>>> When you get off the train in Paris, I'm guessing that you can step straight onto the intracity transit system.
Late reply... yeah, of course, most train stations have metro/subway stops connected to them. Paris, London, Rome (only the main terminal in Rome), Venice, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Hong Kong, and Beijing are the ones I've seen. You get to and from the train station on the metro, no problem.
Yeah, for a personal file server, software should be good enough, but I wouldn't risk it for a "real" server. You can even use IDE/ATA/SATA drives, although there it gets more complex if you want more than 4 drives.
A simple, very safe server setup is RAID 5 w/ a hot spare. One drive fails, the array rebuilds on the hot spare, and you replace the failed drive whenever you have a chance.
In theory, some of this is possible in software, but a good RAID controller card is much, much better.
Folders in a GUI don't have that much in common with real-life folders anymore either
They don't have much in common (I've never seen anyone put a folder inside a folder), but at least they look like physical file folders.
That said, I agree that there's no reason to change the floppy icon for something more "correct." I'm at a Windows PC right now, and in a quick look at Excel I see four out of sixteen toolbar icons that make sense.
The alternative mentioned earlier, with arrows into and out of a folder might make sense as an eventual replacement, but for now, the floppy is fine.
I think the reason for the music tie-in is that there's more and more competition for the coffee-drinker's dollar and they need to come up with new ways to stand out. Within two blocks of my apartment, there's a Starbucks, a Seattle's best, and two local coffee houses. 10 minute's walk up the street, there a cluster of about 6 more coffee places, including 2 Starbucks at the same intersection.
But between the insane cost and the burnt flavour of their coffee, I never go to Starbucks and the ability to put together a CD isn't going to entice me.
Paul Graham has the answer to this, in one of his articles about Bayesian filtering:
That's the whole problem: spammers waste the time of a million people just to reach the 15 stupidest or most perverted.
The people who are responding to spam are stupider than the ones that go for the "It's, like 3 bucks on a hundred! And they're open late!" check-cashing services.
You get hired because they like you, or at least dislike you less than the other candidates.
It often is this subjective...
How a person will fit in and how easy they are to work with are generally critical. There are usually lots of people who have the technical skills, the trick is to find a bunch of them, then try to find one who's a good person to work with.
The technical stuff is easy to filter for, if you make a mistake and interview someone who's not qualified, it comes out in the interview. The feeling that a person would fit in is a lot harder.
Having just come back from Hong Kong, it also pisses me off that there's no pre-paid cell service here (Vancouver, BC, Canada) as good as the Orange Card in Hong Kong.
You buy a SIM card for HK$98 (about CDN$20) and get your phone # when you activate it. As long as you keep re-filling, you keep the same #. The thing is, it's only about 0.30HK/minute (billed per 6seconds I think) so that first 98 bucks goes a long way. I think you have a year to use up the credits. If you want to make long distance calls, just buy a calling card for that.
Of course, with 6 or 8 or however many people it is now in Hong Kong, the economics are a bit different there... But pre-paid is getting less and less useful here, you have to re-fill every month.
I guess it's a great business model - steal as much money as possible before the customer notices. When they leave you, refuse to hand it back and let them realize the cost of an attorney is more than the value of what they've stolen. It happens all the time in the carrier/wholesale telecom business - so much that most telcos have to have a full time carrier audit person (or more) that gets to review and discover all the "mistakes."
As much as possible, I won't deal with companies that try to screw me.
I've seen examples of this sort of "business model," almost everyone I know has had things happen to them, and lots of posters here have cited examples. It might not be an active conspiracy on any company's part, but it's too widespread for it to be a theory - it's real.
I think that lots of companies with fancy computerized (ObAnti-M$: probably Windows-based) billing systems at least allow glitches to occur, if not somehow encourage them. Then it's up to the customer to do the auditing - to find the mistakes and fix them.
For any billing system with manual order entering, it wouldn't take a conspiracy to create computer errors, just normal human errors will occur. I've seen this in a small retail operation, the amount billed by one supplier (dairy) was regularly higher than was actually delivered. In this case, I think the driver just accounted for damaged goods by dumping them and adding a couple cartons here and there to his deliveries. Then it was up to us to notice the problem, go to the trouble of faxing our delivery statement in - there's no way we caught all the mistakes.
I consider it a form of outsourcing and downloading: the big companies lay off staff and set things up so they don't have to do any checking, then the smaller guys have to - essentially - do the work of the bigger company.
It sucks, but the only way around it I've found is to check all bills (I only manage to check most of mine, so I'm sure I miss some) and to get any and all mistakes reversed or to cancel.
As I said, as much as possible, I won't deal with companies that try to screw me, but that's not always easy - I've crossed 2 out of 3 cell companies off my list now... and the remaining one is too expensive!
But everyone should fight back, using any legal means, no matter how obnoxious - if I am talking to a customer service rep for a company that's over/mis-charged me, I'll tell them up front that I don't blame them, but I'm gonna yell at them as the representative of a company that's screwed me.
Argh, this pisses me off more than I can say... As time goes by, more and more often I'm thinking of going back to all-cash. Any system less transparent is a pain in the ass.
Similar to inertial confinement, but without all the expensive lasers and without said lasers using up huge amounts of power themselves making breakeven pretty tenuous.
It would have been no problem: since everyone had to walk uphill all the way in both directions, it would've been possible to get a Razor and coast downhill in the opposite direction.
The other item to balance off against this is the vendor's long-standing history of OS issues and application exploits.
There's one more item, related to "vendor viability": Sure, M$ will likely be around for a while, but there is no guarantee that any of their products will be viable. They can and will stop supporting any product if they think they can get more money out of it i.e. force people to upgrade.
So using VM software to run older OSes and apps on newer hardware is probably less viable with an M$ product.
"Oversized baby pictures with a really hideous background"
Re:Truly P2P if SOBIG.G contains the spam message
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 1
Just thousands and thousands of hapless home machines squeezing out a slow and steady drip of spam.
This is certainly what the article is hinting out, but I'm not sure it's feasible... the army of zombies has to get its orders from somewhere. It might not be just one central machine, but if the spammer wants to control his army, they have to either accept some form of communcation from him, or they have to contact him. Either way, it should trace back to a small # of computers.
Maybe not, maybe it could be hidden... It's looking like ever more restictions on outgoing connections from PCs...
Anyway, diamond semiconductor might be a better outlet for thos artificial diamonds anyway...
DeBeers is smart and agressive at protecting their monopoly, but if diamond semiconductors become viable, that might finally end it.
There are limits (you need a diamond mine) on how many people can go into business producing natural diamonds, but with artificial diamonds, there is room for a lot more companies.
Right now, there are only a couple companies working on artificial diamonds. If diamond semiconductors become as widely used as, e.g., GaAs, there would be many more companies making equipment. This proliferation of equipment would lead to better and cheaper diamond-making machines, so more people can get into the business.
It might take a while, depending on how much DeBeers is able to fight it, but widespread use of diamonds in the semiconductor industry will inevitably make it possible to bypass DeBeers.
What is absolutely unbelievable to me is that investors are accepting and banking on SCO's FUD tactic.
It is insane, but I guess given the media coverage SCO's getting, it's not completely unbelievable.
It's the media coverage that I find unbelievably insane.
What I find amazing is the whole tone of the coverage of each side of the issue: SCO's position comes across as quite reasonable, and you hardly ever see the words "alleged copyright violations." OTOH, there doesn't seem to be a coherent "Linux" side showing up in the media... there are lots of individual points being made, but they don't get reported consistently.
What's really needed is for someone (I'm not sure who, maybe IBM, maybe RedHat, maybe Linux, ??) to consistenly comment on every single event with the same points: the violation is only alleged (with very sketchy real data at this point), the issue would be with distributers, not end users, etc.
On my last move I had to "retire" a couple of 11/725s and most of my "wall of orange"
AT home!?!? That would be a death sentance for me if I even suggested it.
I happen to have lots of bookshelf space at work, so I'm keeping most of the Grey Wall that came with our MicroVAX 3400s (which are still used by one guy in the company for another year). I kept some of the orange binders that came with the 11/750 we had 15 years ago, but the contents are long gone.
In general, I'm a nostalgia freak, but there's just not enough time/storage space/money/interest to make it worthwhile for me to keep as much of the old stuff as I'd like or to call around and try to find someone who would take it. I've tossed out so much working but useless stuff that it no longer bothers me.
Well, almost. Our building was originally wired with a thickwire backbone and thinwire office connections. The DELNIs just keep on running so they're still plugged in, and I'll find some old system to hook up to them.
The only useful things I keep around are some VT420 terminals for setting up switches and a gutted MicroVAX 3400 case that makes a great temporary computer stand: just the right size and easy to wheel around. Oh, and the magnets are from RF- or RZ- hard drives are just amazing!
So far the replies to this haven't included the answer... Anyone? Please?
If they're the copyright holders, it's probably not illegal for them to make the songs available (ie it's probably not entrapment).
But in these particular cases that they're issuing subpoenas for, doesn't that mean that someone copying those particular files is ok? Since it's made available by the copyright holder on a file-sharing network...
Photo quality lasers: you're right, they just don't exist (until you get into the very very high-end).
We've got a Xerox NC60 and it's been quite reliable for us (unlike an earlier post's experience), but it has the same insane warm-up period accompanied by noises that seem to have been designed to make it sound like it's just about to start printing.
The Tektronix models that use the plastic "ink" sticks are pretty good, and cheap enough to run off 100s of copies on. They used to give you the black ink for free, I don't know if that's still the case.
For personal use, we've managed to get our money's worth out of an Epson 640, which gives photo-quality on good paper, but that was a fluke: Staples has a deal where they give you a free cartridge if they're out of stock. We caught them w/out the cartridge one time and sent in 3 other people to get one.
Slashdot Mirror
>>> When you get off the train in Paris, I'm guessing that you can step straight onto the intracity transit system.
Late reply... yeah, of course, most train stations have metro/subway stops connected to them. Paris, London, Rome (only the main terminal in Rome), Venice, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Hong Kong, and Beijing are the ones I've seen. You get to and from the train station on the metro, no problem.
No, the VAX 7000 and 10000 used VAX CPUs
They released DEC7000 and 10000's with Alphas
What the hell are you all talking about?!
VAXes (surprise, surprise) had VAX CPUs, not Alphas.
They had to rename the operating system from VAX/VMS to Open VMS/VAX and OpenVMS/Alpha.
Kids today... I'm surprised no-one's made a comment about Pentium-powered PowerMacs or something equally non-sensical.
Yeah, for a personal file server, software should be good enough, but I wouldn't risk it for a "real" server. You can even use IDE/ATA/SATA drives, although there it gets more complex if you want more than 4 drives.
A simple, very safe server setup is RAID 5 w/ a hot spare. One drive fails, the array rebuilds on the hot spare, and you replace the failed drive whenever you have a chance.
In theory, some of this is possible in software, but a good RAID controller card is much, much better.
Folders in a GUI don't have that much in common with real-life folders anymore either
They don't have much in common (I've never seen anyone put a folder inside a folder), but at least they look like physical file folders.
That said, I agree that there's no reason to change the floppy icon for something more "correct." I'm at a Windows PC right now, and in a quick look at Excel I see four out of sixteen toolbar icons that make sense.
The alternative mentioned earlier, with arrows into and out of a folder might make sense as an eventual replacement, but for now, the floppy is fine.
... But Gretzky scores on the rebound!
I think the reason for the music tie-in is that there's more and more competition for the coffee-drinker's dollar and they need to come up with new ways to stand out. Within two blocks of my apartment, there's a Starbucks, a Seattle's best, and two local coffee houses. 10 minute's walk up the street, there a cluster of about 6 more coffee places, including 2 Starbucks at the same intersection.
But between the insane cost and the burnt flavour of their coffee, I never go to Starbucks and the ability to put together a CD isn't going to entice me.
The people who are responding to spam are stupider than the ones that go for the "It's, like 3 bucks on a hundred! And they're open late!" check-cashing services.
Yah, I'm an insesitve clod.
"Injunction junction, what's your function()...?"
Puttin' together orders, and lawsuits, and judgements...
Not that there's gonna be any judgements any time soon, SCO's just gonna keep dragging this out...
You get hired because they like you, or at least dislike you less than the other candidates.
It often is this subjective...
How a person will fit in and how easy they are to work with are generally critical. There are usually lots of people who have the technical skills, the trick is to find a bunch of them, then try to find one who's a good person to work with.
The technical stuff is easy to filter for, if you make a mistake and interview someone who's not qualified, it comes out in the interview. The feeling that a person would fit in is a lot harder.
... is how many years old now? This must be another one of those M$ innovations we hear so much about:
...
1 convert text-only threading clues to cute graphics
2
3 profit!
Having just come back from Hong Kong, it also pisses me off that there's no pre-paid cell service here (Vancouver, BC, Canada) as good as the Orange Card in Hong Kong.
You buy a SIM card for HK$98 (about CDN$20) and get your phone # when you activate it. As long as you keep re-filling, you keep the same #. The thing is, it's only about 0.30HK/minute (billed per 6seconds I think) so that first 98 bucks goes a long way. I think you have a year to use up the credits. If you want to make long distance calls, just buy a calling card for that.
Of course, with 6 or 8 or however many people it is now in Hong Kong, the economics are a bit different there... But pre-paid is getting less and less useful here, you have to re-fill every month.
Moving sounds good...
I guess it's a great business model - steal as much money as possible before the customer notices. When they leave you, refuse to hand it back and let them realize the cost of an attorney is more than the value of what they've stolen. It happens all the time in the carrier/wholesale telecom business - so much that most telcos have to have a full time carrier audit person (or more) that gets to review and discover all the "mistakes."
As much as possible, I won't deal with companies that try to screw me.
I've seen examples of this sort of "business model," almost everyone I know has had things happen to them, and lots of posters here have cited examples. It might not be an active conspiracy on any company's part, but it's too widespread for it to be a theory - it's real.
I think that lots of companies with fancy computerized (ObAnti-M$: probably Windows-based) billing systems at least allow glitches to occur, if not somehow encourage them. Then it's up to the customer to do the auditing - to find the mistakes and fix them.
For any billing system with manual order entering, it wouldn't take a conspiracy to create computer errors, just normal human errors will occur. I've seen this in a small retail operation, the amount billed by one supplier (dairy) was regularly higher than was actually delivered. In this case, I think the driver just accounted for damaged goods by dumping them and adding a couple cartons here and there to his deliveries. Then it was up to us to notice the problem, go to the trouble of faxing our delivery statement in - there's no way we caught all the mistakes.
I consider it a form of outsourcing and downloading: the big companies lay off staff and set things up so they don't have to do any checking, then the smaller guys have to - essentially - do the work of the bigger company.
It sucks, but the only way around it I've found is to check all bills (I only manage to check most of mine, so I'm sure I miss some) and to get any and all mistakes reversed or to cancel.
As I said, as much as possible, I won't deal with companies that try to screw me, but that's not always easy - I've crossed 2 out of 3 cell companies off my list now... and the remaining one is too expensive!
But everyone should fight back, using any legal means, no matter how obnoxious - if I am talking to a customer service rep for a company that's over/mis-charged me, I'll tell them up front that I don't blame them, but I'm gonna yell at them as the representative of a company that's screwed me.
Argh, this pisses me off more than I can say... As time goes by, more and more often I'm thinking of going back to all-cash. Any system less transparent is a pain in the ass.
Whois sometimes gives valid location information, but for our company it's seriously scrambled.
Geobutton thinks I'm in a city about 1000km from where I really am, so it's obviously not totally reliable either.
General Fusion
Similar to inertial confinement, but without all the expensive lasers and without said lasers using up huge amounts of power themselves making breakeven pretty tenuous.
It would have been no problem: since everyone had to walk uphill all the way in both directions, it would've been possible to get a Razor and coast downhill in the opposite direction.
Wait a minute...
There's one more item, related to "vendor viability": Sure, M$ will likely be around for a while, but there is no guarantee that any of their products will be viable. They can and will stop supporting any product if they think they can get more money out of it i.e. force people to upgrade.
So using VM software to run older OSes and apps on newer hardware is probably less viable with an M$ product.
Or,
"News for Nerds"
Not
"Oversized baby pictures with a really hideous background"
Just thousands and thousands of hapless home machines squeezing out a slow and steady drip of spam.
This is certainly what the article is hinting out, but I'm not sure it's feasible... the army of zombies has to get its orders from somewhere. It might not be just one central machine, but if the spammer wants to control his army, they have to either accept some form of communcation from him, or they have to contact him. Either way, it should trace back to a small # of computers.
Maybe not, maybe it could be hidden... It's looking like ever more restictions on outgoing connections from PCs...
Anyway, diamond semiconductor might be a better outlet for thos artificial diamonds anyway...
DeBeers is smart and agressive at protecting their monopoly, but if diamond semiconductors become viable, that might finally end it.
There are limits (you need a diamond mine) on how many people can go into business producing natural diamonds, but with artificial diamonds, there is room for a lot more companies.
Right now, there are only a couple companies working on artificial diamonds. If diamond semiconductors become as widely used as, e.g., GaAs, there would be many more companies making equipment. This proliferation of equipment would lead to better and cheaper diamond-making machines, so more people can get into the business.
It might take a while, depending on how much DeBeers is able to fight it, but widespread use of diamonds in the semiconductor industry will inevitably make it possible to bypass DeBeers.
What is absolutely unbelievable to me is that investors are accepting and banking on SCO's FUD tactic.
It is insane, but I guess given the media coverage SCO's getting, it's not completely unbelievable.
It's the media coverage that I find unbelievably insane.
What I find amazing is the whole tone of the coverage of each side of the issue: SCO's position comes across as quite reasonable, and you hardly ever see the words "alleged copyright violations." OTOH, there doesn't seem to be a coherent "Linux" side showing up in the media... there are lots of individual points being made, but they don't get reported consistently.
What's really needed is for someone (I'm not sure who, maybe IBM, maybe RedHat, maybe Linux, ??) to consistenly comment on every single event with the same points: the violation is only alleged (with very sketchy real data at this point), the issue would be with distributers, not end users, etc.
On my last move I had to "retire" a couple of 11/725s and most of my "wall of orange"
AT home!?!? That would be a death sentance for me if I even suggested it.
I happen to have lots of bookshelf space at work, so I'm keeping most of the Grey Wall that came with our MicroVAX 3400s (which are still used by one guy in the company for another year). I kept some of the orange binders that came with the 11/750 we had 15 years ago, but the contents are long gone.
In general, I'm a nostalgia freak, but there's just not enough time/storage space/money/interest to make it worthwhile for me to keep as much of the old stuff as I'd like or to call around and try to find someone who would take it. I've tossed out so much working but useless stuff that it no longer bothers me.
Well, almost. Our building was originally wired with a thickwire backbone and thinwire office connections. The DELNIs just keep on running so they're still plugged in, and I'll find some old system to hook up to them.
The only useful things I keep around are some VT420 terminals for setting up switches and a gutted MicroVAX 3400 case that makes a great temporary computer stand: just the right size and easy to wheel around. Oh, and the magnets are from RF- or RZ- hard drives are just amazing!
So far the replies to this haven't included the answer... Anyone? Please?
If they're the copyright holders, it's probably not illegal for them to make the songs available (ie it's probably not entrapment).
But in these particular cases that they're issuing subpoenas for, doesn't that mean that someone copying those particular files is ok? Since it's made available by the copyright holder on a file-sharing network...
Photo quality lasers: you're right, they just don't exist (until you get into the very very high-end).
We've got a Xerox NC60 and it's been quite reliable for us (unlike an earlier post's experience), but it has the same insane warm-up period accompanied by noises that seem to have been designed to make it sound like it's just about to start printing.
The Tektronix models that use the plastic "ink" sticks are pretty good, and cheap enough to run off 100s of copies on. They used to give you the black ink for free, I don't know if that's still the case.
For personal use, we've managed to get our money's worth out of an Epson 640, which gives photo-quality on good paper, but that was a fluke: Staples has a deal where they give you a free cartridge if they're out of stock. We caught them w/out the cartridge one time and sent in 3 other people to get one.