Actually, in your quest to blame religion, you got your facts wrong.
I WAS there, starting with being on the second floor of WTC1 when #1 hit; to walking around both buildings to get to work [ first workaholic thought: "ouch, gotta get to work ASAP, in case out servers in WFC will be affected" ]; to being right under the path of a hitting plane #2, near the wall of WTC2, about 100 feet horisontally from the point of impact. To trying to get across the river to work, with hordes of people trying to escape the City.
Throughout this all, there were FAR more people saying stuff like "OMG" than people
who were swearing. [ i was silent and planning for the short-term and long-term future:) ]
> > 'We're consolidating all of our offering behind Intel,
> > which was the biggest part of our mix already.'
>
> So, because consumer spending is down,
> Gateway is discontinuing its' discount line of computers.
> Because consumers want to buy more expensive
> computers when the economy is in trouble.
>
> I must be missing something.
Yes. One thing that you are missing is that
a company Profit=Sales-Expense.
While the effect on sales for gateway is not easy
to predict (on one hand, pure supply/demand formula would,
as you indicated, decrease sales; on the other hand,
a lot of people buying Gateways would buy a more expensive
higher-clock-rated Intel box than AMD one).
However, the expense for Gareway would be
significantly reduced, because they would
eliminate R&D, support and manufacturing overhead
of having 2 families of systems instead of one.
If you want to use Clancy as an example, neither Red Storm Rising nor R6 are anywhere near what you should have listed.
The ending of Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor": a fuel-loaded 747 slams into US congress's joint session attended by US President, killing off most congresscritters and administration. Published sometime in 1996.
People on alt.books.tom-clancy have been discussing this for a while (before going way off-topic as usual:)
If you follow Clancy's line of prediction, next up: a major biological attack on US soil.
Do you think that there exists a possibility (or can even provide examples of) self-fullfilling analysis, such as "analysis says X is losing market share=>people get skeptical about X=>X loses market share although it may not have done so otherwise"?
If it is possible or already happened, do analysts in general (and you in particular) find it a worrisom possibility, and if so, are there any attempts/ideas to deal with the issue?
The main point of a stealth aircraft is NOT to be "invisible" to the radar - it is visible and can be tracked. The point is to make it near impossble to lock on by a SAM system, which would not be helped much by mere knowledge that the plane is there and its approximate location.
While it sounds "cool", i'll have to agree with other posters who speculate that this is a pure and simple PR play to boost the stock and not something terribly useful.
But a nice idea for Tom Clancy to use in his next book:)
OMG!
Someone please tell me where to find a company like that!
My gf knows my direct phone #. So do all the people I care about. And i would REALLY appreciate not getting between 1 and 5 calls a day (on the average) from headhunters.
If i want a consulting company, i'll pick one that *KNOWS HOW TO USE TE FSCKING E-MAIL*!!!
Well, I use WinAMP, for one thing. And used to use ICQ and AIM when i had time to chat (and intend to continue once i get more free time).
However, this is about a larger issue.
M$ wants to controls the means to deliver content, but short of M$-NBC, doesn't get into content itself.
AOL, on the other hand, wants to control content.
And given their general trend, <nomex underwear>I'd rather side with M$ in this fight
</nomex underwear>
There are a couple of reasons. For once, AOL actively promotes stupidity (I used their clients at various times - free 1 month IS backup - so I know:)
AOL undermines the rest of Intenet structures - there's zillion examples, of which i'll only list Usenet AOL-ization and AIM incompatibility wars - but this all centers on "AOL ***is*** the Internet, dummy" mentality.
Plus, they now own CNN, which I boycott for their anti-Israel pro-terrorist bias, never mind them being uber-leftist politically. Between Gates and Turner, I hate Turner a lot more.
What I use my school email account is for unix-based [almost] reliable mail. So that I can get a high-bandwidth, telnettable-into, procmail-filterable, PINE-readable mail.
(and topped off with usenet access).
ALL [ save for class mailing lists ] of my mail gets forwarded to that school account via Yahoo forwarding or, lately, via my own domain.
Therefore, the only thing i'd want from my grad
school is to let me keep that UNIX account, but they would most assuredly fail to do so - CS department will cancel the account when I leave.
Now, the upsides of having them forward to
<myname>@alum.<myschool>.edu would be:
Stable address: easily achieved by either yahoo forwarding for the cheap people or buying your own domain and getting EVERY_ADDRESS@your_domain as a bundled deal - something most registars do, I believe.
Being listed in a directory there: as was pointed out in this thread already, it's a liability (SPAM magnet) with little benefit. OK, so i'm not one of those people for whom schmoozing with folks you went to college with has any attraction - save for VERY few close friends who have my email,phone,URL,pager,second pager,second phone,another email and parents' phone.<g>
Prestige/showing off. Yes, for MIT grads that would be the major draw and the only possible reason i'd consider that. Not being an MIT grad (i went to a decent - one of the best, but not IVY - grad schools), this has no attraction for me.
School loyalty. Perhaps such thing would be attractive to those schmucks who wear school rings and school-logoed t-shirts long after graduation.
I didn't bother even while IN school.
Downsides:
SPAM collector
Consulting company headhunters heaven.
I already get 3-7 calls a week at both home and work phones, plus e-mail from them. Not really SPAM but still annoying to death.
One downside not mentioned before - a privacy problem. A MAJOR one if you ask me. I don't want people/organizations/companies knowing what I attended who have no business knowing this.
Donations requests. As one of the other posters, I worked for my undergrad college's Development Office. If this idea was not invented by Development folks, i'm Elvis.
Your "permanence" becomes dependent on the U.
Now, i'm not sure about those mentioned in the article, but my U. - a pretty big and good one - has had Internet outages in the last 2 years, lastng from couple of hours and to couple of days, from e-mail closures thanks to worms to bad routers on ISP side. Obviously, they were less responsive (especially on weekends) when fixing those compared to commercial 24x7 outfit.
All in all, unless you're in MIT or a fanatic of your institution for life, I see no reason to bother with one.
If they, on the other hand, offered a long-term (not even permanent) UNIX-based mail account, i'd even agree to pay some monthly/yearly fee for it.
Probably on a separate server if enough people sign up, so it doesn't take CPU/memory resources from real students.
<Dennis Miller>But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.</Dennis Miller>
PBS is not only donations... it also draws our tax money (which i would probably not mind voluntarily donating but absolutely opposed to extorting as a tax).
The article didn't mention this anywhere, but what it seems ideally suited for is powering Land Warrior system - http://www.sbccom.army.mil/programs/lw/.
I don't have my other links to details now but could retrieve if anyone's interested (i used LW as an example of a wearable computer for User Interface Seminar - i bet the only person in the history of such classes to use LW for wearables example and Abrams' IVIS system for car computers example:)
Free Speach is undeniably one of the cornerstones of US political system, and is incredibly important (no disrespect, but as someone who grew up in USSR - and experienced reprecussions for speaking up - I can probably appreciate it even more than people who lived in U.S. all their lives:)
However, a lot of people, including (or may be especially) on/. seem to misunderstand what free speach is about. I'd like to see someone (where's a good lawyer when you need one?) to take a crack at describing - in human language - exactly what is and what is not a free speach issue (Free Speach FAQ anyone?:)
Make it required reading for anyone who wants to post on the topic;)
It seems a lot of people mistake the First Amendement (which prohibits *THE GOVERNMENT* from restricting the speech of The People), with an unrestricted permission to anyone to say anything they want in any forum under any circumstance. However, in reality, it does not place restrictions on *purely private* forums (as was duly noted by the more level-headed people in the freerepublic thread), and there are even some government-initiated restrictions on speech that are in no violation of 1st A.
Well, IANAL, so i'd like to see a professional do a good writeup on this. (wishing for everyone to read it would be rather naive but may be at least some people would take notice).
-DVK
Vive diu prosperaque! (Live long and prosper!)
As usual, the typical anti-law-enforcement knee-jerk reaction from/. people. FBI is OBLIGATED to investigate this site that apparently violates a federal law, whether this site seems to be a dumb satire or not based on common sense. FBI is not arresting anyone - they are investigating to SEE whether the site is for real violation of the law or not.
If I posted pictures of dismembered people on my web site, would YOU know whether i'm being a sick moron or a psycho serial killer? And if you claim to know, i'd like to find out where did you get your Ph.D. in psychology from, as well as what criminal profiling jobs have you had, since Joe "this is obviusly not for real" Average Slashdotter simply doesn't have suficient background to be able to distinguish between the two - yes, most likely it's simply a sick prank but you never know 100% sure.
Oh, and didn't Jeffrey Dalhmer start out with pets too? I shot off an e-mail to my psych-educated friend to clarify if this is a verifiable trend but I expect it to be so.
Yes, if this was a prank and FBI actually harrasses the idjits after verifying this, this would become a First Amendement issue. Right now itr is not.
What exactly is the point in MS merging with Transmeta? their main revenue is in software, and by becoming a direct competitor to Intel+AMD, they shoot themselves in the foot.
It seems that Amazon has a much bigger profit in this than a simple "chunk of the payment" - they get new customers to sign up that way. I'm not a business major but i'd expect the benefits of that to far outweigh the itty bitty amount of money the sites using the jar would collect.
Plus, they obviously get usage statistics - another big plus (while the policy said they don't gather personalized tracking info, they never said they wouldn't gather statistics across users, which would also be very useful, especially since they CAN cross-match that statistics with their own database of items bought from your account.
I'm not sure if i'd be hesitant to use such system or not, but i'm sure i'd MUCH rater prefer a similar system from a company that doesn't also sell things.
-Daniel
Re:Is this a slippery-slope kind of issue?
on
Clever Girl Bess
·
· Score: 2
Not really... your mistake is you're thinking like an individual, not like a borg.
What DOD most likely needs this for is the following: some manager/officer now has the statistics that XXX # of kids visit their recruitment pages for Air Force, YYY visit Army, etc... , and it all is sampled by race/age, so they got themselves a mighty valuable recriuting marketing aid. I know that screaming liberals like Katz are against anything with DoD on it (when will you stop using TCP/IP based software, Katz?), but please, have a clue! Some people actually care about doing their job better, not spying on you for nefarious purposes.
If DoD wanted to actually track which user tries to DDoS them, they can do it using normal networking tools without resorting to aggregate statistics from some company.
> "...librarians have generally done a fine job
> of selecting what they do and don't want in
> their libraries over the centuries".
1. I have a public library down the block, with unrestricted Internet access. I once looked at the history out of curiocity. pr0n, pr0n, free email, pr0n. If you expect our 3 over-worked ilbrarians who wouldn't know what a URL is to be of any help in restricting pr0n usage, you're very mistaken.
2. I completely agree that the most correct response from the community should not be bitching and moaning but writing a competent open source blocking software.
Well, i guess i'm going to say something that will disprove the usual "geeks are one-sided" stereotype - I noticed a couple of replies in this thread already doing that... My favourite two teachers in High School were Literature and History, despite attending a math/science oriented school (a close analog of NYC's Stuyvesant HS) and being a math/physics/computers geek. Both were incredible at not only giving you the material, but getting you interested and engaged in the subjects that they cared immensely about, without pulling the "this is required by curriculum and thus you shalt study it" on us. The history teacher was very unique, as she started teaching things that weren't politically permissible to talk about (this was USSR in early years of Gorby) long before the society as a whole started being open about the topics.
However, I must say I've been blessed with great teachers all my life, starting with my parents - YES, the very best teachers I ever had simply because they taught me how to THINK and to learn and gave me the thirst for knowledge.
Then there was elementary school Teacher, who managed to find some resources from her efforts to support my interest in math way beyond what the rest of the class was showing, and didn't mind it in the least when, one day in second grade, not only I have gotten a different answer to a math problem than her and other 41 kids in the class (yes, to all those Americans whining about large classes, we had 42 kids in elementary school class I attended), but after i've proven my answer right, she was GLAD, not angry.
The next two, who are sadly no longer among the living, were teaching me when i became older... rest in peace, Yevgeniya Nikolayevna Anisimova and Alexandr Borisovich Voronetskiy.
There was my first serious Math teacher, who first spotted me at the age of 6 - she and my parents were neighbours - and gave me a book of advanced math problems for the future when she moved. Later on, in 9th grade, when I tranferred to the Math/Science school, imagine her surprize at me showing up in her class - one of the best in Russia if you judge by various math contests on national level - and quickly getting my place on the city Math team.
Then I must say a kind word about the man who wasn't my official school teacher, but a Teacher - he was training the city's math team and was responsble for my real interest in math by challenging us and refining whatever talents we had (read: Galois theory and Commutative Algebra by the last year of High School). Out of his group, 2 of us wound up in the top 3 spots in Russian National Math contests - and achievement any Master would have been proud of.
The best professor in my NYU grad school years is, without a doubt, our Data Communications and Networks lecturer, who seems to have an energy of a supernova, comic abilities of Letterman and understanding of the subject that only someone who's been on IEEE commeetees and started dealing with TCP/IP in Bell Labs back when they just started working on it. Here's to you, Mr. Padovano!
> Why do we need a computer this fast? What can it
> do that can't be done by a distributed system?
Not every possible computation can be made distributed without major performance loss. Remember, this baby IS vastly parallel (10K-20K processors), but the inter-processor communications are way faster than any network, and some problems that can be parallelized aren't easily distributed.
Also, i doubt you want nuke research done on the same set of systems running SETI@Home:-)
OK, i have only one question...
if the main argument of anti-censorware people is that "breast cancer" sites would be blocked, why not let the librarian know, and they will take that particular site off the "bad" list (i'm assuming any programmer worth more than 1 lira would add an "allowed explicitly" site list to their product)?
Again, as i said above, i don't think censorware right now is the good answer to the problem... it's merely the only cost-effective one.
If you people don't like how it works, write your own, that is better AND free;)))
Slashdot Mirror
I WAS there, starting with being on the second floor of WTC1 when #1 hit; to walking around both buildings to get to work [ first workaholic thought: "ouch, gotta get to work ASAP, in case out servers in WFC will be affected" ]; to being right under the path of a hitting plane #2, near the wall of WTC2, about 100 feet horisontally from the point of impact. To trying to get across the river to work, with hordes of people trying to escape the City.
Throughout this all, there were FAR more people saying stuff like "OMG" than people who were swearing. [ i was silent and planning for the short-term and long-term future :) ]
-DVK
> > 'We're consolidating all of our offering behind Intel,
> > which was the biggest part of our mix already.'
>
> So, because consumer spending is down,
> Gateway is discontinuing its' discount line of computers.
> Because consumers want to buy more expensive
> computers when the economy is in trouble.
>
> I must be missing something.
Yes. One thing that you are missing is that
a company Profit=Sales-Expense.
While the effect on sales for gateway is not easy
to predict (on one hand, pure supply/demand formula would,
as you indicated, decrease sales; on the other hand,
a lot of people buying Gateways would buy a more expensive
higher-clock-rated Intel box than AMD one).
However, the expense for Gareway would be
significantly reduced, because they would
eliminate R&D, support and manufacturing overhead
of having 2 families of systems instead of one.
-DVK
The ending of Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor": a fuel-loaded 747 slams into US congress's joint session attended by US President, killing off most congresscritters and administration. Published sometime in 1996.
People on alt.books.tom-clancy have been discussing this for a while (before going way off-topic as usual :)
If you follow Clancy's line of prediction, next up: a major biological attack on US soil.
-DVK (Who was in 1WTC when the first plane hit).
If it is possible or already happened, do analysts in general (and you in particular) find it a worrisom possibility, and if so, are there any attempts/ideas to deal with the issue?
Thanks,
DVK
While it sounds "cool", i'll have to agree with other posters who speculate that this is a pure and simple PR play to boost the stock and not something terribly useful.
But a nice idea for Tom Clancy to use in his next book :)
-DVK
OMG!
Someone please tell me where to find a company like that!
My gf knows my direct phone #. So do all the people I care about. And i would REALLY appreciate not getting between 1 and 5 calls a day (on the average) from headhunters.
If i want a consulting company, i'll pick one that *KNOWS HOW TO USE TE FSCKING E-MAIL*!!!
However, this is about a larger issue.
M$ wants to controls the means to deliver content, but short of M$-NBC, doesn't get into content itself.
AOL, on the other hand, wants to control content. And given their general trend, <nomex underwear>I'd rather side with M$ in this fight </nomex underwear>
There are a couple of reasons. :)
For once, AOL actively promotes stupidity (I used their clients at various times - free 1 month IS backup - so I know
AOL undermines the rest of Intenet structures - there's zillion examples, of which i'll only list Usenet AOL-ization and AIM incompatibility wars - but this all centers on "AOL ***is*** the Internet, dummy" mentality.
Plus, they now own CNN, which I boycott for their anti-Israel pro-terrorist bias, never mind them being uber-leftist politically. Between Gates and Turner, I hate Turner a lot more.
-DVK
ALL [ save for class mailing lists ] of my mail gets forwarded to that school account via Yahoo forwarding or, lately, via my own domain.
Therefore, the only thing i'd want from my grad school is to let me keep that UNIX account, but they would most assuredly fail to do so - CS department will cancel the account when I leave.
Now, the upsides of having them forward to <myname>@alum.<myschool>.edu would be:
Downsides:
All in all, unless you're in MIT or a fanatic of your institution for life, I see no reason to bother with one.
If they, on the other hand, offered a long-term (not even permanent) UNIX-based mail account, i'd even agree to pay some monthly/yearly fee for it. Probably on a separate server if enough people sign up, so it doesn't take CPU/memory resources from real students.
<Dennis Miller>But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.</Dennis Miller>
-DVK
-DVK
As a follow-up to my own post (ok, roast me if you will :) I just found this in my bookmarks: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/land-warri or.htm seems a much more informative page about Land Warrior.
I don't have my other links to details now but could retrieve if anyone's interested (i used LW as an example of a wearable computer for User Interface Seminar - i bet the only person in the history of such classes to use LW for wearables example and Abrams' IVIS system for car computers example :)
(but thanks for the link
However, a lot of people, including (or may be especially) on /. seem to misunderstand what free speach is about. I'd like to see someone (where's a good lawyer when you need one?) to take a crack at describing - in human language - exactly what is and what is not a free speach issue (Free Speach FAQ anyone? :) ;)
Make it required reading for anyone who wants to post on the topic
It seems a lot of people mistake the First Amendement (which prohibits *THE GOVERNMENT* from restricting the speech of The People), with an unrestricted permission to anyone to say anything they want in any forum under any circumstance. However, in reality, it does not place restrictions on *purely private* forums (as was duly noted by the more level-headed people in the freerepublic thread), and there are even some government-initiated restrictions on speech that are in no violation of 1st A.
Well, IANAL, so i'd like to see a professional do a good writeup on this. (wishing for everyone to read it would be rather naive but may be at least some people would take notice).
-DVK
Vive diu prosperaque! (Live long and prosper!)
First a bunch of both Soviet and US failures near/on Mars. Now the events happen even here... Coincidence? Conspiracy? You decide :)
As usual, the typical anti-law-enforcement knee-jerk reaction from /. people. FBI is OBLIGATED to investigate this site that apparently violates a federal law, whether this site seems to be a dumb satire or not based on common sense. FBI is not arresting anyone - they are investigating to SEE whether the site is for real violation of the law or not.
If I posted pictures of dismembered people on my web site, would YOU know whether i'm being a sick moron or a psycho serial killer? And if you claim to know, i'd like to find out where did you get your Ph.D. in psychology from, as well as what criminal profiling jobs have you had, since Joe "this is obviusly not for real" Average Slashdotter simply doesn't have suficient background to be able to distinguish between the two - yes, most likely it's simply a sick prank but you never know 100% sure.
Oh, and didn't Jeffrey Dalhmer start out with pets too? I shot off an e-mail to my psych-educated friend to clarify if this is a verifiable trend but I expect it to be so.
Yes, if this was a prank and FBI actually harrasses the idjits after verifying this, this would become a First Amendement issue. Right now itr is not.
-DVK
When you need to deal with busness stuff, go to your M$ Office. When you need to do anything taht doesn't require M$, switch abck to Linux.
Plus, they obviously get usage statistics - another big plus (while the policy said they don't gather personalized tracking info, they never said they wouldn't gather statistics across users, which would also be very useful, especially since they CAN cross-match that statistics with their own database of items bought from your account.
I'm not sure if i'd be hesitant to use such system or not, but i'm sure i'd MUCH rater prefer a similar system from a company that doesn't also sell things.
-Daniel
What DOD most likely needs this for is the following: some manager/officer now has the statistics that XXX # of kids visit their recruitment pages for Air Force, YYY visit Army, etc... , and it all is sampled by race/age, so they got themselves a mighty valuable recriuting marketing aid. I know that screaming liberals like Katz are against anything with DoD on it (when will you stop using TCP/IP based software, Katz?), but please, have a clue! Some people actually care about doing their job better, not spying on you for nefarious purposes.
If DoD wanted to actually track which user tries to DDoS them, they can do it using normal networking tools without resorting to aggregate statistics from some company.
"Big Brother Doesn't Care About You"
-DVK
from the good old stupid PowerPoint slides taht most companies use for presentations.
-DVK (FP? who cares!)
> "...librarians have generally done a fine job
> of selecting what they do and don't want in
> their libraries over the centuries".
1. I have a public library down the block, with unrestricted Internet access. I once looked at the history out of curiocity. pr0n, pr0n, free email, pr0n. If you expect our 3 over-worked ilbrarians who wouldn't know what a URL is to be of any help in restricting pr0n usage, you're very mistaken.
2. I completely agree that the most correct response from the community should not be bitching and moaning but writing a competent open source blocking software.
-DVK
However, I must say I've been blessed with great teachers all my life, starting with my parents - YES, the very best teachers I ever had simply because they taught me how to THINK and to learn and gave me the thirst for knowledge.
Then there was elementary school Teacher, who managed to find some resources from her efforts to support my interest in math way beyond what the rest of the class was showing, and didn't mind it in the least when, one day in second grade, not only I have gotten a different answer to a math problem than her and other 41 kids in the class (yes, to all those Americans whining about large classes, we had 42 kids in elementary school class I attended), but after i've proven my answer right, she was GLAD, not angry.
The next two, who are sadly no longer among the living, were teaching me when i became older... rest in peace, Yevgeniya Nikolayevna Anisimova and Alexandr Borisovich Voronetskiy.
There was my first serious Math teacher, who first spotted me at the age of 6 - she and my parents were neighbours - and gave me a book of advanced math problems for the future when she moved. Later on, in 9th grade, when I tranferred to the Math/Science school, imagine her surprize at me showing up in her class - one of the best in Russia if you judge by various math contests on national level - and quickly getting my place on the city Math team.
Then I must say a kind word about the man who wasn't my official school teacher, but a Teacher - he was training the city's math team and was responsble for my real interest in math by challenging us and refining whatever talents we had (read: Galois theory and Commutative Algebra by the last year of High School). Out of his group, 2 of us wound up in the top 3 spots in Russian National Math contests - and achievement any Master would have been proud of.
The best professor in my NYU grad school years is, without a doubt, our Data Communications and Networks lecturer, who seems to have an energy of a supernova, comic abilities of Letterman and understanding of the subject that only someone who's been on IEEE commeetees and started dealing with TCP/IP in Bell Labs back when they just started working on it. Here's to you, Mr. Padovano!
> do that can't be done by a distributed system?
Not every possible computation can be made distributed without major performance loss. Remember, this baby IS vastly parallel (10K-20K processors), but the inter-processor communications are way faster than any network, and some problems that can be parallelized aren't easily distributed.
Also, i doubt you want nuke research done on the same set of systems running SETI@Home :-)
-DVK
if the main argument of anti-censorware people is that "breast cancer" sites would be blocked, why not let the librarian know, and they will take that particular site off the "bad" list (i'm assuming any programmer worth more than 1 lira would add an "allowed explicitly" site list to their product)?
Again, as i said above, i don't think censorware right now is the good answer to the problem... it's merely the only cost-effective one.
If you people don't like how it works, write your own, that is better AND free ;)))
-DVK
-DVK