As someone who has visited the Gerrold/General Instruments/Motorola offices in Hatboro, PA, and who has spoken to a fair number of cable operators, I can tell you this:
The box that this system will be built on, and the services to which it connects will almost certainly not be of the quality that Tivo now provides.
First of all, check out the Wiki entry on this cable box, and you'll see it's not that impressive, although it does have a few nice features (HDTV, recording two channels at once, 120GB disk).
Second, remember that cable operators buy these units by the millions, so every extra penny is a big deal.
You wouldn't think twice about a nice feature in your Tivo box, even if it cost an extra $10. To a cable operator, an extra $10 per box is an insane, indefensible amount and they'll cut the feature instead.
Finally, embedded programming on a cable box is worlds cruftier and more limiting than the Linux underpinnings of the current Tivo architecture. It's virtually certain that some features just won't be portable to this new box.
Count me a curmudgeon on this if you like, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Funny how this apoplectic leftist attack on someone who actually stood in the way of bullets and bombs just so happens to have been authored by Anonymous Coward.
Congratulations, pinhead. You're the new face of the tired and haggard anti-war protest, spitting in the faces of your betters and calling them "baby killer."
I mean honestly, you may think it's all champagne and dancing girls here in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, but I have to tell you it's just grueling, grinding work.
Have you got any idea how much work it is, all day long, crushing dissent, stealing votes, infiltrating Kerry's inner circle, sabotaging his campaign (thanks Teresa!), suppressing turnout, and faking the results?
And now that the election is over, its rape and pillage, rape and pillage, crush the poor, slaughter the weak, and force Christianity on anyone who resists.
It's tiring; I'll tell you that for free.
And, frankly, you would be doing us a great favor if you would just accept the inevitability of the new Bushitler Hegemony, take your hemp jewelry and your Che Guevarra t-shirts and just move to somewhere nice and Socialist like Canada where you can stay safe until the apocalypse arrives.
Warning: If you do not recognize the preceding message as sarcasm and satire, then seek professional help immediately.
See Hugh Hewitt's blog. Hewitt himself is a partisan commentator, no doubt.
But see the emails that he posts, which he received from Professor Cartwright of Rice University.
Given how fast this story is moving, this part of it is almost old news already: the documents are fake.
At this point, the story is shifting to the origin of the documents. To date, some theories have been forwarded, but no smoking guns are in evidence.
My personal view is that these documents are such cheap and tawdry forgeries that it's hard for Dan Rather to shake the impression that he has some level of complicity in the falsehoods.
"We have no political agenda," Mr. Meyer said. "It's the bomb imagery we objected to."
Take it from someone who has bought and placed advertising. The major media routinely reject ads that contain images of weaponry -- guns and bombs especially -- because if they don't then cranks call up and start whining at them about "sending the wrong message to the children."
Leave it to Dreyfuss to turn an overblown story about whether you can say "fuck" on PBS into a cheap partisan jab.
Seriously, does the Hollywood Left so desperately need to advance their bogus "stifling of dissent" narrative that they'll stoop to this transparent nonsense?
Since when is it "unquestionably censorship" when PBS elects not to have one of their new shows sound like a Jerry Springer episode?
I mean, I don't even support the idea of the "public" airwaves, or even "public" television, but why is it so hard to imagine that maybe a minimum of civil behavior could be expected there?
How can people get away with being so willfully obtuse just to score some cheap political points?
You get to cry "censorship" when they tell you that you can't complain about policy on the airwaves. Come back then.
In the mean time, if you want to have people spout "dirty words" on camera, take it to HBO and Showtime like everyone else.
And if I let crack dealers use my house for buys..
on
Safe and Insecure?
·
· Score: 1
...then surely the police will never consider me to be guilty of drug trafficking.
Right?
Reminds me of Cicero, who said: There is no idea so foolish, but some philosopher has said it.
It'll never happen. Why? Terraforming is a multigenerational undertaking. So far the only human creation to span many generations has been religions and the wars they involve.
Surely you don't think that the Earth looked like it does now for the last 10,000 years, do you?
We already have aeons of experience at terraforming. We certainly didn't do it as a conscious plan, but the development of our species absolutely required us to reform and manipulate large sections of our planet to make them more suitable to our needs.
Is Mars harder to change? Absolutely.
Do we know how to modify it for our needs yet? Probably not.
Do we need it for the sake of real estate alone? Nah, plenty of unused space right here on Earth, much easier to get to.
But all species face the same ultimatum: grow or die. Ultimately, we have to expand beyond our origins.
Hey, most slashdotters realize that it's cheaper to keep living in their parents' house. Plenty of room, cheap rent. But eventually, they do often realize the benefits of moving out to a place of their own.
Some of these "protesters" don't know the difference between the right to peaceable assembly and run-amok vandalism.
Read the reports there. The "protesters" say that they came "to shut down" a private facility, based on some kind of tenuous logic linking it to military efforts of which they did not approve.
One of the marchers refers to himself as part of a group of "reinforcements" meant to attack a particular gate. Union dock workers, according to another one of those same reports you linked to, were sent home because of the danger posed by the "protesters."
Another marcher writing there remarks on the generally light, even "friendly" treatment received from police just a few days before. Hmm. What was missing from the prior event? Could it be breaking and entering, trespassing, and vandalism?
The truth is that most of the airheads who get involved with these marches haven't the vaguest idea what oppression is. Rubber bullets and flash bangs against an unruly mob, and they play it up like they were mowed down with gun fire and buried in landfill, like the victims of a certain recently-eliminated tyrant we know of.
Clearly, everyone should guard their freedoms diligently, and speak up when they think those freedoms are infringed. But if you squawk "ooh, I'm bein' oppressed ovah heah!" and "see the violence inherent in the system!" when the cops are simply protecting the peace against your assaults on it, then you're not going to win many friends, to say nothing of winning arguments on their logcal merits.
This really scares me. I am confident that such technologies, as soon as they are entrenched, will start being used against anti-corp, anti free-trade groups rather quickly.
This is a misdirected search for self-confidence, relevance, and meaning disguising itself as paranoia.
The so-called "anti-globalization" drummings of a few highly-motivated but ultimately uninformed marchers is neither as significant, nor as threating to "the man" as to warrant the kind of Gestapo tactics you're talking about.
But it feeds the egos of those involved to imagine that but for the presence of shadowy conspiracies and underhanded tactics, their "movement" would take over the world, instead of just leaving a bunch of litter on Main street and giving the nightly news a few seconds of colorful video to run.
Trust me. You're safe. Hold your marches.
The people don't care about you, and the government doesn't see you as an existential threat, just an occasional traffic control problem.
First things first: the typical techie knows less than zero about managers, let alone executives. But for reasons that have more to do with psychology than business practices, most of them also prefer to confront this unknown the way a caveman would approach a beowulf cluster, grunting, shaking their spears in mock threat, and retreating to the safety of their caves.
And this is pretty surprising because a life in engineering is supposed to be about -- wait for it -- figuring things out. Not getting the response you want from your boss or your boss' boss? Well maybe you need to spend a little time figuring out how the "boss machine" works so that you can program it a little better!
With that spirit in mind, here are a few hints to start you down the path.
Managers (usually) find numbers more believable than generalizations.
While engineers can often be convinced by citations of general principles ("That's so inelegant!"), managers need numbers. And the best numbers of all are the ones that tell them about profit and loss. They really do not care -- nor should they -- about whether the IT environment is the most super neato that it can be. But show them that your proposed change will lower costs or increase profits and you'll get their attention. Don't like doing the math that it takes to prove that case? Then tough, you won't get what you want. Some engineers cop out at this point in the discussion by saying the data doesn't exist. Well, guess what, it does. The studies have been done; the authorities have investigated your problem, whatever it is. Use google to find them, that's what it's there for.
Be a repairman, not a mailman.
A typical manager spends their entire day hearing complaints from every person they encounter. If you think you can imagine what that's like, trust me, you're wrong. If you want your gripe to get put on the same pile as all of those others and ignored, then by all means deliver a complaint and leave it at that. But if you want to see your problem fixed then never state a problem without offering a solution. At the absolute minimum you must say something like: "I have recognized this problem, and though I haven't figured out what we ought to do about it, I am working on a solution. I'd like to meet with you when I have the solution ready so that we can talk about it. Can we do that?" Trust me, asking a manager for permission to bring them an answer to a problem is like asking Charlie Sheen if you can bring him another hooker. Your manager will shake his head so vigorously you'll think it's going to fall off.
Never make your boss look bad.
Your boss keeps her job as long as her colleagues believe that she is competent and hardworking. If you undermine that perception, you are threatening the bread that she feeds to her children. If you are so foolish as to do such a thing by implying that a manager is incompetent or unworthy of basic respect, then you should expect to be immediately and viciously punished. In some rare cases, a boss might do or threaten to do something that is illegal, immoral, or disastrous for the company. Then, obviously, you have to tell someone to try to do what you can to minimize the damage. But a run of the mill disagreement with your boss is not a good enough reason to threaten their job. It's the same as if some other engineer started badmouthing your coding skills to your coworkers. Just don't do it.
Always follow up.
People get busy. Managers and executives especially. (Please, no whining about how awful your workload is since the "big layoffs." Trust me, your boss' workload is worse.) Take a minute every so often to remind your boss of the solutions you've proposed and how they're going. It's not enough to do good things for people. You must remind them of what you've done for them early and often. And don't forget to use numbers. ("Hey, Chris. I just wanted to let you know about how happy I am about that new order processing
Comparing labor costs of Windows technicians to Linux technicians is not really a complete picture. Sure, it's easy to imagine that the relatively larger number of trained Windows techs (along with the still-improving job market) makes their salaries a smidge lower, but it also means a wider variation in their skill levels. The fact that Windows techs costs less is not that impressive UNLESS they can achieve the same uptime result as their more expensive brethren.
Comparing a pile of Windows servers to a Linux mainframe is not what I would call an apples-to-apples comparison.
Cost of development tools is a valid aspect to compare. But is the result that they produce reliable across many different browsers and browser versions? If not, then *poof* there went your savings.
Don't get me wrong. I use MS products every day and I actually think they are a great company despite their severe attitude problems and tendency to play hardball viciously.
But this material is far from the last word on the subject.
Now, show me someone who has documented lower TCO at the same uptime level and load and maybe you've got something.
Since virtually all spam is arranged to prevent automatic replies from working, you have to examine the body of the message in order to find out where to reply.
So, you're telling me that not only do I have to waste time to delete spam, now I have to read them and send a bogus reply too?
And this helps me exactly how?
Plus, spam is a huge drain on network resources. So you're saying the fix for too much bogus mail is -- wait for it -- more bogus mail?
"If you want assault rifles, join the army. We have lots of them" - General Clark (I think)
Here's another one along those lines:
"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA. Ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State" - Heinrich Himmler
First, it's important to remember that all email travels through third-party hardware and software on its way to the intended recipient. All Messagefire does is permit the user to specify the penultimate system in the (sometimes rather long) chain.
But we have not ignored this issue. That's why when we collect mail from a user's ISP (in the Personal Edition), we use the best security available to that user whenever possible, including encrypted links and authentication methods that do not send passwords over the wire.
In the Enterprise Edition (available soon), we will act as an edge server MX host for the user's domain and pass the filtered result directly to the customer's internal SMTP intake servers.
Our data processing facilty has N+1 redundant UPS power supplies and diesel generator backup. It has redundant networking connectivity from multiple tier-1 providers, and is staffed and monitored 24/7. Access to the data facility is strictly controlled with military-grade passcards and entry is limited to security personnel and authorized technicians.
The security of our mail transfer and handling is at least as good -- and in many cases better -- than what customers already have with their current Internet providers.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who has visited the Gerrold/General Instruments/Motorola offices in Hatboro, PA, and who has spoken to a fair number of cable operators, I can tell you this:
The box that this system will be built on, and the services to which it connects will almost certainly not be of the quality that Tivo now provides.
First of all, check out the Wiki entry on this cable box, and you'll see it's not that impressive, although it does have a few nice features (HDTV, recording two channels at once, 120GB disk).
Second, remember that cable operators buy these units by the millions, so every extra penny is a big deal.
You wouldn't think twice about a nice feature in your Tivo box, even if it cost an extra $10. To a cable operator, an extra $10 per box is an insane, indefensible amount and they'll cut the feature instead.
Finally, embedded programming on a cable box is worlds cruftier and more limiting than the Linux underpinnings of the current Tivo architecture. It's virtually certain that some features just won't be portable to this new box.
Count me a curmudgeon on this if you like, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Funny how this apoplectic leftist attack on someone who actually stood in the way of bullets and bombs just so happens to have been authored by Anonymous Coward .
Congratulations, pinhead. You're the new face of the tired and haggard anti-war protest, spitting in the faces of your betters and calling them "baby killer."
What a maroon.
Then why haven't you left?
I mean honestly, you may think it's all champagne and dancing girls here in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, but I have to tell you it's just grueling, grinding work.
Have you got any idea how much work it is, all day long, crushing dissent, stealing votes, infiltrating Kerry's inner circle, sabotaging his campaign (thanks Teresa!), suppressing turnout, and faking the results?
And now that the election is over, its rape and pillage, rape and pillage, crush the poor, slaughter the weak, and force Christianity on anyone who resists.
It's tiring; I'll tell you that for free.
And, frankly, you would be doing us a great favor if you would just accept the inevitability of the new Bushitler Hegemony, take your hemp jewelry and your Che Guevarra t-shirts and just move to somewhere nice and Socialist like Canada where you can stay safe until the apocalypse arrives.
Warning: If you do not recognize the preceding message as sarcasm and satire, then seek professional help immediately.
See Hugh Hewitt's blog. Hewitt himself is a partisan commentator, no doubt.
But see the emails that he posts, which he received from Professor Cartwright of Rice University.
Given how fast this story is moving, this part of it is almost old news already: the documents are fake.
At this point, the story is shifting to the origin of the documents. To date, some theories have been forwarded, but no smoking guns are in evidence.
My personal view is that these documents are such cheap and tawdry forgeries that it's hard for Dan Rather to shake the impression that he has some level of complicity in the falsehoods.
CBS is pushing phony documents in an attempt to sway a presidential election, and Slashdot won't take an entry on that topic. (Yes, I tried.)
But we can discuss a random circle jerk of science fiction writers.
Stuff that matters, eh?
Uh, no, not exactly. What the article said is that the anti-war group claimed that the replacement had also been rejected.
Here's what Clear Channel actually said:
Obviously, one of them is either lying or mistaken. My bet is on the hippies. You can place yours as you see fit.
It's getting so that one can scarcely hear oneself think over the din of Liberals loudly proclaiming how they've been censored.
(Hint for the irony-impaired: think before you mod.)
I dispute the "flame bait" mod to the post above. This is not a "troll" post, but a legitimate part of this discussion.
After all, if it's flame-bait, how come no one flamed?
Take it from someone who has bought and placed advertising. The major media routinely reject ads that contain images of weaponry -- guns and bombs especially -- because if they don't then cranks call up and start whining at them about "sending the wrong message to the children."
Leave it to Dreyfuss to turn an overblown story about whether you can say "fuck" on PBS into a cheap partisan jab.
Seriously, does the Hollywood Left so desperately need to advance their bogus "stifling of dissent" narrative that they'll stoop to this transparent nonsense?
Since when is it "unquestionably censorship" when PBS elects not to have one of their new shows sound like a Jerry Springer episode?
I mean, I don't even support the idea of the "public" airwaves, or even "public" television, but why is it so hard to imagine that maybe a minimum of civil behavior could be expected there?
How can people get away with being so willfully obtuse just to score some cheap political points?
You get to cry "censorship" when they tell you that you can't complain about policy on the airwaves. Come back then.
In the mean time, if you want to have people spout "dirty words" on camera, take it to HBO and Showtime like everyone else.
...then surely the police will never consider me to be guilty of drug trafficking.
Right?
Reminds me of Cicero, who said: There is no idea so foolish, but some philosopher has said it.
Did I just see an approving comment about Microsoft on Slashdot?
Surely you don't think that the Earth looked like it does now for the last 10,000 years, do you?
We already have aeons of experience at terraforming. We certainly didn't do it as a conscious plan, but the development of our species absolutely required us to reform and manipulate large sections of our planet to make them more suitable to our needs.
Is Mars harder to change? Absolutely.
Do we know how to modify it for our needs yet? Probably not.
Do we need it for the sake of real estate alone? Nah, plenty of unused space right here on Earth, much easier to get to.
But all species face the same ultimatum: grow or die. Ultimately, we have to expand beyond our origins.
Hey, most slashdotters realize that it's cheaper to keep living in their parents' house. Plenty of room, cheap rent. But eventually, they do often realize the benefits of moving out to a place of their own.
I say terraform it as soon as we can.
Human survival, wellbeing, and expansion should trump all other concerns. We are the measure of all things.
Second, a species with only one planet is necessarily at greater risk than a species with two planets. We need the insurance policy.
I love science. But the value of another planet to our species is greater than the cost of losing the odd microbe or two that might be found on Mars.
I say, "Let's Go!"
To me, this link proves little or nothing.
Some of these "protesters" don't know the difference between the right to peaceable assembly and run-amok vandalism.
Read the reports there. The "protesters" say that they came "to shut down" a private facility, based on some kind of tenuous logic linking it to military efforts of which they did not approve.
One of the marchers refers to himself as part of a group of "reinforcements" meant to attack a particular gate. Union dock workers, according to another one of those same reports you linked to, were sent home because of the danger posed by the "protesters."
Another marcher writing there remarks on the generally light, even "friendly" treatment received from police just a few days before. Hmm. What was missing from the prior event? Could it be breaking and entering, trespassing, and vandalism?
The truth is that most of the airheads who get involved with these marches haven't the vaguest idea what oppression is. Rubber bullets and flash bangs against an unruly mob, and they play it up like they were mowed down with gun fire and buried in landfill, like the victims of a certain recently-eliminated tyrant we know of.
Clearly, everyone should guard their freedoms diligently, and speak up when they think those freedoms are infringed. But if you squawk "ooh, I'm bein' oppressed ovah heah!" and "see the violence inherent in the system!" when the cops are simply protecting the peace against your assaults on it, then you're not going to win many friends, to say nothing of winning arguments on their logcal merits.
This is a misdirected search for self-confidence, relevance, and meaning disguising itself as paranoia.
The so-called "anti-globalization" drummings of a few highly-motivated but ultimately uninformed marchers is neither as significant, nor as threating to "the man" as to warrant the kind of Gestapo tactics you're talking about.
But it feeds the egos of those involved to imagine that but for the presence of shadowy conspiracies and underhanded tactics, their "movement" would take over the world, instead of just leaving a bunch of litter on Main street and giving the nightly news a few seconds of colorful video to run.
Trust me. You're safe. Hold your marches.
The people don't care about you, and the government doesn't see you as an existential threat, just an occasional traffic control problem.
You don't know Penn and Teller very well, then.
You see, they did a show deriding that foolishness as well.
Nevertheless, it remains the case that pulling that "Dihydrogen Monoxide" trick on fake environmentalist wannabees was devastatingly funny satire.
First things first: the typical techie knows less than zero about managers, let alone executives. But for reasons that have more to do with psychology than business practices, most of them also prefer to confront this unknown the way a caveman would approach a beowulf cluster, grunting, shaking their spears in mock threat, and retreating to the safety of their caves.
And this is pretty surprising because a life in engineering is supposed to be about -- wait for it -- figuring things out. Not getting the response you want from your boss or your boss' boss? Well maybe you need to spend a little time figuring out how the "boss machine" works so that you can program it a little better!
With that spirit in mind, here are a few hints to start you down the path.
Managers (usually) find numbers more believable than generalizations.
While engineers can often be convinced by citations of general principles ("That's so inelegant!"), managers need numbers. And the best numbers of all are the ones that tell them about profit and loss. They really do not care -- nor should they -- about whether the IT environment is the most super neato that it can be. But show them that your proposed change will lower costs or increase profits and you'll get their attention. Don't like doing the math that it takes to prove that case? Then tough, you won't get what you want. Some engineers cop out at this point in the discussion by saying the data doesn't exist. Well, guess what, it does. The studies have been done; the authorities have investigated your problem, whatever it is. Use google to find them, that's what it's there for.
Be a repairman, not a mailman.
A typical manager spends their entire day hearing complaints from every person they encounter. If you think you can imagine what that's like, trust me, you're wrong. If you want your gripe to get put on the same pile as all of those others and ignored, then by all means deliver a complaint and leave it at that. But if you want to see your problem fixed then never state a problem without offering a solution. At the absolute minimum you must say something like: "I have recognized this problem, and though I haven't figured out what we ought to do about it, I am working on a solution. I'd like to meet with you when I have the solution ready so that we can talk about it. Can we do that?" Trust me, asking a manager for permission to bring them an answer to a problem is like asking Charlie Sheen if you can bring him another hooker. Your manager will shake his head so vigorously you'll think it's going to fall off.
Never make your boss look bad.
Your boss keeps her job as long as her colleagues believe that she is competent and hardworking. If you undermine that perception, you are threatening the bread that she feeds to her children. If you are so foolish as to do such a thing by implying that a manager is incompetent or unworthy of basic respect, then you should expect to be immediately and viciously punished. In some rare cases, a boss might do or threaten to do something that is illegal, immoral, or disastrous for the company. Then, obviously, you have to tell someone to try to do what you can to minimize the damage. But a run of the mill disagreement with your boss is not a good enough reason to threaten their job. It's the same as if some other engineer started badmouthing your coding skills to your coworkers. Just don't do it.
Always follow up.
People get busy. Managers and executives especially. (Please, no whining about how awful your workload is since the "big layoffs." Trust me, your boss' workload is worse.) Take a minute every so often to remind your boss of the solutions you've proposed and how they're going. It's not enough to do good things for people. You must remind them of what you've done for them early and often. And don't forget to use numbers. ("Hey, Chris. I just wanted to let you know about how happy I am about that new order processing
You keep telling yourself that, Dr. Dean.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
Alright, then, here's a few:
Don't get me wrong. I use MS products every day and I actually think they are a great company despite their severe attitude problems and tendency to play hardball viciously.
But this material is far from the last word on the subject.
Now, show me someone who has documented lower TCO at the same uptime level and load and maybe you've got something.
What, do you object to the workers owning the means of production?
Since virtually all spam is arranged to prevent automatic replies from working, you have to examine the body of the message in order to find out where to reply.
So, you're telling me that not only do I have to waste time to delete spam, now I have to read them and send a bogus reply too?
And this helps me exactly how?
Plus, spam is a huge drain on network resources. So you're saying the fix for too much bogus mail is -- wait for it -- more bogus mail?
I don't think those strategies are going to work.
Of course, I'm biased. See my sig.
How about Politics?
Here's another one along those lines:
"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA. Ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State" - Heinrich HimmlerThat's a natural concern.
First, it's important to remember that all email travels through third-party hardware and software on its way to the intended recipient. All Messagefire does is permit the user to specify the penultimate system in the (sometimes rather long) chain.
But we have not ignored this issue. That's why when we collect mail from a user's ISP (in the Personal Edition), we use the best security available to that user whenever possible, including encrypted links and authentication methods that do not send passwords over the wire.
In the Enterprise Edition (available soon), we will act as an edge server MX host for the user's domain and pass the filtered result directly to the customer's internal SMTP intake servers.
Our data processing facilty has N+1 redundant UPS power supplies and diesel generator backup. It has redundant networking connectivity from multiple tier-1 providers, and is staffed and monitored 24/7. Access to the data facility is strictly controlled with military-grade passcards and entry is limited to security personnel and authorized technicians.
The security of our mail transfer and handling is at least as good -- and in many cases better -- than what customers already have with their current Internet providers.