What this boils down to is the city's system administrator saw the system go down, and didn't know how to fix it. It took her 24 hours to get the system back up, and to protect her job she cried wolf to the police, shifting the blame from her incompetence to an evil "hacker".
Note to Battle Creek city managers: hire competent IT professionals, and this won't happen
Parent was modded flaimbait, but I agree with it. There really isn't an acceptable excuse for the email server being down for as long as it was. I can just imagine the sysadmin panicking after bouncing the box for the third time and *still* not having the problem "fix itself".
Even a lazy/incompetent Domino admin should know how to clear the mail queue and reboot.
Disney's animatronics are much more convincing than Senator Hollings. You'd think that Disney's Imagineers could give him pointers on how to appear more life-like....
The internet is a huge resource of mostly free material. There isn't any reason that text books can't go to the wayside
Actually, there is a very compelling reason why they can't go to the wayside. Much more likely is that the administration is behind the textbook change. Remember, they get a good chunk of money from bookstore sales. During my seven years of undergrad (yeah, go ahead and snicker) they changed Calculus texts three times. Each time the instructors complained as much as the students did.
I have no doubt that instructors might be getting kick-backs; I'm certain that the administrations in schools with school-owned bookstores force changes in textbooks as often as is politically feasible.
It would be more correct to say that it is difficult to find new warez on the web. If I'm looking for c64 warez or mame roms, I can find them on the web *tons* faster than I can on IRC. same story for pc warez that are more than 5 years old. (#oldwarez has stuff, but not always what i'm looking for)
New stuff, on the other hand, is best found on irc or usenet. (sometimes morpheus, before the split)
Wow, what an awesome idea! I read the payola description and thought "man, this sucks, now i'm gonna have to tweak my filter again".
I would *love* to have slashdot as a newsfeed. I think paying to not see ads is a bunk idea; being able to read slashdot via trn is something I'd pay for.
Allow me to restate myself. When you put down your email address at the bottom of a paper catalog or paper credit card request form, there is some fine print that says "Yes1 I'm interested in receiving exciting offers on how my life can be fullfilled by purchasing more crap from you or your business partners!" you are opting-in to whatever it is that they choose to send you. You are creating a business relationship and are providing them with contact information, something they are more than happy to use.
It's not spam; it's opt-in targetted email list product. Companies pay $100K+ for this hosted solution. The company gives DC a honkin' huge email list; DC sends out Acme branded email and handles things like bounces and unsubscriptions.
This is not "spam", per-se. This product is primarily a hosted solution. Think $100K+. This is for big companies who don't really feel like managing their own lists. When you put down your email address on a catalog or credit card form, the email you start receiving (technically opt-in) will probably be sent using this product.
Asking legal advice from the/. crowd is much like asking the schizophrenics in the lock-up ward for reasons behind the WTC event. Yes, you will get some very interesting, and sometimes seemingly accurate opinions. But then there's always the *really* convincing guy who will tell you that Ms. Portman did it to win Taco's love.
maybe I did too much acid during college, but just today in fact, I received an expected email from a cow-orker containing some word documents and experienced a brief moment of WTH?!? when outlook express 6.0 had greyed out the option to save or open the attached documents. A mouseover revealed the helpful "outlook express has prevented you from accessing this attachment because it might contain virus infected blah blah blah".
Did I hallucinate it?
It was very definitely a Word 2000 attachment.
And it was very definitely Outlook Express 6.0.
And it was very definitely only two hits that last time, six years ago.
One of my friends, matt, was the guy who originally registered internic.com. (not the aussie guy; matt sold the domain to the aussie guy) Matt had up a fake internic web page. It was very obviously a fake page; lots of questions like "what is your quest?" and "spoon?"
People would send him mail all of the time saying stuff like "I have to get my domain registered or I will lose my job!!!"
The best part of it all was that internic.net employees started referring trouble cases to matt at internic.com (obviously knowing that was not the correct site).
If you can scrounge up some old usenet archives, alt.pud had a lot of misplaced mail forwarded there.
Well, Warcraft Adventures really shouldn't be considered Warcraft III.
Not quite. I went to E3 in 1997. The programmer/techie guy there frequently referred to Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans as "Warcraft III". The official E3 press releases didn't use the triple-I designation, but the Blizzard frontline people definitely were (and none too happy about the change in direction away from RTS).
With patents in place, the inventor is sufficiently rewarded for having that patent, either by selling the patent or licensing it. If a car company does try to reverse engineer the design, the inventor has legal recourse for that.
You mean like Robert Kearns, inventor of the intermittent wiper? (good summary available in the Amici Curiae brief) The inventor is sufficiently motivated as long as the inventor is a mega-corporation. As it stands now, corporations can violate a patent for years and years, using delaying tactics to stretch the process out. In effect, they get unrestricted use of the disputed patent while the case takes its time winding through the court system.
This is time that can allow major coporations to become major competitors.
Kearns has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars for his troubles... decades after litigation starter... with most (if not all) of his awards going to pay legal fees.
It's not the patent system that sucks, per se; it's the court system. The guy with the fattest wallet wins. Always.
If you think that winning in court means that you've "won", ask Kearns, who has lost his family, his savings, and the better part of three decades of his life fighting the battle. He was received damages by the big three, thus winning the battle, but losing the war.
Make certain that the game that you are playing is the same one that your opponents are playing. hymie
There is a great deal of irony in my being moderated down (read: censored) for having an unpopular opinion in an article about censorship.
How is being moderated down a form of censorship? Granted, the mod in question was unfair, and if I come across it in metamod.pl, I'll make a note of it, but it wasn't censorship. Censorship would be if, say, CmdrTaco found your post(s) to be objectionable and removed them from the system or slapped a -50 mod onto them.
You just got hit by a clueless moderator, not a censor. There is a difference.
Who wants to learn how to fix a messed up palm, or send it to some one?
Right. Who would want to fix a messed up palm? As the previous replier mentioned, it's much easier to just reset (the stylus head screws off for a reason) the Palm. I'd much, much, much rather tell an end (l)user to "just reset your palm and reload the applications" than spend twenty minutes figuring out that the (l)user in question corrupted the system libraries.
Telling a user to reinstall their desktop is lazy and agruably an unethical waste of several hours of their time. Telling a user to reset and reload their Palm is lazy and arguable an ethical savings of the support person's time (it only takes a minute or three to restore a Palm).
Uhm, I mean... no one ever lost their job by hiring someone with a degree in web programming.
Let's be honest here. The companies ten years from now that are merely doing well in the market place will be those who only hire geeks with degrees. The companies ten years from now who are kicking butt and taking names are those who hire the best, degreed or not.
However, that being said, having a degree at least proves that one can hack a four-year program, generally implying that one is at the least trainable. All other things being equal, they're going to hire the degreed geek every time.
That's why it's important to start working on sexy open-source projects now. If the non-degreed geek can slap down a CD with kernel patches, Quake mods, and stuff from CPAN that they've written, well, things are no longer equal.
Now that non-degreed geek can prove that they are a self-starter, that they can produce, and that they really do know what they're talking about; not that they just took a couple of classes and read a few books (like the typical degreed geeks we've had turn up to interviews).
Now, trying to get onto the management track ten years from now without a degree is a different story....
(is it just me, or is the term 'geek' being watered down in general?)
I'd *really* like to see lateral discovery added to this (props to matt@csbgroup.org). Did 1,000 people have links to theFatProject ? I want to know what pages the majority of those linkers have in common. Maybe they'd all have links to the Body Modification Ezine. Or perhaps 83% of them linked to the NSA parody site.
This would be highly cool for finding eclectic stuff. Kinda like, well, the lateral discovery in Napster.
It's only natural that you have very few, if any, links to static pages, since you've visited them, read the information you needed, and you're not likely to come back (nothing changes!).
Strike that. Reverse that. Since they're static, you're not likely to hit them very often, thus making you less likely to remember the URL, thus making you more likely to bookmark it.
The sites that I hit daily, or even weekly, I can easily remember the URL. In fact, I've gotten to the point where it's so automatic for me to type in the URL for some sites that when asked what's the address for a site I visit often, I actually have to mentally type out the URL to remember (it's more finger memory than brain memory, I guess). The only dynamic pages in my bookmarks are to my dnet stats and the local weather page. The rest are static.
I'm pretty certain that this is where the value is going to be located.
I wonder what kind of traffic these sites actually get... and how many people, *really* click on a banner for some hardcore pr0n site when they were just trying to execute a search on yahoo.com (or whatever one prefers), and mistyped the URL?
It's the fact that you can't immediately tell that you're not on the right site that is evil. Recently I hit www.google.net instead of google.com. Oops. Only... it *looked* like google.com so I didn't notice it right away. Google.net was reserving google.com in a frame. What really bugged me was that it stayed in the frame. Every link that I hit from the google.net search (and the click-path from there on) was potentially recorded by google.net. The added banner ad was just gravy for them (I'm certain that there *are* at least a few people who'd click on the pr0n site banner ad)
You may vote for anyone you want for any reason, even just because they have the best hair, and noone has the right to question it. It is YOUR vote
Well, not exactly. You can (and many people do) vote for the candidate who is the most comely, but you can not sell your vote. Rather, politicians can't buy votes. (well, they can, but this is only allowed by big money interests. Then it's called "lobbying")
First off, the *only* way to evaluate the quality of a perceptual encoder is to listen to it, period. Who cares what is rejected (non encoded) if you don't hear it.
I'll agree that perception is what matters. However, what souds great on my $48 Labtec speakers at work sounds like crap on my $500 studio headphones at home. The fact of the matter is, most people don't have $25,000 of audio equipment nor sufficiently trained ears to tell the difference. I'll readily use LAME encoded stuff from people I trust, but cringe in horror when I listen to the rapage that Xing's encoder performs to the quality of complex music.
Think of it this way: most people are arguing which color of crap tastes better. Sites like this one and the one in the article are trying to point out that you don't have to eat crap.
I know that Xing (AudioCatalyst) doesn't have the greatest encoder, but that's no reason to leave it out...
Well, actually, there is a reason: the Xing encoder blows chunks. Sure, it's fast, but the sound quality sucks. If all you're encoding is Teeny Bopper of the Week music, then you're not missing out on anything. If you're encoding stuff that's a lot more complex, you're better off with soemthing that doesn't sacrifice quality for speed..
Instead of "I smoked, but I didn't inhale" it will be "Yeah, I clicked on that goatse.cx link, but I didn't look at any of the pics." Or, how about "I have no recollection of writing an email requesting Natalie Portman/hot grits stories."
And, of course, "I did not have a first post with that web site."
Slashdot Mirror
Parent was modded flaimbait, but I agree with it. There really isn't an acceptable excuse for the email server being down for as long as it was. I can just imagine the sysadmin panicking after bouncing the box for the third time and *still* not having the problem "fix itself".
Even a lazy/incompetent Domino admin should know how to clear the mail queue and reboot.
Disney's animatronics are much more convincing than Senator Hollings. You'd think that Disney's Imagineers could give him pointers on how to appear more life-like....
Wait, is this a joke? What legal expense? Dude took down his site almost immediately.
He rolled over like a puppy getting patted on the belly precisely *because* he wanted to avoid legal expenses.
Of course, kelloggs does make Smacks. Maybe that's what I'm smelling.
The internet is a huge resource of mostly free material. There isn't any reason that text books can't go to the wayside
Actually, there is a very compelling reason why they can't go to the wayside. Much more likely is that the administration is behind the textbook change. Remember, they get a good chunk of money from bookstore sales. During my seven years of undergrad (yeah, go ahead and snicker) they changed Calculus texts three times. Each time the instructors complained as much as the students did.
I have no doubt that instructors might be getting kick-backs; I'm certain that the administrations in schools with school-owned bookstores force changes in textbooks as often as is politically feasible.
It would be more correct to say that it is difficult to find new warez on the web. If I'm looking for c64 warez or mame roms, I can find them on the web *tons* faster than I can on IRC. same story for pc warez that are more than 5 years old. (#oldwarez has stuff, but not always what i'm looking for) New stuff, on the other hand, is best found on irc or usenet. (sometimes morpheus, before the split)
Wow, what an awesome idea! I read the payola description and thought "man, this sucks, now i'm gonna have to tweak my filter again".
I would *love* to have slashdot as a newsfeed. I think paying to not see ads is a bunk idea; being able to read slashdot via trn is something I'd pay for.
Allow me to restate myself. When you put down your email address at the bottom of a paper catalog or paper credit card request form, there is some fine print that says "Yes1 I'm interested in receiving exciting offers on how my life can be fullfilled by purchasing more crap from you or your business partners!" you are opting-in to whatever it is that they choose to send you. You are creating a business relationship and are providing them with contact information, something they are more than happy to use.
It's not spam; it's opt-in targetted email list product. Companies pay $100K+ for this hosted solution. The company gives DC a honkin' huge email list; DC sends out Acme branded email and handles things like bounces and unsubscriptions.
This is not "spam", per-se. This product is primarily a hosted solution. Think $100K+. This is for big companies who don't really feel like managing their own lists. When you put down your email address on a catalog or credit card form, the email you start receiving (technically opt-in) will probably be sent using this product.
Steve Talbott has an excellent article on the relation between technology and craft/art.
Asking legal advice from the /. crowd is much like asking the schizophrenics in the lock-up ward for reasons behind the WTC event. Yes, you will get some very interesting, and sometimes seemingly accurate opinions. But then there's always the *really* convincing guy who will tell you that Ms. Portman did it to win Taco's love.
maybe I did too much acid during college, but just today in fact, I received an expected email from a cow-orker containing some word documents and experienced a brief moment of WTH?!? when outlook express 6.0 had greyed out the option to save or open the attached documents. A mouseover revealed the helpful "outlook express has prevented you from accessing this attachment because it might contain virus infected blah blah blah".
Did I hallucinate it?
It was very definitely a Word 2000 attachment.
And it was very definitely Outlook Express 6.0.
And it was very definitely only two hits that last time, six years ago.
People would send him mail all of the time saying stuff like "I have to get my domain registered or I will lose my job!!!"
The best part of it all was that internic.net employees started referring trouble cases to matt at internic.com (obviously knowing that was not the correct site).
If you can scrounge up some old usenet archives, alt.pud had a lot of misplaced mail forwarded there.
hymie
Not quite. I went to E3 in 1997. The programmer/techie guy there frequently referred to Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans as "Warcraft III". The official E3 press releases didn't use the triple-I designation, but the Blizzard frontline people definitely were (and none too happy about the change in direction away from RTS).
hymie
You mean like Robert Kearns, inventor of the intermittent wiper? (good summary available in the Amici Curiae brief) The inventor is sufficiently motivated as long as the inventor is a mega-corporation. As it stands now, corporations can violate a patent for years and years, using delaying tactics to stretch the process out. In effect, they get unrestricted use of the disputed patent while the case takes its time winding through the court system.
This is time that can allow major coporations to become major competitors.
Kearns has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars for his troubles... decades after litigation starter... with most (if not all) of his awards going to pay legal fees.
It's not the patent system that sucks, per se; it's the court system. The guy with the fattest wallet wins. Always.
If you think that winning in court means that you've "won", ask Kearns, who has lost his family, his savings, and the better part of three decades of his life fighting the battle. He was received damages by the big three, thus winning the battle, but losing the war.
Make certain that the game that you are playing is the same one that your opponents are playing.
hymie
How is being moderated down a form of censorship? Granted, the mod in question was unfair, and if I come across it in metamod.pl, I'll make a note of it, but it wasn't censorship. Censorship would be if, say, CmdrTaco found your post(s) to be objectionable and removed them from the system or slapped a -50 mod onto them.
You just got hit by a clueless moderator, not a censor. There is a difference.
hymie
Right. Who would want to fix a messed up palm? As the previous replier mentioned, it's much easier to just reset (the stylus head screws off for a reason) the Palm. I'd much, much, much rather tell an end (l)user to "just reset your palm and reload the applications" than spend twenty minutes figuring out that the (l)user in question corrupted the system libraries.
Telling a user to reinstall their desktop is lazy and agruably an unethical waste of several hours of their time. Telling a user to reset and reload their Palm is lazy and arguable an ethical savings of the support person's time (it only takes a minute or three to restore a Palm).
hymie
Uhm, I mean... no one ever lost their job by hiring someone with a degree in web programming.
Let's be honest here. The companies ten years from now that are merely doing well in the market place will be those who only hire geeks with degrees. The companies ten years from now who are kicking butt and taking names are those who hire the best, degreed or not.
However, that being said, having a degree at least proves that one can hack a four-year program, generally implying that one is at the least trainable. All other things being equal, they're going to hire the degreed geek every time.
That's why it's important to start working on sexy open-source projects now. If the non-degreed geek can slap down a CD with kernel patches, Quake mods, and stuff from CPAN that they've written, well, things are no longer equal.
Now that non-degreed geek can prove that they are a self-starter, that they can produce, and that they really do know what they're talking about; not that they just took a couple of classes and read a few books (like the typical degreed geeks we've had turn up to interviews).
Now, trying to get onto the management track ten years from now without a degree is a different story....
(is it just me, or is the term 'geek' being watered down in general?)
hymie
This would be highly cool for finding eclectic stuff. Kinda like, well, the lateral discovery in Napster.
hymie
Strike that. Reverse that. Since they're static, you're not likely to hit them very often, thus making you less likely to remember the URL, thus making you more likely to bookmark it.
The sites that I hit daily, or even weekly, I can easily remember the URL. In fact, I've gotten to the point where it's so automatic for me to type in the URL for some sites that when asked what's the address for a site I visit often, I actually have to mentally type out the URL to remember (it's more finger memory than brain memory, I guess). The only dynamic pages in my bookmarks are to my dnet stats and the local weather page. The rest are static.
I'm pretty certain that this is where the value is going to be located.
hymie
It's the fact that you can't immediately tell that you're not on the right site that is evil. Recently I hit www.google.net instead of google.com. Oops. Only... it *looked* like google.com so I didn't notice it right away. Google.net was reserving google.com in a frame. What really bugged me was that it stayed in the frame. Every link that I hit from the google.net search (and the click-path from there on) was potentially recorded by google.net. The added banner ad was just gravy for them (I'm certain that there *are* at least a few people who'd click on the pr0n site banner ad)
hymie
Well, not exactly. You can (and many people do) vote for the candidate who is the most comely, but you can not sell your vote. Rather, politicians can't buy votes. (well, they can, but this is only allowed by big money interests. Then it's called "lobbying")
hymie
I'll agree that perception is what matters. However, what souds great on my $48 Labtec speakers at work sounds like crap on my $500 studio headphones at home. The fact of the matter is, most people don't have $25,000 of audio equipment nor sufficiently trained ears to tell the difference. I'll readily use LAME encoded stuff from people I trust, but cringe in horror when I listen to the rapage that Xing's encoder performs to the quality of complex music.
Think of it this way: most people are arguing which color of crap tastes better. Sites like this one and the one in the article are trying to point out that you don't have to eat crap.
hymie
Well, actually, there is a reason: the Xing encoder blows chunks. Sure, it's fast, but the sound quality sucks. If all you're encoding is Teeny Bopper of the Week music, then you're not missing out on anything. If you're encoding stuff that's a lot more complex, you're better off with soemthing that doesn't sacrifice quality for speed..
hymie
And, of course, "I did not have a first post with that web site."
hymie