It's just too bad that the "Great Firewall" doesn't work so well in the other direction.
The solution is simple: the U.S. government should put all their important servers on IP addresses leased from Rogers, etc.
When I was in Beijing I could surf Slashdot without any problems at all, but the firewall wouldn't allow me to connect to my home server to get my email. I'm not sure if they were blocking the 24.0.0.0/8 network because they think the home servers are more likely to contain political messages or if it was just a matter of not allowing contact with DHCP addresses because they can't IP-ban content that's moving and would have to use real-time filters.
Appraisers working for auctions routinely set estimates lower than what they really expect the item will fetch at auction - both to encourage bidders to step up to the plate early on and so the auction can claim to get "much higher prices" than expected, thus enforcing the Christie's premium name to sellers/estates who are thinking of consigning items there. Afterall, they have to compete with Sothebys.
That mentality can backfire, of course. Some people might look at the results and conclude that the appraisers had absolutely no clue and were therefore misrepresenting their capability to hold such an auction. The worry would be that if they under-valued the items by 80% on this auction, they might significantly over-value items next time. That would mean that either nothing would sell because of a hard reserve, or else the bidding would go below the starting point on the first few items, encouraging people to down-bid everything else even if the appraisal was reasonable.
Of course all forms of online gambling should be banned! Things like poker chips block the tubes that make up the internets. Only lotteries and horse races gambling should be allowed, to ensure that the tubes are flushed clean regularly. Otherwise, how long do you think the gerbils on wheels that power the internet are going to run? Not long!
I think you're mixing your metaphors. The gerbils on wheels are what powers the trucks, and thanks to Stephens we now know that the internets are not a bunch of trucks!
It's still much, much easier to deploy applications on Windows
Mainly because when you distribute for Windows you know you're normally going to have administrator access to the machine and can use any registry key and installation directory you want as long as it's obfuscated enough to miss other apps through sheer luck. Of course those are all just bad assumptions and Microsoft tells you not to expect such access, but 99% of the developers seem to write with that level of access in mind. I've had numerous Windows applications fail to install on machines where I wasn't administrator. These had no device drivers or complicated security requirements -- they simply failed because the programmer wanted to write to the protected areas of the registry instead of the user nodes.
With windows you're guaranteed binary compatibility on a majority of systems.
Majority != All. I find it particularly odd to see sites still offering programs for download that are not Win32 applications.
It's a huge pain to distribute binaries for every different distro
Well, there are two solutions to this: Use the RPM format and allow the other distros to import using "alien", or else get automated build tools. You would only have to set up the tools once with the distro-specific directories, etc.
They were stunned, but I explained exactly what the program did, which one of them confirmed. Then I explained the error I found. At this point they got very defensive. It seems this piece of code was pulled from their production systems, and "didn't have any errors". I explained what I found to them, and one of them wandered off.
Oddly I didn't get the job.
Heh. You were probably talking to the guy that wrote the defective code. I run into that at my work occasionally. Hell hath no fury like an egotistical programmer who thought his code was golden and was shown the iron pyrite buried within.
Sounds like someone doesn't live in hickville. Or belonged to a PTA anywhere. To believe that banning books is either temporally remote or over with is naive AND incorrect.
It happens all the time. One of the more high-profile cases in Canada was the decision by the Surrey School Board in British Columbia in 1997 to ban three books that were suggested as resources that teachers could use to promote acceptance of diversity and discourage homophobia. A law suit was started against the school board, and they fought to exclude those books all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, costing the taxpayers of Surrey $1,200,000. They caught quite a lot of PR flack when one of their students jumped from a local bridge in 2003 (?) as a result of homophobic taunting from fellow students.
That same school board was in 2005 (?) one of the only school boards in Canada to ban the use of their schools to stage "The Laramie Project", a play performed by and for students based on the Mathew Sheppard story.
Was the director that was leaking the info not doing anything wrong? While it might not excuse Dunn's actions (but, it might) wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that Dunn would never have been in a position to make a bad decision like this if George Keyworth had NOT been leaking inside information?
The point isn't that what Keyworth did wasn't wrong, but that Dunn had many options for pursuing his identity that were legal and chose instead to use illegal methods.
All she *really* had to do was put a consent form in front of each chair at the board meeting and tell them that anyone who didn't consent to a release of phone records would be assumed to have resigned. Keyworth would either have been forced to resign to protect his phone records or give permission to be caught leaking to the press.
"I mean Cuban, Puerto Rican, they are all very hot," the governor says on the recording. "They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it."
Disparaging or not, and Arnold may or may not be racist, it still attributes personality traits based on racial ethnicity.
Depends on what he meant by "hot". It could be the Paris Hilton "That's Hot!" kind of hot...
It's harmless in the sense that it won't crash your computer, but it will still block that user from running any additional programs because it uses up their thread quota. Of course, if you can trick someone into running it as root....
I remember writing stuff similar to this back in the 80's to trip the watchdog on the VAX when the system operator was away and the machine needed a reboot. I think the C code of choice was something like "main(){while(fork(fork())||!fork(fork()))fork();} ". We'd get a few dozen students to run it at the same time and the machine would reboot.
The one thing I haven't found is a stand alone front end that streams the data from the recording box rather than requiring an entire download before playing.
MythTV streams all playback content. It has to in order to support diskless frontends. How are you doing playbacks that is forcing a download? What content are you playing and where is it being downloaded from?
The majority of broadcast automation applications still run on Windows. When I worked at KDKD, we had all the on-air PCs set to "No Sounds"... It's always funny to hear a Windows sound on the radio.
I wonder how fast MS would react if the next sound on the radio was always the announcer saying "Sorry about that, folks. Windows crashed again. You know how it is with those unreliable computers and their mandatory sounds. I hope we get a Mac next time."
wouldn't tying teacher's rate of pay to standardized testing encourage the teachers to teach just the exam and not how to learn and explore?
In any effective education system (there aren't many of them) the teachers don't see the exams until after the students. The teachers and the QA staff have access to the same curriculum - one group creates lesson plans based on the curriculum and the other group creates exams. This division of labour prevents "teaching to the test" because the teachers don't know what's going to be on any given test (everything in the curriculum is fair game), but more importantly it takes away the ability of teachers to "test only what they taught" if they fail to complete the curriculum. That hopefully eliminates the stereotyped "worst case" where a student is promoted all the way through high school without learning to read or do math.
Casual users won't see changes made by anons, so why exactly will their changes be there? Why bother? Editors will still see them, fine, but people like me are usual users but casual editors, they won't have the basic motivation for improving an article - their work won't be available for the public immediately.
Two things come to mind:
If you know enough about a subject and feel strongly enough about accuracy to be making updates to Wiki then you have an incentive to login so your changes are seen. If you don't feel strongly enough about the information to take a moment and login then your change probably isn't worth making. This discourages "drive-by graffiti" artists who rely on their anonymous and ever-changing IP addresses to let them get away with it.
If the public needs to know something but you can't have your name associated with it then you still have the option of making the "Deep Throat" changes and trust the rest of the Wiki community to eventually see and propagate your changes.
This just makes the market that much more confusing for the customer. I'm not arguing it i' just saying that this type of marketing screws over the not so technicly inclined user. The releasing of multiple cards at once is confusing to the customers.
Heck, just having two companies making similar products is confusing to non-technical consumers.
Whenever non-tech people ask me what hardware they should buy I give the same answer: whatever product is closest in price to the number you're willing to pay.
I've been shopping that way for at least a decade now. Back in the 80's and early 90's I would agonize over the price:performance curves looking for the best deals, but these days I just walk up to the counter and let the stickers decide. Before I even walk into the store I tell myself "I need a $80 video card and a $140 hard drive" and then I get whatever the market is offering. I'm rarely dissappointed.
The article was pretty scant on detail, especially exactly *what* the merchants are complaining about.
Judging from their online town-hall type meetings, most of the vendors are complaining because EBay is reducing the number of storefront advertisements and paid placements shown when people search. Of course, as a potential buyer I'm really not interested in the store's retail products. The reason I'm shopping on EBay is because I want to get used stuff dirt cheap. If I wanted retail I'd go to the mall...
And what often works best is to show them your product over and over and over and over and over and over. Like in Gatorade commercials, which are often just a montage of many clips of sweathy athletes drinking Gatorade. The same goes for shampoo.
Showing the product over and over again is only effective if it's marketed to the right demographic and the image that's shown over and over again is both memorable and easily associated with the product. The Geiko gecko is both memorable and easily associated. On the other hand, my favorite shampoo commercials is the series where the woman is making orgasmic sounds while washing her hair. Everyone who's ever seen that commercial remembers it. Nobody knows what brand is represented.
Sometimes merely repeating the content over and over is more damaging than helpful. There's one advertisement that runs in my region which is so annoying I'll change the channel EVERY TIME because it's simply too painful to sit there and endure the ad. Not only is the advertiser losing a customer, but the show it's financing is also losing part of the audience...
The real strength of Google in television advertising will be when cable companies are ready to start streaming personalized content to the digital set-top boxes. That's when we'll all watch the same episode of the network broadcast show but enjoy (?) personalized content during the break.
Cringely talked about that in this column back in January.
Think of it this way, then - Google knows what browser you are using (or at least what your browser is reporting in the User-Agent header), so if they offer you results that won't work for your browser then *everyone* loses - you get lousy results, they lose relevance (compared to a competitor that excludes IE-only sites) and their advertisers waste money on paid placements that you won't be able to render properly and are therefore unlikely to lead to a sale.
What is the business case for Google/Yahoo to do this?
The business case is the same as providing search results optimized for blind people - it's all about improving the search experience in an effort to attract surfers away from the competition. They are going down the same path with their anti-malware tagging of sites.
Non-IE surfers probably represent a much larger demographic than blind users.
When Google announced that they were going to start offering an alternative search for blind people that rates sites based on how well they comply to the W3C usability standards, I really thought they might follow up with a search engine that rates the results according to general standards compliance. I'd love to see "works in any browser" sites on the first page and "IE-only" sites on page 10.... Suddenly all of those commercial sites would have an incentive to make their sites work instead of just making them flash-y.
The march of technology makes the cost of providing N bandwidth drop every year, following a near exponential curve.
Unfortunately, the demand to be "hip" means that individual web pages require N bandwidth to download, which is also increasing along an exponential curve. This Slashdot page was 194kb (text portion only) when I hit "reply". That would have been an insanely large download 10 years ago. CSS is helping to keep the size of web pages under control, but most of the gains are being lost to flash, etc.
It's as much stealing as sending the signal into their home is trespassing.
The courts have repeatedly ruled that radio waves passing through your property don't belong to you and that you don't have a specific right to detect or demodulate those signals. The most common case where this defence is tried (and fails) is when someone gets caught with a radar detector in a place where their use has been banned. It has also been applied to radio scanners and counterfeit television descramblers.
Using someone elses (un-used) bandwidth is more akin to someone breathing the air that was just expunged from your lungs.
The problem with that analogy is that it only applies instantaneously. In the case of bandwidth there may be a monthly quota, and using *today's* unused bandwidth results in less usable bandwidth later (or higher costs). While there may be available bandwidth at the WAP, that doesn't mean that there is available bandwidth all the way to the remote connection, either. At some point the freeloader is using bandwidth that was purchased for someone else.
An analogy as contrived as breathing my exhaust air could be countered by an equally contrived situation where I am in a closed system with CO2 scrubbers and a limited supply of supplimental O2 (think of spacecraft). If something or someone starts consuming the residual O2 in my closed system then they are forcing me to use the supplimental source that much quicker.
The only time it becomes acceptable to use someone else's property is when there is an unrestricted free supply. Then we only have to worry about the tragedy of the commons...
Slashdot Mirror
The solution is simple: the U.S. government should put all their important servers on IP addresses leased from Rogers, etc.
When I was in Beijing I could surf Slashdot without any problems at all, but the firewall wouldn't allow me to connect to my home server to get my email. I'm not sure if they were blocking the 24.0.0.0/8 network because they think the home servers are more likely to contain political messages or if it was just a matter of not allowing contact with DHCP addresses because they can't IP-ban content that's moving and would have to use real-time filters.
I think you're mixing your metaphors. The gerbils on wheels are what powers the trucks, and thanks to Stephens we now know that the internets are not a bunch of trucks!
That same school board was in 2005 (?) one of the only school boards in Canada to ban the use of their schools to stage "The Laramie Project", a play performed by and for students based on the Mathew Sheppard story.
All she *really* had to do was put a consent form in front of each chair at the board meeting and tell them that anyone who didn't consent to a release of phone records would be assumed to have resigned. Keyworth would either have been forced to resign to protect his phone records or give permission to be caught leaking to the press.
It's harmless in the sense that it won't crash your computer, but it will still block that user from running any additional programs because it uses up their thread quota. Of course, if you can trick someone into running it as root....
} ". We'd get a few dozen students to run it at the same time and the machine would reboot.
I remember writing stuff similar to this back in the 80's to trip the watchdog on the VAX when the system operator was away and the machine needed a reboot. I think the C code of choice was something like "main(){while(fork(fork())||!fork(fork()))fork();
I wonder how fast MS would react if the next sound on the radio was always the announcer saying "Sorry about that, folks. Windows crashed again. You know how it is with those unreliable computers and their mandatory sounds. I hope we get a Mac next time."
In any effective education system (there aren't many of them) the teachers don't see the exams until after the students. The teachers and the QA staff have access to the same curriculum - one group creates lesson plans based on the curriculum and the other group creates exams. This division of labour prevents "teaching to the test" because the teachers don't know what's going to be on any given test (everything in the curriculum is fair game), but more importantly it takes away the ability of teachers to "test only what they taught" if they fail to complete the curriculum. That hopefully eliminates the stereotyped "worst case" where a student is promoted all the way through high school without learning to read or do math.
You forgot:
3. ???
4. Profit!
Two things come to mind:
Heck, just having two companies making similar products is confusing to non-technical consumers.
Whenever non-tech people ask me what hardware they should buy I give the same answer: whatever product is closest in price to the number you're willing to pay.
I've been shopping that way for at least a decade now. Back in the 80's and early 90's I would agonize over the price:performance curves looking for the best deals, but these days I just walk up to the counter and let the stickers decide. Before I even walk into the store I tell myself "I need a $80 video card and a $140 hard drive" and then I get whatever the market is offering. I'm rarely dissappointed.
Judging from their online town-hall type meetings, most of the vendors are complaining because EBay is reducing the number of storefront advertisements and paid placements shown when people search. Of course, as a potential buyer I'm really not interested in the store's retail products. The reason I'm shopping on EBay is because I want to get used stuff dirt cheap. If I wanted retail I'd go to the mall...
Showing the product over and over again is only effective if it's marketed to the right demographic and the image that's shown over and over again is both memorable and easily associated with the product. The Geiko gecko is both memorable and easily associated. On the other hand, my favorite shampoo commercials is the series where the woman is making orgasmic sounds while washing her hair. Everyone who's ever seen that commercial remembers it. Nobody knows what brand is represented.
Sometimes merely repeating the content over and over is more damaging than helpful. There's one advertisement that runs in my region which is so annoying I'll change the channel EVERY TIME because it's simply too painful to sit there and endure the ad. Not only is the advertiser losing a customer, but the show it's financing is also losing part of the audience...
The real strength of Google in television advertising will be when cable companies are ready to start streaming personalized content to the digital set-top boxes. That's when we'll all watch the same episode of the network broadcast show but enjoy (?) personalized content during the break.
Cringely talked about that in this column back in January.
Think of it this way, then - Google knows what browser you are using (or at least what your browser is reporting in the User-Agent header), so if they offer you results that won't work for your browser then *everyone* loses - you get lousy results, they lose relevance (compared to a competitor that excludes IE-only sites) and their advertisers waste money on paid placements that you won't be able to render properly and are therefore unlikely to lead to a sale.
Non-IE surfers probably represent a much larger demographic than blind users.
Don't you mean "that's my kind of DO NO EVIL genius"?
When Google announced that they were going to start offering an alternative search for blind people that rates sites based on how well they comply to the W3C usability standards, I really thought they might follow up with a search engine that rates the results according to general standards compliance. I'd love to see "works in any browser" sites on the first page and "IE-only" sites on page 10.... Suddenly all of those commercial sites would have an incentive to make their sites work instead of just making them flash-y.
Unfortunately, the demand to be "hip" means that individual web pages require N bandwidth to download, which is also increasing along an exponential curve. This Slashdot page was 194kb (text portion only) when I hit "reply". That would have been an insanely large download 10 years ago. CSS is helping to keep the size of web pages under control, but most of the gains are being lost to flash, etc.
The courts have repeatedly ruled that radio waves passing through your property don't belong to you and that you don't have a specific right to detect or demodulate those signals. The most common case where this defence is tried (and fails) is when someone gets caught with a radar detector in a place where their use has been banned. It has also been applied to radio scanners and counterfeit television descramblers.
The problem with that analogy is that it only applies instantaneously. In the case of bandwidth there may be a monthly quota, and using *today's* unused bandwidth results in less usable bandwidth later (or higher costs). While there may be available bandwidth at the WAP, that doesn't mean that there is available bandwidth all the way to the remote connection, either. At some point the freeloader is using bandwidth that was purchased for someone else.
An analogy as contrived as breathing my exhaust air could be countered by an equally contrived situation where I am in a closed system with CO2 scrubbers and a limited supply of supplimental O2 (think of spacecraft). If something or someone starts consuming the residual O2 in my closed system then they are forcing me to use the supplimental source that much quicker.
The only time it becomes acceptable to use someone else's property is when there is an unrestricted free supply. Then we only have to worry about the tragedy of the commons...