I can't help but wonder about how many of these events were due to employees in a NOC somewhere downloading all the pr0n they could eat over an OC-48?:-)
There's one reason why I've always wanted VoIP: traceroute.
At my old home, I had a dialup connection to my ISP. About once or twice a month when I would dial in for the evening, I would hear *static* on the phoneline. I'm talking like a noisy AM radio type of static. I would hang up the modem, dial in again, and the static would be gone.
My best guess is that there was a faulty wire *somewhere* in the telco's network that was causing the static, and I was unfortunate enough for my call to end up on that wire. (Remember, POTS is a circuit switched network, the same set of wires is used for the duration of the connection) Of course, when I called Verizon, there was absolutely no way for me to reproduce the problem reliably, so they couldn't do much to help. Had I some equivilent of a way to do a traceroute, I could simply say, 'the link between switch-5.verizon.net and switch-32.verizon.net is dropping packets, please put that in the trouble ticket so the techs can fix it'.
So yeah, I'm a little giddy about VoIP. Almost makes me wanna get a T1 to my current residence and drop the POTS line I have now... Well, I can dream, I suppose.
I never liked the idea of counteroffers much, because the whole concept is that you have to pretty much threaton to quit before your employer will give you a raise. That doesn't set up a good social dynamic at your job, either. Your employer will remember that you're not as "loyal" as the other employees, and if there's ever a round of layoffs, you'll have two strikes against you: you'll cost the company more to keep around, and they'll percieve you as being "disloyal".
There is another good article about counteroffers here. You may also wish to read this article about how to resign from a job.
I used to be very active "back in the day", myself. At one point around 1994 or so, I had accounts on upwards of 100 BBSes, just in my area code (610)!
I remember one day, I dialed into a WWIV board (Innovations BBS), and went through the signup procedure. The system said, "Your User Number is: 2", which I found interesting. 5 seconds later, the SysOp (Bob Pacifico) brings me into chat mode and tells me, "You're my first caller!".
I spent a couple of fun years on that BBS, making friends with folks, uploading files, participating in networked message bases, and playing door games against people from other BBSes. Barren Realms Elite, anyone?:-)
Eventually, in 1996 I discovered the Internet and kind of made the transition to it. I called less and less BBSes, and eventually stopped calling all together.
7:00 AM - Amazing Inventions! Infommercial. Host: Swindle. This week includes a home fusion cannon kit, a plant that grows After Dark screen saver modules, and a one-way dimensional portal. All for only 12 trilitres of energon resin. Operators are standing by.
8:00 AM - Cooking with Slag. Yet more barbecue recipes. Today, Slag shows us why flamethrowers and cooking assistants don't mix.
8:30 AM - Transmaniacs. Cartoon. Yakko decides to play with Shockwave and learns the meaning of "radiation sickness". Broadside sings the "International Friendship Song"
8:00 AM - Time Machine. Science Programming. Eight o'clock??? erceptor, will you turn that #@^^%#! thing off?!
10:00 AM - Decepticon Workout. Trypticon demonstrates how to tear apart vicious and deadly Autobot enemies. Today's victim: Bumblebee.
10:30 AM - Rush Limbaugh. Rush gripes about the growing controversy sweeping the nation: Rumble and Frenzy -- which is which? Also, a commentary on Megatron's and Optimus's new looks, and why Transformers would want to put their own names across their bodies..
11:00 AM - Special: Funeral. Rumble and Frenzy locate the station Rush broadcasts from. Special appearance by Scavenger.
11:30 AM - Star Trek: The Next Generation. Science Fiction. [Yes, even Cybertron gets this show] Riker tries to make the moves on Elita-One, only to get stomped on when he asks to see her hard drive interface card. Also: Data learns to transform into a warp nacelle.
12:30 PM - Movie Matinee: "Terminator 3." In a misguided attempt to get a date for the Skynet dance, the T-1000 pursues Linda Hamilton across Cybertron. Guest stars (in order of appearance) Prowl, Optimus Prime, Groove, Blades, and Octane.
3:30 PM - Cybertronian Gladiators. Game Show In the season premiere, the Gladiators replace the rubber balls in the cannon with Prowl's acid pellets. Will the competitors notice?
4:30 PM - Baywatch: The Director's Cut. Don't even ask.
5:30 PM - The Simpsons. Mr. Burns buys the smelting pits and gets Homer thrown in. Bart accidentally says "Eat me!" to Weirdwolf.
6:00 PM - Kung Fu: The Legend Lives On. Ultra Magnus, a very, very distant relative of Kwai-Chang Cain, conveniently loses all his weapons and has to face Devastator in one-on-one personal combat for the fate of the planet. Again.
7:00 PM - Tales of Earth. Documentary (part 6 of 12). The Cybertronians first encounter the Swarm, Megatron takes Optimus apart, and Omega Supreme invents the galaxy's largest Oreo cookie. Narrated by William Shatner.
8:00 PM - Vilnacron 90210. Drama. Orion Pax runs against Decatron for class rep, and Groove tries Enerweed in the little robots' room. Arcee meets her evil twin sister and gets her boyfriend stolen. As always, Hot Rod just stands around looking cool, doing nothing, and occassionally giving out sagely advice.
9:00 PM - Combiner Variety Hour. Variety. Bruticus does a puppet show, and Superion tries to reassemble himself while running on stale Pepsi instead of energon. Predaking shows off his latest magic act: walking through the Great Wall of China *without* alerting local authorities.
10:00 PM - Brady Bunch: The Next Generation. Comedy. The Dinobots kill several dozen innocent humans and are sent to bed without supper. Arcee asks Davy Jonesicon out on a date.
10:30 PM - The Gunman. Galvatron meets a diabolical new villain with the power to destroy the planet -- and promptly blows his head off. Flashbacks provide blatant filler for the rest of the episode.
11:30 PM - Saturday Night Live. Host: Soundwave. Musical guest: Ratbat. Sketches consist of recycled old skits, except that they occasionally change some of the names in them. Concludes with scenes from the time Sludge hosted the show and was startled by a loud noise.
1:00 AM - Late Night Theater. Tonight: "Godzilla vs. Wheelie." A highly emotional story about a lone Autobot who gets really drunk one night and calls someone "a stupid overweight squishy." For mature (over 5 million vorn) audiences only.
3:00 AM - Closing Commentary. Grimlock points out several flaws in the philosophy of Socrates and meditates for continued peace in the universe. Guests include Ratchet, Wheeljack, and Wrapper, a new Autobot who transforms into a straitjacket.
Re:Better Business Bureau?
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
Has anyone who's gotten stiffed from Best Buy called the BBB?
Hmmm... 2000+ calls may do something about the problem.
Actually, it'd probally be much quicker/efficient to
file a complaint online.
I've done it before against companies that have sent me spam, and have actually gotten responses out of the BBB.
I think that part of the problem with the lack of consumer confidence in high speed Internet Access (especially DSL) is the lack of reliability with these services. DSL outages are something that many folks complain about, and in severe cases, such as when
Northpoint went bankrupt, service was cut with little or no warning. Having to put up with things like this make me think twice before getting broadband to my place.
Personally, I think one way to prevent problems like this from happening again would be to have DSL lines regulated by each state's
Public Utility Commission, just like POTS and T1s are. With those lines being under their current regulations, getting disconnected suddenly will result in the ILEC landing in very hot water with the PUC. But when Northpoint decides to go belly-up and screw hundreds of thousands of people, they get away scott-free.
That's my $0.02, feel free to mod up or down as appropriate.
What a great system that was for its time. My only question is "What were they thinking?!", at ~$600 a system, that put it out of the reach of most consumers.
Had it been priced at a more reasonable price, say $200, they would have taken a huge financial loss on the systems, but more than made up for it by beating the SNES and Genesis in the market at the time.
I tend to use C++ as my controlling program, and then execute Perl, PHP, or Java depending on what will give me the best performance for and cause me the least amount of pain to accomplish the task at hand. Do you guys use this kind of method?
Absolutely. You should always use the best tool for the job.
Case in point, at where I work now, I inherited a Perl script which handles software sales on our website. It's an ugly bastard of a thing -- 1300 lines, like 60K long, no naming scheme on the variables, etc.
So, rather than try to figure out all this code, I instead wrote a nice little Perl module that I use to call PHP code. Even went so far as to design a little communications protocol so that the PHP code can pass back values and the Perl can parse them and pass those variables to other PHP scripts.
Is it a bit resource intensive? Yep. But the tradeoff is that I did this in a fraction of the time that it would have taken me to hack on the existing Perl code, and since there's a big crunch to get this done on time, the boss is happy and I look good.:-)
The author will be speaking at SpamCon
on
RFC for Spammers
·
· Score: 5
Just as an FYI, the author, Ted Gavin, will be
speaking at
SpamCon next week.
(SpamCon is still accepting registrations, BTW. More info can be found
here.)
Even finding a qualified systems administrator (and knowing who is qualified and who is not) is often simply too hard a task for many non-technical people.
So um, what would stop a company that is starting up from renting webspace on a server for something in the range of $100-200 a month? That's a lot cheaper than any sysadmin.:-)
It may sound kinda silly, and may not apply in your situation, but if your site offers some of "community service", look around for any ISPs that would be supportive of it and offer you cheaper rates in return for contributing to the greater good.
Other than that, as someone else said here, cut down the amount of graphics you are using, that will really help on bandwidth consumption. One thing that I tried on the
pictures section of my site was to not have any thumbnails on the pages, but instead fo use Javascript popup windows for the pictures. This has two benefits:
No thumbnails loading reduces bandwidth consumption.
A popup prevents someone from loading a picture into their current browser window, pressing back to return to the list of puctures, and possibly reloading that same page because their browser is retarded/configured badly.
Just my $.02, from the perspective of someone who gets >150,000 hits/month on his website...
Here's something useful if you have your own domain with unlimited aliases:
Put the name of the website as the name of the email. For example:
slashdot.org@mydomain.com
Filter it in your favorite email reader, and when you are tremendously bored you can go through your trash folder see what websites sold your name to spammers...
Heh, it gets even better. In the interest of saving namespace on my domain, I use a plussed variant of my address, dmuth+slashdot<at>claws-and-paws.com, when I post here. As it turns out, spammers, being stupid as usual, end up breaking off the address at the plus sign, so now spam comes into slashdot<at>claws-and-paws.com.
Everything will be disposable eventually, including computers.
You say that as if they aren't already.:-)
When's the last time you've been able to use a computer with off-the-shelf games and Windows applications, as well as Windows itself, for more than a year or two before the newer stuff requires more powerful hardware?
In fact, the Freeze-Frame function is gone. It has been replaced by a "Serve Me A Commercial" function. Press the same button you've always pressed for Freeze Frame and now you get to look at a Coca-Cola commercial or some such for 25 minutes.
How did this happen? Replay TV downloaded the change one night, along with the TV log updates. No notice was given, and no choice was offered. They just stripped away basic functionality and replaced it with something that brought them more revenue.
Hmm.. I wonder what Replay TV's Terms of Service has to say about something like this? From an ethical standpoint, I think it's pretty underhanded to do something like that, but I wonder if Replay TV might have put themselves at legal liability?
At the very least, I think this is going to enrage a lot of people who use "traditional" appliances (TVs, VCRs, washing machines, etc.) and don't expect the functionality to suddenly change on them with no notice, and more importantly, to have a freature which they presumably paid for be replaced by something useless to them!
It would be like pressing the "mute" button on your TV's remote control and having the channel changed to
QVC or something.
I'm the sysadmin for
suespammers.org, which was one of the many systems affected by Northpoint shutting down their network. I've seen other folks comment about MSN not given their customers notice, etc. Well, even with the notice, there was nothing we could do.
We got our Internet access through Infoasis, which
told us on the 22nd about Northpoint. Yet, all we had was a week's notice, not nearly enough time to get another DSL line (from say, Pacbell) or a T1.
Giving a week's notice was nothing short of irresponsible on the part of Northpoint.
Thanks Northpoint, thanks for not show any compassion for your customers and making us now have to scramble for alternate connections.
I'm going to flame lightly here because hey, your post irritated me just a bit, especially since it contradicts my experience with Linux. I'll try to acutally have some useful information in this post, though.
Of course, the system bombed the next day when he tried to update Java 1.2 to the 1.3 J2SE, so I got to repeat the whole thing again.
You're telling me that updating an app screwed up a system so bad that you had to reinstall? I really doubt that. What I suspect happened is that he did something stupid as root. I've seen my computer saavy (but Linux illiterate) friends fsck up their systems before in a similar manner. (I've been guilty of it too, many years ago when I first started learning Linux)
And then it bombed again a week later when he tried to shut it down, and the whole damned filesystem corrupted (as far as I'm concerned, ext2 is just plain evil).
Really. I've been running Slackware and Redhat for a total of 5 years now, and never had that problem happen before. But you had backups made that you could restore from, right?
Cell phone users drive worse than drunks, by a long shot. I want to build a mobile one and attach it to my motorcycle.
So what happens if there's an accident and someone needs to dial 911?
True story - every day I walk (not drive) from my office about a mile into town to get lunch, along a fairly busy stretch of PA-145 which leads into Allentown, Pennsylvania. In the 2+ years I've been doing this, I've seen some nasty accidents, including one 4 car pileup. On the most recent accident, a vehicle got rear-ended coming off of US-22W, which happened about 20 feet from where I was standing(!), I was able to use my cell phone to dial 911 immediately and report the accident within seconds.
Now, I was standing on the sidewalk when I did this, and my cell phone usage wasn't a hazard to anyone. What right would you have to interfere with my cell phone usage in this instance? Think about it.
Is that getting accurate figures, at least from anti-virus companies/agencies, is going to be difficult. After all, the more serious they play out the problem to be, the more people are going to buy their products.
Case in point, back during the Michelangelo fiasco in 1992, John McAfee claimed that
"5 million computers were infected, which was nothing but hype on his part, especially as he later contradicted himself (on March 6th, 1992) by saing that only 10,000 machines had been hit.
This is a very cool idea, IMHO, but one slight problem is that the site doesn't use SSL. So if you live in a, shall we say, "repressed" country, where authorities might be monitoring Internet traffic, they'll still catch you in the act of visiting the site and decoding your message, which would not be a good thing.:-(
Slashdot Mirror
I can't help but wonder about how many of these events were due to employees in a NOC somewhere downloading all the pr0n they could eat over an OC-48? :-)
There's one reason why I've always wanted VoIP: traceroute.
At my old home, I had a dialup connection to my ISP. About once or twice a month when I would dial in for the evening, I would hear *static* on the phoneline. I'm talking like a noisy AM radio type of static. I would hang up the modem, dial in again, and the static would be gone.
My best guess is that there was a faulty wire *somewhere* in the telco's network that was causing the static, and I was unfortunate enough for my call to end up on that wire. (Remember, POTS is a circuit switched network, the same set of wires is used for the duration of the connection) Of course, when I called Verizon, there was absolutely no way for me to reproduce the problem reliably, so they couldn't do much to help. Had I some equivilent of a way to do a traceroute, I could simply say, 'the link between switch-5.verizon.net and switch-32.verizon.net is dropping packets, please put that in the trouble ticket so the techs can fix it'.
So yeah, I'm a little giddy about VoIP. Almost makes me wanna get a T1 to my current residence and drop the POTS line I have now... Well, I can dream, I suppose.
I'll stop babbling now...
I never liked the idea of counteroffers much, because the whole concept is that you have to pretty much threaton to quit before your employer will give you a raise. That doesn't set up a good social dynamic at your job, either. Your employer will remember that you're not as "loyal" as the other employees, and if there's ever a round of layoffs, you'll have two strikes against you: you'll cost the company more to keep around, and they'll percieve you as being "disloyal".
There is another good article about counteroffers here. You may also wish to read this article about how to resign from a job.
Good luck!
I used to be very active "back in the day", myself. At one point around 1994 or so, I had accounts on upwards of 100 BBSes, just in my area code (610)!
:-)
I remember one day, I dialed into a WWIV board (Innovations BBS), and went through the signup procedure. The system said, "Your User Number is: 2", which I found interesting. 5 seconds later, the SysOp (Bob Pacifico) brings me into chat mode and tells me, "You're my first caller!".
I spent a couple of fun years on that BBS, making friends with folks, uploading files, participating in networked message bases, and playing door games against people from other BBSes. Barren Realms Elite, anyone?
Eventually, in 1996 I discovered the Internet and kind of made the transition to it. I called less and less BBSes, and eventually stopped calling all together.
*sigh* I'll miss those days...
Already have. Many times, in fact.
And probally will, just to see Yoda in action.
I don't know how to describe it. It was like...Kermit the Frog on crack!
(Ripped from my Transformers webpage...)
TV Guide: Cybertron Edition
7:00 AM - Amazing Inventions!
Infommercial. Host: Swindle. This week includes a home fusion cannon kit, a plant that grows After Dark screen saver modules, and a one-way dimensional portal. All for only 12 trilitres of energon resin.
Operators are standing by.
8:00 AM - Cooking with Slag.
Yet more barbecue recipes. Today, Slag shows us why flamethrowers and cooking assistants don't mix.
8:30 AM - Transmaniacs.
Cartoon. Yakko decides to play with Shockwave and learns the meaning of "radiation sickness". Broadside sings the "International Friendship Song"
8:00 AM - Time Machine.
Science Programming. Eight o'clock??? erceptor, will you turn that #@^^%#! thing off?!
10:00 AM - Decepticon Workout.
Trypticon demonstrates how to tear apart vicious and deadly Autobot enemies.
Today's victim: Bumblebee.
10:30 AM - Rush Limbaugh.
Rush gripes about the growing controversy sweeping the nation: Rumble and Frenzy -- which is which? Also, a commentary on Megatron's and Optimus's new looks, and why Transformers would want to put their own names across their bodies..
11:00 AM - Special: Funeral.
Rumble and Frenzy locate the station Rush broadcasts from. Special appearance by Scavenger.
11:30 AM - Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Science Fiction. [Yes, even Cybertron gets this show] Riker tries to make the moves on Elita-One, only to get stomped on when he asks to see her hard drive interface card. Also: Data learns to transform into a warp nacelle.
12:30 PM - Movie Matinee: "Terminator 3."
In a misguided attempt to get a date for the Skynet dance, the T-1000 pursues Linda Hamilton across Cybertron. Guest stars (in order of appearance) Prowl, Optimus Prime, Groove, Blades, and Octane.
3:30 PM - Cybertronian Gladiators.
Game Show In the season premiere, the Gladiators replace the rubber balls in the cannon with Prowl's acid pellets. Will the competitors notice?
4:30 PM - Baywatch: The Director's Cut.
Don't even ask.
5:30 PM - The Simpsons.
Mr. Burns buys the smelting pits and gets Homer thrown in. Bart accidentally says "Eat me!" to Weirdwolf.
6:00 PM - Kung Fu: The Legend Lives On.
Ultra Magnus, a very, very distant relative of Kwai-Chang Cain, conveniently loses all his weapons and has to face Devastator in one-on-one personal combat for the fate of the planet. Again.
7:00 PM - Tales of Earth.
Documentary (part 6 of 12). The Cybertronians first encounter the Swarm, Megatron takes Optimus apart, and Omega Supreme invents the galaxy's largest Oreo cookie. Narrated by William Shatner.
8:00 PM - Vilnacron 90210.
Drama. Orion Pax runs against Decatron for class rep, and Groove tries Enerweed in the little robots' room. Arcee meets her evil twin sister and gets her boyfriend stolen. As always, Hot Rod just stands around looking cool, doing nothing, and occassionally giving out sagely advice.
9:00 PM - Combiner Variety Hour.
Variety. Bruticus does a puppet show, and Superion tries to reassemble himself while running on stale Pepsi instead of energon. Predaking shows off his latest magic act: walking through the Great Wall of China *without*
alerting local authorities.
10:00 PM - Brady Bunch: The Next Generation.
Comedy. The Dinobots kill several dozen innocent humans and are sent to bed without supper. Arcee asks Davy Jonesicon out on a date.
10:30 PM - The Gunman.
Galvatron meets a diabolical new villain with the power to destroy the planet -- and promptly blows his head off. Flashbacks provide blatant filler for the rest of the episode.
11:30 PM - Saturday Night Live.
Host: Soundwave. Musical guest: Ratbat. Sketches consist of recycled old skits, except that they occasionally change some of the names in them. Concludes with scenes from the time Sludge hosted the show and was startled by a loud noise.
1:00 AM - Late Night Theater. Tonight: "Godzilla vs. Wheelie." A highly emotional story about a lone Autobot who gets really drunk one night and calls someone "a stupid overweight squishy." For mature (over 5 million vorn) audiences only.
3:00 AM - Closing Commentary.
Grimlock points out several flaws in the philosophy of Socrates and meditates for continued peace in the universe. Guests include Ratchet, Wheeljack, and Wrapper, a new Autobot who transforms into a straitjacket.
Personally, I think one way to prevent problems like this from happening again would be to have DSL lines regulated by each state's Public Utility Commission, just like POTS and T1s are. With those lines being under their current regulations, getting disconnected suddenly will result in the ILEC landing in very hot water with the PUC. But when Northpoint decides to go belly-up and screw hundreds of thousands of people, they get away scott-free.
That's my $0.02, feel free to mod up or down as appropriate.
Had it been priced at a more reasonable price, say $200, they would have taken a huge financial loss on the systems, but more than made up for it by beating the SNES and Genesis in the market at the time.
My $.02.
Absolutely. You should always use the best tool for the job.
Case in point, at where I work now, I inherited a Perl script which handles software sales on our website. It's an ugly bastard of a thing -- 1300 lines, like 60K long, no naming scheme on the variables, etc.
So, rather than try to figure out all this code, I instead wrote a nice little Perl module that I use to call PHP code. Even went so far as to design a little communications protocol so that the PHP code can pass back values and the Perl can parse them and pass those variables to other PHP scripts.
Is it a bit resource intensive? Yep. But the tradeoff is that I did this in a fraction of the time that it would have taken me to hack on the existing Perl code, and since there's a big crunch to get this done on time, the boss is happy and I look good.
(SpamCon is still accepting registrations, BTW. More info can be found here.)
--
--
Other than that, as someone else said here, cut down the amount of graphics you are using, that will really help on bandwidth consumption. One thing that I tried on the pictures section of my site was to not have any thumbnails on the pages, but instead fo use Javascript popup windows for the pictures. This has two benefits:
- No thumbnails loading reduces bandwidth consumption.
- A popup prevents someone from loading a picture into their current browser window, pressing back to return to the list of puctures, and possibly reloading that same page because their browser is retarded/configured badly.
Just my $.02, from the perspective of someone who gets >150,000 hits/month on his website...--
<sigh>I hate spammers...
--
I suggest you read this Cyberspace Law Lesson for more background on libel and slander, so you can use the terms properly in the future.
--
When's the last time you've been able to use a computer with off-the-shelf games and Windows applications, as well as Windows itself, for more than a year or two before the newer stuff requires more powerful hardware?
--
At the very least, I think this is going to enrage a lot of people who use "traditional" appliances (TVs, VCRs, washing machines, etc.) and don't expect the functionality to suddenly change on them with no notice, and more importantly, to have a freature which they presumably paid for be replaced by something useless to them!
It would be like pressing the "mute" button on your TV's remote control and having the channel changed to QVC or something.
--
We got our Internet access through Infoasis, which told us on the 22nd about Northpoint. Yet, all we had was a week's notice, not nearly enough time to get another DSL line (from say, Pacbell) or a T1. Giving a week's notice was nothing short of irresponsible on the part of Northpoint.
Thanks Northpoint, thanks for not show any compassion for your customers and making us now have to scramble for alternate connections.
--
--
True story - every day I walk (not drive) from my office about a mile into town to get lunch, along a fairly busy stretch of PA-145 which leads into Allentown, Pennsylvania. In the 2+ years I've been doing this, I've seen some nasty accidents, including one 4 car pileup. On the most recent accident, a vehicle got rear-ended coming off of US-22W, which happened about 20 feet from where I was standing(!), I was able to use my cell phone to dial 911 immediately and report the accident within seconds.
Now, I was standing on the sidewalk when I did this, and my cell phone usage wasn't a hazard to anyone. What right would you have to interfere with my cell phone usage in this instance? Think about it.
--
Case in point, back during the Michelangelo fiasco in 1992, John McAfee claimed that "5 million computers were infected, which was nothing but hype on his part, especially as he later contradicted himself (on March 6th, 1992) by saing that only 10,000 machines had been hit.
</rant>
--
--