I used to have a site hosted on a Rackspace dedicated server. Monthly hosting costs were over $350 a month. Then we moved to another host with a comparable dedicated server and our costs dropped to about $170 a month. Recently, we realized that we didn't need a dedicated server and switched to a VPS host for $34 a month. Unless your site is extremely powerful or resource-intensive, you probably don't need a $300+ a month dedicated server, despite what Rackspace tells you.
As a post-script to our move off of Rackspace, I contacted them to cancel our plan well before the renewal date. They informed me that our contract stipulated that I needed to give them one month notice. I went looking for the clause. Our contract referenced or original contract and buried in there was one line with this stipulation. They refused to waive this. So we wound up having to pay about $350 extra for a dedicated server we weren't using because they decided to be sticklers for a line hidden in the legalese. Lessons learned: 1) Always read your contracts. 2) Ask way ahead of time about cancellation procedures so you don't get caught by hidden rules.
Exactly this. Too many times I hear from people "Well, I just grabbed this from Google Images because if it's on the Internet it's public domain." There are some people who seem to think that the act of putting something online somehow strips it of all copyright protections. At the very least, a computer program could be trained to spot copyright information and determine whether or not an image was allowed to be displayed. (It would require a lot of cooperation and coding work and wouldn't work in all cases, but it is possible.)
No, consensus isn't needed for science to progress, but it is an inevitable result of science. A theory comes out, it is tested, peer-reviewed, and people see that it best describes the data. So more and more scientists in that field will accept that theory until something better comes along.
Now, you can be that one guy who says "here is my theory which contradicts prevailing views." This has happened a lot in the past. However, the key point is that those contradicting theories need an extraordinary amount of evidence to prove them. If your radical new theory was that relativity wasn't actually true and you could explain everything with X, then you'd need a TON of reproducible proof to convince your peers that X is true. This is because we have so much evidence that relativity is true that it would take a lot to unseat it.
What you can't do is insist that a theory with broad consensus is wrong because you have a different theory, offer up little to no proof, and demand that those "in the consensus" provide extraordinary proof that they are right.
Yes, but the corporations don't come and shoot you if you don't choose to give them your money.
No, but in the "bad old days", if you decided to strike, they could hire people to kill you.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre:
The company hired the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency to protect the new workers and harass the strikers.
Baldwin–Felts had a reputation for aggressive strike breaking. Agents shone searchlights on the tent villages at night and fired bullets into the tents at random, occasionally killing and maiming people. They used an improvised armored car, mounted with a machine gun the union called the "Death Special" to patrol the camp's perimeters. The steel-covered car was built in the CF&I plant in Pueblo, Colorado from the chassis of a large touring sedan. Frequent sniper attacks on the tent colonies drove the miners to dig pits beneath the tents where they and their families could be better protected.
And, if that didn't work, the company could just get the National Guard to do their dirty work:
The fighting raged for the entire day. The militia was reinforced by non-uniformed mine guards later in the afternoon. At dusk, a passing freight train stopped on the tracks in front of the Guards' machine gun placements, allowing many of the miners and their families to escape to an outcrop of hills to the east called the "Black Hills." By 7:00 p.m., the camp was in flames, and the militia descended on it and began to search and loot the camp. Louis Tikas had remained in the camp the entire day and was still there when the fire started. Tikas and two other men were captured by the militia. Tikas and Lt. Karl Linderfelt, commander of one of two Guard companies, had confronted each other several times in the previous months. While two militiamen held Tikas, Linderfelt broke a rifle butt over his head. Tikas and the other two captured miners were later found shot dead. Tikas had been shot in the back.[24] Their bodies lay along the Colorado and Southern Railway tracks for three days in full view of passing trains. The militia officers refused to allow them to be moved until a local of a railway union demanded the bodies be taken away for burial.
During the battle, four women and eleven children had been hiding in a pit beneath one tent, where they were trapped when the tent above them was set on fire. Two of the women and all of the children suffocated. These deaths became a rallying cry for the UMWA, who called the incident the "Ludlow Massacre."
Of course, I'm sure - in Bill Gates' version of history - companies were always benevolent entities who just want to look out for their workers' best interests.
Apparently, the teacher has now spoken and is disputing what the law enforcement departments have said. For example, they claimed he built a scale model of the school. Ominous sign of attack planning, right? Well, not once he adds the context of him having studied architecture, having an interest in building models, and having built a cruise ship and house model also. By picking and choosing which facts you focus on and removing all context, you could probably make anyone out to be a threat.
Even though he hasn't been arrested, he's still been taken in for medical treatment and apparently the doctors are being fed bad information about him to give him an incorrect diagnosis. One would hope that the doctors would look at the patient for evidence of a mental health issue and not just information given to them about the patient. Then again, if the police wanted to get a diagnosis on someone, I'm sure they know which doctors would play along with them and which wouldn't.
I'd like to see the letter that he wrote that "caused concern."
Finally, commenters never fail to make me roll my eyes. On that linked news story, one commenter said (with spelling mistakes intact): "That is just too many coinsidences. Crazy ppl don't know they are crazy. Keep him away from our precious children. Go be weird somewhere far away, all by yourself." Yes, because we wouldn't want any teachers to vary one iota from normal in any way. Some of my best teachers in school were the ones that were far from normal. If his only "crime" winds up being "he's just not normal" then that's no reason to "keep him away from our precious children."
I would add a secondary question to this: If online vigilantism is valid, what are the limits? It's one thing if Person A did Some Horrible Thing and was outed on the Internet. (e.g. If John Smith killed a man and Internet Vigilantes hacked his accounts to release proof of his guilt.) It's another thing is Person A did Some Minor Thing That A Tiny Group Thinks Is Awful. (e.g. If John Smith expressed an unpopular opinion and Internet Vigilantes released detailed information about him to keep him quiet.)
If these were very clear-cut, different actions, there wouldn't be a question, but it's a sliding scale. It's easy to label the ends of the scale as "reasonable" and "not reasonable" but where is the line dividing the two? At what point does "This Internet Vigilantism Is Justified" turn into "Vigilantes Out Of Control." In the case of the latter, there's a well known group that tries to threaten anyone they don't agree with until those people get off the Internet because they see it as "Theirs." I'm sure the group thinks they are fighting the good fight, but most other people just see them as nuisances at best. (It's a sad commentary that I don't want to name the group lest they spot this post and target me. It should be quite obvious who the group is, though.)
Tried the new Uber Buggy Whip service. I was picked up by my ride - and by "picked up", I mean harnessed to the front of a carriage and then whipped until I pulled the carriage where I wanted to go.
Cons: The whipping hurt and the carriage was heavy.
Pros: I lost 5 pounds and the bag of oats they strapped to my mouth were tasty.
Rating: 3 1/2 stars. Might use again to help shed those holiday pounds.
They aren't comparing his getting fired to Soviet-style punishment. The comparison is to the forcing him, against his will, to "an emergency medical evaluation" in a location that only the police know of and won't release any details about. Making a guy disappear because he's suspected of bad behavior isn't something that's supposed to happen in the US. (That last statement might sound a bit naive. Take it as a goal for how our country should operate instead of the totalitarian method of just letting the authorities do whatever they want for whatever reason.)
The police don't need to act on every tip reported in. If that were the case, they would need to respond to every 911 call that reported that the McDonald's teller gave them a medium fries and not a large like they ordered. You know, because it might possibly become a violent situation and if they don't act they might be to blame.
Even if they did "act" on this tip, all it would warrant might be a visit to the guy's house to talk with him briefly and run some background checks on him. That would have shown that he's a fiction writer and not publishing some manifesto about how he's going to go berserk and kill everyone. Then the author and the police would go their own ways with as little fuss as possible. Forcibly taking him in for "an emergency medical evaluation", not letting anyone know where he is, and releasing statements phrasing everything he did as if he was an imminent threat isn't "acting", it's overreacting. Overreacting never takes down valid threats - at least, not without also taking down a lot of non-threats as well. If they actually, properly "acted", we wouldn't be reading about this because it would have been a routine interview and closing of the report.
Instead of 900 years in the future, he should have set it in the past. Or at least included dinosaurs. You'd never get in trouble for writing about Dinosaurs... Oops, sorry. Forget about that.
In all seriousness, though, school shootings are a problem. However, I'm much more afraid of my oldest son (who begins middle school in a couple of days) getting in trouble for someone mistaking something he says/does as being a threat against the school than I am afraid that someone will walk into the building and kill a bunch of people. (My oldest is diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and anxiety disorder. He can tend to be clueless about "other meanings" to the things he says or how people might take offense to certain phrases that he means in an innocent manner. Not a good combination with overzealous administrators who are jumping at the slightest whiff of trouble.)
You'd need to talk to an astronomer to find out the reason that astronomers at the time thought planets weren't common. It might have just been because we hadn't detected any and a lack of evidence for something translates into a certain amount of skepticism about whether that thing exists.`
In a previous discussion, I argued that I wouldn't buy a self-driving car if it didn't have a steering wheel. Someone (I honestly forget who) argued with me that unless self-driving cars didn't have steering wheels, they wouldn't be real self-driving cars. When I pointed out that the technology had to be proven before I'd trust it to drive me with no backup system, they pointed out the "Google has driven their cars X miles." I didn't say it at the time, but I suspected that there would be some difference between Google's test drives and real-world driving. Now it looks like I was right.
So I would but a self-driving car once it's ready, but I'd still want a steering wheel for those times when I just don't trust the computer to drive me. It'd be foolish to get into a Consumer GoogleCar Version 1.0 that didn't have any manual steering/braking system.
No, I'm saying that we don't have one and won't have one if the big ISPs get their way. Municipal broadband won't turn a monopoly market into a free market, but towns should be free to decide to do it if they want.
I would love a free market for broadband Internet. The big companies that offer broadband Internet, though, don't want one and will use all of their power and influence to keep one from emerging.
That might be the real reason, but the public reason the big ISPs offer up is "unfair competition" from government - even when the "competition" would be serving an area that the ISP isn't serving. And yet, Comcast and Time Warner Cable claim they aren't competing with each other because they serve different areas.
At one point, the prevailing scientific theory was that planets were a rarity. Then we found the first exoplanet and astronomers started wondering if they might be more common. By now, with the thousands of exoplanets found, we know that planets are plentiful. We don't know how many Earth-like ones are out there, but many astronomers think that this is more of a deficiency in our planetary detection methods than a rarity of Earth-like worlds. (Bigger planets are easier to detect.)
Exactly. Currently, our furthest space probe is Voyager 1 and that's only 0.002 light years away from us after travelling for 37 years. At that rate, it will take 18,500 years before it travels one light year and over 200,000 years before it travels 11 light years. Even if we could leave right now and cut the travel time in half, we still wouldn't arrive until the year 102,014. To put it another way, we as a species (Homo Sapiens) have only been around for 200,000 years. A probe sent to this closest planet at Voyager's speed, would have needed to have been sent when Homo Sapiens first emerged in order for it to have arrived now.
It's even worse when the big ISPs are trying to kill municipal broadband in an area they don't serve. Because you can't have the government competing with them in an area that they might, someday, begin to consider serving. Until then, the residents should grovel (over dial-up) at the big ISPs' feet for broadband Internet service.
Thanks. That's the one I was thinking of. And, yes, Hulk is the best. Though Captain America managed to pull off the "here's my rear and chest facing in the same direction" pose. Must be that super soldier serum.
Considering that I'm married with two kids, I've already found a woman who is attracted to me. She's never arched her back and stuck her butt out. And she's certainly never twisted her spine so that I could see both her chest and rear at the same time. Honestly, if she did that pose, I'd be concerned about rushing her to the hospital, not thinking "Boy, does that look sexy."
I actually like coding in PHP. You can create some really nice applications using it. Then again, you can create really nice applications with just about any server side language if you know what you are doing.
My main beef with PHP is the inconsistency with built-in function names. If you want to replace within a string, you use "str_replace", if you want to split a string into an array, you use "str_split". However, if you want to get part of the string, you use "substr". And if you want to compare two strings, you use "strcmp". If they could get some consistency there, it would vastly improve the language.
Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago!
on
PHP 5.6.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
How has PHP been given a monopoly on the entire industry? There are other languages out there and many of them are used quite a bit. PHP may or may not be the most popular (I honestly have no stats to tell either way), but even if it was vastly more popular than any other web programming language, it would be far from a monopoly.
Re:You can get into trouble for using PHP
on
PHP 5.6.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
For a split second, I was going to voice my outrage over such a thing happening before my brain kicked in and I remembered that BBSpot is a humor website.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to have a site hosted on a Rackspace dedicated server. Monthly hosting costs were over $350 a month. Then we moved to another host with a comparable dedicated server and our costs dropped to about $170 a month. Recently, we realized that we didn't need a dedicated server and switched to a VPS host for $34 a month. Unless your site is extremely powerful or resource-intensive, you probably don't need a $300+ a month dedicated server, despite what Rackspace tells you.
As a post-script to our move off of Rackspace, I contacted them to cancel our plan well before the renewal date. They informed me that our contract stipulated that I needed to give them one month notice. I went looking for the clause. Our contract referenced or original contract and buried in there was one line with this stipulation. They refused to waive this. So we wound up having to pay about $350 extra for a dedicated server we weren't using because they decided to be sticklers for a line hidden in the legalese. Lessons learned: 1) Always read your contracts. 2) Ask way ahead of time about cancellation procedures so you don't get caught by hidden rules.
Exactly this. Too many times I hear from people "Well, I just grabbed this from Google Images because if it's on the Internet it's public domain." There are some people who seem to think that the act of putting something online somehow strips it of all copyright protections. At the very least, a computer program could be trained to spot copyright information and determine whether or not an image was allowed to be displayed. (It would require a lot of cooperation and coding work and wouldn't work in all cases, but it is possible.)
No, consensus isn't needed for science to progress, but it is an inevitable result of science. A theory comes out, it is tested, peer-reviewed, and people see that it best describes the data. So more and more scientists in that field will accept that theory until something better comes along.
Now, you can be that one guy who says "here is my theory which contradicts prevailing views." This has happened a lot in the past. However, the key point is that those contradicting theories need an extraordinary amount of evidence to prove them. If your radical new theory was that relativity wasn't actually true and you could explain everything with X, then you'd need a TON of reproducible proof to convince your peers that X is true. This is because we have so much evidence that relativity is true that it would take a lot to unseat it.
What you can't do is insist that a theory with broad consensus is wrong because you have a different theory, offer up little to no proof, and demand that those "in the consensus" provide extraordinary proof that they are right.
No, but in the "bad old days", if you decided to strike, they could hire people to kill you.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre :
And, if that didn't work, the company could just get the National Guard to do their dirty work:
Of course, I'm sure - in Bill Gates' version of history - companies were always benevolent entities who just want to look out for their workers' best interests.
No, make them all sphere shaped so the physics is easier!
Apparently, the teacher has now spoken and is disputing what the law enforcement departments have said. For example, they claimed he built a scale model of the school. Ominous sign of attack planning, right? Well, not once he adds the context of him having studied architecture, having an interest in building models, and having built a cruise ship and house model also. By picking and choosing which facts you focus on and removing all context, you could probably make anyone out to be a threat.
Even though he hasn't been arrested, he's still been taken in for medical treatment and apparently the doctors are being fed bad information about him to give him an incorrect diagnosis. One would hope that the doctors would look at the patient for evidence of a mental health issue and not just information given to them about the patient. Then again, if the police wanted to get a diagnosis on someone, I'm sure they know which doctors would play along with them and which wouldn't.
I'd like to see the letter that he wrote that "caused concern."
Finally, commenters never fail to make me roll my eyes. On that linked news story, one commenter said (with spelling mistakes intact): "That is just too many coinsidences. Crazy ppl don't know they are crazy. Keep him away from our precious children. Go be weird somewhere far away, all by yourself." Yes, because we wouldn't want any teachers to vary one iota from normal in any way. Some of my best teachers in school were the ones that were far from normal. If his only "crime" winds up being "he's just not normal" then that's no reason to "keep him away from our precious children."
I would add a secondary question to this: If online vigilantism is valid, what are the limits? It's one thing if Person A did Some Horrible Thing and was outed on the Internet. (e.g. If John Smith killed a man and Internet Vigilantes hacked his accounts to release proof of his guilt.) It's another thing is Person A did Some Minor Thing That A Tiny Group Thinks Is Awful. (e.g. If John Smith expressed an unpopular opinion and Internet Vigilantes released detailed information about him to keep him quiet.)
If these were very clear-cut, different actions, there wouldn't be a question, but it's a sliding scale. It's easy to label the ends of the scale as "reasonable" and "not reasonable" but where is the line dividing the two? At what point does "This Internet Vigilantism Is Justified" turn into "Vigilantes Out Of Control." In the case of the latter, there's a well known group that tries to threaten anyone they don't agree with until those people get off the Internet because they see it as "Theirs." I'm sure the group thinks they are fighting the good fight, but most other people just see them as nuisances at best. (It's a sad commentary that I don't want to name the group lest they spot this post and target me. It should be quite obvious who the group is, though.)
Tried the new Uber Buggy Whip service. I was picked up by my ride - and by "picked up", I mean harnessed to the front of a carriage and then whipped until I pulled the carriage where I wanted to go.
Cons: The whipping hurt and the carriage was heavy.
Pros: I lost 5 pounds and the bag of oats they strapped to my mouth were tasty.
Rating: 3 1/2 stars. Might use again to help shed those holiday pounds.
They aren't comparing his getting fired to Soviet-style punishment. The comparison is to the forcing him, against his will, to "an emergency medical evaluation" in a location that only the police know of and won't release any details about. Making a guy disappear because he's suspected of bad behavior isn't something that's supposed to happen in the US. (That last statement might sound a bit naive. Take it as a goal for how our country should operate instead of the totalitarian method of just letting the authorities do whatever they want for whatever reason.)
The police don't need to act on every tip reported in. If that were the case, they would need to respond to every 911 call that reported that the McDonald's teller gave them a medium fries and not a large like they ordered. You know, because it might possibly become a violent situation and if they don't act they might be to blame.
Even if they did "act" on this tip, all it would warrant might be a visit to the guy's house to talk with him briefly and run some background checks on him. That would have shown that he's a fiction writer and not publishing some manifesto about how he's going to go berserk and kill everyone. Then the author and the police would go their own ways with as little fuss as possible. Forcibly taking him in for "an emergency medical evaluation", not letting anyone know where he is, and releasing statements phrasing everything he did as if he was an imminent threat isn't "acting", it's overreacting. Overreacting never takes down valid threats - at least, not without also taking down a lot of non-threats as well. If they actually, properly "acted", we wouldn't be reading about this because it would have been a routine interview and closing of the report.
Instead of 900 years in the future, he should have set it in the past. Or at least included dinosaurs. You'd never get in trouble for writing about Dinosaurs... Oops, sorry. Forget about that.
In all seriousness, though, school shootings are a problem. However, I'm much more afraid of my oldest son (who begins middle school in a couple of days) getting in trouble for someone mistaking something he says/does as being a threat against the school than I am afraid that someone will walk into the building and kill a bunch of people. (My oldest is diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and anxiety disorder. He can tend to be clueless about "other meanings" to the things he says or how people might take offense to certain phrases that he means in an innocent manner. Not a good combination with overzealous administrators who are jumping at the slightest whiff of trouble.)
You'd need to talk to an astronomer to find out the reason that astronomers at the time thought planets weren't common. It might have just been because we hadn't detected any and a lack of evidence for something translates into a certain amount of skepticism about whether that thing exists.`
In a previous discussion, I argued that I wouldn't buy a self-driving car if it didn't have a steering wheel. Someone (I honestly forget who) argued with me that unless self-driving cars didn't have steering wheels, they wouldn't be real self-driving cars. When I pointed out that the technology had to be proven before I'd trust it to drive me with no backup system, they pointed out the "Google has driven their cars X miles." I didn't say it at the time, but I suspected that there would be some difference between Google's test drives and real-world driving. Now it looks like I was right.
So I would but a self-driving car once it's ready, but I'd still want a steering wheel for those times when I just don't trust the computer to drive me. It'd be foolish to get into a Consumer GoogleCar Version 1.0 that didn't have any manual steering/braking system.
No, I'm saying that we don't have one and won't have one if the big ISPs get their way. Municipal broadband won't turn a monopoly market into a free market, but towns should be free to decide to do it if they want.
I would love a free market for broadband Internet. The big companies that offer broadband Internet, though, don't want one and will use all of their power and influence to keep one from emerging.
That might be the real reason, but the public reason the big ISPs offer up is "unfair competition" from government - even when the "competition" would be serving an area that the ISP isn't serving. And yet, Comcast and Time Warner Cable claim they aren't competing with each other because they serve different areas.
At one point, the prevailing scientific theory was that planets were a rarity. Then we found the first exoplanet and astronomers started wondering if they might be more common. By now, with the thousands of exoplanets found, we know that planets are plentiful. We don't know how many Earth-like ones are out there, but many astronomers think that this is more of a deficiency in our planetary detection methods than a rarity of Earth-like worlds. (Bigger planets are easier to detect.)
Not if you factor in meddling by a certain mad man in a blue box. He makes the math go all wibbly wobbly.
Exactly. Currently, our furthest space probe is Voyager 1 and that's only 0.002 light years away from us after travelling for 37 years. At that rate, it will take 18,500 years before it travels one light year and over 200,000 years before it travels 11 light years. Even if we could leave right now and cut the travel time in half, we still wouldn't arrive until the year 102,014. To put it another way, we as a species (Homo Sapiens) have only been around for 200,000 years. A probe sent to this closest planet at Voyager's speed, would have needed to have been sent when Homo Sapiens first emerged in order for it to have arrived now.
It's even worse when the big ISPs are trying to kill municipal broadband in an area they don't serve. Because you can't have the government competing with them in an area that they might, someday, begin to consider serving. Until then, the residents should grovel (over dial-up) at the big ISPs' feet for broadband Internet service.
Thanks. That's the one I was thinking of. And, yes, Hulk is the best. Though Captain America managed to pull off the "here's my rear and chest facing in the same direction" pose. Must be that super soldier serum.
Considering that I'm married with two kids, I've already found a woman who is attracted to me. She's never arched her back and stuck her butt out. And she's certainly never twisted her spine so that I could see both her chest and rear at the same time. Honestly, if she did that pose, I'd be concerned about rushing her to the hospital, not thinking "Boy, does that look sexy."
I actually like coding in PHP. You can create some really nice applications using it. Then again, you can create really nice applications with just about any server side language if you know what you are doing.
My main beef with PHP is the inconsistency with built-in function names. If you want to replace within a string, you use "str_replace", if you want to split a string into an array, you use "str_split". However, if you want to get part of the string, you use "substr". And if you want to compare two strings, you use "strcmp". If they could get some consistency there, it would vastly improve the language.
How has PHP been given a monopoly on the entire industry? There are other languages out there and many of them are used quite a bit. PHP may or may not be the most popular (I honestly have no stats to tell either way), but even if it was vastly more popular than any other web programming language, it would be far from a monopoly.
For a split second, I was going to voice my outrage over such a thing happening before my brain kicked in and I remembered that BBSpot is a humor website.
In my defense, though, when a teen can be arrested for writing a story in which he uses a gun to kill his neighbor's pet dinosaur, the humor/satire stories can be hard to separate from the true stories.