Say I belong to a minority religion and have kids in school. Even if 95% of the community at large is Christian and is happy with Christian censoring in the schools, I'm not. If the schools decide to teach Christianity, the government isn't forcing religion on schools, the schools are considered part of the government and are forcing religion on the students.
The school board, or even the parents in general, should NOT be allowed to decide, because you will likely end up with the majority trampling the rights of the minority.
Government is the only place those of us of minority religions get respite from this trampling. For example, right now the stores have aisles and aisles of Easter candy, but no snacks that can be eaten during Passover (similar annoyance affects all minority religions). This is expected because what the stores stock is determined by the market, but what the schools teach should be neutral.
I attended a small private university with a rather pathetic IT budget. But they managed to land a good deal with Sun and put up several labs of SunRays. Being able to work on something, pull my card out to go to the bathroom then return to the lab and be right where I left off (even if I had to sit at a different machine) kicked ass. They never removed my account either, I can still visit campus and wander into a lab with my card and log in:)
It does, but he'll have plenty of time to legalize political spam first. I'm moving out of state next week and wasn't planning to vote in the primary, but it's almost worth it just to vote against him.
Aww, how sad.
I had the inside of my husband's wedding ring inscribed with r=sin(erm, not sure how to make a theta show up in the post) + 0.5
He didn't notice that there was any inscription until I told him to look at it. (feh! men!) He was a math geek so he got it, and then he had to explain it to the whole wedding party. He died a few years ago so now I am a single, hopefully clever geek-woman, but I don't know that I'm properly cynical, so I can't say for sure that what you're looking for exists. I do, however, have a framed print of the mandelbrot set hanging on my wall.;)
I can't do arithmetic at all. I have to get out pen and paper (or a calculator) to add anything larger than single digits. But I have a BS in math and can explain curl or whatnot to you. (I think I'm sane, too, and I would rather be sane than a great mathematician).
Someone tried to steal my car. They smashed the window and took apart the steering column trying to hotwire it, but since they didn't have anything with the radio code it wouldn't start. I had to pay my deductible to get it fixed, but hell, I'm just glad I still have my car.
And while alarms don't turn heads as much as they used to, my car has not been vandalized in the two months since I got an alarm installed, while it had been 3 times in the month previous.
The ISP I work for resells Pac Bell and Covad DSL. Even in areas where cable is an option we still get sales. People willing to spend the $$ for bandwidth like the fact that we offer static IPs and allow servers. They also like the fact that they aren't sharing the bandwidth. In certain parts of my town the cable is incredibly slow, I'm sure it's the same in other areas we are selling DSL that cable is also available. Of course, the vast majority of people just want to check their email once a day and are sticking with dialup because the bandwidth isn't worth it to them.
I saw this thing at LWCE too, and it looks like it will kick ass. However, talking with the guy I asked if it was a standard IDE HDD that could be upgraded. He said that to keep the RIAA sorts happy all the mp3s were stored encrypted and that it was some sort of proprietary interface to keep people from swapping out HDDs. He said that you could pay for them to put in a bigger HDD, but that they had to have something to keep the lawsuits away, and that they were pleased that this was all it took to get approval from the music industry.
Linus said we are celebrating early. The actual date he gave was in mid september, the 17th sounds about right. That was apparently the date on the first tarball (I haven't seen said tarball, but I'll trust him on that one). He said that he's not sure when he actually started working on it. It was 10 years ago after all, and he didn't expect it to turn into anything big. I think celebrating on August 25th is kinda like celebrating the date of an announcement that occured before a baby's birth. But I'll be at the party anyway.
Intent is all-around important in cases of security. Also making sure that your intent is obvious is a good idea, lest someone claim that you weren't really doing whatever to help out.
For example, the ISP I work for has a rule that anyone caught portscanning the servers will be in danger of having their employment terminated. Several guys in tech support have gotten into deep trouble for this. I, however, portscan a server every week or two. I'm the UNIX sysadmin, and for me the portscanner is a useful tool. I can use it not only to verify the results of netstat, but also to make sure that a new installation of portsentry is blocking people properly. I certainly hope that if I ever get caught the managers take into consideration that I already have root on the machines and perhaps I'm using it to test my systems.
It is unfortunate that useful tools often have negative uses, but let's not prevent people from making or distributing something intended to be a tool just because some kiddie might use it for ill. Now, distributing it in a skr1pt k1dd1e channel on IRC is another matter...
I live in California. I have three computers at home, two of which are on 24/7. My average electric bill is about $60/month. Neither of those is running seti@home or anything that eats CPU that much unless I'm there using it. Neither has an array of disk drives that are constantly churning. Just because you have a 250W PSU doesn't mean you're using that much. However, I use all fluorescent lights and unplug appliances with clocks and stuff on them when they aren't being used. That probably contrubutes nicely to the electric bill's being reasonable.
But if a bug is discovered, they can't fix it and release an updated, bug-fixed qmail rpm, with the srpm. And despite what everyone has said that qmail has never had a bug, any company with common sense wouldn't want to have to completely trust that a piece of software will never have a bug. That would be utter foolishness. And while srpms are great, a lot of people just want the binary.
I work hourly and am sometimes on call, and my employer pays me for for being on call. They pay a fixed amount per weekday and a higher fixed amount per weekend day (because during regular work hours on weekdays other people are there so I wouldn't have to go in).
I hope this helps to give you a general idea of what's happening with on call people at other companies. Mine certainly considers it work and pays me for it, not that they pay a lot.
No, they're not. I work for a medium sized ISP, and we frequently buy smaller ISPs that can't make it on their own. We already have the infrastructure so assimilating them won't cost us as much as staying in business separately would cost them. But the deal is just like a company buying any other company. If you buy something from one company and another company buys them, you call the new company for warranty issues. It's definitely less odd than banks selling peoples' mortgages to each other.
My company (an ISP) uses netbotz' rackbotz and wallbotz to monitor our machines. We once caught a guy from the telco disconnecting the network cables from one of our servers when he was supposedly fixing something elsewhere in the building, and we had full-face pictures of him in the act as evidence. They are handy because they not only display images on a site, they also make records and can page you if something comes up that triggers an alarm (in our case, something like overheating in a cabinet). I was going to recommend them but checked to see if they had been mentioned yet, and found your post.
I wonder ifthe physics BS I'm about done with will be enough to get me anywhere near the door. Probably not. It's a good thing I like the job I have now (sysadminning.. yum), because my degree is going to be pretty worthless. Why didn't someone tell me that when I started it?
Re:What if thats all there are?
on
CPRM Voted Down
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· Score: 1
all the new ones may be at some point...but if we buy enough "large" drives before these are on the shelves, then we can make arrays out of them and use them at least for awhile. Maybe by then enough people will have complained that they scrap the CPRM idea. (we can always hope)
Yup, you can play Warlords in realtime over the Internet. But you can take turns playing it on the same machine (without multiple logins to the machine) if the players are all in the same place IRL and have only one computer at their disposal. If you think two people can sit close enough to share a keyboard...um...most GUI real-time games don't allow for multiple players at one console.
As nice as it is to play Diablo II with my IRC friends, I miss turn based games. When we were dating my husband and I would sit together talking about stuff and taking turns at Warlords. My parents have only one computer, and my little brothers fight over who gets to play with it. It doesn't occur to them that there are games that they could play together, both at the same time. While real-time games are great if you're sitting in your house alone, turn-based games can be played with a group of people all at one machine. So you get to play computer games and get the social interaction parent-types seem to think we should get, all at once. And without the bother of carrying your machine to a LAN party.
It costs money when you are an ISP having to constantly upgrade your mail server not because your customers need it, but because your machines are choking during spam attacks and you want them to be able stay up then for legit stuff too. It then costs the 'net user when their ISP is spending money dealing with spam instead of doing something to otherwise improve their service.
What seems to have been missed in the comments so far is so obvious it's pathetic. There is nothing wrong with advertising. As annoying as it can be, we all know better than to think if it goes away the 'net will be the same as before but without the ads. Spam is different.
When you get junk mail via snail mail, sure, you have to sort through it and throw out the ads. But that's not where the money is lost with spam. Junk snail mailers pay the post office to send their spam. The infrastructure of the mail system is not threatened because people are paying to advertise. Banner ads can clutter a site, but the owner of the site is getting paid. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Spammers Dont Pay Their Share For the Internet Infrastructure Used. Spammers usually sign up for a dialup account meant for residential use, spam all night, and get their accounts shut off the next day. Often they signed up with a fake credit card number, but by the time the ISP tries to verify it the next morning it's too late. The meatspace equivalent of spam would be a bulk snail mailer forging stamps and putting their bulk mail in the box without paying the postage.
Sure getting advertisements from JC Penney once a week is annoying. But JC Penney pays for their own mail servers and will let you unsubscribe. The real problem is Joe Schmoe entrepreneur who sees a quick buck by setting up some sort of scam and getting "free postage" to send out their advertisements with no legitimate contact info and no way to be removed from their list.
Believe it or not, there are those of us out there that don't pirate. We actually buy our music, and if we need to use non-free software we actually buy it. And we don't install it on other people's machines and we don't burn copies of their cds when they want to share with friends. We don't let them keep "archival copies" of proprietary things we bought, knowing they might use them. And as much as not being able to watch encrypted DVDs on our machines pisses us off, we won't use illegal software even though we disagree with its illegality. Not everyone that reminds people (and rightfully so) that their GPL'ed code isn't public domain is a hypocrite.
And yes, I still get laughed at at work for making my parents buy Windows instead of finding them a warezed copy.
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Say I belong to a minority religion and have kids in school. Even if 95% of the community at large is Christian and is happy with Christian censoring in the schools, I'm not. If the schools decide to teach Christianity, the government isn't forcing religion on schools, the schools are considered part of the government and are forcing religion on the students.
The school board, or even the parents in general, should NOT be allowed to decide, because you will likely end up with the majority trampling the rights of the minority.
Government is the only place those of us of minority religions get respite from this trampling. For example, right now the stores have aisles and aisles of Easter candy, but no snacks that can be eaten during Passover (similar annoyance affects all minority religions). This is expected because what the stores stock is determined by the market, but what the schools teach should be neutral.
I attended a small private university with a rather pathetic IT budget. But they managed to land a good deal with Sun and put up several labs of SunRays. Being able to work on something, pull my card out to go to the bathroom then return to the lab and be right where I left off (even if I had to sit at a different machine) kicked ass. They never removed my account either, I can still visit campus and wander into a lab with my card and log in :)
It does, but he'll have plenty of time to legalize political spam first. I'm moving out of state next week and wasn't planning to vote in the primary, but it's almost worth it just to vote against him.
Aww, how sad. ;)
I had the inside of my husband's wedding ring inscribed with r=sin(erm, not sure how to make a theta show up in the post) + 0.5
He didn't notice that there was any inscription until I told him to look at it. (feh! men!) He was a math geek so he got it, and then he had to explain it to the whole wedding party. He died a few years ago so now I am a single, hopefully clever geek-woman, but I don't know that I'm properly cynical, so I can't say for sure that what you're looking for exists. I do, however, have a framed print of the mandelbrot set hanging on my wall.
I can't do arithmetic at all. I have to get out pen and paper (or a calculator) to add anything larger than single digits. But I have a BS in math and can explain curl or whatnot to you. (I think I'm sane, too, and I would rather be sane than a great mathematician).
Someone tried to steal my car. They smashed the window and took apart the steering column trying to hotwire it, but since they didn't have anything with the radio code it wouldn't start. I had to pay my deductible to get it fixed, but hell, I'm just glad I still have my car.
And while alarms don't turn heads as much as they used to, my car has not been vandalized in the two months since I got an alarm installed, while it had been 3 times in the month previous.
The ISP I work for resells Pac Bell and Covad DSL. Even in areas where cable is an option we still get sales. People willing to spend the $$ for bandwidth like the fact that we offer static IPs and allow servers. They also like the fact that they aren't sharing the bandwidth. In certain parts of my town the cable is incredibly slow, I'm sure it's the same in other areas we are selling DSL that cable is also available. Of course, the vast majority of people just want to check their email once a day and are sticking with dialup because the bandwidth isn't worth it to them.
I saw this thing at LWCE too, and it looks like it will kick ass. However, talking with the guy I asked if it was a standard IDE HDD that could be upgraded. He said that to keep the RIAA sorts happy all the mp3s were stored encrypted and that it was some sort of proprietary interface to keep people from swapping out HDDs. He said that you could pay for them to put in a bigger HDD, but that they had to have something to keep the lawsuits away, and that they were pleased that this was all it took to get approval from the music industry.
Linus said we are celebrating early. The actual date he gave was in mid september, the 17th sounds about right. That was apparently the date on the first tarball (I haven't seen said tarball, but I'll trust him on that one). He said that he's not sure when he actually started working on it. It was 10 years ago after all, and he didn't expect it to turn into anything big. I think celebrating on August 25th is kinda like celebrating the date of an announcement that occured before a baby's birth. But I'll be at the party anyway.
Intent is all-around important in cases of security. Also making sure that your intent is obvious is a good idea, lest someone claim that you weren't really doing whatever to help out.
For example, the ISP I work for has a rule that anyone caught portscanning the servers will be in danger of having their employment terminated. Several guys in tech support have gotten into deep trouble for this. I, however, portscan a server every week or two. I'm the UNIX sysadmin, and for me the portscanner is a useful tool. I can use it not only to verify the results of netstat, but also to make sure that a new installation of portsentry is blocking people properly. I certainly hope that if I ever get caught the managers take into consideration that I already have root on the machines and perhaps I'm using it to test my systems.
It is unfortunate that useful tools often have negative uses, but let's not prevent people from making or distributing something intended to be a tool just because some kiddie might use it for ill. Now, distributing it in a skr1pt k1dd1e channel on IRC is another matter...
I live in California. I have three computers at home, two of which are on 24/7. My average electric bill is about $60/month. Neither of those is running seti@home or anything that eats CPU that much unless I'm there using it. Neither has an array of disk drives that are constantly churning. Just because you have a 250W PSU doesn't mean you're using that much. However, I use all fluorescent lights and unplug appliances with clocks and stuff on them when they aren't being used. That probably contrubutes nicely to the electric bill's being reasonable.
But if a bug is discovered, they can't fix it and release an updated, bug-fixed qmail rpm, with the srpm. And despite what everyone has said that qmail has never had a bug, any company with common sense wouldn't want to have to completely trust that a piece of software will never have a bug. That would be utter foolishness. And while srpms are great, a lot of people just want the binary.
I work hourly and am sometimes on call, and my employer pays me for for being on call. They pay a fixed amount per weekday and a higher fixed amount per weekend day (because during regular work hours on weekdays other people are there so I wouldn't have to go in). I hope this helps to give you a general idea of what's happening with on call people at other companies. Mine certainly considers it work and pays me for it, not that they pay a lot.
No, they're not. I work for a medium sized ISP, and we frequently buy smaller ISPs that can't make it on their own. We already have the infrastructure so assimilating them won't cost us as much as staying in business separately would cost them. But the deal is just like a company buying any other company. If you buy something from one company and another company buys them, you call the new company for warranty issues. It's definitely less odd than banks selling peoples' mortgages to each other.
me too. weird.
The hurdles are stupidity and laziness.
My company (an ISP) uses netbotz' rackbotz and wallbotz to monitor our machines. We once caught a guy from the telco disconnecting the network cables from one of our servers when he was supposedly fixing something elsewhere in the building, and we had full-face pictures of him in the act as evidence. They are handy because they not only display images on a site, they also make records and can page you if something comes up that triggers an alarm (in our case, something like overheating in a cabinet). I was going to recommend them but checked to see if they had been mentioned yet, and found your post.
I wonder ifthe physics BS I'm about done with will be enough to get me anywhere near the door. Probably not. It's a good thing I like the job I have now (sysadminning.. yum), because my degree is going to be pretty worthless. Why didn't someone tell me that when I started it?
all the new ones may be at some point...but if we buy enough "large" drives before these are on the shelves, then we can make arrays out of them and use them at least for awhile. Maybe by then enough people will have complained that they scrap the CPRM idea. (we can always hope)
Yup, you can play Warlords in realtime over the Internet. But you can take turns playing it on the same machine (without multiple logins to the machine) if the players are all in the same place IRL and have only one computer at their disposal. If you think two people can sit close enough to share a keyboard...um...most GUI real-time games don't allow for multiple players at one console.
As nice as it is to play Diablo II with my IRC friends, I miss turn based games. When we were dating my husband and I would sit together talking about stuff and taking turns at Warlords. My parents have only one computer, and my little brothers fight over who gets to play with it. It doesn't occur to them that there are games that they could play together, both at the same time. While real-time games are great if you're sitting in your house alone, turn-based games can be played with a group of people all at one machine. So you get to play computer games and get the social interaction parent-types seem to think we should get, all at once. And without the bother of carrying your machine to a LAN party.
It costs money when you are an ISP having to constantly upgrade your mail server not because your customers need it, but because your machines are choking during spam attacks and you want them to be able stay up then for legit stuff too. It then costs the 'net user when their ISP is spending money dealing with spam instead of doing something to otherwise improve their service.
What seems to have been missed in the comments so far is so obvious it's pathetic. There is nothing wrong with advertising. As annoying as it can be, we all know better than to think if it goes away the 'net will be the same as before but without the ads. Spam is different.
When you get junk mail via snail mail, sure, you have to sort through it and throw out the ads. But that's not where the money is lost with spam. Junk snail mailers pay the post office to send their spam. The infrastructure of the mail system is not threatened because people are paying to advertise. Banner ads can clutter a site, but the owner of the site is getting paid. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Spammers Dont Pay Their Share For the Internet Infrastructure Used. Spammers usually sign up for a dialup account meant for residential use, spam all night, and get their accounts shut off the next day. Often they signed up with a fake credit card number, but by the time the ISP tries to verify it the next morning it's too late. The meatspace equivalent of spam would be a bulk snail mailer forging stamps and putting their bulk mail in the box without paying the postage.
Sure getting advertisements from JC Penney once a week is annoying. But JC Penney pays for their own mail servers and will let you unsubscribe. The real problem is Joe Schmoe entrepreneur who sees a quick buck by setting up some sort of scam and getting "free postage" to send out their advertisements with no legitimate contact info and no way to be removed from their list.
Think, people!
True. Probably the majority. But not all. :-)
Believe it or not, there are those of us out there that don't pirate. We actually buy our music, and if we need to use non-free software we actually buy it. And we don't install it on other people's machines and we don't burn copies of their cds when they want to share with friends. We don't let them keep "archival copies" of proprietary things we bought, knowing they might use them. And as much as not being able to watch encrypted DVDs on our machines pisses us off, we won't use illegal software even though we disagree with its illegality. Not everyone that reminds people (and rightfully so) that their GPL'ed code isn't public domain is a hypocrite.
And yes, I still get laughed at at work for making my parents buy Windows instead of finding them a warezed copy.