Anybody who is "lost" on google, the most beautifully minimalist site for searching is not "without experience of the net", they are "without a significant portion of their brain".
...because it seems to rely on little more than inertia to succeed. People use Yahoo! to search, therefor people will pay Yahoo! to search?
Hm. Er. No. The Yahoo general searches will still be free (for finding public material), while the Yahoo specialized search of research articles, etc., will not be free.
I use Google for my searching. When it doesn't turn up what I want, or when I need a particular citation, I fire up my lexis-nexis account. I would imagine that anyone who does serious research will do the same. This way, people who have always used Yahoo will continue to use Yahoo (unless driven away by worries of the entire service becoming pay-based?), and will, for serious research, use lexis-nexis. Their pay-as-you-go pricing is affordable enough for the occasional user, and their daily/weekly pricing falls into about what you'd expect if you're using this is a corporate resource. They're also a company that actually turns a profit, and has a very solid reputation. Not to mention that most organizations that require extensive research already maintain a lexnex account for their employees to make use of.
And I'd reckon it's easier to get a PO approved to Lexis-Nexis for searching purposes than it is for Yahoo!. They branded themselves as fun and off-beat. Fun and off-beat do not a good reference source make.
Oh well. This doesn't affect me in the slightest, I just don't see it working. They were early-to-market with their portal, but they're late-to-market with this, and I don't believe inertia from the portal / general search will carry over to this realm.
Sending a letter to their PR department takes very little time, and to those who suggest that we allow the market to correct the deficiencies and dementia in their licensing agreement -- public outcry would be counted amongst the forces that can influence the market.
It took me about 60 seconds to type up a very brief e-mail:
-----
Greetings,
Your new licensing scheme for Kylix and JBuilder 5 has ensured that I will strongly recommend against that software under that license being used by my company, and furthermore will pass the word via the mailing lists and discussion groups to which I belong in order to ensure that nobody is duped into purchasing it without reading the licensing agreement.
I would suggest that you consider a change, as draconian tactics do little more than alienate your potential markets and detract from your present ones.
Your products are doubtless one of the reasons that I learned my profession, and I find this to be on a personal level quite a disappointment.
-----
It certainly can't hurt anyone to send something similar. This is a benefit/neutral scenario, unless 1.5 minutes of your time counts as a detraction.
I would rather have Borland realize their error and seek to correct -- perhaps start by replacing their legal consultation team -- immediately, rather than wait until their quarterly earnings dictate that they ought to alter something.
Consumers (not just slashdot ubergeeks) will have to sit up and take notice at this one, I think. It's getting a bit more coverage / product placement, and isn't being couched in esoteric terms (MS has a tendency of releasing patches that have descriptions which underplay the effects of not patching, or else are so laden with jargon that the layman cannot quite process them). It really is an "uber patch", and it really is MS saying, "We've been releasing insecure software for awhile. In fact, we're still doing so, as evidenced by the three bugs that you don't even know about that we're patching. Please install this patch or else you're screwed."
I think consumers can weather something like, "Apply this patch in order to ensure that your copy of internet explorer appropriately identifies content header types and reconciles them with dialogue saving and automated execution routines." because it just looks so *foreign*. Approached from a non-computing background, it looks like something very small and unlikely to affect anyone. This patch, though, looks a bit more like "Oops. Our browser sucks for security. Install immediately."
Hopefully this will draw peoples attention to:
1) The importance of frequent patching
2) The lack of security in MSIE
3) The problems associated with bundling a browser into core OS functionality (bit more unlikely).
Of course, the spin is still there, but:
Who should read this bulletin: Customers using Microsoft® Internet Explorer.
Impact of vulnerability: Run code of attacker's choice.
Maximum Severity Rating: Critical
Recommendation: Customers using IE should install the patch immediately.
Affected Software:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0
...is still pretty cut & dry. Anyone with even half a brain should realize that if a gaping hole in a consumer product existed through *2* releases (like having a 2000 and a 2001 Honda both explode in flames under appropriate conditions), that product may not be the best built out there.
Right?
Of course, I'd be much more pleased if people were being notified via a big ol' link on msn.com, and through a mail from the beloved "Hotmail Staff". What, are they scared of leveraging a monopoly to insure the security of their users?
I just wrote out way too long of a question, so I'm deleting and starting over.
Members of the judiciary are largely unqualified to comment or judge upon issues of a technical nature, simply because their careers do not incorporate a great deal of technical knowledge, and also because they have not sought it (and I don't blame them, probably didn't have time) on their own.
Now, they *are* qualified to comment on matters of criminality, which are supported by a huge amount of precedent, legislation, etc that has been repeatedly modified, challenged, or simply let stand.
However, there are new "crimes" coming into being, called "cybercrimes" by the buzzwordish. Our judges, lacking technical skills or a real awareness of digital culture, are passing judgement in cases that have either very loose or no precedent to be found, or that are the result of new and innovative legislature (see: DMCA).
My concern is that the judges who are making the decisions are the least qualified to do so -- that we won't have a lot of judges with a high awareness of the intricacies involved for several years. However, the judges presently seating are essentially creating a body of law to govern what they do not understand.
My question: How large of a threat will these precedents pose to the continuation or reclamation of freedoms? Will we be able to take back the ground we've alrady lost, or will the intricacies of the legal system vis-a-vis tort & precendent, ensure that we cannot?
-l
(this one is way too long too. I just can't seem to make it fit)
Two small points: 1) The list is not ordered in a "top twelve" fashion. "Number one on the list" is simply the first item in the category, "Toys tied to video games". 2) "Number one on the list" is not MGS:2, but the action figure of Solid Snake.
Funny Quote: "Hey kids, want to score some Metal Gear Solid 2..." -- (from McFarlane Toys website). The wording is just so reminiscent of PSA's involving shady street corners and overdressed pimp-daddy crack dealers peddling to schoolchildren.
While I personally don't agree with the idea of corporate / government enforced content control (being a firm believer that a parent controls what their child sees for the first portion of their life, after which parental control becomes impossible as the child is exposed to an increasing number of information sources), what this site is really doing is taking some people to task for cross-marketing, and others to task for marketing clearly violent products / ideas in a guise that makes them appear to be "child friendly". For proponents of ratings systems, etc., this appears to be a worthy cause?
I will not quote their page, but provide my perspective on their top 12, to further my point.
1)MGS:2 Solid Snake Action Figure: While the figure is certainly no worse than GI Joes, it does tie to an extremely violent video game. Buying this toy will do little more than make your child want the video game, and you'll be viewed as a hypocrite by your kid for endorsing one and not the other.
2)Rock 'em Sock 'em Robot: The marketing angle used to sell these toys is a very violent one, which does not limit itself to robot mayhem ("taking candy from a baby's intestines"). As well, they tie to a PG-rated game. See (1), Above.
3)Mobile Suit Gundam: Simply a violent toy. Lots of explosion sounds, machine gun fire, etc. Also brands itself as "A thinking toy", which might be misleading, as use does not seem to require or encourage thought.
4)CommandoBot: Toy marketed to six year olds with a "sentry" function and missile launching capability. I wouldn't let *my* kid have this, because I'd go nuts everytime I opened a cupboard to be greeted by a robotic sentry.
5)"Striking Z Fighters": Toy tied closely to violent cartoon show. See (1) and (2). Toy itself has "kung fu-grip" style features.
6)Power Rangers Virtual Reality World: Toy appears to have no purpose other than to encourage emulation of violent behaviour.
7)Mech Warrior Shadow Cat: Perversion of basic construction toy. Instead of creating things and constantly adding to them, you will now create weapons and destroy your lego/construx/tinker toy cities. Also ties in with television show. See (1), (2), (5).
8)Zoids Gun Sniper: Perversion of basic model assembly toy. Instead of assembling a marginally educational (or at least historically accurate dinosaur), you create a dinosaur-like fighting machine. Doubtless, it will soon go to work ensuring those real dinosaur models you have remain extinct.
9)SSFII: Revival: Marketed to everyone. Cartoony animation and long-standing acceptance may cause people to fail to notice that it's ridiculously violent, containing some very violent quotations and scenarios, animated or not.
10) Final Fight I: See (9). Also, they appear to take issue with the possibility that this game barely requires a functional brain and could probably be played adequately by one of those water-drinking bobble-birds that you see on peoples desks.
11)Doom for GBA: For some reason rated "Teen", despite being virtually identical in violent content to the "Mature" version released for the PC.
12)Ecks vs. Sever: Violent storyline which involves such concepts as murder, terrorism, and such.
Please note that these are not my views, but simply a condensation of the service I believe these people are trying to provide. Some of the items do contain information that might not be known to the average consumer blinded by marketing blitz. All it's trying to do is help people weed out violent content from their christmas tree. It's merely a grass-roots anti-violence/marketing violence to young children campaign.
I disagree wildly with some of their picks, but at least they're providing another side to corp-spin. (Oh yes, a game where the objective is to maul 100 people in a row, while saying such lovely things as 'Your blood is on my fists' is PERFECTLY suitable for a hypertense 5 year old. While you're here, why not buy this Virtual Reality gear so they can act out all of the violence they're already vicariously enjoying?)
Some parents don't have time, sadly, to investigate gifts. And if a compelling reason to *not buy* something does not present itself quickly, they may just purchase something that they will end up disapproving of in the long run.
Personally, I don't think video games are even that suitable of a gift for little kids, but that's just me. I also don't think television is suitable for little kids, though it's less to do with violence and more to do with the insipid nature of most comment.
Anyhow, stop laughing at these people. They're fighting against a multi-billion dollar marketing machine that is impinging upon their ideas of morality. Remind you of anything?
Hockey has been around in some form since around the time skates were invented. The first game organized by rules that would make it recognizable as the modern (read: NHL) sport took place in Canada mid-nineteenth century.
Basketball was invented by James Naismith for the YMCA while he was at the University of Michigan. It was invented to fill the lull between sporting seasons by providing a vigorous indoor sport. It originally used Peach Baskets. Hence, basketball. Dr. Naismith was a Canadian; the first players were Americans.
I bought into what they were selling hook, line, and sinker when I...er... bought what they were selling, did I not? I can look at a pile of 100 CDs in my room, and based on the slim edge of each CD, can tell you which band, what songs I like on that album, and whether or not it has any scratches that detract from playing it. At a glance towards my collection, I recall songs I haven't listened to in months that I really ought to. And then I pull the CD out, put it into my player, and listen to it. While listening, I can admire the artwork and browse the lyrics. This all takes place in the physical world, which for me is infinitely more comfortable than the digital world of MP3 playlists, doubleclicks and directory structure.
Consumerism isn't about buying, it's about consumption. Your MP3 collection is less an ode to the music you love, and more a trophy of your consumerism. Because you are consuming other peoples works. Does having those MP3s make you feel good? It's consumerism. Consuming makes you feel good, just like it makes me feel good. You're just consuming a different sort of good.
When you purchase CDs, you *are* supporting the band. Just not very much. $0.10-$0.90 per CD, I believe, depending on songwriting / production credits.
And, actually, money from both Tool and the Backstreet boys (who are BOTH big ticket items -- if you're under the impression that Tool is somehow "indie", you're mistaken) goes to marketing the smaller bands on the label, not towards marketing the bigger ones. When you sign on, the record company says "Okay, we'll do $100k worth of promotion for you and you can recoup it in sales." That $100k comes from Tool / Backstreet Boys to the smaller players. Unfortunately, the contracts that they make you sign are awful, awful things, and basically force you into an indentured servitude scenario. Those contracts are the big problem. I don't really have much to do with them, though. I've written letters about it to CEOs of RIAA affiliated companies, expressing my belief that the contracts are prohibitive and harm both the longevity and quality of bands/artists they are attached to. Have you?
I inhabit the physical world. It gives me comfort to control some of my environs and be intimately familiar with them. Hence, physical objects. Why would I choose abstract objects like MP3s above physical ones like CDs? I do not live or think within my computer, nor do I want to.
You seem to be missing the connection between a collector and a music listener. For as long as there has been a physical format for personal storage of music (phonorecordings, vinyl, 8 track, cassette, CD), there have been collectors. Collectors collect the *album*, including sleeve, liner notes, artwork, lyric sheets. Listeners only care about the music. I would say that most people are hybrid collector/listeners, with a minority at either end being pure collectors (shrinkwrapped White Albums), or listeners (Music all on MP3/Burn CDs/Mixed Tapes). Downloading music caters to one slim minority. I want my artwork. I want my textured sleeve (those plastic CD cases were the worst, I'm glad people are starting to use sleeves instead). I want my lyric sheet. I want it all to be well laid out and legible. I want it to be intimately connected to the music itself by virtue of being stored with it. I do not want it to involve XML, CDDB or anything else.
I support my favourite bands by attending their shows, by the way, and that is where an indie band really needs your help. That's where most bands get their money to make their first album, or do their first tour.
These services aren't going to work for several reasons, or at least not in the foreseeable future:
1) They are being created to counteract the spread of P2P filesharing services, IRC mp3 channels, and even websites that provide mp3s for downloads, not to mention your standard ripping / copying from friends. They are also well behind the pack -- the P2P sharing services provide more than these people will provide (huge selection of rarities & standards both), and they do it without a subscription fee (for the most part), and they do it without the red tape required in the recording industry.
2)My first reaction was "So I spend $250, cancel my internet access after awhile, and then I have no tunes?" The straight retail CD business has a better model than this.
3)They are providing content of the traditional sort (Studio releases, megahits), over a new distribution channel. They have failed to grasp that it is the non-traditional content as much as the non-traditional distribution that has led to the soaring popularity of first Napster and now Morpheus. If I want to track down a live version of Michael Stipe and Vic Chesnutt singing a duet of 'Wounded Bird', it won't take me more than an hour on existing (and illegal) distribution models. Would that song even be available on a corporate-run service? Probably not.
I don't download that many songs -- I prefer to buy albums so that I get the additional content (sleeves, cover art, lyric sheets that weren't typed up by a half-deaf 12 year old dyslexic) and I also like to have a physical representation of what I own. I like to be able to pile my records/CDs. It makes me feel good to walk into my room and see the rows of brightly coloured cases and sleeves. It makes me feel dumb to walk into my room and see stacks of CD-Rs. People like me won't sign up for this service, will continue using P2P to sample new artists and then will subsequently purchase the album if it is enjoyable (my last 40 or so CD purchases happened like this). It'd be pointless to me -- I listen to maybe 20 songs a month over P2P. It'd be pointless to people who do a lot over P2P and obviously don't care about legal / artistic ramifications, as well.
So who is this service for?
I reckon if the business is run as a tight ship, they could keep a slim enough margin to stay profitable. But they're not going to be making cash hand over fist, and they won't be detracting from the appeal of P2P.
So I'll keep it brief. After comment #200, nobody pays attention.
The problems with cameras is not that they are an invasion of privacy in the same sense as, say, police entering your home without a warrant.
The problem with them is that they require you to place absolute trust in your government. In the states, at least, that seems to run completely counter to the ideas of the founding fathers.
Whoever is in power has access to tapes of everything you do -- including who you spent time with. (Right to associate freely), including what placard you were holding (free speech), your religious dress / ornamentation(freedom of religion).
So whoever is in power, with some simple cross referencing, could isolate dissidents/undesirables pretty quickly, assuming they bothered to maintain an index of the tapes.
Too much information possessed by a government regarding its citizenry is a very very bad thing. Film showing everything a citizen does in a public place is certainly too much information.
Simply not true. While the subsidies aren't high, they do exist.
The primary reason that you have cheap and available broadband access, though, is because the broadband providers are regulated in the public interest by the government.
They are required to charge less than $50 canadian per month for "basic" broadband access. They are also required to show, within their business model, that they are working towards connecting rural / outlying communities.
Has exactly zero to do with it being cold here , although I understand where you're coming from, as I proably read the same article you did. It actually referred to the extremely high penetration of internet in Canada, particularly in the maritimes -- it had nothing to do with the price. And yes, it being "cold" was one of the reasons listed. So was the highly seasonal employment market centered around a lot of industries (timber & oil spring to mind). And about a dozen other things.
(and that I'll be -1 Redundant, as I generally am).
My educational background was in philosophy, too, and I didn't even manage to complete my BA (I still have one year left). I'm not a Unix Administrator, but I have held positions in systems administration which involved administering *nix boxen.
I started out at the lowest possible tier in a company -- a very junior position that paid slightly above minimum wage for doing GUI mock-ups to spec. Pretty fun, huh? Well, I held it for 8 months and used that experience to take a tech support position at a very much bricks & mortar business.
I then applied my independent learning to that company, and started talking to management about upgrading network infrastructure, implementing databases, etc. This is basically what launched my career -- I went from a Technical Support Flunky position to a management one in about two years, with a year of that spent as a DBA/Unix Administrator.
And that is what it took, and I have every confidence that this will work for you, or anyone for that matter. All you have to do is find the right company -- don't pick a place that's geek-heavy like a development house, aim for an established business, preferably one that does not have a global presence. A local company with 100-200 people would be great, I'd say, but even bigger companies can work out for you. It just tends to take longer (more red tape before your ideas get heard).
If you do things right, you can basically define your own position within a company like that, and bring a serious amount of value to them through your expertise.
As for "too old", I've worked with (and above) several juniors your age (I'm younger than you are), and their age was not a barrier to either hiring or advancement. It may be a problem at some places, but it won't be at all places.
If you've ever given nieces / nephews advice about getting their first job, it probably went along the lines of "Make 50 resumes. Drop them all off, and sit by the phone". Well, that's what you have to do, now. If you distribute enough copies of your resume, you'll get enough callbacks that one of those callbacks will result in an interview, your interviewer will like you, and off you go.
The only caveat is that to succed in the IT industry -- or any industry -- through this method, you have to work like a dog. You do not have a piece of paper saying you know lots about computers, so you have to demonstrate it. Repeatedly.
If you decide that Sys/Unix Admin isn't where you want to go, by the way, that philosophy degree will once again have career-value if you move into project management / general management. Logic, communication, and lateral thinking play a large role in both.
Phantasy Star does, indeed, hold a special place in my heart. It was the first console RPG that rivalled my beloved text-based adventure games for play value.
I take exception with the notion that Phantasy Star was a rip-off of Final Fantasy, however, as it was released in 1987. A full 3 years before Final Fantasy made its way onto the NES platform.
It was actually released slightly before Dragon Warrior, a far inferior RPG that received a great deal more attention.
And while Final Fantasy I and Phantasy Star are quite different (FFI being more traditionally RPG and PS incorporating futuristic themes), I would note that I was struck by how the later Final Fantasy themes would begin to rip off the original Phantasy Star (from 1987!!!), with the incorporation of a great deal of science fiction and the adopting of a standard scenario whereby the world was a combination of technical and magical components.
Sega has often set the bar by which other console games are judged, only to regretfully be forgotten about themselves. They just couldn't sell enough console units to generate buzz, and eventually their game quality decreased even as their engineering grew more apt.
Still, their existing Arcade games are head-and-shoulders above most, in my opinion. When I go to the Arcade (twice a year?), it's not to play Tekken Tag or any of the more mindless games, it's to play the queer looking machines that have strange controllers, odd viewpoints, fascinating takes.... by and large, these machines proudly sport the "Sega" insignia.
I have heard several news reports say that the terrorists used knives and gained entrance to the cockpit probably by killing stewardesses to trick a pilot into leaving, killing him and entering.
Now, my question is: if there is a significant incident on board an airplane (something to make the pilot leave the cockpit), are they not required immediately to report this to, well, someone?
It seems like if this was how it was done (knives, stewardesses), there would have been advance warning.
While it's true that human beings can interpret images to mean something that a machine could never pick up on, that's not the thrust of the research being done here.
He is doing research into a very particular kind of steganography, whereby messages are concealed within an image via slightly altering the least significant bits of an image.
When you encode information in this way, somebody knowing how to extract it can pull out a message which is not subjective (as in the example of interpreted images given by another poster), but rather is very concrete.
There is some evidence that this form of encoding has been used to communicate information throughout terrorist cells.
What the researcher is doing is developing a method to detect when the LSB's in an image have been manipulated slightly. He is not trying to decode the message, but only to flag particular images as being suspicious.
Decoding would be a matter for someone completely different -- like the FBI, for instance.
His method does have applications, and if it is through alteration of LSB that a message is embedded in an image, it will apparently detect such 90% of the time.
This is a vast improvement over any existing methods I know of for detecting LSB manipulation.
So he's not quite looking for a needle in a haystack. He's examining millions of haystacks, and pinpointing the ones that probably *do* have needles in them.
Why do people insist on calling this a revolution? Information has been fairly distributed within the western world for quite awhile through public libraries. Have you been to a library lately? Not the busiest place for non-grad students. Who says people really want / need all of this information, let alone the completely non-authoritative source mostly found on the 'net.
What revolution? What promises? Who made these promises?
We are not living in the world that birthed the Communist Revolution, nor the French Revolution, nor the schism between Protestantism and Catholocicism. We're not living in the world of the Emperor Julian, nor in the world of Gutenberg.
For all of the people who called "Revolution! REVOLUTION!" with regards to the net, there were an equal number rubbing their temples and saying "Shut up.".
With the rise of punditry and the dissemination of information therefrom, we've been left in the unfortunate position of listening to people who have little or nothing to do with the so-called "revolution". These are commentators who are paid by eyeballs grabbed or ears tugged, and they're looking for the most bombastic doggerel they can dig up from whatever experience they've had with scandal sheets. "THE NET WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!", "THE NET WILL ELIMINATE THIRD WORLD DEBT", "THE NET WILL PROVIDE PORN TO EVERY AMERICAN WITH AN INTERNET ACCOUNT WHO DESIRES IT!". Only the last one has come true, and that's the only one I would've banked on 10 years ago.
The only reason to be disappointed with the net is because you listened to the promises that were being made by people who didn't have and weren't willing or able to fulfill them.
I find the net to be somewhat handy. That's my assessment, and I've never found it to be anything less.
No, corporations in America are most certainly not people, and should not be confused with them.
Chief Justice Marshall, in his 1919 decision of Dartmouth vs. Woodward gave U.S. law its definition and perception of corporations. To paraphrase, they are nothing more than a creature composed of law, and as such should have no rights greater than even the most common of human lives, nor should they be permitted to threaten or dominate those lives.
(Full decision here
While it is true that corporations have, in effect, been discovered to act as a "single immortal entity" (thus avoiding some nasty tax issues when the CEO dies, etc), they do NOT have the rights of people.
Falling into the state where you assume that your government has already forgotten about you is going to result in just that. You, as a human being, still have rights, but they will be ignored by corporate-payrolled politicians until such a time as enough people stand up and say that "This is enough".
So, start standing. Apathy isn't going to do anything except make your life worse. You won't be heard unless you speak. Speak. Write congress, join initiatives such as the ACLU or any of the sattelite organisations surrounding it. Take an active part in your community. Read about the law. Understand what's happening, and do it in a more informative way than reading a Newspaper.
Everything you need is out there, you just have to be willing to find it. This includes other people who feel exactly the same as you do.
When enough people yell, they can make the world shake.
-l
I'm not a tremendous Dylan fan myself, though I do credit some of the revival of interest in folk music (such as that of Billy Bragg, or the quasi-re-discovery of Woody Guthro) with his influences in popular culture. Which is important.
The Beatles are certainly one of the greatest bands of the 20th century. Definitely the greatest rock & roll band thereof, in my mind. Will we be listening to them in 100 years? I don't know. Will rock & roll even exist then? If country music exists in 100 years, Johnny Cash will still be listened to. If Rock & Roll, then the Beatles will be. If Jazz, well... Davis, Peterson, Coltrane, Gerschwins...:)
The thing is, not a lot of people these days are even listening to the Beatles. At least, I've had people ask me when I put on the White Album: "Who is this?". I'm sure you've had similar experiences.:)
Just don't malign all country... just ninety-ish percent of the new stuff. A lot of that old country music is excellent. I could listen to Johnny Cash all day, and have from time-to-time.
The Dixie Chicks? Nah. But, I can't think of many modern bands I can listen to for extended periods. Vic Chesnutt, Kristin Hersch, Tom Waits (who can't really be classed as modern by any means), John Prine (more country-folk for ye)....
And none of 'em hit the charts. "Popular Music", which was at its most challenging with the dominance of the Beatles(by my estimation), is currently a few steps removed from insipipd. Maybe a couple of steps. Jazz has retreated into the parlors of middle-aged white men and the occasional club that's just asking to go out of business, as well as into the pretensions of the young. The Blues have been re-regionalised. Few people can name any classical compositions from the last 50 years, or even any performers outside of Yo Yo Ma. Country has jumped away from the examination of dark times in the soul and into the lament of love lost... it's all a bit sad, really.:P
Would like to note, for the record, that Johnny Cash is hardly looking at tremendously obvious concepts. Nor is Willie Nelson. Nor, for that matter, was Hank Williams.
Do you actually know what country music is?
Long Black Veil, Jacob's Ladder, So Lonesome, etc. are great songs with great lyrics and a tremendous amount of craft and melody injected into them.
Have you ever listened to "Delia" (cash)? Not only is that one of the most disturbing songs that I've ever heard (beating out even Springsteen's State Trooper), but it touches on quite a lot of things people would rather not alight upon.
To the best of my knowledge, there are precious few country musicians who call what they're writing deep, either. As a matter of fact:
"Could somebody go get my notebook? I left it in the back there... I need it, it's got all the lyrics that I stole written down in it."
From Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues album.
Not that this is remotely on topic. Oh well.
"The [xyz] is keeping me down genre" could, when so narrowly viewed, apply as well to the lifework of Schopenhaur. I certainly hope you don't view him as cashing in on commercial commodities.
Is Bob Dylan crap, too? 'cuz guess where lots of his influences lie?
First off, I'd like to suggest that someone employ an editor for Katz. It's actually getting painful to wade through these posts, and that's probably causing a drop-off in Katz readership. Please, just run them through an editor to check for broken links and erroneous spellings. I'm assuming that was meant to be 'morale', not 'moral' for instance.
I'm not mentioning this to nit-pick or play kick-the-Katz, but because it really is bloody annoying. Do you remember when people used to put blinking text in their ANSI sigs and it'd make your poor little terminal bleed until someone told them that they shouldn't be doing that? Consider it a PSA.
Anyway, on to the point. Universal Access. Who cares? It's only useful for breeding into the society to which it belongs. The wired society. Universal Access isn't going to be some kind of wonder that fixes everything. Early adopters will have an edge in the tech jobs market, but that's going to mean absolutely nothing in a few years, once society catches up to itself.
What good is the internet? That's the question I've been asking myself quite frequently lately. I'm not coming up with a large listing of answers, either.
People employed by 'progressive' companies will now be installing filter software to keep their kids from checking out porn. Woot-oot. Is anybody under the illusion that the average teenager or even child is going to be enriching themselves on the net? Television did wonders for them.
I actually try to enrich myself somewhat, and I'm not making a hell of a lot of progress at the moment.
Don't just say this is a nice step for no reason. Why does everyone have to be wired? Why is it so important?
This doesn't impact, to a huge degree, the workers that are getting them. It doesn't make their jobs any easier. What it does is make it more likely that they'll:
1) Stay with the company 2) Passively headhunt for the company
Woo-oo.
Don't fall all over yourself thinking this is some gigantic leap into the future. It ain't. It's a company utilising an incentive package to keep current employees and lure new ones into their fold.
Considering the possibility that internet use can prove addictive, it may even be on the shady side of legal. Free cigarettes to employees wasn't all that uncommon in years gone by.
It seems unlikely anyone (including yourself) is going to read this, but I'll post it anyway.
The reason that Win2k/SQL Server 2k was not brought into the conversation was because the initial poster obviously came from an established company that had had the IX solution in place for awhile.
If you take a look at TPCs results from last year for database benchmarking, you'll notice that the Win NT / MS SQL Server benchmarks were, while cheaper, drastically less capable of processing numerous transactions.
As well, IX systems offer more scalability than Windows. Beyond that, and relating back to the initial poster -- the cost of transferring entire systems over to win2k/sql 2k is extensive. You might want to take a look at executive summary and full disclosure on that site as well. For enterprise systems, until Win2k proves itself, I'll recommend IX, I'm afraid.
Another interesting facet is that most of the other companies in the top 10 have not submitted solutions in quite some time. Microsoft submits to TPC religiously (and has had some hubbub over fudging results), whereas other vendors do not.
The price of IBM / Sun, etc systems are falling, albeit slowly. If you want a system that can deal with 5000 simultaneous users, I'd doubt it's even possible to scale Win2k to handle it. If you've any literature to the contrary, I'd appreciate your sending it on to me.
I sympathize with your having to deal with a tech staff throwing buzz words at you. Essentially, the advantage of the IX platforms is pure reliability. I initiated the purchasing of an RS/6000 running AIX as our primary database server about half a year ago, basing its cost efficiency upon the lack of downtime -- working for a sales driven company, an hour of downtime roughly equates to $22,000 worth of loss. The downtimes with IX platforms are much, much lower. This translates into less 'lost opportunity costs'. (The kind that you've probably sued your telco or ISP over at some stage when they violate their uptime guarantees)
I'd imagine your NT servers are being used primarily for user interaction -- possibly metaframes to allow for wide area networking, and possibly fileservers as well as particular application servers. You may even be running your primary domain controller off of windows NT. These are all fine and good uses of Windows NT, administration of which requires a middling skill set to pull it off without dropping bombs. The incredible number of MSCEs kicking about will keep the salaries low.
I would have to hypothesise that your database servers and core heavy applications (webservers, et al) are running on IX systems. IX systems don't tend to crash as much (when you have a good administrator), and they also provide much faster querying times for databases than NT based servers. Take a look at TPC.org for some benchmarks on the subject. Take note that, yes, NT solutions are cheaper than IX, but look also at the efficiency achieved. It all comes back to opportunity costs, in my mind.
The reason your admins can go snowboarding is probably because they're quite good, although I question the wisdom of letting every IX admin in the house go off snowboarding without leaving at least a skeleton crew. IX administrators do their work in a different way than NT administrators. NT administrators fight fires, whereas IX administrators primarily stop them from occurring.
Fewer people have the skills required to be an excellent IX administrator, and a top-notch one can make your system much more efficient than a middling one. That's why you pay so much money to them. This is also due, as you know, to the current labour shortage in highly responsible technical positions (it seems to be levelling off amongst junior staff and programmers).
Ultimately, the best choice for a mission critical application is an IX system. They don't go down as much, they support much more comprehensive data recovery operations and are much easier to diagnose for difficulties. As well, they scale (in my opinion) much easier than NT servers. When I want to add 60 gigs of storage space to my RS, it takes me somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes, at least half of which is making certain that I'm mounting them appropriately.
Feel free to mail me (Drop the X's), as I'm a business oriented techie, so I may be able to shed some light. Of course, there are many more eminently qualified people who are doubtless right now critiquing my misuse of various terms. No time to proofread.
As for that unhelpful tech staff, I'd suggest that you tell them if they don't start justifying their expenses properly, they aren't going to be passed. It doesn't take/that/ much effort to word things in English. Everybody who has ever tendered a proposal has had to do it at some point.
Off on a bit of a tangent, but you should check on costs of upgrading those NT servers, keeping up on the latest Windows software, etc. You may find that they tally up. -l
Like a few of the other posters to this thread, I'm in what is essentially a managerial position. My workday runs from 9-5:30. Generally, I leave the office at exactly 5:30 and head home. I drop in most weekends for 4-hour days of planning, but this is not the largest portion of my job. My office hours are those hours because I spend them communicating, and I really don't need more than 7.5 hours of communication per day.
But when does my workday stop? I do object models on my PC at home, ponder staff requirements at the pub, contemplate projected growth in the bath and just generally think about every facet of what I do no matter where I am or what I am doing.
I do not think this is anything new, though. There is a reason that "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" and "Let's not talk about work" are such trite phrases. They've been in use for awhile, and applied to exactly people in our position. People who have to think, and who as an extension of this express their thoughts to the uninterested -- who are then quite rightly irritated at the downturn of conversation.
I work 37.5 hours a week. I work 80 hours per week.
The one is time spent at the office, the other is time where my mind is focused on work.
There's nothing new about this. Statistics have never tracked it, and yes people have disagreed with them before -- I remember articles in the paper from 10 years ago about how our 'young executives' were burning out quickly despite a 'shorter work week' than in the past.
Here's a simple formula: More white collar jobs (knowledge sector) = More People working the "Unofficial Workday" (from waking to sleeping), and as a result of there being more people there is more public interest, because those people (us) are now the public, not the fringe.
As a side note, though, I remember time spent on a development team with quite often an in-office workday of 12 hours. Weekends, too. We kept caffeine pills in a candy jar on the receptionists desk. Good days!
There has been quite the mess lately, both here and on other sites, regarding Slashdot's alleged or future loss of integrity due to the recent acquisition of Andover.net. I'd like to suggest that everybody stop playing prophet and take a look at where Slashdot is in 6 months. If the staff at Slashdot keep the faith with their ideals -- and their contract agreement allows this -- then we will have no issue. This entire quandary can be resolved in one of two manners:
1) Trust. 2) Maxim: "Innocent until proven guilty"
I think that the worst mistake that Slashdot could make just now is to devour a lot of energy to showing people just how unbiased they are. The article this story linked to offered no insight beyond the rounds of discussion we've already engaged in. Yes, there is a perceived conflict of interest between a Linux vendor and a Linux-related information vendor. Yes, this could cause problems. But let's not forget -- the entire Slashdot staff is aware of our feelings on this matter, there is no need to rehash them ad nauseum. If all of you at SlashDot will remain independent despite standing beneath VA's banner, then you have my respect and gratitude. If not, then you have lost my traffic. There is no need to show me how unbiased you are. When and if I feel the ratio of stories representing VA interests has no bearing on the reality of the situation (I.E. We hear about VA's minor advances ahead of Red Hat's major ones), then I will make my decision as regards Slashdot and, perhaps, start tinkering with Slash code.
Since SlashDot has thus far displayed no obvious bias (save towards self-defense) they maintain my readership, and I suggest that anybody who has doubts or worries simply follow the same formula that I am: Wait and see.
Slashdot Mirror
Operating Systems, RDBMS', Office Applications, etc. all take money to develop, too.
Anybody who is "lost" on google, the most beautifully minimalist site for searching is not "without experience of the net", they are "without a significant portion of their brain".
-l
...because it seems to rely on little more than inertia to succeed. People use Yahoo! to search, therefor people will pay Yahoo! to search?
Hm. Er. No. The Yahoo general searches will still be free (for finding public material), while the Yahoo specialized search of research articles, etc., will not be free.
I use Google for my searching. When it doesn't turn up what I want, or when I need a particular citation, I fire up my lexis-nexis account. I would imagine that anyone who does serious research will do the same. This way, people who have always used Yahoo will continue to use Yahoo (unless driven away by worries of the entire service becoming pay-based?), and will, for serious research, use lexis-nexis. Their pay-as-you-go pricing is affordable enough for the occasional user, and their daily/weekly pricing falls into about what you'd expect if you're using this is a corporate resource. They're also a company that actually turns a profit, and has a very solid reputation. Not to mention that most organizations that require extensive research already maintain a lexnex account for their employees to make use of.
And I'd reckon it's easier to get a PO approved to Lexis-Nexis for searching purposes than it is for Yahoo!. They branded themselves as fun and off-beat. Fun and off-beat do not a good reference source make.
Oh well. This doesn't affect me in the slightest, I just don't see it working. They were early-to-market with their portal, but they're late-to-market with this, and I don't believe inertia from the portal / general search will carry over to this realm.
-l
Sending a letter to their PR department takes very little time, and to those who suggest that we allow the market to correct the deficiencies and dementia in their licensing agreement -- public outcry would be counted amongst the forces that can influence the market.
It took me about 60 seconds to type up a very brief e-mail:
-----
Greetings,
Your new licensing scheme for Kylix and JBuilder 5 has ensured that I will strongly recommend against that software under that license being used by my company, and furthermore will pass the word via the mailing lists and discussion groups to which I belong in order to ensure that nobody is duped into purchasing it without reading the licensing agreement.
I would suggest that you consider a change, as draconian tactics do little more than alienate your potential markets and detract from your present ones.
Your products are doubtless one of the reasons that I learned my profession, and I find this to be on a personal level quite a disappointment.
-----
It certainly can't hurt anyone to send something similar. This is a benefit/neutral scenario, unless 1.5 minutes of your time counts as a detraction.
I would rather have Borland realize their error and seek to correct -- perhaps start by replacing their legal consultation team -- immediately, rather than wait until their quarterly earnings dictate that they ought to alter something.
-l
Consumers (not just slashdot ubergeeks) will have to sit up and take notice at this one, I think. It's getting a bit more coverage / product placement, and isn't being couched in esoteric terms (MS has a tendency of releasing patches that have descriptions which underplay the effects of not patching, or else are so laden with jargon that the layman cannot quite process them). It really is an "uber patch", and it really is MS saying, "We've been releasing insecure software for awhile. In fact, we're still doing so, as evidenced by the three bugs that you don't even know about that we're patching. Please install this patch or else you're screwed."
I think consumers can weather something like, "Apply this patch in order to ensure that your copy of internet explorer appropriately identifies content header types and reconciles them with dialogue saving and automated execution routines." because it just looks so *foreign*. Approached from a non-computing background, it looks like something very small and unlikely to affect anyone. This patch, though, looks a bit more like "Oops. Our browser sucks for security. Install immediately."
Hopefully this will draw peoples attention to:
1) The importance of frequent patching
2) The lack of security in MSIE
3) The problems associated with bundling a browser into core OS functionality (bit more unlikely).
Of course, the spin is still there, but:
Who should read this bulletin: Customers using Microsoft® Internet Explorer.
Impact of vulnerability: Run code of attacker's choice.
Maximum Severity Rating: Critical
Recommendation: Customers using IE should install the patch immediately.
Affected Software:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0
...is still pretty cut & dry. Anyone with even half a brain should realize that if a gaping hole in a consumer product existed through *2* releases (like having a 2000 and a 2001 Honda both explode in flames under appropriate conditions), that product may not be the best built out there.
Right?
Of course, I'd be much more pleased if people were being notified via a big ol' link on msn.com, and through a mail from the beloved "Hotmail Staff". What, are they scared of leveraging a monopoly to insure the security of their users?
-l
I just wrote out way too long of a question, so I'm deleting and starting over.
Members of the judiciary are largely unqualified to comment or judge upon issues of a technical nature, simply because their careers do not incorporate a great deal of technical knowledge, and also because they have not sought it (and I don't blame them, probably didn't have time) on their own.
Now, they *are* qualified to comment on matters of criminality, which are supported by a huge amount of precedent, legislation, etc that has been repeatedly modified, challenged, or simply let stand.
However, there are new "crimes" coming into being, called "cybercrimes" by the buzzwordish. Our judges, lacking technical skills or a real awareness of digital culture, are passing judgement in cases that have either very loose or no precedent to be found, or that are the result of new and innovative legislature (see: DMCA).
My concern is that the judges who are making the decisions are the least qualified to do so -- that we won't have a lot of judges with a high awareness of the intricacies involved for several years. However, the judges presently seating are essentially creating a body of law to govern what they do not understand.
My question: How large of a threat will these precedents pose to the continuation or reclamation of freedoms? Will we be able to take back the ground we've alrady lost, or will the intricacies of the legal system vis-a-vis tort & precendent, ensure that we cannot?
-l
(this one is way too long too. I just can't seem to make it fit)
Two small points: 1) The list is not ordered in a "top twelve" fashion. "Number one on the list" is simply the first item in the category, "Toys tied to video games". 2) "Number one on the list" is not MGS:2, but the action figure of Solid Snake.
Funny Quote: "Hey kids, want to score some Metal Gear Solid 2..." -- (from McFarlane Toys website). The wording is just so reminiscent of PSA's involving shady street corners and overdressed pimp-daddy crack dealers peddling to schoolchildren.
While I personally don't agree with the idea of corporate / government enforced content control (being a firm believer that a parent controls what their child sees for the first portion of their life, after which parental control becomes impossible as the child is exposed to an increasing number of information sources), what this site is really doing is taking some people to task for cross-marketing, and others to task for marketing clearly violent products / ideas in a guise that makes them appear to be "child friendly". For proponents of ratings systems, etc., this appears to be a worthy cause?
I will not quote their page, but provide my perspective on their top 12, to further my point.
1)MGS:2 Solid Snake Action Figure: While the figure is certainly no worse than GI Joes, it does tie to an extremely violent video game. Buying this toy will do little more than make your child want the video game, and you'll be viewed as a hypocrite by your kid for endorsing one and not the other.
2)Rock 'em Sock 'em Robot: The marketing angle used to sell these toys is a very violent one, which does not limit itself to robot mayhem ("taking candy from a baby's intestines"). As well, they tie to a PG-rated game. See (1), Above.
3)Mobile Suit Gundam: Simply a violent toy. Lots of explosion sounds, machine gun fire, etc. Also brands itself as "A thinking toy", which might be misleading, as use does not seem to require or encourage thought.
4)CommandoBot: Toy marketed to six year olds with a "sentry" function and missile launching capability. I wouldn't let *my* kid have this, because I'd go nuts everytime I opened a cupboard to be greeted by a robotic sentry.
5)"Striking Z Fighters": Toy tied closely to violent cartoon show. See (1) and (2). Toy itself has "kung fu-grip" style features.
6)Power Rangers Virtual Reality World: Toy appears to have no purpose other than to encourage emulation of violent behaviour.
7)Mech Warrior Shadow Cat: Perversion of basic construction toy. Instead of creating things and constantly adding to them, you will now create weapons and destroy your lego/construx/tinker toy cities. Also ties in with television show. See (1), (2), (5).
8)Zoids Gun Sniper: Perversion of basic model assembly toy. Instead of assembling a marginally educational (or at least historically accurate dinosaur), you create a dinosaur-like fighting machine. Doubtless, it will soon go to work ensuring those real dinosaur models you have remain extinct.
9)SSFII: Revival: Marketed to everyone. Cartoony animation and long-standing acceptance may cause people to fail to notice that it's ridiculously violent, containing some very violent quotations and scenarios, animated or not.
10) Final Fight I: See (9). Also, they appear to take issue with the possibility that this game barely requires a functional brain and could probably be played adequately by one of those water-drinking bobble-birds that you see on peoples desks.
11)Doom for GBA: For some reason rated "Teen", despite being virtually identical in violent content to the "Mature" version released for the PC.
12)Ecks vs. Sever: Violent storyline which involves such concepts as murder, terrorism, and such.
Please note that these are not my views, but simply a condensation of the service I believe these people are trying to provide. Some of the items do contain information that might not be known to the average consumer blinded by marketing blitz. All it's trying to do is help people weed out violent content from their christmas tree. It's merely a grass-roots anti-violence/marketing violence to young children campaign.
I disagree wildly with some of their picks, but at least they're providing another side to corp-spin. (Oh yes, a game where the objective is to maul 100 people in a row, while saying such lovely things as 'Your blood is on my fists' is PERFECTLY suitable for a hypertense 5 year old. While you're here, why not buy this Virtual Reality gear so they can act out all of the violence they're already vicariously enjoying?)
Some parents don't have time, sadly, to investigate gifts. And if a compelling reason to *not buy* something does not present itself quickly, they may just purchase something that they will end up disapproving of in the long run.
Personally, I don't think video games are even that suitable of a gift for little kids, but that's just me. I also don't think television is suitable for little kids, though it's less to do with violence and more to do with the insipid nature of most comment.
Anyhow, stop laughing at these people. They're fighting against a multi-billion dollar marketing machine that is impinging upon their ideas of morality. Remind you of anything?
-l
Hockey has been around in some form since around the time skates were invented. The first game organized by rules that would make it recognizable as the modern (read: NHL) sport took place in Canada mid-nineteenth century.
Basketball was invented by James Naismith for the YMCA while he was at the University of Michigan. It was invented to fill the lull between sporting seasons by providing a vigorous indoor sport. It originally used Peach Baskets. Hence, basketball. Dr. Naismith was a Canadian; the first players were Americans.
-l
Well.
I bought into what they were selling hook, line, and sinker when I...er... bought what they were selling, did I not? I can look at a pile of 100 CDs in my room, and based on the slim edge of each CD, can tell you which band, what songs I like on that album, and whether or not it has any scratches that detract from playing it. At a glance towards my collection, I recall songs I haven't listened to in months that I really ought to. And then I pull the CD out, put it into my player, and listen to it. While listening, I can admire the artwork and browse the lyrics. This all takes place in the physical world, which for me is infinitely more comfortable than the digital world of MP3 playlists, doubleclicks and directory structure.
Consumerism isn't about buying, it's about consumption. Your MP3 collection is less an ode to the music you love, and more a trophy of your consumerism. Because you are consuming other peoples works. Does having those MP3s make you feel good? It's consumerism. Consuming makes you feel good, just like it makes me feel good. You're just consuming a different sort of good.
When you purchase CDs, you *are* supporting the band. Just not very much. $0.10-$0.90 per CD, I believe, depending on songwriting / production credits.
And, actually, money from both Tool and the Backstreet boys (who are BOTH big ticket items -- if you're under the impression that Tool is somehow "indie", you're mistaken) goes to marketing the smaller bands on the label, not towards marketing the bigger ones. When you sign on, the record company says "Okay, we'll do $100k worth of promotion for you and you can recoup it in sales." That $100k comes from Tool / Backstreet Boys to the smaller players. Unfortunately, the contracts that they make you sign are awful, awful things, and basically force you into an indentured servitude scenario. Those contracts are the big problem. I don't really have much to do with them, though. I've written letters about it to CEOs of RIAA affiliated companies, expressing my belief that the contracts are prohibitive and harm both the longevity and quality of bands/artists they are attached to. Have you?
I inhabit the physical world. It gives me comfort to control some of my environs and be intimately familiar with them. Hence, physical objects. Why would I choose abstract objects like MP3s above physical ones like CDs? I do not live or think within my computer, nor do I want to.
You seem to be missing the connection between a collector and a music listener. For as long as there has been a physical format for personal storage of music (phonorecordings, vinyl, 8 track, cassette, CD), there have been collectors. Collectors collect the *album*, including sleeve, liner notes, artwork, lyric sheets. Listeners only care about the music. I would say that most people are hybrid collector/listeners, with a minority at either end being pure collectors (shrinkwrapped White Albums), or listeners (Music all on MP3/Burn CDs/Mixed Tapes). Downloading music caters to one slim minority. I want my artwork. I want my textured sleeve (those plastic CD cases were the worst, I'm glad people are starting to use sleeves instead). I want my lyric sheet. I want it all to be well laid out and legible. I want it to be intimately connected to the music itself by virtue of being stored with it. I do not want it to involve XML, CDDB or anything else.
I support my favourite bands by attending their shows, by the way, and that is where an indie band really needs your help. That's where most bands get their money to make their first album, or do their first tour.
-l
These services aren't going to work for several reasons, or at least not in the foreseeable future:
1) They are being created to counteract the spread of P2P filesharing services, IRC mp3 channels, and even websites that provide mp3s for downloads, not to mention your standard ripping / copying from friends. They are also well behind the pack -- the P2P sharing services provide more than these people will provide (huge selection of rarities & standards both), and they do it without a subscription fee (for the most part), and they do it without the red tape required in the recording industry.
2)My first reaction was "So I spend $250, cancel my internet access after awhile, and then I have no tunes?" The straight retail CD business has a better model than this.
3)They are providing content of the traditional sort (Studio releases, megahits), over a new distribution channel. They have failed to grasp that it is the non-traditional content as much as the non-traditional distribution that has led to the soaring popularity of first Napster and now Morpheus. If I want to track down a live version of Michael Stipe and Vic Chesnutt singing a duet of 'Wounded Bird', it won't take me more than an hour on existing (and illegal) distribution models. Would that song even be available on a corporate-run service? Probably not.
I don't download that many songs -- I prefer to buy albums so that I get the additional content (sleeves, cover art, lyric sheets that weren't typed up by a half-deaf 12 year old dyslexic) and I also like to have a physical representation of what I own. I like to be able to pile my records/CDs. It makes me feel good to walk into my room and see the rows of brightly coloured cases and sleeves. It makes me feel dumb to walk into my room and see stacks of CD-Rs. People like me won't sign up for this service, will continue using P2P to sample new artists and then will subsequently purchase the album if it is enjoyable (my last 40 or so CD purchases happened like this). It'd be pointless to me -- I listen to maybe 20 songs a month over P2P. It'd be pointless to people who do a lot over P2P and obviously don't care about legal / artistic ramifications, as well.
So who is this service for?
I reckon if the business is run as a tight ship, they could keep a slim enough margin to stay profitable. But they're not going to be making cash hand over fist, and they won't be detracting from the appeal of P2P.
-l
So I'll keep it brief. After comment #200, nobody pays attention.
The problems with cameras is not that they are an invasion of privacy in the same sense as, say, police entering your home without a warrant.
The problem with them is that they require you to place absolute trust in your government. In the states, at least, that seems to run completely counter to the ideas of the founding fathers.
Whoever is in power has access to tapes of everything you do -- including who you spent time with. (Right to associate freely), including what placard you were holding (free speech), your religious dress / ornamentation(freedom of religion).
So whoever is in power, with some simple cross referencing, could isolate dissidents/undesirables pretty quickly, assuming they bothered to maintain an index of the tapes.
Too much information possessed by a government regarding its citizenry is a very very bad thing. Film showing everything a citizen does in a public place is certainly too much information.
-l
Simply not true. While the subsidies aren't high, they do exist.
The primary reason that you have cheap and available broadband access, though, is because the broadband providers are regulated in the public interest by the government.
They are required to charge less than $50 canadian per month for "basic" broadband access. They are also required to show, within their business model, that they are working towards connecting rural / outlying communities.
Has exactly zero to do with it being cold here , although I understand where you're coming from, as I proably read the same article you did. It actually referred to the extremely high penetration of internet in Canada, particularly in the maritimes -- it had nothing to do with the price. And yes, it being "cold" was one of the reasons listed. So was the highly seasonal employment market centered around a lot of industries (timber & oil spring to mind). And about a dozen other things.
rgds,
l
(and that I'll be -1 Redundant, as I generally am).
My educational background was in philosophy, too, and I didn't even manage to complete my BA (I still have one year left). I'm not a Unix Administrator, but I have held positions in systems administration which involved administering *nix boxen.
I started out at the lowest possible tier in a company -- a very junior position that paid slightly above minimum wage for doing GUI mock-ups to spec. Pretty fun, huh? Well, I held it for 8 months and used that experience to take a tech support position at a very much bricks & mortar business.
I then applied my independent learning to that company, and started talking to management about upgrading network infrastructure, implementing databases, etc. This is basically what launched my career -- I went from a Technical Support Flunky position to a management one in about two years, with a year of that spent as a DBA/Unix Administrator.
And that is what it took, and I have every confidence that this will work for you, or anyone for that matter. All you have to do is find the right company -- don't pick a place that's geek-heavy like a development house, aim for an established business, preferably one that does not have a global presence. A local company with 100-200 people would be great, I'd say, but even bigger companies can work out for you. It just tends to take longer (more red tape before your ideas get heard).
If you do things right, you can basically define your own position within a company like that, and bring a serious amount of value to them through your expertise.
As for "too old", I've worked with (and above) several juniors your age (I'm younger than you are), and their age was not a barrier to either hiring or advancement. It may be a problem at some places, but it won't be at all places.
If you've ever given nieces / nephews advice about getting their first job, it probably went along the lines of "Make 50 resumes. Drop them all off, and sit by the phone". Well, that's what you have to do, now. If you distribute enough copies of your resume, you'll get enough callbacks that one of those callbacks will result in an interview, your interviewer will like you, and off you go.
The only caveat is that to succed in the IT industry -- or any industry -- through this method, you have to work like a dog. You do not have a piece of paper saying you know lots about computers, so you have to demonstrate it. Repeatedly.
If you decide that Sys/Unix Admin isn't where you want to go, by the way, that philosophy degree will once again have career-value if you move into project management / general management. Logic, communication, and lateral thinking play a large role in both.
Good luck.
-l
Phantasy Star does, indeed, hold a special place in my heart. It was the first console RPG that rivalled my beloved text-based adventure games for play value.
I take exception with the notion that Phantasy Star was a rip-off of Final Fantasy, however, as it was released in 1987. A full 3 years before Final Fantasy made its way onto the NES platform.
It was actually released slightly before Dragon Warrior, a far inferior RPG that received a great deal more attention.
And while Final Fantasy I and Phantasy Star are quite different (FFI being more traditionally RPG and PS incorporating futuristic themes), I would note that I was struck by how the later Final Fantasy themes would begin to rip off the original Phantasy Star (from 1987!!!), with the incorporation of a great deal of science fiction and the adopting of a standard scenario whereby the world was a combination of technical and magical components.
Sega has often set the bar by which other console games are judged, only to regretfully be forgotten about themselves. They just couldn't sell enough console units to generate buzz, and eventually their game quality decreased even as their engineering grew more apt.
Still, their existing Arcade games are head-and-shoulders above most, in my opinion. When I go to the Arcade (twice a year?), it's not to play Tekken Tag or any of the more mindless games, it's to play the queer looking machines that have strange controllers, odd viewpoints, fascinating takes.... by and large, these machines proudly sport the "Sega" insignia.
-l
I have heard several news reports say that the terrorists used knives and gained entrance to the cockpit probably by killing stewardesses to trick a pilot into leaving, killing him and entering.
Now, my question is: if there is a significant incident on board an airplane (something to make the pilot leave the cockpit), are they not required immediately to report this to, well, someone?
It seems like if this was how it was done (knives, stewardesses), there would have been advance warning.
Just a question. No flames please.
-l
While it's true that human beings can interpret images to mean something that a machine could never pick up on, that's not the thrust of the research being done here.
He is doing research into a very particular kind of steganography, whereby messages are concealed within an image via slightly altering the least significant bits of an image.
When you encode information in this way, somebody knowing how to extract it can pull out a message which is not subjective (as in the example of interpreted images given by another poster), but rather is very concrete.
There is some evidence that this form of encoding has been used to communicate information throughout terrorist cells.
What the researcher is doing is developing a method to detect when the LSB's in an image have been manipulated slightly. He is not trying to decode the message, but only to flag particular images as being suspicious.
Decoding would be a matter for someone completely different -- like the FBI, for instance.
His method does have applications, and if it is through alteration of LSB that a message is embedded in an image, it will apparently detect such 90% of the time.
This is a vast improvement over any existing methods I know of for detecting LSB manipulation.
So he's not quite looking for a needle in a haystack. He's examining millions of haystacks, and pinpointing the ones that probably *do* have needles in them.
Quite a large difference, really.
-l
Why do people insist on calling this a revolution? Information has been fairly distributed within the western world for quite awhile through public libraries. Have you been to a library lately? Not the busiest place for non-grad students. Who says people really want / need all of this information, let alone the completely non-authoritative source mostly found on the 'net.
What revolution? What promises? Who made these promises?
We are not living in the world that birthed the Communist Revolution, nor the French Revolution, nor the schism between Protestantism and Catholocicism. We're not living in the world of the Emperor Julian, nor in the world of Gutenberg.
For all of the people who called "Revolution! REVOLUTION!" with regards to the net, there were an equal number rubbing their temples and saying "Shut up.".
With the rise of punditry and the dissemination of information therefrom, we've been left in the unfortunate position of listening to people who have little or nothing to do with the so-called "revolution". These are commentators who are paid by eyeballs grabbed or ears tugged, and they're looking for the most bombastic doggerel they can dig up from whatever experience they've had with scandal sheets. "THE NET WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!", "THE NET WILL ELIMINATE THIRD WORLD DEBT", "THE NET WILL PROVIDE PORN TO EVERY AMERICAN WITH AN INTERNET ACCOUNT WHO DESIRES IT!". Only the last one has come true, and that's the only one I would've banked on 10 years ago.
The only reason to be disappointed with the net is because you listened to the promises that were being made by people who didn't have and weren't willing or able to fulfill them.
I find the net to be somewhat handy. That's my assessment, and I've never found it to be anything less.
Or anything more.
-l
No, corporations in America are most certainly not people, and should not be confused with them. Chief Justice Marshall, in his 1919 decision of Dartmouth vs. Woodward gave U.S. law its definition and perception of corporations. To paraphrase, they are nothing more than a creature composed of law, and as such should have no rights greater than even the most common of human lives, nor should they be permitted to threaten or dominate those lives. (Full decision here While it is true that corporations have, in effect, been discovered to act as a "single immortal entity" (thus avoiding some nasty tax issues when the CEO dies, etc), they do NOT have the rights of people. Falling into the state where you assume that your government has already forgotten about you is going to result in just that. You, as a human being, still have rights, but they will be ignored by corporate-payrolled politicians until such a time as enough people stand up and say that "This is enough". So, start standing. Apathy isn't going to do anything except make your life worse. You won't be heard unless you speak. Speak. Write congress, join initiatives such as the ACLU or any of the sattelite organisations surrounding it. Take an active part in your community. Read about the law. Understand what's happening, and do it in a more informative way than reading a Newspaper. Everything you need is out there, you just have to be willing to find it. This includes other people who feel exactly the same as you do. When enough people yell, they can make the world shake. -l
Let us create a tiny little off-topic thread. :)
:)
:)
:P
I'm not a tremendous Dylan fan myself, though I do credit some of the revival of interest in folk music (such as that of Billy Bragg, or the quasi-re-discovery of Woody Guthro) with his influences in popular culture. Which is important.
The Beatles are certainly one of the greatest bands of the 20th century. Definitely the greatest rock & roll band thereof, in my mind. Will we be listening to them in 100 years? I don't know. Will rock & roll even exist then? If country music exists in 100 years, Johnny Cash will still be listened to. If Rock & Roll, then the Beatles will be. If Jazz, well... Davis, Peterson, Coltrane, Gerschwins...
The thing is, not a lot of people these days are even listening to the Beatles. At least, I've had people ask me when I put on the White Album: "Who is this?". I'm sure you've had similar experiences.
Just don't malign all country... just ninety-ish percent of the new stuff. A lot of that old country music is excellent. I could listen to Johnny Cash all day, and have from time-to-time.
The Dixie Chicks? Nah. But, I can't think of many modern bands I can listen to for extended periods. Vic Chesnutt, Kristin Hersch, Tom Waits (who can't really be classed as modern by any means), John Prine (more country-folk for ye)....
And none of 'em hit the charts. "Popular Music", which was at its most challenging with the dominance of the Beatles(by my estimation), is currently a few steps removed from insipipd. Maybe a couple of steps. Jazz has retreated into the parlors of middle-aged white men and the occasional club that's just asking to go out of business, as well as into the pretensions of the young. The Blues have been re-regionalised. Few people can name any classical compositions from the last 50 years, or even any performers outside of Yo Yo Ma. Country has jumped away from the examination of dark times in the soul and into the lament of love lost... it's all a bit sad, really.
Disclaimer: I've been drinking.
regards
Would like to note, for the record, that Johnny Cash is hardly looking at tremendously obvious concepts. Nor is Willie Nelson. Nor, for that matter, was Hank Williams.
Do you actually know what country music is?
Long Black Veil, Jacob's Ladder, So Lonesome, etc. are great songs with great lyrics and a tremendous amount of craft and melody injected into them.
Have you ever listened to "Delia" (cash)? Not only is that one of the most disturbing songs that I've ever heard (beating out even Springsteen's State Trooper), but it touches on quite a lot of things people would rather not alight upon.
To the best of my knowledge, there are precious few country musicians who call what they're writing deep, either. As a matter of fact:
"Could somebody go get my notebook? I left it in the back there... I need it, it's got all the lyrics that I stole written down in it."
From Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues album.
Not that this is remotely on topic. Oh well.
"The [xyz] is keeping me down genre" could, when so narrowly viewed, apply as well to the lifework of Schopenhaur. I certainly hope you don't view him as cashing in on commercial commodities.
Is Bob Dylan crap, too? 'cuz guess where lots of his influences lie?
regards
First off, I'd like to suggest that someone employ an editor for Katz. It's actually getting painful to wade through these posts, and that's probably causing a drop-off in Katz readership. Please, just run them through an editor to check for broken links and erroneous spellings. I'm assuming that was meant to be 'morale', not 'moral' for instance.
I'm not mentioning this to nit-pick or play kick-the-Katz, but because it really is bloody annoying. Do you remember when people used to put blinking text in their ANSI sigs and it'd make your poor little terminal bleed until someone told them that they shouldn't be doing that? Consider it a PSA.
Anyway, on to the point. Universal Access. Who cares? It's only useful for breeding into the society to which it belongs. The wired society. Universal Access isn't going to be some kind of wonder that fixes everything. Early adopters will have an edge in the tech jobs market, but that's going to mean absolutely nothing in a few years, once society catches up to itself.
What good is the internet? That's the question I've been asking myself quite frequently lately. I'm not coming up with a large listing of answers, either.
People employed by 'progressive' companies will now be installing filter software to keep their kids from checking out porn. Woot-oot. Is anybody under the illusion that the average teenager or even child is going to be enriching themselves on the net? Television did wonders for them.
I actually try to enrich myself somewhat, and I'm not making a hell of a lot of progress at the moment.
Don't just say this is a nice step for no reason. Why does everyone have to be wired? Why is it so important?
This doesn't impact, to a huge degree, the workers that are getting them. It doesn't make their jobs any easier. What it does is make it more likely that they'll:
1) Stay with the company
2) Passively headhunt for the company
Woo-oo.
Don't fall all over yourself thinking this is some gigantic leap into the future. It ain't. It's a company utilising an incentive package to keep current employees and lure new ones into their fold.
Considering the possibility that internet use can prove addictive, it may even be on the shady side of legal. Free cigarettes to employees wasn't all that uncommon in years gone by.
Peace.
It seems unlikely anyone (including yourself) is going to read this, but I'll post it anyway.
The reason that Win2k/SQL Server 2k was not brought into the conversation was because the initial poster obviously came from an established company that had had the IX solution in place for awhile.
If you take a look at TPCs results from last year for database benchmarking, you'll notice that the Win NT / MS SQL Server benchmarks were, while cheaper, drastically less capable of processing numerous transactions.
As well, IX systems offer more scalability than Windows. Beyond that, and relating back to the initial poster -- the cost of transferring entire systems over to win2k/sql 2k is extensive. You might want to take a look at executive summary and full disclosure on that site as well. For enterprise systems, until Win2k proves itself, I'll recommend IX, I'm afraid.
Another interesting facet is that most of the other companies in the top 10 have not submitted solutions in quite some time. Microsoft submits to TPC religiously (and has had some hubbub over fudging results), whereas other vendors do not.
The price of IBM / Sun, etc systems are falling, albeit slowly. If you want a system that can deal with 5000 simultaneous users, I'd doubt it's even possible to scale Win2k to handle it. If you've any literature to the contrary, I'd appreciate your sending it on to me.
-l
I sympathize with your having to deal with a tech staff throwing buzz words at you. Essentially, the advantage of the IX platforms is pure reliability. I initiated the purchasing of an RS/6000 running AIX as our primary database server about half a year ago, basing its cost efficiency upon the lack of downtime -- working for a sales driven company, an hour of downtime roughly equates to $22,000 worth of loss. The downtimes with IX platforms are much, much lower. This translates into less 'lost opportunity costs'. (The kind that you've probably sued your telco or ISP over at some stage when they violate their uptime guarantees)
/that/ much effort to word things in English. Everybody who has ever tendered a proposal has had to do it at some point.
I'd imagine your NT servers are being used primarily for user interaction -- possibly metaframes to allow for wide area networking, and possibly fileservers as well as particular application servers. You may even be running your primary domain controller off of windows NT. These are all fine and good uses of Windows NT, administration of which requires a middling skill set to pull it off without dropping bombs. The incredible number of MSCEs kicking about will keep the salaries low.
I would have to hypothesise that your database servers and core heavy applications (webservers, et al) are running on IX systems. IX systems don't tend to crash as much (when you have a good administrator), and they also provide much faster querying times for databases than NT based servers. Take a look at TPC.org for some benchmarks on the subject. Take note that, yes, NT solutions are cheaper than IX, but look also at the efficiency achieved. It all comes back to opportunity costs, in my mind.
The reason your admins can go snowboarding is probably because they're quite good, although I question the wisdom of letting every IX admin in the house go off snowboarding without leaving at least a skeleton crew. IX administrators do their work in a different way than NT administrators. NT administrators fight fires, whereas IX administrators primarily stop them from occurring.
Fewer people have the skills required to be an excellent IX administrator, and a top-notch one can make your system much more efficient than a middling one. That's why you pay so much money to them. This is also due, as you know, to the current labour shortage in highly responsible technical positions (it seems to be levelling off amongst junior staff and programmers).
Ultimately, the best choice for a mission critical application is an IX system. They don't go down as much, they support much more comprehensive data recovery operations and are much easier to diagnose for difficulties. As well, they scale (in my opinion) much easier than NT servers. When I want to add 60 gigs of storage space to my RS, it takes me somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes, at least half of which is making certain that I'm mounting them appropriately.
Feel free to mail me (Drop the X's), as I'm a business oriented techie, so I may be able to shed some light. Of course, there are many more eminently qualified people who are doubtless right now critiquing my misuse of various terms. No time to proofread.
As for that unhelpful tech staff, I'd suggest that you tell them if they don't start justifying their expenses properly, they aren't going to be passed. It doesn't take
Off on a bit of a tangent, but you should check on costs of upgrading those NT servers, keeping up on the latest Windows software, etc. You may find that they tally up. -l
Like a few of the other posters to this thread, I'm in what is essentially a managerial position. My workday runs from 9-5:30. Generally, I leave the office at exactly 5:30 and head home. I drop in most weekends for 4-hour days of planning, but this is not the largest portion of my job. My office hours are those hours because I spend them communicating, and I really don't need more than 7.5 hours of communication per day.
But when does my workday stop? I do object models on my PC at home, ponder staff requirements at the pub, contemplate projected growth in the bath and just generally think about every facet of what I do no matter where I am or what I am doing.
I do not think this is anything new, though. There is a reason that "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" and "Let's not talk about work" are such trite phrases. They've been in use for awhile, and applied to exactly people in our position. People who have to think, and who as an extension of this express their thoughts to the uninterested -- who are then quite rightly irritated at the downturn of conversation.
I work 37.5 hours a week.
I work 80 hours per week.
The one is time spent at the office, the other is time where my mind is focused on work.
There's nothing new about this. Statistics have never tracked it, and yes people have disagreed with them before -- I remember articles in the paper from 10 years ago about how our 'young executives' were burning out quickly despite a 'shorter work week' than in the past.
Here's a simple formula: More white collar jobs (knowledge sector) = More People working the "Unofficial Workday" (from waking to sleeping), and as a result of there being more people there is more public interest, because those people (us) are now the public, not the fringe.
As a side note, though, I remember time spent on a development team with quite often an in-office workday of 12 hours. Weekends, too. We kept caffeine pills in a candy jar on the receptionists desk. Good days!
-l
There has been quite the mess lately, both here and on other sites, regarding Slashdot's alleged or future loss of integrity due to the recent acquisition of Andover.net. I'd like to suggest that everybody stop playing prophet and take a look at where Slashdot is in 6 months. If the staff at Slashdot keep the faith with their ideals -- and their contract agreement allows this -- then we will have no issue. This entire quandary can be resolved in one of two manners:
1) Trust.
2) Maxim: "Innocent until proven guilty"
I think that the worst mistake that Slashdot could make just now is to devour a lot of energy to showing people just how unbiased they are. The article this story linked to offered no insight beyond the rounds of discussion we've already engaged in. Yes, there is a perceived conflict of interest between a Linux vendor and a Linux-related information vendor. Yes, this could cause problems. But let's not forget -- the entire Slashdot staff is aware of our feelings on this matter, there is no need to rehash them ad nauseum. If all of you at SlashDot will remain independent despite standing beneath VA's banner, then you have my respect and gratitude. If not, then you have lost my traffic. There is no need to show me how unbiased you are. When and if I feel the ratio of stories representing VA interests has no bearing on the reality of the situation (I.E. We hear about VA's minor advances ahead of Red Hat's major ones), then I will make my decision as regards Slashdot and, perhaps, start tinkering with Slash code.
Since SlashDot has thus far displayed no obvious bias (save towards self-defense) they maintain my readership, and I suggest that anybody who has doubts or worries simply follow the same formula that I am: Wait and see.
-l