Center isn't necessarily critical, but California is a socially very liberal state on the whole (well, progressive I guess is a better word), and running a social conservative there is about as effective as screaming at a brick wall. California's fiscal views, however, are much more varied. If the Republican Party wants to win elections, then, it naturally follows that they must adjust their tactics to better suit the region by running socially liberal, but fiscally conservative candidates. If they did that, they'd get a lot more votes, while still retaining at least some of their core values to some extent.
Tell the people who lead the California Republican Party to pick candidates who are closer to the center.
WTF? What does that have to do with Feinstein, who has been a radical Left-winger from Day 1?
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. For California to choose someone over Feinstein, that person has to be close enough to center to attract some of the left-wing vote. Otherwise, if both candidates are equally unacceptable, albeit in different ways, the left-wing voters are going to naturally choose the incumbent by default, because the other side has given them insufficient reason to choose someone else.
I really wanted to vote against Feinstein and Boxer, but to me, all of the alternatives were markedly worse (which is saying something, because I generally disagree with both of them far more often than I agree with them). If the Republicans run someone decent (read socially moderate to liberal, but fiscally conservative), I'll vote for that person in a heartbeat.
The last Senate election, the Republicans ran Carly Fiorina against Boxer. Their candidate was best known for being the person who single-handedly nearly bankrupted one of the largest high-tech companies in the world. As a result, a bunch of current and former HP employees had a website with her name that basically talked about what a disaster her leadership at HP had been. She was pretty much guaranteed to lose almost the entire Silicon Valley vote, and probably didn't do well here even among Republicans.
And the last time Feinstein was up for reelection, they ran Elizabeth Emken, whose position against marriage equality made her pretty much guaranteed to lose any election at the state level.
It is pretty clear that the Republicans aren't even trying to win in California. If you want to beat a Democrat in California, you need a fiscal conservative who is socially somewhat liberal. Anybody else is pretty much a non-starter.
It's not just views. The entire design idiom is different:
Mac apps: Each document gets its own window. May use many other small windows for various things. Important actions should be in a menu bar, with Command-key shortcuts. Menu bars are per-app. Right-click is useful, but should not be required for any feature. Standard controls are sized for use with a mouse on a large screen. Users open files from disk using a system-provided UI. Gestures are used for scroll, zoom, rotation, and possibly other features, but those features should also be supported on devices that lack those trackpad capabilities.
Windows apps: Entire app gets one window, often divided up into panes. Menu bars are per-window. Right-click is often required, and that's okay because everyone has a multi-button mouse. Important actions should have control-key shortcuts. Standard controls are sized for use with a mouse on a large screen. Users open files from disk using a system-provided UI.
iOS apps: Entire app gets one view, often divided up into panes. Various gestures let you access other views in place of part or all of the app's existing view. Standard controls are sized for use with a digit on a small screen. Users open documents from a per-app directory, using an app-specific UI (which is usually very simple).
No matter how you restyle your Windows app's window, it is never going to look like an iOS app, because the entire way you design UIs for mobile devices is completely different from the way you design UIs for the desktop.
Now you might be able to get away with it if you're designing only for iOS and Android, but only because the design idioms are fairly similar. And even then, your users are likely to complain about the lack of animation and other advanced UI features that likely don't translate well into cross-platform APIs.
Here's the thing: No decent UI is going to be portable anyway. Every platform out there has its own idioms that users expect an app to obey, and no cross-platform technology will realistically conform to those idioms well enough to not feel out of place.
The only good approach for writing portable code is to get people who understand the platform to write a fully native UI, and to write all the underpinnings in a portable language. Share the model, and maybe share the controller, but don't even attempt to share the view. Therein lies the path to madness.
This. Xcode 6 has generally been a disaster, with 6.2 and 6.3 being the worst of the bunch by far. I've experienced almost nonstop crashes while trying to use the debugger, some literally just seconds apart.
I ended up downgrading to 6.1 because I couldn't usefully debug any iOS or OS X code in 6.2 or 6.3. It still misbehaves in strange ways every so often (bizarre bugs that truly defy comprehension, and are probably fixed in 6.2 or 6.3), but at least I can hit the step button more than about two or three times without Xcode "unexpectedly" quitting and losing my whole debugging session.
The bigger concern is this: If Apple's IDE is in such poor shape, how much of a train wreck will iOS 9 and OS X v10.11 be as a result of all their developers being constantly hamstrung by broken tools?
You're right. I did ignore a lot of those things, though presumably you as an individual would incur most of those same costs. The point was to demonstrate the costs that you would pay, but Comcast wouldn't. I suppose I didn't quite do that as well as I had hoped. Mea culpa.
Of course, in most places, the utility companies are required to mark the lines at the landowner's request, at no charge, so that's not a cost; it's just a "to do". (Amusingly, that's probably one of the few costs that Comcast would incur that the landowner wouldn't.)
Either way, there's some profit margin built into any contracting company's fees, and a company big enough to have their own custom cable and conduit manufacturing is also probably big enough to hire their own employees, thus cutting out that portion of the cost. Whether they choose to do so or not is another question, of course.
They were independent contractors hired by Comcast with a Contract requirement that they badge their trucks and wear Comcast shirts. Comcast supplies the materials, there is an advantage to labeled conduit in that people digging utility test holes can easily identify the owner.
Maybe so, but if so, they're playing a very dangerous game. The legal term that comes to mind here is "agency by estoppel." Briefly put, that term means that if a company authorizes you to act on their behalf, and if they allow you to look and act like an agent of a company, then the company can be held liable for your actions.
As long as Comcast's name is on those trucks, if they screw up, Comcast is almost guaranteed to be held liable in court, regardless of whether the workers are employees or independent contractors. That legal risk is the reason that most contracts these days contain clauses that forbid you from representing yourself as being a partner of or an agent of that company.
The only communication utility that has direct buried cables (no conduit) that I'm even aware of is very old installations of telephone wires. I have run into some of the older fiber optic cables that were not in conduits but they were in armored cables with flowable fill. Such cables aren't used for anything that's not very very important. Anything installed within about the last 30 years when cheap PVC conduit became cheap is now in conduits.
Admittedly, I've only seen cables being buried for cable companies in rural areas, but they were A. coax, and B. not in any sort of conduit whatsoever. That was only a few years ago, and I doubt that practice has changed much except in areas that have gone to fiber. Mind you, that practice does vary widely from place to place, so if you live in a city (or even within twenty or thirty miles of a large city), I can understand why you would not have seen it. That doesn't mean it isn't common practice in truly rural areas.
So rural is easier, but then it's about the same cost?
It's easier, but the distance is also longer. The cost is higher in rural areas, because fewer houses can be served by a single line or set of lines. However, it isn't as much higher as the distance implies, because you don't have to bore under a driveway or sidewalk every fifty feet (and/or dig up and re-build sidewalks and driveways). Building the infrastructure while you're putting in a neighborhood is much cheaper than building it later for the same reason. The less crap you have to work around, the less it costs to put lines in. That statement is amazingly straightforward, and I would challenge you do prove it wrong.
You might find this hard to believe because you don't know what you are talking about but the cost to install the cable to this one house could be a million dollars. He could be on the outer limit of the amplification limits such that it would require them to install an entire fiber hut and amplification system. He could be on the other side of a protected refuge or there could be major utilities between him and the closest connection. In fact there could hundreds of reasons that only Comcast knows about why they can't afford to service that house. There is little point is speculating about what those reasons are unless you want to pay the $5K it would cost for an engineering and locate study to check the feasibility of the installation.
I'm not speculating. The person in question did the installation. There were no boosters, no multi-million-dollar fiber huts. The person paid to have someone trench and run a cable. The cable company lit the cable. End of story. Therefore, I do know that none of those things were necessary, and none of the things you're talking about are even slightly relevant in this case. Clearly the cost was not a million dollars. In fact, it was about $3,000. It is safe to sa
First, all Comcast construction is done by contractors for liability reasons. This isn't negotiable for a large company, a single improper process for a contractor digging a utility in could bankrupt even a company of Comcast's size if their employee's were directly involved in the right incident.
The folks digging up our street were Comcast employees (or at least contractors working for Comcast, not some installer company). They drove Comcast trucks. They ran underground pipes that were manufactured specifically for Comcast, with their name printed every few inches all the way down the length of the tubing. Maybe you don't realize just how big a company we're talking about here.
As for liability, there's a little thing called liability insurance. Companies doing that sort of work have to have it, and if they hire a company to do the work, the company they hire has to have it. It is usually required by law. Whether Comcast pays that cost directly or indirectly is irrelevant; they're still paying the cost of that insurance. Comcast chooses to use contractors in some places because they don't have enough work to keep full-time staff occupied, and/or because it confers tax advantages to use contractors instead of employees. The liability claim is just something they tell contractors so they don't realize how badly they're getting screwed.
Second, though it may only cost $200 a day to rent it's rather irrelevant because Comcast pays the going Contract rate for installations.
Think about this: You're a contracting company that specializes in pulling cables. You have two options:
Work hard to find a bunch of small jobs, knowing that if you can keep your schedule full all day, you'll make n dollars, but realistically knowing that some days you'll barely make n/4 dollars.
Take a contract with Comcast that pays.5n dollars, knowing that they're going to keep sending you work on an ongoing basis.
Which one would you choose? Most contracting companies would choose B, knowing that they'll still be able to pay their employees the same wages, but the company as a whole will be more immune to market fluctuations.
Third, if you think digging the cable in is the only cost you have no concept. There is the planning and engineering costs, the utility mapping, the right-of-way access, the coordination with the local city and the compliance with the local building codes, the insurance costs, the contract management costs, the inspection costs, the quality control and quality assurance. Pulling and splicing cables through the conduits, power and other interconnection costs, splicing the cables, testing and validation, and plant hookup.
Maybe you didn't read the original post. This was about a rural installation. In my experience, that usually means bare coax cables in the ground (no conduit, and probably not fiber), minimal utility mapping (relatively few houses with taps from the power and phone lines), minimal planning and engineering. I mean yes, you do have to do utility mapping, but it's a whole lot easier to map a rural street with a straight wire that parallels the road than it is to map a suburban street that has wires going in random directions from transformers to houses every fifty or one hundred feet.
The cable company would have to comply with the local building codes no matter what. I doubt there's a huge difference there between a rural install and an urban install. If anything, the rural install is probably more laid back, less rigorous, and has lower overall compliance cost. A building code inspector isn't likely to inspect the entire length of wire, but rather the termini, so that cost should be about the same for a 1,000-foot run as for a 50-foot run, assuming it doesn't require them to install any boosters along the way (and if it did, he/she wouldn't have gotten satisfac
We're talking about the lines that they put in the ground, not the in-home installers. And I'd expect most independent contractors to be glorified employees, just under month-to-month contracts.
But even if they contract other companies to do the digging work, they're still paying a lot less for them than you would be as an individual, because those companies know that you are a one-time job, and they need to get as much as they can out of you, whereas the Comcasts of the world are repeat customers that will keep sending you business.
It's only expensive because you were paying for it. The cable companies employ people to run cables, which makes those employees basically a sunk cost. They have to have those people to do repairs on an ongoing basis. When they aren't doing repairs, it costs the cable nothing to have them run lines to new houses, beyond the cost of the wire, which I suspect is somewhere between a third and a sixth of what you paid. (Over the long term, this isn't true, but when it comes to short-term variation, it is.)
Moreover, it costs $200 to rent a trenching machine for a day, and probably less than that to hire someone for a day to run the thing. So basically, even by the most conservative estimate, you overpaid for your installation by about $1,600, all of which went into the pockets of middlemen. Cable companies don't pay middlemen; they pay workers. So even in the worst case scenario, where all their workers were fully booked so that they had to hire new people to handle running your cable, they'd still pay less than half what you paid.
So at your price, it would have been about an 8-year payoff. At half that price, it would be a 4-year payoff. In the telecom world, a four-year payoff is amazingly quick, from what I've read. Your cable company just couldn't be bothered. It had nothing to do with cost, or if it did have something to do with cost, it was only because they were pushing the high up-front cost onto you as a means of ensuring that you could actually afford the service. Either that or they are nearly bankrupt and couldn't afford the $3,000, in which case you probably just wasted your money. Hard to say which.
None of the pages about this bug—not the article, not the CVE, and not the Adobe explanation—tell what the actual attack vector is. They just say that they're vulnerable to XSS. Does that mean that the Flash code can be used on somebody else's domain? Does it mean that the Flash code can in some way be tricked into loading content from the wrong domain on behalf of page JavaScript? If so, and if Flash code uses only non-hardcoded URLs, does that mitigate the problem?
The thing is, even if you got rid of all the insecure Flash applets out there, a malicious person could still host one somewhere. So depending on the nature of the attack, the only real way to fix it might be for Flash to deliberately break every Flash applet linked against the old SDK. If the attack is dependent upon the flash being hosted from the same domain as the content you're trying to steal (e.g. cookies), then the right way to fix it is for web developers to eradicate Flash from their websites.
Fundamentally, the only any driver really does is send commands to a device over a bus and handle the responses. What other kind of driver were you hoping for?:-)
And today, after almost six years of reasonably reliable service, I'm starting to have my doubts about Dreamhost. Two nights in a row, I made minor changes to the configuration for my domains through their Web Panel, and the Apache server on their west coast shared hosting box died and never came back on its own. The first outage was 2.5 hours. This outage is ten hours and counting.
Anybody know a good shared hosting provider with better reliability? This latest failure brings them down to barely two nines YTD, not including scheduled maintenance.
I'm also using GANDI as my registrar. I'm reluctantly letting DreamHost provide DNS for one domain, and deferring part of another domain to their nameserver, but otherwise I've always preferred to keep my DNS servers in-house (literally), for maximum control. My primary is a Mac Mini, and my secondary is a Raspberry Pi.
I was using their shared hosting to serve images associated with my domain, with the HTML served from my home server over DSL—basically as a poor-man's Akamai. Unfortunately, what I found was that their site would randomly take the better part of a minute to respond to a request. That meant that sporadically it would take longer for them to serve an image than for me to do so from my home DSL connection, and pretty much the entire transfer time was spent waiting to get the first byte back from their server.
At some point, I decided to gather statistics on the problem by using a machine at work (typically approaching or reaching gigabit speeds) to make a very short request to the server every couple of minutes. I forget what percentage of those requests took more than half a minute to come back, but I'm pretty sure it was in the double digits.
Obviously, I got a terrible server that was badly configured and/or massively overloaded. Obviously that won't happen to everybody. The reason I left is that even after proving definitively that the server sucked, and requesting that my content be migrated to a server that wasn't overloaded, they refused to fix the problem. Every server provider will have problems now and again. What matters is how you handle them when they happen, or in this case, whether you handle them when they happen. GoDaddy didn't, and that makes them a terrible provider even if only a tiny percentage of their customers have problems, because you never know when you're going to find yourself in that tiny percentage.
Besides that, you're probably fine with any of them. My GoDaddy experience can best be summed up as:
On their hosting service, they limited all processes run by your user account (not just CGI) to a certain number of seconds. This made it almost impossible to upload large files, because they invariably timed out before the upload could finish.
Despite that limit, the service was still unusably slow because of all the WordPress and PHPBB instances whose full-text searches stink on ice. Requests to move my (purely static) content to a server that wasn't so bogged down were denied.
Then, I tried to buy a cert from them. After I made the purchase, but before it actually became available for me to retrieve, they cancelled the purchase and told me that they no longer offered the number of years that I'd bought, despite the fact that I bought it using publicly available links on their website.
Let's just say I ditched them within the first month, and we'll leave it at that. I switched to DreamHost, and haven't looked back. Their service isn't perfect performance-wise, but it is so much better than GD that it isn't even funny. (Yes, I know you're just asking about domain registration, but lots of folks do one, then the other, so....)
And whatever you do, don't get your hosting from the same company that provides your domain names. There are far too many horror stories of hosting-related disputes leading to frozen domain names.
I came to that conclusion about Google several years ago. There's a reason that I never bother to look at my Google+ account even though I created one. I didn't trust it to not go away, so why bother. And that was almost four years ago.
We're well past the point where new Google services should be presumed DOA. My general assumption at this point is that unless it is a major source of ad revenue or they spent at least triple-digit millions to acquire it, they don't care about it.
You're assuming that fix-ups involve the same characters. That need not be the case. For example, most people would probably categorize my first novel as a fix-up, because a chunk of it started as an unrelated short story that I adapted into the universe. It uses different characters, and is expressed as a flashback to the main character as a child, being told the secondary story by his grandfather (who otherwise plays a very insignificant role in the book).
Other fix-ups interleave stories about different groups of characters that are happening at the same time. If done well, the result is indistinguishable from any other well-written third-person novel unless you've read one or more of the original stories.
Slashdot Mirror
Center isn't necessarily critical, but California is a socially very liberal state on the whole (well, progressive I guess is a better word), and running a social conservative there is about as effective as screaming at a brick wall. California's fiscal views, however, are much more varied. If the Republican Party wants to win elections, then, it naturally follows that they must adjust their tactics to better suit the region by running socially liberal, but fiscally conservative candidates. If they did that, they'd get a lot more votes, while still retaining at least some of their core values to some extent.
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. For California to choose someone over Feinstein, that person has to be close enough to center to attract some of the left-wing vote. Otherwise, if both candidates are equally unacceptable, albeit in different ways, the left-wing voters are going to naturally choose the incumbent by default, because the other side has given them insufficient reason to choose someone else.
I really wanted to vote against Feinstein and Boxer, but to me, all of the alternatives were markedly worse (which is saying something, because I generally disagree with both of them far more often than I agree with them). If the Republicans run someone decent (read socially moderate to liberal, but fiscally conservative), I'll vote for that person in a heartbeat.
The last Senate election, the Republicans ran Carly Fiorina against Boxer. Their candidate was best known for being the person who single-handedly nearly bankrupted one of the largest high-tech companies in the world. As a result, a bunch of current and former HP employees had a website with her name that basically talked about what a disaster her leadership at HP had been. She was pretty much guaranteed to lose almost the entire Silicon Valley vote, and probably didn't do well here even among Republicans.
And the last time Feinstein was up for reelection, they ran Elizabeth Emken, whose position against marriage equality made her pretty much guaranteed to lose any election at the state level.
It is pretty clear that the Republicans aren't even trying to win in California. If you want to beat a Democrat in California, you need a fiscal conservative who is socially somewhat liberal. Anybody else is pretty much a non-starter.
It's not just views. The entire design idiom is different:
No matter how you restyle your Windows app's window, it is never going to look like an iOS app, because the entire way you design UIs for mobile devices is completely different from the way you design UIs for the desktop.
Now you might be able to get away with it if you're designing only for iOS and Android, but only because the design idioms are fairly similar. And even then, your users are likely to complain about the lack of animation and other advanced UI features that likely don't translate well into cross-platform APIs.
Tell the people who lead the California Republican Party to pick candidates who are closer to the center.
Here's the thing: No decent UI is going to be portable anyway. Every platform out there has its own idioms that users expect an app to obey, and no cross-platform technology will realistically conform to those idioms well enough to not feel out of place.
The only good approach for writing portable code is to get people who understand the platform to write a fully native UI, and to write all the underpinnings in a portable language. Share the model, and maybe share the controller, but don't even attempt to share the view. Therein lies the path to madness.
This. Xcode 6 has generally been a disaster, with 6.2 and 6.3 being the worst of the bunch by far. I've experienced almost nonstop crashes while trying to use the debugger, some literally just seconds apart.
I ended up downgrading to 6.1 because I couldn't usefully debug any iOS or OS X code in 6.2 or 6.3. It still misbehaves in strange ways every so often (bizarre bugs that truly defy comprehension, and are probably fixed in 6.2 or 6.3), but at least I can hit the step button more than about two or three times without Xcode "unexpectedly" quitting and losing my whole debugging session.
The bigger concern is this: If Apple's IDE is in such poor shape, how much of a train wreck will iOS 9 and OS X v10.11 be as a result of all their developers being constantly hamstrung by broken tools?
You're right. I did ignore a lot of those things, though presumably you as an individual would incur most of those same costs. The point was to demonstrate the costs that you would pay, but Comcast wouldn't. I suppose I didn't quite do that as well as I had hoped. Mea culpa.
Of course, in most places, the utility companies are required to mark the lines at the landowner's request, at no charge, so that's not a cost; it's just a "to do". (Amusingly, that's probably one of the few costs that Comcast would incur that the landowner wouldn't.)
Either way, there's some profit margin built into any contracting company's fees, and a company big enough to have their own custom cable and conduit manufacturing is also probably big enough to hire their own employees, thus cutting out that portion of the cost. Whether they choose to do so or not is another question, of course.
Maybe so, but if so, they're playing a very dangerous game. The legal term that comes to mind here is "agency by estoppel." Briefly put, that term means that if a company authorizes you to act on their behalf, and if they allow you to look and act like an agent of a company, then the company can be held liable for your actions.
As long as Comcast's name is on those trucks, if they screw up, Comcast is almost guaranteed to be held liable in court, regardless of whether the workers are employees or independent contractors. That legal risk is the reason that most contracts these days contain clauses that forbid you from representing yourself as being a partner of or an agent of that company.
Admittedly, I've only seen cables being buried for cable companies in rural areas, but they were A. coax, and B. not in any sort of conduit whatsoever. That was only a few years ago, and I doubt that practice has changed much except in areas that have gone to fiber. Mind you, that practice does vary widely from place to place, so if you live in a city (or even within twenty or thirty miles of a large city), I can understand why you would not have seen it. That doesn't mean it isn't common practice in truly rural areas.
It's easier, but the distance is also longer. The cost is higher in rural areas, because fewer houses can be served by a single line or set of lines. However, it isn't as much higher as the distance implies, because you don't have to bore under a driveway or sidewalk every fifty feet (and/or dig up and re-build sidewalks and driveways). Building the infrastructure while you're putting in a neighborhood is much cheaper than building it later for the same reason. The less crap you have to work around, the less it costs to put lines in. That statement is amazingly straightforward, and I would challenge you do prove it wrong.
I'm not speculating. The person in question did the installation. There were no boosters, no multi-million-dollar fiber huts. The person paid to have someone trench and run a cable. The cable company lit the cable. End of story. Therefore, I do know that none of those things were necessary, and none of the things you're talking about are even slightly relevant in this case. Clearly the cost was not a million dollars. In fact, it was about $3,000. It is safe to sa
The folks digging up our street were Comcast employees (or at least contractors working for Comcast, not some installer company). They drove Comcast trucks. They ran underground pipes that were manufactured specifically for Comcast, with their name printed every few inches all the way down the length of the tubing. Maybe you don't realize just how big a company we're talking about here.
As for liability, there's a little thing called liability insurance. Companies doing that sort of work have to have it, and if they hire a company to do the work, the company they hire has to have it. It is usually required by law. Whether Comcast pays that cost directly or indirectly is irrelevant; they're still paying the cost of that insurance. Comcast chooses to use contractors in some places because they don't have enough work to keep full-time staff occupied, and/or because it confers tax advantages to use contractors instead of employees. The liability claim is just something they tell contractors so they don't realize how badly they're getting screwed.
Think about this: You're a contracting company that specializes in pulling cables. You have two options:
Which one would you choose? Most contracting companies would choose B, knowing that they'll still be able to pay their employees the same wages, but the company as a whole will be more immune to market fluctuations.
Maybe you didn't read the original post. This was about a rural installation. In my experience, that usually means bare coax cables in the ground (no conduit, and probably not fiber), minimal utility mapping (relatively few houses with taps from the power and phone lines), minimal planning and engineering. I mean yes, you do have to do utility mapping, but it's a whole lot easier to map a rural street with a straight wire that parallels the road than it is to map a suburban street that has wires going in random directions from transformers to houses every fifty or one hundred feet.
The cable company would have to comply with the local building codes no matter what. I doubt there's a huge difference there between a rural install and an urban install. If anything, the rural install is probably more laid back, less rigorous, and has lower overall compliance cost. A building code inspector isn't likely to inspect the entire length of wire, but rather the termini, so that cost should be about the same for a 1,000-foot run as for a 50-foot run, assuming it doesn't require them to install any boosters along the way (and if it did, he/she wouldn't have gotten satisfac
Err... sending them business, I mean.
We're talking about the lines that they put in the ground, not the in-home installers. And I'd expect most independent contractors to be glorified employees, just under month-to-month contracts.
But even if they contract other companies to do the digging work, they're still paying a lot less for them than you would be as an individual, because those companies know that you are a one-time job, and they need to get as much as they can out of you, whereas the Comcasts of the world are repeat customers that will keep sending you business.
It's only expensive because you were paying for it. The cable companies employ people to run cables, which makes those employees basically a sunk cost. They have to have those people to do repairs on an ongoing basis. When they aren't doing repairs, it costs the cable nothing to have them run lines to new houses, beyond the cost of the wire, which I suspect is somewhere between a third and a sixth of what you paid. (Over the long term, this isn't true, but when it comes to short-term variation, it is.)
Moreover, it costs $200 to rent a trenching machine for a day, and probably less than that to hire someone for a day to run the thing. So basically, even by the most conservative estimate, you overpaid for your installation by about $1,600, all of which went into the pockets of middlemen. Cable companies don't pay middlemen; they pay workers. So even in the worst case scenario, where all their workers were fully booked so that they had to hire new people to handle running your cable, they'd still pay less than half what you paid.
So at your price, it would have been about an 8-year payoff. At half that price, it would be a 4-year payoff. In the telecom world, a four-year payoff is amazingly quick, from what I've read. Your cable company just couldn't be bothered. It had nothing to do with cost, or if it did have something to do with cost, it was only because they were pushing the high up-front cost onto you as a means of ensuring that you could actually afford the service. Either that or they are nearly bankrupt and couldn't afford the $3,000, in which case you probably just wasted your money. Hard to say which.
I hereby propose to rename it "Software As a Disservice", or "SAD".
Agreed. Flash really should apply the patch, and if it fails, it should refuse to load the Applet.
None of the pages about this bug—not the article, not the CVE, and not the Adobe explanation—tell what the actual attack vector is. They just say that they're vulnerable to XSS. Does that mean that the Flash code can be used on somebody else's domain? Does it mean that the Flash code can in some way be tricked into loading content from the wrong domain on behalf of page JavaScript? If so, and if Flash code uses only non-hardcoded URLs, does that mitigate the problem?
The thing is, even if you got rid of all the insecure Flash applets out there, a malicious person could still host one somewhere. So depending on the nature of the attack, the only real way to fix it might be for Flash to deliberately break every Flash applet linked against the old SDK. If the attack is dependent upon the flash being hosted from the same domain as the content you're trying to steal (e.g. cookies), then the right way to fix it is for web developers to eradicate Flash from their websites.
Err.. the only thing any driver really does....
Fundamentally, the only any driver really does is send commands to a device over a bus and handle the responses. What other kind of driver were you hoping for? :-)
And today, after almost six years of reasonably reliable service, I'm starting to have my doubts about Dreamhost. Two nights in a row, I made minor changes to the configuration for my domains through their Web Panel, and the Apache server on their west coast shared hosting box died and never came back on its own. The first outage was 2.5 hours. This outage is ten hours and counting.
Anybody know a good shared hosting provider with better reliability? This latest failure brings them down to barely two nines YTD, not including scheduled maintenance.
I'm also using GANDI as my registrar. I'm reluctantly letting DreamHost provide DNS for one domain, and deferring part of another domain to their nameserver, but otherwise I've always preferred to keep my DNS servers in-house (literally), for maximum control. My primary is a Mac Mini, and my secondary is a Raspberry Pi.
I was using their shared hosting to serve images associated with my domain, with the HTML served from my home server over DSL—basically as a poor-man's Akamai. Unfortunately, what I found was that their site would randomly take the better part of a minute to respond to a request. That meant that sporadically it would take longer for them to serve an image than for me to do so from my home DSL connection, and pretty much the entire transfer time was spent waiting to get the first byte back from their server.
At some point, I decided to gather statistics on the problem by using a machine at work (typically approaching or reaching gigabit speeds) to make a very short request to the server every couple of minutes. I forget what percentage of those requests took more than half a minute to come back, but I'm pretty sure it was in the double digits.
Obviously, I got a terrible server that was badly configured and/or massively overloaded. Obviously that won't happen to everybody. The reason I left is that even after proving definitively that the server sucked, and requesting that my content be migrated to a server that wasn't overloaded, they refused to fix the problem. Every server provider will have problems now and again. What matters is how you handle them when they happen, or in this case, whether you handle them when they happen. GoDaddy didn't, and that makes them a terrible provider even if only a tiny percentage of their customers have problems, because you never know when you're going to find yourself in that tiny percentage.
Besides that, you're probably fine with any of them. My GoDaddy experience can best be summed up as:
Let's just say I ditched them within the first month, and we'll leave it at that. I switched to DreamHost, and haven't looked back. Their service isn't perfect performance-wise, but it is so much better than GD that it isn't even funny. (Yes, I know you're just asking about domain registration, but lots of folks do one, then the other, so....)
And whatever you do, don't get your hosting from the same company that provides your domain names. There are far too many horror stories of hosting-related disputes leading to frozen domain names.
I came to that conclusion about Google several years ago. There's a reason that I never bother to look at my Google+ account even though I created one. I didn't trust it to not go away, so why bother. And that was almost four years ago.
We're well past the point where new Google services should be presumed DOA. My general assumption at this point is that unless it is a major source of ad revenue or they spent at least triple-digit millions to acquire it, they don't care about it.
So what you're saying is that the GGP should himself or herself a letter about it. Sounds like a solid plan to me.
You're assuming that fix-ups involve the same characters. That need not be the case. For example, most people would probably categorize my first novel as a fix-up, because a chunk of it started as an unrelated short story that I adapted into the universe. It uses different characters, and is expressed as a flashback to the main character as a child, being told the secondary story by his grandfather (who otherwise plays a very insignificant role in the book).
Other fix-ups interleave stories about different groups of characters that are happening at the same time. If done well, the result is indistinguishable from any other well-written third-person novel unless you've read one or more of the original stories.