Re:Thanks a lot, Sematech, for ruining Austin
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Sili-Hudson Valley?
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There are chicks at the lake!
Dude, those are walruses.
Re:I Cancelled My Earthlink Account
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Disconnecting
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An ISP cannot legitimately trash your credit. I'd be very surprised if they even tried. When I worked collections, back in a prior life, filing a credit report on someone was taken pretty seriously, since if you filed incorrectly on someone the company could be in for a mountain of trouble.
The exception to this would be if you've signed on for a specific contract period... like if you commit to being there for 2 years in exchange for a lower rate... then you've got a problem since you've probably signed an agreement to pay an early termination fee. If you're just going month by month, you shouldn't have a problem.
You're right that you don't want to do it without telling them. Send a letter (registered mail if you're feeling paranoid) to the ISP telling them you're closing your account. Call the credit card company, tell them you're cancelling an account that has been charging your card directly, you don't trust the ISP to cease billing, and to close your account and open a new one. Explain the whole situation to the card company and make sure the rep you talk to makes notes in your account. IIRC, the card company can either put a kind of "stop payment" on that particular item (so they would never accept a request from Earthlink on that card again), or you can request that they give you a whole new account number.
Credit card companies will gladly change your number and reissue a new card. Any existing balances will transfer right over. I change my card numbers every few years just to avoid building up too much of a history with one particular number.
So I can tell my boss he can safely drop his plans for MQ?;)
It's accurate to say that, by definition, Jabber already contains the core functionality of a message router. That's a great starting point, but it's kind of like having an engine without the rest of the car. More work needs to be done.
(Note to self: use "insanely expensive admin spetsnaz" at next staff meeting.:)
Yeah, I think the IETF effort is "too little too late". The IMUnified effort is apparently dead as well, since the last press release on their website is from mid-2000.
Is it just me, or does it look like none of the big mass-market IM players (AOL, MSN, Yahoo) really want an interoperable IM protocol? AIM has the market share, so they don't want to change anything. MSN has a desktop monopoly and want to do to AIM what they did to Netscape. Yahoo probably thinks they have a chance to dominate with a proprietary protocol if AIM and MSN can just tear each other to shreds...
This is interesting, particularly since the middleware area is full of so much BS and vendor lock-in.
I'd like to see if it's possible to wedge Jabber protocol adaptors in front of existing messaging systems. So the existing messaging layer could handle routing and Jabber provides the protocol definition.
From a portability perspective I'd look at JMS-compliance instead of MQ specifically. There are a lot of JMS implementations, including some open source ones (OpenJMS, Joram, Object Cube).
Last time I sent messages to an SMTP server, it couldn't even spell "hello" correctly.
Jabber is very similar to SMTP, but it also provides "presence", the notification that someone is actually logged in on the other end. SMTP is more "fire and forget".
Probably going to bring us a whole new dimension in online marketing, God forbid.
AFAIK, you can't cluster Jabber servers in the sense of lots of Jabber servers virtualized being a load balancer. At least not with the current reference implementation.
You can distribute the load, with users logging in to different servers and the jabber servers will route messages appropriately.
So yeah, if one of those servers goes down, the users who login to that server are hosed. Pretty much modelled on SMTP.
the approach this book takes is that Jabber isn't just an XML-based protocol strictly for IM, rather it is a general purpose event notification protocol that has some very nice message routing and user management features built into it.
There was a "jabber as middleware" (JAM) intiative going on last year. Not sure if it's still active. My understanding is that it intended to morph jabber into a middleware message router which would have connectivity to the desktop.
What's always confused me about this approach is that there are already plenty of messaging systems out there. It might make more sense to shim a Jabber protocol adapter in front of an existing JMS implementation.
Any alien horror stories?
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KDE 3.0 is Out
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· Score: 1
Not the kind of stories where they implant the larvae in your chest cavity...
Alien claims to work on RPMs, apparently converting them to.deb files.
Has anyone tried this with KDE3? Or have alien horror stories?
The software you run on the nodes is going to largely determine the network performance... I would look pretty closely at where any intermediate files are created and make sure that they get stored in a ram disk instead of sent back and forth across the network.
I think he means John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, which was busted up by the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Rockefeller was the Bill Gates of his day.
Re:Last summer, Andy Hertzfeld got a standing ovat
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Eazel Come, Eazel Go?
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· Score: 1
I'm not saying it was a great business plan. Just that if you went and talked to their bizdev people, that's the kind of thing they would tell you. No intention of selling Nautilus.
I think they were looking at the enterprise and corporate IT, which are beginning to take open source software seriously. There's a ton of money in supporting enterprise systems. Particularly if you can make a desktop product that can compete with microsoft and move Linux from the server-side to the desktop.
Course, that's a big 'if', and Nautilus is only a part of that solution.
Re:Last summer, Andy Hertzfeld got a standing ovat
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Eazel Come, Eazel Go?
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· Score: 2
If you can't charge for your products, you fold.
Granted, but Eazel's product was not Nautilus. It was support services and whatnot for Nautilus. They never got to the point of really trying the business model to see if it would work.
Kind of like sampling? Grab an existing song and hack it up?
Could underground collaborative music ever break into the charts?
I suspect there's a lot of music that's popular by virtue of the marketing muscle behind it rather than the actual quality of the music.
They're cookie-cutter books. The level of inspiration and creativity is minimal. The author has to stay within pre-approved subject and plot boundaries. No risks.
And usually the style is horribly reminiscent of fan-fiction. (This blithe over-generalization is based on reading a fair number of the old trek books, plus a truly unfortunate handful of X-files books.)
It's escapist reading with no intention of making you think. Not really bad, but it's the SF equivalent of bodice-ripper romance novels.
Yeah, Rincewind and Cugel both succeed in spite of themselves, and are usually oblivious to the real causes of what happens around them.
There's only two Cugel books, right? They're definitely the funniest things I've read from Vance.
As for the footnotes, I remember being very impressed by one from "The Last Castle" where Vance explains that what the character said in the main text and what he literally said were different. It reinforced the notion that the story itself was an interpretation of something really quite alien.
"Were power-wagons at hand, I'd volith riding forth with a whip to send the raudlebogs skirkling home."
Sure, there's Dearth Vader and Dearth Maul... I think they're Australian or something.
I think literary quality declines in inverse proportion to the number of titles in a particular series. Which is not to say that it's not entertaining, just that it's formula fiction. (Remember "Doc Savage"? Now that was pulp with no redeeming literary value whatsoever. Man, I used to love reading that crap.)
I've never seen Vance's characters as the strongest point of his work. Some authors build characters for the sake of the character, so that the personality of the character becomes a driving force in the plot. Vance provides characters that support the social framework that he is building. They tend to have firmly held opinions because that reinforces the cultural contrast which he is usually trying to illustrate.
Generally, what I take away from a Vance book (and I think I've read most of them, having scavenged used-bookstore shelves for quite a while now) is the sense that our own customs and lifestyles are arbitrary and more than a little ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, those are walruses.
The exception to this would be if you've signed on for a specific contract period ... like if you commit to being there for 2 years in exchange for a lower rate ... then you've got a problem since you've probably signed an agreement to pay an early termination fee. If you're just going month by month, you shouldn't have a problem.
You're right that you don't want to do it without telling them. Send a letter (registered mail if you're feeling paranoid) to the ISP telling them you're closing your account. Call the credit card company, tell them you're cancelling an account that has been charging your card directly, you don't trust the ISP to cease billing, and to close your account and open a new one. Explain the whole situation to the card company and make sure the rep you talk to makes notes in your account. IIRC, the card company can either put a kind of "stop payment" on that particular item (so they would never accept a request from Earthlink on that card again), or you can request that they give you a whole new account number.
Credit card companies will gladly change your number and reissue a new card. Any existing balances will transfer right over. I change my card numbers every few years just to avoid building up too much of a history with one particular number.
It's been awhile, but I thought they had the alpha JDK available at the end of 94.
So I can tell my boss he can safely drop his plans for MQ? ;)
It's accurate to say that, by definition, Jabber already contains the core functionality of a message router. That's a great starting point, but it's kind of like having an engine without the rest of the car. More work needs to be done.
(Note to self: use "insanely expensive admin spetsnaz" at next staff meeting. :)
Yeah, I think the IETF effort is "too little too late". The IMUnified effort is apparently dead as well, since the last press release on their website is from mid-2000.
Is it just me, or does it look like none of the big mass-market IM players (AOL, MSN, Yahoo) really want an interoperable IM protocol? AIM has the market share, so they don't want to change anything. MSN has a desktop monopoly and want to do to AIM what they did to Netscape. Yahoo probably thinks they have a chance to dominate with a proprietary protocol if AIM and MSN can just tear each other to shreds...
This is interesting, particularly since the middleware area is full of so much BS and vendor lock-in.
I'd like to see if it's possible to wedge Jabber protocol adaptors in front of existing messaging systems. So the existing messaging layer could handle routing and Jabber provides the protocol definition.
From a portability perspective I'd look at JMS-compliance instead of MQ specifically. There are a lot of JMS implementations, including some open source ones (OpenJMS, Joram, Object Cube).
Last time I sent messages to an SMTP server, it couldn't even spell "hello" correctly.
Jabber is very similar to SMTP, but it also provides "presence", the notification that someone is actually logged in on the other end. SMTP is more "fire and forget".
Probably going to bring us a whole new dimension in online marketing, God forbid.
AFAIK, you can't cluster Jabber servers in the sense of lots of Jabber servers virtualized being a load balancer. At least not with the current reference implementation.
You can distribute the load, with users logging in to different servers and the jabber servers will route messages appropriately.
So yeah, if one of those servers goes down, the users who login to that server are hosed. Pretty much modelled on SMTP.
There was a "jabber as middleware" (JAM) intiative going on last year. Not sure if it's still active. My understanding is that it intended to morph jabber into a middleware message router which would have connectivity to the desktop.
What's always confused me about this approach is that there are already plenty of messaging systems out there. It might make more sense to shim a Jabber protocol adapter in front of an existing JMS implementation.
Alien claims to work on RPMs, apparently converting them to .deb files.
Has anyone tried this with KDE3? Or have alien horror stories?
The software you run on the nodes is going to largely determine the network performance ... I would look pretty closely at where any intermediate files are created and make sure that they get stored in a ram disk instead of sent back and forth across the network.
Rockefeller was the Bill Gates of his day.
I think they were looking at the enterprise and corporate IT, which are beginning to take open source software seriously. There's a ton of money in supporting enterprise systems. Particularly if you can make a desktop product that can compete with microsoft and move Linux from the server-side to the desktop.
Course, that's a big 'if', and Nautilus is only a part of that solution.
Granted, but Eazel's product was not Nautilus. It was support services and whatnot for Nautilus. They never got to the point of really trying the business model to see if it would work.
Kind of like sampling? Grab an existing song and hack it up?
Could underground collaborative music ever break into the charts? I suspect there's a lot of music that's popular by virtue of the marketing muscle behind it rather than the actual quality of the music.
And usually the style is horribly reminiscent of fan-fiction. (This blithe over-generalization is based on reading a fair number of the old trek books, plus a truly unfortunate handful of X-files books.)
It's escapist reading with no intention of making you think. Not really bad, but it's the SF equivalent of bodice-ripper romance novels.
There's only two Cugel books, right? They're definitely the funniest things I've read from Vance.
As for the footnotes, I remember being very impressed by one from "The Last Castle" where Vance explains that what the character said in the main text and what he literally said were different. It reinforced the notion that the story itself was an interpretation of something really quite alien.
"Were power-wagons at hand, I'd volith riding forth with a whip to send the raudlebogs skirkling home."
It's amazing what you can find on google.
I think literary quality declines in inverse proportion to the number of titles in a particular series. Which is not to say that it's not entertaining, just that it's formula fiction. (Remember "Doc Savage"? Now that was pulp with no redeeming literary value whatsoever. Man, I used to love reading that crap.)
Generally, what I take away from a Vance book (and I think I've read most of them, having scavenged used-bookstore shelves for quite a while now) is the sense that our own customs and lifestyles are arbitrary and more than a little ridiculous.