I remember that a couple of years ago you could get a sort of pen that would light up whenever somebody within a certain range (a couple meters) was using his cell phone. The CellTrac-r described in the article sounds like a similar gadget, with possible extra capabilities (like determining the distance).
If you don't want any mails from CmdrTaco why not simply say so?
Kidding aside, a spell checking filter would be hard to tune when you're expecting emails in various languages (from people with varying typing skills).
I don't get it -- the "mainline geek culture" picture is a syringe attached to what? (Oh, it's an Ethernet cable, right?
Damn I better have my eyes checked - until I read your post I thought it was a vacuum cleaner with an uberdimensional network plug on the sucker. I even thought it had to do something with the artist's name.
Instead, don't click it, tell your grandmother about it!
She will pay his site a visit and find out that he is helping her to get rid of all possible body part enlargement proposals - this time without destroying anyone's computers.
Don't be so harsh with America - poor reporting is an international tradition. I am saying this as a European.
Always reached destination, sometimes late
on
SMS Messaging Unreliable
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Is this report consistent with your experience?
Back in 1998 I was working on a frost alarm system for farmers (in Italy). Subscribed farmers would get an SMS containing information about the temperature/wind/precipitaion and a number of other parameters, from hundreds of weather stations all over the area, whenever a configurable event was triggered.
During our test phase all messages arrived, but unfortunately the provider could not handle the rather consistent load, and therefore a high percentage of the alarm SMS arrived only hours (or even days) later, which was - for obvious reasons - useless in that case.
Since then providers in Italy have expanded their message centers, and although I am not working on any such project currently, some colleagues of mine are, and they confirm that nearly all messages arrive at destination, and the ones that don't usually have invalid recipient mobile numbers. You get confirmation messages that not only let you know a message has arrived (or not), but in case of a successful delivery you can also know the exact time the recipient received your message.
On another note, maybe slightly offtopic: some posters have expressed their fear of Telemarketers and Spammers taking advantage of SMS. Personally I have only been spammed by one single company: my mobile provider. That's the main reason why I have changed provider lately (after 5 years). I have never gotten a single spam SMS by anybody else.
In Italy (don't know about other countries) you can get SMS over landlines, too, if you have an SMS enabled phone. If you do not have such a phone, the message will be read to you by the system. Now this is something a bit more scary: it is much easier for Telemarketers to collect a huge database of landline numbers than mobile ones, although since Italy has issued the "privacy law" a few years back, unsolicited advertising (via snail mail or phone) has dropped from "a couple a day" to "max 2 a year".
Which is what's actually happening in Italy with TIM (telco). They keep sending out spam sms with "promotional information". You can opt out, but you're automatically opted in again the next time your credit gets next to zero, which is pretty annoying.
Now that you can send and receive SMS over standard phone lines (Telecom Italia) too, that kind of spam has already begun. If you have the right kind of (home) phone, you will get the SMS on it's screen; if you have the old kind of phone, it will ring, and when you pick it up an automated system will read the message to you. So you can't even let them know how you feel about being disturbed.
Phone solicitation creates costs for the initiator. Not just the calling costs, but somebody actually has to pay a couple persons to stay on the phone and talk to you. They don't call you 3 times in a row within an hour and ask you the same question. I do agree that phone solicitation is annoying, especially for people that get a load of these calls each day. I get a maximum of 10 calls per year (live in Italy), and I can live with that. I am definitely more annoyed by junk sms messages on my mobile.
Spam creates costs for the recipient (=me), and very low costs to the initiator. The "sender" can be a 15 years old jerk with his nice 2-CD-set of harvested email addresses and a "klick-and-go" software that sends out mails promising BIZ-domains, a big penis and a loan free life to millions of persons who have not requested this information.
I have my server at an ISP, and I pay for every MB that runs into, out of or through its network card. And when I read my mail over IMAP, I pay every second I'm connected from home via ISDN. So each time I get a spam message I pay for it a) when the spam hits my mail server, b) when I download it from my server, c) while I am connected from home. Point a) still applies when I filter my mail server side, and unfortunately it applies also when using systems as TMDA. And even when I'll get my flat rate ADSL I have pay about 1.000 Euro per year for it, so I do expect that only the stuff _I_ want and _I_ request travels on _my_ expense.
I'd rather waste my bandwith with The Weekly Kernel Update than with spam.
Would it really be that bad if MS really allowed access to their website through MSIE only? Leaving aside for a moment the fact that all of this seems to be another marketing trick, it is "their website" after all. You do not have the implicit _right_ to watch their content (even if you had any interest in it). So if they require you to use their product to watch their content (propaganda?): fine, you still have a choice, it depends on you.
Yes, it it sad when companies or individuals "optimize" their website for one or the other browser; yes, it goes against the principle of sharing information with as many as possible. But it is not an infringement of your very rights. You can let them know what you think of their policies by simply not visiting the website in question.
The steady flow of spam mails praising the advantages of a.biz domain has come to a point where it is even higher than the number of mails trying to convince me to buy a penis enlarger or to increase my (hairy) breast size. Now one can win a friggin'.biz domain at a lottery. Does that mean we'll soon see happy winners of the [fill-in-your-state]-lottery walk away with the latest John-Holmes-kit(tm)?
What kind of applications are being created that are based on MySQL? Is it mainly web-based solutions, or is that just my impression?
I have used MySQL for web-based applications only until now. And while I like it because it is fast, easy to install and administer, as others have alread pointed out, I find it still lacks some rather important "features" (like views, nested queries and stored procedures), a fact that makes MySQL a non-choice for most of my customers at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
My boss was too busy learning to play flute
Oh, you were working for Richard?
You probably wanted to write
vi is better than Emacs
as the grandparent poster put all the cool stuff on the right side.
Take business courses, etc. Broaden your horizons in profitable ways.
Very good point. Search for a field you are interested in, be it business, medical science, physics, or anything else.
The extra knowledge you gain will be of advantage to both you and your future employers or customers.
Will anyone ever drag my favorite site out of 1996 and introduce it to some lovely CSS-P?
Someone already did the hard work.
Now try to convince your favourite site's editors to apply the necessary changes.
They'd be able to CGI half the TOS crew on top of the current Shatner...
I remember that a couple of years ago you could get a sort of pen that would light up whenever somebody within a certain range (a couple meters) was using his cell phone. The CellTrac-r described in the article sounds like a similar gadget, with possible extra capabilities (like determining the distance).
I don't think vi can emulate Emacs.
http://www.vimacs.cx/about.html
If you don't want any mails from CmdrTaco why not simply say so?
Kidding aside, a spell checking filter would be hard to tune when you're expecting emails in various languages (from people with varying typing skills).
does this code belong to sco?
And can those who have bought a license sue them now?
SCO is clueless
They probably couldn't care less about what they own or not, as long as their bluff works.
--
I don't get it -- the "mainline geek culture" picture is a syringe attached to what? (Oh, it's an Ethernet cable, right?
Damn I better have my eyes checked - until I read your post I thought it was a vacuum cleaner with an uberdimensional network plug on the sucker. I even thought it had to do something with the artist's name.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030425
Instead, don't click it, tell your grandmother about it!
She will pay his site a visit and find out that he is helping her to get rid of all possible body part enlargement proposals - this time without destroying anyone's computers.
You forgot
11. dupes.slashdot.org
unless it is supposed to be covered by 5.
I just heard they have a new bit at Slashdot. It's called "DupeBit" and this is the first article which got it.
They actually use a NewBit for articles that are supposed to slip through without a dupe.
Poor reporting is an American tradition.
Don't be so harsh with America - poor reporting is an international tradition. I am saying this as a European.
Is this report consistent with your experience?
Back in 1998 I was working on a frost alarm system for farmers (in Italy). Subscribed farmers would get an SMS containing information about the temperature/wind/precipitaion and a number of other parameters, from hundreds of weather stations all over the area, whenever a configurable event was triggered.
During our test phase all messages arrived, but unfortunately the provider could not handle the rather consistent load, and therefore a high percentage of the alarm SMS arrived only hours (or even days) later, which was - for obvious reasons - useless in that case.
Since then providers in Italy have expanded their message centers, and although I am not working on any such project currently, some colleagues of mine are, and they confirm that nearly all messages arrive at destination, and the ones that don't usually have invalid recipient mobile numbers. You get confirmation messages that not only let you know a message has arrived (or not), but in case of a successful delivery you can also know the exact time the recipient received your message.
On another note, maybe slightly offtopic: some posters have expressed their fear of Telemarketers and Spammers taking advantage of SMS. Personally I have only been spammed by one single company: my mobile provider. That's the main reason why I have changed provider lately (after 5 years). I have never gotten a single spam SMS by anybody else.
In Italy (don't know about other countries) you can get SMS over landlines, too, if you have an SMS enabled phone. If you do not have such a phone, the message will be read to you by the system. Now this is something a bit more scary: it is much easier for Telemarketers to collect a huge database of landline numbers than mobile ones, although since Italy has issued the "privacy law" a few years back, unsolicited advertising (via snail mail or phone) has dropped from "a couple a day" to "max 2 a year".
Which is what's actually happening in Italy with TIM (telco). They keep sending out spam sms with "promotional information". You can opt out, but you're automatically opted in again the next time your credit gets next to zero, which is pretty annoying.
Now that you can send and receive SMS over standard phone lines (Telecom Italia) too, that kind of spam has already begun. If you have the right kind of (home) phone, you will get the SMS on it's screen; if you have the old kind of phone, it will ring, and when you pick it up an automated system will read the message to you. So you can't even let them know how you feel about being disturbed.
--
for f in `find /my/resumes -name "*.txt" `; do mv $f $f.bak; sed 's/beer/water/g' $f.bak >$f; rm -f $f.bak; done
ssh corporate_mp3_server
/etc/init.d/nfs stop
/etc/init.d/smb stop
rm -rf
*whew*
Phone solicitation creates costs for the initiator. Not just the calling costs, but somebody actually has to pay a couple persons to stay on the phone and talk to you. They don't call you 3 times in a row within an hour and ask you the same question. I do agree that phone solicitation is annoying, especially for people that get a load of these calls each day. I get a maximum of 10 calls per year (live in Italy), and I can live with that. I am definitely more annoyed by junk sms messages on my mobile.
Spam creates costs for the recipient (=me), and very low costs to the initiator. The "sender" can be a 15 years old jerk with his nice 2-CD-set of harvested email addresses and a "klick-and-go" software that sends out mails promising BIZ-domains, a big penis and a loan free life to millions of persons who have not requested this information.
I have my server at an ISP, and I pay for every MB that runs into, out of or through its network card. And when I read my mail over IMAP, I pay every second I'm connected from home via ISDN. So each time I get a spam message I pay for it a) when the spam hits my mail server, b) when I download it from my server, c) while I am connected from home. Point a) still applies when I filter my mail server side, and unfortunately it applies also when using systems as TMDA. And even when I'll get my flat rate ADSL I have pay about 1.000 Euro per year for it, so I do expect that only the stuff _I_ want and _I_ request travels on _my_ expense.
I'd rather waste my bandwith with The Weekly Kernel Update than with spam.
Yes, it it sad when companies or individuals "optimize" their website for one or the other browser; yes, it goes against the principle of sharing information with as many as possible. But it is not an infringement of your very rights. You can let them know what you think of their policies by simply not visiting the website in question.
The steady flow of spam mails praising the advantages of a .biz domain has come to a point where it is even higher than the number of mails trying to convince me to buy a penis enlarger or to increase my (hairy) breast size. Now one can win a friggin' .biz domain at a lottery. Does that mean we'll soon see happy winners of the [fill-in-your-state]-lottery walk away with the latest John-Holmes-kit(tm)?
I have used MySQL for web-based applications only until now. And while I like it because it is fast, easy to install and administer, as others have alread pointed out, I find it still lacks some rather important "features" (like views, nested queries and stored procedures), a fact that makes MySQL a non-choice for most of my customers at the moment.
Great to hear they are bringing hi-tech industry to a place [map24.com] otherwise dominated by apple trees and a handful of cows.
--