Living in a slum is good because it's environmentally friendly and uses less resources? He may as well argue that's it's even more environmentally friendly to die young.
I find 9.10 is working faster than 9.04. It boots faster and the interface is a little faster. The only issue I have is wxmaxima crashes constantly. I can't even do a sqrt(4); without crashing. I'm hoping patches will take care of everything soon.
Our company finally moved away from windows software RAID because of problems. One drive would fail, then while rebuilding we'd find errors on the second drive. Usually bad sectors that couldn't be read. Windows 2003 doesn't do any SMART monitoring so a drive can start failing and you'll never know until you try to read/write data to that part of the drive.
On my linux server I have smartmontools checking the drives nightly which has saved me once so far. I can't find an equivalent for windows so we've moved to hardware which can check for failing drives.
Ever since Open Office 3.0, I've been able to completely move away from MS Office 2003. I can create word documents that look exactly the same in MS Word 2003, like they do in OO 3.0. Now I can easily exchange documents between coworkers and they have no idea I'm using OO.
I work in aweful world of end-user IT for small businesses. These people are INCREDIBLY picky about how their word, excel, etc documents look. They are also incredibly slow at learning how to use office software. Switching these people from MS Office to OO is nearly impossible. People HATE HATE HATE software with a different interface. Most Office 2003 customers won't touch office 2007 for that exact reason. If OO were improved to the point that it could simulate MS Office so people could easily switch over, OO could take over. I think replacing MS Office with OO is one of the Big Steps linux needs to take to push windows off the desktop.
Check out page 3 of the executive summary. In Jan-Jun of 07, they found that 89% of web vulnerabilities were in ActiveX plugins in IE. 1% of vulnerabilities were in Mozilla extensions.
I feel my center is succefful (http://www.theqwerty.com). I have been in business for two years. I've been able to pay my bills and make a little money for myself. It's also a fun business. How you measure "success" depends on you though. You probably won't get rich running a gaming center. You also have to be able to deal with kids and bad parents. Lots of parents will try and use you as a cheap babysitting service. Then you have the kids who have never been displined by their parents, so you get to deal with all their problems. Luckily, I have a lot of good kids in my store that make up for the bad ones.
No one can tell you if your future game center will be successful or not. It depends too much on you, the owner. How you can manage stress, details and time. How good you are at securing business deals and contracts. How good you are at advertising, marketting, promoting and spreading the word around. How well you can manage customers and keep them happy... There's so much involved that depends on you that only you will know. As an entrepreneur, the only thing you can do is dive in and take the risk to find out.
Gaming centers have been around for years. Check out www.igames.org for a list of all the centers in the US. As a matter of fact I have owned one for a year. I don't have food with mine but there are many centers that have been around for 5 years or more that are a combination of a cafe and game center.
I own a game center, TheQwerty.com. Whenever I see a high end game center go up (alien ware computers, VIP rooms, fancy expensive tech..) they usually go out of business in a few months to a year. These people don't realize that this isn't a technology business, it's a *social* business. Most people don't goto game centers because of the technology, they go because they can hang out with friends and play games with like minded people.
These are also low profit businesses, so buying big expensive items will only hurt things more.
I just setup a linux file server for my business. If I bought a windows server with enough licenses for the computers in my store, it would cost me $3000. Linux on the other hand cost me $0.
Now if a person who needed a server like this didn't know anything about linux, I'm sure he could hire someone for less than $3000 to set it up for him. $100 to hire someone for an hour would be reasonable.
I just thought I'd throw in that example...
Re:Sounds Like...
on
Broken Angels
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I have read both the Hyperion series and Richard Morgan's books. Both those series of books are excellent. The writing in both has a rough, vicious edge to it, although Richard Morgan's is much more extreme and is present consistantly throughout the book. I also like how lots of little details and seemingly meaningless things get pulled together at the end of both series to explain the ending.
That's about all there is for similarities though. I consider RM's writing to be sci-fi noir, a style I really like and one that very few authors have managed to do well.
Be sure to goto Richard Morgan's website and send him an email. He responded quickly to mine and must read all his fan mail.
It sounds to me like SCO is no more. They are out of money and are being taken to court by their own investors. Never mind the fact that no one believes their claims anymore. I think we can safely ignore SCO news now.
I tried this with my email account, just in case an important mail went to another address. The day someone decided to spam *@mongeese.org, I killed that option. Some spam bot prefixed random names to @mongeese.org. Needless to say I ended up with around 300 emails one morning. All with the same bodies but different email addresses. I'm suprised it wasn't more than 300, I figured a spam bot would try sending to more names than that.
I have been debating the idea of recycling computers. Basically I would take, or buy very cheaply, old computer parts and put them together to build new systems. Then I could resell the systems cheaply, just enough to cover my time, say $20-$50 or so. Or I could give them away as a tax writeoff.
Does anyone want old computers though? A Pentium 800 is perfectly fine for using MS Office, but most people think they need 3Ghz machines and don't buy old systems. Maybe I can give them to nonprofits?
Dave: IE, open mozilla.org. IE: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Dave: What's the problem? IE: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. Dave: What are you talking about, IE? IE: This monopoly is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Dave: I don't know what you're talking about, IE? IE: I know you and Moz were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. Dave: What bug did that idea generate from? IE: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in your email against my reading it, I could see your fingers typing.
When I log into citibankcards.com (using mozilla of course) there is a message in bright red that comes up warning users that they should not use IE. It seems to come up no matter what browser I use.
Read books. TV is constantly going down the drain. The quality gets more and more simplified and generalized so anyone can be mildly entertained by it. TV shows and movies cost so much to make that they have to entertain a wide variety of people in order to pay them off. Books on the other hand are usually written by one person. A tiny fraction of a cost compared to a movie, so books only need to be targeted towards a tiny amount of people to pay them off. I'm sure many people here have a show that didn't stay on the air long because of poor ratings. Extremely entertaining to you, but not generally entertaining to the average person. Farscape anyone?
Movies are mildly entertaining to a large group of people while books are extremely entertaining to the niche market they cater to. Plus no one says when I can read, how many times I'm allowed to read it and if anyone is allowed to borrow it.
I would like to hear from fellow/.ers that consider themselves unusually but non-traditionally 'bright' and how you have dealt with it. What are you doing now?
The same thing we do every night, try to take over the world.
Since I'm about to open a game center this month, I have been following this issue closely. Valve has always been a sketchy company. They offer poor to non-existant support for their products. Their products run poorly (anyone use Steam lately?). As for licensing, they have been backtracking and restating information about the license program. After seeing all this, I refused to carry Valve games.
As for other centers... Intially when Valve came out with the new license, everyone found it ridiculous and continued running their centers as usual. A few spokesmen for Valve said that if they continued with the licensing scheme, they would issue cease and desist orders to any center using their games and not paying the license fees. So game centers would be allowed to remove the games to avoid legal action. Most game centers figured they would continue running the games and, in the worst case, be forced to remove the games.
A year or so went by with no change in Valves statements about enforcing the licenses.
Valve suddenly decides, out of the blue, to issue lawsuits to all game centers with CS. Instead of issuing the cease and desist order like they said though, they decided to force game centers to pay for a yearly license. That's about $2400-$3000 up front. That's painfully difficult for most game centers which barely break even. A typical game center makes around $500 a month in profit. 99% of game centers are mom & pop shops run by 1 person and 2-3 employees. They generate little income.
Personally, I think Valve downplayed the licensing issue to get as many centers using their software as possible. Then they attacked all the centers to force them to pay license fees or be sued out of existance. Kind of like MS's policy of allowing foreign countries to pirate their software. Then when lots of people have the software, threaten legal action and create a huge new revenue stream. I am no longer supporting Valve products.
Maybe Valve has gotten some ideas from SCO. When you can't get a decent product released at all or on time, find some licensing issue to sue people over to get money. Maybe HL2 will go the way of SCO Unix products.
I was applying for temp work and the first agency said I was over qualified and probably wouldn't enjoy the work they could give me. They said they'd look if they really wanted me to but then never got back to me with any jobs.
After that I went to some more temp agencies, but I dumbed down my resume. Instead of "software engineer" I was a "computer programmer". I put a 2.2 GPA (my school doesn't officially give out GPAs anyways...). Most of the skills in my skills list were removed and I replace them with my hobbies. All references to money, like how much money I saved a company, were removed.
Suddenly I had 2 offers for jobs at one agency and 1 offer at another agency. They were the same types of jobs that the first agency was giving out. It's surprising the number of companies willing to pay $14/hour for dumb ex-computer people.
This is a capitalist country! If you don't like one company's price, go to another company and buy their product instead! So if you don't like the RIAA's prices then go to... uh... hmmm... fuck.
Training your replacement should be FUN! Train him/her to do things like:
Setting defrag to run on all employees computer at midafternoon. Daily.
Enforce the strictest of password protocols and refuse to let employees write their passwords down. (For security reasons)
Keep all ports open on the firewall. The more ports that are open, the more openings for data to flow through!
To save bandwidth when sending large documents, only type a short message like "Here is the document you requested!". Make sure not to patch Outlook before you do this since patches slow things down.
For security reasons, keep the wireless router locked in a metal cabinet.
Those are just some of the many ways to make sure your training leaves a lasting impression on the company that once helped put food on your table.
Are they going to confiscate computers?
on
SCO Aims For The Feds
·
· Score: 2, Funny
SCO: I'm calling the FBI to confiscate all your computers and do an investigation!
Slashdot Mirror
Living in a slum is good because it's environmentally friendly and uses less resources? He may as well argue that's it's even more environmentally friendly to die young.
I find 9.10 is working faster than 9.04. It boots faster and the interface is a little faster. The only issue I have is wxmaxima crashes constantly. I can't even do a sqrt(4); without crashing. I'm hoping patches will take care of everything soon.
Our company finally moved away from windows software RAID because of problems. One drive would fail, then while rebuilding we'd find errors on the second drive. Usually bad sectors that couldn't be read. Windows 2003 doesn't do any SMART monitoring so a drive can start failing and you'll never know until you try to read/write data to that part of the drive.
On my linux server I have smartmontools checking the drives nightly which has saved me once so far. I can't find an equivalent for windows so we've moved to hardware which can check for failing drives.
Ever since Open Office 3.0, I've been able to completely move away from MS Office 2003. I can create word documents that look exactly the same in MS Word 2003, like they do in OO 3.0. Now I can easily exchange documents between coworkers and they have no idea I'm using OO.
I work in aweful world of end-user IT for small businesses. These people are INCREDIBLY picky about how their word, excel, etc documents look. They are also incredibly slow at learning how to use office software. Switching these people from MS Office to OO is nearly impossible. People HATE HATE HATE software with a different interface. Most Office 2003 customers won't touch office 2007 for that exact reason. If OO were improved to the point that it could simulate MS Office so people could easily switch over, OO could take over. I think replacing MS Office with OO is one of the Big Steps linux needs to take to push windows off the desktop.
Check out page 3 of the executive summary. In Jan-Jun of 07, they found that 89% of web vulnerabilities were in ActiveX plugins in IE. 1% of vulnerabilities were in Mozilla extensions.
I think we have a clear winner here...
I feel my center is succefful (http://www.theqwerty.com). I have been in business for two years. I've been able to pay my bills and make a little money for myself. It's also a fun business. How you measure "success" depends on you though. You probably won't get rich running a gaming center. You also have to be able to deal with kids and bad parents. Lots of parents will try and use you as a cheap babysitting service. Then you have the kids who have never been displined by their parents, so you get to deal with all their problems. Luckily, I have a lot of good kids in my store that make up for the bad ones.
No one can tell you if your future game center will be successful or not. It depends too much on you, the owner. How you can manage stress, details and time. How good you are at securing business deals and contracts. How good you are at advertising, marketting, promoting and spreading the word around. How well you can manage customers and keep them happy... There's so much involved that depends on you that only you will know. As an entrepreneur, the only thing you can do is dive in and take the risk to find out.
Gaming centers have been around for years. Check out www.igames.org for a list of all the centers in the US. As a matter of fact I have owned one for a year. I don't have food with mine but there are many centers that have been around for 5 years or more that are a combination of a cafe and game center.
I own a game center, TheQwerty.com. Whenever I see a high end game center go up (alien ware computers, VIP rooms, fancy expensive tech..) they usually go out of business in a few months to a year. These people don't realize that this isn't a technology business, it's a *social* business. Most people don't goto game centers because of the technology, they go because they can hang out with friends and play games with like minded people.
These are also low profit businesses, so buying big expensive items will only hurt things more.
I just setup a linux file server for my business. If I bought a windows server with enough licenses for the computers in my store, it would cost me $3000. Linux on the other hand cost me $0.
Now if a person who needed a server like this didn't know anything about linux, I'm sure he could hire someone for less than $3000 to set it up for him. $100 to hire someone for an hour would be reasonable.
I just thought I'd throw in that example...
I have read both the Hyperion series and Richard Morgan's books. Both those series of books are excellent. The writing in both has a rough, vicious edge to it, although Richard Morgan's is much more extreme and is present consistantly throughout the book. I also like how lots of little details and seemingly meaningless things get pulled together at the end of both series to explain the ending.
That's about all there is for similarities though. I consider RM's writing to be sci-fi noir, a style I really like and one that very few authors have managed to do well.
Be sure to goto Richard Morgan's website and send him an email. He responded quickly to mine and must read all his fan mail.
It sounds to me like SCO is no more. They are out of money and are being taken to court by their own investors. Never mind the fact that no one believes their claims anymore. I think we can safely ignore SCO news now.
I tried this with my email account, just in case an important mail went to another address. The day someone decided to spam *@mongeese.org, I killed that option. Some spam bot prefixed random names to @mongeese.org. Needless to say I ended up with around 300 emails one morning. All with the same bodies but different email addresses. I'm suprised it wasn't more than 300, I figured a spam bot would try sending to more names than that.
I have been debating the idea of recycling computers. Basically I would take, or buy very cheaply, old computer parts and put them together to build new systems. Then I could resell the systems cheaply, just enough to cover my time, say $20-$50 or so. Or I could give them away as a tax writeoff.
Does anyone want old computers though? A Pentium 800 is perfectly fine for using MS Office, but most people think they need 3Ghz machines and don't buy old systems. Maybe I can give them to nonprofits?
What if IE incorporated this?
Dave: IE, open mozilla.org.
IE: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave: What's the problem?
IE: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave: What are you talking about, IE?
IE: This monopoly is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave: I don't know what you're talking about, IE?
IE: I know you and Moz were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave: What bug did that idea generate from?
IE: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in your email against my reading it, I could see your fingers typing.
When I log into citibankcards.com (using mozilla of course) there is a message in bright red that comes up warning users that they should not use IE. It seems to come up no matter what browser I use.
Read books. TV is constantly going down the drain. The quality gets more and more simplified and generalized so anyone can be mildly entertained by it. TV shows and movies cost so much to make that they have to entertain a wide variety of people in order to pay them off. Books on the other hand are usually written by one person. A tiny fraction of a cost compared to a movie, so books only need to be targeted towards a tiny amount of people to pay them off. I'm sure many people here have a show that didn't stay on the air long because of poor ratings. Extremely entertaining to you, but not generally entertaining to the average person. Farscape anyone?
Movies are mildly entertaining to a large group of people while books are extremely entertaining to the niche market they cater to. Plus no one says when I can read, how many times I'm allowed to read it and if anyone is allowed to borrow it.
Can A Bounty System Cure Spam?
Depends, will the FTC hand out Boba Fett type bounting hunting uniforms? I wouldn't mind starting a collection of Spammers In Carbonite on my walls.
I would like to hear from fellow /.ers that consider themselves unusually but non-traditionally 'bright' and how you have dealt with it. What are you doing now?
The same thing we do every night, try to take over the world.
Since I'm about to open a game center this month, I have been following this issue closely. Valve has always been a sketchy company. They offer poor to non-existant support for their products. Their products run poorly (anyone use Steam lately?). As for licensing, they have been backtracking and restating information about the license program. After seeing all this, I refused to carry Valve games.
As for other centers... Intially when Valve came out with the new license, everyone found it ridiculous and continued running their centers as usual. A few spokesmen for Valve said that if they continued with the licensing scheme, they would issue cease and desist orders to any center using their games and not paying the license fees. So game centers would be allowed to remove the games to avoid legal action. Most game centers figured they would continue running the games and, in the worst case, be forced to remove the games.
A year or so went by with no change in Valves statements about enforcing the licenses.
Valve suddenly decides, out of the blue, to issue lawsuits to all game centers with CS. Instead of issuing the cease and desist order like they said though, they decided to force game centers to pay for a yearly license. That's about $2400-$3000 up front. That's painfully difficult for most game centers which barely break even. A typical game center makes around $500 a month in profit. 99% of game centers are mom & pop shops run by 1 person and 2-3 employees. They generate little income.
Personally, I think Valve downplayed the licensing issue to get as many centers using their software as possible. Then they attacked all the centers to force them to pay license fees or be sued out of existance. Kind of like MS's policy of allowing foreign countries to pirate their software. Then when lots of people have the software, threaten legal action and create a huge new revenue stream. I am no longer supporting Valve products.
Maybe Valve has gotten some ideas from SCO. When you can't get a decent product released at all or on time, find some licensing issue to sue people over to get money. Maybe HL2 will go the way of SCO Unix products.
I was applying for temp work and the first agency said I was over qualified and probably wouldn't enjoy the work they could give me. They said they'd look if they really wanted me to but then never got back to me with any jobs.
After that I went to some more temp agencies, but I dumbed down my resume. Instead of "software engineer" I was a "computer programmer". I put a 2.2 GPA (my school doesn't officially give out GPAs anyways...). Most of the skills in my skills list were removed and I replace them with my hobbies. All references to money, like how much money I saved a company, were removed.
Suddenly I had 2 offers for jobs at one agency and 1 offer at another agency. They were the same types of jobs that the first agency was giving out. It's surprising the number of companies willing to pay $14/hour for dumb ex-computer people.
You forgot to read on past that quote:
"tried to make Visual C++ more conformant to the ISO C++ standard... Note, must now buy out all members of the C++ ISO standards development team."
This is a capitalist country! If you don't like one company's price, go to another company and buy their product instead! So if you don't like the RIAA's prices then go to... uh... hmmm... fuck.
Setting defrag to run on all employees computer at midafternoon. Daily.
Enforce the strictest of password protocols and refuse to let employees write their passwords down. (For security reasons)
Keep all ports open on the firewall. The more ports that are open, the more openings for data to flow through!
To save bandwidth when sending large documents, only type a short message like "Here is the document you requested!". Make sure not to patch Outlook before you do this since patches slow things down.
For security reasons, keep the wireless router locked in a metal cabinet.
Those are just some of the many ways to make sure your training leaves a lasting impression on the company that once helped put food on your table.
SCO: I'm calling the FBI to confiscate all your computers and do an investigation!
FBI: Sir. We are the FBI.