AOL only bought Netscape for the traffic going to the portal site. Management viewed Netscape's software portfolio as unwanted baggage, so they jettisoned that as early as they could, getting as much goodwill and publicity out of it as possible. $2M is chump change for a company bringing in over a billion in cash every year.
The irony is that immediately after taking over, traffic on the Netscape.com portal site dropped by 90-95%. AOL has an amazing talent for buying high-traffic web properties and turning them into low-traffic ones. Having witnessed it first-hand, the disconnect between AOL's management and reality is utterly mind-boggling./ex-AOL employee
the public would be much more comfortable with a conventional explosive
To put it bluntly, the public are a bunch of uneducated morons. When it comes to resolving an (inter)national crisis, their opinions and comfort levels are irrelevant. Unless you have a PhD in geophysics and an extensive experience in deep-water drilling, you really don't have anything significant to contribute to the discussion. STFU and let the experts do their jobs.
One of the things education and experience gives you is an understanding of the limits of your knowledge. I'm a very good engineer, in my own specialty. Outside of that specialty, I'll defer to experts in that field.
I'm a photographer. Find me a laser printer that will do gallery-quality photos and I'll use it. Laser printers aren't appropriate for every job
The lab I use can profitably sell me 50 11x14 archival quality giclee (inkjet) prints for less than $70 -- that's including ink, labor, paper, packaging, and shipping. So why in the hell does it cost me over $120 just in ink to make the same number of prints myself? You know the labs not spending anything close to that on ink.
The only people who are going to take a job like this are untalented drones of marginal technical ability who can't get a job elsewhere, especially at the . Furthermore, peer pressure is going to be enough to discourage most people (talented or not) from getting paid to turn narc / sell out to the man.
The smart, creative people are going to be on the other side of the fight.
Anyone with half a brain can tell that the copyright cartels are fighting a losing battle, desperately clinging to a business model that has been rendered obsolete by modern technology. P2P would largely disappear overnight if there was a legal alternative that offered a perceived benefit (guaranteed quality, good search, high speed download, brand loyalty, etc) over a pirate source. The studios are unwilling to do that because then they would have to charge prices that are dictated by the market, rather than by monopolistic fiat.
There will always be some people who will take free over speed or convenience, but there are plenty who won't -- just witness Starbuck's ability to sell a quarter's worth of coffee at a 1000+% markup.
a smile make you appear friendly, being friendly is appreciating and empathizing.
A smile makes you appear friendly to OTHER HUMANS.
Baring your teeth to an alien could very well be interpreted a sign of aggression or who knows what.
For all you know, they might communicate though pheromones and your halitosis is saying in their language "I'm going to rip out your snorklax and shove it up your frebnark".
any aliens with the technology to travel across interstellar space would have to have some pretty phenomenal computer technology
The only thing safe to assume about aliens is that they will be ALIEN. As in, completely unlike us in every way. It's a mistake to terrestrialize ETs, let alone anthropomorphize them. Their concept of 'communication', let alone their culture and motivations, will likely be be so wildly different than ours as to be beyond our ability to even conceive of it.
Hell, we have a hard enough time understanding and communicating with other HUMAN cultures. Aliens, especially aliens sophisticated enough to cross interstellar distances? Forget about it.
Sadly, there are a lot of people who are simply incapable of performing any job that requires original or creative thought. Call me an elitist if you will, but you know it's true. There are only so many burgers that need to be flipped, floors that need to be mopped, etc.
Put someone into a job that's beyond their capacity they'll do it poorly, be miserable while doing it, and make everyone everyone miserable in the process.
A casual acquaintance from high school has been working for the last 25 years cleaning up roadkill for the county, and he's as happy as a pig in slop doing what most people here would consider a shit job. He'd consider any job that involved more math than tallying up how many critters he scraped off the pavement to be the "shit job".
I was going to say, "Cool, one stop identity theft".
I'm not even sure I want to even visit the UK anymore. Shame, as the Tower of London has the best collection of medieval arms and armor in the world, and I was looking forward to seeing it one day.
Anyway, Brits, enjoy your police state. Let us know how it works out for you.
That's the way it's SUPPOSED to work. Sometimes it does actually work that way, as long as your explanation agrees with the judge's prejudices.
If you try and tell at judge something conflicts with his ideology, he'll ignore the facts and rule based on his ignorant superstitions. IF you can afford to, you can appeal, but that is a long expensive fight and sometimes you have to go through multiple appeals to get a panel of judges that can see past their Bibles.
When you have children to support, their welfare takes priority over all other concerns. The discussions were more along the lines of "what will we do when I turn down this job, if I can't find another" versus "should I take this job or not".
You generally don't chose your citizenship; it's an accident of birth. Only a tiny percentage of the population will ever immigrate to another country, even if they had the opportunity to do so.
Not so with employment - except in the case of conscription, it's entirely voluntary who you chose to work for.
Ignorance of the company's nature may be a defense, but if you willfully go to work for a company knowing from the outset that they routinely engage in illegal, immoral, or unethical behavior as a matter of standard practice, you are a willing collaborator in those misdeeds and bear your own share of guilt, even if you are not directly involved. CF: Nuremberg trials.
THIS... after 20 years in IT, I've worked with a lot of H1B's. My experience has been that the bell curve of ability among immigrant workers seems to be inverted -- they tend to be either insanely talented or completely incompetent, with very little middle ground between the two.
Standard disclaimers about confirmation bias and limited sample size apply.
Exactly. There's no reason to keep logs past a certain window unless you have a specific business reason for doing so (debugging,data mining, etc).
Logfile rotation should be done routinely and religiously as a matter of corporate policy (providing there is no notice made of pending litigation). That which is deleted cannot be subpoenaed.
There are no good people working at bad companies. They chose to work there. Even the "it was the only job I could get" defense is complete bullshit. You ALWAYS have a choice, even if you don't like the alternatives you have to chose from.
After I got laid off the last time, I got a VERY lucrative offer from an extremely scummy company that did data mining and direct marketing. After a long discussion with my wife, I turned it down, even though there was a very real chance that doing so would have meant losing my house. Fortunately something else came along, but it was scary there for a while.
That old story. I'm surprised people don't know it's fake when they hear it:
1. Given the curvature of the earth, if the ship saw the light from the lighthouse, how close is he?
2. If he is seeing the lighthouse on radar, why doesn't the radar show the coast?
3. Carriers and battleships usually sail in the middle of a task force.
4. Someone in charge of a multi-million dollar capital ship is too stupid to know where land is? Come on.
You'd have to be stuck on stupid to believe it is true.
It's rare, but it does happen. August 28, 1913: Battleship Louisiana ran aground in the harbor in Vera Cruz, Mexico. It was re-floated without damage later that day.
Naval commanders, even highly experienced ones, do occasional f*ck up.
The design goal of a submarine is for it to be completely undetectable -- to everyone, even it's own Navy. Typically submarine commanders are given a (huge) patrol area; they go there and get lost - no one not on board the sub, not even the fleet admiral, knows exactly where it is. What you don't know, enemy spies can't find out.
Since this was enforced, and there were thousands of hosts, you'd be able to look at a box, figure out who owned the thing and where it was (if a DC is having local problems, for instance). Not clever, but clever just gets you into trouble.
Bingo. Cutsie pie names have no place in a datacenter.
Security through obscurity is never an effective strategy. Anyone talented enough to breach a properly administered firewall and gain access to your internal network is going to be slowed down for all of five minutes by your obscure naming scheme.
Conversely, your admins are going to take a productivity hit every time they have to do anything to more than one box. Even a small headache gets annoying when you have to deal with it multiple times every day.
A goofy naming scheme is a bad idea when you're running over 100 servers in a dynamic environment.
AMEN. Actually, I'd lower that number to somewhere around a dozen. At a former employer, the database servers were all named after Classical composers. It was a nightmare to administer. Save the whimsical names for the test lab, desktop machines, and your home network.
Where I work now we use project-servertype+number EG: flarp-db01, frotz-web07, etc. When you've got 25+ servers for a single project and you're responsible for a half dozen projects it preserves your sanity. Not to mention making it a whole lot easier to automate administration. Do you really want to log in to a dozen or more servers manually to change some config settings on each one? It's much more productive to script it out and run it once.
Exactly. Throttling is reducing your connection bandwidth by a constant factor. This is a bad thing. Traffic shaping is giving some packets higher priority than others. This, done correctly, is a good thing -- some applications are far more tolerant of additional latency than others. done incorrectly - where priority is set based on the destination of the traffic versus the type of traffic - can be used to arbitrarily discriminate against competing services and to grant favoritism to affiliated companies.
There's no problem with traffic shaping as long as it is done in a network neutral manner. Legal standards to enforce network neutrality, on the national / international level, would be a good thing for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
AOL only bought Netscape for the traffic going to the portal site. Management viewed Netscape's software portfolio as unwanted baggage, so they jettisoned that as early as they could, getting as much goodwill and publicity out of it as possible. $2M is chump change for a company bringing in over a billion in cash every year. The irony is that immediately after taking over, traffic on the Netscape.com portal site dropped by 90-95%. AOL has an amazing talent for buying high-traffic web properties and turning them into low-traffic ones. Having witnessed it first-hand, the disconnect between AOL's management and reality is utterly mind-boggling. /ex-AOL employee
Who is more the fool ... the fool, or the fool who hires him?
I would say the fool who hires him, and then ignores his advice because it would be too expensive to implement.
the public would be much more comfortable with a conventional explosive
To put it bluntly, the public are a bunch of uneducated morons. When it comes to resolving an (inter)national crisis, their opinions and comfort levels are irrelevant. Unless you have a PhD in geophysics and an extensive experience in deep-water drilling, you really don't have anything significant to contribute to the discussion. STFU and let the experts do their jobs.
One of the things education and experience gives you is an understanding of the limits of your knowledge. I'm a very good engineer, in my own specialty. Outside of that specialty, I'll defer to experts in that field.
I'm a photographer. Find me a laser printer that will do gallery-quality photos and I'll use it. Laser printers aren't appropriate for every job
The lab I use can profitably sell me 50 11x14 archival quality giclee (inkjet) prints for less than $70 -- that's including ink, labor, paper, packaging, and shipping. So why in the hell does it cost me over $120 just in ink to make the same number of prints myself? You know the labs not spending anything close to that on ink.
When Teddy Roosevelt and the rest of the sane people left the Republican party in 1912.
That's why I'm not worried about this.
The only people who are going to take a job like this are untalented drones of marginal technical ability who can't get a job elsewhere, especially at the . Furthermore, peer pressure is going to be enough to discourage most people (talented or not) from getting paid to turn narc / sell out to the man.
The smart, creative people are going to be on the other side of the fight.
Anyone with half a brain can tell that the copyright cartels are fighting a losing battle, desperately clinging to a business model that has been rendered obsolete by modern technology. P2P would largely disappear overnight if there was a legal alternative that offered a perceived benefit (guaranteed quality, good search, high speed download, brand loyalty, etc) over a pirate source. The studios are unwilling to do that because then they would have to charge prices that are dictated by the market, rather than by monopolistic fiat.
There will always be some people who will take free over speed or convenience, but there are plenty who won't -- just witness Starbuck's ability to sell a quarter's worth of coffee at a 1000+% markup.
for those of you who aren't autistic spectrum.
a smile make you appear friendly, being friendly is appreciating and empathizing.
A smile makes you appear friendly to OTHER HUMANS. Baring your teeth to an alien could very well be interpreted a sign of aggression or who knows what. For all you know, they might communicate though pheromones and your halitosis is saying in their language "I'm going to rip out your snorklax and shove it up your frebnark".
any aliens with the technology to travel across interstellar space would have to have some pretty phenomenal computer technology
The only thing safe to assume about aliens is that they will be ALIEN. As in, completely unlike us in every way. It's a mistake to terrestrialize ETs, let alone anthropomorphize them. Their concept of 'communication', let alone their culture and motivations, will likely be be so wildly different than ours as to be beyond our ability to even conceive of it. Hell, we have a hard enough time understanding and communicating with other HUMAN cultures. Aliens, especially aliens sophisticated enough to cross interstellar distances? Forget about it.
Sadly, there are a lot of people who are simply incapable of performing any job that requires original or creative thought. Call me an elitist if you will, but you know it's true. There are only so many burgers that need to be flipped, floors that need to be mopped, etc.
Put someone into a job that's beyond their capacity they'll do it poorly, be miserable while doing it, and make everyone everyone miserable in the process.
A casual acquaintance from high school has been working for the last 25 years cleaning up roadkill for the county, and he's as happy as a pig in slop doing what most people here would consider a shit job. He'd consider any job that involved more math than tallying up how many critters he scraped off the pavement to be the "shit job".
I was going to say, "Cool, one stop identity theft".
I'm not even sure I want to even visit the UK anymore. Shame, as the Tower of London has the best collection of medieval arms and armor in the world, and I was looking forward to seeing it one day.
Anyway, Brits, enjoy your police state. Let us know how it works out for you.
That's the way it's SUPPOSED to work. Sometimes it does actually work that way, as long as your explanation agrees with the judge's prejudices. If you try and tell at judge something conflicts with his ideology, he'll ignore the facts and rule based on his ignorant superstitions. IF you can afford to, you can appeal, but that is a long expensive fight and sometimes you have to go through multiple appeals to get a panel of judges that can see past their Bibles.
"Just doing my job" is NO excuse, and the legal precedent for this was set during the Nuremberg trials, that is all that is meant in the comparison.
That message needs to be repeated loudly and often. Great job setting fire to the straw man, BTW.
When you're ready to shut down the US Postal Service, which would cease to be a financially viable enterprise if junk mail were eliminated.
You say that like it would be a bad thing.
When you have children to support, their welfare takes priority over all other concerns. The discussions were more along the lines of "what will we do when I turn down this job, if I can't find another" versus "should I take this job or not".
Ignorance of the company's nature may be a defense, but if you willfully go to work for a company knowing from the outset that they routinely engage in illegal, immoral, or unethical behavior as a matter of standard practice, you are a willing collaborator in those misdeeds and bear your own share of guilt, even if you are not directly involved. CF: Nuremberg trials.
THIS... after 20 years in IT, I've worked with a lot of H1B's. My experience has been that the bell curve of ability among immigrant workers seems to be inverted -- they tend to be either insanely talented or completely incompetent, with very little middle ground between the two.
Standard disclaimers about confirmation bias and limited sample size apply.
Exactly. There's no reason to keep logs past a certain window unless you have a specific business reason for doing so (debugging,data mining, etc).
Logfile rotation should be done routinely and religiously as a matter of corporate policy (providing there is no notice made of pending litigation). That which is deleted cannot be subpoenaed.
After I got laid off the last time, I got a VERY lucrative offer from an extremely scummy company that did data mining and direct marketing. After a long discussion with my wife, I turned it down, even though there was a very real chance that doing so would have meant losing my house. Fortunately something else came along, but it was scary there for a while.
That old story. I'm surprised people don't know it's fake when they hear it:
1. Given the curvature of the earth, if the ship saw the light from the lighthouse, how close is he?
2. If he is seeing the lighthouse on radar, why doesn't the radar show the coast?
3. Carriers and battleships usually sail in the middle of a task force.
4. Someone in charge of a multi-million dollar capital ship is too stupid to know where land is? Come on.
You'd have to be stuck on stupid to believe it is true.
It's rare, but it does happen. August 28, 1913: Battleship Louisiana ran aground in the harbor in Vera Cruz, Mexico. It was re-floated without damage later that day.
Naval commanders, even highly experienced ones, do occasional f*ck up.
The design goal of a submarine is for it to be completely undetectable -- to everyone, even it's own Navy. Typically submarine commanders are given a (huge) patrol area; they go there and get lost - no one not on board the sub, not even the fleet admiral, knows exactly where it is. What you don't know, enemy spies can't find out.
Since this was enforced, and there were thousands of hosts, you'd be able to look at a box, figure out who owned the thing and where it was (if a DC is having local problems, for instance). Not clever, but clever just gets you into trouble.
Bingo. Cutsie pie names have no place in a datacenter.
Conversely, your admins are going to take a productivity hit every time they have to do anything to more than one box. Even a small headache gets annoying when you have to deal with it multiple times every day.
A goofy naming scheme is a bad idea when you're running over 100 servers in a dynamic environment.
AMEN. Actually, I'd lower that number to somewhere around a dozen. At a former employer, the database servers were all named after Classical composers. It was a nightmare to administer. Save the whimsical names for the test lab, desktop machines, and your home network.
Where I work now we use project-servertype+number EG: flarp-db01, frotz-web07, etc. When you've got 25+ servers for a single project and you're responsible for a half dozen projects it preserves your sanity. Not to mention making it a whole lot easier to automate administration. Do you really want to log in to a dozen or more servers manually to change some config settings on each one? It's much more productive to script it out and run it once.
Exactly. Throttling is reducing your connection bandwidth by a constant factor. This is a bad thing. Traffic shaping is giving some packets higher priority than others. This, done correctly, is a good thing -- some applications are far more tolerant of additional latency than others. done incorrectly - where priority is set based on the destination of the traffic versus the type of traffic - can be used to arbitrarily discriminate against competing services and to grant favoritism to affiliated companies. There's no problem with traffic shaping as long as it is done in a network neutral manner. Legal standards to enforce network neutrality, on the national / international level, would be a good thing for everyone.
The only drawback is that RIAA might argue a used CD is not legal because I didn't pay full price.
The copyright cartel already tried to shut down second-hand record & CD stores and got their asses handed to them in court.