No, it is (as the original poster said) one of the best decisions that the Irish government has ever made.
It is a simple, straightforeward tax aimed at preventing litter. And (now pay attention - this is the important bit...) IT WORKS.
People have started reusing plastic bags. The don't thow them away, or drop them on the street. They reuse them.
In the South African case, the country has a major problem in some areas of litter from cheap plastic bags. The bags are made as thin as possible, to make them as cheap as possible, and they are pretty much impossible to use more than once - they just rip apart too easily, and they end up making a lot of litter.
So the SA govt has now outlawed these untra thin bags. You are now required to use thicker bags. Thicker bags are more likely to be reused. They also do not catch the wind so easily, so they are less likely to end up hanging from trees even if they are dropped as litter.
The Irish example would not have worked in SA, because the country is far too large and rural to be able to police properly as the Irish do. Also, the combination of poverty and corruption in SA would have resulted in widescale flouting of an Irish-style bag tax.
Show me specific law where the software distributed on SuSE 8.2 is either not GPL (or similar) or under a free-beer license. As far as the cd layout being copyrighted, I'm not familiar with that. Again, please give me a specific case to back up your claim.
YaST for one. You not allowed to copy YaST, so you'd have to strip it from the distribution if you wanted to share... but then why bother going with SuSE if you're going to do that?
Also, I hear they've included a licenced commercial copy of Main Actor in 8.2. You probably don't want to be copying that either.
And certainly older versions included Star Office, which is also commercial, though I think they've switched to Open Office now, so that may be a moot point.
Other than that, it's mostly freely distributable, and you would naturally be most welcome to copy it. But don't forget to check the licences on everything, in case there's a few other small goodies they've include that aren't free...
Direct predecessor to the Commodore64, and identical in shape, though it was a slightly different shade of beige.
Not a particularly inspiring machine really, if truth be told. The C64 was fantastic, but the Vic was just a little too underpowered....or maybe that's just me remembering my childhood jealousy when I was stuck with the Vic playing a poor-man's version of space invaders, while everyone else was playing Hungry Horace on their C64s.
I love the scroll wheel. It is possibly the most significant UI innovation of the last ten years.
But I hate having it clickable as the third button.
Particularly in Konqueror, I find myself scrolling through a document, and suddenly I press too hard on the wheel and it jumps me to some random hyperlink that I hadn't even noticed let alone intended to click on. *grrrrr*
Personally I'd rather have a scroll wheel than a third button. The third button is nice, and I always liked having it, but the wheel is better, and the two don't co-exist too well.:-/
If you're running it as a hobby, don't expect to earn anything serious. Trust me, I know.:-(
Sure, you can set up advertising, banners, pop-ups, merchandise, blah-di-blah-di-blah, but unless you're prepared to put in a lot of time, you simply won't get much out of it.
In order to make a significant amount from web advertising, you will need to keep a careful eye on which ads are earning and which aren't. You'll need to constantly add new ads, and purge the ones that aren't working. You'll need to keep in touch with the latest trends - what are people clicking on, and why, and change your adverts to follow the trends.
Put simply, if it's a hobby, you're not likely to have time to put in the effort required to make money from it.
Putting up a simple banner ad might get you a small amount of income - it depends on just how popular your site actually is ("moderately popular" is not a well defined amount), and also whether you're willing to sell your soul and advertise gambing sites and dodgy credit cards (these two categories will earn you about ten times anything else, but I still refuse to advertise them).
The other idea that might work for you (depending on what your site actually has on it) is merchandising. If your site is suitable for merchandising, may I humbly recommend you visit CafePress, and start selling mugs and t-shirts with your logo. I have actually managed to make a bit of money from this, where advertising failed dismally. (also not much, but again I'm not putting in any real time to actively market them)
a picture of an employee sitting in front of their PC won't tell them anything (how will they know if employee is doing "real work", or looking at pr0n?)
They'll be able to see it in the reflection in your glasses!:-D
ISAM is a method of storing data, but it isn't a standard file format any more than "relational database"; it's just a name for a type of file, and there are many different ISAM files.
I'm not familiar with Databus / PL/B, so I can't speak with absolute authority, but I do have experience with a near-identical situation involving a different type of ISAM file, so with luck I might be able to at least offer some clues.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to look into the possibility of accessing our existing ISAM files in a web page.
These files were the database for a fairly old application that we sold on various flavours of Unix, and some of our clients wanted to give their customers a web front-end for ordering.
I offered three approaches: 1) Write a web interface using the same language and tools as the existing application. This would mean that the data would be easily available, as would our existing business logic. 2) Write a VB-Script web site, and use the ODBC driver that we knew was available for the ISAM files. 3) Write a Java-based web site, and try to find a JDBC driver to do the same job.
Option 1 was ruled out quite quickly for various reasons.
We eventually went with the VB route, primarily because the technology was already in place. There was a beta-test JDBC driver available, but we couldn't get it to work.
However, the important point was that we did find a company that specialises in supplying drivers for all sorts of obscure file formats.
I recommend you have a look at Trifox inc. Their Vortex and Genesis database drivers support just about every database I've ever heard of, and plenty I haven't, are available for practically every platform, and for a wide variety of languages and interfaces.
I have to confess that they weren't particularly helpful when I contacted them; it was their JDBC driver that didn't work (their ODBC driver did work, but we already had one of those), but don't let that put you off - they do seem to have a lot of expertise in the area.
That sums it up really; elegant design, way ahead of it's time, but poorly marketed (still sold pretty well in some quarters, tho), and now getting well and truly stomped on by the big M$ in the form of PocketPC (now that they've finally begun to catch up).
Very sad that another innovative product seems to be losing the fight. Psion discontinued their truly excellent Series 5 just as sales of PDAs were begining to accelerate.:-(
There is hope, though - Symbian is the reborn son so Psion, now selling the OS to any handheld manufacturer that's interested. I only hope the new company can maintain the vision and innovation of the original... and has better fortunes.
Anywhere else this would be considered a misleading business practice. MacDowells serving Big Mic's? yaho.com running a search engine? Revoke their business licences, or throw the creeps in jail. This isn't a bad practice of porn sites, this is a bad practice.
You see, that's a large part of the problem: you don't need a business licence to register and run a domain name.
"Whitehouse.com" was not founded at that address because he thought it would be a good way to found his business: it was founded because he wanted to trick people who would otherwise not want to view his warez into viewing them
Firstly, I completely agree with your position - the sort of domain spamming under discussion is sick, illegitimate and inexcusable. There are dozens, if not hundreds of examples, and they soil and degrade the internet as a whole.
However, with specific regard to Whitehouse.com, you are obviously not aware that Whitehouse has been a soft-core print magazine since many many years before they registered the domain name. It might not have quite the same circulation as Hustler and Playboy, but it's a recognised magazine brand name, which means that ironically for your argument, you picked the one site that probably does have a legitimate argument for it's domain name.
That doesn't lessen the validity of your argument as a whole, but you may want to pick a different example.:-)
(I don't know what the original logic was for the name of the magazine - it probably was chosen in the first instance with the name of a certain building in mind, but as a phrase, "white house" is probably more generic even than "windows" so I don't think anyone can complain)
Good grief. That was the strangest set of sounds I've heard a computer make since I tried playing around with the POKE command too close to the C64s audio addresses.
Some of the CDT's conclusions do seem obvious, but others really contradict prevailing beliefs. For one thing, they found that opting out of future mailings generally didn't result in the email address being sold or shared, thus attracting even greater quantities of spam.
Yes, it is suprising, but I think there is an important distinction between opting out via the same web site form that you opted in through, as opposed to opting out via the dodgy "Reply to remove" message at the end of most spam.
They seem to have used the former of those methods, but not the latter, and I suspect that it's that one that would have really brought the junk mail flooding in.:-/
Slashdot Mirror
Eight Thousand Euro???
Wow.
That's what I call getting a Bang for your bucks.
No, it is (as the original poster said) one of the best decisions that the Irish government has ever made.
It is a simple, straightforeward tax aimed at preventing litter. And (now pay attention - this is the important bit...) IT WORKS.
People have started reusing plastic bags. The don't thow them away, or drop them on the street. They reuse them.
In the South African case, the country has a major problem in some areas of litter from cheap plastic bags. The bags are made as thin as possible, to make them as cheap as possible, and they are pretty much impossible to use more than once - they just rip apart too easily, and they end up making a lot of litter.
So the SA govt has now outlawed these untra thin bags. You are now required to use thicker bags. Thicker bags are more likely to be reused. They also do not catch the wind so easily, so they are less likely to end up hanging from trees even if they are dropped as litter.
The Irish example would not have worked in SA, because the country is far too large and rural to be able to police properly as the Irish do. Also, the combination of poverty and corruption in SA would have resulted in widescale flouting of an Irish-style bag tax.
Show me specific law where the software distributed on SuSE 8.2 is either not GPL (or similar) or under a free-beer license. As far as the cd layout being copyrighted, I'm not familiar with that. Again, please give me a specific case to back up your claim.
YaST for one. You not allowed to copy YaST, so you'd have to strip it from the distribution if you wanted to share... but then why bother going with SuSE if you're going to do that?
Also, I hear they've included a licenced commercial copy of Main Actor in 8.2. You probably don't want to be copying that either.
And certainly older versions included Star Office, which is also commercial, though I think they've switched to Open Office now, so that may be a moot point.
Other than that, it's mostly freely distributable, and you would naturally be most welcome to copy it. But don't forget to check the licences on everything, in case there's a few other small goodies they've include that aren't free...
...but I never trust anyone who calls *themself* "sickeningly cute"!
VIC20 = The first computer I ever owned.
...or maybe that's just me remembering my childhood jealousy when I was stuck with the Vic playing a poor-man's version of space invaders, while everyone else was playing Hungry Horace on their C64s.
Direct predecessor to the Commodore64, and identical in shape, though it was a slightly different shade of beige.
Not a particularly inspiring machine really, if truth be told. The C64 was fantastic, but the Vic was just a little too underpowered.
I don't know about glass, but I got a stained computer case just by spilling coffee on it...
I love the scroll wheel. It is possibly the most significant UI innovation of the last ten years.
:-/
But I hate having it clickable as the third button.
Particularly in Konqueror, I find myself scrolling through a document, and suddenly I press too hard on the wheel and it jumps me to some random hyperlink that I hadn't even noticed let alone intended to click on. *grrrrr*
Personally I'd rather have a scroll wheel than a third button. The third button is nice, and I always liked having it, but the wheel is better, and the two don't co-exist too well.
If you're running it as a hobby, don't expect to earn anything serious. Trust me, I know. :-(
Sure, you can set up advertising, banners, pop-ups, merchandise, blah-di-blah-di-blah, but unless you're prepared to put in a lot of time, you simply won't get much out of it.
In order to make a significant amount from web advertising, you will need to keep a careful eye on which ads are earning and which aren't. You'll need to constantly add new ads, and purge the ones that aren't working. You'll need to keep in touch with the latest trends - what are people clicking on, and why, and change your adverts to follow the trends.
Put simply, if it's a hobby, you're not likely to have time to put in the effort required to make money from it.
Putting up a simple banner ad might get you a small amount of income - it depends on just how popular your site actually is ("moderately popular" is not a well defined amount), and also whether you're willing to sell your soul and advertise gambing sites and dodgy credit cards (these two categories will earn you about ten times anything else, but I still refuse to advertise them).
The other idea that might work for you (depending on what your site actually has on it) is merchandising. If your site is suitable for merchandising, may I humbly recommend you visit CafePress, and start selling mugs and t-shirts with your logo. I have actually managed to make a bit of money from this, where advertising failed dismally. (also not much, but again I'm not putting in any real time to actively market them)
a picture of an employee sitting in front of their PC won't tell them anything (how will they know if employee is doing "real work", or looking at pr0n?)
:-D
They'll be able to see it in the reflection in your glasses!
It really does depend on the files themselves.
ISAM is a method of storing data, but it isn't a standard file format any more than "relational database"; it's just a name for a type of file, and there are many different ISAM files.
I'm not familiar with Databus / PL/B, so I can't speak with absolute authority, but I do have experience with a near-identical situation involving a different type of ISAM file, so with luck I might be able to at least offer some clues.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to look into the possibility of accessing our existing ISAM files in a web page.
These files were the database for a fairly old application that we sold on various flavours of Unix, and some of our clients wanted to give their customers a web front-end for ordering.
I offered three approaches:
1) Write a web interface using the same language and tools as the existing application. This would mean that the data would be easily available, as would our existing business logic.
2) Write a VB-Script web site, and use the ODBC driver that we knew was available for the ISAM files.
3) Write a Java-based web site, and try to find a JDBC driver to do the same job.
Option 1 was ruled out quite quickly for various reasons.
We eventually went with the VB route, primarily because the technology was already in place. There was a beta-test JDBC driver available, but we couldn't get it to work.
However, the important point was that we did find a company that specialises in supplying drivers for all sorts of obscure file formats.
I recommend you have a look at Trifox inc. Their Vortex and Genesis database drivers support just about every database I've ever heard of, and plenty I haven't, are available for practically every platform, and for a wide variety of languages and interfaces.
I have to confess that they weren't particularly helpful when I contacted them; it was their JDBC driver that didn't work (their ODBC driver did work, but we already had one of those), but don't let that put you off - they do seem to have a lot of expertise in the area.
Psion: The Amiga of handhelds.
:-(
That sums it up really; elegant design, way ahead of it's time, but poorly marketed (still sold pretty well in some quarters, tho), and now getting well and truly stomped on by the big M$ in the form of PocketPC (now that they've finally begun to catch up).
Very sad that another innovative product seems to be losing the fight. Psion discontinued their truly excellent Series 5 just as sales of PDAs were begining to accelerate.
There is hope, though - Symbian is the reborn son so Psion, now selling the OS to any handheld manufacturer that's interested. I only hope the new company can maintain the vision and innovation of the original... and has better fortunes.
You're probably right. Of course, it does involve learning a bit of code, and there are plenty of people who aren't comfortable with that.
And then there are those who have small sites with only a couple of pages that don't need to change very often. Not much call for PHP on those.
the ``unstable'' version still reads OpenZaurus 3.1-rc3.1. Wonder why they released this version as 3.2
Some software releases use odd version numbers for beta, and even numbers for release versions (or vice versa). Maybe this is one of them.
Shuttle Missions Will Be Monitored From Space
;-)
Why don't we just ask the aliens? Everyone knows they're already monitoring all our space flights.
Hmmm.... so Intel are naming their new processor after a British politician who's most noticable feature is that he's an overwight bully.
I wonder if they'll spot the irony in that?
Where is the best online repository/library of common and reusable code snippets?
:-/
The US Patent Office.
Haha! You definitely deserve a +1 Funny or two, just for that subject line. :-)
Sorry I couldn't give 'em to you.
Anywhere else this would be considered a misleading business practice. MacDowells serving Big Mic's? yaho.com running a search engine? Revoke their business licences, or throw the creeps in jail. This isn't a bad practice of porn sites, this is a bad practice.
You see, that's a large part of the problem: you don't need a business licence to register and run a domain name.
"Whitehouse.com" was not founded at that address because he thought it would be a good way to found his business: it was founded because he wanted to trick people who would otherwise not want to view his warez into viewing them
:-)
Firstly, I completely agree with your position - the sort of domain spamming under discussion is sick, illegitimate and inexcusable. There are dozens, if not hundreds of examples, and they soil and degrade the internet as a whole.
However, with specific regard to Whitehouse.com, you are obviously not aware that Whitehouse has been a soft-core print magazine since many many years before they registered the domain name. It might not have quite the same circulation as Hustler and Playboy, but it's a recognised magazine brand name, which means that ironically for your argument, you picked the one site that probably does have a legitimate argument for it's domain name.
That doesn't lessen the validity of your argument as a whole, but you may want to pick a different example.
(I don't know what the original logic was for the name of the magazine - it probably was chosen in the first instance with the name of a certain building in mind, but as a phrase, "white house" is probably more generic even than "windows" so I don't think anyone can complain)
Good grief. That was the strangest set of sounds I've heard a computer make since I tried playing around with the POKE command too close to the C64s audio addresses.
Eek! What a terrible concept...
:-/
... The author would need to ...
Too right.
The biggest single problem with this approach
Yikes. You've just told them exactly what to do!!! Aaarrrggg!!! The genie is out of the bottle!!! Now we'll never be safe!!!
On the bright side, I suppose, there's not too many evil spammers reading this.... but you just never know!!!
Some of the CDT's conclusions do seem obvious, but others really contradict prevailing beliefs. For one thing, they found that opting out of future mailings generally didn't result in the email address being sold or shared, thus attracting even greater quantities of spam.
:-/
Yes, it is suprising, but I think there is an important distinction between opting out via the same web site form that you opted in through, as opposed to opting out via the dodgy "Reply to remove" message at the end of most spam.
They seem to have used the former of those methods, but not the latter, and I suspect that it's that one that would have really brought the junk mail flooding in.
To dump dump, or not to dump dump. That is the question.
Somehow, "nixing" seems to be an oddly appropriate word usage here.... :-D
With any luck, we'll find out now whether the cores of these things really are giant diamonds.
;-)
(and if they are, what are the bets the space race suddenly hots up again...