Another vote for Linode. Not only do these guys know what they're doing, the support is top notch. They're very open about when problems pop up and inform us users and the world via several different forms (forum, irc, twitter).
Exactly! At other jobs in the past, we had a time clock, you punched in and punched out. No need for a computer to log into to punch in or out. At my current and last jobs, office workers just report the hours they work. Shop workers "punch in" by entering their employee code at a remote green screen terminal which is on 24/7 and connected to a mainframe which is also on 24/7.
Maybe they need to start "clocking" people in the second they walk through the door of the building by swiping their card through security or what ever they do.
Even the poorest of the poor who have a computer can afford $10 per release or at least per year. If you truly cannot afford that little amount, then do $5 or if you're really on hard times, then so long as everyone else donates something, they're helping out.
Those a-holes that dozens of free Ubuntu CDs and hand them out without donating a dime piss me off. In the long run it might help as it gets Ubuntu into the hands of the people, but most of those people won't realize that they can or, IMO, should, donate to the project.
If everyone who used Ubuntu donated just a little bit and institutions who install Ubuntu across their entire school or company paid just $10 per install per release they'd really be helping out. Either that or came up with what they thought was a fair number. Instead of $7,000 for 700 seats, maybe just $1000 for 700 seats. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than Microsoft or Apple.
If you can give more and want to, then do so. I give to Ubuntu, OpenOffice and Gimp for each release and donate time supporting other projects.
It might also help Ubuntu and other projects to become non-profit (501c3 in the US) as then donations would be tax deductible. Of course there's other overhead (administrative and monetary) associated with that and you have to way the pros and cons of doing so.
Yes, but for those of us who have their PCs on 24/7 with the cases open and a hard drive or two just sitting on the desk, sans enclosure, connected to the PC wouldn't mind something like this at all. In fact I'd love to have something like this.
When I get tired of the noise coming from the computer, I just shut the office door. When I'm using the computer, I just tune the noise out or turn the speakers up and don't even notice the PC.
I used it for a total of 5 minutes. It's just not a good browser. It's so feature less it's not useful for anything other than browsing. It doesn't make a good tool for web development or even for us "power browsers".
I understand how that sounds, yes, a browser should be a browser, but Firefox has become such an integral part of my tools I use. Chrome would be like having a remote control that has 5 buttons, power, channel up&down and volume up&down.
To bring in the car analogy, Chrome would be like having a car without power anything, including windshield wipers, it would also be lacking a truck because why would you haul anything in a car that's designed to transport people and get them from point a to point b?
I used to work with cattle on my uncle's farm when I was a kid. They are dumb animals. They do dumb things. Anytime you try to move them, they do all kinds of stupid shit. I've seen them get "trapped" in fencing, in ditches, even in bushes and trees.
I grew up around cows and many other animals. They are not dumb animals. Read the book Animals in Translation where the author talks specifically about why cattle behave as they do.
I agree though, the system is stupid and can't compete with what a few good cowboys can do.
The problem there is, if Google makes it harder for a person to get a account, say, for example, they have to call a number, and talk to a human, People will get annoyed and go somewhere else.
I fully understand that. That's why I didn't offer any suggestions for a solution. I don't have one. I just know it's a major problem and needs to be fixed. I really wish I had an idea as to how to fix it.
It's currently way to easy for a bot or some very low paid Chinese, Indian, African, etc to sign up for bogus accounts to send spam out of from all of the major email providers, blogging sites, etc.
Everything I've thought of can, as bendodge stated, can be "dictionaried" over time. While they might make good solutions for the short time, it wouldn't take long for them to be cracked as well.
I was using Google as an example because that's where I've personally seen the most abuse. But bendodge is right, we need new ideas for this problem. Captcha isn't cutting it anymore, if it ever really did.
I've only seen one solution that seems to work on a small scale. On some blogs where people can place comments they require a valid email address to be used to make a comment. The first time you try to make a comment you use a valid email address. You then have to click a link in an email that is sent to your address. After that you can use the name and email address you used to make comments in the future on that blog without having to answer the challenge. If spammer started posting spam, the person running the blog can then just revoke the ability for comments from that email address.
The problem is that only works on the smaller scale and requires more intervention by the blog owner. On a larger scale if that blog is getting 1000s or more comments a day, a spammer could easily overwhelm the blog owner. The other problem, this appears to really only work for blog comments. I'm not sure how this would work for signing up for email accounts or blogger accounts as you're now hitting that large scale problem that would require quite a bit of man power behind it to do the filtering.
What is? Breaking Captcha? Not even close. Whether it's done with software or by paying humans in China, India, Africa, etc it's not impressive to say the least.
Google's captcha has been broken for a very long time. Only nobody has admitted it until now. I have several Google alerts setup for certain keywords. I use to get some pretty interesting alerts to articles, blogs, other sites, etc. Now 98%+ of the alerts I get are Blogger.com spam sites. It's been this way for about 5 months, possibly longer, but that's about when I started seeing an influx of pure junk.
At first I was reporting them to Google. Then after about the 100th or so alert and having checked several of the blogs to see if they were taken down (they weren't, just the one particular page that I reported was) I just gave up. Realizing that Google's captcha is seriously flawed and was broken.
Google and others need to change how easy it is for people to sign up for an account with them. Yes, it's going to be a hard row to hoe, but it needs to be done, especially for blogspot/blogger.com as those pages are just littering the internet with junk.
The only reason not to use google apps is if you are paranoid about people looking at your emails. If that is the case then you should be setting up Postfix or Sendmail.
If you are that paranoid, you shouldn't be using email.
I've been using it for 1.5 years now and have a few connectivity issues. Sometimes their service does go down for the free users. Apparently the Premier users have a guaranteed uptime of 99.9%.
Though I can't think where I've had an issue where webmail, POP and IMAP were all down. The few (3 or 4) times service was interrupted for 1-3 hours I was able to get to my email through at least one method.
I've only had better email service when I was hosting my email on my web hosting account or our Exchange servers at work, though the spam filtering at Google is many times better than well anything else I've seen except for our expensive spam filtering appliance at work.
Man you guys who think this is an IT only thing, really need to get out and look around.
Yes you can't test for everything, but you can get a decent feel if if the person has some competency with the code for a programmer.
I've seen mechanical engineers asked to design a solution to a problem. I've seen drafters/designers given tests with the software they use. Welders get tested before being hired. Divers get tested before being hired.
I don't understand what the big problem is. Programmers write code and can at least be tested on their ability to write code. Maybe they can't engineer a program, but at least they can weed out the idiots just selling themselves.
What are you going to test an accountant on? Can you add 2+2? Seriously, accounting has a lot of rules, but it's quite honestly easy, boring as fuck, but easy. How are you going to test your attorney? How are you going to test an HR or sales person? This is why a lot of jobs usually have a 30/60/90 day trial/probation period.
No fricking kidding. I'm glad this loser got "busted". Directory pages are completely useless. If I search for "ball bearings" I want to find manufacturers, not some link farm.
Another one that google desperately needs to wipe from the face of the www, is directorym.
[That's not to imply there are no clueful gov employees. Their are, but they are quite rare in my experience.]
They're rare everywhere. I know a few competent IT people working in government. I know a lot of incompetent IT people working for businesses. Fortunately during the dot com bubble burst, a lot of them got laid off and turned into warehouse workers or truck drivers, precisely right where their level of education landed them. To this day, they are still doing working those unskilled jobs and have been unable to get a job working in IT.
Use email, text, phone, snail mail, private family website for us geeks, but DO NOT ever use myspace, facebook or any other social networking site to keep in contact with people. That is unless you want anything and everything you post to potentially become public knowledge. Setting something to "private" on any of these social networking sites that we already know are full of security holes means nothing. It just means someone needs to find some of your friends who have posted information about you on their public profile or become a "friend" of a "friend" and work their way in that way.
Fortunately, myspace, twitter, facebook, et al, all have a limited shelf life and eventually you kids and you adults who didn't grow up with computers are going to grow up and realize the idiocy of spewing your private info all over the place. Then these social networking sites are going to shrivel up and die. I find it odd that some companies have actually places a value on them. I find them pretty value-less.
I don't need facebook or any other facility to get in contact with an old friend, yet I still happen to have a busy social life. In fact nothing has changed from my days in HS or college or early adult life. If I want to get in contact with a friend, I call them. No need to post my personal info for all to see in the hopes of some long lost friend to find me or to plan this weekends event.
Not only that, but once you know which port on which switch something is connected to, it truly is just a matter of following the wires to find the device. A pain in the ass, yes, but it really is that simple.
Unfortunately, it appears that with all the tech talent in SF, not a single person with an ounce of talent or know how has been hired by the city.
Insightful? How the fuck is this insightful? NO company big or small should be getting ANY sort of help from the government.
Big companies should just have to pay more taxes, not get tax breaks from cities, counties or states to entice them to have a presence there.
Small shouldn't be getting any break or handouts from the government either. Either they make it or they don't.
I'm a small business owner and I see small businesses come and go all over the place. Guess what, the ones that go out of business rarely go out of business because the competition put them out of business. They go out of business because they don't know how to run a business or they just plain had a bad business idea to begin with that was never going to fly.
2. Any semi-periodic event that must be noted and accommodated by the general public that cannot be calendared years in advance is virtually guaranteed to be a snarling mess
We seem to get along just fine with the idiotic Daylight Savings Time and changing clocks twice a year.
True those who are paying attention actually know which days those are. But the same could be done with a leap hour as those could be scheduled and known years in advance.
Not that I agree with the concept of a leap hour, I think the very idea is moronic as I agree more with your first statement. People don't care or notice if their clocks are off by a few seconds or even a few minutes. If they happen to notice, they they make the minor adjustment and go on with their lives.
Why is this informative? Funny, maybe, but not really. Informative or insightful, not even close. Mozilla already announced they were going to nag the hell out of FF 2.x users: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/22/1552202
I hate Comcast as much as the next person, but I can't believe all these people complaining about the limit. I have serious doubts any of you even hit 100GB/month. I've been trying to find a post on a website that I read about this exact topic a few months back. Unfortunately, I can't find it. Basically, unless you're downloading movies, or doing some other activity that violates your contract, there is just no possible way for you to hit this limit. The very small number of people hitting this limit are abusing the network. These are the same user's who would get reprimanded at work for violating policies.
From what I remember, this is in the ballpark somewhere. That post listed what you'd have to do in a month to hit that limit:
download ~86,000 mp3s view ~82,000 flickr pages with full size images play WoW 24/7 for 50 or 60 days
Again, I can't find that post, so these number are only somewhere in the ballpark and may be way off. But you get the general idea. No NORMAL user would ever hit their limits. The people hitting the limits are downloading many movies, sharing their connection, doing other activities that are outside the bounds of their agreement with Comcast.
I didn't know anything about them except that someone in a forum was describing how you could have the same avatar in compatible forums that you participate in. The second I read that your hashed email address was part of the URL I turned around and never looked back knowing full well that if someone wanted to, they could eventually get my email address.
Slashdot Mirror
Another vote for Linode. Not only do these guys know what they're doing, the support is top notch. They're very open about when problems pop up and inform us users and the world via several different forms (forum, irc, twitter).
Exactly! At other jobs in the past, we had a time clock, you punched in and punched out. No need for a computer to log into to punch in or out. At my current and last jobs, office workers just report the hours they work. Shop workers "punch in" by entering their employee code at a remote green screen terminal which is on 24/7 and connected to a mainframe which is also on 24/7.
Maybe they need to start "clocking" people in the second they walk through the door of the building by swiping their card through security or what ever they do.
Why not? Just like Windows, Linux needs cleaned out every now and then. Right?
Even the poorest of the poor who have a computer can afford $10 per release or at least per year. If you truly cannot afford that little amount, then do $5 or if you're really on hard times, then so long as everyone else donates something, they're helping out.
Those a-holes that dozens of free Ubuntu CDs and hand them out without donating a dime piss me off. In the long run it might help as it gets Ubuntu into the hands of the people, but most of those people won't realize that they can or, IMO, should, donate to the project.
If everyone who used Ubuntu donated just a little bit and institutions who install Ubuntu across their entire school or company paid just $10 per install per release they'd really be helping out. Either that or came up with what they thought was a fair number. Instead of $7,000 for 700 seats, maybe just $1000 for 700 seats. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than Microsoft or Apple.
If you can give more and want to, then do so. I give to Ubuntu, OpenOffice and Gimp for each release and donate time supporting other projects.
It might also help Ubuntu and other projects to become non-profit (501c3 in the US) as then donations would be tax deductible. Of course there's other overhead (administrative and monetary) associated with that and you have to way the pros and cons of doing so.
Yes, but for those of us who have their PCs on 24/7 with the cases open and a hard drive or two just sitting on the desk, sans enclosure, connected to the PC wouldn't mind something like this at all. In fact I'd love to have something like this.
When I get tired of the noise coming from the computer, I just shut the office door. When I'm using the computer, I just tune the noise out or turn the speakers up and don't even notice the PC.
I used it for a total of 5 minutes. It's just not a good browser. It's so feature less it's not useful for anything other than browsing. It doesn't make a good tool for web development or even for us "power browsers".
I understand how that sounds, yes, a browser should be a browser, but Firefox has become such an integral part of my tools I use. Chrome would be like having a remote control that has 5 buttons, power, channel up&down and volume up&down.
To bring in the car analogy, Chrome would be like having a car without power anything, including windshield wipers, it would also be lacking a truck because why would you haul anything in a car that's designed to transport people and get them from point a to point b?
I used to work with cattle on my uncle's farm when I was a kid. They are dumb animals. They do dumb things. Anytime you try to move them, they do all kinds of stupid shit. I've seen them get "trapped" in fencing, in ditches, even in bushes and trees.
I grew up around cows and many other animals. They are not dumb animals. Read the book Animals in Translation where the author talks specifically about why cattle behave as they do.
I agree though, the system is stupid and can't compete with what a few good cowboys can do.
How could you post this without a link to this site:
http://www.shaveeverywhere.com/ (possibly NSFW in some places, but frickin' hilarious)
The problem there is, if Google makes it harder for a person to get a account, say, for example, they have to call a number, and talk to a human, People will get annoyed and go somewhere else.
I fully understand that. That's why I didn't offer any suggestions for a solution. I don't have one. I just know it's a major problem and needs to be fixed. I really wish I had an idea as to how to fix it.
It's currently way to easy for a bot or some very low paid Chinese, Indian, African, etc to sign up for bogus accounts to send spam out of from all of the major email providers, blogging sites, etc.
Everything I've thought of can, as bendodge stated, can be "dictionaried" over time. While they might make good solutions for the short time, it wouldn't take long for them to be cracked as well.
I was using Google as an example because that's where I've personally seen the most abuse. But bendodge is right, we need new ideas for this problem. Captcha isn't cutting it anymore, if it ever really did.
I've only seen one solution that seems to work on a small scale. On some blogs where people can place comments they require a valid email address to be used to make a comment. The first time you try to make a comment you use a valid email address. You then have to click a link in an email that is sent to your address. After that you can use the name and email address you used to make comments in the future on that blog without having to answer the challenge. If spammer started posting spam, the person running the blog can then just revoke the ability for comments from that email address.
The problem is that only works on the smaller scale and requires more intervention by the blog owner. On a larger scale if that blog is getting 1000s or more comments a day, a spammer could easily overwhelm the blog owner. The other problem, this appears to really only work for blog comments. I'm not sure how this would work for signing up for email accounts or blogger accounts as you're now hitting that large scale problem that would require quite a bit of man power behind it to do the filtering.
What is? Breaking Captcha? Not even close. Whether it's done with software or by paying humans in China, India, Africa, etc it's not impressive to say the least.
Google's captcha has been broken for a very long time. Only nobody has admitted it until now. I have several Google alerts setup for certain keywords. I use to get some pretty interesting alerts to articles, blogs, other sites, etc. Now 98%+ of the alerts I get are Blogger.com spam sites. It's been this way for about 5 months, possibly longer, but that's about when I started seeing an influx of pure junk.
At first I was reporting them to Google. Then after about the 100th or so alert and having checked several of the blogs to see if they were taken down (they weren't, just the one particular page that I reported was) I just gave up. Realizing that Google's captcha is seriously flawed and was broken.
Google and others need to change how easy it is for people to sign up for an account with them. Yes, it's going to be a hard row to hoe, but it needs to be done, especially for blogspot/blogger.com as those pages are just littering the internet with junk.
The only reason not to use google apps is if you are paranoid about people looking at your emails. If that is the case then you should be setting up Postfix or Sendmail.
If you are that paranoid, you shouldn't be using email.
I've been using it for 1.5 years now and have a few connectivity issues. Sometimes their service does go down for the free users. Apparently the Premier users have a guaranteed uptime of 99.9%.
Though I can't think where I've had an issue where webmail, POP and IMAP were all down. The few (3 or 4) times service was interrupted for 1-3 hours I was able to get to my email through at least one method.
I've only had better email service when I was hosting my email on my web hosting account or our Exchange servers at work, though the spam filtering at Google is many times better than well anything else I've seen except for our expensive spam filtering appliance at work.
Man you guys who think this is an IT only thing, really need to get out and look around.
Yes you can't test for everything, but you can get a decent feel if if the person has some competency with the code for a programmer.
I've seen mechanical engineers asked to design a solution to a problem. I've seen drafters/designers given tests with the software they use. Welders get tested before being hired. Divers get tested before being hired.
I don't understand what the big problem is. Programmers write code and can at least be tested on their ability to write code. Maybe they can't engineer a program, but at least they can weed out the idiots just selling themselves.
What are you going to test an accountant on? Can you add 2+2? Seriously, accounting has a lot of rules, but it's quite honestly easy, boring as fuck, but easy. How are you going to test your attorney? How are you going to test an HR or sales person? This is why a lot of jobs usually have a 30/60/90 day trial/probation period.
Yes, but sourcetool.com is not trying to cover a niche market. It's a general purpose, useless link farm.
No fricking kidding. I'm glad this loser got "busted". Directory pages are completely useless. If I search for "ball bearings" I want to find manufacturers, not some link farm.
Another one that google desperately needs to wipe from the face of the www, is directorym.
[That's not to imply there are no clueful gov employees. Their are, but they are quite rare in my experience.]
They're rare everywhere. I know a few competent IT people working in government. I know a lot of incompetent IT people working for businesses. Fortunately during the dot com bubble burst, a lot of them got laid off and turned into warehouse workers or truck drivers, precisely right where their level of education landed them. To this day, they are still doing working those unskilled jobs and have been unable to get a job working in IT.
Use email, text, phone, snail mail, private family website for us geeks, but DO NOT ever use myspace, facebook or any other social networking site to keep in contact with people. That is unless you want anything and everything you post to potentially become public knowledge. Setting something to "private" on any of these social networking sites that we already know are full of security holes means nothing. It just means someone needs to find some of your friends who have posted information about you on their public profile or become a "friend" of a "friend" and work their way in that way.
Fortunately, myspace, twitter, facebook, et al, all have a limited shelf life and eventually you kids and you adults who didn't grow up with computers are going to grow up and realize the idiocy of spewing your private info all over the place. Then these social networking sites are going to shrivel up and die. I find it odd that some companies have actually places a value on them. I find them pretty value-less.
I don't need facebook or any other facility to get in contact with an old friend, yet I still happen to have a busy social life. In fact nothing has changed from my days in HS or college or early adult life. If I want to get in contact with a friend, I call them. No need to post my personal info for all to see in the hopes of some long lost friend to find me or to plan this weekends event.
Not only that, but once you know which port on which switch something is connected to, it truly is just a matter of following the wires to find the device. A pain in the ass, yes, but it really is that simple.
Unfortunately, it appears that with all the tech talent in SF, not a single person with an ounce of talent or know how has been hired by the city.
Insightful? How the fuck is this insightful? NO company big or small should be getting ANY sort of help from the government.
Big companies should just have to pay more taxes, not get tax breaks from cities, counties or states to entice them to have a presence there.
Small shouldn't be getting any break or handouts from the government either. Either they make it or they don't.
I'm a small business owner and I see small businesses come and go all over the place. Guess what, the ones that go out of business rarely go out of business because the competition put them out of business. They go out of business because they don't know how to run a business or they just plain had a bad business idea to begin with that was never going to fly.
2. Any semi-periodic event that must be noted and accommodated by the general public that cannot be calendared years in advance is virtually guaranteed to be a snarling mess
We seem to get along just fine with the idiotic Daylight Savings Time and changing clocks twice a year. True those who are paying attention actually know which days those are. But the same could be done with a leap hour as those could be scheduled and known years in advance. Not that I agree with the concept of a leap hour, I think the very idea is moronic as I agree more with your first statement. People don't care or notice if their clocks are off by a few seconds or even a few minutes. If they happen to notice, they they make the minor adjustment and go on with their lives.
Why is this informative? Funny, maybe, but not really. Informative or insightful, not even close. Mozilla already announced they were going to nag the hell out of FF 2.x users:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/22/1552202
future proof of what though?
Can anyone explain why this has the "big brother" tag? Is it simply because of the evacuation order? If so, why?
I hate Comcast as much as the next person, but I can't believe all these people complaining about the limit. I have serious doubts any of you even hit 100GB/month. I've been trying to find a post on a website that I read about this exact topic a few months back. Unfortunately, I can't find it. Basically, unless you're downloading movies, or doing some other activity that violates your contract, there is just no possible way for you to hit this limit. The very small number of people hitting this limit are abusing the network. These are the same user's who would get reprimanded at work for violating policies.
From what I remember, this is in the ballpark somewhere. That post listed what you'd have to do in a month to hit that limit:
download ~86,000 mp3s
view ~82,000 flickr pages with full size images
play WoW 24/7 for 50 or 60 days
Again, I can't find that post, so these number are only somewhere in the ballpark and may be way off. But you get the general idea. No NORMAL user would ever hit their limits. The people hitting the limits are downloading many movies, sharing their connection, doing other activities that are outside the bounds of their agreement with Comcast.
This is exactly the reason I don't use Gravatar. They even tell everyone they are morons right here:
http://en.gravatar.com/site/implement/url
I didn't know anything about them except that someone in a forum was describing how you could have the same avatar in compatible forums that you participate in. The second I read that your hashed email address was part of the URL I turned around and never looked back knowing full well that if someone wanted to, they could eventually get my email address.