Where I live, if you want to throw away a PC or a monitor, you have to buy special stamps that say that you've paid your "disposal fee" or whatever. Then you can just put it on the curb once a month. The trash guys see the stamps on the stuff and know that it's ok to pick up - otherwise you get a visit from the local police and a fine, I think.
(So, if you find a PC on the curb in Tokyo, leave the stamps on - that way you save a few bucks if you ever decide to pitch it later...)
Microsoft is "publishing" something and in the same moment trying to disallow you to use that knowledge which is published. A thing that is really serious because the human brain doesn't have an infrastructure that tags information as "not usuable for Open Source" and so on. Or can you imagine a school that learns you how to add 1+1 and then tells you: You are not allowed to use this knowledge.
Mine is 2.5 lbs, has an integrated keyboard, mouse, soundcard, camera and hard drive. It runs Linux and has a wireless network card. (It's my 2 year old Sony vaio...)
This is "Overstepping the bounds" in more than one sense.
When I open a web page, I am generally agreeing to let a web designer do whatever he or she wants with the space between the <HTML> and </HTML> tags. Not my destop, not the frame, just the page. If I don't have the option of turning this off, I will change browsers and not patronize sites that use this technique.
Why is it that every blank space has to become an advertising marquee?
...since the research is being done in Japan. Japanese has very few dipthongs. A word that might be spelled 'Ao' using latin characters,(Â), would be pronounced as 'Ah-ow' (sort of). Some words do change the vowels, but usually just by extending it. The word Tokyo isn't pronounced 'toe-key-o' as much as it is 'to-u-key-o-u'. The audible differences can be very slight, though. Possibly by sensing the muscle movements, it would be easier to discern the differences. Another interesting capability would be the ability to discern mood. Consider the following: 'Yes dear, I'd <rolls_eyes>love</rolls_eyes>to have your mother visit this weekend...'
I'm not sure that I'd want my phone telling my girlfriend when I'm being sarcastic. You could have a new groupof 'tags' kind of like those you see on IRC:
roll_eyes
clench_jaw
check_watch
sneer
cringe
shake_head_in_disbelief_at_the_studidity_of_what_i s_being_said
But look at it this way. Every time a manager walks into someones office, they see that person minimize everything. This continues to go on for months. Eventually management wants to know why people are hiding what they are doing.
What I proposed is that anyone can go read the proxy server logs. If the manager cares that much, he can look it up on the intranet.
If you are root... Here at my company, as a sysadmin, I've been suggesting a policy of completely unfiltered web access *and* completely unfiltered proxy log access. From the CEO all the way down to the temps. (Except for *me* of course...)
We already filter out dangerous attachments from email and have good virus software. We really don't have a problem in that respect.
The thing is, once you take something like this away from your staff, you are saying "We don't trust you. We think you're slacking."
In my office, people work damn hard and are pretty happy in their work. We have a good atmosphere and no real division between workers and management. Once a company starts doing this kind of thing, the mood changes and people get resentful.
How many people in how many companies have said "This place really started to go downhill when they took away the free soft drinks..."?
A good friend of mine was told to pick an element for his machine name at one job, but of course all of the good elements were taken by that time. (Who the hell wants to be Boron, after all...)
"The majority of the junk mail (is) not created in China, so why (should) they block mail from China?" said Zeng Xiaozhen, a professor at Jilin University
Because it's being relayed through your servers, Zeng.
(Don't you just *hate* it when people just don't get basic concepts like this?)
Mr. Xiaozhen, Please take an hour, RTFM and close your open relays. Tell your friends to do the same. Until then, get yourself a Hotmail account - you're gonna need it.
Perhaps because he gave away quite a bit of money to charitable causes during that time?
(Encarta 2000 was, after all, put out just around the time they were forming the "Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" - I'm sure charity was on their mind at that time.)
I mean, I don't admire the guy particularly and I don't use his company's products, but slamming the guy for updating his bio (after 4 years) seems a bit silly.
I live in Japan and have been renting videos from Tsutaya for years. In Japan, for a huge number of young people, the keitai (cell phone) is the primary phone - they don't have another one in their apartment. So when you sign up at Tsutaya, they want your keitai number. Big deal. I'll bet Blockbuster has your phone number, too. Over here, it used to be that your keitai number was also your email - 09012345678@docomo.ne.jp - most people have changed it to something a bit less spammable. (I don't know anyone who hasn't changed it.) So, most likely, Tsutaya doesn't have any linked information, unless you've offered to link it for them via their website...
I just don't see how this relates exclusively to Japan or to advanced CRM or keitais: the same thing could have been done 100 years ago by your library using postcards.
Keitais are not so advanced here that they can tell when you are watching a movie or close to a store. Perhaps you get an occasional email on your phone. (I've never gotten one.) This is not particularly Big-Brother-ish.
Blockbuster already knows what movies you rent from them, what days you rent, how often you pick a foreign film, a soft-core, a sci-fi, new release, whatever. They also have your phone number and maybe your email, if you signed up for some promotion or "member's club" on their website.
This is completely a non-story. Any website that ties browsing to any real-world activity can do this. If blockbuster.com or bestbuy.com has a page where you can enter your personal info and you actually do, you can bet that you will be tracked in this way. It's not really an invasion of privacy if you are opting in...
Censorship is what governments do. Editing is what editors do.
This is a privately-run forum, the content of which is largely decided upon by a handful of editors.
That thread was a brute-force attempt to change the subject of a pre-decided topic - one that had no relation to "the forbidden topic".
It was offtopic and moderated as such.
If it was even like censorship, the posts would have been deleted. They weren't, last I checked. Anyone who wants to set their threshold so low that they see this sort of irrelevant crap can go read all of the posts, exactly as they were typed in.
Sure, it was an active thread, but it was only popular with a few hundred of Slashdot's half million or so readers. The people who came to read about the Oracle story probably couldn't care less about what this vocal minority was talking about. I doubt that most of the readers of this site give half a crap about trolls and Penis Birds and goatse guys and Natalie WhatsHerFace and whatever she has in her pants.
Some of us come here looking for stuff that matters to them, not stuff that rightfully gets modded down.
If this "Troll Investigation" were so important, it should have been submitted as a story. If it got rejected, it should have been sent to ZDNet or Salon or put up on a free Geocities page. For God's sake, print out a few hundred copies of this "story" and pass it out in front of your local city hall. You'd see then just how little people care about this particular non-issue.
As for heavy-handed editors with unlimited mod points, get over it. Any publication either thrives or fails due to its editorial guidance. I'd say that Slashdot would quickly become completely unreadable if people with too much time on their hands were allowed to hijack a story in which they had little interest to go on a rant about something of so little interest. Having a moderation system in place lets me filter out unrelated junk - that thread included. It's not perfect, but it works well enough for me.
Calling it censorship doesn't strengthen its importance. It shows a mis-understanding of the term. Why not just call it 'Terrorism'? That term is getting mis-used a lot lately with good results...
Is the Starband box enough like an ADSL box to be compatible? I was setting up the IPCop firewall distro the other day and the setup screens had a configuration utility for setting up USB ADSL connections.
The whole ISO is around 22MB, so it might be worth it for someone with the service to toy around with.
My girlfriend had been pushing me to go to Hello Work this summer and I was damn reluctant. Being unemployed is depressing enough without having to go to some dreary government beaurocracy and staring at a green terminal or flipping through grimy printouts of manual labor positions.
Boy was I wrong - I went to the Iidabashi branch and found it to be clean, well-lit and running modern computers. The staff was helpful and the job listings well-organized. I was truly impressed.
This is how this sort of thing should be done. The US should have this sort of system.
Before you say "well, Japan is so much more technologically advanced", take a look over here - In most areas, Japanese business is technologically 20 years behind the US. They are famous for making computers, not particularly for *using* them.
Thanks for the link, I didn't know they had a website.
Your post was a bit vague on the name of the actual product you are endorsing...
;^)
(I just counted the word 'Webmin' like 17 times in your post...)
Actually, I couldn't agree more.
A couple of weeks ago, my boss called me 2 hours before I was supposed to be at work to tell me that something needed to be fixed on the server. I literally rolled over, grabbed my laptop, logged in using the ssl option, fixed it and went back to sleep.
Now you might say that all I really needed was SSH and VI, but I hadn't had any coffee yet and Webmin just required a bit of clicking. It rarely screws up and doesn't mess with your config files.
I wrote a bit more on it on my web site a while back - scroll down about half way.
to what end will you take this ridiculous argument? why don't you fly off to some 3rd world nation and feed the poor and hungry instead of going to work?
My 'ridiculous argument' centered around sending fifteen bucks to a charity that you believe in.
How this is prohibited by "our current sociopolitical and economic systems" is a bit beyond me.
Have you considered the fact that you may just be being a cynical asshole?
The world *is* a slightly better place when you do something for someone else, no matter how small it is.
Wasn't it Ghandi who said "Almost everything you will do is meaningless, but it is still important you do it." ?
Our "current sociopolitical and economic systems" allow for plenty of ways to help people in third world countries. It allows for people from those countries to become educated and economically viable. But then again, you'd probably just call that imperialism, wouldn't you?
I'd venture to say that nobody reading this, you and I included, would be doing as well as we are, living where we live, able to read, with access to decent medical care, had it not been for some act of charity or kindness by someone who didn't have to do it.
A poor guy's kid needs a heart transplant.
The heart transplant costs a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS.
The guy can't afford it.
The guy takes a gun and steals the procedure.
This makes him a hero?
...
I don't get it.
You know, in some countries, kids die because they can't afford food and clean water.
Oh, wait - this is an *American* kid - that makes this sort of thing OK - I see now...
Sort of makes me wish that they took the money that they used to make the movie and used it to buy food and heart transplants for people that need them rather than for mildly amusing a bunch of well-off people for 90 minutes.
(Yes, I believe that if you have the means to see this movie somehow, you are comparatively well-off, in the grand scheme of things.)
How about this - if you haven't seen the movie yet, *don't*.
Send $15 to UNICEF (or whoever) instead.
This movie strikes me as just another case of *talking* about doing good, rather than actually *doing* something good.
I seem to remember that one of the early uses of telephone technology was a subscription service that let you listen to musical performances (live opera, etc.) over an ordinary telephone.
I'm pretty sure this was in Europe somewhere and would have probably been about 1905 - I read this about eight years ago in a colleague's thesis on the telecom industry.
An interesting side note was that they could give you a 'stereo' performance if you had two telephones.
Does this 'ring a bell' with anyone?
Perhaps we can ask Bob Bemer?;-)
You wouldn't wear them, would you?
I had the same opinion about wasting money on Intel, so I bought AMD. Though I'm glad you're having a good experience with your AMD, I simply can't agree:
I really don't agree with your feeling that performance is how well something works when it works. If that were true, I could just stay home from work most of the time and kick butt when I show up. (OK, I sort of do that now, but that's another issue...)
Performance, in my book, is a judgement of how well something is doing its job. My AMD 'sometimes-kickass' workstation is not performing well in my opinion, even though when it does run, it runs great.
If I look at the system as the tool that it's supposed to be, it simply isn't giving good performance.
Let me explain:
I have a few boxes on a small network at home - My main workstation is an Asus/AMD 1200Mhz setup running RedHat 7.2 - Before that, it was an Asus/AMD 600Mhz setup. Both systems have had the same problems, even though *Every Component* has been replaced in an effort to track down the problem. This morning, it froze a few minutes after the screen saver kicked in.
Each time this happens, I have to do a hard reboot. The other day, I added that mem=nopentium option and it still has the problem.
I used to have some big drives in the PC, but they were getting thrashed by the powerdowns, so I replaced them with a single 10GB and moved the 2 60GB drives to the server in my laundry room.
The server, by the way, is an old 300Mhz IBM with an Intel chip and it happily chugs along, serving files by Samba, database stuff, CGI/Apache stuff, SSH logins, VNC logins, whatever I happen to throw at it.
This is a machine that I literally snagged from the trash, but you couldn't *pry* it from me at this point. I just ran uptime on it, just for kicks:
11:39am up 155 days, 13:45, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
So, do I regret spending so much time and money on AMD? Yes.
Would I buy them again?
No.
To me it *is* a performance issue. The AMD system has not done its job.
If they are a private company, why are they subject to so much regulation? Any innovation, change of business practice, rate increase, etc.
The USPS is a GSE - Government Sponsored Entity - like Freddie MAC, Fannie Mae, etc.
Yet still, legally, they are owned by the members of the USPS Union. (I don't think that just anyone else can buy stock in them...)
As for them being able to do what they like - I truly doubt it. Did you ever notice that it costs exactly the same price to send a letter across the street as it does to send a letter to someone in a remote rural location? If they could 'do what they want', I'm sure they would start charging more for the inconvenient deliveries...
They are not open to free-market competition, either - the have been granted a monopoly on first class mail. That's why FedEx can't suddenly start offering first-class mail - the USPS has been granted a monopoly on that. With that monopoly comes a huge amount of government regulation -
In fact, the National Association of Letter Carriers has regulations that specifically prohibit advertising in Post Office Lobbies - Take a look at section 338.413 of the following: http://www.nalc.org/depart/cau/pdf/manuals/asm/asm c3.pdf
I'm only writing this because there's a lot of confusion on the subject - If your post was a troll, it was pathetic. Put a little more effort into it next time.
I 'll first admit that I don't know if this is legal or not, but I hate to think that tax dollars are being used to rent a space for Microsoft to do their promotions in such a prominent location.
I'd complain to your postmaster and probably a letter to the editor of your local paper. Leave out any anti-MS rant, just complain that this is not the sort of thing that they should be doing with public space.
If that post office is anything like the ones I've had to use, they have a fairly captive audience, bored to tears waiting in line. Microsoft brochures would probably actually get *read* there (Think of the money that supermarkets must get paid to feature items in the checkout lanes - gum, candy, tabloids, etc.)
If you really care, see if MS paid money to do this, and to whom...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Slashdot Mirror
Where I live, if you want to throw away a PC or a monitor, you have to buy special stamps that say that you've paid your "disposal fee" or whatever.
Then you can just put it on the curb once a month.
The trash guys see the stamps on the stuff and know that it's ok to pick up - otherwise you get a visit from the local police and a fine, I think.
(So, if you find a PC on the curb in Tokyo, leave the stamps on - that way you save a few bucks if you ever decide to pitch it later...)
Cheers,
Jim
Microsoft is "publishing" something and in the same moment trying to disallow you to use that knowledge which is published. A thing that is really serious because the human brain doesn't have an infrastructure that tags information as "not usuable for Open Source" and so on. Or can you imagine a school that learns you how to add 1+1 and then tells you: You are not allowed to use this knowledge.
And they have the gall to call the GPL 'Viral'...
Sickening.
Jim
I can just see it now: Clueless newbies installing "Lycoris" over and over again just to play more solitaire
That wouldn't be such a bad thing if they did it on a different machine each time...
Cheers,
Jim
Mine is 2.5 lbs, has an integrated keyboard, mouse, soundcard, camera and hard drive.
It runs Linux and has a wireless network card.
(It's my 2 year old Sony vaio...)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
This is "Overstepping the bounds" in more than one sense.
.sigs don't count.)
When I open a web page, I am generally agreeing to let a web designer do whatever he or she wants with the space between the <HTML> and </HTML> tags. Not my destop, not the frame, just the page.
If I don't have the option of turning this off, I will change browsers and not patronize sites that use this technique.
Why is it that every blank space has to become an advertising marquee?
Cheers
Jim in Tokyo
(Of course,
...since the research is being done in Japan.
i s_being_said
Japanese has very few dipthongs.
A word that might be spelled 'Ao' using latin characters,(Â), would be pronounced as 'Ah-ow' (sort of).
Some words do change the vowels, but usually just by extending it. The word Tokyo isn't pronounced 'toe-key-o' as much as it is 'to-u-key-o-u'. The audible differences can be very slight, though. Possibly by sensing the muscle movements, it would be easier to discern the differences.
Another interesting capability would be the ability to discern mood. Consider the following:
'Yes dear, I'd <rolls_eyes>love</rolls_eyes>to have your mother visit this weekend...'
I'm not sure that I'd want my phone telling my girlfriend when I'm being sarcastic. You could have a new groupof 'tags' kind of like those you see on IRC:
roll_eyes
clench_jaw
check_watch
sneer
cringe
shake_head_in_disbelief_at_the_studidity_of_what_
You get the idea...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
But look at it this way. Every time a manager walks into someones office, they see that person minimize everything. This continues to go on for months. Eventually management wants to know why people are hiding what they are doing.
What I proposed is that anyone can go read the proxy server logs. If the manager cares that much, he can look it up on the intranet.
If you are root...
Here at my company, as a sysadmin, I've been suggesting a policy of completely unfiltered web access *and* completely unfiltered proxy log access.
From the CEO all the way down to the temps.
(Except for *me* of course...)
We already filter out dangerous attachments from email and have good virus software. We really don't have a problem in that respect.
The thing is, once you take something like this away from your staff, you are saying "We don't trust you. We think you're slacking."
In my office, people work damn hard and are pretty happy in their work. We have a good atmosphere and no real division between workers and management. Once a company starts doing this kind of thing, the mood changes and people get resentful.
How many people in how many companies have said "This place really started to go downhill when they took away the free soft drinks..."?
Just my 2 yen,
Jim in Tokyo
Sony: Tell you what. We'll Rochambeau you for it.
Nah, they probably would have offered to settle with the ancient Japanese contest Jan-Ken-Pon...
Cheers,
Jim
A good friend of mine was told to pick an element for his machine name at one job, but of course all of the good elements were taken by that time. (Who the hell wants to be Boron, after all...)
What did he choose?
Immodium.
That still cracks me up - (thanks, Dave!)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
"The majority of the junk mail (is) not created in China, so why (should) they block mail from China?" said Zeng Xiaozhen, a professor at Jilin University
Because it's being relayed through your servers, Zeng.
(Don't you just *hate* it when people just don't get basic concepts like this?)
Mr. Xiaozhen, Please take an hour, RTFM and close your open relays. Tell your friends to do the same. Until then, get yourself a Hotmail account - you're gonna need it.
Perhaps because he gave away quite a bit of money to charitable causes during that time?
(Encarta 2000 was, after all, put out just around the time they were forming the "Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" - I'm sure charity was on their mind at that time.)
I mean, I don't admire the guy particularly and I don't use his company's products, but slamming the guy for updating his bio (after 4 years) seems a bit silly.
I live in Japan and have been renting videos from Tsutaya for years.
In Japan, for a huge number of young people, the keitai (cell phone) is the primary phone - they don't have another one in their apartment.
So when you sign up at Tsutaya, they want your keitai number. Big deal. I'll bet Blockbuster has your phone number, too.
Over here, it used to be that your keitai number was also your email - 09012345678@docomo.ne.jp - most people have changed it to something a bit less spammable. (I don't know anyone who hasn't changed it.)
So, most likely, Tsutaya doesn't have any linked information, unless you've offered to link it for them via their website...
I just don't see how this relates exclusively to Japan or to advanced CRM or keitais: the same thing could have been done 100 years ago by your library using postcards.
Keitais are not so advanced here that they can tell when you are watching a movie or close to a store. Perhaps you get an occasional email on your phone. (I've never gotten one.) This is not particularly Big-Brother-ish.
Blockbuster already knows what movies you rent from them, what days you rent, how often you pick a foreign film, a soft-core, a sci-fi, new release, whatever. They also have your phone number and maybe your email, if you signed up for some promotion or "member's club" on their website.
This is completely a non-story.
Any website that ties browsing to any real-world activity can do this.
If blockbuster.com or bestbuy.com has a page where you can enter your personal info and you actually do, you can bet that you will be tracked in this way.
It's not really an invasion of privacy if you are opting in...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
That wasn't censorship, it was editing.
Censorship is what governments do.
Editing is what editors do.
This is a privately-run forum, the content of which is largely decided upon by a handful of editors.
That thread was a brute-force attempt to change the subject of a pre-decided topic - one that had no relation to "the forbidden topic".
It was offtopic and moderated as such.
If it was even like censorship, the posts would have been deleted. They weren't, last I checked. Anyone who wants to set their threshold so low that they see this sort of irrelevant crap can go read all of the posts, exactly as they were typed in.
Sure, it was an active thread, but it was only popular with a few hundred of Slashdot's half million or so readers. The people who came to read about the Oracle story probably couldn't care less about what this vocal minority was talking about. I doubt that most of the readers of this site give half a crap about trolls and Penis Birds and goatse guys and Natalie WhatsHerFace and whatever she has in her pants.
Some of us come here looking for stuff that matters to them, not stuff that rightfully gets modded down.
If this "Troll Investigation" were so important, it should have been submitted as a story. If it got rejected, it should have been sent to ZDNet or Salon or put up on a free Geocities page. For God's sake, print out a few hundred copies of this "story" and pass it out in front of your local city hall. You'd see then just how little people care about this particular non-issue.
As for heavy-handed editors with unlimited mod points, get over it. Any publication either thrives or fails due to its editorial guidance. I'd say that Slashdot would quickly become completely unreadable if people with too much time on their hands were allowed to hijack a story in which they had little interest to go on a rant about something of so little interest.
Having a moderation system in place lets me filter out unrelated junk - that thread included. It's not perfect, but it works well enough for me.
Calling it censorship doesn't strengthen its importance. It shows a mis-understanding of the term. Why not just call it 'Terrorism'? That term is getting mis-used a lot lately with good results...
JMNSHO...
That's what all of the canals were for...
Duh.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Is the Starband box enough like an ADSL box to be compatible?
I was setting up the IPCop firewall distro the other day and the setup screens had a configuration utility for setting up USB ADSL connections.
The whole ISO is around 22MB, so it might be worth it for someone with the service to toy around with.
Hope this helps someone.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
My girlfriend had been pushing me to go to Hello Work this summer and I was damn reluctant.
Being unemployed is depressing enough without having to go to some dreary government beaurocracy and staring at a green terminal or flipping through grimy printouts of manual labor positions.
Boy was I wrong - I went to the Iidabashi branch and found it to be clean, well-lit and running modern computers. The staff was helpful and the job listings well-organized.
I was truly impressed.
This is how this sort of thing should be done. The US should have this sort of system.
Before you say "well, Japan is so much more technologically advanced", take a look over here - In most areas, Japanese business is technologically 20 years behind the US. They are famous for making computers, not particularly for *using* them.
Thanks for the link, I didn't know they had a website.
Cheers,
Jim
Your post was a bit vague on the name of the actual product you are endorsing...
;^)
(I just counted the word 'Webmin' like 17 times in your post...)
Actually, I couldn't agree more.
A couple of weeks ago, my boss called me 2 hours before I was supposed to be at work to tell me that something needed to be fixed on the server. I literally rolled over, grabbed my laptop, logged in using the ssl option, fixed it and went back to sleep.
Now you might say that all I really needed was SSH and VI, but I hadn't had any coffee yet and Webmin just required a bit of clicking. It rarely screws up and doesn't mess with your config files.
I wrote a bit more on it on my web site a while back - scroll down about half way.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
to what end will you take this ridiculous argument? why don't you fly off to some 3rd world nation and feed the poor and hungry instead of going to work?
My 'ridiculous argument' centered around sending fifteen bucks to a charity that you believe in.
How this is prohibited by "our current sociopolitical and economic systems" is a bit beyond me.
Have you considered the fact that you may just be being a cynical asshole?
The world *is* a slightly better place when you do something for someone else, no matter how small it is.
Wasn't it Ghandi who said "Almost everything you will do is meaningless, but it is still important you do it." ?
Our "current sociopolitical and economic systems" allow for plenty of ways to help people in third world countries. It allows for people from those countries to become educated and economically viable. But then again, you'd probably just call that imperialism, wouldn't you?
I'd venture to say that nobody reading this, you and I included, would be doing as well as we are, living where we live, able to read, with access to decent medical care, had it not been for some act of charity or kindness by someone who didn't have to do it.
Attitudes like yours are a disgrace.
A poor guy's kid needs a heart transplant.
The heart transplant costs a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS.
The guy can't afford it.
The guy takes a gun and steals the procedure.
This makes him a hero?
...
I don't get it.
You know, in some countries, kids die because they can't afford food and clean water.
Oh, wait - this is an *American* kid - that makes this sort of thing OK - I see now...
Sort of makes me wish that they took the money that they used to make the movie and used it to buy food and heart transplants for people that need them rather than for mildly amusing a bunch of well-off people for 90 minutes.
(Yes, I believe that if you have the means to see this movie somehow, you are comparatively well-off, in the grand scheme of things.)
How about this - if you haven't seen the movie yet, *don't*.
Send $15 to UNICEF (or whoever) instead.
This movie strikes me as just another case of *talking* about doing good, rather than actually *doing* something good.
JMHO...
Try here for one version of this story.
Gotta love Google.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I seem to remember that one of the early uses of telephone technology was a subscription service that let you listen to musical performances (live opera, etc.) over an ordinary telephone.
;-)
I'm pretty sure this was in Europe somewhere and would have probably been about 1905 - I read this about eight years ago in a colleague's thesis on the telecom industry.
An interesting side note was that they could give you a 'stereo' performance if you had two telephones.
Does this 'ring a bell' with anyone?
Perhaps we can ask Bob Bemer?
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
You wouldn't wear them, would you?
I had the same opinion about wasting money on Intel, so I bought AMD. Though I'm glad you're having a good experience with your AMD, I simply can't agree:
I really don't agree with your feeling that performance is how well something works when it works. If that were true, I could just stay home from work most of the time and kick butt when I show up. (OK, I sort of do that now, but that's another issue...)
Performance, in my book, is a judgement of how well something is doing its job. My AMD 'sometimes-kickass' workstation is not performing well in my opinion, even though when it does run, it runs great.
If I look at the system as the tool that it's supposed to be, it simply isn't giving good performance.
Let me explain:
I have a few boxes on a small network at home - My main workstation is an Asus/AMD 1200Mhz setup running RedHat 7.2 - Before that, it was an Asus/AMD 600Mhz setup. Both systems have had the same problems, even though *Every Component* has been replaced in an effort to track down the problem. This morning, it froze a few minutes after the screen saver kicked in.
Each time this happens, I have to do a hard reboot. The other day, I added that mem=nopentium option and it still has the problem.
I used to have some big drives in the PC, but they were getting thrashed by the powerdowns, so I replaced them with a single 10GB and moved the 2 60GB drives to the server in my laundry room.
The server, by the way, is an old 300Mhz IBM with an Intel chip and it happily chugs along, serving files by Samba, database stuff, CGI/Apache stuff, SSH logins, VNC logins, whatever I happen to throw at it.
This is a machine that I literally snagged from the trash, but you couldn't *pry* it from me at this point. I just ran uptime on it, just for kicks:
11:39am up 155 days, 13:45, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
So, do I regret spending so much time and money on AMD? Yes.
Would I buy them again?
No.
To me it *is* a performance issue. The AMD system has not done its job.
YMMV,
Jim in Tokyo
If they are a private company, why are they subject to so much regulation? Any innovation, change of business practice, rate increase, etc.m c3.pdf
The USPS is a GSE - Government Sponsored Entity - like Freddie MAC, Fannie Mae, etc.
Yet still, legally, they are owned by the members of the USPS Union. (I don't think that just anyone else can buy stock in them...)
As for them being able to do what they like - I truly doubt it. Did you ever notice that it costs exactly the same price to send a letter across the street as it does to send a letter to someone in a remote rural location? If they could 'do what they want', I'm sure they would start charging more for the inconvenient deliveries...
They are not open to free-market competition, either - the have been granted a monopoly on first class mail. That's why FedEx can't suddenly start offering first-class mail - the USPS has been granted a monopoly on that. With that monopoly comes a huge amount of government regulation -
In fact, the National Association of Letter Carriers has regulations that specifically prohibit advertising in Post Office Lobbies - Take a look at section 338.413 of the following: http://www.nalc.org/depart/cau/pdf/manuals/asm/as
I'm only writing this because there's a lot of confusion on the subject - If your post was a troll, it was pathetic. Put a little more effort into it next time.
Cheers,
Jim in tokyo
I 'll first admit that I don't know if this is legal or not, but I hate to think that tax dollars are being used to rent a space for Microsoft to do their promotions in such a prominent location.
I'd complain to your postmaster and probably a letter to the editor of your local paper. Leave out any anti-MS rant, just complain that this is not the sort of thing that they should be doing with public space.
If that post office is anything like the ones I've had to use, they have a fairly captive audience, bored to tears waiting in line. Microsoft brochures would probably actually get *read* there (Think of the money that supermarkets must get paid to feature items in the checkout lanes - gum, candy, tabloids, etc.)
If you really care, see if MS paid money to do this, and to whom...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo