When I checked out the story on Canada.com, I noticed something very troubling: their partial list completely omitted the "Vile Pun" winners! Is there some Canadian plot against bad puns, or did the writer or editor just have a really bad time as a kid (everyone using wordplays on their name or something)?
I have boxen that won't run Win95 with Novell Client 32 without thrashing. There is no way Wine would be able to run the software, even though much of it is probably Win3.1 software recompiled.
It seems that every overview of IPv6 I read talks about it eliminating the need for NAT. However, this is only going to be in the case of, for example, a large corporation that is using NAT solely to avoid spending money on IP addresses. In my little piece of the world, I run NAT (IP masq) NOT because there aren't enough addresses but rather because my ISP adds about $7/month for each additional computer, and only up to three on a home account (at least double the price if you want a business account).
There is no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks that my ISP is going to just up and say "Okay, now there are plenty of addresses, so we'll stop charging extra for additional computers." They're not going to just let me have six computers connected with IPv6, IPv4, or whatever. For the home user (cable modem, xDSL, modem, or whatever), there will always be a need for NAT.
Okay, you have:
6 billion people
900 people-years MTBF
Now just divide to find the answer:
900 people-years / 6 billion people
= 0.00000015 years between failures (deaths)
= about 4.73 seconds between failures
It's not so much that it picks a *right* answer out of all possible answers, but rather, the impossible states collapse and you are left with a quantum superposition of all the possible states. (Or, to try to put it more simply, those answers that cannot exist cease to exist, leaving only those answers that can exist.)
Basically MS is trying to track down companies that are claiming they have a site license (in order to get a discount per unit on new PCs they order), but in fact are just using one copy of Windows that gets "passed around".
Bzzzt! Wrong!
What MS is saying (and has said all along) is that a site license only covers the PCs at the site at the time it went into effect. A site license, in MS terms, does not cover new computers. If you buy a new computer, you have to pay for a licensed copy of Windows regardless of whether you already have a site license for all the computers in your organization.
I guess that's the rub. You pay umpteen dollars for a business-wide site license, but that does absolutely nothing to your licensing situation. You already paid for all the Windows licenses on the computers you've already purchased, and you have to pay for licenses on any new computers you purchase, so a "site license" is simply a sacrifice to the MS legal department to keep them from considering you for an audit (unless you buy new computers).
So, according to the.doc files at the morons.org links about Alcatel, they also upgraded from Word 8.0 to Word 9.0? Does anyone have any collaborating evidence (like another copy of the alleged original)? It just seems a little too easy...
I'm not saying that the stuff was fabricated, but I'd definitely take it with a very large grain of salt. (And no, I wouldn't be dumb enough to use Word to post something on the web.):)
If you don't remember reading CNN's review of The Matrix from way back in 1999, you've just got to read it again. It's absolutely hilarious that the reviewer was that stupid. (Yet more data to support my belief that whatever the reviews say should be run through an XOR-powered decryption routine with very few bits set in the mask.) Anyway, the review is at http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9904/09/review.m atrix/
If you want to see the "blurb" for the show you've got on, it used to be an overlay, but now it's full-screen with ads (so you can't keep watching and quick check which ep it is).
They've taken to spamming the boxes, too. ("Watch Idiot vs. Dolt tonight at 7:00 in the heavyweight championship... only $349.95 plus TT&L".)
It's hideously slower!
Did I mention that it seems to be using a 486 over at AOL via a satellite link to Afghanistan to do anything? I won't even get onto the fact that they use "Red" for movies and "red" for cartoons (or kids shows?); after all, as long as I have my TV tuned well and don't lose my Pantone chart, I can tell the difference.:)
Since mudA and mudB are both true, the value of mudC is indeterminate. An individual, therefore, would not know the value of mudC (his own forehead muddiness), solely from handA, handB, mudA, and mudB. However, when the kid saw that at least one of the others was sufferring from the indeterminacy of his own forehead muddiness, the only reason is that that kid is also seeing the same problem of two hands and two muddy foreheads. Seeing this, the kid pronounced that his forehead must certainly also be muddy. QED.
As if it isn't obvious enough already that this is another lawyers-as-money-trees scheme, NCR wants a jury trial. Everyone knows, if you want a huge settlement and an easier case, you ask for a jury. It should be patently obvious (pardon me) that the jury will be wholly and permanently unqualified to render judgement on this one. (NCR isn't going to sit around and let any qualified people sit, are they?)
I'm quite sure that NCR's blood-sucking lawyers made sure that they stayed two-steps removed from the legal definition of blackmail, but the fact that they're asking for a jury trial and to have Palm and Handspring essentially blocked from doing anything to generate revenue is as plain as a "voluntary" confession at gunpoint.
(What makes me sick is that there's no legal way for us to get rid of the lawyers, and that will never change, since the lawyers make the laws.)
It strikes me that, perhaps, the US government has just about finished it transformation from a government of the people, by the people, and for the people into a government of the businesses, by the businesses, and for the businesses. Of course, since a corporation is a legal person in this country, perhaps they've just misplaced part of their heads.
The scary thing is that almost nobody sees what's going on. When those that do see the dangers have the audacity to talk about it, they are branded as conspiracy theorists et al. I can hardly put forward the idea that our freedoms are being usurped by big business before I'm dismissed as a radical. If eternal vigilance is indeed the price of freedom, I'm afraid that the days of freedom are limited. Perhaps there are still many left, but at the rate we're progressing, we're getting dangerously close to the point where nothing short of a full-fledged revolt will have any chance at producing change.
We're precipitously close to an Orweillian society run, not by governments, but by big businesses who all but own the governments. If such a dystopia comes in to power, I'm afraid it may be extremely difficult to break the bonds of socio-economic tyrrany. At our current progress, such a system will at the very least attempt to take over; I can only hope that we can work fast enough and be strong enough to topple it in its infancy.
I wonder if there's any chance of them selling some of those up in the States? It seems to me that if they sold some up here (at a small profit), it could do them well.
I wouldn't mind getting my hands on some of these; they seem like an ideal thing to use to make a school Linux computer lab... A dozen or two of these and a server running NFS for storage would be much more cost efficient than, say, Win/Dells, and they have much more processing power than recycled Pentium 100 systems.
It seems to me that we could help them and they could help us, all at the same time, and I would so love to infiltrate some high schools with real programming classes (even if you only teach PHP/MySQL/Apache, it would be much more useful than what they currently teach, and I'm sure you could get Java or C/C++/Cb in there).
-- "Duh! Headline of the Year" nominee, from News.Com: -- Trojan horse targets AOL subscribers
Members of the Internet service are being warned to keep watch for a
password-stealing virus circulating in the form of an e-mail attachment.
February 1, 2001, 8:40 a.m. PT
This is going to sound very stupid, but you must look at it not from the standpoint of geekdom, but rather from the standpoint of a scum-sucking lawyer (the good lawyers would also find this idiotic, but they don't seem to count much in the real world).
If you ROT13'd all the.exe's you distribute, and included a setup program that, after EULA, ROT13'd them back to usable state, they would be "effectively unusable" in their "encrypted" form. Sure, an evil cracker could reverse-engineer them, but how can a court make a rule about the complexity of the math required to decrypt something? A common user wouldn't have any idea how to un-ROT13 a binary executable without using your WinROT Protection System.
Now, if they say that, say, DSA with at least 128 bits is "effective", then what about, say, an elliptical cipher of a certain arbitrary length. Of what about some new-fangled one? How big a Blowfish key do you need, or what about if you use Twofish?
This would obviously be unconstitutionally vague, and so they would have to either allow our WinROT encrypted binaries the same protection as the almost (but not quite) equally flawed DVD CSS, or they'd have to do the only sane thing and blow the law back up the location it came from.
Worst case scenario: When puzzle books have to be reprinted to explicitly include permission to solve the included puzzles, we just might be able to get a few people to dress up like natives and destroy large shipments of coffee destined for Washington DC.
Wow, so, this is more or less what you end up seeing if you look at the Matrix in raw form long enough, eh? (Although I still would have a hard time noticing an agent versus a doberman, but hey, I just need practice, right.)
Incidentally, does anyone know where to get a green filter for my upcoming ascii-cam?
--
(For those who played Acrophobia a long time ago, I'm already crawling toward the couch.)
The best teacher I ever had was Mr. Arsenault. It would be hard to tell you everything about him, so I'll just say that his sense of humor (including quite a dry wit) and acceptance of students was phenomenal. One example for you:
He would never get mad, and he played the quintessential straight man (the Abbot of Abbot and Costello, but with a much more intelligent air). One day, one of his senior classes locked him out of his classroom. While most other teachers I've had would have marched straight to the office, he marched straight to the edge of campus to the maintenance sheds and got an extension ladder (his room was on the second floor). He then proceeded to climb up the ladder and through his classroom window; then he walked up to the chalkboard and without even cracking a smile (a major feat while pulling off an act like this), he picked up the chalk and began teaching as if nothng at all was out of the ordinary.
People told that story for years, and it was only one of a bunch. He understood what you had to do if you wanted to get people to learn, and he'd do it. He'd help anybody that needed it. He taught me geometry in 9th grade while I was also taking algebra, and in the same class (of two), he taught a senior (I hope she's done well in life; she was quite slow).
Oh, and since it doesn't take the whole hour to teach geometry if you only have two students, he'd let her work on her homework so he could help her with any problems, and we'd play chess the rest of the hour... he won the year, but I actually won one more game than he did. (That's the problem with playing matches and sets.):)
Anyway, there you go. (My second best teacher has much less a sense of humor, but he used to take classes on camping trips... you haven't lived until you've played our variant of capture-the-flag/chase on a raining, moonless night in Louisiana backwoods.)
Interestingly enough, they originally had it under a very misleading title (it said "Minor bug lingers in Pentium 4 processor" IIRC). They apparently got enough feedback that they retitled it by this morning.
Some apps will "never" be able to run in Wine (Windows lets you do things that Linux knows are *bad* ideas). With this in mind, are there any applications that you would really like to see running in Windows (or whatever) on Plex86?
Everyone mentions running Microsoft Office when it comes to Wine; do you have any "milestone events" in mind for Plex86 (as the list of booting OS's continues to climb)?
Is it just me, or does Iridium have more lives than a cat? I mean, hey, being slated for destruction two, or even three, times is one thing, but when even the US DoD steps in to take up the slack, you've got to wonder if those satellites are ever coming down.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that the Iridium project was actually an integral part of the new global monitoring system the US uses to track late model vehicles and toothpaste choices. At least then I would have a reason for the invulnerability of the Iridium system.
As it stands, I can only assume that it's the aliens that have kept Iridium flying so the astronomers can't see them. It wasn't a design fluke that the satellites wreak havoc on astronomers; the aliens got tired of hiding behind the moon, so they set up Iridium so they can take field trips around the earth.
You know, on the other hand, perhaps it's just an annoying thing that just won't die... kind of like Windows (or FORTRAN), I guess.
I worked for a small ISP a while back. The owner proposed that I get an MCSE, and that he would pay for the tests on the condition that if I left within a year of taking a test, I reimburse him for the test. I think that offer would have been workable except for one thing: since I started working there, he had hired five new employees, all of whom has less experience than I, and all of whom has fewer job resposibilities than I. Every single one of the new hires was paid between $1 and $7/hour more than he paid me, even after a "generous" (to him) raise.
The fact that I was quite obviously being given the short end of the wage deal was enough to make me consider the one-year-or-reimburse deal to be not nearly sweet enough. When I left after a year and a quarter (the second longest tenure of any of his employees, according to the bookkeeper), I was still getting paid the same very low wage.
So, basically, I suppose what I'm saying is that it is impossible to retain employees if you give them the distinct impression that you will not be fair to them. If you give them a fair deal, something like an "if you leave within a year, we get back some|all of the money we spent on your training" will look a whole lot more attractive, and pay the person running your entire ISP division a bit more than the new techie grunt.
I must say, and I hope I don't incite a riot by saying this (it's just my opinion), but I personally consider the Ender's Game set (counting however many books there are now) to be my favorite large story in book form. It's right up there next to my favorite large story in audio-visual form, that being Babylon 5, of course.
(My friend loaned me her copy of Ender's Game one Friday night. I read it cover to cover the next day, and bought the whole set the day after. Had them all done in less than a week. I can't wait to read more.)
It might be relatively insignificant from a practical standpoint (it's what, two weeks), but I respect the symbolism of releasing RSA to the public domain just ever so slightly early.
This means that I can now legally use a little SSH program I found for Windows, and I needn't have any qualms about infringement. While I may not have been too concerned for myself at home, I haven't used the program at work (a public school system), since companies love finding licensing problems in public institutions.
Anyway, to me, releasing RSA early is like getting one of those little gold stars on the poster in grade school. It may not have any significant impact on anything at all, but it does make you feel like there's just a little good in there.
Imagine if the community could get together enough people to just put $20 in. We could have the first community-owned supercomputer. Imagine the possibilities...
Actually, although I must admit that I'd love to have one around, I don't think it would do the Linux community much good in the current hot projects. On the other hand, perhaps new projects would be created that would fill the available space.
Now there's an idea. The open source/free software communities are a gas; wherever they find empty space, they inevitably expand to fill it. Of course, you may say that the atmosphere does not expand outward to fill up all space; perhaps the analogue is the gravity of litigation (some energetic members will undoubtedly reach escape velocity, though, eg. DeCSS).
(I believe I may have taken that analogy too far, but it was an interesting way to explain why the community would want to buy a used Cray... other than the fact that it would probably look quite penguin-like with the right paint job, and having little daemons peeking out would probably be nice, too.)
I was the first at my local RadioShack. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, really, but it will decode the big, long barcode on Netflix address labels. From the number of 0's, I'd say they are planning on being around a while.:)
Of course, since I'm in Windows and didn't want to reboot or spend the time to track down a Windows decoder, I made my own. I just wonder what all the other information it send back is... guess I'll have to search after all.
Slashdot Mirror
When I checked out the story on Canada.com, I noticed something very troubling: their partial list completely omitted the "Vile Pun" winners! Is there some Canadian plot against bad puns, or did the writer or editor just have a really bad time as a kid (everyone using wordplays on their name or something)?
I have boxen that won't run Win95 with Novell Client 32 without thrashing. There is no way Wine would be able to run the software, even though much of it is probably Win3.1 software recompiled.
It seems that every overview of IPv6 I read talks about it eliminating the need for NAT. However, this is only going to be in the case of, for example, a large corporation that is using NAT solely to avoid spending money on IP addresses. In my little piece of the world, I run NAT (IP masq) NOT because there aren't enough addresses but rather because my ISP adds about $7/month for each additional computer, and only up to three on a home account (at least double the price if you want a business account).
There is no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks that my ISP is going to just up and say "Okay, now there are plenty of addresses, so we'll stop charging extra for additional computers." They're not going to just let me have six computers connected with IPv6, IPv4, or whatever. For the home user (cable modem, xDSL, modem, or whatever), there will always be a need for NAT.
Okay, you have:
6 billion people
900 people-years MTBF
Now just divide to find the answer:
900 people-years / 6 billion people
= 0.00000015 years between failures (deaths)
= about 4.73 seconds between failures
Make sense now?
Okay, let me give this a try...
It's not so much that it picks a *right* answer out of all possible answers, but rather, the impossible states collapse and you are left with a quantum superposition of all the possible states. (Or, to try to put it more simply, those answers that cannot exist cease to exist, leaving only those answers that can exist.)
Basically MS is trying to track down companies that are claiming they have a site license (in order to get a discount per unit on new PCs they order), but in fact are just using one copy of Windows that gets "passed around".
Bzzzt! Wrong!
What MS is saying (and has said all along) is that a site license only covers the PCs at the site at the time it went into effect. A site license, in MS terms, does not cover new computers. If you buy a new computer, you have to pay for a licensed copy of Windows regardless of whether you already have a site license for all the computers in your organization.
I guess that's the rub. You pay umpteen dollars for a business-wide site license, but that does absolutely nothing to your licensing situation. You already paid for all the Windows licenses on the computers you've already purchased, and you have to pay for licenses on any new computers you purchase, so a "site license" is simply a sacrifice to the MS legal department to keep them from considering you for an audit (unless you buy new computers).
Do I have this at all right?
So, according to the .doc files at the morons.org links about Alcatel, they also upgraded from Word 8.0 to Word 9.0? Does anyone have any collaborating evidence (like another copy of the alleged original)? It just seems a little too easy...
I'm not saying that the stuff was fabricated, but I'd definitely take it with a very large grain of salt. (And no, I wouldn't be dumb enough to use Word to post something on the web.) :)
If you don't remember reading CNN's review of The Matrix from way back in 1999, you've just got to read it again. It's absolutely hilarious that the reviewer was that stupid. (Yet more data to support my belief that whatever the reviews say should be run through an XOR-powered decryption routine with very few bits set in the mask.) Anyway, the review is at http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9904/09/review.m atrix/
- It's terribly slower now.
- If you want to see the "blurb" for the show you've got on, it used to be an overlay, but now it's full-screen with ads (so you can't keep watching and quick check which ep it is).
- They've taken to spamming the boxes, too. ("Watch Idiot vs. Dolt tonight at 7:00 in the heavyweight championship... only $349.95 plus TT&L".)
- It's hideously slower!
Did I mention that it seems to be using a 486 over at AOL via a satellite link to Afghanistan to do anything? I won't even get onto the fact that they use "Red" for movies and "red" for cartoons (or kids shows?); after all, as long as I have my TV tuned well and don't lose my Pantone chart, I can tell the difference.handA = (mudB or mudC);
handB = (mudA or mudC);
Since mudA and mudB are both true, the value of mudC is indeterminate. An individual, therefore, would not know the value of mudC (his own forehead muddiness), solely from handA, handB, mudA, and mudB. However, when the kid saw that at least one of the others was sufferring from the indeterminacy of his own forehead muddiness, the only reason is that that kid is also seeing the same problem of two hands and two muddy foreheads. Seeing this, the kid pronounced that his forehead must certainly also be muddy. QED.
As if it isn't obvious enough already that this is another lawyers-as-money-trees scheme, NCR wants a jury trial. Everyone knows, if you want a huge settlement and an easier case, you ask for a jury. It should be patently obvious (pardon me) that the jury will be wholly and permanently unqualified to render judgement on this one. (NCR isn't going to sit around and let any qualified people sit, are they?)
I'm quite sure that NCR's blood-sucking lawyers made sure that they stayed two-steps removed from the legal definition of blackmail, but the fact that they're asking for a jury trial and to have Palm and Handspring essentially blocked from doing anything to generate revenue is as plain as a "voluntary" confession at gunpoint.
(What makes me sick is that there's no legal way for us to get rid of the lawyers, and that will never change, since the lawyers make the laws.)
It strikes me that, perhaps, the US government has just about finished it transformation from a government of the people, by the people, and for the people into a government of the businesses, by the businesses, and for the businesses. Of course, since a corporation is a legal person in this country, perhaps they've just misplaced part of their heads.
The scary thing is that almost nobody sees what's going on. When those that do see the dangers have the audacity to talk about it, they are branded as conspiracy theorists et al. I can hardly put forward the idea that our freedoms are being usurped by big business before I'm dismissed as a radical. If eternal vigilance is indeed the price of freedom, I'm afraid that the days of freedom are limited. Perhaps there are still many left, but at the rate we're progressing, we're getting dangerously close to the point where nothing short of a full-fledged revolt will have any chance at producing change.
We're precipitously close to an Orweillian society run, not by governments, but by big businesses who all but own the governments. If such a dystopia comes in to power, I'm afraid it may be extremely difficult to break the bonds of socio-economic tyrrany. At our current progress, such a system will at the very least attempt to take over; I can only hope that we can work fast enough and be strong enough to topple it in its infancy.
I wonder if there's any chance of them selling some of those up in the States? It seems to me that if they sold some up here (at a small profit), it could do them well.
I wouldn't mind getting my hands on some of these; they seem like an ideal thing to use to make a school Linux computer lab... A dozen or two of these and a server running NFS for storage would be much more cost efficient than, say, Win/Dells, and they have much more processing power than recycled Pentium 100 systems.
It seems to me that we could help them and they could help us, all at the same time, and I would so love to infiltrate some high schools with real programming classes (even if you only teach PHP/MySQL/Apache, it would be much more useful than what they currently teach, and I'm sure you could get Java or C/C++/Cb in there).
-- "Duh! Headline of the Year" nominee, from News.Com: --
Trojan horse targets AOL subscribers
Members of the Internet service are being warned to keep watch for a
password-stealing virus circulating in the form of an e-mail attachment.
February 1, 2001, 8:40 a.m. PT
This is going to sound very stupid, but you must look at it not from the standpoint of geekdom, but rather from the standpoint of a scum-sucking lawyer (the good lawyers would also find this idiotic, but they don't seem to count much in the real world).
.exe's you distribute, and included a setup program that, after EULA, ROT13'd them back to usable state, they would be "effectively unusable" in their "encrypted" form. Sure, an evil cracker could reverse-engineer them, but how can a court make a rule about the complexity of the math required to decrypt something? A common user wouldn't have any idea how to un-ROT13 a binary executable without using your WinROT Protection System.
If you ROT13'd all the
Now, if they say that, say, DSA with at least 128 bits is "effective", then what about, say, an elliptical cipher of a certain arbitrary length. Of what about some new-fangled one? How big a Blowfish key do you need, or what about if you use Twofish?
This would obviously be unconstitutionally vague, and so they would have to either allow our WinROT encrypted binaries the same protection as the almost (but not quite) equally flawed DVD CSS, or they'd have to do the only sane thing and blow the law back up the location it came from.
Worst case scenario: When puzzle books have to be reprinted to explicitly include permission to solve the included puzzles, we just might be able to get a few people to dress up like natives and destroy large shipments of coffee destined for Washington DC.
Wow, so, this is more or less what you end up seeing if you look at the Matrix in raw form long enough, eh? (Although I still would have a hard time noticing an agent versus a doberman, but hey, I just need practice, right.)
Incidentally, does anyone know where to get a green filter for my upcoming ascii-cam?
--
(For those who played Acrophobia a long time ago, I'm already crawling toward the couch.)
The best teacher I ever had was Mr. Arsenault. It would be hard to tell you everything about him, so I'll just say that his sense of humor (including quite a dry wit) and acceptance of students was phenomenal. One example for you:
:)
He would never get mad, and he played the quintessential straight man (the Abbot of Abbot and Costello, but with a much more intelligent air). One day, one of his senior classes locked him out of his classroom. While most other teachers I've had would have marched straight to the office, he marched straight to the edge of campus to the maintenance sheds and got an extension ladder (his room was on the second floor). He then proceeded to climb up the ladder and through his classroom window; then he walked up to the chalkboard and without even cracking a smile (a major feat while pulling off an act like this), he picked up the chalk and began teaching as if nothng at all was out of the ordinary.
People told that story for years, and it was only one of a bunch. He understood what you had to do if you wanted to get people to learn, and he'd do it. He'd help anybody that needed it. He taught me geometry in 9th grade while I was also taking algebra, and in the same class (of two), he taught a senior (I hope she's done well in life; she was quite slow).
Oh, and since it doesn't take the whole hour to teach geometry if you only have two students, he'd let her work on her homework so he could help her with any problems, and we'd play chess the rest of the hour... he won the year, but I actually won one more game than he did. (That's the problem with playing matches and sets.)
Anyway, there you go. (My second best teacher has much less a sense of humor, but he used to take classes on camping trips... you haven't lived until you've played our variant of capture-the-flag/chase on a raining, moonless night in Louisiana backwoods.)
CNET's News.com had a story on this as well:
Minor bug lingers in Pentium 4 chipset
Interestingly enough, they originally had it under a very misleading title (it said "Minor bug lingers in Pentium 4 processor" IIRC). They apparently got enough feedback that they retitled it by this morning.
Some apps will "never" be able to run in Wine (Windows lets you do things that Linux knows are *bad* ideas). With this in mind, are there any applications that you would really like to see running in Windows (or whatever) on Plex86?
Everyone mentions running Microsoft Office when it comes to Wine; do you have any "milestone events" in mind for Plex86 (as the list of booting OS's continues to climb)?
Is it just me, or does Iridium have more lives than a cat? I mean, hey, being slated for destruction two, or even three, times is one thing, but when even the US DoD steps in to take up the slack, you've got to wonder if those satellites are ever coming down.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that the Iridium project was actually an integral part of the new global monitoring system the US uses to track late model vehicles and toothpaste choices. At least then I would have a reason for the invulnerability of the Iridium system.
As it stands, I can only assume that it's the aliens that have kept Iridium flying so the astronomers can't see them. It wasn't a design fluke that the satellites wreak havoc on astronomers; the aliens got tired of hiding behind the moon, so they set up Iridium so they can take field trips around the earth.
You know, on the other hand, perhaps it's just an annoying thing that just won't die... kind of like Windows (or FORTRAN), I guess.
I worked for a small ISP a while back. The owner proposed that I get an MCSE, and that he would pay for the tests on the condition that if I left within a year of taking a test, I reimburse him for the test. I think that offer would have been workable except for one thing: since I started working there, he had hired five new employees, all of whom has less experience than I, and all of whom has fewer job resposibilities than I. Every single one of the new hires was paid between $1 and $7/hour more than he paid me, even after a "generous" (to him) raise.
The fact that I was quite obviously being given the short end of the wage deal was enough to make me consider the one-year-or-reimburse deal to be not nearly sweet enough. When I left after a year and a quarter (the second longest tenure of any of his employees, according to the bookkeeper), I was still getting paid the same very low wage.
So, basically, I suppose what I'm saying is that it is impossible to retain employees if you give them the distinct impression that you will not be fair to them. If you give them a fair deal, something like an "if you leave within a year, we get back some|all of the money we spent on your training" will look a whole lot more attractive, and pay the person running your entire ISP division a bit more than the new techie grunt.
I must say, and I hope I don't incite a riot by saying this (it's just my opinion), but I personally consider the Ender's Game set (counting however many books there are now) to be my favorite large story in book form. It's right up there next to my favorite large story in audio-visual form, that being Babylon 5, of course.
(My friend loaned me her copy of Ender's Game one Friday night. I read it cover to cover the next day, and bought the whole set the day after. Had them all done in less than a week. I can't wait to read more.)
No, no, no. Obviously, the correct abbreviation for Chief Intellectual Property Officer is "ChIPO" (pronounced "cheep-o").
It might be relatively insignificant from a practical standpoint (it's what, two weeks), but I respect the symbolism of releasing RSA to the public domain just ever so slightly early.
This means that I can now legally use a little SSH program I found for Windows, and I needn't have any qualms about infringement. While I may not have been too concerned for myself at home, I haven't used the program at work (a public school system), since companies love finding licensing problems in public institutions.
Anyway, to me, releasing RSA early is like getting one of those little gold stars on the poster in grade school. It may not have any significant impact on anything at all, but it does make you feel like there's just a little good in there.
Imagine if the community could get together enough people to just put $20 in. We could have the first community-owned supercomputer. Imagine the possibilities...
Actually, although I must admit that I'd love to have one around, I don't think it would do the Linux community much good in the current hot projects. On the other hand, perhaps new projects would be created that would fill the available space.
Now there's an idea. The open source/free software communities are a gas; wherever they find empty space, they inevitably expand to fill it. Of course, you may say that the atmosphere does not expand outward to fill up all space; perhaps the analogue is the gravity of litigation (some energetic members will undoubtedly reach escape velocity, though, eg. DeCSS).
(I believe I may have taken that analogy too far, but it was an interesting way to explain why the community would want to buy a used Cray... other than the fact that it would probably look quite penguin-like with the right paint job, and having little daemons peeking out would probably be nice, too.)
I was the first at my local RadioShack. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, really, but it will decode the big, long barcode on Netflix address labels. From the number of 0's, I'd say they are planning on being around a while. :)
Of course, since I'm in Windows and didn't want to reboot or spend the time to track down a Windows decoder, I made my own. I just wonder what all the other information it send back is... guess I'll have to search after all.