One of my clients is an ISP - and they *want* the bounces to go out for the simple reason that it broadcasts to the world that "your mail is safe with us".
So the bounce messages go something like "Our mail server detected a virus in an email you appear to have sent, and we protected our customer... For more information about our services come to --URL--"
I don't know if it's effective at all, but it sure doesn't cost much - the virus notification is essentially a mild form of SPAM which few people really get up in arms about.
Just to understand, there are market conditions behind those virus notices...
Does this particular story add anything to the debate or is it just a troll?
It most certainly *does* add something. If you say something once, people will be very unlikely to remember it. If you say it twice, a few will remember it.
If it's repeated every week or so for a year, most everybody will have gotten the point. It's called "repetition".
I'll paraphrase Hitler: "Repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it to be true".
Except, in this case, there's no lie, except maybe at the patent office.
Banning list-generation software seems a bit heavy-handed, doesn't it?
Which is it going to be?!?
On one hand, we decry any attempt to regulate the Internet for any reason (see this article just earlier today!) unless it's XYZ...
This is why true democracy always fails... Everybody will vote only for themselves, but the end result is that everybody votes *against* everybody else.
So we have slowly eroding personal liberties, along with a gradually growing, now almost all-encompassing quasi-socialistic govornment. (here in the US)
Sometimes altruism pays. Is it so terrible to BAN email harvesters and their accompanying list generators? How about google? They've certainly made notes on some of my recent activity...
Most any slashdotter will agree that a line needs to be drawn, even if it's just ABM. (Anything But Microsoft)
It takes a level head to realize the idea of valid compromise towards drawing lines that will function well in society.
Companies are always searching for ways to squeeze more productivity out of their staff - I wonder if there's ever been any objective study to show that people *don't* work as effectively when they know they are amoebas under microscopic management.
Or do they work harder, and quit earlier? What's the cost of replacement?
It'd sure be nice if a well-funded and run study showed that being nice made people more productive... any studies at all?
Anybody remember the campus of a software company that had free medical (via on-site doctor) child care, membership in a health club, free food (all you can eat) soccer games, and the like?
I seem to remember seeing "60 Minutes" or something on this company - how they were able to improve productivity *and* morale by providing the extras on campus so that the people are just free to work...
Anybody have a link? Can this method be brought to everyday, or is/was this a fluke based on uncommonly good market conditions for said company?
Personally, I can't stand ILECs and in fact don't have a land line myself, but the dogma that telephony shouldn't be subject to regulatory requirements if it uses the internet doesn't sit well with me.
Try reading this as:
Personally, I can't stand Post Offices and in fact don't have a mail box myself, but the dogma that mail shouldn't be subject to regulatory requirements if it uses the internet doesn't sit well with me.
Do you want to pay taxes on your email? Slashdot views?
There's nothing about VOIP that differentiates it substantively from email, I/M, or pr0n.
For instance, if a tiny number of customer hosts are infected and are blasting huge amounts of traffic, the best response may simply be to remove them from the network, or block the relevant ports on the proximal router.
The other day, I was using my computer at work. While using my Mozilla browser on Linux, SBC redirected my browser to a web page declaring that my computer had been infected with the Blaster Worm.
It should be obvious to you already why this was simply rediculous.
I don't object to your idea of disconnecting people that are using computer that have been infected by whatever virus, but should my service have been disconnected, I would expect financial remuneration since I was clearly not the problem.
The real issue here is that even with the best detection methods, you can never be truly sure.
So, I called SBC, and asked them why this was happening. It turns out that since port 135 was blocked by our firewall, and DENY was used instead of REJECT, there were at any given moment anywhere from 5 to 15 worms attempting to infect our firewall repeatedly.
This was construed by SBC's detector as "high traffic".
So if you are going to block any traffic at all, as an ISP, you had better be sure that the benefits outweight the potential for economic losses as a result of loss of service of your clientelle.
So I can recall that Joe said something three weeks ago that relates to a current problem, and look in the "Joe" virtual folder to find it.
Hm. I've found that Kmails search function works very well for this kind of thing. I have all business email going back nearly 4 years in Kmail and the filtering is just kewl.
"All messages where from contains david and where subject contains money"
If software patents are really so bad, then the laws of economics will eventually kick in and favor those nations/areas that don't allow them.
Really. It's that simple.
I have mixed feelings about software patents. I don't think that the concept is really so awful, but the way the US Patent office has been handing out S/W patents like lollipops has been evil and destructive.
However, if *any* decent economic power refuses software patents (India, anybody?) the clear advantages would be enough to favor them economically - and those clueless enough to uphold s/w patents would pay and pay, like Europe has for missing such a large piece of the information revolution.
Assuming, of course, that s/w patents are *really* all that terrible.
As a software developer, I rely heavily on open-source tools to write very proprietary software.
Anything that doesn't offer a clear advantage to me to keep gets tossed into the public pool - I've donated large amounts of patches, software, and projects into the public sector - and it nearly always comes back to *help* me later.
But there's plenty I still hold close to my chest.
So, really - time will tell if it *really* is so horrible to have software patents. Although, in the case of the US, time will tell if it *really* is so horrible to have incompetently granted software patents.
I suspect that the whole area of S/W patents in the US will get so bad that the whole thing gets trashed eventually - but we'll see.
It starts with a small scope. In some, small, area, Linux is "good enough".
Then, somebody asks: "What about..."? - and it works there, too.
And then somebody else asks: "Well, it worked here, what about..."? and it's good enough there, too.
This process continues until some major company decides to bet their farm on it - and it's good enough for that.
Suddenly, everybody sees it. Everybody recognizes the value. This is a turning point. One of many, but one of the big ones.
Linux is now widely recognized as "the future". As a Linux user, I routinely have conversations where Linux is "the future" and it's not questioned anymore.
With paying clients. And other vendors.
Linux is on its way. In 10 years, it'll be the default, like Windows is today still.
However, I do question the ability of RSS to scale. Think of a scenario where millions of users need to poll hundreds of thousands of sources to check for updates on the feeds. How much unnecessary load does this pose to the network and servers?
In this case, it might make sense to combine HTTP and BitTorrent technologies. HTTP is *very* instant, BT is *very* efficient, particularly with large amounts of bandwidth.
However, using checksumming (a la sha1) would all but guarantee that you get an accurate feed, and by doing the "p2p" thing, you could drastically cut down on the bandwidth to the server.
I picture a "referral" system - person connects to central server, and get a public key + referral as the response.
If the referral is itself too busy, it refers to one of its referrals, and so on.
In short, you'd rapidly end up with a technology that could scale easily to hundreds of thousands of feeds simultaneously, with near-linear growth.
Use of public key guarantees that the feed actually came from the right server, even with untrusted hosts.
This type of system would allow for growth to include every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth to be taken care of with a/. grade server equipment. (Impressive, but not all *that* expensive)
Microsoft once tried (and failed) to get AIM opened to the public. They wanted to establish an "open" IM protocol.
Numerous fights between MS and AOL ensured.
Fast forward a few years. Now MS has something. AIM is no longer a near monopoly, and MSN is paying the bill. Suddenly they don't want to be so open. What happened to their cries for "openness"?
Gee, what a surprise. Do they ever surprise? No, I don't think so, either.
Market economics ultimately makes a few people very wealthy and most people extremely poor. I am not an American, but I have been to New York, and I can tell you, in the heart of capitalism, I have never seen such poverty living alongside such obscene wealth.
The law of nature is that of "survival of the fittest". It's very brutal. It's not at all fair. It's not democratic, it's not just.
But, it's very effective. Those that can gather the werewithal to make money, and to study ways to make more money, and will become wealthy.
Those that don't, won't. I'm not arguing that it's optimum or that it's right or even that I like it.
But to pretend that some stupid, ineffective law would solve everything is just stupid and ineffective. The utopian future they all thought 50 years ago would happen someday didn't happen - and it seems to be part of human nature to make sure it never does.
Sad, but so far, true.
Have you ever bothered to take the time to find out *why* those people on the street in NYC are on the street? If you haven't, you're part of the problem. If you have, you're still part of the problem because I can be pretty sure you aren't working feverishly to help them.
When you're poor (and I have been) utopia is when you have the resources to buy a car with cash, you have food in the fridge, and no worries about buying more tomorrow.
Well, I buy (used) cars with a few thou in cash, plenty of healthy food for me and my five children, and I'm not worried about buying more tomorrow.
How come I don't feel like I'm in utopia? Now, utopia means providing tuition for my 14 Y.O. boys who aspire to Harvard and MIT. Utopia means buying a *new* car instead of a "last decade" model. Utopia means I hire somebody else to mow the lawn, instead of either yelling at said 14 Y.O. boys or doing it myself.
It's just human nature to strive for more.
At the end of the day, this is another market correction. In 100 years, our economic woes will be as dim a memory as the severe market slump of the late 1890s. (What, were you sleeping in history class?)
In 100 years, people will fall in love, go to work, eat, argue, and reproduce, just like they do today, and have for millenia.
Nope, what is hillarious is that all that is required to prevent this is legislation requiring any american company to pay any employee US equivalent wages for the job they do, regardless of the work they are doing.
Nope! Bzzzzzzzztt! I call Bullshit!
You think that if this kind of law was passed, that it would make *any* difference at all?
All that would happen is that the Nikes of the world would re-incorporate oversees as "Nike-Asia" or something, becoming two separate companies with a complex arrangement of contracts, and the work would be done by a "foreign" company (Nike-Asia) by contract, and the products (software) "imported" into the US by a "local" company. (Nike)
In fact, I'd be pretty certain this has already done in order to prevent passage of liability.
In short, it's called "out-sourcing" and it's done legally any time any company provides a service to another.
There are no easy ways to stop this.
It's just market economics doing what they do best - balancing out supply and demand. So, do as the article says, wise up, and be very aware of the many opportunities as they arise.
Put together a quick, simple web-thingy that you can administer, and give permission to your boss to assign priorities to items you get.
Somebody puts in a request? Great! Post it on your web-thingy, and notify your boss to assign priorities for the request(s).
Then, when user NNN sees their priority bumped to position #37 (ETA==never) they can take it up with your boss... while you just appear to be clean, professional, and attentive.
This is the kind of thing you could hack together with Linux/Apache/PHP/Perl in a matter of a few hours, if you really are any good.
Heck, put in a submission form so that you don't even need to type it in!
CI Host has a huge marketing and sales department and tiny tech support division. Dont you dare, ever, believe a word of their marketing crap. They suck. Pure and simple. They've cost me thousands because of the clients i've lost because of their incompetence.
If you lost hundreds of dollars because of them once, it's their fault. If you lost hundreds because of them repeatedly, it's your fault.
Really.
Given today's hosting environment, if you aren't absolutely happy with your current provider, move. A few hundred well-place dollars can put you at a new facility with all the fixins.
I find rackspace to be quite expensive - I've been working with John Companies and so far, I've been quite pleased.
On Unix and unix-like systems, one has to explicitly mark a file as executable before ths OS will try to run it, and it's even possible to deny the "execute" permission to an entire filesystem (for instance, users' read-write home directories).
You think? Try this one:/bin/sh ~/badnasty.sh
I really think that there should be *another* bit - "executable" and "scriptable". Anything without a "scriptable" bit set can't be executed by bash/perl/python/php/ksh/etc.
I added a second vonage number for faxing and it works perfectly (except during the blackout).
This is precisely why treating a VOIP line like a phone line won't work. Telephones are on their own independent circuit and so have advantages for emergencies. VOIP is no more regulatable for telecommunications than SPAM is.
One of the things that I've discovered in my adult life is that every word is a promise. As soon as you have to defend your honesty, you've already lost the trust.
If you ever yell at your kids "I mean it", you've already demonstrated that you don't. If you catch yourself saying "I mean it" or "I'm serious" that's a pretty good clue that you need to re-evaluate your actions, because somewhere you are shooting yourself in the foot.
With that in mind, read the following quote:
(We) just don't want the rest of the world to believe that it's not (there), that this is some sort of smoke and mirrors. It's not.
I read this as "I mean it this time!". 'Nuff said.
Corporations who have embraced open software (linux specifically) are really saving themselves a lot of money. It'd be nice of those coporations would kick back some of their savings into supporting open source projects and initiatives.
Yeah, it would be nice. But it really doesn't matter.
You see, if I release software under a free license, (which I frequently do) I really don't care how many people use it. It could be 1, 10, 100, 10,000 people, or more.
The 10,000th copy costs me the same as the 1st.
Yet the power of OSS comes back to assist me when somebody, ANYBODY out there finds a change to make to the software that improves it, and re-posts it back to the community.
There's the value - and the other 9,999 people are guaranteed to get all the attention from me that they deserve - nada.
Eyes have the potential problem of a thief scanning your house to see what you have inside. Slashdotters unite! We must band together to ban optic nerves!
While funny, and apparently a good analogy, it fails for a very simple reason...
When people need to see what it would take to prevent unathorized scanning by optic nerves [sic], they can do so simply by looking around.
To prevent scanning by RFID tag sensors, one must first
A) Get a suitable detector B) Configure it to read each and every of the potential wavelengths for all RFID tags, C) Configure it to understand the protocol(s) and protocol variations for all RFID tags in the area D) Then, without being able to actually see limits of the area being scanned, one must scan the entire area.
The issue isn't really the RFID tags, it's the relatively indefensible position they leave you in against somebody with more techology/money than you have.
As a software vendor myself, some software sold on a subscription basis "phones home". It's done very openly, through a "synch" where the users enter their login/password, which is then authenticated via an encrypted protocol to a central server which updates their license for another 30 days.
If the synch doesn't fly, neither does the software. Very simple, and there's nothing for anybody to complain about "unknown information". With this, the idea of "stealing" the software is pretty meaningless, and anybody who objects doesn't have to log on.
This synch, BTW, is a good way for us to backup their data (which they REALLY like) and update their software. (which they also REALLY like)
So, it's not about "phoning home" it's about not telling anybody about it.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my clients is an ISP - and they *want* the bounces to go out for the simple reason that it broadcasts to the world that "your mail is safe with us".
... For more information about our services come to --URL--"
So the bounce messages go something like "Our mail server detected a virus in an email you appear to have sent, and we protected our customer
I don't know if it's effective at all, but it sure doesn't cost much - the virus notification is essentially a mild form of SPAM which few people really get up in arms about.
Just to understand, there are market conditions behind those virus notices...
Does this particular story add anything to the debate or is it just a troll?
It most certainly *does* add something. If you say something once, people will be very unlikely to remember it. If you say it twice, a few will remember it.
If it's repeated every week or so for a year, most everybody will have gotten the point. It's called "repetition".
I'll paraphrase Hitler: "Repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it to be true".
Except, in this case, there's no lie, except maybe at the patent office.
Banning list-generation software seems a bit heavy-handed, doesn't it?
Which is it going to be?!?
On one hand, we decry any attempt to regulate the Internet for any reason (see this article just earlier today!) unless it's XYZ...
This is why true democracy always fails... Everybody will vote only for themselves, but the end result is that everybody votes *against* everybody else.
So we have slowly eroding personal liberties, along with a gradually growing, now almost all-encompassing quasi-socialistic govornment. (here in the US)
Sometimes altruism pays. Is it so terrible to BAN email harvesters and their accompanying list generators? How about google? They've certainly made notes on some of my recent activity...
Most any slashdotter will agree that a line needs to be drawn, even if it's just ABM. (Anything But Microsoft)
It takes a level head to realize the idea of valid compromise towards drawing lines that will function well in society.
Companies are always searching for ways to squeeze more productivity out of their staff - I wonder if there's ever been any objective study to show that people *don't* work as effectively when they know they are amoebas under microscopic management.
Or do they work harder, and quit earlier? What's the cost of replacement?
It'd sure be nice if a well-funded and run study showed that being nice made people more productive... any studies at all?
Anybody remember the campus of a software company that had free medical (via on-site doctor) child care, membership in a health club, free food (all you can eat) soccer games, and the like?
I seem to remember seeing "60 Minutes" or something on this company - how they were able to improve productivity *and* morale by providing the extras on campus so that the people are just free to work...
Anybody have a link? Can this method be brought to everyday, or is/was this a fluke based on uncommonly good market conditions for said company?
Personally, I can't stand ILECs and in fact don't have a land line myself, but the dogma that telephony shouldn't be subject to regulatory requirements if it uses the internet doesn't sit well with me.
Try reading this as:
Personally, I can't stand Post Offices and in fact don't have a mail box myself, but the dogma that mail shouldn't be subject to regulatory requirements if it uses the internet doesn't sit well with me.
Do you want to pay taxes on your email? Slashdot views?
There's nothing about VOIP that differentiates it substantively from email, I/M, or pr0n.
For instance, if a tiny number of customer hosts are infected and are blasting huge amounts of traffic, the best response may simply be to remove them from the network, or block the relevant ports on the proximal router.
The other day, I was using my computer at work. While using my Mozilla browser on Linux, SBC redirected my browser to a web page declaring that my computer had been infected with the Blaster Worm.
It should be obvious to you already why this was simply rediculous.
I don't object to your idea of disconnecting people that are using computer that have been infected by whatever virus, but should my service have been disconnected, I would expect financial remuneration since I was clearly not the problem.
The real issue here is that even with the best detection methods, you can never be truly sure.
So, I called SBC, and asked them why this was happening. It turns out that since port 135 was blocked by our firewall, and DENY was used instead of REJECT, there were at any given moment anywhere from 5 to 15 worms attempting to infect our firewall repeatedly.
This was construed by SBC's detector as "high traffic".
So if you are going to block any traffic at all, as an ISP, you had better be sure that the benefits outweight the potential for economic losses as a result of loss of service of your clientelle.
--Telnet or SSH to bbs.kaos-citadel.net and login with 'bbs' as your username and pwd to experience the KAOS Citadel.
Uh, you might want to recheck that.
$ telnet bbs.kaos-citadel.net
Error: host unknown
$
That leaves you with choosing one of the scripting languages: Ruby, Perl or Python.
Why is it that when the term "scripting language" is brought up, PHP is so universally forgotten?
It's excellent at text parsing, (which is its native purpose) widely supported, and incredibly flexible.
Hmmm. Well I tried google.
:
:
:
1 pound in ounces
1 pound = 16 ounces
1 lightyear in miles
1 lightyear = 5.87849981 x 1012 miles
1 elephant in whales
Results 1 - 10 of about 54,500
(sigh)
So I can recall that Joe said something three weeks ago that relates to a current problem, and look in the "Joe" virtual folder to find it.
Hm. I've found that Kmails search function works very well for this kind of thing. I have all business email going back nearly 4 years in Kmail and the filtering is just kewl.
"All messages where from contains david
and where subject contains money"
Yep. That good. I've been *very* happy.
If software patents are really so bad, then the laws of economics will eventually kick in and favor those nations/areas that don't allow them.
Really. It's that simple.
I have mixed feelings about software patents. I don't think that the concept is really so awful, but the way the US Patent office has been handing out S/W patents like lollipops has been evil and destructive.
However, if *any* decent economic power refuses software patents (India, anybody?) the clear advantages would be enough to favor them economically - and those clueless enough to uphold s/w patents would pay and pay, like Europe has for missing such a large piece of the information revolution.
Assuming, of course, that s/w patents are *really* all that terrible.
As a software developer, I rely heavily on open-source tools to write very proprietary software.
Anything that doesn't offer a clear advantage to me to keep gets tossed into the public pool - I've donated large amounts of patches, software, and projects into the public sector - and it nearly always comes back to *help* me later.
But there's plenty I still hold close to my chest.
So, really - time will tell if it *really* is so horrible to have software patents. Although, in the case of the US, time will tell if it *really* is so horrible to have incompetently granted software patents.
I suspect that the whole area of S/W patents in the US will get so bad that the whole thing gets trashed eventually - but we'll see.
-Ben
It starts with a small scope. In some, small, area, Linux is "good enough".
Then, somebody asks: "What about..."? - and it works there, too.
And then somebody else asks: "Well, it worked here, what about..."? and it's good enough there, too.
This process continues until some major company decides to bet their farm on it - and it's good enough for that.
Suddenly, everybody sees it. Everybody recognizes the value. This is a turning point. One of many, but one of the big ones.
Linux is now widely recognized as "the future". As a Linux user, I routinely have conversations where Linux is "the future" and it's not questioned anymore.
With paying clients. And other vendors.
Linux is on its way. In 10 years, it'll be the default, like Windows is today still.
However, I do question the ability of RSS to scale. Think of a scenario where millions of users need to poll hundreds of thousands of sources to check for updates on the feeds. How much unnecessary load does this pose to the network and servers?
/. grade server equipment. (Impressive, but not all *that* expensive)
In this case, it might make sense to combine HTTP and BitTorrent technologies. HTTP is *very* instant, BT is *very* efficient, particularly with large amounts of bandwidth.
However, using checksumming (a la sha1) would all but guarantee that you get an accurate feed, and by doing the "p2p" thing, you could drastically cut down on the bandwidth to the server.
I picture a "referral" system - person connects to central server, and get a public key + referral as the response.
If the referral is itself too busy, it refers to one of its referrals, and so on.
In short, you'd rapidly end up with a technology that could scale easily to hundreds of thousands of feeds simultaneously, with near-linear growth.
Use of public key guarantees that the feed actually came from the right server, even with untrusted hosts.
This type of system would allow for growth to include every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth to be taken care of with a
Sounds like a solid plan...now to get a certificate signed for a decent price is the challenge.
Anybody here ever notice that Bind9 comes with support for DNSSEC?
It's much like a certificate, only issued by the name server, rather than some random third party.
The name server is responsible for telling the world how to get there - shouldn't it also be responsible for ensuring that you did?
Microsoft once tried (and failed) to get AIM opened to the public. They wanted to establish an "open" IM protocol.
Numerous fights between MS and AOL ensured.
Fast forward a few years. Now MS has something. AIM is no longer a near monopoly, and MSN is paying the bill. Suddenly they don't want to be so open. What happened to their cries for "openness"?
Gee, what a surprise. Do they ever surprise? No, I don't think so, either.
Market economics ultimately makes a few people very wealthy and most people extremely poor.
I am not an American, but I have been to New York, and I can tell you, in the heart of capitalism, I have never seen such poverty living alongside such obscene wealth.
The law of nature is that of "survival of the fittest". It's very brutal. It's not at all fair. It's not democratic, it's not just.
But, it's very effective. Those that can gather the werewithal to make money, and to study ways to make more money, and will become wealthy.
Those that don't, won't. I'm not arguing that it's optimum or that it's right or even that I like it.
But to pretend that some stupid, ineffective law would solve everything is just stupid and ineffective. The utopian future they all thought 50 years ago would happen someday didn't happen - and it seems to be part of human nature to make sure it never does.
Sad, but so far, true.
Have you ever bothered to take the time to find out *why* those people on the street in NYC are on the street? If you haven't, you're part of the problem. If you have, you're still part of the problem because I can be pretty sure you aren't working feverishly to help them.
When you're poor (and I have been) utopia is when you have the resources to buy a car with cash, you have food in the fridge, and no worries about buying more tomorrow.
Well, I buy (used) cars with a few thou in cash, plenty of healthy food for me and my five children, and I'm not worried about buying more tomorrow.
How come I don't feel like I'm in utopia? Now, utopia means providing tuition for my 14 Y.O. boys who aspire to Harvard and MIT. Utopia means buying a *new* car instead of a "last decade" model. Utopia means I hire somebody else to mow the lawn, instead of either yelling at said 14 Y.O. boys or doing it myself.
It's just human nature to strive for more.
At the end of the day, this is another market correction. In 100 years, our economic woes will be as dim a memory as the severe market slump of the late 1890s. (What, were you sleeping in history class?)
In 100 years, people will fall in love, go to work, eat, argue, and reproduce, just like they do today, and have for millenia.
What's so horrible about that?
Nope, what is hillarious is that all that is required to prevent this is legislation requiring any american company to pay any employee US equivalent wages for the job they do, regardless of the work they are doing.
Nope! Bzzzzzzzztt! I call Bullshit!
You think that if this kind of law was passed, that it would make *any* difference at all?
All that would happen is that the Nikes of the world would re-incorporate oversees as "Nike-Asia" or something, becoming two separate companies with a complex arrangement of contracts, and the work would be done by a "foreign" company (Nike-Asia) by contract, and the products (software) "imported" into the US by a "local" company. (Nike)
In fact, I'd be pretty certain this has already done in order to prevent passage of liability.
In short, it's called "out-sourcing" and it's done legally any time any company provides a service to another.
There are no easy ways to stop this.
It's just market economics doing what they do best - balancing out supply and demand. So, do as the article says, wise up, and be very aware of the many opportunities as they arise.
There will most certainly be plenty!
Put together a quick, simple web-thingy that you can administer, and give permission to your boss to assign priorities to items you get.
Somebody puts in a request? Great! Post it on your web-thingy, and notify your boss to assign priorities for the request(s).
Then, when user NNN sees their priority bumped to position #37 (ETA==never) they can take it up with your boss... while you just appear to be clean, professional, and attentive.
This is the kind of thing you could hack together with Linux/Apache/PHP/Perl in a matter of a few hours, if you really are any good.
Heck, put in a submission form so that you don't even need to type it in!
CI Host has a huge marketing and sales department and tiny tech support division. Dont you dare, ever, believe a word of their marketing crap. They suck. Pure and simple. They've cost me thousands because of the clients i've lost because of their incompetence.
If you lost hundreds of dollars because of them once, it's their fault. If you lost hundreds because of them repeatedly, it's your fault.
Really.
Given today's hosting environment, if you aren't absolutely happy with your current provider, move. A few hundred well-place dollars can put you at a new facility with all the fixins.
I find rackspace to be quite expensive - I've been working with John Companies and so far, I've been quite pleased.
On Unix and unix-like systems, one has to explicitly mark a file as executable before ths OS will try to run it, and it's even possible to deny the "execute" permission to an entire filesystem (for instance, users' read-write home directories).
/bin/sh ~/badnasty.sh
You think? Try this one:
I really think that there should be *another* bit - "executable" and "scriptable". Anything without a "scriptable" bit set can't be executed by bash/perl/python/php/ksh/etc.
I added a second vonage number for faxing and it works perfectly (except during the blackout).
This is precisely why treating a VOIP line like a phone line won't work. Telephones are on their own independent circuit and so have advantages for emergencies. VOIP is no more regulatable for telecommunications than SPAM is.
Some people just don't have a clue.
-Ben
One of the things that I've discovered in my adult life is that every word is a promise. As soon as you have to defend your honesty, you've already lost the trust.
If you ever yell at your kids "I mean it", you've already demonstrated that you don't. If you catch yourself saying "I mean it" or "I'm serious" that's a pretty good clue that you need to re-evaluate your actions, because somewhere you are shooting yourself in the foot.
With that in mind, read the following quote:
(We) just don't want the rest of the world to believe that it's not (there), that this is some sort of smoke and mirrors. It's not.
I read this as "I mean it this time!". 'Nuff said.
Corporations who have embraced open software (linux specifically) are really saving themselves a lot of money. It'd be nice of those coporations would kick back some of their savings into supporting open source projects and initiatives.
Yeah, it would be nice. But it really doesn't matter.
You see, if I release software under a free license, (which I frequently do) I really don't care how many people use it. It could be 1, 10, 100, 10,000 people, or more.
The 10,000th copy costs me the same as the 1st.
Yet the power of OSS comes back to assist me when somebody, ANYBODY out there finds a change to make to the software that improves it, and re-posts it back to the community.
There's the value - and the other 9,999 people are guaranteed to get all the attention from me that they deserve - nada.
-Ben
Eyes have the potential problem of a thief scanning your house to see what you have inside. Slashdotters unite! We must band together to ban optic nerves!
While funny, and apparently a good analogy, it fails for a very simple reason...
When people need to see what it would take to prevent unathorized scanning by optic nerves [sic], they can do so simply by looking around.
To prevent scanning by RFID tag sensors, one must first
A) Get a suitable detector
B) Configure it to read each and every of the potential wavelengths for all RFID tags,
C) Configure it to understand the protocol(s) and protocol variations for all RFID tags in the area
D) Then, without being able to actually see limits of the area being scanned, one must scan the entire area.
The issue isn't really the RFID tags, it's the relatively indefensible position they leave you in against somebody with more techology/money than you have.
As a software vendor myself, some software sold on a subscription basis "phones home". It's done very openly, through a "synch" where the users enter their login/password, which is then authenticated via an encrypted protocol to a central server which updates their license for another 30 days.
If the synch doesn't fly, neither does the software. Very simple, and there's nothing for anybody to complain about "unknown information". With this, the idea of "stealing" the software is pretty meaningless, and anybody who objects doesn't have to log on.
This synch, BTW, is a good way for us to backup their data (which they REALLY like) and update their software. (which they also REALLY like)
So, it's not about "phoning home" it's about not telling anybody about it.