I just did a search on msn for "linux", like someone here suggested.
The first non-paid for result was "below the fold" of my window. I have to scroll if I want to even see past the ads.
If I want an ad engine, I'll go visit double-click. Nothing wrong with some ads...but mostly true non paid for results are what it's all about. It should not be a chore to see past the ads.
This webservice is not complicated enough for SOAP to be worth while.
Parsing a URL query string with 200 name-value pairs, then assembling that back into the XML document that the recipient expects does not seem like a good solution.
That does not describe Amazon's interface. There are a handful of parameters at most.
SOAP is not the best solution for all problems like this. In the Amazon case, REST may be better in some (many?) cases.
I developed www.bitworm.com (Computer Books) using the XML over http service. I have never used SOAP, and have never seen a reason to. With their server side XSL translations, I retieve custom responses designed to conserve bandwidth/response when combined with my caching backend. I don't think I can do that with SOAP.
SOAP is just too much work in the Amazon case with little ROI. XML is just as simple when used with JDom, or another simple parser.
(Smart) people will use the right tool for the job. In this case, XMLoverHTTP is a better solution than SOAP. I am glad to see I am not the only person who thinks SOAP just isn't worth the trouble.
Koetzle noted that while Microsoft's patches for the last nine high-profile Windows security holes predated such attacks by an average of 305 days, too few customers applied the fixes because "administrators lacked both the confidence that a patch won't bring down a production system and the tools and time to validate Microsoft's avalanche of patches."
I know I have totally screwed at least one "critical" production server by installing a service pack. Granted, that was NT4, which on the whole is just an impossible architecture to patch...or so they say.
Lack of security from the ground up in their design is what I believe the problem really is. The lack of a simple "bring this server up to date" scheduler doesn't help either. Even if they had that, people wouldn't use it due to patches toasting systems in the past.
For better or worse, that is David Pogue's style. He use to write like that for MacWorld, which is where I know his name from. People who buy this book already knowing him will expect that it contains his "jab here and there" style of writting. That's exactly what many Mac user want.
They must have good technical skills and be comfortable dealing with repetitive and mundane tasks, said Tucker. "They are usually one or the other," he said.
The computer world has come a long way in terms of automating mundane tasks while they have stood at one point in time. That is the problem, not the lack of people smart enough to type commands and follow instruction, but dumb enough to be content doing the mudane tasks over and over for their whole life. Automate the monkey tasks. It's not rocket science. Wake up and smell the 80's.
Long ago people invented things like print servers and backup schedulers. No reason at all humans should still be doing those tasks. That's what most of the the ops did in the two AS/400 shops I've worked in.
I have had my Yao laptop for about 3 weeks now, after not having a Mac since system 8 had just come out.
While I think it has some neat features, other people around me are dumbfounded that I can print anything into PDF. PDF -> Mail is something that QuickBooks/Mac has been missing. Not that I use that feature of Quickbooks, but maybe that is something they left out knowing this was coming.
Does anyone have an sites where I can find scripts that do these things?
BTW - I entertained people in meeting for about 5 minutes yesterday with my "YaoBook"...taking requests to minimize and maximize windows, just so they could watch the gennie effect into and out of the dock. Wow. Apple really hit the marketing bullseye with that otherwise useless feature.
Come on now. Spam is so old school. It's legacy. The wave has already crested.
Why can't they come up with some new inovative way to plaster ads in front of internet users? These people control the desktop, and 99% of the browser market after all.
At least companies like Gator offered new and different technology to monetize the users.
Microsoft is better than this. I never thought they would have to stoop as low as sending spam. They must really be hurting for new cashflow sources to impress "The Street."
I have to second that. ApacheToolBox rocks. Not only can it download and configure all of that, but it can also create an RPM at the end that contains everything and the configuration.
That's a nice feature when you want the exact same configuration on more than one server.
Wrox Press seem to have become masters at putting together volumes from a large number of authors.
I have always hated Wrox books and never known quite why. The pictures of all the people on some of the covers are kind of cheesey, but I had never put two and two together.
I just can't stand the way they are written. Tech books usually are usually of two varieties; reference or tutorial. Wrox books don't fit either of those descriptions, and usualy (both times) I make the purchase decision after reading a single chapter in Barnes and Nobels and found useful for a specific problem I need to solve. The book after that is not only useless, but I get frustrated when I need information from them.
Video blogs will never catch on for the same reason people hate voicemail after using email. While it may be a more fully featured sensory experience, a major feature is lacking; Scanning.
When I go to a web page, I can scan down it in a fraction of the time it would take to read the text. Voicemail and Video can't match that. Video can, if you are watching it for visual content instead of audio content. While you can "zzzzip" through messages on some voice mail systems, you still don't get what you could get from scanning a text message.
With video blogs, you would be forced to either watch for as long as it took the author(?) to record it, or miss parts. That is part of the "killer app" of email and current blogs that video blogs can't shake a stick at.
Now that last year they lost more money than most small countries ever hope to see, they are starting to get their act together.
AOL should have been doing this two years ago as a way to boost subscribers to AOL Broadband. AOL should be throwing as much "fat" content like this, and their movies libraries down the AOL Broadband pipe for as close to free as possible. Something needs to stop the upgrading to (other supplier) broadband hemoraging which is sweeping through their user base like ants when one discovers candy on the ground.
Really, they were very stupid for not doing this a long time ago. This is a lot of the reason they merged in the first place.
While many of these hacks utilize programming bugs, most hackers are finding it far easier and quicker to get access or information simply by calling the company on the phone. These so-called social engineering tactics involve calling AOL customer support centers and simply asking to have a given user's password reset. Logging in with the new password gives the intruder full access to the account. In a telephone interview, two hackers using the handles Dan and Cam0 explained that security measures (such as verifying the last four digits of a credit card number) can be bypassed by mumbling. A third hacker, using the name hakrobatik, confirmed the mumbling method.
This article is more about social engineering than about the AOL break in. This is odd, if this were true, I would expect a much different type of artcle to be on the lead edge of the breaking news like this. I don't know if this is true or not, but the Wired article does not really have a whole lot of meat with it.
The five year warranty is a welcome inclusion. Western Digital is good about replacements.
I have a hard time believing though all my clicking-clacking(WD), and bad block (Maxtor) drives have to due with lack of testing. Testing doesn't help make the drives more reliable. Either SCSI drives have a high test failure rate, or there is more to the story.
10K drives at less than SCSI prices are a welcome addition to the low end market, but I'd only use it where reliability and high performance isn't crucial. IDE drives still don't have their own processor leaving a big advantage to SCSI, right?
I hope IBM has what is takes to fix the major flaw in the Sharp unit, which is battery time with wireless. That's where this OS will really shine, but currently get a black-eye due to the power requirements.
Wireless devices like this I would think would be right up IBM's alley, it's the next logical step.
While Amazon and Dell are the loudest complainers, they will be laughing all the way to the bank when the aftershock is over.
Small Businesses which sell online will be killed by this as I understand (which I may not) it's present form. Small one or two people web stores just don't have the resources to collect and pay sales tax to all 50 states. It's hard enough to do for the one they are in. For example, some states don't charge tax on clothes while some do. I know in my state certain types of groceries are taxed while others are not. With all the differences, not to mention the actual payments to each state, the overhead of maintaining this is huge.
I am sure this could run many small web sites out of business. Amazon at least should welcome that.
I have a shell script that sends contents of a directory on my home systems to a machine of mine at a hosting company in another state, and vis-versa. Cron runs it on a nighly basis.
I always figured it was a fairly common thing for "data conscience geeks" to do.
Of course this is aimed at users who don't have their own off-site servers.
My first collection of bookmarks was scrawled on paper, and titled "Servers", since none of us had heard of "Bookmarks" yet.
Anyone have an old copy of the Internet Yellowpages sitting in their shelf? (Or in their basement...)
I remember how cool we though it was to download gif images of weather maps from University of Michigan. We didn't have to wait for the news to see an up to date weather map! Think of how commonplace that is today.
Too bad they are blocking useful research tools like Google. Otherwise they would know the Segway "scooter" beat them to some of these technological feats.
Can a human ride on the robot's back and still have it sense and adapt to changing surface angle...like the segway.
In Central New York (upstate, not the city), Time Warner Cable is offering a combination Digital Reciever/PVR.
I don't know much about the units, other than hearing they hold 40 hours, and integrate with the digital cable TV Guide type thing.
They must have the if you can't beat them, join them attitude when it comes to PVR's. The devices cost about $10 a month, on top of digital cable. All in all, that does not sound like a bad price to me , when your consider that is what the service alone costs for most third party PVR's like TiVo.
Does anyone know more about this unit? Is the software crap? Is it smart like Tivo, recording things you might like?
Anyway, they don't ALL hate EVERYTHING about PVR's.
Slashdot Mirror
I just did a search on msn for "linux", like someone here suggested.
The first non-paid for result was "below the fold" of my window. I have to scroll if I want to even see past the ads.
If I want an ad engine, I'll go visit double-click. Nothing wrong with some ads...but mostly true non paid for results are what it's all about. It should not be a chore to see past the ads.
-Pete
Would make for great datacenters. Does any other place in the world have a higher density of nuclear resistant underground bunkers?
I am sure the US bunker buster bombs didn't get them all.
-Pete
I hope this update will make my 12" TiBook with Airport Extream stop crashing my Linksys Wireless access point.
That is really a problem for me.
-Pete
This webservice is not complicated enough for SOAP to be worth while.
Parsing a URL query string with 200 name-value pairs, then assembling that back into the XML document that the recipient expects does not seem like a good solution.
That does not describe Amazon's interface. There are a handful of parameters at most.
SOAP is not the best solution for all problems like this. In the Amazon case, REST may be better in some (many?) cases.
-Pete
I developed www.bitworm.com (Computer Books) using the XML over http service. I have never used SOAP, and have never seen a reason to. With their server side XSL translations, I retieve custom responses designed to conserve bandwidth/response when combined with my caching backend. I don't think I can do that with SOAP.
SOAP is just too much work in the Amazon case with little ROI. XML is just as simple when used with JDom, or another simple parser.
(Smart) people will use the right tool for the job. In this case, XMLoverHTTP is a better solution than SOAP. I am glad to see I am not the only person who thinks SOAP just isn't worth the trouble.
-Pete
.Net on other platforms (mono, etc) are no different than the IBM JDK/JRE, JRocket, etc.
-Pete
Koetzle noted that while Microsoft's patches for the last nine high-profile Windows security holes predated such attacks by an average of 305 days, too few customers applied the fixes because "administrators lacked both the confidence that a patch won't bring down a production system and the tools and time to validate Microsoft's avalanche of patches."
I know I have totally screwed at least one "critical" production server by installing a service pack. Granted, that was NT4, which on the whole is just an impossible architecture to patch...or so they say.
Lack of security from the ground up in their design is what I believe the problem really is. The lack of a simple "bring this server up to date" scheduler doesn't help either. Even if they had that, people wouldn't use it due to patches toasting systems in the past.
-Pete
For better or worse, that is David Pogue's style. He use to write like that for MacWorld, which is where I know his name from. People who buy this book already knowing him will expect that it contains his "jab here and there" style of writting. That's exactly what many Mac user want.
Believe it or not, he has other books out as well which include Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual. The XP Home books seems to be a hit as well.
-Pete
They must have good technical skills and be comfortable dealing with repetitive and mundane tasks, said Tucker. "They are usually one or the other," he said.
The computer world has come a long way in terms of automating mundane tasks while they have stood at one point in time. That is the problem, not the lack of people smart enough to type commands and follow instruction, but dumb enough to be content doing the mudane tasks over and over for their whole life. Automate the monkey tasks. It's not rocket science. Wake up and smell the 80's.
Long ago people invented things like print servers and backup schedulers. No reason at all humans should still be doing those tasks. That's what most of the the ops did in the two AS/400 shops I've worked in.
-Pete
I have had my Yao laptop for about 3 weeks now, after not having a Mac since system 8 had just come out.
While I think it has some neat features, other people around me are dumbfounded that I can print anything into PDF. PDF -> Mail is something that QuickBooks/Mac has been missing. Not that I use that feature of Quickbooks, but maybe that is something they left out knowing this was coming.
Does anyone have an sites where I can find scripts that do these things?
BTW - I entertained people in meeting for about 5 minutes yesterday with my "YaoBook"...taking requests to minimize and maximize windows, just so they could watch the gennie effect into and out of the dock. Wow. Apple really hit the marketing bullseye with that otherwise useless feature.
-Pete
Come on now. Spam is so old school. It's legacy. The wave has already crested.
Why can't they come up with some new inovative way to plaster ads in front of internet users? These people control the desktop, and 99% of the browser market after all.
At least companies like Gator offered new and different technology to monetize the users.
Microsoft is better than this. I never thought they would have to stoop as low as sending spam. They must really be hurting for new cashflow sources to impress "The Street."
-Pete
I have to second that. ApacheToolBox rocks. Not only can it download and configure all of that, but it can also create an RPM at the end that contains everything and the configuration.
That's a nice feature when you want the exact same configuration on more than one server.
-Pete
Wrox Press seem to have become masters at putting together volumes from a large number of authors.
I have always hated Wrox books and never known quite why. The pictures of all the people on some of the covers are kind of cheesey, but I had never put two and two together.
I just can't stand the way they are written. Tech books usually are usually of two varieties; reference or tutorial. Wrox books don't fit either of those descriptions, and usualy (both times) I make the purchase decision after reading a single chapter in Barnes and Nobels and found useful for a specific problem I need to solve. The book after that is not only useless, but I get frustrated when I need information from them.
-Pete
The whole appeal of Tivo is that the watcher can take back control of watching TV. That is what makes Tivo a "killer app."
This reigns back in that control. That being the case, it is not the "killer app" TWC hopes it will be.
-Pete
Video blogs will never catch on for the same reason people hate voicemail after using email. While it may be a more fully featured sensory experience, a major feature is lacking; Scanning.
When I go to a web page, I can scan down it in a fraction of the time it would take to read the text. Voicemail and Video can't match that. Video can, if you are watching it for visual content instead of audio content. While you can "zzzzip" through messages on some voice mail systems, you still don't get what you could get from scanning a text message.
With video blogs, you would be forced to either watch for as long as it took the author(?) to record it, or miss parts. That is part of the "killer app" of email and current blogs that video blogs can't shake a stick at.
-Pete
Now that last year they lost more money than most small countries ever hope to see, they are starting to get their act together.
AOL should have been doing this two years ago as a way to boost subscribers to AOL Broadband. AOL should be throwing as much "fat" content like this, and their movies libraries down the AOL Broadband pipe for as close to free as possible. Something needs to stop the upgrading to (other supplier) broadband hemoraging which is sweeping through their user base like ants when one discovers candy on the ground.
Really, they were very stupid for not doing this a long time ago. This is a lot of the reason they merged in the first place.
-Pete
While many of these hacks utilize programming bugs, most hackers are finding it far easier and quicker to get access or information simply by calling the company on the phone. These so-called social engineering tactics involve calling AOL customer support centers and simply asking to have a given user's password reset. Logging in with the new password gives the intruder full access to the account. In a telephone interview, two hackers using the handles Dan and Cam0 explained that security measures (such as verifying the last four digits of a credit card number) can be bypassed by mumbling. A third hacker, using the name hakrobatik, confirmed the mumbling method.
This article is more about social engineering than about the AOL break in. This is odd, if this were true, I would expect a much different type of artcle to be on the lead edge of the breaking news like this. I don't know if this is true or not, but the Wired article does not really have a whole lot of meat with it.
-Pete
Apple has quietly entered the groupware collaboration market.
-Pete
> The Raptor also carries a five-year warranty.
The five year warranty is a welcome inclusion. Western Digital is good about replacements.
I have a hard time believing though all my clicking-clacking(WD), and bad block (Maxtor) drives have to due with lack of testing. Testing doesn't help make the drives more reliable. Either SCSI drives have a high test failure rate, or there is more to the story.
10K drives at less than SCSI prices are a welcome addition to the low end market, but I'd only use it where reliability and high performance isn't crucial. IDE drives still don't have their own processor leaving a big advantage to SCSI, right?
-Pete
I hope IBM has what is takes to fix the major flaw in the Sharp unit, which is battery time with wireless. That's where this OS will really shine, but currently get a black-eye due to the power requirements.
Wireless devices like this I would think would be right up IBM's alley, it's the next logical step.
-Pete
While Amazon and Dell are the loudest complainers, they will be laughing all the way to the bank when the aftershock is over.
Small Businesses which sell online will be killed by this as I understand (which I may not) it's present form. Small one or two people web stores just don't have the resources to collect and pay sales tax to all 50 states. It's hard enough to do for the one they are in. For example, some states don't charge tax on clothes while some do. I know in my state certain types of groceries are taxed while others are not. With all the differences, not to mention the actual payments to each state, the overhead of maintaining this is huge.
I am sure this could run many small web sites out of business. Amazon at least should welcome that.
-Pete
I have a shell script that sends contents of a directory on my home systems to a machine of mine at a hosting company in another state, and vis-versa. Cron runs it on a nighly basis.
I always figured it was a fairly common thing for "data conscience geeks" to do.
Of course this is aimed at users who don't have their own off-site servers.
-Pete
My first collection of bookmarks was scrawled on paper, and titled "Servers", since none of us had heard of "Bookmarks" yet.
Anyone have an old copy of the Internet Yellowpages sitting in their shelf? (Or in their basement...)
I remember how cool we though it was to download gif images of weather maps from University of Michigan. We didn't have to wait for the news to see an up to date weather map! Think of how commonplace that is today.
-Pete
Too bad they are blocking useful research tools like Google. Otherwise they would know the Segway "scooter" beat them to some of these technological feats.
Can a human ride on the robot's back and still have it sense and adapt to changing surface angle...like the segway.
On the other hand, the segway doesn't do tai chi.
-Pete
In Central New York (upstate, not the city), Time Warner Cable is offering a combination Digital Reciever/PVR.
I don't know much about the units, other than hearing they hold 40 hours, and integrate with the digital cable TV Guide type thing.
They must have the if you can't beat them, join them attitude when it comes to PVR's. The devices cost about $10 a month, on top of digital cable. All in all, that does not sound like a bad price to me , when your consider that is what the service alone costs for most third party PVR's like TiVo.
Does anyone know more about this unit? Is the software crap? Is it smart like Tivo, recording things you might like?
Anyway, they don't ALL hate EVERYTHING about PVR's.
-Pete