Sure, no big deal. I jog an average about 20 miles per week. It's not about the ride or the distance.
But let me ask you this: How many boardroom visits (3 piece suit, at least slacks and a button-up, collard shirt) do YOU go to drenched in sweat after riding your folding 5-speed bike 3 miles in 100 degree weather? That's right! None! At the very least, it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience because, if you do, they'll never have you back! Ever! It's not like the boardroom has a shower behind it...
Totally different focus, totally different market. Flying cars were stupid, but this is a damned good idea.
Oh my !@#king godz yes!
One of the biggest limitations of flying is... what do you do once you land there? It's just like fast Internet - the famous "last mile" problem. Great, there's a small airport just 3 miles from your destination, making your 6 hour drive, 3-day trip into a 1.5 hour flight, day-tripper, but how do you get that last 3 miles from the airport to your actual, intended destination?
You can rent a car, but that's hassle-prone and expensive. You can ask somebody there to pick you up, but that's dicey at best. Also, if the weather goes bad, you're stuck. And then what?
This "drivable airplane" solves both problems completely!
Yes, I'm a private pilot. I fly for business and pleasure. (had a great time taking my sister up just yesterday!) And let me tell you: I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want!!!
-If it's at night, you have to use your RFID badge to get in the front door -Check in with security and sign out for your key if the door is not a combo lock -Security needs to buzz you through the first door -RFID badge and finger print through two or three doors -Iris scan in the man-trap to get to the datacenter floor -Combo or the checked-out key to get in to the cabinet or cage
Similar here, though we don't have an iris scan. It calls itself a 'tier 1' hosting facility, and so far, I've been rather impressed with it - 1ft concrete exterior walls, etc.
The shocker is how cheap it actually is, and the prices are fairly typical!
You pay a minimum price of about $100/month to get one server with light usage.
To have half a dozen servers with moderate usage (5-10 Mbps average) runs about $1000/month. For comparison, a T1 (1.5 Mb) runs about $600-700 after loop charges and the like are added in. (as of a year or two ago, prices may have dropped somewhat)
4x the bandwidth, redundant power, redundant network feeds, 24x7 "hot hands" for all but extreme emergencies, and 100 Mb connection for about 1.5x the price as a T1? WTF?!?
The problem is they know a lot of people aren't happy with Windows but it runs all their programs. Once the scrap that backwards compatibility and build something solid, despite the fact it may be their best OS ever, it's on a level playing field with the rest which means people have to find an alternative to their old programs and they might just pick something that isn't Windows and MS isn't having that.
And that is the point of this article. What keeps Windows' market share is inertia, and not much else.
As a writer/purveyor of work flow management software fitting somewhere between 2 and 3 in their list of programmers, (I write "enterprise" software, I sure give a damn about quality, but I shy away from the cutting edge) I'm not interested in anything specific to either OSX or Windows. I will not adopt a technology that ties me to either. But I deal every day with companies that have XYZ custom program that's written in VB or something and when I mention Mac/Linux/Alternative the first thing from their mouth is "we're Windows-only because of XYZ" with a shrug.
Here's what Microsoft needs to do to stay relevant:
1) Be Microsoft. Be OK with design by committee that "mostly works" and embrace the mediocrity therefrom. We don't expect you to be stylish, we expect you to be practical and cheap.
2) Eat its own dogfood. Why does Microsoft have published UI conventions for Windows that they don't follow? If ".net" is the one true way, why aren't all their new applications not written in it?
3) Be open. If Microsoft has this handy-dandy ribbon interface, it should be accessible to developers. One of the classic beauties of Windows has been the COM interface..NET kinda shot that in the foot, and unfortunately, with MS almost abandoning.net, developers don't trust them, anymore. Remember when Microsoft was ABOUT developers? Now it seems that they are ABOUT STEALING as much bread as possible from them!
4) Make decent products! Ever try to develop for IE in a standards-compliant way? Even IE 7 is riddled with gotchas! How is it that there are three browsers out there developed by little guys (Mozilla, Opera, and Safari) that manage to get it "right" (or at least "right-er") when the Bazillionaire has a product that sucks so badly?
Sigh.
The result is that evelopers hedge their best with cross-platform technologies to mitigate the threat of Microsoft as much as possible. No, we can't ignore them. But we sure don't have to bow to them, anymore.
The best thing honestly would be for these servers to just clean their act up and handle things properly. Mail rejects should be done before the connection between the two servers closes. It should always be up to the SENDING mail server to generate a bounce rather than the receiving.
Eh, not so, unfortunately.
Sendmail has a drop-dead simple way of setting up "slave" mail servers in case the primary is down, an option that's commonly used for backup mail relaying. It's part of the official Sendmail documentation and so is very unlikely to "go away". And, when this is enabled, there is no address verification "before the connection between the two servers close[s].".
So, good luck with enforcing your ideas on how the world should work!
It is fundamental. It's called secure input handling, or sanitizing input. Just because it's a rule doesn't mean it is followed.
Rules aren't fundamental - they are accessory.
Why does the Database API in most scripting languages even ALLOW a SQL injection vuln? Yes, my tool of choice, PHP, still has this problem. I've worked around it by using a DB abstraction layer that uses prepared statements, all but eliminating the problem.
Stupid that it's not "fundamental" in the native API. It's an easily solved problem.
Isn't this largely what TV was back in the 50's? "The Colgate Comedy Hour" etc... It's just TV going full circle and back to the pitiful whores they were in the first place.
You whiner.
I just don't get the NEGATIVE ATTITUDE that comes from this. I mean, 24x7, you're getting shows that cost a TON OF MONEY to create for FREE. How about "gee, thanks!"??? You could go and support local community theater, but we all know that's something you go to because you think community theater is a "good idea", or because you know somebody in it, not because you'd actually want to go see it every night after dinner.
Don't like the show? Go do something else! Learn to play the guitar! Take your bored dog for a walk! Go have sex with your partner! Or, go find a partner to have sex with! Read a book! Study differential calculus! Learn to cook Mahi-Mahi Flambe.
But, you don't want to do that, and you don't like advertising? Well, you could PAY FOR THE SHOW. You know, buy season DVDs and only watch those. Don't bother with the advertising supported television! No commercials! Somewhere along the line, somebody's got to pay the bill.
The truth is, this is a natural response to the rise of the DVR. I've been wondering how long it would be before this would happen - I haven't watched a standard TV commercial in a long, long time. Any shows that count me as an advertising "eyeball" are lying to their advertisers. And while I appreciate the free ride in the short term, the long term is that this situation is simply unsustainable, as the cost of DVRs drop and adoption continues to climb.
Yep. I was totally sick of Windows and all its hassles, and I couldn't resist the opportunity to use a desktop OS with the strength and configurability of UNIX with a slick modern GUI.
So I got a Mac.
For all it's "power of UNIX" allure, OSX 10.5 is gawdawfully unstable. My Mac mini would run for weeks just fine with Tiger, but Leopard is lucky to last more than 24 hours or so. I mean, I hate to say it, but Leopard, for all its sex appeal, is LESS STABLE THAN WINDOWS 95 was for me.
Do I love the Mac? Sure! Is it as stable as my Linux PCs? Not a chance. Sorry.
I tried for months to get Windows NT4 to operate as a webserver and a DNS server with an uptime > 2-3 days. Couldn't do it with a (then pretty decent) Pentium-100 with 32 MB of RAM.
Then, a year or two later, I discovered Linux, and tried it out on an old junker AM486/100. With 16 MB of ram, and a 500 MB HDD, and X-Windows/KDE 1.x running on the super-long VLB video card, it managed to host a web server, a DNS server, telnetd, ntpd, postgres, php, AND ssh reliably, 24x7 for MONTHS before I learned enough of what's going on to see that it was actually doing all that!
That was RedHat 5.1. It's what sold me on Linux, because, for all its many warts, it actually did the job reliably. And now, some 9 years later, it's still "doing it" (Now CentOS 4) and I'm still loving it, 24x7!
Ebay's success comes because it's a moderator - a broker in a sale. It connects two parties together, and nothing more. When it does that, Ebay is golden. It's UI is nice, it's search feature generally works, and that's why it's a multi-billion dollar corp.
But if they cram paypal down my throat, I'll swallow something else. I'm already at the point where Ebay is my LAST resort, since their ratings have been so thoroughly gamed I have no idea who I'm really dealing with, anymore.
Forcing paypal? No way. I refuse. What's the next halfway decent auction house? Truthfully, I've already moved much of my online purchasing to froogle.com....
The issue was with old, pre-CDMA cell phones and extremely old avionics, like those found in small and mid-sized non-comercial aircraft about 40 years ago.
Oh, you mean like a '68 Piper Cherokee? I flew one about 3 weeks ago. I was a bit surprised when the pilot actually took a call on his phone shortly after taking some aerial photographs. No effect though, so while I supposed pre-CDMA might have been a problem, it certainly isn't anymore.
People forget to turn on or off their cell phones on every flight I've been on for years... I'll hear voicemail chimes start going off about a mile from the ground, typically about 10 minutes or so before landing.
On one flight, one of the SouthWest airline pilots was sitting 2 or 3 rows ahead of me. Well AFTER the "turn your phone off now!" notice, and while we were busy burning down the runway through, and well after, takeoff, the pilot was yapping away on his cell phone...
Add iron, plankton grows. Plankton absorbs CO2, then dies, sinking.
Oh, if it were only that simple! Yes, in most circumstances, iron is a primary limiting factor in the growth of plankton. But it's not the only one. Add iron and you'll see a strong bloom, that will soon die. Add more, and you'll see hardly anything, because as soon as iron is no longer the limiting factor, the plankton bloom until some other material is the limiting factor.
So, after iron, you find you need magnesium. Or calcium. Or phosphorus. Or... ?
There is no simple solution. The only real solution is a COMPREHENSIVE one.
Because you know SOOOO much more about fighting tens of billions of spam per day than the engineers at Google. And I can be pretty confident in my dismissive contempt because, if you actually were any good at fighting spam, you'd be raking in the big bucks actually doing it instead of mumbling about it on Slashdot.
Maybe you actually do know something about fighting spam. In which case, you really should be registering a domain name (hint: both spamkillz.com and killzpam.com are not taken as I write this) and offering your helpful service to the worldwide community. If you were really any good, and provided a useful service free of spam, you could be a millionaire in 2 or 3 years.
I dunno. Usually, millions of dollars is sufficient motivation that you won't waste valuable knowledge here.
I don't use my bank's internet-based facilities, because they don't support my (more secure) choice of software- bizarre...
Since I rely on online banking considerably, I wouldn't bank with a bank that wouldn't let me use my choice of O/S, be it Windows, OSX, or *nix. (I use Firefox on FC8 and OSX with my bank without any noticed issue)
Switch banks. You know there are tons of 'em. They all want your business. And write a letter to your old bank as to why you are leaving. Will your letter matter? No, or at least, not right away. But it will make a difference if you aren't the only one. And you'll be safer, whatever the legalities of the issue. I mean, who wants to go thru the legal hassle that comes when some farquad steals your identity because they got your password to your bank's website?
I don't know whether roads marked as private are considered public or not
Start with the definition of private which has, as its most applicable definition: "not open or accessible to the general public".
So, you make a nice, long driveway on your personal property. It's a private road, leading to your house. Your driveway is not a public road. It's not maintained by the city/county/state, it's not surveyed by public surveyors, it's not public.
If you specifically wanted personal privacy, and payed nicely for it, wouldn't you think it reasonable to get pissed if somebody drives down your private driveway and takes pictures to publish worldwide?
The lawsuit is for peanuts - if won, would barely cover the cost of suing. It's to make a point.
Yeah yeah, Streissand effect and all that. She was nuts. So was Scientology. But these guys? Not so much. And if they can set a precedent, no matter how small, we can begin to preserve our private lives lived in private places. Public places have always been just that...
The cool part is that you'll be able to give back lots - anything that you do which isn't a "core competence" is appropriately handled by giving your work back to the community, so that it can be absorbed into the codebase and used forever thereafter.
Sometimes by contributing code/bug fixes, sometimes by working with devs, and sometimes by paying cash, I've contributed significantly to ALL the projects you name, and many others. Until you've personally seen just how developer-friendly the OSS circle is, it's hard to believe or understand.
The risk of service work is not this lack of ramp up that you claim. Instead, the real risk is a higher level of competition. That is, you'll have a lot of others who can provide the same kind of service, including support service for open source software. Another risk is that if you identify a need to make improvements, you won't invest money in that effort since you can't use it as market leverage. By contrast, a service can be to sell the work of customizing the software to meet individual client needs.
Open source software (Linux, Apache, Postgres, Sendmail, etc) provides virtually unlimited opportunity for making money by providing service. It's all stable, reliable, secure and proven. It provides an EXCELLENT platform for providing services on. But if you think that providing Linux, Apache, Postgres, or Sendmail service is what you'd be selling, get ready to lose your shirt.
These softwares aren't particularly conducive to service in and of themselves, because they are free, and simply providing access to these toolkits is "commodity service". So get set for $6.95/month hosting, or maybe even free. Whoopee! (not!)
To make money, you don't sell sendmail or apache service, you sell services with these as a platform. Find something that you can build with these powerful tools, and sell THAT.
Assume that you've identified a need to track tractor tire overhauls. You could put together a special tool for tracking tractor tire overhauls to farmers using PHP, Postgres, and a $500 Linux server. If you market it right, you could build a million dollar business.
In fields everywhere from brokering the exchange of liver and kidney transplants, tracking the average speed of cars on the highway, to delivering educational flash videos to pre-school children, you'll find an endless variety of services you can deliver very profitably using open source software as your base.
The cool part is that you'll be able to give back lots - anything that you do which isn't a "core competence" is appropriately handled by giving your work back to the community, so that it can be absorbed into the codebase and used forever thereafter.
It's a brave new world, one that the quick, nimble, and creative will excel in.
... * 2000 - windows 2000, brought together the stability of the NT line with support for critical things like plug and play and USB.
I would add one more release:
* Oct 2001 Windows XP - added the games compatability of the Win9X codebase with the stability of the Windows 2000 codebase. With SP2, XP added a number of much-needed security features.
I believe Windows XP is the last release of Windows that was written to directly answer the needs of end users. Windows Vista was about locking users in, and users are rejecting it en masse.
I think this sucks for developers more than anything in that effectively Microsoft is asking them to support two platforms.
Which two?
We provide software for schools. We use PHP-GTK as a cross-platform RAD toolkit, and it does quite well.
Vista sucks, and has resulted in many support calls, But really, porting our Win 2000/XP codebase to Vista took an afternoon. The biggest problem was the installer, and the bazrillions of "you just downloaded a file, did you want to save it? - if you save this file, it might use some disk space. Are you sure?" messages.
Ultimately, most of the calls from Vista boiled down to training issues - how do you use Vista? Since the changes we ultimately made are retro-compatible, we don't treat it any different than our NT/2K/XP port. Are you referring to Macintosh support, which has (much as I'd like to say otherwise) been much more problematic and represents almost exactly 5% of our user base? Trying to manage builds on 3 different platforms (10.5, 10.4, 10.3) and 2 different chipsets (i386, ppc) is not easy when you figure in the requirement for Xcode and X11 at the same time. (yuck!) Or are you referring to Linux support, which represents 0% of our users? Yes, we've had instructions for Unix/Linux support for 3 years. Nobody's ever followed them.
I'm no fan of Microsoft. But, as a CTO of a small but very profitable company (and part-time developer), it's really hard to justify "cross platform" even when using a blatantly cross-platform toolkit. Since all our core systems are Linux based, we'll continue to do so, but not because our users are demanding it...
We've yet to see an independent production company get a show off the ground and make money solely off of Internet distribution. There have been some indie movies that have had a measure of Internet success but nothing that's been a break-out success.
I notice that, just after accusing "big media" companies of thinking conventionally, you immediately fall victim to thinking conventionally. You're thinking that it's going to be a "production company" that exists to "make money solely off of Internet distribution".
But amazing things have been happening that don't involve a company at all, or even any specific organization! For example, one of the more popular videos ever shown on YouTube was "produced" by somebody who remains, to this day, completely anonymous. It's sparked a worldwide phenomenon involving tens of thousands of people over months of time, in a movement that appears to be still gaining steam, not losing it.
Production company? Ha! Profit? Ha! There's not even any form of sensible "organization" - more like a collection of memes and interested individuals. When millions upon millions are watching and doing, at what point do you acknowledge that the rules have fundamentally changed?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, no big deal. I jog an average about 20 miles per week. It's not about the ride or the distance.
But let me ask you this: How many boardroom visits (3 piece suit, at least slacks and a button-up, collard shirt) do YOU go to drenched in sweat after riding your folding 5-speed bike 3 miles in 100 degree weather? That's right! None! At the very least, it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience because, if you do, they'll never have you back! Ever! It's not like the boardroom has a shower behind it...
Totally different focus, totally different market. Flying cars were stupid, but this is a damned good idea.
Oh my !@#king godz yes!
One of the biggest limitations of flying is... what do you do once you land there? It's just like fast Internet - the famous "last mile" problem. Great, there's a small airport just 3 miles from your destination, making your 6 hour drive, 3-day trip into a 1.5 hour flight, day-tripper, but how do you get that last 3 miles from the airport to your actual, intended destination?
You can rent a car, but that's hassle-prone and expensive. You can ask somebody there to pick you up, but that's dicey at best. Also, if the weather goes bad, you're stuck. And then what?
This "drivable airplane" solves both problems completely!
Yes, I'm a private pilot. I fly for business and pleasure. (had a great time taking my sister up just yesterday!) And let me tell you: I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want!!!
-If it's at night, you have to use your RFID badge to get in the front door
-Check in with security and sign out for your key if the door is not a combo lock
-Security needs to buzz you through the first door
-RFID badge and finger print through two or three doors
-Iris scan in the man-trap to get to the datacenter floor
-Combo or the checked-out key to get in to the cabinet or cage
Similar here, though we don't have an iris scan. It calls itself a 'tier 1' hosting facility, and so far, I've been rather impressed with it - 1ft concrete exterior walls, etc.
The shocker is how cheap it actually is, and the prices are fairly typical!
You pay a minimum price of about $100/month to get one server with light usage.
To have half a dozen servers with moderate usage (5-10 Mbps average) runs about $1000/month. For comparison, a T1 (1.5 Mb) runs about $600-700 after loop charges and the like are added in. (as of a year or two ago, prices may have dropped somewhat)
4x the bandwidth, redundant power, redundant network feeds, 24x7 "hot hands" for all but extreme emergencies, and 100 Mb connection for about 1.5x the price as a T1? WTF?!?
Why do companies host any differently?
The problem is they know a lot of people aren't happy with Windows but it runs all their programs. Once the scrap that backwards compatibility and build something solid, despite the fact it may be their best OS ever, it's on a level playing field with the rest which means people have to find an alternative to their old programs and they might just pick something that isn't Windows and MS isn't having that.
.NET kinda shot that in the foot, and unfortunately, with MS almost abandoning .net, developers don't trust them, anymore. Remember when Microsoft was ABOUT developers? Now it seems that they are ABOUT STEALING as much bread as possible from them!
And that is the point of this article. What keeps Windows' market share is inertia, and not much else.
As a writer/purveyor of work flow management software fitting somewhere between 2 and 3 in their list of programmers, (I write "enterprise" software, I sure give a damn about quality, but I shy away from the cutting edge) I'm not interested in anything specific to either OSX or Windows. I will not adopt a technology that ties me to either. But I deal every day with companies that have XYZ custom program that's written in VB or something and when I mention Mac/Linux/Alternative the first thing from their mouth is "we're Windows-only because of XYZ" with a shrug.
Here's what Microsoft needs to do to stay relevant:
1) Be Microsoft. Be OK with design by committee that "mostly works" and embrace the mediocrity therefrom. We don't expect you to be stylish, we expect you to be practical and cheap.
2) Eat its own dogfood. Why does Microsoft have published UI conventions for Windows that they don't follow? If ".net" is the one true way, why aren't all their new applications not written in it?
3) Be open. If Microsoft has this handy-dandy ribbon interface, it should be accessible to developers. One of the classic beauties of Windows has been the COM interface.
4) Make decent products! Ever try to develop for IE in a standards-compliant way? Even IE 7 is riddled with gotchas! How is it that there are three browsers out there developed by little guys (Mozilla, Opera, and Safari) that manage to get it "right" (or at least "right-er") when the Bazillionaire has a product that sucks so badly?
Sigh.
The result is that evelopers hedge their best with cross-platform technologies to mitigate the threat of Microsoft as much as possible. No, we can't ignore them. But we sure don't have to bow to them, anymore.
The best thing honestly would be for these servers to just clean their act up and handle things properly. Mail rejects should be done before the connection between the two servers closes. It should always be up to the SENDING mail server to generate a bounce rather than the receiving.
Eh, not so, unfortunately.
Sendmail has a drop-dead simple way of setting up "slave" mail servers in case the primary is down, an option that's commonly used for backup mail relaying. It's part of the official Sendmail documentation and so is very unlikely to "go away". And, when this is enabled, there is no address verification "before the connection between the two servers close[s].".
So, good luck with enforcing your ideas on how the world should work!
It is fundamental. It's called secure input handling, or sanitizing input. Just because it's a rule doesn't mean it is followed.
Rules aren't fundamental - they are accessory.
Why does the Database API in most scripting languages even ALLOW a SQL injection vuln? Yes, my tool of choice, PHP, still has this problem. I've worked around it by using a DB abstraction layer that uses prepared statements, all but eliminating the problem.
Stupid that it's not "fundamental" in the native API. It's an easily solved problem.
Bring your own laptop. There is no other way.
Of course, that won't protect you from keyloggers on your own laptop, which may be even more damaging, but still...
Isn't this largely what TV was back in the 50's? "The Colgate Comedy Hour" etc... It's just TV going full circle and back to the pitiful whores they were in the first place.
You whiner.
I just don't get the NEGATIVE ATTITUDE that comes from this. I mean, 24x7, you're getting shows that cost a TON OF MONEY to create for FREE. How about "gee, thanks!"??? You could go and support local community theater, but we all know that's something you go to because you think community theater is a "good idea", or because you know somebody in it, not because you'd actually want to go see it every night after dinner.
Don't like the show? Go do something else! Learn to play the guitar! Take your bored dog for a walk! Go have sex with your partner! Or, go find a partner to have sex with! Read a book! Study differential calculus! Learn to cook Mahi-Mahi Flambe.
But, you don't want to do that, and you don't like advertising? Well, you could PAY FOR THE SHOW. You know, buy season DVDs and only watch those. Don't bother with the advertising supported television! No commercials! Somewhere along the line, somebody's got to pay the bill.
The truth is, this is a natural response to the rise of the DVR. I've been wondering how long it would be before this would happen - I haven't watched a standard TV commercial in a long, long time. Any shows that count me as an advertising "eyeball" are lying to their advertisers. And while I appreciate the free ride in the short term, the long term is that this situation is simply unsustainable, as the cost of DVRs drop and adoption continues to climb.
Yep. I was totally sick of Windows and all its hassles, and I couldn't resist the opportunity to use a desktop OS with the strength and configurability of UNIX with a slick modern GUI.
So I got a Mac.
For all it's "power of UNIX" allure, OSX 10.5 is gawdawfully unstable. My Mac mini would run for weeks just fine with Tiger, but Leopard is lucky to last more than 24 hours or so. I mean, I hate to say it, but Leopard, for all its sex appeal, is LESS STABLE THAN WINDOWS 95 was for me.
Do I love the Mac? Sure! Is it as stable as my Linux PCs? Not a chance. Sorry.
Couldn't be you. The OP used proper punctuation and capitalization!
Yup.
Amd it worked. NTx couldn't actually do this part.
I tried for months to get Windows NT4 to operate as a webserver and a DNS server with an uptime > 2-3 days. Couldn't do it with a (then pretty decent) Pentium-100 with 32 MB of RAM.
Then, a year or two later, I discovered Linux, and tried it out on an old junker AM486/100. With 16 MB of ram, and a 500 MB HDD, and X-Windows/KDE 1.x running on the super-long VLB video card, it managed to host a web server, a DNS server, telnetd, ntpd, postgres, php, AND ssh reliably, 24x7 for MONTHS before I learned enough of what's going on to see that it was actually doing all that!
That was RedHat 5.1. It's what sold me on Linux, because, for all its many warts, it actually did the job reliably. And now, some 9 years later, it's still "doing it" (Now CentOS 4) and I'm still loving it, 24x7!
Am I the only one to remember ED 209 from Robocop?
Sometimes it seems, the more things change, the more they stay the same...
Ebay's success comes because it's a moderator - a broker in a sale. It connects two parties together, and nothing more. When it does that, Ebay is golden. It's UI is nice, it's search feature generally works, and that's why it's a multi-billion dollar corp.
But if they cram paypal down my throat, I'll swallow something else. I'm already at the point where Ebay is my LAST resort, since their ratings have been so thoroughly gamed I have no idea who I'm really dealing with, anymore.
Forcing paypal? No way. I refuse. What's the next halfway decent auction house? Truthfully, I've already moved much of my online purchasing to froogle.com....
Yeah, all that hurry and you still didn't get FRIST PSOST!
The issue was with old, pre-CDMA cell phones and extremely old avionics, like those found in small and mid-sized non-comercial aircraft about 40 years ago.
Oh, you mean like a '68 Piper Cherokee? I flew one about 3 weeks ago. I was a bit surprised when the pilot actually took a call on his phone shortly after taking some aerial photographs. No effect though, so while I supposed pre-CDMA might have been a problem, it certainly isn't anymore.
People forget to turn on or off their cell phones on every flight I've been on for years... I'll hear voicemail chimes start going off about a mile from the ground, typically about 10 minutes or so before landing.
On one flight, one of the SouthWest airline pilots was sitting 2 or 3 rows ahead of me. Well AFTER the "turn your phone off now!" notice, and while we were busy burning down the runway through, and well after, takeoff, the pilot was yapping away on his cell phone...
Add iron, plankton grows. Plankton absorbs CO2, then dies, sinking.
... ?
Oh, if it were only that simple! Yes, in most circumstances, iron is a primary limiting factor in the growth of plankton. But it's not the only one. Add iron and you'll see a strong bloom, that will soon die. Add more, and you'll see hardly anything, because as soon as iron is no longer the limiting factor, the plankton bloom until some other material is the limiting factor.
So, after iron, you find you need magnesium. Or calcium. Or phosphorus. Or
There is no simple solution. The only real solution is a COMPREHENSIVE one.
Right.
Because you know SOOOO much more about fighting tens of billions of spam per day than the engineers at Google. And I can be pretty confident in my dismissive contempt because, if you actually were any good at fighting spam, you'd be raking in the big bucks actually doing it instead of mumbling about it on Slashdot.
Maybe you actually do know something about fighting spam. In which case, you really should be registering a domain name (hint: both spamkillz.com and killzpam.com are not taken as I write this) and offering your helpful service to the worldwide community. If you were really any good, and provided a useful service free of spam, you could be a millionaire in 2 or 3 years.
I dunno. Usually, millions of dollars is sufficient motivation that you won't waste valuable knowledge here.
I don't use my bank's internet-based facilities, because they don't support my (more secure) choice of software- bizarre...
Since I rely on online banking considerably, I wouldn't bank with a bank that wouldn't let me use my choice of O/S, be it Windows, OSX, or *nix. (I use Firefox on FC8 and OSX with my bank without any noticed issue)
Switch banks. You know there are tons of 'em. They all want your business. And write a letter to your old bank as to why you are leaving. Will your letter matter? No, or at least, not right away. But it will make a difference if you aren't the only one. And you'll be safer, whatever the legalities of the issue. I mean, who wants to go thru the legal hassle that comes when some farquad steals your identity because they got your password to your bank's website?
I don't know whether roads marked as private are considered public or not
Start with the definition of private which has, as its most applicable definition: "not open or accessible to the general public".
So, you make a nice, long driveway on your personal property. It's a private road, leading to your house. Your driveway is not a public road. It's not maintained by the city/county/state, it's not surveyed by public surveyors, it's not public.
If you specifically wanted personal privacy, and payed nicely for it, wouldn't you think it reasonable to get pissed if somebody drives down your private driveway and takes pictures to publish worldwide?
The lawsuit is for peanuts - if won, would barely cover the cost of suing. It's to make a point.
Yeah yeah, Streissand effect and all that. She was nuts. So was Scientology. But these guys? Not so much. And if they can set a precedent, no matter how small, we can begin to preserve our private lives lived in private places. Public places have always been just that...
Troll.
But just for giggles, read this paragraph AGAIN:
The cool part is that you'll be able to give back lots - anything that you do which isn't a "core competence" is appropriately handled by giving your work back to the community, so that it can be absorbed into the codebase and used forever thereafter.
Sometimes by contributing code/bug fixes, sometimes by working with devs, and sometimes by paying cash, I've contributed significantly to ALL the projects you name, and many others. Until you've personally seen just how developer-friendly the OSS circle is, it's hard to believe or understand.
The risk of service work is not this lack of ramp up that you claim. Instead, the real risk is a higher level of competition. That is, you'll have a lot of others who can provide the same kind of service, including support service for open source software. Another risk is that if you identify a need to make improvements, you won't invest money in that effort since you can't use it as market leverage. By contrast, a service can be to sell the work of customizing the software to meet individual client needs.
Open source software (Linux, Apache, Postgres, Sendmail, etc) provides virtually unlimited opportunity for making money by providing service. It's all stable, reliable, secure and proven. It provides an EXCELLENT platform for providing services on. But if you think that providing Linux, Apache, Postgres, or Sendmail service is what you'd be selling, get ready to lose your shirt.
These softwares aren't particularly conducive to service in and of themselves, because they are free, and simply providing access to these toolkits is "commodity service". So get set for $6.95/month hosting, or maybe even free. Whoopee! (not!)
To make money, you don't sell sendmail or apache service, you sell services with these as a platform. Find something that you can build with these powerful tools, and sell THAT.
Assume that you've identified a need to track tractor tire overhauls. You could put together a special tool for tracking tractor tire overhauls to farmers using PHP, Postgres, and a $500 Linux server. If you market it right, you could build a million dollar business.
In fields everywhere from brokering the exchange of liver and kidney transplants, tracking the average speed of cars on the highway, to delivering educational flash videos to pre-school children, you'll find an endless variety of services you can deliver very profitably using open source software as your base.
The cool part is that you'll be able to give back lots - anything that you do which isn't a "core competence" is appropriately handled by giving your work back to the community, so that it can be absorbed into the codebase and used forever thereafter.
It's a brave new world, one that the quick, nimble, and creative will excel in.
... * 2000 - windows 2000, brought together the stability of the NT line with support for critical things like plug and play and USB.
I would add one more release:
* Oct 2001 Windows XP - added the games compatability of the Win9X codebase with the stability of the Windows 2000 codebase. With SP2, XP added a number of much-needed security features.
I believe Windows XP is the last release of Windows that was written to directly answer the needs of end users. Windows Vista was about locking users in, and users are rejecting it en masse.
I think this sucks for developers more than anything in that effectively Microsoft is asking them to support two platforms.
Which two?
We provide software for schools. We use PHP-GTK as a cross-platform RAD toolkit, and it does quite well.
Vista sucks, and has resulted in many support calls, But really, porting our Win 2000/XP codebase to Vista took an afternoon. The biggest problem was the installer, and the bazrillions of "you just downloaded a file, did you want to save it? - if you save this file, it might use some disk space. Are you sure?" messages.
Ultimately, most of the calls from Vista boiled down to training issues - how do you use Vista? Since the changes we ultimately made are retro-compatible, we don't treat it any different than our NT/2K/XP port. Are you referring to Macintosh support, which has (much as I'd like to say otherwise) been much more problematic and represents almost exactly 5% of our user base? Trying to manage builds on 3 different platforms (10.5, 10.4, 10.3) and 2 different chipsets (i386, ppc) is not easy when you figure in the requirement for Xcode and X11 at the same time. (yuck!) Or are you referring to Linux support, which represents 0% of our users? Yes, we've had instructions for Unix/Linux support for 3 years. Nobody's ever followed them.
I'm no fan of Microsoft. But, as a CTO of a small but very profitable company (and part-time developer), it's really hard to justify "cross platform" even when using a blatantly cross-platform toolkit. Since all our core systems are Linux based, we'll continue to do so, but not because our users are demanding it...
We've yet to see an independent production company get a show off the ground and make money solely off of Internet distribution. There have been some indie movies that have had a measure of Internet success but nothing that's been a break-out success.
I notice that, just after accusing "big media" companies of thinking conventionally, you immediately fall victim to thinking conventionally. You're thinking that it's going to be a "production company" that exists to "make money solely off of Internet distribution".
But amazing things have been happening that don't involve a company at all, or even any specific organization! For example, one of the more popular videos ever shown on YouTube was "produced" by somebody who remains, to this day, completely anonymous. It's sparked a worldwide phenomenon involving tens of thousands of people over months of time, in a movement that appears to be still gaining steam, not losing it.
Production company? Ha! Profit? Ha! There's not even any form of sensible "organization" - more like a collection of memes and interested individuals. When millions upon millions are watching and doing, at what point do you acknowledge that the rules have fundamentally changed?