Free speech isn't a basic civil right???? I think most americans WILL understand that someone got arrested for TALKING about a subject that the government says you can't talk about. Frankly, you tan TALK about how to build a bomb, but not how to play a DVD. Most American's can understand the insanity of this, no matter how stupid.
The reality is that they can arrest / fine a good portion of the people. The system can easily handle thousands of people. It does so every day. Most people are not independantly wealthy, and many have families to support. For the majority of us, we just can't risk it. This is why laws work...
Perens is not advocating software piracy. Read the article. He plans to explain how to mod a DVD player to play legally purchased DVD's from other regions.
The current hollywood restriction that requires region coding is highly questionable. The legality of restricting your ability to play a purchased disc in a player from another region is questionable (I don't think it has ever been challenged in court.) The only thing I believe restricting this in the US is the DMCA.
Yeah, linux has been very stable for years. In fact, I belive my linux server ran the entire year of 1998 without a reboot (it had an uptime of somewhere around 750 days before I had to power down to move it.)
From what I read of the article, there was nothing "real-time" about any of the tasks that these extra systems were doing. No need for QNX.
As for Matthew's flamebait comment on a "30 year old dead horse", this "dead horse" is more stable that any MS crap out there. It's well known and understood, easy to program, easy to extend, open, versitile, etc. All things that MS weenies would love but can't have.
Your right. It's not funny that Win98 BSOD's every 10 minutes. It's also not funny that an auto mfr would choose to use such an unstable OS for use in a car. The consequences of losing all sorts of functionality in your car or causing undesirable operation when (not if) it crashes is very "not funny."
The most "not funny" part of this would be if we had to pay the MS tax 5 extra times (one for each "system") to buy a volvo.
Yeah, the least expensive ones ship it off (electronically via high-speed scanner) to India or some other country where labor is dirt cheap. I've used them in the past.
OCR is just too unreliable. The best of them are only around 99% accurate with typewritten pages which still means lots of errors per page. OCR of handwritten input is a joke. HUMAN interpretation of handwritten data isn't even totally accurate due to the piss poor handwritting some people have.
If you can minimize the amount of "essay" data and maximize multiple choice with fill-in-the-dot you will be able to lower your error rate.
I don't think it had anything to do with being foolish. It was obvioulsy a political decision. Hey, it's no skin off your nose if it's someone elses money. In business, the people signing contracts usually have a financial stake in their company (stock options.) Getting the best deal affects their own personal financial outlook so they are more likely to be picky.
This is a basic problem with government in general. If each congressperson was basically charged double the tax rate of the average citizen (for life, not just their term) they MAY be more likely to be fiscally responsible.
It's not just a california problem, most ALL federal, state, and local governments have the same basic problem. Once a new program is started, it basically never ends. Agencies never have to justify existing spending, only NEW spending (and not even detailed at that.) What needs to happen is for government to look at Each and Every office, person, program, and for agency directors to justify every penny spent and justify the continuation of the program on an annual basis. Make them criminally liable for thier numbers much like congress wants to do for CEO's of companies.
Government spending could probably be cut 70% if we did this.
Better yet, call/write/email the ADVERTISER and tell them why you will be buying their competitors products instead. Of course if you are a guy and it's a tampon commercial they just may ignore you.:-)
While the US telcos are really bad, at least they have a shread of reasonable behavior in terms of net costs. That's outrageous. Extortion comes to mind.
Offtopic, I know, but the company I used to work for hired one of those as a VP, and was my manager. I quit and went to their competitor as a senior VP one level above what she was, and a nice comp package to boot! Aparently she only lasted a couple months until the person who hired her was fired.
Seriously, if any company hires someone like this in a senior role, you KNOW it's time to leave.
This is BS. There are ZERO laws on the books requiring corporations to filter their employees from the net. Hell, the laws on filtering PUBLIC access can't even pass constitutional challenges.
If an employee is doing sexual harrasment and you do nothing, you can be liable. Doesn't matter if they use snail mail, net, fax, phone, posters in the john, whatever. If you respond to complaints and handle them appropriately, you have a good defense from liability (nothing will protect you completely.)
Any company using "harrassment" as an excuse is LYING. It's a made up story for the sheep.
/., NYT and LAT are VERY different. With/., you don't need to register to READ. NYT and LAT you do. LAT is worse tha NYT because they require a valid email which is a BIG no no for those who hate spam and want to retain a shread of privacy.
The bottom line is that SPAM and loss of privacy are too much to ask for. The cost is just too high.
If they lose readership, the value to advertisers goes down which means less money. Is this what they really want?
if you want to view their content, you should play by their rules
Let's look at the rules.
When you subscribe to the paper, they know your name and address. Nothing else. Of course they need this info to GET the paper to you, and handle billing. If you buy one on the stand they know NOTHING. Why are they asking for additional information from web readers? Age, gender, income, email address, and phone number are required fields. Why? It's not needed for billing since it's still free, and not needed for delivery either. Advertisers still pay for the "publishing" just like they do for the print edition.
As I said. Screw it. Their content isn't worth the invasion of privacy and massive loads of spam from "partners." Hey, it's a decision they made, and if losing lots of readers isn't a big deal, then fine... I don't patronize "registration required to read" sites.
Email is too easily abused. Snail mail has a (significant) cost associated with it, so marketers are more careful about who they put on their lists. I've never recieved more than 12 items of junk mail in any given day and it's usually much less, but I frequently get (or servers attempt to send me and get blocked) dozens of spams per day. Worst was almost 200.
With the current spam problem and the history of companies abusing their "customer list", it's no wonder people are reluctant to give out their email address.
LA times is worse because they don't just want an email address. At the "size, color and style of underwear" question I finally gave up. Screw them, there are plenty of other sources of news on the net.
Keep a "default" image of the pre-installed software that you setup for clients. It makes life MUCH easier when you need to service the machine. CD's are cheap. Keep them in a numbered box with a database to help you find the correct CD by serial number of machine (YOUR serial number, not the MFR's. I assume you will also sell some name-brand boxes. Oh yeah, have some ser number labels printed up.) The database should also have ALL the details about the machine as you sold it. Ram, HD, vid cards, software, bios, etc. Keep a history of the machine. Put your phone number on the serial number tag too.
Your database will also allow you to send out "tech update" notices to people. First, they will appreciate the info. Second, that will entice them to come to YOU for updates, fixes, etc.
This is the kind of thing a mom&pop can do that big companies and stores never will.
Service, service, and more service. Of all types. Consider your store your home base and nothing else. Store front retail should almost be the icing on the cake, and give your customers some peace of mind that you are not running a business out of your garage.
Figure that you basically are not going to make anything on a base computer. Focus on upgrades (even for new systems,) Repairs, software enemas, etc. Market yourself to other small local businesses as a resource. If you are in a small town setting, you may be able to pickup service contracts for government offices, schools, etc. The smaller offices / businesses generally don't have their own IT person.
To support small businesses, check out POS systems, and learn accounting software. You need to be the "goto guy".
Know networking inside and out. Be able to setup routers, network printers, firewalls, file servers, and focus on security. Find an electrical contractor to partner with to run conduit and wires for you (both from a labor / equipment point of view, and license / liability point.)
Don't forget backup systems / UPS's, and remote access for troubleshooting (Timbuktu.)
Hey, this isn't easy stuff. Running a small business is Hard Work. You are going to put in more time than you ever did at a regular job. You also need to be an expert in everything.
... unless you have a T1 line, or IDSL. T1 rates are from $600 on the low end to $2500. My IDSL which is about 1/10th of a T1 costs $129 / month. So it depends.
The real deal is that large pipes = good rates. I had a T3 (45Mb) for $18K / month which included the local loop and unlimited usage. That works out to about $350 / Mb? Something like that. When you buy an OC12 it's a much better rate than that per Mb.
Small ISP's don't pay on # of bytes transfered, they pay generally on the 95th percentile of sustained usage (MB / Sec). Large ISP's just lease long-distance pipe from a fiber company and run their own backbone. They exchage packets via public and private peering points with each other based on individual contracts.
Speaking of aircompressors, careful when blowing out computers. If you spin the little fans beyond their normal speed you can kill the little sleeve bearings... I've did this a couple times years ago before I learned better. If you must clean the fan, stop it from spinning with a screwdriver or something. Also, make sure you have a water trap on your air line or you can end up spraying a fine mist of water all over the inside of your computer.
Back on topic, lots of commercial machines / servers have this ducting. My compaq servers had it over the ram and CPU's and rather than blowing in from the out side, it sucked the air out. Your big heat generators are your RAM, CPU, and diskdrives.
My homebrew tower actually has one big-mother fan that takes up 3 5-1/4" drive bay slots (sits in the front of the opening) to cool the drives behind it in addition to the 2 other case fans, and power supply fans. With dual processors, 2G ram, 4 36G 10Krpm scsi drives, it would get bloody hot in there without all those fans.
While I haven't played with it much, the lmsensors package on linux can tell you temps of various things on the motherboard which could be useful in playing with cooling.
In trying to keep the noise out of the house, I built a cabinet in the garage for my servers and ran a duct from my central airconditioner to the cabinet. I run the furnace fan continually and the thermostat is never set over 75, so it keeps things nice (note that I have a thermostat controlled damper that shuts the vent when the heat kicks on.) I'm mentioning this because you have to keep in mind that you can have that you can have nice airflow in your case, but if your machines in a 95 degree room it's not gonna do much good.
Yes and no. Yes it has more features, but your preferences are still in edit, most items are still in the same category, etc.
Unix software in generall just get's more refined. More features are added, but generally it doesn't change look and feel. Yes, there are exceptions. But not many.
In contrast, MS moves crap around for the sake of moving crap around. The changes in NT4 -> 2000 -> XP for example can leave you totally lost. Network configuration, devices, services for example have changed a LOT. Enough so that MS requires recertification for MCSE's (Well, they also want to make mcse's poor.:-)
Until OSX, Mac's have also been fairly static from OS to OS, not having changed much in 18 years.
Re:Quick kudos to the XFree86 team
on
Xinerama Part of X
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Um, this announcement has NOTHING to do with xfree86 tarballs. Xinerama was ALREADY THERE. What it has to do with is that xinerama will now be part of the main X consortium's tree. This will (eventually) make commercial X servers (such as those in Solaris, AIX, etc.) slightly larger due to xinerama support being "backported". Not enough so to make a difference in the grand scheme of things. It can take YEARS for X Consortium's members to get the latest code into their products.
Slashdot Mirror
... and "enlighteneduser@jabber", "oldtimer@effnet".
Film and broadcast are completely different. NTSC has NOTHING to do with film. NTSC is the US "video" standard.
Free speech isn't a basic civil right???? I think most americans WILL understand that someone got arrested for TALKING about a subject that the government says you can't talk about. Frankly, you tan TALK about how to build a bomb, but not how to play a DVD. Most American's can understand the insanity of this, no matter how stupid.
The reality is that they can arrest / fine a good portion of the people. The system can easily handle thousands of people. It does so every day. Most people are not independantly wealthy, and many have families to support. For the majority of us, we just can't risk it. This is why laws work...
Perens is not advocating software piracy. Read the article. He plans to explain how to mod a DVD player to play legally purchased DVD's from other regions.
The current hollywood restriction that requires region coding is highly questionable. The legality of restricting your ability to play a purchased disc in a player from another region is questionable (I don't think it has ever been challenged in court.) The only thing I believe restricting this in the US is the DMCA.
The flash player is many releases old, and shockwave is NOT availble for Linux.
Yeah, linux has been very stable for years. In fact, I belive my linux server ran the entire year of 1998 without a reboot (it had an uptime of
somewhere around 750 days before I had to power down to move it.)
From what I read of the article, there was nothing "real-time" about any of the tasks that these extra systems were doing. No need for QNX.
As for Matthew's flamebait comment on a "30 year old dead horse", this "dead horse" is more stable that any MS crap out there. It's well known and understood, easy to program, easy to extend, open, versitile, etc. All things that MS weenies would love but can't have.
Your right. It's not funny that Win98 BSOD's every 10 minutes. It's also not funny that an auto mfr would choose to use such an unstable OS for use in a car. The consequences of losing all sorts of functionality in your car or causing undesirable operation when (not if) it crashes is very "not funny."
The most "not funny" part of this would be if we had to pay the MS tax 5 extra times (one for each "system") to buy a volvo.
Yeah, the least expensive ones ship it off (electronically via high-speed scanner) to India or some other country where labor is dirt cheap. I've used them in the past.
OCR is just too unreliable. The best of them are only around 99% accurate with typewritten pages which still means lots of errors per page. OCR of handwritten input is a joke. HUMAN interpretation of handwritten data isn't even totally accurate due to the piss poor handwritting some people have.
If you can minimize the amount of "essay" data and maximize multiple choice with fill-in-the-dot you will be able to lower your error rate.
Before windows, there was DOS. Kids used dos. Kids used Apple ]['s.
Don't underestimate kids. They learn FAST.
I don't think it had anything to do with being foolish. It was obvioulsy a political decision. Hey, it's no skin off your nose if it's someone elses money. In business, the people signing contracts usually have a financial stake in their company (stock options.) Getting the best deal affects their own personal financial outlook so they are more likely to be picky.
This is a basic problem with government in general. If each congressperson was basically charged double the tax rate of the average citizen (for life, not just their term) they MAY be more likely to be fiscally responsible.
It's not just a california problem, most ALL federal, state, and local governments have the same basic problem. Once a new program is started, it basically never ends. Agencies never have to justify existing spending, only NEW spending (and not even detailed at that.) What needs to happen is for government to look at Each and Every office, person, program, and for agency directors to justify every penny spent and justify the continuation of the program on an annual basis. Make them criminally liable for thier numbers much like congress wants to do for CEO's of companies.
Government spending could probably be cut 70% if we did this.
Better yet, call/write/email the ADVERTISER and tell them why you will :-)
be buying their competitors products instead. Of course if you are a guy and it's a tampon commercial they just may ignore you.
While the US telcos are really bad, at least they have a shread of reasonable behavior in terms of net costs. That's outrageous. Extortion comes to mind.
Offtopic, I know, but the company I used to work for hired one of those as a VP, and was my manager. I quit and went to their competitor as a senior VP one level above what she was, and a nice comp package to boot!
Aparently she only lasted a couple months until the person who hired her was fired.
Seriously, if any company hires someone like this in a senior role, you KNOW it's time to leave.
This is BS. There are ZERO laws on the books requiring corporations to filter their employees from the net. Hell, the laws on filtering PUBLIC access can't even pass constitutional challenges.
If an employee is doing sexual harrasment and you do nothing, you can be liable. Doesn't matter if they use snail mail, net, fax, phone, posters in the john, whatever. If you respond to complaints and handle them appropriately, you have a good defense from liability (nothing will protect you completely.)
Any company using "harrassment" as an excuse is LYING. It's a made up story for the sheep.
/., NYT and LAT are VERY different. With /., you don't need to register to READ. NYT and LAT you do. LAT is worse tha NYT because they require a valid email which is a BIG no no for those who hate spam and want to retain a shread of privacy.
The bottom line is that SPAM and loss of privacy are too much to ask for. The cost is just too high.
If they lose readership, the value to advertisers goes down which means less money. Is this what they really want?
if you want to view their content, you should play by their rules
Let's look at the rules.
When you subscribe to the paper, they know your name and address. Nothing else. Of course they need this info to GET the paper to you, and handle billing. If you buy one on the stand they know NOTHING. Why are they asking for additional information from web readers? Age, gender, income, email address, and phone number are required fields. Why? It's not needed for billing since it's still free, and not needed for delivery either. Advertisers still pay for the "publishing" just like they do for the print edition.
As I said. Screw it. Their content isn't worth the invasion of privacy and massive loads of spam from "partners." Hey, it's a decision they made, and if losing lots of readers isn't a big deal, then fine... I don't patronize "registration required to read" sites.
Email is too easily abused. Snail mail has a (significant) cost associated with it, so marketers are more careful about who they put on their lists. I've never recieved more than 12 items of junk mail in any given day and it's usually much less, but I frequently get (or servers attempt to send me and get blocked) dozens of spams per day. Worst was almost 200.
With the current spam problem and the history of companies abusing their "customer list", it's no wonder people are reluctant to give out their email address.
LA times is worse because they don't just want an email address. At the "size, color and style of underwear" question I finally gave up. Screw them, there are plenty of other sources of news on the net.
Good stuff. One more thing:
Keep a "default" image of the pre-installed software that you setup for clients. It makes life MUCH easier when you need to service the machine. CD's are cheap. Keep them in a numbered box with a database to help you find the correct CD by serial number of machine (YOUR serial number, not the MFR's. I assume you will also sell some name-brand boxes. Oh yeah, have some ser number labels printed up.) The database should also have ALL the details about the machine as you sold it. Ram, HD, vid cards, software, bios, etc. Keep a history of the machine. Put your phone number on the serial number tag too.
Your database will also allow you to send out "tech update" notices to people. First, they will appreciate the info. Second, that will entice them to come to YOU for updates, fixes, etc.
This is the kind of thing a mom&pop can do that big companies and stores never will.
Service, service, and more service. Of all types. Consider your store your home base and nothing else. Store front retail should almost be the icing on the cake, and give your customers some peace of mind that you are not running a business out of your garage.
Figure that you basically are not going to make anything on a base computer. Focus on upgrades (even for new systems,) Repairs, software enemas, etc. Market yourself to other small local businesses as a resource. If you are in a small town setting, you may be able to pickup service contracts for government offices, schools, etc. The smaller offices / businesses generally don't have their own IT person.
To support small businesses, check out POS systems, and learn accounting software. You need to be the "goto guy".
Know networking inside and out. Be able to setup routers, network printers, firewalls, file servers, and focus on security. Find an electrical contractor to partner with to run conduit and wires for you
(both from a labor / equipment point of view, and license / liability point.)
Don't forget backup systems / UPS's, and remote access for troubleshooting (Timbuktu.)
Hey, this isn't easy stuff. Running a small business is Hard Work. You are going to put in more time than you ever did at a regular job. You also need to be an expert in everything.
... unless you have a T1 line, or IDSL. T1 rates are from $600 on the low end to $2500. My IDSL which is about 1/10th of a T1 costs $129 / month. So it depends.
The real deal is that large pipes = good rates. I had a T3 (45Mb) for $18K / month which included the local loop and unlimited usage. That works out to about $350 / Mb? Something like that. When you buy an OC12 it's a much better rate than that per Mb.
Small ISP's don't pay on # of bytes transfered, they pay generally on the 95th percentile of sustained usage (MB / Sec). Large ISP's just lease long-distance pipe from a fiber company and run their own backbone. They exchage packets via public and private peering points with each other based on individual contracts.
Speaking of aircompressors, careful when blowing out computers. If you spin the little fans beyond their normal speed you can kill the little sleeve bearings... I've did this a couple times years ago before I learned better. If you must clean the fan, stop it from spinning with a screwdriver or something. Also, make sure you have a water trap on your air line or you can end up spraying a fine mist of water all over the inside of your computer.
Back on topic, lots of commercial machines / servers have this ducting. My compaq servers had it over the ram and CPU's and rather than blowing in from the out side, it sucked the air out. Your big heat generators are your RAM, CPU, and diskdrives.
My homebrew tower actually has one big-mother fan that takes up 3 5-1/4" drive bay slots (sits in the front of the opening) to cool the drives behind it in addition to the 2 other case fans, and power supply fans. With dual processors, 2G ram, 4 36G 10Krpm scsi drives, it would get bloody hot in there without all those fans.
While I haven't played with it much, the lmsensors package on linux can tell you temps of various things on the motherboard which could be useful in playing with cooling.
In trying to keep the noise out of the house, I built a cabinet in the garage for my servers and ran a duct from my central airconditioner to the cabinet. I run the furnace fan continually and the thermostat is never set over 75, so it keeps things nice (note that I have a thermostat controlled damper that shuts the vent when the heat kicks on.) I'm mentioning this because you have to keep in mind that you can have that you can have nice airflow in your case, but if your machines in a 95 degree room it's not gonna do much good.
Yes and no. Yes it has more features, but your preferences are still in edit, most items are still in the same category, etc.
:-)
Unix software in generall just get's more refined. More features are added, but generally it doesn't change look and feel. Yes, there are exceptions. But not many.
In contrast, MS moves crap around for the sake of moving crap around. The changes in NT4 -> 2000 -> XP for example can leave you totally lost. Network configuration, devices, services for example have changed a LOT. Enough so that MS requires recertification for MCSE's (Well, they also want to make mcse's poor.
Until OSX, Mac's have also been fairly static from OS to OS, not having changed much in 18 years.
Um, this announcement has NOTHING to do with xfree86 tarballs. Xinerama was ALREADY THERE. What it has to do with is that xinerama will now be part of the main X consortium's tree. This will (eventually) make commercial X servers (such as those in Solaris, AIX, etc.) slightly larger due to xinerama support being "backported". Not enough so to make a difference in the grand scheme of things. It can take YEARS for X Consortium's members to get the latest code into their products.