Fine, then you are a leach, and in reality you are the minority. Surveys have shown that downloadable music actually has a positive impact on sales of popular albums and a negative impact on unpopular albums. The net result is only a slight decline in music sales on the order of like 1 in 5000 cd's.
Find, great, good. I'm so glad that someone has a study now that contradicts the RIAA party line. And I'm sure the Slashdot community has vigorously studies the methods used by the investigators; to make sure there is no bias, that there methods are sound and so forth. Because we all know that the RIAA studies presented were complete BS, b/c they had an agenda. Let's disregard all that. No we have a study that proves our point of view.
This is such unadulterated BULLSHIT! When the RIAA had studies, everyone on Slashdot loved to disregard the studies (biased or not) and instead touted their anecdotal stories. Hey guess what? No one f'in knows if p2p networks increase or decrease record sales. My gut feeling says that they do, although the RIAA clearly exaggerates its effect. And if p2p increases sales, then why are nearly all the big money musicians against it? I guess they're not as smart as the Slashdot crowd and the RIAA has managed to brainwash them with their biased studies, and they really believe that p2p might hurt their incomes. Poor stupid bastards.
The outright arrogance of 90% of the posts (not necessarily 90% of posters or readers; rather, the vocal plurality) on Slashdot is overwhelming. It's always tinged with the idea that since-I'm-a-techie-I'm-smarter-than-the-average-pe rson smarminess. Fuck that. We're no brighter than the rest of the populace. I know jack-all about the effect of p2p downloading other than through personal experience. Often there are subjects I'm more knowledgeable about, and I hope my posts reflect that. By the BS like that espoused by this AC ("surveys have shown?") are just too much too bear.
Enough. Just because you're passionate about a subject doesn't mean you know what the hell you're talking about. Post some links, provide some critical analysis, but please don't parrot the same Slashthink BS that permeates Slashdot.
Well, here's the deal. You can make up any playlist you want, and listen to it anywhere. This is practically the celestial jukebox in the sky. And it doesn't have a thing to do with running/ not running on Linux; the existing services answer that question well enough.
Honestly, I just don't get it. Microsoft is working on a new plan will let MS Windows users who buy a supported MP3 player have anytime/ anywhere access to all the music in their library. Want to listen to the new Britney Spears album, but don't want to spend the $10? Load it up on your WinPod, give it a listen & chuck it. If you commute by train 40 minutes a day, you could listen to 45 new albums each month for $10! This is a phenomenal value.
Ya, DRM sucks. SO what? DOn't think there's DRM on your beloved ShoutCast stations-- get a clue. 'course, they can all be circumvented in one way or another.
Shoutcast I'm sure is really cool, there's probably lots of good stuff. But my friend has Rhapsody, and while at his CPU, it's as close to the old Napster experience you can find. Listen to any song you want. In any order. $10/month. If I could put it on my iPod, I'd pay it in a minute.
And I still don't get the reaction. It isn't for everyone, but to see an announcement like this be universally derided is a sad reflection on the Slashdot community- it represents group-think at it's worse. MS comes out with an unambiguous improvement on an existing product, and 95% of the comments talk about how much this sucks. If Apple or MP3.com or Google or TiVo announced this service, the comments here would gloat about how MS will never be able to match it.
If there's ever been a better example of Slashdot groupthink (particularly of the anti-MS type), I'd like to see it (links please).
I'm reading the responses here, and I'm a bit apalled (sp?) at the number of people complaining that this won't work/is evil/ shouldn't be used.
Are you kidding me? You're going to give me anytime, anywhere access to over 400,000 songs for $10/month, and you complain? Man, I wish Apple would do this, because I would certainly pay for the service to use with my iPod. These subscriptions are marginally useful to a small group of people in their current form (work on CPU only). Give me a $10 subscription that I can use on my iPod, and I'll sign up tomorrow.
Who cares if it's DRM. It's a great value, and the type of service we've all been anticipating for many years. I hope Apple beats 'em to the punch!
Mod this thing thing up! Isn't the whole point of the April 1 stories is to give us a chance to laugh at the guy who doesn't realize it's a joke. His post should be +5, Funny.
It always ticked me off how much companies charge to storage. I know that bandwidth costs money, and it costs money to maintain servers, but since the typical consumer price for a hard drive is approaching $0.50/gigabyte, it was just a matter of time before someone offered scads of storage for low-bandwidth applications. Maybe someone else will see what Google is doing and offer unlimited storage of photos and other stuff (with bandwidth limits, of course) that you can share with others.
I wrote my thesis using FrameMaker, and it saved my bacon multiple times. After having Word munge 5-too-many documents (~20 pages with 30-40 embedded objects), I decided enough was enough and I needed something designed for long documents. Although time consuming to properly create EPS files for embedding (linking actually) and setting up my paragraph formats, once it was working there was nothing that could touch it. In the end, my thesis was about 200 pages with 100+ references, oodles of cross-refernces, automatically updating Tables of Contents & Figures, close to 100 embedded grpahs & pictures, countless diagrams, a dozen tables and a small kitchen sink.
Doing it all over again, I might have used LaTeX, but Frame was very powerful and never left me wanting for more power. Plus, getting started was easy and, unlike Word, it remained stable even as I included more and more figures, etc. I'm convinced that I'd still be in grad school if I stuck with MS Word. I've vowed never to use Word for a complicated document again. In short, FrameMaker rocked.
Geeze, all that's missing is the violin music! Being an IT worker may suck, but when you start making up FoxFacts(R) to support your argument, "your brain and emotions tend to get sensitized to stupidity," you don't support your argument very well.
The fact is, most IT workers would rather work in IT than be shit-shovelers, hence that's what they do. Every job has its own set of physical & mental demands. But the constant whining of the IT folks about how hard their job is and how no one can understand how unappreciated they are drives me batty. Just because a small subset of IT guys are vocal whiners doesn't make their job any easier.
Mod this as flamebait if that suits, but shouting down opposing points of view won't make anyone appreciate you any more than they do now.
From page 6 of the article--in other words, further than 90% of the posters will read:) .
''Consider the word apple,'' Pulgram wrote. To the horticulturalist or expert grocer, it hardly occurs: instead we have ''Pippins, Codlins, Reinettes, Baldwins, McIntosh Reds, Biffins, Rome Beauties.'' Now, of course, an Apple is a computer. It's also a record label and holding company for the Beatles. Apple Computer and Apple Corps managed to co-exist for a quarter-century, but now Apple Computer has a music store, and the Beatles' representatives have filed suit.
Hmmm, nice article, but this is at least the 3rd lawsuit between the 2 Apples. I don't know why Apple Records keeps winning, although they seem to have a better case now than ever before. I'm also curious as to why Apple Records has never sued Bad Apple Records or Big Apple Records. Doesn't seem like they're doing a very good job of protecting their trademarks! And c'mon, has anyone ever confused the 2 Apples? Coming from a big Apple Computer fan, but an even bigger Beatles fan.
Well, since we're on the topic of "cool shell scripts," I have a question. Has anyone written a shell script to act as a DynDNS.org client? I ask, because 1) I couldn't fine one on their site, and 2) I need one. Specifically, I want to run it on my TiVo periodically (every couple hours) so that my IP address is up to date. I want to run it on my TiVo, as it's the only computer I own that's on all day.
And yes, I already have installed an ethernet card and I have telnet access (locally only). The goal is to always have TiVo Web Plus access (via a non-standard port and password protection) anytime, anywhere.
So, has anyone written a client like this? I think TiVo has a bash client (it runs on Linux, of course). Thanks.
Don't be bitter. I'm not that important. I work at a company where 70%+ of the Technical Staff have graduate degrees, and I'm probably in the lower half of the pay-scale. I doubt we spend as much time & effort hiring our support personnel (which may go to the crux of the problem). My only point was, whoever decided to implement this system did not do a very good job at assessing how much of a pain-in-the-ass it would be for end-users; and when they were making their ROI calculations, they probably neglected to include the cost to the company for an end-user to sit on hold for 10 minutes in order to cancel a print job. No slight was intended.
I think the sysadmins are largely responsible for these clueless users making silly requests. Not on the admin-level necessarily, but on the executive tech type level. Let me give you one example.
With Win2000, when you print a document, a printer icon appears on the system tray. Double-click this icon, and the network printer you're using shows up and lists the currently queued jobs. So if a document doesn't print out, take a look at the printer, figure out what user is holding up the line, and ask him to cancel. Or if you accidently print 10 copies of your overheads for a talk, you can easily cancel your own print job. Took about 10 seconds start to finish. It always seemed to work, and was never a problem. My guess is that is occasionally took a sysadmin 15 minutes to solve a problem caused by someone canceling the wrong job. Time is money! So naturally, the admins "improved" it.
How? Well, they removed the ability to view the current queue of jobs. So now we can't cancel our own print jobs, or figure out who the bastard is who's holding up the line. What do we do now? Call our support desk. Enter our employee number, choose the correct option from a choice of 5, wait on hold for one of our sysadmins, tell him or her the problem. Tell them the name of the printer. Verify our employee number. Job is cancelled. The last two times I've done this, it's taken about 10 minutes of my time, and about 2 minutes for the admins. And my time costs the company a lot more money than the sys admins time. But the costs for running the support center went down, so it must be good!
Honestly, this is more descriptive of the level of Dilbertism present than a general indictment of admins. To tie in with the original post, this is what causes user frustration. Thinks work fine, someone who "knows better" changes things to make them supposedly better (but actually just more complicated), and the user gets frustrated. Waiting on hold for 10 minutes to cancel a print job (when I should be doing other work) is really frustrating. Add in instances where the admins re-start computers which are in the middle of hours-longs computations without bothering to check in with the users, and it creates generally feelings of hostility towards the tech support staff.
So you want smarter or nicer users? Spend a little time understanding how the admin actions affect the end-user before implementing brain-dead improvements. I suggest doing this by asking them.
Man, I'm sure it's been posted 20+ times by now, and I'll probably be modded redundant, and no excuse for the class-A morons implicitly theatening you, but...
You're a butthead! News organizations have no duty to remove or alter an article, pay a settlement fee, or even acknowledge someone who threatens to sue them for posting a "misleasing" article. Good lord, could you imagine the precedent this would set? Everytime a bad review is written about Ford or GM or Microsoft or Enron or MCI or Haliburton or Walmart or Costco, they would sue the publisher in question. Didn't mention that Ford has a full-size spare tire on the SUV-- you get sued for being misleading. Forget to refer to Walmart as America's leading retailer-- lawsuit!! Write that Haliburton may be over-charging taxpayers for services, see you in court buddy!
I think this was a real popular thing to do back in the 70's against activists, when corporations would sue politicians or reporters in a vain attempt to muzzle them. These were termed SLAPP suits, and in response to them, laws were passed to punish the filers of these lawsuits.
The 1st Amendment is one of, if not the, important piece of legislation we have in this country. Implicit in that is being able to say whatever the hell you want as long as it's not false & damaging. Misleading & damaging-- sorry, that's protected speech. False & pointless-- no harm, no foul. False & damaging-- OK, you can sue for that, but you better have an air-tight case.
I hope Infinium gets there butts handed to them; and as for the next 2nd-rate outfit that wants to goes sue-happy in an attempt to silence their critics, I hope they think twice after watching Infinium get sanctioned for their mobster style tactics. And I hope you never get sued for writing a misleading review, because I bet it would suck.
I just wrote to my congresswoman. I encourage the others here to do the same. Here's what I wrote.
Please oppose HR3261. This bill will have the sad effect of making facts private information. This bill makes it very easy for sports leagues to sue those who provide statistics from the game, would allow race organizers to prevent 3rd parties from listing a collection of winning times, and may even prevent publication of stock quotes. This law will have a chilling effect on free speech, and will encourage frivolous lawsuits against those entities which do such a wonderful job of providing information, including internet search engines and public libraries.
This law wil not help consumers, and will make it more costly for citzens to access factual information. Please oppose this bill.
Please post here any the comments you sent to your elected representative.
Insightful? Interesting? Overrated? Speelling errors? Are you kiddin' me? This later should be +5, Funny. It's the best send-up of the Slashdot community I've seen in a long time. The fact that no one got the joke tels you just how on-target the post is.
I think your last line summed it up nicely, "But, I have learned my lesson, and from now on I will be calling and verifying such assumptions before I make a purchase."
Contrary to some of the others assailing you for making a false set of assumptions, I can clearly see your point of view. A customer-oriented company would take your experience into account and design their storefront to make it more clear what the return policy is for a particular piece of equipment. For example, a reminder of their policy on the order confirmation page would be very suitable.
Here's a question for you-- what are you doing with the XServe now?
Well, if we're going to put together massive government databases on citizens, this is the way to do it. If you're convicted of a crime, you give up certain rights. After reading so much about CAPPS and other super-spying databases that are geared towards law-abiding citizens, I'm glad someone saw the utility in applying it to people who actually commit crimes.
As for the "correlation does not equal causality" mantra being waved like a flag: no shit! I don't think the article even makes that jump, it just points out the correlation. It's left to the reader to draw his or her own inference. It's a data point, it's useful, and it should be reported. The fact that others (not so smart as yourselves) will seek to twist this one data point to their own benefit is a separate issue. I'm sure it will happen (or had happened). Doesn't mean a reporter should ignore it.
Put aside the arms race issue, and the financial issues, ability to develop the technology, etc.
The big problem is what happens once we start blowing up satellites in orbit. The debris will all enter new orbits, and there's a good chance that some of this debris will strike other satellites, which will strike others, which will destroy low-earth orbit for 50 years. That's probably why the US would not focus on kinetic weapons, which could hve chaotic consequences. OTOH, other countries with less dependence on space (and fearful of having their satellites blown up while the US satellites continue to function), would be more apt to use kinetic weapons and risk destroying loads of stuff in low-earth orbit. Don't worry, this won't affect GPS or DirecTV.
Well, the official propaganda arm of the USA, the Voice of America, has an article on the matter. I'll pull out one choice quote:
"It allows the average citizen who rents movies or movies or software or games to understand what is correct activity and what is incorrect activity," he said. "They need to understand that there is a law involved and that law is very important, and they should abide by it."
So, amyone want to bet that the RIAA doesn't note any of the "correct" ways we can our media, such as sharing with friends, making backup copies or selling them?
(By the way, I know that VOA isn't really a propaganda machine in the same sense as the Bush press office is. But it sounds funny.)
Ya, let them do that. I don't think judges think very highly of lawyers who file sham lawsuits in their courtrooms. That's probably the type of thing that would get a lawyer disbarred. I don't think David Boies is going to flush his career as a lawyer down the toilet so that SCO can save face.
I think DirecTV is great, but my experience yesterday was awful. Let me give the rundown.
1) Get my DirecTV bill, and I'm not credited with $10 as I should have been.
2) Call DirecTV. On 1st menu, select choice for existing customer.
3) Enter my phone number (so they can figure out my account). Read my phone number back to me-- y'know, 'cause I always mistype it. Press "1" to continue.
4) Enter my account number-- what? So they can confirm my account.
5) They read my street address. Press "1" to confirm. So I've now given them a unique identifier, and confirmed that I entered it correctly 3 times!!!
6) Long-winded spiel about checking my balance. Gimme a friggin' break. How many people call up DirecTV to check their account balance. 1 out of 1000? Finally select choice for other option.'
7) Next menu has no option that apply. Press "0" to talk to real person.
8) Wait on hold 5-10 minutes with no estimate of wait time.
9) Person with difficult to understand Indian accent picks up the phone. Asks for my phone number. Twice. (I've now confirmed my unique identifier 5 times).
10) Asks for my name to verify the acocunt (6 times confirming ID)
11) Explain the problem. Claims his system is down and I have to wait 2-3 minutes. Finally credits my account.
Total time, about 20 minutes. I honestly think DirecTV does this on purpose, along with many other companies. I can't remember the last time I was underbilled, but I've been overbilled by DirecTV, Verizon, Verizon Wireless, Covad, Earthlink and Adelphia probably close to 20 times in the lst 2.5 years. They know it's a PITA to resolve these things, so they hope we'll eventually give up.
Next time I call DirecTV, I'm pretending I'm a new customer.
And this is off-topic because...? Maybe flame-bait or a troll, but it's definitely off-topic. Anyways, I think it's bad for Apple and bad for the platform if Apple does not keep Safari up-to-date on at least its past 2 OS versions. Dropping support after 6 months would be a very bad thing, and this will serve to marginalize Macs. Now websites may only support Safari 1.2, and those people running Jag-wire are out-of-luck.
I'll grant that Apple may have released it for Panther first and will follow through with Jag-wire support later, and that would be fine. Barring that, I think not supporting an essential application like Safari after less than 6 months is a colossal mis-step, and I hope Apple corrects it. I suppose Safari 1.1 was 10.3 only, but I think that was more for compatibility sake. Will Safari q.2 even run on 10.2? Has anyone tried?
Well, all these aerospace programs have a lot of hands in them. It wasn't a JPL mission in the sense that JPL was not in charge of the system engineering, and they were not in charge of overall mission success-- they had a team that contributed to one part of the mission. The failure of Contour wasn't due to the failure of any one system, but instead was likely due to a component working as designed, but the system engineers did not understand how it would function; working as designed the solid rocket motor fired to kick Contour out of orbit likely damaged other parts of the craft and led to its failure. Read more here.
JPL is actually a federally-funded research & development center (FFRDC), run by Caltech. Most of JPL's funding does come from NASA, but JPL employees are not NASA employees. If you don't believe me, just ask one!
Well, something like MATRIX has been coming for a long time, the trends were clear 20-30 years ago. In fact, I bet a lot of people think that the government already has this ability. I mean, they're able to do this stuff on CSI, True Lies, that bad Will Smith/ Gene Hackman movie, etc.
The truth is, this kind of one-stop-shop could be very useful for law enforcement, and could protect our privacy well if a court order were required to search it. But, it looks like instead of being controlled by a consumer-oriented agency, it's being run by a private company for their own profit. The IRS is probably the best example of a government agency which protects citizens personal data. A few years ago, when it was found that agents were looking up this data willy-nilly, there were congressional hearings & the process was tightened up.
So, the IRS is probably the best model of a government agency protecting critical private information. That we've allowed a for-profit company to run this thing is a travesty. A MATRIX-like database is probably inevitable, but it needs to be set up in a way that protects our privacy much better.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine, then you are a leach, and in reality you are the minority. Surveys have shown that downloadable music actually has a positive impact on sales of popular albums and a negative impact on unpopular albums. The net result is only a slight decline in music sales on the order of like 1 in 5000 cd's.
e rson smarminess. Fuck that. We're no brighter than the rest of the populace. I know jack-all about the effect of p2p downloading other than through personal experience. Often there are subjects I'm more knowledgeable about, and I hope my posts reflect that. By the BS like that espoused by this AC ("surveys have shown?") are just too much too bear.
Find, great, good. I'm so glad that someone has a study now that contradicts the RIAA party line. And I'm sure the Slashdot community has vigorously studies the methods used by the investigators; to make sure there is no bias, that there methods are sound and so forth. Because we all know that the RIAA studies presented were complete BS, b/c they had an agenda. Let's disregard all that. No we have a study that proves our point of view.
This is such unadulterated BULLSHIT! When the RIAA had studies, everyone on Slashdot loved to disregard the studies (biased or not) and instead touted their anecdotal stories. Hey guess what? No one f'in knows if p2p networks increase or decrease record sales. My gut feeling says that they do, although the RIAA clearly exaggerates its effect. And if p2p increases sales, then why are nearly all the big money musicians against it? I guess they're not as smart as the Slashdot crowd and the RIAA has managed to brainwash them with their biased studies, and they really believe that p2p might hurt their incomes. Poor stupid bastards.
The outright arrogance of 90% of the posts (not necessarily 90% of posters or readers; rather, the vocal plurality) on Slashdot is overwhelming. It's always tinged with the idea that since-I'm-a-techie-I'm-smarter-than-the-average-p
Enough. Just because you're passionate about a subject doesn't mean you know what the hell you're talking about. Post some links, provide some critical analysis, but please don't parrot the same Slashthink BS that permeates Slashdot.
Well, here's the deal. You can make up any playlist you want, and listen to it anywhere. This is practically the celestial jukebox in the sky. And it doesn't have a thing to do with running/ not running on Linux; the existing services answer that question well enough.
Honestly, I just don't get it. Microsoft is working on a new plan will let MS Windows users who buy a supported MP3 player have anytime/ anywhere access to all the music in their library. Want to listen to the new Britney Spears album, but don't want to spend the $10? Load it up on your WinPod, give it a listen & chuck it. If you commute by train 40 minutes a day, you could listen to 45 new albums each month for $10! This is a phenomenal value.
Ya, DRM sucks. SO what? DOn't think there's DRM on your beloved ShoutCast stations-- get a clue. 'course, they can all be circumvented in one way or another.
Shoutcast I'm sure is really cool, there's probably lots of good stuff. But my friend has Rhapsody, and while at his CPU, it's as close to the old Napster experience you can find. Listen to any song you want. In any order. $10/month. If I could put it on my iPod, I'd pay it in a minute.
And I still don't get the reaction. It isn't for everyone, but to see an announcement like this be universally derided is a sad reflection on the Slashdot community- it represents group-think at it's worse. MS comes out with an unambiguous improvement on an existing product, and 95% of the comments talk about how much this sucks. If Apple or MP3.com or Google or TiVo announced this service, the comments here would gloat about how MS will never be able to match it.
If there's ever been a better example of Slashdot groupthink (particularly of the anti-MS type), I'd like to see it (links please).
I'm reading the responses here, and I'm a bit apalled (sp?) at the number of people complaining that this won't work/is evil/ shouldn't be used.
Are you kidding me? You're going to give me anytime, anywhere access to over 400,000 songs for $10/month, and you complain? Man, I wish Apple would do this, because I would certainly pay for the service to use with my iPod. These subscriptions are marginally useful to a small group of people in their current form (work on CPU only). Give me a $10 subscription that I can use on my iPod, and I'll sign up tomorrow.
Who cares if it's DRM. It's a great value, and the type of service we've all been anticipating for many years. I hope Apple beats 'em to the punch!
Mod this thing thing up! Isn't the whole point of the April 1 stories is to give us a chance to laugh at the guy who doesn't realize it's a joke. His post should be +5, Funny.
It always ticked me off how much companies charge to storage. I know that bandwidth costs money, and it costs money to maintain servers, but since the typical consumer price for a hard drive is approaching $0.50/gigabyte, it was just a matter of time before someone offered scads of storage for low-bandwidth applications. Maybe someone else will see what Google is doing and offer unlimited storage of photos and other stuff (with bandwidth limits, of course) that you can share with others.
It's shameful that a company would use a system that forces 20% of employees to be ranked below average. Instead, I propose the following:
10% of employees are ranked as among the top 1%
25% are ranked from 1-10%
35% ranked from 11-25%
25% ranked from 26-50%
5% are ranked below average.
I'll refer to the above scale as the Modified Woebegone System (in Lake Woebegone, of course, all the children are above average).
I wrote my thesis using FrameMaker, and it saved my bacon multiple times. After having Word munge 5-too-many documents (~20 pages with 30-40 embedded objects), I decided enough was enough and I needed something designed for long documents. Although time consuming to properly create EPS files for embedding (linking actually) and setting up my paragraph formats, once it was working there was nothing that could touch it. In the end, my thesis was about 200 pages with 100+ references, oodles of cross-refernces, automatically updating Tables of Contents & Figures, close to 100 embedded grpahs & pictures, countless diagrams, a dozen tables and a small kitchen sink.
Doing it all over again, I might have used LaTeX, but Frame was very powerful and never left me wanting for more power. Plus, getting started was easy and, unlike Word, it remained stable even as I included more and more figures, etc. I'm convinced that I'd still be in grad school if I stuck with MS Word. I've vowed never to use Word for a complicated document again. In short, FrameMaker rocked.
Geeze, all that's missing is the violin music! Being an IT worker may suck, but when you start making up FoxFacts(R) to support your argument, "your brain and emotions tend to get sensitized to stupidity," you don't support your argument very well.
The fact is, most IT workers would rather work in IT than be shit-shovelers, hence that's what they do. Every job has its own set of physical & mental demands. But the constant whining of the IT folks about how hard their job is and how no one can understand how unappreciated they are drives me batty. Just because a small subset of IT guys are vocal whiners doesn't make their job any easier.
Mod this as flamebait if that suits, but shouting down opposing points of view won't make anyone appreciate you any more than they do now.
Well, since we're on the topic of "cool shell scripts," I have a question. Has anyone written a shell script to act as a DynDNS.org client? I ask, because 1) I couldn't fine one on their site, and 2) I need one. Specifically, I want to run it on my TiVo periodically (every couple hours) so that my IP address is up to date. I want to run it on my TiVo, as it's the only computer I own that's on all day.
And yes, I already have installed an ethernet card and I have telnet access (locally only). The goal is to always have TiVo Web Plus access (via a non-standard port and password protection) anytime, anywhere.
So, has anyone written a client like this? I think TiVo has a bash client (it runs on Linux, of course). Thanks.
Don't be bitter. I'm not that important. I work at a company where 70%+ of the Technical Staff have graduate degrees, and I'm probably in the lower half of the pay-scale. I doubt we spend as much time & effort hiring our support personnel (which may go to the crux of the problem). My only point was, whoever decided to implement this system did not do a very good job at assessing how much of a pain-in-the-ass it would be for end-users; and when they were making their ROI calculations, they probably neglected to include the cost to the company for an end-user to sit on hold for 10 minutes in order to cancel a print job. No slight was intended.
I think the sysadmins are largely responsible for these clueless users making silly requests. Not on the admin-level necessarily, but on the executive tech type level. Let me give you one example.
With Win2000, when you print a document, a printer icon appears on the system tray. Double-click this icon, and the network printer you're using shows up and lists the currently queued jobs. So if a document doesn't print out, take a look at the printer, figure out what user is holding up the line, and ask him to cancel. Or if you accidently print 10 copies of your overheads for a talk, you can easily cancel your own print job. Took about 10 seconds start to finish. It always seemed to work, and was never a problem. My guess is that is occasionally took a sysadmin 15 minutes to solve a problem caused by someone canceling the wrong job. Time is money! So naturally, the admins "improved" it.
How? Well, they removed the ability to view the current queue of jobs. So now we can't cancel our own print jobs, or figure out who the bastard is who's holding up the line. What do we do now? Call our support desk. Enter our employee number, choose the correct option from a choice of 5, wait on hold for one of our sysadmins, tell him or her the problem. Tell them the name of the printer. Verify our employee number. Job is cancelled. The last two times I've done this, it's taken about 10 minutes of my time, and about 2 minutes for the admins. And my time costs the company a lot more money than the sys admins time. But the costs for running the support center went down, so it must be good!
Honestly, this is more descriptive of the level of Dilbertism present than a general indictment of admins. To tie in with the original post, this is what causes user frustration. Thinks work fine, someone who "knows better" changes things to make them supposedly better (but actually just more complicated), and the user gets frustrated. Waiting on hold for 10 minutes to cancel a print job (when I should be doing other work) is really frustrating. Add in instances where the admins re-start computers which are in the middle of hours-longs computations without bothering to check in with the users, and it creates generally feelings of hostility towards the tech support staff.
So you want smarter or nicer users? Spend a little time understanding how the admin actions affect the end-user before implementing brain-dead improvements. I suggest doing this by asking them.
Man, I'm sure it's been posted 20+ times by now, and I'll probably be modded redundant, and no excuse for the class-A morons implicitly theatening you, but...
You're a butthead! News organizations have no duty to remove or alter an article, pay a settlement fee, or even acknowledge someone who threatens to sue them for posting a "misleasing" article. Good lord, could you imagine the precedent this would set? Everytime a bad review is written about Ford or GM or Microsoft or Enron or MCI or Haliburton or Walmart or Costco, they would sue the publisher in question. Didn't mention that Ford has a full-size spare tire on the SUV-- you get sued for being misleading. Forget to refer to Walmart as America's leading retailer-- lawsuit!! Write that Haliburton may be over-charging taxpayers for services, see you in court buddy!
I think this was a real popular thing to do back in the 70's against activists, when corporations would sue politicians or reporters in a vain attempt to muzzle them. These were termed SLAPP suits, and in response to them, laws were passed to punish the filers of these lawsuits.
The 1st Amendment is one of, if not the, important piece of legislation we have in this country. Implicit in that is being able to say whatever the hell you want as long as it's not false & damaging. Misleading & damaging-- sorry, that's protected speech. False & pointless-- no harm, no foul. False & damaging-- OK, you can sue for that, but you better have an air-tight case.
I hope Infinium gets there butts handed to them; and as for the next 2nd-rate outfit that wants to goes sue-happy in an attempt to silence their critics, I hope they think twice after watching Infinium get sanctioned for their mobster style tactics. And I hope you never get sued for writing a misleading review, because I bet it would suck.
Insightful? Interesting? Overrated? Speelling errors? Are you kiddin' me? This later should be +5, Funny. It's the best send-up of the Slashdot community I've seen in a long time. The fact that no one got the joke tels you just how on-target the post is.
I think your last line summed it up nicely, "But, I have learned my lesson, and from now on I will be calling and verifying such assumptions before I make a purchase."
Contrary to some of the others assailing you for making a false set of assumptions, I can clearly see your point of view. A customer-oriented company would take your experience into account and design their storefront to make it more clear what the return policy is for a particular piece of equipment. For example, a reminder of their policy on the order confirmation page would be very suitable.
Here's a question for you-- what are you doing with the XServe now?
Well, if we're going to put together massive government databases on citizens, this is the way to do it. If you're convicted of a crime, you give up certain rights. After reading so much about CAPPS and other super-spying databases that are geared towards law-abiding citizens, I'm glad someone saw the utility in applying it to people who actually commit crimes.
As for the "correlation does not equal causality" mantra being waved like a flag: no shit! I don't think the article even makes that jump, it just points out the correlation. It's left to the reader to draw his or her own inference. It's a data point, it's useful, and it should be reported. The fact that others (not so smart as yourselves) will seek to twist this one data point to their own benefit is a separate issue. I'm sure it will happen (or had happened). Doesn't mean a reporter should ignore it.
I guess Sally Ride and the Bulletin of the Atomics have no clue either.
r imack.html.
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2002/so02/so02p
They might be right or they might be wrong, but my statement is not ill-informed or fanciful.
Put aside the arms race issue, and the financial issues, ability to develop the technology, etc.
The big problem is what happens once we start blowing up satellites in orbit. The debris will all enter new orbits, and there's a good chance that some of this debris will strike other satellites, which will strike others, which will destroy low-earth orbit for 50 years. That's probably why the US would not focus on kinetic weapons, which could hve chaotic consequences. OTOH, other countries with less dependence on space (and fearful of having their satellites blown up while the US satellites continue to function), would be more apt to use kinetic weapons and risk destroying loads of stuff in low-earth orbit. Don't worry, this won't affect GPS or DirecTV.
(By the way, I know that VOA isn't really a propaganda machine in the same sense as the Bush press office is. But it sounds funny.)
Ya, let them do that. I don't think judges think very highly of lawyers who file sham lawsuits in their courtrooms. That's probably the type of thing that would get a lawyer disbarred. I don't think David Boies is going to flush his career as a lawyer down the toilet so that SCO can save face.
I think DirecTV is great, but my experience yesterday was awful. Let me give the rundown.
1) Get my DirecTV bill, and I'm not credited with $10 as I should have been.
2) Call DirecTV. On 1st menu, select choice for existing customer.
3) Enter my phone number (so they can figure out my account). Read my phone number back to me-- y'know, 'cause I always mistype it. Press "1" to continue.
4) Enter my account number-- what? So they can confirm my account.
5) They read my street address. Press "1" to confirm. So I've now given them a unique identifier, and confirmed that I entered it correctly 3 times!!!
6) Long-winded spiel about checking my balance. Gimme a friggin' break. How many people call up DirecTV to check their account balance. 1 out of 1000? Finally select choice for other option.'
7) Next menu has no option that apply. Press "0" to talk to real person.
8) Wait on hold 5-10 minutes with no estimate of wait time.
9) Person with difficult to understand Indian accent picks up the phone. Asks for my phone number. Twice. (I've now confirmed my unique identifier 5 times).
10) Asks for my name to verify the acocunt (6 times confirming ID)
11) Explain the problem. Claims his system is down and I have to wait 2-3 minutes. Finally credits my account.
Total time, about 20 minutes. I honestly think DirecTV does this on purpose, along with many other companies. I can't remember the last time I was underbilled, but I've been overbilled by DirecTV, Verizon, Verizon Wireless, Covad, Earthlink and Adelphia probably close to 20 times in the lst 2.5 years. They know it's a PITA to resolve these things, so they hope we'll eventually give up.
Next time I call DirecTV, I'm pretending I'm a new customer.
And this is off-topic because...? Maybe flame-bait or a troll, but it's definitely off-topic. Anyways, I think it's bad for Apple and bad for the platform if Apple does not keep Safari up-to-date on at least its past 2 OS versions. Dropping support after 6 months would be a very bad thing, and this will serve to marginalize Macs. Now websites may only support Safari 1.2, and those people running Jag-wire are out-of-luck.
I'll grant that Apple may have released it for Panther first and will follow through with Jag-wire support later, and that would be fine. Barring that, I think not supporting an essential application like Safari after less than 6 months is a colossal mis-step, and I hope Apple corrects it. I suppose Safari 1.1 was 10.3 only, but I think that was more for compatibility sake. Will Safari q.2 even run on 10.2? Has anyone tried?
Well, all these aerospace programs have a lot of hands in them. It wasn't a JPL mission in the sense that JPL was not in charge of the system engineering, and they were not in charge of overall mission success-- they had a team that contributed to one part of the mission. The failure of Contour wasn't due to the failure of any one system, but instead was likely due to a component working as designed, but the system engineers did not understand how it would function; working as designed the solid rocket motor fired to kick Contour out of orbit likely damaged other parts of the craft and led to its failure. Read more here.
JPL is actually a federally-funded research & development center (FFRDC), run by Caltech. Most of JPL's funding does come from NASA, but JPL employees are not NASA employees. If you don't believe me, just ask one!
Well, something like MATRIX has been coming for a long time, the trends were clear 20-30 years ago. In fact, I bet a lot of people think that the government already has this ability. I mean, they're able to do this stuff on CSI, True Lies, that bad Will Smith/ Gene Hackman movie, etc.
The truth is, this kind of one-stop-shop could be very useful for law enforcement, and could protect our privacy well if a court order were required to search it. But, it looks like instead of being controlled by a consumer-oriented agency, it's being run by a private company for their own profit. The IRS is probably the best example of a government agency which protects citizens personal data. A few years ago, when it was found that agents were looking up this data willy-nilly, there were congressional hearings & the process was tightened up.
So, the IRS is probably the best model of a government agency protecting critical private information. That we've allowed a for-profit company to run this thing is a travesty. A MATRIX-like database is probably inevitable, but it needs to be set up in a way that protects our privacy much better.