No kidding. One of my clients signed up for the Sprint Ion service 6 months ago or something. Sounded real nice, 3 phone lines and hi-speed internet on a single line for a reasonable price.
Same as you mention. They could not handle 4 lines at any price, but even worse, after taking 2 months to get everything working right, they cancelled the service less than a month later!
I'm VERY DOWN on Sprint...
Oh, and their TV ads for "clear all digitial cellular service" are an outright lie. It may be digital, but it's definitely *NOT* "all clear" or "static free". It's far worse than their competitor Verizon in these parts! (Northern Calif)
I have little respect for a company that outright lies in advertising campaigns.
My cell phone is a "dual mode" phone - my provider is Verizon. It works on either digital or analog cell towers.
Which means, that in the city, I always get my text messaging and the like, but in some areas (out in the woods) it's typical to have analog-only service. Not only does this not bother me, I appreciate having some service over none.
Why can't they do this with televisions? Put a tuner in their that will work with both types of channels? If the FCC simply required that all new TVs were "dual mode tuner" TVs, rollout of HDTV would be *ALOT* less painful!
I'd imagine that the analog tuner circuitry would quickly drop to a single $3 chip...
A Houston home security analyst has been charged with breaking and entering after demonstrating the insecurity of a county court office.
Stefan Puffer, 33, was indicted by a Grand Jury on Wednesday with two counts of burglary for allegedly breaking into Harris County district clerk's offices. It's believed to be the first case of its kind in the US.
Puffer, who was employed briefly by the county's security department in 1999, could get five years in jail and faces a $250,000 fine on each count if convicted, the Houston Chronicle reports.
He's accused of accessing the offices March 8 in an alleged intrusion that cost the county a reported $5,000 to clean up.
District Clerk Charles Bacarisse told the paper that no confidential paperwork was disclosed but the alleged intrusion eventually resulted in the county closing its new offices only a month after they were opened.
But is the prosecution a case of shooting the messenger?
On March 18, Puffer demonstrated to a county official and a Chronicle reporter how easy it was to gain access to the court's offices using only a hammer and paperclip. Puffer first noticed the problem while scanning for insecure homes and offices throughout Houston earlier that month, around the time that the alleged offence took place.
Would you be upset at the above news story?
Really folks, with a $4 hammer, you'd be surprised at how "insecure" most homes are! Have you ever heard of a "white hat" burglar?
I remember a while back, one of my clients needed to move a bunch of dns records from one server to another. Took me ~ 45 minutes to write a php shell script using REGEX to create new bind zone records for over 300 domains, and convert them - records intact, complete, ready to restart named.
This poor client had paid somebody else to do it, they spent several DAYS at it and there were still lots of (human) mistakes.
And, this wasn't complicated stuff!
Any programmer who doesn't know regex is crippled!
Take a Handspring Treo (with full browser, Palm O/S on it) and add the following:
1) LED Flashlight - doesn't need to be terribly bright, but bright enough to be useful. On a high density cell phone battery, you'd be able to run for hours w/o running out. (My bike light, plenty bright, burns for weeks on a AA)
2) Infrared universal remote control - Push a "magic button" and you have a programmable, universal remote control. Make an easy overlay-based system so you just key in the manufacturer and model number (SMS style) and you have an instant Remote Control!
You could even base it on a DSP, and just download the codes from your phone company, rather than keep all that crap on your phone! That way it could always be up to date.
So why is VPN, a very practical and legitimate usage of a home internet connection, banned while gaming for hours on end during peak time accepted?
Simple. Most ISPs offer "business" services for a significant mark-up (read: profits) that include the ability to do VPNs.
The goal is to create a distinction between the "consumer" (cheap) grade service and the "business" (costly) service, even though they are fundamentally the same thing.
I don't get a couple of things. First, if the Chinese govt. is feeling threatened by the Internet, why don't they just change the default policy of the firewall to deny? Instead of keeping a "deny" list, keep an "accept" list?
But, it seems, the issue isn't even really the firewall - the reference in the news article is to an INTERNAL event that spread via email and a web posting.
The Internet is a can of worms, and the worms have been let loose. If China wants to keep control of the information, they are simply going to have to drop the 'net.
I use Red Hat Linux for my servers. I'd not dream of anything else at the moment. Why?
1) Excellent support - whatever software I want to install, I can be quite sure that there's a RH version - often in RPM form. This reduces the cost of maintanence dramatically.
2) The RED HAT NETWORK is fantastic! I simply type "up2date -u" and 10 minutes later, I have all the relevant security patches installed! Just $5 per month, and their download servers are FAST. (I routinely see 15-20 Mbit connections - 10x-15x FASTER than an unfettered T1!)
3) Reliability. My Red Hat systems are stable. They work today, tomorrow and next year.
4) Stability of the distro. Red Hat has been around. They are profitable, or at least not burning capital very fast. I can feel good knowing that I'm investing my considerable time, money, and energy into a platform that will be there in the future, too.
With the above, I can fulfill my support contracts easily and cheaply, and focus on the delvery of service rather than simple maintanence.
Is Red Hat perfect? No. But it satisifies the above, and they are what I need to found my business upon.
Seems to me that Microsoft is in a battle against the Internet - what better way to subvert the 'net than to cripple its effectiveness?
I mean, maybe they didn't intentionally bring this suit about, but perhaps they are only appointing their first year paralegals and one lawyer who hasn't won a case since 1977 to this case?
Yes, perhaps I *am* a bit paranoid, but since MS is trying to "take down" the internet, what better way than to cripple the competition?
... said the first four weeks of testing at the Palm Beach airport showed the technology was "less accurate than a coin toss." The system matched the faces of the volunteers just 455 out of 958 times, or about 47 percent of the time.
Actually, no. It's considerably more accurate than a coin toss!
Let's say you have 1,000 faces in your (rather small) database. You walk these 1,000 people by the camera, and some guy with a quarter.
The camera was able to identify, of the 1,000 people, which person it was 47% of the time.
The guy with the quarter would get (on average) 0.1%, (1 in 1,000 odds) and this is assuming that the guy knows that the person in front of him is actually in the database! That's 470 times better!
However, this is a test done in a real airport! Run 10,000 people by, and let's say the camera gets 47% right.The guy with the quarter now averages around 0.001%
In this scenario, the camera would do 47,000 times better than the guy randomly guessing!
But even that is not as rigorous as the actual test! In this case, they ran it 10,000 times per day for 8 weeks, or (potentially) 560,000 faces.
What we should be looking at, is that it's choosing the right guy (out of 250) almost 50% of the time in a sample size of 560,000.
That's quite a feat. When that hits 95%, and it's pattern matching Osama Bin Laden, what do you think airport security would do if there's a match?
Even with that, I don't think it's going to reach that point without 3D modeling with two cameras. Isn't there an article here someplace about how great and wonderful NVIDIA is at 3D stuff?
Open-source projects aren't "dead" when source is no longer available - they are DEAD when nobody is maintaining the codebase!
Go to your local dollar store to see lots of "dead" shareware for $1, eh? Company is gone, software still works 'cause Win 3.x APIs exist in Win 9x/2K, software is DEAD but still works...
I remember reading some time back that in times past, "idiot" referred to somebody of great learning, highly educated.
The term gradually came to include the connotation of "lacking common sense", as in "over-educated idiot", and finally has come to simply mean "lacking common sense", as in "What an idiot!".
It seems that "Brilliant" is going down the same evolutionary path. I mean "He's brilliant!" becomes "Geez, that's f--king brilliant" to finally, " That's just brilliant. ".
I've been fighting SPAM for years. I've complained to numerous ISPs, I've done untold numbers of traceroutes and the like to identify parent networks, and the whole gig.
But MAPS just seems too draconian for my taste! I've never liked the idea, as it's just too much of a shotgun approach to the problem. We need something more surgical.
SPAM filtering results in false positives. It's like having emails deleted for you at random.
ZERO false positives. ZERO false negatives. (so far, out of hundreds of junk mails)
In order to use it, you pretty much have to sit at the command prompt on your mail server as a local user, but it's effectiveness is (so far) flawless!
So, does this mean that we can now sue Microsoft for all the FUD they plaster all over their website about what's legal and what's not?
What I find endless amusement in reading/. is statements like the above.
Lawyers have done an amazing job of compartmentalizing the applicability of ANY decision. That's why you need lawyers to decipher the law!
For example, a case hits the California district court, where a case is one that sets a precedent.
So, there you are, in Oregon, 10 miles from the California border. Think that District court decision applies?
NOT!
Take a look at the case. The only thing decided here is that Nike cannot use "Freedom of speech" to defend their case.
Nowhere does this decision say anything about incurring liability, thus this sets no precedent for a suit.
Talk to a lawyer some time. Spend a few hours at it. If you can get a lawyer friend or something to tell you all about it, you'll realize that they are just as knowledge about "Bills of attainder" and "writs of something-or-rather" as an experienced programmer must be in APIs, algorithms, and protocols.
Just as there is a S--tload of sloppy, crappy software developed by wannabes in their spare time, there is a similar sized load of legal advice by wannabe paralegals.
It'd be nice if this DID set a precendent in that regard. The idea of corporations having "constitutional rights" I find to be a sick perversion of society.
And, both Nike and Walmart certainly have my distaste.
Lying doesn't work. All that does is not allow them to trace anything to you personally.
What makes you think they care about you?
What they are looking for with these cards is associations like:
People who buy Reddenbocker's popcorn prefer Brand X Ice Cream
People who buy generic milk do/don't buy generic soda.
What do people buy when they just run in for a gallon of milk?
They *MIGHT* pay attention to the racial/ethnic information you filled out, but knowing its accuracy is going to be *alot* lower than the computerized records of what was bought, they'd give alot less credence.
here is an article coving a study to determine relationships like these.
This information is used for product placement, promotional offers, and in negotiating contracts with suppliers.
The ethnic information, though less accurate, is still going to be accurate enough to sway decisions for advertising and promotion...
This guy's getting the "Slashdot-SPAMed-my-Mailbox-to-Death" effect, I would imagine. Stop SPAM! Read the karma whore's version here!
If the site is properly designed, that wouldn't happen.
When I build in error notification, I also build in some kind of limiter so that I don't wind up with 4,000 identical panic emails in my inbox.
An easy method? When an email is sent, update the time on an empty file.
Before sending out an email, check the time of that file, and see that it's at least 20 minutes old before sending out another notification email. That way, you get (at most) an error notification every 20 minutes.
Better yet, abstract the notification method itself (instead of sending an email directly) and allow the sysadmin to have errors sent to email, SMS-capable cell phone, pager, etc.
Ok, of the "this is an ad" posts. Any moer should be considered -1 redundant.
The real issue here is not "is this an ad" or "can books be promoted on the net" or even "I don't like dogs", but this:
" Can books be 'net' books... profitably?".
Had Jon mentioned profitability or actual sales or given some demonstration of the idea that his alternative marketing and/or distribution means are actually working, it would be news.
The closest he comes is here: "... I believe the Running To The Mountain excerpt that ran on Slashdot sold more books than a subsequent appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show....".
No proof, no studies whatsoever, not even a clear and certain anecdote.
It's EASY to get proof - sell the books under different catalog numbers, and enter the catalog numbers on the invoice(s). Or, use an 800 number, and use different 800 numbers for different adv. media, and compare the phone bills.
As it sits now, it's like listening to the life story of a homeless person - not likely to get you anywhere meaningful.
Slashdot Mirror
Same as you mention. They could not handle 4 lines at any price, but even worse, after taking 2 months to get everything working right, they cancelled the service less than a month later!
I'm VERY DOWN on Sprint...
Oh, and their TV ads for "clear all digitial cellular service" are an outright lie. It may be digital, but it's definitely *NOT* "all clear" or "static free". It's far worse than their competitor Verizon in these parts! (Northern Calif)
I have little respect for a company that outright lies in advertising campaigns.
Which means, that in the city, I always get my text messaging and the like, but in some areas (out in the woods) it's typical to have analog-only service. Not only does this not bother me, I appreciate having some service over none.
Why can't they do this with televisions? Put a tuner in their that will work with both types of channels? If the FCC simply required that all new TVs were "dual mode tuner" TVs, rollout of HDTV would be *ALOT* less painful!
I'd imagine that the analog tuner circuitry would quickly drop to a single $3 chip...
Stefan Puffer, 33, was indicted by a Grand Jury on Wednesday with two counts of burglary for allegedly breaking into Harris County district clerk's offices. It's believed to be the first case of its kind in the US.
Puffer, who was employed briefly by the county's security department in 1999, could get five years in jail and faces a $250,000 fine on each count if convicted, the Houston Chronicle reports.
He's accused of accessing the offices March 8 in an alleged intrusion that cost the county a reported $5,000 to clean up.
District Clerk Charles Bacarisse told the paper that no confidential paperwork was disclosed but the alleged intrusion eventually resulted in the county closing its new offices only a month after they were opened.
But is the prosecution a case of shooting the messenger?
On March 18, Puffer demonstrated to a county official and a Chronicle reporter how easy it was to gain access to the court's offices using only a hammer and paperclip. Puffer first noticed the problem while scanning for insecure homes and offices throughout Houston earlier that month, around the time that the alleged offence took place.
Would you be upset at the above news story?
Really folks, with a $4 hammer, you'd be surprised at how "insecure" most homes are! Have you ever heard of a "white hat" burglar?
For more details on this, try this url at Technology Review.
HEAR YE, HEAR YE!
You speak WISDOM...
I remember a while back, one of my clients needed to move a bunch of dns records from one server to another. Took me ~ 45 minutes to write a php shell script using REGEX to create new bind zone records for over 300 domains, and convert them - records intact, complete, ready to restart named.
This poor client had paid somebody else to do it, they spent several DAYS at it and there were still lots of (human) mistakes.
And, this wasn't complicated stuff!
Any programmer who doesn't know regex is crippled!
And, I've tried each WM, including ice and a few others, and I keep coming back to KDE.
The funny part? I like Kmail and I just HAVE TO HAVE ctrl-tab for swapping desktops!
-Ben
1) LED Flashlight - doesn't need to be terribly bright, but bright enough to be useful. On a high density cell phone battery, you'd be able to run for hours w/o running out. (My bike light, plenty bright, burns for weeks on a AA)
2) Infrared universal remote control - Push a "magic button" and you have a programmable, universal remote control. Make an easy overlay-based system so you just key in the manufacturer and model number (SMS style) and you have an instant Remote Control!
You could even base it on a DSP, and just download the codes from your phone company, rather than keep all that crap on your phone! That way it could always be up to date.
THIS WOULD BE FREAKIN' AWESOME!
-Ben
Simple. Most ISPs offer "business" services for a significant mark-up (read: profits) that include the ability to do VPNs.
The goal is to create a distinction between the "consumer" (cheap) grade service and the "business" (costly) service, even though they are fundamentally the same thing.
I tried to call some lawyers involved in a class-action anti-trust law suit against the phone company, but their phone was disconnected....
Seems it was all just smoke and mirrors....
You must install it first. Do a search for "checkinstall" at freshmeat.net...
I don't get a couple of things. First, if the Chinese govt. is feeling threatened by the Internet, why don't they just change the default policy of the firewall to deny? Instead of keeping a "deny" list, keep an "accept" list?
But, it seems, the issue isn't even really the firewall - the reference in the news article is to an INTERNAL event that spread via email and a web posting.
The Internet is a can of worms, and the worms have been let loose. If China wants to keep control of the information, they are simply going to have to drop the 'net.
Good luck, guys!
Sadly, I went to babelfish, and got much the same result as above.
It sounds like a joke, until you try it...
-Ben
I use Red Hat Linux for my servers. I'd not dream of anything else at the moment. Why?
1) Excellent support - whatever software I want to install, I can be quite sure that there's a RH version - often in RPM form. This reduces the cost of maintanence dramatically.
2) The RED HAT NETWORK is fantastic! I simply type "up2date -u" and 10 minutes later, I have all the relevant security patches installed! Just $5 per month, and their download servers are FAST. (I routinely see 15-20 Mbit connections - 10x-15x FASTER than an unfettered T1!)
3) Reliability. My Red Hat systems are stable. They work today, tomorrow and next year.
4) Stability of the distro. Red Hat has been around. They are profitable, or at least not burning capital very fast. I can feel good knowing that I'm investing my considerable time, money, and energy into a platform that will be there in the future, too.
With the above, I can fulfill my support contracts easily and cheaply, and focus on the delvery of service rather than simple maintanence.
Is Red Hat perfect? No. But it satisifies the above, and they are what I need to found my business upon.
Is it just me, or am I just paranoid?
Seems to me that Microsoft is in a battle against the Internet - what better way to subvert the 'net than to cripple its effectiveness?
I mean, maybe they didn't intentionally bring this suit about, but perhaps they are only appointing their first year paralegals and one lawyer who hasn't won a case since 1977 to this case?
Yes, perhaps I *am* a bit paranoid, but since MS is trying to "take down" the internet, what better way than to cripple the competition?
Actually, no. It's considerably more accurate than a coin toss!
Let's say you have 1,000 faces in your (rather small) database. You walk these 1,000 people by the camera, and some guy with a quarter.
The camera was able to identify, of the 1,000 people, which person it was 47% of the time.
The guy with the quarter would get (on average) 0.1%, (1 in 1,000 odds) and this is assuming that the guy knows that the person in front of him is actually in the database! That's 470 times better!
However, this is a test done in a real airport! Run 10,000 people by, and let's say the camera gets 47% right.The guy with the quarter now averages around 0.001%
In this scenario, the camera would do 47,000 times better than the guy randomly guessing!
But even that is not as rigorous as the actual test! In this case, they ran it 10,000 times per day for 8 weeks, or (potentially) 560,000 faces.
What we should be looking at, is that it's choosing the right guy (out of 250) almost 50% of the time in a sample size of 560,000.
That's quite a feat. When that hits 95%, and it's pattern matching Osama Bin Laden, what do you think airport security would do if there's a match?
Even with that, I don't think it's going to reach that point without 3D modeling with two cameras. Isn't there an article here someplace about how great and wonderful NVIDIA is at 3D stuff?
Open-source projects aren't "dead" when source is no longer available - they are DEAD when nobody is maintaining the codebase!
Go to your local dollar store to see lots of "dead" shareware for $1, eh? Company is gone, software still works 'cause Win 3.x APIs exist in Win 9x/2K, software is DEAD but still works...
Sheesh...
The term gradually came to include the connotation of "lacking common sense", as in "over-educated idiot", and finally has come to simply mean "lacking common sense", as in "What an idiot!".
It seems that "Brilliant" is going down the same evolutionary path. I mean "He's brilliant!" becomes "Geez, that's f--king brilliant" to finally, " That's just brilliant. ".
Am I wrong, here?
An example of this might be name brand T-shirts..
But this puts "viral marketing" in a whole new light...
But MAPS just seems too draconian for my taste! I've never liked the idea, as it's just too much of a shotgun approach to the problem. We need something more surgical.
SPAM filtering results in false positives. It's like having emails deleted for you at random.
Then, I discovered ASK (Active Spam Killer). This thing ROCKS!
ZERO false positives. ZERO false negatives. (so far, out of hundreds of junk mails)
In order to use it, you pretty much have to sit at the command prompt on your mail server as a local user, but it's effectiveness is (so far) flawless!
Rather than actually make sense, these theories get weirder, stranger, more incomprehensible, and more imaginative with each cycle.
Pretty soon, they'll be talking about the "archangel" as though he/she/it were proven!
Perhaps, rather than looking at the "cyclical theory of the universe" we should be looking at the "cyclical view of universe theory"?
What I find endless amusement in reading /. is statements like the above.
Lawyers have done an amazing job of compartmentalizing the applicability of ANY decision. That's why you need lawyers to decipher the law!
For example, a case hits the California district court, where a case is one that sets a precedent.
So, there you are, in Oregon, 10 miles from the California border. Think that District court decision applies?
NOT!
Take a look at the case. The only thing decided here is that Nike cannot use "Freedom of speech" to defend their case.
Nowhere does this decision say anything about incurring liability, thus this sets no precedent for a suit.
Talk to a lawyer some time. Spend a few hours at it. If you can get a lawyer friend or something to tell you all about it, you'll realize that they are just as knowledge about "Bills of attainder" and "writs of something-or-rather" as an experienced programmer must be in APIs, algorithms, and protocols.
Just as there is a S--tload of sloppy, crappy software developed by wannabes in their spare time, there is a similar sized load of legal advice by wannabe paralegals.
It'd be nice if this DID set a precendent in that regard. The idea of corporations having "constitutional rights" I find to be a sick perversion of society.
And, both Nike and Walmart certainly have my distaste.
What makes you think they care about you?
What they are looking for with these cards is associations like:
They *MIGHT* pay attention to the racial/ethnic information you filled out, but knowing its accuracy is going to be *alot* lower than the computerized records of what was bought, they'd give alot less credence.
here is an article coving a study to determine relationships like these.
This information is used for product placement, promotional offers, and in negotiating contracts with suppliers.
The ethnic information, though less accurate, is still going to be accurate enough to sway decisions for advertising and promotion...
I was reading about this last night there...
Of course, Fark's comments section sucks compared to /. - you can't browse at +3 like I do, for example.
If you've ever strolled through /. at 0 or -1, you'll get a good idea of what fark's comment section is like. (egads!)
Probably OT, though...
This guy's getting the "Slashdot-SPAMed-my-Mailbox-to-Death" effect, I would imagine. Stop SPAM! Read the karma whore's version here!
If the site is properly designed, that wouldn't happen.
When I build in error notification, I also build in some kind of limiter so that I don't wind up with 4,000 identical panic emails in my inbox.
An easy method? When an email is sent, update the time on an empty file.
Before sending out an email, check the time of that file, and see that it's at least 20 minutes old before sending out another notification email. That way, you get (at most) an error notification every 20 minutes.
Better yet, abstract the notification method itself (instead of sending an email directly) and allow the sysadmin to have errors sent to email, SMS-capable cell phone, pager, etc.
Come on, people. INTELLIGENT design is possible!
-Ben
The real issue here is not "is this an ad" or "can books be promoted on the net" or even "I don't like dogs", but this:
" Can books be 'net' books
Had Jon mentioned profitability or actual sales or given some demonstration of the idea that his alternative marketing and/or distribution means are actually working, it would be news.
The closest he comes is here: "... I believe the Running To The Mountain excerpt that ran on Slashdot sold more books than a subsequent appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show.
No proof, no studies whatsoever, not even a clear and certain anecdote.
It's EASY to get proof - sell the books under different catalog numbers, and enter the catalog numbers on the invoice(s). Or, use an 800 number, and use different 800 numbers for different adv. media, and compare the phone bills.
As it sits now, it's like listening to the life story of a homeless person - not likely to get you anywhere meaningful.