Have you looked around on freshmeat.net? There are quite a few people providing some sort of business management package. A quick search for "billing invoicing" turned up the Trabas VoIP Billing package as the first hit. Probably a good place to start. I'm sure there is plenty of stuff that will do most of what you want. Is your company comfortable with doing some minor coding on an existing project to get exactly what you want? If so, there are a lot more options.
What I want is the Gimp plugin that adds the "Eurion Constellation" or whatever it is to my picture so that Photoshop won't open it. I think it would be quite funny to start trying to put the magic watermark as many places as possible, making Photoshop break as often as possible.
I personally have zero respect for companies that go out of their way to cripple their product in one way or another. Software has enough unintentional bugs without the developers deciding to break it on purpose.
Megabloks, a company that makes a building brick that is essentially compatible with LEGO, opened up shop almost to the day that LEGO's patent expired on the brick and has been slowly and steadily improving the quality of their own product ever since. They aren't half bad right now.
I had never really heard of Megabloks until you mentioned it here. So I took a quick look at their site, and all I can say is "wow". I'm not suprised LEGO is losing money. The ProBuilder sets look pretty nice at amazing prices. A 2,450 piece submarine for $39.97 from Amazon? LEGO would probably want ~$200 bucks for a set that size. A 2005 peice space shuttle for $39.98 vs. a 826 piece shuttle from LEGO for $49.99? I'm tempted to pick up one of the ~200 piece kits since they only run $10 or $11 and see what the quality is. That money would buy you like 1.5 Bionicles from LEGO.
I don't think any part of this plan involves having the WiFi "aggregator" actually aggregate any traffic at layer 3. The whole point is that the people who set up the hotspots are already getting IP connectivity from some ISP, and the people using the hotspot just use that connectivity. There isn't any need to centrally aggregate the actual data traffic.
the Pledge of Allegiance will (and should always) continue to include the phrase "under god." NO matter what you do, the original is sitll the original
That's a fine theory, if not for the fact that that's not the original. The phrase "under God" was added during the 50s as part of McCarthyism's attack on godless communism. So, given that fact, I assume that you will be supporting the return of the Pledge to it's "original" godless version?
What they forget to mention in the press release, is that a 20% drop seems to represent a whopping 3 cents. From 15 cents to 12 cents. I'm sorry, if you're stock is that close to being worthless, I think an academic paper is the least of your problems.
I used to feel bad about giving telemarketers a hard time, but then I came to a realization: if we make their lives a living hell, they won't want to work as telemarketers anymore. If we are nice to them, they will enjoy (or at least tolerate) their jobs, and they will keep doing what they are doing. When their job becomes a source of major stress in their lives, they will hopefully end up quitting and then there will be one less telemarketer in the world.
My state (CO) has had a DNC list in effect for quite a while now, and it's awesome. Works great. The number of calls I get has dropped by probably an order of magnitude at least. Before it went into effect, I was always curt but polite as I told the callers to place me on their do not call list. But if the telemarketers somehow succeed in getting my state's DNC list overturned, you can bet that my response to them is pretty much going to be "F*** you you F****** loser! Get a real job you piece of s***" until they hang up.
No body is arguing that advertising should be banned. That's just a straw man argument.
The question should really be, should companies be allowed to use all available means of communication for advertisements? Or can we possibly have one or two which don't have their utility diluted by relentless advertising? Advertisers completely dominate [i]all[/i] forms of mass media communications, whether it's tv, radio, newspapers or magazines. And quite frankly, until my states DNC list went into effect, the advertisers were dominating the use of my telephone as well. I have no problem myself with a blanket ban on unsolicited advertisements in communication channels whose primary use is individual person-to-person communication such as phone,email,pager,IRC,etc. A corporation has [i]zero[/i] right to compel my attention by advertising to me thru such invasive means.
Not only does Linux not have a default, Linux cannot have a default. The original article states "Microsoft's choices weren't made by fiat". Uh, whatever. Microsoft (and Apple) might solicit the opinion of users and developers but ultimately they do dicate an official GUI by fiat. But on "Linux" there is nobody in a position to issue that fiat.
Having a standard GUI ultimately means preventing developers from writing for other GUI's. Because after all, if a bunch of developers ignore the standard and keep writing applications for other GUI's it's not much of a standard, is it? If Linus decrees that Gnome will henceforce be the official Linux GUI, but the KDE folks keep right on working on KDE, what's been accomplished? But there isn't anybody or any organization that's in a position to tell developers what to do. That's the whole beauty of open source. And maybe it's a weakness as well, but I don't think so.
The logical fallacy some of the "standard GUI" crowd makes is in assuming that "Linux" is an end user product. It's not. It's just a kernel. And XFree86 isn't an end user product either. Nor are the GNU tools, nor even KDE or Gnome. They are just parts. It's the role of distributions to make actual end-user products. If a "standard" end-user experience is important, then a distro will address that and only make "standard" looking and working applications available to the end user. And hey, what do you know, that's exactly what Red Hat is doing! Hopefully it will work out for them.
He basically proposes only allowing a form of hostname which is (1) too long to type manually, and (2) includes long random-looking strings. His justification for this is `users seem to do alright with bookmarks, and as soon as everything is links, no problem!'
All this really does is push the security problem from DNS into whatever system is publishing the bookmarks/links. I'm not sure a self-certifying system really buys you much. And if you are now relying on obfuscated DNS names which are always hidden behind bookmarks, does it matter if the names are self-certified? No one is looking at them anyway.
Not to mention a whole crapload of other problems. URL's can no longer be used in print media. Email addresses cannot be written down, put on business cards, nor read over a phone. I'm sure that won't introduce any problems.
More importantly, the chain of trust doesn't have to start at Verisign/.com. You can exchange keys manually with folks in order to have DNSSEC with their whole domain. The protocols can handle having multiple starting points for trust. It's just more convenient to have a single key at the top so that not as much has to be exchange, and it works universally. Kind of like how it's nice to have a single root of the DNS tree, but not mandated by the protocol.
GIMP is worthless as a publishing tool unless your platform is the internet. not only does it lack CMYK support, but it only supports one resolution, so let's not confuse the purpose of the program. it is a design and paint app for the internet, and only the internet.
I'll grant you the CMYK is a real problem if you are publishing. But what's the deal with "resolution"? In a digital image, "resolution" isn't actually a function of the image. The image data contains a certain number of pixels in each dimension. But it doesn't make any sense to refer to it having a resolution until it has a specific size, which is dependent on what it's being displayed/printed on.
I dunno. I just don't understand it. Graphic design folks have something weird going on with images. My wife, God bless her, cannot grasp pixels. We put pictures on the web, and I'll be like "OK, so we'll scale this to 320x240 because that's a friendly size for folks on modems" and she comes back with "What do you mean? How big is that in inches?" To which I reply "How the hell should I know? It depends on how big the persons monitor is!" And it's all downhill from there. She knows "inches". And she knows "dots per inch". But extrapolating from that to "dots" just doesn't seem to happen. Any insight you can provide into what exactly graphic designers think the "resolution" of a JPEG is would be appreciated.
I think I've received two mailings in the last four years that said: "Mr. Miller! Here are some wonderful coupons that are tailored to your unique shopping needs!"
All this really tells you is that you don't know what the data is being used for. Grocery stores spend big bucks setting up and maintaining those systems. Not to mention the "discounts" used to entice people to sign up. You've probably "saved" hundreds of dollars. A couple of mass mailings sure isn't making up that kind of cost.
So you've shown that direct mail marketing does not appear to be the primary use of all that data. Well then, what is the primary use? My theory is that the insurance companies are or will be the largest consumer, since I expect that that data is possibly a better predictor of future health costs than almost anything else. In fact, that data would be so valuable that insurance companies would be almost negligent in their duty to the shareholders to not buy it.
From the article: Recently, Derrick received an e-mail from an atlas company offering to sell him a color-coded map of the United States with all the electric power generation and transmission systems. He hit the reply button on his e-mail and typed: "With friends like you, we don't need any enemies in the world."
WTF? Like a terrorist needs a map to find power plants and transmission lines? At least most other vital infrastructure is buried and largely hidden from view. It's not obvious where the major fiber optic trunks are, at least to the untrained eye. But electricity? Give me a break! Am I supposed to avert my gaze when I see high voltage power lines because their location is "classified"?
Doesn't that make some people want to wait for the extra year?
I suppose some people might wait, but don't underestimate the pent up demand for a high performance Mac. Apple's customers have already been waiting a looooong time for this machine. I don't think announcing that there will be a speed bump in a year will do much to the short term sales of the new boxes. Maybe in six months people will start holding off for the promised 3GHz boxes, but not now.
I found that article quite interesting. Who knows if it's all true, hopefully we'll find out it is. But I do think he presents a quite plausible case not only for why Linux and SCO would have common code, but more importantly why SCO might not realize it and stumble ahead down a path which will make them look incredibly stupid if it turns out to be true.
The really interesting part is that if the AT&T code is really contaminated with BSD code (which certainly seems to be the case) than the value of the SVR4 code which SCO licenses is quite a bit lower than they might think. I mean, if it's full of BSD code, sure they can license it but it will end up making it damn hard to sue anybody and prove that the code is really AT&T vs. BSD.
I'll grant you that I was wrong when I said that the FCC was decreasing regulations of radio industry but:
THEY ARE KEEPING THE REGULATIONS THAT ARE IN PLACE FOR RADIO!!!! Therefore they are RE-regulating radio.
this is wrong. My boss didn't fire me today. Does that me he re-hired me? I didn't divorce my wife today, does that mean I re-married her? If the FCC had put the old ownership rules back in place, that would be re-regulation.
Um, actually de-regulation is not the opposite of re-regulation. In your case , 'de' refers to "remove or remove from" while 're' refers to "again, anew". Not the same thing, with quite distinct meanings. To claim that a relaxation of existing regulations is to "re-regulate" an industry is quite frankly bullshit.
Really, there isn't anything to worry about. ClearChannel wouldn't ever mis-report the news. They are more than happy to even put the news of FCC's "vote to re-regulate the radio industry" right on their home page
They will have more power to control elections; more power to sell wars; more power to do anything they want.
Judging by the last couple of years, I think they already have ample power in that respect. The latest changes are really just a small incremental review, the big changes were during 1996. That's when the ownership rules were really gutted.
So if a badguy shoots someone and takes their car how does this system keep the badguy from using the roads?
Um, because a stolen car can be located much, much faster than possible thru any other means? Would you steal cars if you knew the police could locate and track you within minutes of the car being reported stolen?
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your ?0.02, so:P
Live mid-market rates as of 2003.05.30 19:24:11 GMT. 0.02 ? = 0.0235500 USD
Cisco uses unused pairs; hence, you can't have Gig-over-copper AND POE.
Actually, they are using the data pairs. At least when you are providing power via the WS-X6348 line cards. I'm not sure that they don't use the unused pairs with the dumb power injectors.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you looked around on freshmeat.net? There are quite a few people providing some sort of business management package. A quick search for "billing invoicing" turned up the Trabas VoIP Billing package as the first hit. Probably a good place to start. I'm sure there is plenty of stuff that will do most of what you want. Is your company comfortable with doing some minor coding on an existing project to get exactly what you want? If so, there are a lot more options.
What I want is the Gimp plugin that adds the "Eurion Constellation" or whatever it is to my picture so that Photoshop won't open it. I think it would be quite funny to start trying to put the magic watermark as many places as possible, making Photoshop break as often as possible.
I personally have zero respect for companies that go out of their way to cripple their product in one way or another. Software has enough unintentional bugs without the developers deciding to break it on purpose.
NAT. If their DSL connection isn't reliable, adding another layer of encapsulation on top isn't going to help anyway.
Megabloks, a company that makes a building brick that is essentially compatible with LEGO, opened up shop almost to the day that LEGO's patent expired on the brick and has been slowly and steadily improving the quality of their own product ever since. They aren't half bad right now.
I had never really heard of Megabloks until you mentioned it here. So I took a quick look at their site, and all I can say is "wow". I'm not suprised LEGO is losing money. The ProBuilder sets look pretty nice at amazing prices. A 2,450 piece submarine for $39.97 from Amazon? LEGO would probably want ~$200 bucks for a set that size. A 2005 peice space shuttle for $39.98 vs. a 826 piece shuttle from LEGO for $49.99? I'm tempted to pick up one of the ~200 piece kits since they only run $10 or $11 and see what the quality is. That money would buy you like 1.5 Bionicles from LEGO.
I don't think any part of this plan involves having the WiFi "aggregator" actually aggregate any traffic at layer 3. The whole point is that the people who set up the hotspots are already getting IP connectivity from some ISP, and the people using the hotspot just use that connectivity. There isn't any need to centrally aggregate the actual data traffic.
Somethings tells me these might not go over too well either:
/* Abort (ANSI). */ /* Kill, unblockable (POSIX). */
/* Termination (ANSI). */
#define SIGABRT 6
#define SIGKILL 9
But being California, I suppose this one's fine:
#define SIGTERM 15
How totally pathetic that someone trys to turn a thread about court and contract into a bash GWB fest... Get a life
Les Francais sont des singes de capitulation qui mangent du fromage.
Translation: The French are monkeys of capitulation which eat cheese
How totally pathetic that someone trys[sp] to turn every thread into a bash the French fest... Get a life
the Pledge of Allegiance will (and should always) continue to include the phrase "under god." NO matter what you do, the original is sitll the original
That's a fine theory, if not for the fact that that's not the original. The phrase "under God" was added during the 50s as part of McCarthyism's attack on godless communism. So, given that fact, I assume that you will be supporting the return of the Pledge to it's "original" godless version?
What they forget to mention in the press release, is that a 20% drop seems to represent a whopping 3 cents. From 15 cents to 12 cents. I'm sorry, if you're stock is that close to being worthless, I think an academic paper is the least of your problems.
I used to feel bad about giving telemarketers a hard time, but then I came to a realization: if we make their lives a living hell, they won't want to work as telemarketers anymore. If we are nice to them, they will enjoy (or at least tolerate) their jobs, and they will keep doing what they are doing. When their job becomes a source of major stress in their lives, they will hopefully end up quitting and then there will be one less telemarketer in the world.
My state (CO) has had a DNC list in effect for quite a while now, and it's awesome. Works great. The number of calls I get has dropped by probably an order of magnitude at least. Before it went into effect, I was always curt but polite as I told the callers to place me on their do not call list. But if the telemarketers somehow succeed in getting my state's DNC list overturned, you can bet that my response to them is pretty much going to be "F*** you you F****** loser! Get a real job you piece of s***" until they hang up.
No body is arguing that advertising should be banned. That's just a straw man argument.
The question should really be, should companies be allowed to use all available means of communication for advertisements? Or can we possibly have one or two which don't have their utility diluted by relentless advertising? Advertisers completely dominate [i]all[/i] forms of mass media communications, whether it's tv, radio, newspapers or magazines. And quite frankly, until my states DNC list went into effect, the advertisers were dominating the use of my telephone as well. I have no problem myself with a blanket ban on unsolicited advertisements in communication channels whose primary use is individual person-to-person communication such as phone,email,pager,IRC,etc. A corporation has [i]zero[/i] right to compel my attention by advertising to me thru such invasive means.
Not only does Linux not have a default, Linux cannot have a default. The original article states "Microsoft's choices weren't made by fiat". Uh, whatever. Microsoft (and Apple) might solicit the opinion of users and developers but ultimately they do dicate an official GUI by fiat. But on "Linux" there is nobody in a position to issue that fiat.
Having a standard GUI ultimately means preventing developers from writing for other GUI's. Because after all, if a bunch of developers ignore the standard and keep writing applications for other GUI's it's not much of a standard, is it? If Linus decrees that Gnome will henceforce be the official Linux GUI, but the KDE folks keep right on working on KDE, what's been accomplished? But there isn't anybody or any organization that's in a position to tell developers what to do. That's the whole beauty of open source. And maybe it's a weakness as well, but I don't think so.
The logical fallacy some of the "standard GUI" crowd makes is in assuming that "Linux" is an end user product. It's not. It's just a kernel. And XFree86 isn't an end user product either. Nor are the GNU tools, nor even KDE or Gnome. They are just parts. It's the role of distributions to make actual end-user products. If a "standard" end-user experience is important, then a distro will address that and only make "standard" looking and working applications available to the end user. And hey, what do you know, that's exactly what Red Hat is doing! Hopefully it will work out for them.
He basically proposes only allowing a form of hostname which is (1) too long to type manually, and (2) includes long random-looking strings. His justification for this is `users seem to do alright with bookmarks, and as soon as everything is links, no problem!'
All this really does is push the security problem from DNS into whatever system is publishing the bookmarks/links. I'm not sure a self-certifying system really buys you much. And if you are now relying on obfuscated DNS names which are always hidden behind bookmarks, does it matter if the names are self-certified? No one is looking at them anyway.
Not to mention a whole crapload of other problems. URL's can no longer be used in print media. Email addresses cannot be written down, put on business cards, nor read over a phone. I'm sure that won't introduce any problems.
More importantly, the chain of trust doesn't have to start at Verisign/.com. You can exchange keys manually with folks in order to have DNSSEC with their whole domain. The protocols can handle having multiple starting points for trust. It's just more convenient to have a single key at the top so that not as much has to be exchange, and it works universally. Kind of like how it's nice to have a single root of the DNS tree, but not mandated by the protocol.
GIMP is worthless as a publishing tool unless your platform is the internet. not only does it lack CMYK support, but it only supports one resolution, so let's not confuse the purpose of the program. it is a design and paint app for the internet, and only the internet.
I'll grant you the CMYK is a real problem if you are publishing. But what's the deal with "resolution"? In a digital image, "resolution" isn't actually a function of the image. The image data contains a certain number of pixels in each dimension. But it doesn't make any sense to refer to it having a resolution until it has a specific size, which is dependent on what it's being displayed/printed on.
I dunno. I just don't understand it. Graphic design folks have something weird going on with images. My wife, God bless her, cannot grasp pixels. We put pictures on the web, and I'll be like "OK, so we'll scale this to 320x240 because that's a friendly size for folks on modems" and she comes back with "What do you mean? How big is that in inches?" To which I reply "How the hell should I know? It depends on how big the persons monitor is!" And it's all downhill from there. She knows "inches". And she knows "dots per inch". But extrapolating from that to "dots" just doesn't seem to happen. Any insight you can provide into what exactly graphic designers think the "resolution" of a JPEG is would be appreciated.
I think I've received two mailings in the last four years that said: "Mr. Miller! Here are some wonderful coupons that are tailored to your unique shopping needs!"
All this really tells you is that you don't know what the data is being used for. Grocery stores spend big bucks setting up and maintaining those systems. Not to mention the "discounts" used to entice people to sign up. You've probably "saved" hundreds of dollars. A couple of mass mailings sure isn't making up that kind of cost.
So you've shown that direct mail marketing does not appear to be the primary use of all that data. Well then, what is the primary use? My theory is that the insurance companies are or will be the largest consumer, since I expect that that data is possibly a better predictor of future health costs than almost anything else. In fact, that data would be so valuable that insurance companies would be almost negligent in their duty to the shareholders to not buy it.
From the article:
Recently, Derrick received an e-mail from an atlas company offering to sell him a color-coded map of the United States with all the electric power generation and transmission systems. He hit the reply button on his e-mail and typed: "With friends like you, we don't need any enemies in the world."
WTF? Like a terrorist needs a map to find power plants and transmission lines? At least most other vital infrastructure is buried and largely hidden from view. It's not obvious where the major fiber optic trunks are, at least to the untrained eye. But electricity? Give me a break! Am I supposed to avert my gaze when I see high voltage power lines because their location is "classified"?
Doesn't that make some people want to wait for the extra year?
I suppose some people might wait, but don't underestimate the pent up demand for a high performance Mac. Apple's customers have already been waiting a looooong time for this machine. I don't think announcing that there will be a speed bump in a year will do much to the short term sales of the new boxes. Maybe in six months people will start holding off for the promised 3GHz boxes, but not now.
I found that article quite interesting. Who knows if it's all true, hopefully we'll find out it is. But I do think he presents a quite plausible case not only for why Linux and SCO would have common code, but more importantly why SCO might not realize it and stumble ahead down a path which will make them look incredibly stupid if it turns out to be true.
The really interesting part is that if the AT&T code is really contaminated with BSD code (which certainly seems to be the case) than the value of the SVR4 code which SCO licenses is quite a bit lower than they might think. I mean, if it's full of BSD code, sure they can license it but it will end up making it damn hard to sue anybody and prove that the code is really AT&T vs. BSD.
I'll grant you that I was wrong when I said that the FCC was decreasing regulations of radio industry but:
THEY ARE KEEPING THE REGULATIONS THAT ARE IN PLACE FOR RADIO!!!! Therefore they are RE-regulating radio.
this is wrong. My boss didn't fire me today. Does that me he re-hired me? I didn't divorce my wife today, does that mean I re-married her? If the FCC had put the old ownership rules back in place, that would be re-regulation.
Um, actually de-regulation is not the opposite of re-regulation. In your case , 'de' refers to "remove or remove from" while 're' refers to "again, anew". Not the same thing, with quite distinct meanings. To claim that a relaxation of existing regulations is to "re-regulate" an industry is quite frankly bullshit.
Really, there isn't anything to worry about. ClearChannel wouldn't ever mis-report the news. They are more than happy to even put the news of FCC's "vote to re-regulate the radio industry" right on their home page
Wait, "re-regulate". WTF?
They will have more power to control elections; more power to sell wars; more power to do anything they want.
Judging by the last couple of years, I think they already have ample power in that respect. The latest changes are really just a small incremental review, the big changes were during 1996. That's when the ownership rules were really gutted.
So if a badguy shoots someone and takes their car how does this system keep the badguy from using the roads?
:P
Um, because a stolen car can be located much, much faster than possible thru any other means? Would you steal cars if you knew the police could locate and track you within minutes of the car being reported stolen?
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your ?0.02, so
Live mid-market rates as of 2003.05.30 19:24:11 GMT.
0.02 ? = 0.0235500 USD
Cisco uses unused pairs; hence, you can't have Gig-over-copper AND POE.
Actually, they are using the data pairs. At least when you are providing power via the WS-X6348 line cards. I'm not sure that they don't use the unused pairs with the dumb power injectors.
Really? Don't tell my wife. She'll probably make me get rid of my uncut sheet of $2 bills.