Not allowing people with very little investment experience and not a whole lot of liquid wealth to participate in a risky investment like an IPO doesn't seem too cruel to me.
True, except they are also rejecting people who do have investment experience, and plenty of liquid cash.
Their sham of a "financial questionnaire" only asked about my income, and how much liquid cash I have. Their sham of a "financial questionnaire" did not ask if I carry a mortgage, or if I carry a credit card debt. You cannot obtain a financial profile of anyone without having BOTH their assets and liabilities, and E*trade's phony financial questionaire only asks about the assets.
Additionally they didn't even ask how many shares I wanted to buy, before rejecting me. They don't even know how much money you would like to spend, before concluding that you do not qualify.
In fact, I didn't pass the second time; I'm not going to lie just to get in on this. End of story.
DITTO. I'd give you a moderation point, if I could. I still have no answer from Etrade, but, even if they do, eventually, get their shit together, I will be giving them the same exact set of answers I gave the first time.
Maybe that's considered strange and quaint these days, but I do not lie like that. Even though Etrade silly questionnaire is an obvious sham that everyone can see through, I never had a habit of lying about my financial status, and I do not have a reason to do it again. --
Actually, no. Read the other thread. A guy called the SEC, and was told that there are no regulations whatsoever regarding the financial status of anyone who wants to get in on the IPO. That's silly.
When the guy called Etrade back, it changed from "SEC regulations" to "house rules", end of story. --
Either way, since I'm gonna be a Red Hat shareholder, I'll be taking your source and building Red Hat friendly RPMs wih it.
I have no problem with that whatsoever. Actually, I'm reconsidering, and will probably do something else, like putting "Boycott Etrade" at the end of every %descr, and repeating the message in "Help", or equivalent.
However, I am not letting this issue go. I managed to get a hold of a Red Hat contact, and looks like they might be interested in looking into Etrade's shennanigans. Their reaction to the Wired piece was rather, ummm, interesting.
We'll see how this turns out.
P.S. I can't get onto Etrade and check it out today. I'm just going to drop this, it's not worth the hassle. But, Etrade is going to pay for this. --
But it is true that they are really only attempting to protect inexpereiced invenstors from being screwed.
My response to that was simply: fuck you.
I have 60K in liquid cash, and I earn a six digit salary, and I do have some trading experience.
E*Trade blew me off, so I told them to mail me my check back.
I would really want to know how many open source developers would actually qualify under E*Trade's guidelines. Not many, I bet, which would make Red Hat's offer a complete sham. --
I had correctly told E*Trade that I earn $125K+ a year, and I have about 60K in liquid cash. They did not want my money.
I told them to close my account, and mail my check back. I was ready to invest in at least 1000 shares. They said that they'll send it back on August 10th, because they allegedly have to wait for my initial check to clear first.
That's ok, because I have plenty of more cash to invest, in the mean time. --
Nobody there had a social life, just sixty hour weeks living like monks doing product testing and development all day long.
Anyone who puts up with something like this is plain stupid. Anyone who actually knows how to do development, right now, can name his own price, and work 40 hours a week. The shortage of highly-skilled, knowledgeable, developers grows more acute every day. --
... Because it feels like I must undergo a major lobotomy before I'm allowed to code.
Occasionally I do engage in billbashing, of course, but I'm not really much into Linux versus Windows/NT thingy. Still, I can't resist flaming here.
Fortunately, my consulting work involves mostly UNIX development. From now on, I've made a decision that I will NOT accept any more consulting assignments that involve any kind of development in Windows platform. Not Visual C++, not Visual Basic, nada. I've done both in the past, but not any more. Basically, right now there's one fewer Windows developer out there, but I bet that I'm not the only one who've made the same decision. Here's why.
Basically, I just can't tolerate it anymore, that's all. Windows-based development is so technologically crippled that I feel like I need to have my IQ artificially reduced by a few digits before I start coding.
Visual C++ is the only C++-based environment that I know of that actually *requires* a bloody WIZARD to develop. Souls who are cursed with having to use VC++ know what I'm talking about.
The damn thing is so silly, I have to laugh at it. So much absolute GLOP has to go into a VC++ program just to support the patently idiotic Windows API that even the smallest applications come out of the gate already bloated beyond all recognition.
And I won't get into the fact that even the most simple Windows-based applications have to be written using an event-driven model. That is so downright stupid that I can't even find the words to describe it.
I'VE HAD IT! Bye, Windows. I won't even miss you. --
Well, Red Hat does sort of like that. They take a kernel that they've tested on a bunch of hardware, and believe to be stable. Usually, by the time they're done, they're two or three releases behind. So they just backport all the minor patches from the later kernel revisions. Their current 2.2.5 production kernel really contains patches from 2.2.6 and 2.2.7, as well as the SNMP DOS patch from 2.2.10. --
Or was that some kind of Cobalt bomb or something? It was actually called "Cobalt Sodium G", and it was a part of the Doomsday Device that the Russians were building in the 1960s... --
Maybe users just need to be able to bounce mail rather than merely delete it.
That is what I was referring to, but with a twist.
Bouncing a mail is a fairly expensive procedure. The bouncing server has to generate a non-delivery report. A modern mail server will generate delivery status notifications compliant with RFC 1891, which is a fairly extensive procedure. Then, after generating the report, the same server has to deliver it. That involves additional CPU resources AND network bandwidth.
Traditional user-level mail filtering kicks in after the users' mail server has already accepted the message, so if it's bounced at that point, you bear the cost of bouncing the mail. And, if the return address if forged, you've just contributed to mailbombing of a third party.
What you should do is have the filters kick in earlier, when your mail server is receiving the message. If it's flagged as spam, the server rejects it with an SMTP 5xx error code. Then, it is the relay that's spamming you, not the server that's receiving the spam, that has to spin its cycles handling undeliverable mail.
After everyone starts doing that, poorly configured mail servers - that are hijacked for spam runs - will end up mailbombing their own postmaster instead of spamming all over the place, because everyone will reject its mail. Which is as it should be. --
I believe that the final solution to the spam problem will be a combination of both technical and political approaches: that is, some laws against spam on the books, but, more important than that, sophisticated mail filters to block the crud.
If you put your mind to it, you can put together a bunch of mail filters that will reliably block 95-99% of the crud with a negligible false-positive rate. However, the problem is that even with that being the case, when spam is blocked it does not get cost-shifted back to the sender.
Spam is a problem because it is a cost-shifted method of advertising: the recipients bear most of the cost in delivering the spam. The costs consist of network resources used to deliver the spam, and spending your time sifting the crud out of your mailbox.
But even if you block the spam, you still do not shift the cost of it back to the sender. All that happens is that the spam disappears into the bit-bucket.
To stop the spam, the cost of it must be shifted back to the sender. Every time the spammer starts spewing to a million addresses, 990,000 of them will come back as undeliverable, basically mailbombing the spammer off the Internet.
Once that starts to happen, that will be the last time you'll ever see anyone spam.
Unfortunately this is not possible because SMTP is not authenticated, so the only thing that can be done is to reject the mail, bouncing it back to the relay. That still isn't completely bad -- clogging up the relay is better than nothing. However, by the time you have the spam in the mailbox, your mail server already received and accepted the message.
What's needed is for end users to be able to set up mail filters that are used by servers while receiving the mail via SMTP. Then, if your mail filters flag the mail as spam, reject it with an error code, and let the remote relay choke on the bounce. I've been doing that for over a year now -- works great. But this is not something that everyone can do right now, you can do this only if you run your own mail server. --
Hotmail has a member directory, like AOL, that can be harvested for addresses. There was no kickback of any sort from MSN to any spammer, sheesh. It's just some spambag running an address sucker. --
Since Linux doesn't scale well beyond four processors (and has a fixed upper limit of 16 CPUs, AFAIK), a 24-CPU box does not make sense.
Unless -- and here's a bizarre thought -- you have the same box run multiple virtual Linux machines, sort of VMWare-like. Six virtual Linux servers, four CPUs a piece. --
This is what passes for intelligent commentary on the internet?? The best you can say to repudiate Brin is to say that your "take is that Brin is simply jealous"??
Yes. Jealousy is a very simple, and natural, human emotion that does not need complicated explanations. Brin obviously thinks he can write better than Lucas, and he attempts to prove it by writing obfuscated opinion pieces that nobody can understand. If I put my mind to it, I'm pretty sure that I can put together long-winded diatribes that are just as convoluted. If you won't be able to understand a word of it, would that mean that I'm smarter than you?
Then you offer jealousy (since you either can't, or won't, invalidate his argument intellectually)
What argument would that be? There's apparently some trouble finding anyone who can coherently explain what Brin was trying to say in that Salon piece.
or proof that we should all keep our heads in the sand and just listen to the rich guy, because he's got all that money and thus must be doing something right??
Who said that we should all listen to the rich guy? It's just a movie, for God's sake, and a damn good one. It's not the Bible, or the Torah. It's "Star Wars", not "The Ten Commandments". Liam Neeson doesn't look anywhere like Charleton Heston.
I read Brin's original piece in Salon, as well as his follow-up.
My personal impression is that Brin is simply too full of himself. The Salon piece was the most long-winded, arrogant, and condescending drivel I've read in a long, long time. Parts of it were completely unreadable because, I guess, Mr. Brin wanted to impress the reader with his extensive vocabulary. After reading that dissertation a couple of times, I still can't figure out what he was saying. Picking apart popular sci-fi movies and books is a popular past time on Usenet and the web. It goes on all the time. Yet, Brin takes this to ridiculous extremees.
I've read some of Brin's novels. They didn't impress me much. My take is that Brin is simply jealous of George Lucas's success, that's all.
His humorous country doctor, very un-military ways were never replaced.
There were some Voyager episodes this season where they definitely put a bit of McCoy into The Doctor. There were a few "I'm a doctor, not a..." lines thrown in, and some McCoy mannerism.
... that if you were to call them up on the phone, they'll tell you that Linux is "unsupported", and they'll only install this if you are running Windows.
My question is what can Windows possibly do with a 100mb/s pipe?
Here's one way you can provide feedback to Nvidia: see that little warranty card that came with the video card? Fill it in, and send it in.
I'm the type that almost never fills in the manufacturers' warranty cards. But when I dropped a TNT card into this box, a few months ago, I made a note to fill out the warranty card. Under "Operating Systems" I checked off "Other" and wrote in "Linux". Then, under "reason for purchase", I checked off "Other" again, and wrote "Linux compatibility".
It's absolutely true that the warranty cards are really used for marketing, more than anything else. But in this case this is precisely what you want the salesdroids to know: that Linux is selling these cards. My warranty card was postage-paid, that tells you right there that the video card manufacturers are very much interested in the their customers demographical information, and warranty cards are the primary source of information that they go with.
... And I'll be dropping a second warranty card into the mail this weekend, after I upgrade another workstation with a new motherboard, and a TNT card.
Good job, Nvidia.
Open Source Doesn't Pay
on
VA on Upside
·
· Score: 2
That should NOT have been moderated down.
> Thats not saying that you can NOT pay a hacker a good salary though;
Well, you can't. You can probably make a reasonable wage working for VA, or Red Hat, but you'll always be able to get more money elsewhere. In the big corporate world, a good programmer will get six digits a year easily. Well into six digits.
> just that it's not the most important thing.
Yes, but money talks, and it what puts the food on the table. Until open source jobs pay the same as the rest of the industry, I'll just have to make do with hacking for a couple of hours each week. I would certainly jump at the chance to work on open source projects - Linux mainly. But, that's not going to happen, at least with the way things are right now.
I'm far from against people creating software for free but what is going to drive comapnies to release software for linux if someone just goes out and copies what they are doing?
I don't think I'm going to buy vmware, and it's not because of the 99 bucks. I have no problems with paying $99 for the product, but it better come with the source code. I'm not going to pay money, just to end up in a situation where something breaks tomorrow, and I'm screwed.
Another way to avoid having NS block on DNS lookups is to use the Junkbuster proxy, and you get to filter out banner ads as a bonus.
One word of caution, though, manually bind Junkbuster to 127.0.0.1 - this may have changed, but previously the default setup you get by following README binds junkbuster to any IP address, resulting in an open proxy invitation to script kiddies.
Slashdot Mirror
True, except they are also rejecting people who do have investment experience, and plenty of liquid cash.
Their sham of a "financial questionnaire" only asked about my income, and how much liquid cash I have. Their sham of a "financial questionnaire" did not ask if I carry a mortgage, or if I carry a credit card debt. You cannot obtain a financial profile of anyone without having BOTH their assets and liabilities, and E*trade's phony financial questionaire only asks about the assets.
Additionally they didn't even ask how many shares I wanted to buy, before rejecting me. They don't even know how much money you would like to spend, before concluding that you do not qualify.
It's a scam.
--
DITTO. I'd give you a moderation point, if I could. I still have no answer from Etrade, but, even if they do, eventually, get their shit together, I will be giving them the same exact set of answers I gave the first time.
Maybe that's considered strange and quaint these days, but I do not lie like that. Even though Etrade silly questionnaire is an obvious sham that everyone can see through, I never had a habit of lying about my financial status, and I do not have a reason to do it again.
--
Actually, no. Read the other thread. A guy called the SEC, and was told that there are no regulations whatsoever regarding the financial status of anyone who wants to get in on the IPO. That's silly.
When the guy called Etrade back, it changed from "SEC regulations" to "house rules", end of story.
--
I have no problem with that whatsoever. Actually, I'm reconsidering, and will probably do something else, like putting "Boycott Etrade" at the end of every %descr, and repeating the message in "Help", or equivalent.
However, I am not letting this issue go. I managed to get a hold of a Red Hat contact, and looks like they might be interested in looking into Etrade's shennanigans. Their reaction to the Wired piece was rather, ummm, interesting.
We'll see how this turns out.
P.S. I can't get onto Etrade and check it out today. I'm just going to drop this, it's not worth the hassle. But, Etrade is going to pay for this.
--
I did. I talked to them on the phone. The IPO is open to anyone who has received the invitation.
--
Wrong. I have much more than that in my bank account, and E*Trade still blew me off.
--
My response to that was simply: fuck you.
I have 60K in liquid cash, and I earn a six digit salary, and I do have some trading experience.
E*Trade blew me off, so I told them to mail me my check back.
I would really want to know how many open source developers would actually qualify under E*Trade's guidelines. Not many, I bet, which would make Red Hat's offer a complete sham.
--
I had correctly told E*Trade that I earn $125K+ a year, and I have about 60K in liquid cash. They did not want my money.
I told them to close my account, and mail my check back. I was ready to invest in at least 1000 shares. They said that they'll send it back on August 10th, because they allegedly have to wait for my initial check to clear first.
That's ok, because I have plenty of more cash to invest, in the mean time.
--
Anyone who puts up with something like this is plain stupid. Anyone who actually knows how to do development, right now, can name his own price, and work 40 hours a week. The shortage of highly-skilled, knowledgeable, developers grows more acute every day.
--
Occasionally I do engage in billbashing, of course, but I'm not really much into Linux versus Windows/NT thingy. Still, I can't resist flaming here.
Fortunately, my consulting work involves mostly UNIX development. From now on, I've made a decision that I will NOT accept any more consulting assignments that involve any kind of development in Windows platform. Not Visual C++, not Visual Basic, nada. I've done both in the past, but not any more. Basically, right now there's one fewer Windows developer out there, but I bet that I'm not the only one who've made the same decision. Here's why.
Basically, I just can't tolerate it anymore, that's all. Windows-based development is so technologically crippled that I feel like I need to have my IQ artificially reduced by a few digits before I start coding.
Visual C++ is the only C++-based environment that I know of that actually *requires* a bloody WIZARD to develop. Souls who are cursed with having to use VC++ know what I'm talking about.
The damn thing is so silly, I have to laugh at it. So much absolute GLOP has to go into a VC++ program just to support the patently idiotic Windows API that even the smallest applications come out of the gate already bloated beyond all recognition.
And I won't get into the fact that even the most simple Windows-based applications have to be written using an event-driven model. That is so downright stupid that I can't even find the words to describe it.
I'VE HAD IT! Bye, Windows. I won't even miss you.
--
Well, Red Hat does sort of like that. They take a kernel that they've tested on a bunch of hardware, and believe to be stable. Usually, by the time they're done, they're two or three releases behind. So they just backport all the minor patches from the later kernel revisions. Their current 2.2.5 production kernel really contains patches from 2.2.6 and 2.2.7, as well as the SNMP DOS patch from 2.2.10.
--
Or was that some kind of Cobalt bomb or something? It was actually called "Cobalt Sodium G", and it was a part of the Doomsday Device that the Russians were building in the 1960s...
--
Maybe users just need to be able to bounce mail rather than merely delete it.
That is what I was referring to, but with a twist.
Bouncing a mail is a fairly expensive procedure. The bouncing server has to generate a non-delivery report. A modern mail server will generate delivery status notifications compliant with RFC 1891, which is a fairly extensive procedure. Then, after generating the report, the same server has to deliver it. That involves additional CPU resources AND network bandwidth.
Traditional user-level mail filtering kicks in after the users' mail server has already accepted the message, so if it's bounced at that point, you bear the cost of bouncing the mail. And, if the return address if forged, you've just contributed to mailbombing of a third party.
What you should do is have the filters kick in earlier, when your mail server is receiving the message. If it's flagged as spam, the server rejects it with an SMTP 5xx error code. Then, it is the relay that's spamming you, not the server that's receiving the spam, that has to spin its cycles handling undeliverable mail.
After everyone starts doing that, poorly configured mail servers - that are hijacked for spam runs - will end up mailbombing their own postmaster instead of spamming all over the place, because everyone will reject its mail. Which is as it should be.
--
I believe that the final solution to the spam problem will be a combination of both technical and political approaches: that is, some laws against spam on the books, but, more important than that, sophisticated mail filters to block the crud.
If you put your mind to it, you can put together a bunch of mail filters that will reliably block 95-99% of the crud with a negligible false-positive rate. However, the problem is that even with that being the case, when spam is blocked it does not get cost-shifted back to the sender.
Spam is a problem because it is a cost-shifted method of advertising: the recipients bear most of the cost in delivering the spam. The costs consist of network resources used to deliver the spam, and spending your time sifting the crud out of your mailbox.
But even if you block the spam, you still do not shift the cost of it back to the sender. All that happens is that the spam disappears into the bit-bucket.
To stop the spam, the cost of it must be shifted back to the sender. Every time the spammer starts spewing to a million addresses, 990,000 of them will come back as undeliverable, basically mailbombing the spammer off the Internet.
Once that starts to happen, that will be the last time you'll ever see anyone spam.
Unfortunately this is not possible because SMTP is not authenticated, so the only thing that can be done is to reject the mail, bouncing it back to the relay. That still isn't completely bad -- clogging up the relay is better than nothing. However, by the time you have the spam in the mailbox, your mail server already received and accepted the message.
What's needed is for end users to be able to set up mail filters that are used by servers while receiving the mail via SMTP. Then, if your mail filters flag the mail as spam, reject it with an error code, and let the remote relay choke on the bounce. I've been doing that for over a year now -- works great. But this is not something that everyone can do right now, you can do this only if you run your own mail server.
--
Hotmail has a member directory, like AOL, that can be harvested for addresses. There was no kickback of any sort from MSN to any spammer, sheesh. It's just some spambag running an address sucker.
--
Unless -- and here's a bizarre thought -- you have the same box run multiple virtual Linux machines, sort of VMWare-like. Six virtual Linux servers, four CPUs a piece.
--
This is what passes for intelligent commentary on the internet?? The best you can say to repudiate Brin is to say that your "take is that Brin is simply jealous"??
Yes. Jealousy is a very simple, and natural, human emotion that does not need complicated explanations. Brin obviously thinks he can write better than Lucas, and he attempts to prove it by writing obfuscated opinion pieces that nobody can understand. If I put my mind to it, I'm pretty sure that I can put together long-winded diatribes that are just as convoluted. If you won't be able to understand a word of it, would that mean that I'm smarter than you?
Then you offer jealousy (since you either can't, or won't, invalidate his argument intellectually)
What argument would that be? There's apparently some trouble finding anyone who can coherently explain what Brin was trying to say in that Salon piece.
or proof that we should all keep our heads in the sand and just listen to the rich guy, because he's got all that money and thus must be doing something right??
Who said that we should all listen to the rich guy? It's just a movie, for God's sake, and a damn good one. It's not the Bible, or the Torah. It's "Star Wars", not "The Ten Commandments". Liam Neeson doesn't look anywhere like Charleton Heston.
I read Brin's original piece in Salon, as well as his follow-up.
My personal impression is that Brin is simply too full of himself. The Salon piece was the most long-winded, arrogant, and condescending drivel I've read in a long, long time. Parts of it were completely unreadable because, I guess, Mr. Brin wanted to impress the reader with his extensive vocabulary. After reading that dissertation a couple of times, I still can't figure out what he was saying. Picking apart popular sci-fi movies and books is a popular past time on Usenet and the web. It goes on all the time. Yet, Brin takes this to ridiculous extremees.
I've read some of Brin's novels. They didn't impress me much. My take is that Brin is simply jealous of George Lucas's success, that's all.
His humorous country doctor, very un-military ways were never replaced.
There were some Voyager episodes this season where they definitely put a bit of McCoy into The Doctor. There were a few "I'm a doctor, not a..." lines thrown in, and some McCoy mannerism.
I thought it was a hoot. A great tribute.
Anyone have favorite episodes? A favorite movie line?
Yes, I have one by Dr. Mccoy, from STII, referring to Spock:
Dee Kelley, may you rest in peace, and Godspeed ahead. You shall be remembered.
I'll watch my tape of STII again, this weekend, in your memory.
Anyone have an address for a card, or flowers?
... that if you were to call them up on the phone, they'll tell you that Linux is "unsupported", and they'll only install this if you are running Windows.
My question is what can Windows possibly do with a 100mb/s pipe?
Here's one way you can provide feedback to Nvidia: see that little warranty card that came with the video card? Fill it in, and send it in.
I'm the type that almost never fills in the manufacturers' warranty cards. But when I dropped a TNT card into this box, a few months ago, I made a note to fill out the warranty card. Under "Operating Systems" I checked off "Other" and wrote in "Linux". Then, under "reason for purchase", I checked off "Other" again, and wrote "Linux compatibility".
It's absolutely true that the warranty cards are really used for marketing, more than anything else. But in this case this is precisely what you want the salesdroids to know: that Linux is selling these cards. My warranty card was postage-paid, that tells you right there that the video card manufacturers are very much interested in the their customers demographical information, and warranty cards are the primary source of information that they go with.
... And I'll be dropping a second warranty card into the mail this weekend, after I upgrade another workstation with a new motherboard, and a TNT card.
Good job, Nvidia.
That should NOT have been moderated down.
> Thats not saying that you can NOT pay a hacker a good salary though;
Well, you can't. You can probably make a reasonable wage working for VA, or Red Hat, but you'll always be able to get more money elsewhere. In the big corporate world, a good programmer will get six digits a year easily. Well into six digits.
> just that it's not the most important thing.
Yes, but money talks, and it what puts the food on the table. Until open source jobs pay the same as the rest of the industry, I'll just have to make do with hacking for a couple of hours each week. I would certainly jump at the chance to work on open source projects - Linux mainly. But, that's not going to happen, at least with the way things are right now.
I'm far from against people creating software for free but what is going to drive comapnies to release software for linux if someone just goes out and copies what they are doing?
I don't think I'm going to buy vmware, and it's not because of the 99 bucks. I have no problems with paying $99 for the product, but it better come with the source code. I'm not going to pay money, just to end up in a situation where something breaks tomorrow, and I'm screwed.
Another way to avoid having NS block on DNS lookups is to use the Junkbuster proxy, and you get to filter out banner ads as a bonus.
One word of caution, though, manually bind Junkbuster to 127.0.0.1 - this may have changed, but previously the default setup you get by following README binds junkbuster to any IP address, resulting in an open proxy invitation to script kiddies.