A few years ago Ticketmaster and Clear Channel decided that selling out concerts meant lost revenue. Their goal is to price the tickets high enough that they get about 90% occupancy. Then Clear Channel cut Ticketmaster out of the loop and started handling their own ticket sales. The end result of this is concerts that almost never sell out, but the face value on the tickets is about what you would have paid from a scalper.
Since Clear Channel typically owns the venue, puts the tour together, owns the radio stations on which the concert is promoted and sells the tickets, all the money goes to them. Their public image has become so bad recently that they have taken to promoting their concerts under the names of all the old regional promoters they bought up probably 10 years ago (I know it's Pace Concerts in the south.)
Basically, if a disgruntled employee stole client data and said clients sued the company, it would cost several hundred/thousand times more than just paying him not to do the 2 weeks of halfassed work anyway (come on, you can't tell me everyone gives 100% when they know they're out of there.) To a suit writing policy, avoiding that kind of risk exposure is worth paying the guy to play video games.
It's nothing personal, and it shouldn't be taken as such. It's all about risk management, not your relationship with your employer. A vacation between jobs is never a bad idea anyway.
Any sort of mass windows deployment will usually include a license server. I know it's been a feature of Windows Server since at least Windows 2000. No clue if it works with anything other than MS stuff tho.
Old hardware is another story. I have a TV in card that I bought probably 10 years ago. The technology hasn't really changed at all in this timespan. However, it doesn't work in anything past Windows 98. But it works just fine on Linux.
The downside to open source drivers is that it takes a while for the initial drivers to be released. The upside is that even if the company who originally made the hardware is long gone, development can still continue, or at least kept current with OS releases.
Asterisk is a wonderful program, but for a real company, let someone who knows what they're doing design your phone system. Having done it myself, it may have been easier to pay someone else, the number of variables in a phone system are staggering and the thing is still a beast to maintain. What happens to your company when the person who designed the Asterisk system leaves? What kind of phones should you buy?
Saying any IT department can design you a phone system with Asterisk is like saying any IT department can design you a web site with Apache. AMP is good for a small setup, but I found it lacking and inflexible for even the needs of a small company. Asterisk is definitely the way to go, but try and see if you can find someone to do it for you. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.
I'm not saying Asterisk is something you can't/shouldn't learn, but there is a pretty good learning curve if you're new to VoIP and phone systems in general. This wiki has a lot of good information about VoIP in general, though mostly how it relates to Asterisk.
Probably more likely is that the form target is https, just not the page the form comes from. This would be fine, and is smart design, as SSL connections eat about 10 times more resources than http connections on a large e-commerce site. As long as their site doesn't store credit card numbers on your account this is a perfectly safe way to do things.
There's nothing wrong with PHP; in recent versions it has become a much more mature as a language. It works very well for what it does (web apps; yes they can be done in perl or C, but PHP was designed with web app designer's needs in mind.)
I agree with you about MySQL though. Postgres has been superior for a long, long time. MySQL is fine for small projects, but for anything you want to eventually get "big" Postgres is the way to go. MySQL doesn't scream "cheap" to me so much as it screams "hobbyist."
It was sort of a myth. Most consoles have sold at a small loss in the beginning, but as manufacturing processes are refined, that cost comes down significantly over time. They may sell the first 500,000 consoles at a small loss when they know they'll be able to sell the next 6 million for a profit. MS is another story, they just feel like bleeding money.
Dunno what dorms you've been in recently, but most aren't big enough for much more than a 15" TV. Most people I knew in the dorms (granted, that was 4 years ago) watched cable on the commons TV because it was usually a big screen. I was the only guy on my floor who had a TV, and that was mainly for my PS2.
More college students have computers than televisions. Most use the computer screen *as* a television for watching DVDs or whatever movies the guy down the hall got off of the internet.
Dunno about the busted one, but my personal favorite was the episode they did on rapid beer chilling. It seems that just by adding a good bit of salt to your ice chest is the most efficient (well, efficient and possible on a budget that will still allow you to afford more beer.) Mmmmm... Beer....
Nitpick much? NAT is a process involving a packet filter (you've gotta check those connection states to see who to send the packet to, incoming connections must be checked against a port forwarding list.) Saying "NAT is not a security measure, the packet filter is" is like saying "An alarm system is not a security measure, but the door sensor is." Packet filtering is one of the things that makes effective NAT possible.
Yes, you can do NAT without packet filtering, but not the kind of NAT that allows you to map one IP -> many devices, which is what we're talking about here. The simple fact that the machines behind NAT are not addressable to the large part of the internet provides some level of security.
You can remove IE from your system and windows explorer is still able to render pages. I have this done on my home PC, and it works great because I don't have to have IE (iexplore.exe does not exist) installed on my system, but if I need to check a page for compatability, I just open a "My Computer" window and paste the URL.
Pretty much everything you listed is available via higher level functions within IPv4. One could argue that the lack of enough IP addresses has made the internet *more* secure: instead of giving every machine in your company an internet-accessible IP, everything has to go through a NAT firewall except those machines you specify to be world-accessible.
No serious business is going to migrate to IPv6 exclusively because nobody is using it. This means that anyone who has an IPv6 connection has an IPv4 connection as well, which kind of provides no benefit to anyone. Every benefit of IPv6 is lost because IPv4 is still the primary network.
Also, the costs of initial deployment for a technology nobody is using ensures that nobody will use it in the future. There is not a market demand for IPv6, and while it is nice, and has some good features that would be really useful, there are no dealbreakers that IPv4 can't provide with higher level functions.
There are going to have to be a lot of companies who feel they can make a significant ROI to justify the cost of re-designing their entire internal network. Nobody is losing money by sticking with IPv4 over IPv6, so none of the suits are gonna buy into it. I don't see the critical mass necessary to force IPv6 compliance happening any time soon.
Most of the crap kids endure at schools these days is to make school administrators feel self-important and powerful. Teachers are usually fine and pretty in tune with what's going on, but administrators will make and enforce stupid rules just so they can pat themselves on the back later.
Intel is Apple's first choice because Intel's mobile processors are better than AMD's -- and don't try to argue this, you will lose. AMD may have the lead in desktop CPUs, but find me a major manufacturer who is making AMD laptops. Then consider that laptops are outselling desktops by a pretty decent margin.
Pentium M is not a bad architecture. It wouldn't surprise me to see Apple move the XServe line to Opterons, but the desktops will probably stay Intel for the forseeable future. Most "workstation" apps are highly optimized for Intel chips.
Hardware based DRM will always fail. If hackers have a stationary target to aim at (read: any copy protection scheme that is not changed) they will crack it given enough time.
Google has learned this, which is why they tweak the PageRank formula almost daily. DirecTV is another one. A moving target is always harder to hit.
It's slashdot, don't take it personally. There are troll moderators out there who will mod down perfectly legitimate posts just to screw with the system. Well intentioned moderators will usually mod you back up if they feel your post is worth spending the mod point on.
Me? I had my mod privs revoked long ago for posting in a "forbidden" thread. Just saves me the trouble of having to moderate though.
The reason the Supreme Court probably refused to hear this case is specifically because there is legislation in the works to address the issue. They tend to let the legislative system work before rushing to judgement (there are exceptions; namely "political suicide" issues like abortion and gay rights which the legislators won't touch.)
And approximately 0% of these cards/devices are produced in the US. The Chinese will still make them, and we will still be able to buy them in Canada. Not to mention this does 0 to stop movie piracy either; the professional pirates will still be around, operating in China like they have been for the past 20 years.
If you think the WoW GMs are incompetent now, just wait till you start losing epic loot because their game bugs out and they don't care. Their response is always "Sorry, better luck next time. *logoff*"
OTOH, trolls are smart, whereas spammers aren't. If spammers were smart we'd see lots more linkspam in ASP and Coldfusion sites.
Common misconception. Spammers are usually very smart, but they were tempted to the dark side by the wads and wads of quick cash available by spamming.
And trolls usually aren't very smart either, they're just bored.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago Ticketmaster and Clear Channel decided that selling out concerts meant lost revenue. Their goal is to price the tickets high enough that they get about 90% occupancy. Then Clear Channel cut Ticketmaster out of the loop and started handling their own ticket sales. The end result of this is concerts that almost never sell out, but the face value on the tickets is about what you would have paid from a scalper.
Since Clear Channel typically owns the venue, puts the tour together, owns the radio stations on which the concert is promoted and sells the tickets, all the money goes to them. Their public image has become so bad recently that they have taken to promoting their concerts under the names of all the old regional promoters they bought up probably 10 years ago (I know it's Pace Concerts in the south.)
Basically, if a disgruntled employee stole client data and said clients sued the company, it would cost several hundred/thousand times more than just paying him not to do the 2 weeks of halfassed work anyway (come on, you can't tell me everyone gives 100% when they know they're out of there.) To a suit writing policy, avoiding that kind of risk exposure is worth paying the guy to play video games.
It's nothing personal, and it shouldn't be taken as such. It's all about risk management, not your relationship with your employer. A vacation between jobs is never a bad idea anyway.
Any sort of mass windows deployment will usually include a license server. I know it's been a feature of Windows Server since at least Windows 2000. No clue if it works with anything other than MS stuff tho.
Old hardware is another story. I have a TV in card that I bought probably 10 years ago. The technology hasn't really changed at all in this timespan. However, it doesn't work in anything past Windows 98. But it works just fine on Linux.
The downside to open source drivers is that it takes a while for the initial drivers to be released. The upside is that even if the company who originally made the hardware is long gone, development can still continue, or at least kept current with OS releases.
Have you ever known any piece of technology to work for 25 years, let alone 10,000? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Asterisk is a wonderful program, but for a real company, let someone who knows what they're doing design your phone system. Having done it myself, it may have been easier to pay someone else, the number of variables in a phone system are staggering and the thing is still a beast to maintain. What happens to your company when the person who designed the Asterisk system leaves? What kind of phones should you buy?
Saying any IT department can design you a phone system with Asterisk is like saying any IT department can design you a web site with Apache. AMP is good for a small setup, but I found it lacking and inflexible for even the needs of a small company. Asterisk is definitely the way to go, but try and see if you can find someone to do it for you. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.
I'm not saying Asterisk is something you can't/shouldn't learn, but there is a pretty good learning curve if you're new to VoIP and phone systems in general. This wiki has a lot of good information about VoIP in general, though mostly how it relates to Asterisk.
Probably more likely is that the form target is https, just not the page the form comes from. This would be fine, and is smart design, as SSL connections eat about 10 times more resources than http connections on a large e-commerce site. As long as their site doesn't store credit card numbers on your account this is a perfectly safe way to do things.
There's nothing wrong with PHP; in recent versions it has become a much more mature as a language. It works very well for what it does (web apps; yes they can be done in perl or C, but PHP was designed with web app designer's needs in mind.)
I agree with you about MySQL though. Postgres has been superior for a long, long time. MySQL is fine for small projects, but for anything you want to eventually get "big" Postgres is the way to go. MySQL doesn't scream "cheap" to me so much as it screams "hobbyist."
It was sort of a myth. Most consoles have sold at a small loss in the beginning, but as manufacturing processes are refined, that cost comes down significantly over time. They may sell the first 500,000 consoles at a small loss when they know they'll be able to sell the next 6 million for a profit. MS is another story, they just feel like bleeding money.
Dunno what dorms you've been in recently, but most aren't big enough for much more than a 15" TV. Most people I knew in the dorms (granted, that was 4 years ago) watched cable on the commons TV because it was usually a big screen. I was the only guy on my floor who had a TV, and that was mainly for my PS2.
More college students have computers than televisions. Most use the computer screen *as* a television for watching DVDs or whatever movies the guy down the hall got off of the internet.
Dunno about the busted one, but my personal favorite was the episode they did on rapid beer chilling. It seems that just by adding a good bit of salt to your ice chest is the most efficient (well, efficient and possible on a budget that will still allow you to afford more beer.) Mmmmm... Beer....
It's also slashdot. Nobody puts more than half a second worth of thought into anything posted here, so why pick on this guy?
Nitpick much? NAT is a process involving a packet filter (you've gotta check those connection states to see who to send the packet to, incoming connections must be checked against a port forwarding list.) Saying "NAT is not a security measure, the packet filter is" is like saying "An alarm system is not a security measure, but the door sensor is." Packet filtering is one of the things that makes effective NAT possible.
Yes, you can do NAT without packet filtering, but not the kind of NAT that allows you to map one IP -> many devices, which is what we're talking about here. The simple fact that the machines behind NAT are not addressable to the large part of the internet provides some level of security.
You can remove IE from your system and windows explorer is still able to render pages. I have this done on my home PC, and it works great because I don't have to have IE (iexplore.exe does not exist) installed on my system, but if I need to check a page for compatability, I just open a "My Computer" window and paste the URL.
Even so, the US Govt considers 256 bit AES to be good enough for "Top Secret" documents so I doubt it's crackable in 90 days.
Pretty much everything you listed is available via higher level functions within IPv4. One could argue that the lack of enough IP addresses has made the internet *more* secure: instead of giving every machine in your company an internet-accessible IP, everything has to go through a NAT firewall except those machines you specify to be world-accessible.
No serious business is going to migrate to IPv6 exclusively because nobody is using it. This means that anyone who has an IPv6 connection has an IPv4 connection as well, which kind of provides no benefit to anyone. Every benefit of IPv6 is lost because IPv4 is still the primary network.
Also, the costs of initial deployment for a technology nobody is using ensures that nobody will use it in the future. There is not a market demand for IPv6, and while it is nice, and has some good features that would be really useful, there are no dealbreakers that IPv4 can't provide with higher level functions.
There are going to have to be a lot of companies who feel they can make a significant ROI to justify the cost of re-designing their entire internal network. Nobody is losing money by sticking with IPv4 over IPv6, so none of the suits are gonna buy into it. I don't see the critical mass necessary to force IPv6 compliance happening any time soon.
Most of the crap kids endure at schools these days is to make school administrators feel self-important and powerful. Teachers are usually fine and pretty in tune with what's going on, but administrators will make and enforce stupid rules just so they can pat themselves on the back later.
Intel is Apple's first choice because Intel's mobile processors are better than AMD's -- and don't try to argue this, you will lose. AMD may have the lead in desktop CPUs, but find me a major manufacturer who is making AMD laptops. Then consider that laptops are outselling desktops by a pretty decent margin.
Pentium M is not a bad architecture. It wouldn't surprise me to see Apple move the XServe line to Opterons, but the desktops will probably stay Intel for the forseeable future. Most "workstation" apps are highly optimized for Intel chips.
Hardware based DRM will always fail. If hackers have a stationary target to aim at (read: any copy protection scheme that is not changed) they will crack it given enough time.
Google has learned this, which is why they tweak the PageRank formula almost daily. DirecTV is another one. A moving target is always harder to hit.
It's slashdot, don't take it personally. There are troll moderators out there who will mod down perfectly legitimate posts just to screw with the system. Well intentioned moderators will usually mod you back up if they feel your post is worth spending the mod point on.
Me? I had my mod privs revoked long ago for posting in a "forbidden" thread. Just saves me the trouble of having to moderate though.
The reason the Supreme Court probably refused to hear this case is specifically because there is legislation in the works to address the issue. They tend to let the legislative system work before rushing to judgement (there are exceptions; namely "political suicide" issues like abortion and gay rights which the legislators won't touch.)
And approximately 0% of these cards/devices are produced in the US. The Chinese will still make them, and we will still be able to buy them in Canada. Not to mention this does 0 to stop movie piracy either; the professional pirates will still be around, operating in China like they have been for the past 20 years.
If you think the WoW GMs are incompetent now, just wait till you start losing epic loot because their game bugs out and they don't care. Their response is always "Sorry, better luck next time. *logoff*"
OTOH, trolls are smart, whereas spammers aren't. If spammers were smart we'd see lots more linkspam in ASP and Coldfusion sites.
Common misconception. Spammers are usually very smart, but they were tempted to the dark side by the wads and wads of quick cash available by spamming.
And trolls usually aren't very smart either, they're just bored.