? I don't read minds.
I can guess, but that's hardly going to stand up in court, now is it?
Well, here's what I normally see.. Some moron at a bank or law office or whatever forwards a lame joke to like 20 of their buddies, with full legal disclaimer attached. The 20 recipients then go on to forward it to 1000 aol accounts and everyone else in their address books, and somewhere down the line a "friend" that I haven't talked to in 4 years but has me in his address book forwards it along to me and everyone else in his address book. I now have a lame joke about 6 generations removed from the original sender but the full disclaimer about how I'm not supposed to read the email still attached. Funny thing is, the disclaimer is at the BOTTOM of the email.. Tell me how I am supposed to UNREAD the lame joke after I see the disclaimer...
In a reasonable environment where your boss is right there and you work directly with other employees, bullshit like that is a bit harder to float.
While someone might float bullshit like this for a little while (remotely or in a "real" office), any competent boss will eventually see through it. We have an employee in my department that ALWAYS has some sort of crisis. His car won't start. His dog is sick. His alarm didn't go off. He has food poisoning. One of his buddies accidentally took off with his car keys at the bar last night (yes, he actually used this). To listen to his excuses of why he constantly can't make it to work you'd think he was the most unlucky person in the world. Eventually the boss will get tired of putting up with this and get rid of him.
Same would happen to your example of a person missing a deadline and claiming their hard drive crashed. Eventually the boss would get fed up with excuses for missed deadlines and sack them.
One bright spot here, I suppose, is that if you were really working from home 100% of the time, you could, with a little creative use of flex time, hold two jobs at once.
Wow, you call that a bright spot? Or did my sarcasm detector not go off? :)
SCO cuts jobs to reach product profit
Investors seem to always assume job cuts will lead to profitability.
Oh but it does. People spending all week day evenings nailed to the couch do not excercise, doubtfully eat very healthy. With national healthcare paid out of our taxes it becomes my problem. Just as your heroin consumption.
Eh, but it's not T.V.'s fault people are "nailed to the couch". Lazy people are lazy people, myself included. If you took away my TV instead of laying on the couch watching the tube I'd be laying on the couch reading a book. Or using my laptop to surf slashdot. Or sleeping. Just because there's suddenly not a TV in the room doesn't mean I'm going to go out and take up jogging.
Same with heroin. People who tend towards heroin addition generally have addictive personalities and are either trying to escape something (their present, their past), or simply love being "fucked up". But guess what? You take away their heroin and they'll move to oxycontin. Or Robitussen. Or alcohol. You get the idea. You can't change people by removing their access to a vice. This is why bans on gambling/smoking/drugs/drinking NEVER work.
(ducks)
The public as a whole doesn't think space exploration is "necessary", therefore they deem any lives lost as a preventable trajedy.. Which is a shame. Those involved in space exploration know the risks and go into it voluntarily. Obviously every reasonable effort should be made to protect them, but there ARE going to be failures. If we can consider a soldier dying in iraq a hero who died fighting for what he believed in why can't we look as astronauts the same way?
Also, most headers are standard (From:, Subject:, etc) so they could be tokenized down to 1 byte.
Right, not only that, but since google IS a data management company, I suspect they'll break out your email into tokens and just store those tokens. Remember, just because it's an email service doesn't mean google is stuck using mbox, maildir, or any standard "on disk" format. They can easily tokenize your email and store it as references to tokens, to be reconstructed on the fly when you want to read it. The advantages are it reduces the disk space required, so what you see as 10GB may only exist as 10MB of token references, and several GB of shared tokens shared between all users. Also, they can massage the data any way they want for demographic info, trends, and of course, targeted ads.
How cool would it be to see an email zeitgeist? You'd find out things like "the most popular phrase in email the day after the super bowl was 'Janet Jackson'".
Changing subjects - I think the targeted ad thing has HUGE potential if implemented properly.. You email your dad asking if he wants to join you for a weekend of golf in Palm Springs, and when he opens the email there's an ad for a Palms Springs golf course. Or email your brother about finding a WiFi hotspot in Seattle, and when he replies you get an ad for a WiFi-enabled coffee shop in Seattle.. Lots of potential there.