I've yet to see a simple way to produce some of the reports (writing reports, eeewwwwwwww) people can think up.
On another note, when these exremely complex sorts of things break down, anyone who can fix them will be able to charge really big zorkmids! Same way it is now.
Stop! Who approaches the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three!
What... is your name?
Arthur: It is 'Arthur', King of the Britons.
What... is your quest?
Arthur: To seek the Holy Grail.
What's the average length of time between a slashdot posting and the subsequent DoS attack on the linked site?
Arthur: What do you mean? An American or European attack?
Huh? I-- I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!
Bedevere: How do know so much about slashdot effects?
Arthur: Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
This is what always blows me away at Walmart, is the insane number of helpers they have wandering around. If you stand in a spot for more than 30 second looking pensive, they'll rush right up to you and offer assistance in finding whatever you're looking for, sometimes annoying, but usually getting the shopping done and out of the store before you can submit to impulse shopping.
I used to work for a logistics company and it was recognised that Walmart's major success was theire logistics end. They do their own trucking and warehousing and have it down pat, enough that they are beating the other retailers with it. As that's part of the infrastructure that makes Walmart such a success, I imagine the savings there is what translates into the ability to staff with everyone but the goatse.cx guy.
Getting Walmart to change such a model system isn't goint to be any kind of cakewalk.
Now, if Walmart were to be managed by some of the greedy fsckwits, like many companies and corporations are, that recognise, in the short term, shrinking a business is more profitable than growing it (just long enough for them to get a fscking huge salary bonus and get the hell out before it collapses), you might find someone willing to cut out whatever proprietary software fees they're dealing with now. Problem being, that would be only the first part (aside from clearing out all those floorwalkers to get the immediate profit up), once they got about halfway into it they'd slash the IT budget, lose a bunch of expensive IT pros and you'd have chaos and Kmart would rise from the ashes like a phoenix.
But then again, who is to say that IBM won't turn into a monopoly just because they play nice now?
Interesting point. IBM has come down a long way, from back in the 80's when their suits came in, showed us a system 390 and did Q&A all with a very 'fsck you if you don't buy our system, because you're so very fscking stupid for not recognising it's the only solution' attitude. It put a lot of people off, just that attitude. During the early 90's as they did some serious housecleaning, they did it so fast and so far that I was getting call forwarding to different sales people each week, until the regional sales manager (some 'region' of Michigan, that is) was the one who put together the invoice for the RS/6000 we were buying (despite my protests that we should have gone with an HP9000, instead.)
IBM is no longer an 800 lb gorilla, they've been beaten and had their lunchmoney taken away from them by Dell, Compaq, Cisco, etc. They're still a pretty good size monkey, but very much more intouch with reality. Research and licensing is now a big part of their plan.
"energy bashing bashing the 800 pound gorilla,..."
"allign the support of"
"efficiency should embeace the benefits of Open Source."
How about, instead of cramming all these lameness hacks into slashdot, demonstrate the usefulness of Open Source by tying a spell/grammar checker into the perl slashcode, at least for submissions.
Then again, the submitter may be an alias for CmdrTaco...
Captain: "Now that we've landed, we ought to name it something."
Number 1: "Good idea, let's call it Earth II."
Captain: "No, I think the world settled by bad Hollywood writer's called theirs that."
Number 2: "How about Planet X, I've always fancied that one."
Captain: "Well, it does have certain pannache, but the settlers of Earth II might not be happy about it."
Number 3: "Perhaps we should call it Dirt, since we're standing on it and it's clearly made up of lots of dirt"
Number 1: "But it's got rocks, too, and sandy bits."
Number 3: "Then we could call it Dirt, Rocks and Sand!"
Captain: "Humm. While it is a descriptive name, I don't feel it would gain us much respect if we named our new world 'Dirt, Rocks and Sand'"
Number 2: "We could call it Planet of the Huge, Bloodthirsty Creatures."
Captain: "Why on Earth, or rather, here and whatever we shall call it, would we want to call it that, it's quite an alarming name and would probably do little for our budding tourism industry."
Number 2: "Well, there are some huge creatures over there which have crawled up out of the dirt, rocks and sand and are eating the passengers."
Captain: "Well, alright then, that does seem a rather good descriptive name for our new world."
And so it was settled, shortly before the crew were also devoured and it would become the Planet of Huge Creatures with Indigestion...
Ok, your mixing anecdote and generalizing, and people are going out of their way to flame you, but you do have a point.
I live in a part of the country which is no stranger to anarchist wannabes, hippies, and all manner of people in some state of disagreement with that status quo. The worst of which are the professional protesters, people who will show up for a protest or march without really any deep understanding of the purpose, and you can tell who they are, because when you show them that their arguments are full of holes and don't hold up, utter something about how you're part of the problem or start trying to outshout the voice of reason. Ok, they'll still entitled.
There are, however the spoiled and neglected children of the rich or middle class who go off and find some cause to fill their idle minds. Give them one or two in the bunch who really are dangerous and you wind up with Daly Cops beating in the heads of protesters, often protesters who are protesting reasonably, but someone with a larger agenda sets events into motion.
Sometimes all it takes is a night in jail and being bailed out by parents to shake them up a little. Perhaps that's what the authorities hope for in this case, but counseling is certainly a must, not just for the kid, but for the parents as well.
And as far as anarchists go, they're really much more comfortable with the status quo. It's fun and popular to rage against society, but most of them wouldn't last a day in a place like Mogadishu(1993) or Bogata(past 20 years).
At first, I thought I was too poor, then I realized I wasn't, but that I spend too little time in front of the t00b to justify the expense, now I just don't think much about it because it would cut into my time doing other things, and it seems I have very little spare time for it anyway. Probably why I haven't got a TiVo yet, tho I do lust after having one on a regular basis. I just saw a neat 18" LCD monitor I might have to get, so that means probably another year without cable.
Lately I've been watching Michael Palin's Full Circle, tapes I bought about 2 years ago and have finally gotten around to watching. Good stuff.
Something CmdrTaco will no doubt have less of;) See previous poll.
I cared enough to actually put mine on a fragment of dead tree, stuff into another fragment of dead tree and affix an even lesser size portion of a dead tree, and drop into a box made from coal, iron ore and a lot of energy.
It is my wish that none of this consumption has been in vain. I want what's right, and in light of what has happened with Enron and some major a** covering in Washington DC, I really mean it. Do not reward criminals with the DoJ's proposal. It'd be like giving Fastow and Skilling an honorary tickertape parade.
It's probably still part of some arcane bit of law that the register be printed (probably a founding father owned a printing press, thus creating the first government subsidy). I get a lot of government documents in.pdf for work and we're publishing our W2's to employers we service in.pdf format. Works rather nice.
But I suppose the DoJ, if they're bothered by the availibility of so many opinions counter to their remedy proposal, they could ask Adobe to put it in an e-book and encrypt it, jumping out from behind the DMCA in the event anyone tried to decrypt it and read it.
I probably shouldn't be giving them any such ideas... Bush would probably leap at this to keep energy conference notes locked up.
The Department of Justice
is arguing that there are simply too many comments to publish on paper, despite the legal requirement to do so.)
Odd, seems like a very nice way to give jobs to some of those people just itching to get back into the work force.
...oh, wait, Bush is in favor of smaller government, isn't he?
Seems to me that going into these waters, the DoJ, under any administration should have provisions for such circumstances, particularly since they knew it was coming, right? Or is it even the worry of the DoJ about such matters as the Federal Register, I'm not so sure it is.
Ignorance is always the first line of defense, whether in war or creating operating systems and applications.
Probing the defenses: looking for where the code doesn't anticipate a certain condition, isn't very efficient, but has been pretty much the way vulnerabilities are found.
Intelligence: lack of source availibility is depriving yourself of 1,000 eyes to find the vulnerability, thus it remains. If their closed code is stolen, without the benefit of freelance auditors, the problem compounds, exploits are found and can be executed when and where they can do the most damage. Open source is inviting those, 1,000 eyes of freelance auditors to report a vulnerability. There still remains the chance some unethical person will spot it and not report it, choosing to exploit it later, but they play roulette in that someone still may find the hole and close it.
I wish Fry's would (the big tech store chain), but the dingbats behind the counter seem trained to explain these fee differences to me, like I could care. They don't take my card, I shop elsewhere. My visa is actually a check cart, which is the way I prefer to keep it.
Also, it's the best card for travel, since Amex has offices throughout the world you can go to for help, exchange and other services. Membership does have some tangible benefits.
When crossing the border, it's about as important to have as the passport, IMHO.
Sure a chunk of it is EBay, but I'm finding, just this morning, another dealer on the web accepting payment through PayPal. EBay, AFAIK, espouses Billpoint, to the extent that it's a standard option for payment.
As a buyer, Paypal is nice, because they accept Amex, where other services don't, and I prefer to use the green card. As an occasional seller, I don't use them anymore due to restrictions they claim have been imposed upon them, limiting the amount that maybe transferred from one person's account to anothers. Last I used it it was only good for $100/mo, now I can't receive cc payments unless I sign up for more service, which I haven't done, but expect the fee schedule to be less than welcome, from dealers I have talked to.
On another tack, I'm not too surprised the IPO was only for 70 million, investors aren't as likely to run willy-nilly (a highly technical term) to throw money at. I think Paypal does have a bright future, particularly since they've made it easy for me to buy and sell things to people overseas, and I have a contact here, if it goes wrong. I'd just like more insurance, when the seller withdraws all their funds and runs away without sending anything, rather than a confirmation.
"Yep, they ripped you off, bud. How else may we be of service?"
Well last I looked there weren't very many modded down, so I think you two have caught the trolls with their pants up and without their steaming hot grits! A good sign, I reckon.
Sorry, had one more in me after the CmdrTaco loves Kathleen article.
Shouldn't happen again for a few weeks. I've just had a few Pils Urquells which supress the urge nicely.
Nice article on sharks in Santa Cruz Good Times last week, stupidly I left my copy behind. I'll need to catch another one before they all get recycled. Studying blue and great whites off Ano Nuevo, California, where seals, sea lions and elephant seals breed. Neat stuff about the misconceptions of sharts propagated by Jaws and shellfish fisherman, some great pictures, too.
Not a fan, could barely sit through it. I'm not surprised actors and actresses are abandoning it like a sinking ship. Michael Shanks shows uncommon sense and courage in saving his career before it's irreparably damaged by typecasting in shallow conspiracy theory shows. The theme is overdone and Hollywood's stable of young, unimaginative writers is as much to blame as the moronic producers who favor formula over substance.
I bailed on X-Files when it turned into a conspiracy show, because, let's face it, real-life government is full of much more interesting genuine intrigue and scandal if that's what you want. It's there, and you don't even have to look very hard. Why watch TV that can't even get your heart going with suspense, let along a plot from lame writing.
A thought just struck me (ouch), I grew up about the time TV was getting over the fascination of the new medium and starting to put together some decent shows. So I've been exposed to pretty much all of it, but it's still a young medium (compared to print and radio) and I get the feeling my indifference isn't so much in having seen 'it' all before or that the writing isn't so fresh, but that TV is really in a big decline. Profit margins, commoditizing, and some other things really have replaced the talented people that got TV started in the first place. As campy as some older shows are, they demonstrated some serious imagination and cooperative atmosphere to make them happen that seems missing in shows like SG-1, which seem utterly pointless.
It would be very interesting to see a live show where actors are handed a script and actually try to do something, rather than shows loaded up with male and female models as vacuous and passionless as the writing.
PS: This lameness filtering obviously is optional, as you get away with a 4 chr post, while I had to type this whole postscript to get past some silly minimum # of characters per line.
Slashdot Mirror
Rocket powered Nike shoes
802.11b wrist computers with 1G ram and 10G harddisk
Britney Spears gets old and finally goes away
N'Sync found dead, their contribution to pop music will be greatly missed
Cheese in a can is still around, woohoo!
Robots doing your cooking, laundry, and house cleaning and not expecting a thing for Valentine's day
Survivor XXIX where Rambus executives are thrown into a cage of lions which haven't eaten for two weeks
Still having Social Security around
President CowboyNeal
On another note, when these exremely complex sorts of things break down, anyone who can fix them will be able to charge really big zorkmids! Same way it is now.
Stop! Who approaches the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three!
What... is your name?
Arthur: It is 'Arthur', King of the Britons.
What... is your quest?
Arthur: To seek the Holy Grail.
What's the average length of time between a slashdot posting and the subsequent DoS attack on the linked site?
Arthur: What do you mean? An American or European attack?
Huh? I-- I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!
Bedevere: How do know so much about slashdot effects?
Arthur: Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
This is what always blows me away at Walmart, is the insane number of helpers they have wandering around. If you stand in a spot for more than 30 second looking pensive, they'll rush right up to you and offer assistance in finding whatever you're looking for, sometimes annoying, but usually getting the shopping done and out of the store before you can submit to impulse shopping.
I used to work for a logistics company and it was recognised that Walmart's major success was theire logistics end. They do their own trucking and warehousing and have it down pat, enough that they are beating the other retailers with it. As that's part of the infrastructure that makes Walmart such a success, I imagine the savings there is what translates into the ability to staff with everyone but the goatse.cx guy.
Getting Walmart to change such a model system isn't goint to be any kind of cakewalk.
Now, if Walmart were to be managed by some of the greedy fsckwits, like many companies and corporations are, that recognise, in the short term, shrinking a business is more profitable than growing it (just long enough for them to get a fscking huge salary bonus and get the hell out before it collapses), you might find someone willing to cut out whatever proprietary software fees they're dealing with now. Problem being, that would be only the first part (aside from clearing out all those floorwalkers to get the immediate profit up), once they got about halfway into it they'd slash the IT budget, lose a bunch of expensive IT pros and you'd have chaos and Kmart would rise from the ashes like a phoenix.
IBM is no longer an 800 lb gorilla, they've been beaten and had their lunchmoney taken away from them by Dell, Compaq, Cisco, etc. They're still a pretty good size monkey, but very much more intouch with reality. Research and licensing is now a big part of their plan.
"energy bashing bashing the 800 pound gorilla,..."
"allign the support of"
"efficiency should embeace the benefits of Open Source."
How about, instead of cramming all these lameness hacks into slashdot, demonstrate the usefulness of Open Source by tying a spell/grammar checker into the perl slashcode, at least for submissions.
Then again, the submitter may be an alias for CmdrTaco...
Number 1: "Good idea, let's call it Earth II."
Captain: "No, I think the world settled by bad Hollywood writer's called theirs that."
Number 2: "How about Planet X, I've always fancied that one."
Captain: "Well, it does have certain pannache, but the settlers of Earth II might not be happy about it."
Number 3: "Perhaps we should call it Dirt, since we're standing on it and it's clearly made up of lots of dirt"
Number 1: "But it's got rocks, too, and sandy bits."
Number 3: "Then we could call it Dirt, Rocks and Sand!"
Captain: "Humm. While it is a descriptive name, I don't feel it would gain us much respect if we named our new world 'Dirt, Rocks and Sand'"
Number 2: "We could call it Planet of the Huge, Bloodthirsty Creatures."
Captain: "Why on Earth, or rather, here and whatever we shall call it, would we want to call it that, it's quite an alarming name and would probably do little for our budding tourism industry."
Number 2: "Well, there are some huge creatures over there which have crawled up out of the dirt, rocks and sand and are eating the passengers."
Captain: "Well, alright then, that does seem a rather good descriptive name for our new world."
And so it was settled, shortly before the crew were also devoured and it would become the Planet of Huge Creatures with Indigestion...
I live in a part of the country which is no stranger to anarchist wannabes, hippies, and all manner of people in some state of disagreement with that status quo. The worst of which are the professional protesters, people who will show up for a protest or march without really any deep understanding of the purpose, and you can tell who they are, because when you show them that their arguments are full of holes and don't hold up, utter something about how you're part of the problem or start trying to outshout the voice of reason. Ok, they'll still entitled.
There are, however the spoiled and neglected children of the rich or middle class who go off and find some cause to fill their idle minds. Give them one or two in the bunch who really are dangerous and you wind up with Daly Cops beating in the heads of protesters, often protesters who are protesting reasonably, but someone with a larger agenda sets events into motion.
Sometimes all it takes is a night in jail and being bailed out by parents to shake them up a little. Perhaps that's what the authorities hope for in this case, but counseling is certainly a must, not just for the kid, but for the parents as well.
And as far as anarchists go, they're really much more comfortable with the status quo. It's fun and popular to rage against society, but most of them wouldn't last a day in a place like Mogadishu(1993) or Bogata(past 20 years).
It may be easier to just get a new domain or IP address, yes, no?
Lately I've been watching Michael Palin's Full Circle, tapes I bought about 2 years ago and have finally gotten around to watching. Good stuff.
Something CmdrTaco will no doubt have less of ;) See previous poll.
It is my wish that none of this consumption has been in vain. I want what's right, and in light of what has happened with Enron and some major a** covering in Washington DC, I really mean it. Do not reward criminals with the DoJ's proposal. It'd be like giving Fastow and Skilling an honorary tickertape parade.
But I suppose the DoJ, if they're bothered by the availibility of so many opinions counter to their remedy proposal, they could ask Adobe to put it in an e-book and encrypt it, jumping out from behind the DMCA in the event anyone tried to decrypt it and read it.
I probably shouldn't be giving them any such ideas... Bush would probably leap at this to keep energy conference notes locked up.
Odd, seems like a very nice way to give jobs to some of those people just itching to get back into the work force.
Seems to me that going into these waters, the DoJ, under any administration should have provisions for such circumstances, particularly since they knew it was coming, right? Or is it even the worry of the DoJ about such matters as the Federal Register, I'm not so sure it is.
Probing the defenses: looking for where the code doesn't anticipate a certain condition, isn't very efficient, but has been pretty much the way vulnerabilities are found.
Intelligence: lack of source availibility is depriving yourself of 1,000 eyes to find the vulnerability, thus it remains. If their closed code is stolen, without the benefit of freelance auditors, the problem compounds, exploits are found and can be executed when and where they can do the most damage. Open source is inviting those, 1,000 eyes of freelance auditors to report a vulnerability. There still remains the chance some unethical person will spot it and not report it, choosing to exploit it later, but they play roulette in that someone still may find the hole and close it.
Formal Methods: "Here, code this"
Code Audits: "Did it compile?"
Testing: "Put it in the final distribution."
Design Reviews: "Are these coffee stains on the spec sheets?"
Codified Best Practices: "Profits are up and we've extended our monopoly, here's your salary bonus."
I wonder what they've planned for the other 27 days...
I wish Fry's would (the big tech store chain), but the dingbats behind the counter seem trained to explain these fee differences to me, like I could care. They don't take my card, I shop elsewhere. My visa is actually a check cart, which is the way I prefer to keep it.
When crossing the border, it's about as important to have as the passport, IMHO.
As a buyer, Paypal is nice, because they accept Amex, where other services don't, and I prefer to use the green card. As an occasional seller, I don't use them anymore due to restrictions they claim have been imposed upon them, limiting the amount that maybe transferred from one person's account to anothers. Last I used it it was only good for $100/mo, now I can't receive cc payments unless I sign up for more service, which I haven't done, but expect the fee schedule to be less than welcome, from dealers I have talked to.
On another tack, I'm not too surprised the IPO was only for 70 million, investors aren't as likely to run willy-nilly (a highly technical term) to throw money at. I think Paypal does have a bright future, particularly since they've made it easy for me to buy and sell things to people overseas, and I have a contact here, if it goes wrong. I'd just like more insurance, when the seller withdraws all their funds and runs away without sending anything, rather than a confirmation.
"Yep, they ripped you off, bud. How else may we be of service?"
Gee, it's like they're husband and wife already!
Well last I looked there weren't very many modded down, so I think you two have caught the trolls with their pants up and without their steaming hot grits! A good sign, I reckon.
Shouldn't happen again for a few weeks. I've just had a few Pils Urquells which supress the urge nicely.
Nice article on sharks in Santa Cruz Good Times last week, stupidly I left my copy behind. I'll need to catch another one before they all get recycled. Studying blue and great whites off Ano Nuevo, California, where seals, sea lions and elephant seals breed. Neat stuff about the misconceptions of sharts propagated by Jaws and shellfish fisherman, some great pictures, too.
A thought just struck me (ouch), I grew up about the time TV was getting over the fascination of the new medium and starting to put together some decent shows. So I've been exposed to pretty much all of it, but it's still a young medium (compared to print and radio) and I get the feeling my indifference isn't so much in having seen 'it' all before or that the writing isn't so fresh, but that TV is really in a big decline. Profit margins, commoditizing, and some other things really have replaced the talented people that got TV started in the first place. As campy as some older shows are, they demonstrated some serious imagination and cooperative atmosphere to make them happen that seems missing in shows like SG-1, which seem utterly pointless.
It would be very interesting to see a live show where actors are handed a script and actually try to do something, rather than shows loaded up with male and female models as vacuous and passionless as the writing.
"...can't get enough of your love, babe..."
Congrats to you both!
PS: This lameness filtering obviously is optional, as you get away with a 4 chr post, while I had to type this whole postscript to get past some silly minimum # of characters per line.
Oh, and grats!