... wonderful idea. Look for it to be integrated by Nokia in a few months.... prol'y a good money-maker too, I bet you could sell lots of background noises at $0.75 per download.
Start recording your own noises now, so that you can be first to go live with a downloadable noise web store!
No wait, this is SlashDot... we need GPL'ed noises. Then we can sue SCO when they go into the cell phone business and start stealing our noises after their litigation business collapses.
Ha! In Soviet Russia, background noises *you*! Oh... wait, that didn't work either. Sheesh. I'm giving up.
I'm not sure about the amount of power. I gather that they are using "enough" to get to the Part 15 emmissions limit (which is pretty large, if you are a nearby shortwave receiver) and are seeking waivers to the Part 15 duty cycle limit. It's the duty cycle that makes this such a problem. A short burst of interference would have about the same impact as a static crash. BPL would be like living in a 24x7 severe thunderstorm. It would raise the HF noise floor in my neighborhood by 60dB to 70dB or so. No more Voice of America, no more BBC World Service. KFS would not hear any more ships in the Pacific Ocean.
So far, they are *not* Part 15 certified. They are operating under an experimental license, NOT part 15, because there is no way they can pass the current Part 15 requirements, especially with respect to being "intermittent" emitters. They are continuous. The BPL industry is trying to get a change in Part 15 to make them legal under Part 15 -- at this point they are not and are therefor licensed. They are broadband from 1500 KHz or so (upper end of AM BC) to about 80 MHz.
BTW -- just in case anyone is still reading this story, it is not just hams that are upset. Shortwave broadcasters are upset -- you can write off being able to hear them in a BPL neighborhood. Also all the military/embassy/commercial/ship-to-shore users in the hf spectrum.
Let me tell you about how Part 15 certification *really* works. They found no problems because they didn't go looking for them. The only BPL trials so far have been: 1) very limited in area, 2) very limited in time, (1 year? Continuous? Hardee-har) 3) some of them on underground primaries, 4) they don't poll HF spectrum users to find out about interference.
The BPL trials have winked on and off so fast that no interference complaints could be logged. It takes a *lot* of time to document an interference complaint so that it is sufficient for an FCC filing.
The Part 15 industry is notorious for submitting "lab queens" to the FCC for certification. Especially the Part 15 devices that run on house wiring and over power lines... they only *model* the power lines, and the models are pathetically simple-minded -- the better to pass Part 15.
Part 15 is a cesspool of spectrum mismanagement and BPL is the biggest turd ever. What galls me is that the FCC should be playing honest broker here, but instead they are cheerleading a questionable technology.
So, let's help him out. Would it be moderately parallel? Slightly parallel? Hmmm... what is opposite of "massive"... light-weight parallel? Hey... there's a buzzword with pointy-hairedness all over it: "light-weight parallel processing"
Corporations are not going to be blocking mail based on a lack of SPF, Caller-ID, or anything.
??
Why do you say that? It doesn't make sense to me. Corps large enough to have 1+ mail admins already are up to their armpits in deployed and operational spam and virus filtering tools. SPF doesn't have much downside for them, only upside. Maybe *tiny* companies where the mail server is a 1 hour a week of some programmer that has been saddled with playing net-admin during his lunch hours will be slow to get this rolling, but it seems to me that companies with actual IT staff will be pretty quick about it.
Roving user is not an issue for big companies, since the road-warriors need to VPN into the corp net to get to the mail server anyway, so viola, they are no longer "roving" as far as SPF is concerned.
Feel free to convince me that I'm wrong. Use data, actual experience, and facts. OK -- I realize that using any of those three is a risk to one's karma. Post AC, if you need to:-)
Indeed!! That stuff drives me nuts. At first, I tried to slog through his crap to find out what he was trying to say, but that French chef schtick just got in the way. Pretty quickly, I just started completely ignoring his columns. Then I dropped the magazine. It was an easy decision... which of two Linux magazines do I want to continue paying for? Easy: shit-can the FRENCH CHEF magazine.
County officials have not yet determined if they will tell the families involved about the incident.
The county has lost sight of it's moral obligations. How could they *not* tell the people involved? Some may have double-damn-good personal safety reasons for knowing that their privacy has been compromised.
Really, why give a contractor real data? You can copy the schema into a toy database and make up dummy records for all the interesting programming cases. *That* is the only thing that should go out of the house. Anything else is just stupid.
And *not* telling people that you have compromized their privacy and perhaps the personal safety of their children is simply immoral. It should be illegal, and it most certainly is grounds for a big-time law suit against the county.
Of course, the county attorney knows that and will fix it when he gets involved... let's hope he reads SlashDot:-)
"I have good communicationing skills. As you seeing from cover letter, I can speaking and writing very well English"
Okaaaay... look, I don't need a James Joyce clone for an entry level engineering job so this kind of English is not a disqualifier by itself, but I try to avoid the delusional. Don't fib.
Worst resume boner:
Some guy got past the screeing process with a resume that looked quite good. Lot's of relevant experience items. So, naturally, I thought I'd pick one and let him expound, you know, give him a chance to show his stuff. First one fizzled. Second. Third. So, about the fifth try I decided to pick one a drill down to the bedrock, what did this guy really know? He listed experiece with SPICE. So I asked him some basic SPICE questions. Deer in headlights. It turns out, the "experiece" this guy had with spice, is that when he was a lab monitor some grad student had needed SPICE on a workstation, so he had tar'ed it off the tape. THAT WAS IT. He ran tar to pull SPICE off a tape. His entire resume was just as inflated as that item. His interview day ended shortly after.
Don't inflate, don't stretch. It will bite you in the ass, big time.
What kinds of suggestions would Slashdotters make in addition to Mr. Kerr's to help make open source software on public library shelves a widespread reality?
Here is my idea, and I hearby place it the public domain for all to steal... er... implement.
Put OSS on breakfast food boxes. Seriously. I've seen breakfast cereal boxes with CDs bound to them... games and so forth, so why not OSS? Think about the Wheaties(tm) box, with pictures of athletes on it. Only we put famous OSS programmers on it. Linus, of course, and Larry Wall, and Guido, and... well, grep the sources. Then we include the source disk for their stuff. I propose a modified version of Cheerios(tm) for food content. Only instead of just 0's, we have 1's, too. "Bits" breakfast food.
We're talking about a vendor-to-vendor relationship here, so there is more room to ask questions, and you are talking to a different sales force. You can ask them about what validation they do, or even tour their validation lab. Escalate paths are the same thing... consumer-to-vendor escalate paths vary wildly. Vendor-to-vendor escalate paths have a much better action-to-bullshit ratio, in general. (Been on both ends of *that*:-)
I disagree, because the vendor that makes the software gets to take on the validation costs. They have an escalate path and someone specific to crank on when it fails.
quite true. non-self-supporting users are looking for someone who will shoulder the support burden. inserting one's self in the middle can lead to customer satisfaction issues if not well handled.
Well, they don't mention *why* they can not test. In a past life, I have managed both hardware and software validation laboratories. It is an expensive proposition to do it well. Windows is the worst.. Between 95, 95osr1, 95osr2, 98, 98se, 98me, variants of 2000... and the fact that every application install is an OS upgrade because of DLL-Hell... and then add in a zillion flavors of language support (OK, I was running 98me with the left-to-right Hebrew keyboard, the German version of Visual Studio, and Oriental character file name support...)... oh, now cross all these with hardware variation, chipset, cpu, what-have-you.
So, personally, I can well believe that *if* they looked at the cost of validating some particular build of some particular OSS software for download from their web site, that they would conclude that it cost too much. So "We can't because it costs too much" is a reasonable response. Chicken, yes, and maybe doesn't server the customer the best possible way, but reasonable.
Of course, every time I've dealt with Dell in the past they've been idiots, so that might be a reason, too.
One rat hole that IT departments go down is trying to get one configuration to serve everyone. It won't. Managers and admins need good e-mail and calendaring. Developers need something radically different... and much more flexible. A lot of arguments happen when IT tries to force the generic solution to non-generic problems.
Giving developers there own firewalled-off sub-nets makes sense some times. I used to run a software validation lab. I *knew* we would be installing dangerous shit, like buggy network drivers, beta OS's with experimental network file systems, etc. Anybody can see that there is no way my lab should be on the corporate network. The corporate IT department would have stonewalled all the way until a VP cracked their skulls. They were/are stuck in the "one-size-fits-all" mentality that can stop productive development work cold. Fortunately, our division had our own IT department dedicated to supporting developers. They helped me solve the problem. We built a dual-homed file server (with no back-up, just RAID). Basically, a firewall that routes zero, zip, nada. But we could push files back and forth to the "real world". The chaos of my lab was thus contained... my team was only allowed to shoot their own toes off:-)
Its about identifying and solving the *real* problem. In this specific instance. Not force-fitting the generic solution onto a unique problem.
That argument is just plain silly. The international treaty has a general purpose "we'll comply with the treaty only if we feel like it" escape cause for everyone's military. We may not like it much when despotic regimes invoke that clause, but it is necessary from the standpoint of our own defense. Or are you saying our missile defense systems should not try to jam the control signals of incoming enemy missiles?
I wonder why Chris Hellwig himself does not reply.
Well, if you ever look in your day planner and see that for the next 6 weeks you have twice-per-week 3 hour meetings with the company lawyers for deposition training, you will wonder no more.
Nice troll, but I'll bite. I'm happy for you that you are recognized as an expert on computers. When you also become expert at time management, like say, the day when you grow up and your time actually becomes valuable, only very special friends will get your free advice.
As to IBM, I must say that the most pleasant, almost-no-time-on-hold, intelligent, responsive, helpful, "please send it back to us shipping charges COD", help line call I have ever been on was to IBM. I made a note of that.... what a contrast that was to hours of wasted lifespan waiting for and talking to idoits at other companies (Dell, to name one). Using my personal data points, I simply can't paint IBM's customer support with the same brush as everyone else.
Re:Nicest use of XML I've seen
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
XML-RPC. A sort of lightweight SOAP
You realize, of course, that SOAP was derived from/inspired by XML-RPC, don't you? The relationship is not quite so accidental as you make it sound.
The only thing they can do which is a violation is to add to the codebase but not contribute the code added
No. Perfectly OK under the GPL, by design. You can make all the patches you want, without sharing the patches, as long as you don't distribute the binary. RMS feels quite strongly about this.
It would be a violation to distribute binaries but no source.
Some moderators need a better understanding of the GPL.
Finally, a coherent plan for dealing with Darl. All we need to do is tip Darl off to the tremendous potential of ING, and he'll buy it to pursue litigation, thus losing lose interest in SCO and Linux. What a marvelous decoy!
Yesirreee, private ownership is *always* the best way to go for infrastructure. I think the interstate highway system should be turned over to a corporation, run by me, naturally, so that I can turn the whole shebang into a maze of toll roads, and put up coast-to-coast advertising. Oh, and, all those dumpy little state highways will have to be paying an annual connection fee in order to keep using the interchanges.
Seriously, I'm pretty conservative politically, but even I believe that base infrastructure needs to have easy, low-economic-friction access, should be built according to clear standards, and the standards should change *slowly* and *deliberately*.
(although I'm not a regular reader) that explains why... I thought had a reputation for honest writing/reporting. you are so misinformed.
It doesn't take too many readings of Forbes to realize it sees its primary mission as fluffing up the egos of vain CEO's.
Fact checking has never been their forte. "Balance" is not in their house dictionary.
On the one hand, I could invite you to read it more often to see if you agree with me. On the other hand, I believe your time is better spent on just about any other financial press.
Slashdot Mirror
... wonderful idea. Look for it to be integrated by Nokia in a few months.... prol'y a good money-maker too, I bet you could sell lots of background noises at $0.75 per download.
Start recording your own noises now, so that you can be first to go live with a downloadable noise web store!
No wait, this is SlashDot... we need GPL'ed noises. Then we can sue SCO when they go into the cell phone business and start stealing our noises after their litigation business collapses.
Ha! In Soviet Russia, background noises *you*! Oh... wait, that didn't work either. Sheesh. I'm giving up.
I'm not sure about the amount of power. I gather that they are using "enough" to get to the Part 15 emmissions limit (which is pretty large, if you are a nearby shortwave receiver) and are seeking waivers to the Part 15 duty cycle limit. It's the duty cycle that makes this such a problem. A short burst of interference would have about the same impact as a static crash. BPL would be like living in a 24x7 severe thunderstorm. It would raise the HF noise floor in my neighborhood by 60dB to 70dB or so. No more Voice of America, no more BBC World Service. KFS would not hear any more ships in the Pacific Ocean.
So far, they are *not* Part 15 certified. They are operating under an experimental license, NOT part 15, because there is no way they can pass the current Part 15 requirements, especially with respect to being "intermittent" emitters. They are continuous. The BPL industry is trying to get a change in Part 15 to make them legal under Part 15 -- at this point they are not and are therefor licensed. They are broadband from 1500 KHz or so (upper end of AM BC) to about 80 MHz.
BTW -- just in case anyone is still reading this story, it is not just hams that are upset. Shortwave broadcasters are upset -- you can write off being able to hear them in a BPL neighborhood. Also all the military/embassy/commercial/ship-to-shore users in the hf spectrum.
Let me tell you about how Part 15 certification *really* works. They found no problems because they didn't go looking for them. The only BPL trials so far have been: 1) very limited in area, 2) very limited in time, (1 year? Continuous? Hardee-har) 3) some of them on underground primaries, 4) they don't poll HF spectrum users to find out about interference.
The BPL trials have winked on and off so fast that no interference complaints could be logged. It takes a *lot* of time to document an interference complaint so that it is sufficient for an FCC filing.
The Part 15 industry is notorious for submitting "lab queens" to the FCC for certification. Especially the Part 15 devices that run on house wiring and over power lines... they only *model* the power lines, and the models are pathetically simple-minded -- the better to pass Part 15.
Part 15 is a cesspool of spectrum mismanagement and BPL is the biggest turd ever. What galls me is that the FCC should be playing honest broker here, but instead they are cheerleading a questionable technology.
nit picker...
So, let's help him out. Would it be moderately parallel? Slightly parallel? Hmmm... what is opposite of "massive"... light-weight parallel? Hey... there's a buzzword with pointy-hairedness all over it: "light-weight parallel processing"
As for me, I'm massively serial here
Corporations are not going to be blocking mail based on a lack of SPF, Caller-ID, or anything.
:-)
??
Why do you say that? It doesn't make sense to me. Corps large enough to have 1+ mail admins already are up to their armpits in deployed and operational spam and virus filtering tools. SPF doesn't have much downside for them, only upside. Maybe *tiny* companies where the mail server is a 1 hour a week of some programmer that has been saddled with playing net-admin during his lunch hours will be slow to get this rolling, but it seems to me that companies with actual IT staff will be pretty quick about it.
Roving user is not an issue for big companies, since the road-warriors need to VPN into the corp net to get to the mail server anyway, so viola, they are no longer "roving" as far as SPF is concerned.
Feel free to convince me that I'm wrong. Use data, actual experience, and facts. OK -- I realize that using any of those three is a risk to one's karma. Post AC, if you need to
Indeed!! That stuff drives me nuts. At first, I tried to slog through his crap to find out what he was trying to say, but that French chef schtick just got in the way. Pretty quickly, I just started completely ignoring his columns. Then I dropped the magazine. It was an easy decision... which of two Linux magazines do I want to continue paying for? Easy: shit-can the FRENCH CHEF magazine.
Hrumph.
... why the stereotypical *nix guru has a full, woolly beard and a (now probably grey) pony-tail?
wonder no more
County officials have not yet determined if they will tell the families involved about the incident.
:-)
The county has lost sight of it's moral obligations. How could they *not* tell the people involved? Some may have double-damn-good personal safety reasons for knowing that their privacy has been compromised.
Really, why give a contractor real data? You can copy the schema into a toy database and make up dummy records for all the interesting programming cases. *That* is the only thing that should go out of the house. Anything else is just stupid.
And *not* telling people that you have compromized their privacy and perhaps the personal safety of their children is simply immoral. It should be illegal, and it most certainly is grounds for a big-time law suit against the county.
Of course, the county attorney knows that and will fix it when he gets involved... let's hope he reads SlashDot
Yes, I've done some hirin' and some firin'.
Worst cover letter boner:
"I have good communicationing skills. As you seeing from cover letter, I can speaking and writing very well English"
Okaaaay... look, I don't need a James Joyce clone for an entry level engineering job so this kind of English is not a disqualifier by itself, but I try to avoid the delusional. Don't fib.
Worst resume boner:
Some guy got past the screeing process with a resume that looked quite good. Lot's of relevant experience items. So, naturally, I thought I'd pick one and let him expound, you know, give him a chance to show his stuff. First one fizzled. Second. Third. So, about the fifth try I decided to pick one a drill down to the bedrock, what did this guy really know? He listed experiece with SPICE. So I asked him some basic SPICE questions. Deer in headlights. It turns out, the "experiece" this guy had with spice, is that when he was a lab monitor some grad student had needed SPICE on a workstation, so he had tar'ed it off the tape. THAT WAS IT. He ran tar to pull SPICE off a tape. His entire resume was just as inflated as that item. His interview day ended shortly after.
Don't inflate, don't stretch. It will bite you in the ass, big time.
well, clearly then I should have aquired a business method patent. once again, riches escape my grasp.
What kinds of suggestions would Slashdotters make in addition to Mr. Kerr's to help make open source software on public library shelves a widespread reality?
Here is my idea, and I hearby place it the public domain for all to steal... er... implement.
Put OSS on breakfast food boxes. Seriously. I've seen breakfast cereal boxes with CDs bound to them... games and so forth, so why not OSS? Think about the Wheaties(tm) box, with pictures of athletes on it. Only we put famous OSS programmers on it. Linus, of course, and Larry Wall, and Guido, and... well, grep the sources. Then we include the source disk for their stuff. I propose a modified version of Cheerios(tm) for food content. Only instead of just 0's, we have 1's, too. "Bits" breakfast food.
We're talking about a vendor-to-vendor relationship here, so there is more room to ask questions, and you are talking to a different sales force. You can ask them about what validation they do, or even tour their validation lab. Escalate paths are the same thing... consumer-to-vendor escalate paths vary wildly. Vendor-to-vendor escalate paths have a much better action-to-bullshit ratio, in general. (Been on both ends of *that* :-)
I disagree, because the vendor that makes the software gets to take on the validation costs. They have an escalate path and someone specific to crank on when it fails.
quite true. non-self-supporting users are looking for someone who will shoulder the support burden. inserting one's self in the middle can lead to customer satisfaction issues if not well handled.
Well, they don't mention *why* they can not test. In a past life, I have managed both hardware and software validation laboratories. It is an expensive proposition to do it well. Windows is the worst.. Between 95, 95osr1, 95osr2, 98, 98se, 98me, variants of 2000... and the fact that every application install is an OS upgrade because of DLL-Hell... and then add in a zillion flavors of language support (OK, I was running 98me with the left-to-right Hebrew keyboard, the German version of Visual Studio, and Oriental character file name support...) ... oh, now cross all these with hardware variation, chipset, cpu, what-have-you.
So, personally, I can well believe that *if* they looked at the cost of validating some particular build of some particular OSS software for download from their web site, that they would conclude that it cost too much. So "We can't because it costs too much" is a reasonable response. Chicken, yes, and maybe doesn't server the customer the best possible way, but reasonable.
Of course, every time I've dealt with Dell in the past they've been idiots, so that might be a reason, too.
One rat hole that IT departments go down is trying to get one configuration to serve everyone. It won't. Managers and admins need good e-mail and calendaring. Developers need something radically different... and much more flexible. A lot of arguments happen when IT tries to force the generic solution to non-generic problems.
:-)
Giving developers there own firewalled-off sub-nets makes sense some times. I used to run a software validation lab. I *knew* we would be installing dangerous shit, like buggy network drivers, beta OS's with experimental network file systems, etc. Anybody can see that there is no way my lab should be on the corporate network. The corporate IT department would have stonewalled all the way until a VP cracked their skulls. They were/are stuck in the "one-size-fits-all" mentality that can stop productive development work cold. Fortunately, our division had our own IT department dedicated to supporting developers. They helped me solve the problem. We built a dual-homed file server (with no back-up, just RAID). Basically, a firewall that routes zero, zip, nada. But we could push files back and forth to the "real world". The chaos of my lab was thus contained... my team was only allowed to shoot their own toes off
Its about identifying and solving the *real* problem. In this specific instance. Not force-fitting the generic solution onto a unique problem.
That argument is just plain silly. The international treaty has a general purpose "we'll comply with the treaty only if we feel like it" escape cause for everyone's military. We may not like it much when despotic regimes invoke that clause, but it is necessary from the standpoint of our own defense. Or are you saying our missile defense systems should not try to jam the control signals of incoming enemy missiles?
I wonder why Chris Hellwig himself does not reply.
Well, if you ever look in your day planner and see that for the next 6 weeks you have twice-per-week 3 hour meetings with the company lawyers for deposition training, you will wonder no more.
Nice troll, but I'll bite. I'm happy for you that you are recognized as an expert on computers. When you also become expert at time management, like say, the day when you grow up and your time actually becomes valuable, only very special friends will get your free advice.
As to IBM, I must say that the most pleasant, almost-no-time-on-hold, intelligent, responsive, helpful, "please send it back to us shipping charges COD", help line call I have ever been on was to IBM. I made a note of that.... what a contrast that was to hours of wasted lifespan waiting for and talking to idoits at other companies (Dell, to name one). Using my personal data points, I simply can't paint IBM's customer support with the same brush as everyone else.
XML-RPC. A sort of lightweight SOAP
You realize, of course, that SOAP was derived from/inspired by XML-RPC, don't you? The relationship is not quite so accidental as you make it sound.
Ummm.... +5 Insightful?
The only thing they can do which is a violation is to add to the codebase but not contribute the code added
No. Perfectly OK under the GPL, by design. You can make all the patches you want, without sharing the patches, as long as you don't distribute the binary. RMS feels quite strongly about this.
It would be a violation to distribute binaries but no source.
Some moderators need a better understanding of the GPL.
Finally, a coherent plan for dealing with Darl. All we need to do is tip Darl off to the tremendous potential of ING, and he'll buy it to pursue litigation, thus losing lose interest in SCO and Linux. What a marvelous decoy!
Yesirreee, private ownership is *always* the best way to go for infrastructure. I think the interstate highway system should be turned over to a corporation, run by me, naturally, so that I can turn the whole shebang into a maze of toll roads, and put up coast-to-coast advertising. Oh, and, all those dumpy little state highways will have to be paying an annual connection fee in order to keep using the interchanges.
Seriously, I'm pretty conservative politically, but even I believe that base infrastructure needs to have easy, low-economic-friction access, should be built according to clear standards, and the standards should change *slowly* and *deliberately*.
(although I'm not a regular reader)
that explains why...
I thought had a reputation for honest writing/reporting.
you are so misinformed.
It doesn't take too many readings of Forbes to realize it sees its primary mission as fluffing up the egos of vain CEO's.
Fact checking has never been their forte. "Balance" is not in their house dictionary.
On the one hand, I could invite you to read it more often to see if you agree with me. On the other hand, I believe your time is better spent on just about any other financial press.