The number one feature management asks for on any private telephone system (PBX/key, etc.) is "boss listen" or equivalent. It is on probably seventy percent of private telephone systems in the US, and I don't know how many in the UK. Some PBX makers no longer list it as an option, but have it as part of the default operating set.
Email is the same way. Lots of companies simply record everything in and out of the server "just in case".
The key is in whether the management really monitors these things. Easy enough to find out, though. Use disinformation, and see where the screams come from...
California is the only state I know of that guarantees privacy only to criminal defendants, not to ordinary citizens. Go ahead, READ the state constitution carefully.
Will californians have to get arrested to use this new office?
We all agree that the major profitmaker for Digital Convergence is the demographics information that can be marketed.
Having been in the business, I can tell you that demographics are only as good as the data behind them, and that the profitability of such is based strictly upon accuracy. Nobody wants to pollute their marketing prediction models with bullshit data.
Since DC is asking us (the computer user) for information, maybe we should give them some.
Hypothetically speaking, what would happen if a script were written that emulates a CueCat? Suppose somebody took the list of valid UPCs (or genned up the entire space) and ran a script against it that picked random items, set up a query string, dropped it on DC's server, and sent any return output to/dev/null? Suppose they make it work slow, and on a random time basis. perhaps they weight the UPC list pick so that things with cuecat barcodes in magazines and catalogs are picked in preference. Lord knows they will probably spoof those return addresses.
How long do you think this would have to go on before DC's CUSTOMERS would have a fit? About the first time some large firm makes a bogus million dollar advertising investment based on DC's numbers, that will be all she wrote.
Dang! I wish it was the Justice Department instead of just the FCC.
This merger will be the best thing since fried bread for people like you and I. Think of it, all the consumerish suzy-does-it it-was-good-enough-for-dad,-so-it's-good-enough-fo r-me me-tooing monkey-see-monkey-do banner-clicking morons all in one place, and we can call that place AOL/Time-Warner.
Shouldn't be too hard to map it out. We can all share, kind of like the spam black hole list. Mark it and block it. Think of what it would be like to have Usenet back again. Or not have to pay a fortune on bandwidth charges to a web site simply because a gaggle of AOL gradeschoolers thought there were cool scripts there.
Of course, they could block us, but is this bad thing? If you have content, they will want it, no question about that. Just be sure to charge them enough...
Gee, I always thought the CIA ran Radio Free Europe, at least until the NSA took it away from them. Oh, you meant officially...
That little world still goes on. You can scroll through the shortwave band and occasionally hear the dead lady chanting her numbers. But now they are in spanish, not russian.
Really, how remote are you talking? How much bandwidth do you need? Realtime, or will short-store-and-forward work? Fixed, switched, or DAMA?What's your limit on latency?
Satellite immediately springs to mind, but there are spots on this earth where footprints don't reach (polar regions behind mountain ranges...) If you have the right sort of data you could meteor burst it, or use old-style RTTY.
AMsat can get you bandwidth in sixty-four K chunks from a portable transceiver, what they don't tell you is the latency, and the bloody thing won't tolerate compression, or multi-link well.
Most vendors of "works anywhere" equipment have not really tested their stuff. It is amazing how many companies would drag their equipment out to one of our remote sites for tests, have it fail, and then say something like "it worked okay at the cabin in Maine...". Let me tell you, there is no place in the contiguous 48 american states that may be considered "remote". When dealing with the vendors, always ask how the gear/method works at higher latitudes and arctic regions. You will most likely get a mixed response. It may work in the middle of the ocean at the equator, but things are iffy at longer reaches.
If worse comes to worse, you could simply mail them the CD-ROM...
For a while there, I thought we were going to have to TELL them what to do with Napster.
You would think that with all the charge-backs and profit-splitting that recording companies traditionally do, that any group or musician with enough fan-base would want to get away from those contracts just as fast as they could.
Has anyone considered that high-tech work may not be the entire issue here? That there is also a social effect to the H1B system?
Consider: High-tech worker (possibly from upper classes of their society, certainly educated) comes to America and is immersed in our culture for six years. What happens when he goes home?
Does he not yearn for a REAL Coke? Doesn't he know that Nikes are cool? Doesn't he want to drive his car to work instead of riding the train? Doesn't he want his government to work as well as ours? (knock it if you want, but for all the kinks and bullshit the US government has, it is light years ahead of most others.)
The US government couldn't buy a better missionary. We tried the Peace Corp earlier, and it didn't work for this purpose. One, because it was frequently used as a cover for three letter agency types, and two, because it was a bunch of Americans handing down the "way it shall be". A much better approach is to let folks in other countries come see what is better, and then send them back to want it and do something about it in their own areas. If you want to know, it was this apporach that pretty well started the old Soviet Union off to ruin. A bunch of dudes from the state department make sure that every Soviet countryman that came to the states was able to see a supermarket, a department store, and a family in action. And then sent them home to tell the neighbors...
There are some folks here who do this regularly. Most of them take the snowmachine, instead of walking. Of course, you have to live in Little Diomede, but it is a great source of all kinds of neat things...
Use either the regular mail, or DHL, or send it via airline counter service (assuming there is an airport nearby). Don't expect anything good to get there intact.
Don't ask him anything. Just DO something about it
on
FBI Rep To Speak
·
· Score: 2
like offer to teach people how to encrypt thier email so that what they have just heard about won't bother them.
Be sure to explain to the crowd at large that while the FBI is collecting the email of the bad guys, they are also having a good chuckle reading the other folks as well.
Use the postcard analogy, that is that this technology will make the FBI just like the postman who reads all of the postcards, of course, it means that all of the public's mail will be about as secure as a postcard.
Be sure to explain to the nice men in the suits that you are just trying to be helpful...
They call themselves hackers, and they don't even know enough to bypass/edit-out on log files?
My friends, this is what's wrong with America. We are going to leave this country to a bunch of dweebs who havn't learned to avoid grief, even when they KNOW it is there.
To my mind, they simply didn't think about what they were doing. Of course, if they had been taught to think, then they may not have done it in the first place.
The thing that waxed Smalltalk at first was lack of horsepower. We didn't learn it at school because there were limited resources, and it was hard to find an instructor who was anything but a COBOL/FORTRAN/RPGII nerd retreaded with C and BASIC. Yeah, Smalltalk worked, but it ate up the timeslots that would ordinarily go to five other terminals. So we used it (and LISP, and APL) late at night after the lab was closed.
I, for one, thought that micros would change things, and that Smalltalk and its OO brethren would move to their rightful places. Not so. Performance was king. After all, if it doesn't work from the customer's point of view, who care what language it's written in. Smalltalk didn't have the abilites of hardware manipulation or operationg system interaction that were needed to produce real-world programs. The only thing even close was Forth.
Then compute power got cheap, and I am once again expecting Smalltalk or its ilk to surface, not as a competitor to program-writing systems already in place, but as a method of reducing the labor factor during the maintenance life cycle of new programs. "Standards based" may have whacked this problem for now, but after the E-business thing gets really going, and business folks realize that changing program features will affect market share and profitability, custom code will make a comeback. Constant change to fit market conditions will require as easy maintenance as possible, and hardware will just be a minor cost.
Consider, this may not be hackers, but programmers in general.
When we program we deal with a large project, from a human's point of view. Even small programs are complex. Often thousands of different variables, not all of which are under our control, or even known to us affect what we do. We try to fix something that is immensely complex, and often, for no reason we can understand, it breaks, or fixes, itself.
When you put people into a system where the manipulations and results are not predictable, you are going to get some form of religion out. It is just that Lutheran ministers and Babtist preachers don't know what you are babbling about, and whatever it is, they can't help you with it. They also don't want you to infect their flock with thought, or ideas, or anything, and so programming folk are often pushed out to the edges of established religions (or any other social system, really.)
As this technology becomes better understood and more widespread (yes, computers are everywhere, but programming is not. How many of the actual public knows what a systems programmer looks like?)then I suspect a drop in alternative religion use by programmer folk. This may be what is happening.
Last time I did any research on the subject the Egyptian pyramids were not as the builders had originally created them. As I understand it, they were painted and carved, to a certain extent. An entire layer of stone had been removed for use as building materials. Happened some time in the seventeen hundreds, but I may be wrong about this.
Now, granted, they are still in use as tombs, which was at least the main function (aside from ceremonial uses) and they seem to have served the purpose really well. But they have suffered the ravages of time, even in a relatively lifeless desert. Like all good buildings, their builders relied on the three L's - Location, Location, Location.
To give you an example of what I am getting at, go look at a paved street. Then go find a paved street that has been cut off, no traffic and no maintenance, for a few years. Look at what plants do to it. How long do you think it will last?
Locating a huge tower/deorbit site would be even more difficult if you accept that it has to be on the equator, as this puts it near water (mostly) and a healthy ecosystem.
Troy was plenty newer than the pyramids. What shape was it in? I swear if I were to go out and sink a three foot thick solid titanium shaft into a piece of bedrock in the middle of a desert, the only fitting engravment would be "And this too, shall pass."
When will people understand that web design is not print?
Web design has a lot more in common with video production than it does with print. About the only thing that seems to be a constant are the marketing rules: "if you don't see it in the first ten seconds, it doesn't matter", and "if it isn't on the first page it doesn't count".
I think the only solution is to have manufacturers build PC's and monitors that only display Pantone colors. We know what is good for the people...
Cashing in on cheap broadcast capabilities?
on
Nokia Media Terminal
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· Score: 2
Note that the mobile unit uses DVB as the downlink and GSM cell phone as the uplink. This will entail a broadcaster supporting the bloody things in your particular area.
This could be a godsend for those broadcasters in the USA who are having a hard time coming up with the considerable scratch needed to meet the FCC's deadlines for HDTV transmissions. Using Digital Video Broadcasting they can still create a revenue stream (info delivery) while avoiding the many equipment changes that they would have to pay for HDTV support. All they have to do is get connectivity and a digital transmitter, which they would have to purchase in any case. They drop out of the video production biz (studios, camera, lights, editing gear, etc. all have to be changed or modified to fit HDTV...) and just concentrate on delivery, and let the cable folks pick up the broadcast segement. After all, there is little broadcast penetration in major markets anyway. It is all cable.
Makes me wonder if Nokia is going to supply the back end of this. Anybody know?
Slashdot Mirror
Second, make sure that you battery has the best seat in the house at all times.
When approaching your battery, you should bow, and ask it's blessing upin the computing you are about to perform...
And does it last more than five minutes?
Email is the same way. Lots of companies simply record everything in and out of the server "just in case".
The key is in whether the management really monitors these things. Easy enough to find out, though. Use disinformation, and see where the screams come from...
Besides, cabbages are a higher plant life form, and thus I (and journalists) don't qualify.
Now all I have to do if get them to drop it somewhere more convienient than the Atlantic ocean. Hmm, Africa might do...
Will californians have to get arrested to use this new office?
Just glad I don't live there...
Take your coat off. This place could use more journalists
Welcome!?
Nobody buys demographics if they are wrong.
Hypothetically, someone could use a good-sized database of UPCs to make false cue-cat scans, and send them to DC's servers.
There is no way for DC to tell which ones are real or bogus. There is no way for DC's customers to tell, either.
DC's customers will eventually find this out. Maybe somebody should spare them the trouble and tell them up front.
This could be the basis for a really good nerve-to-silicon sensor arrangement.
People,
Who don't need people,
Are the happiest people,
in the world...
[/singing]
Sorry, couldn't help myself...
Having been in the business, I can tell you that demographics are only as good as the data behind them, and that the profitability of such is based strictly upon accuracy. Nobody wants to pollute their marketing prediction models with bullshit data.
Since DC is asking us (the computer user) for information, maybe we should give them some.
Hypothetically speaking, what would happen if a script were written that emulates a CueCat? Suppose somebody took the list of valid UPCs (or genned up the entire space) and ran a script against it that picked random items, set up a query string, dropped it on DC's server, and sent any return output to /dev/null? Suppose they make it work slow, and on a random time basis. perhaps they weight the UPC list pick so that things with cuecat barcodes in magazines and catalogs are picked in preference. Lord knows they will probably spoof those return addresses.
How long do you think this would have to go on before DC's CUSTOMERS would have a fit? About the first time some large firm makes a bogus million dollar advertising investment based on DC's numbers, that will be all she wrote.
This merger will be the best thing since fried bread for people like you and I. Think of it, all the consumerish suzy-does-it it-was-good-enough-for-dad,-so-it's-good-enough-fo r-me me-tooing monkey-see-monkey-do banner-clicking morons all in one place, and we can call that place AOL/Time-Warner.
Shouldn't be too hard to map it out. We can all share, kind of like the spam black hole list. Mark it and block it. Think of what it would be like to have Usenet back again. Or not have to pay a fortune on bandwidth charges to a web site simply because a gaggle of AOL gradeschoolers thought there were cool scripts there.
Of course, they could block us, but is this bad thing? If you have content, they will want it, no question about that. Just be sure to charge them enough...
The shamans tell me that they could convince the whales to sing messages for them. Now, I just have to figure out how to write a driver...
That little world still goes on. You can scroll through the shortwave band and occasionally hear the dead lady chanting her numbers. But now they are in spanish, not russian.
Really, how remote are you talking? How much bandwidth do you need? Realtime, or will short-store-and-forward work? Fixed, switched, or DAMA?What's your limit on latency?
Satellite immediately springs to mind, but there are spots on this earth where footprints don't reach (polar regions behind mountain ranges...) If you have the right sort of data you could meteor burst it, or use old-style RTTY.
AMsat can get you bandwidth in sixty-four K chunks from a portable transceiver, what they don't tell you is the latency, and the bloody thing won't tolerate compression, or multi-link well.
Most vendors of "works anywhere" equipment have not really tested their stuff. It is amazing how many companies would drag their equipment out to one of our remote sites for tests, have it fail, and then say something like "it worked okay at the cabin in Maine...". Let me tell you, there is no place in the contiguous 48 american states that may be considered "remote". When dealing with the vendors, always ask how the gear/method works at higher latitudes and arctic regions. You will most likely get a mixed response. It may work in the middle of the ocean at the equator, but things are iffy at longer reaches.
If worse comes to worse, you could simply mail them the CD-ROM...
You would think that with all the charge-backs and profit-splitting that recording companies traditionally do, that any group or musician with enough fan-base would want to get away from those contracts just as fast as they could.
Consider: High-tech worker (possibly from upper classes of their society, certainly educated) comes to America and is immersed in our culture for six years. What happens when he goes home?
Does he not yearn for a REAL Coke? Doesn't he know that Nikes are cool? Doesn't he want to drive his car to work instead of riding the train? Doesn't he want his government to work as well as ours? (knock it if you want, but for all the kinks and bullshit the US government has, it is light years ahead of most others.)
The US government couldn't buy a better missionary. We tried the Peace Corp earlier, and it didn't work for this purpose. One, because it was frequently used as a cover for three letter agency types, and two, because it was a bunch of Americans handing down the "way it shall be". A much better approach is to let folks in other countries come see what is better, and then send them back to want it and do something about it in their own areas. If you want to know, it was this apporach that pretty well started the old Soviet Union off to ruin. A bunch of dudes from the state department make sure that every Soviet countryman that came to the states was able to see a supermarket, a department store, and a family in action. And then sent them home to tell the neighbors...
Use either the regular mail, or DHL, or send it via airline counter service (assuming there is an airport nearby). Don't expect anything good to get there intact.
Be sure to explain to the crowd at large that while the FBI is collecting the email of the bad guys, they are also having a good chuckle reading the other folks as well.
Use the postcard analogy, that is that this technology will make the FBI just like the postman who reads all of the postcards, of course, it means that all of the public's mail will be about as secure as a postcard.
Be sure to explain to the nice men in the suits that you are just trying to be helpful...
My friends, this is what's wrong with America. We are going to leave this country to a bunch of dweebs who havn't learned to avoid grief, even when they KNOW it is there.
To my mind, they simply didn't think about what they were doing. Of course, if they had been taught to think, then they may not have done it in the first place.
The thing that waxed Smalltalk at first was lack of horsepower. We didn't learn it at school because there were limited resources, and it was hard to find an instructor who was anything but a COBOL/FORTRAN/RPGII nerd retreaded with C and BASIC. Yeah, Smalltalk worked, but it ate up the timeslots that would ordinarily go to five other terminals. So we used it (and LISP, and APL) late at night after the lab was closed.
I, for one, thought that micros would change things, and that Smalltalk and its OO brethren would move to their rightful places. Not so. Performance was king. After all, if it doesn't work from the customer's point of view, who care what language it's written in. Smalltalk didn't have the abilites of hardware manipulation or operationg system interaction that were needed to produce real-world programs. The only thing even close was Forth.
Then compute power got cheap, and I am once again expecting Smalltalk or its ilk to surface, not as a competitor to program-writing systems already in place, but as a method of reducing the labor factor during the maintenance life cycle of new programs. "Standards based" may have whacked this problem for now, but after the E-business thing gets really going, and business folks realize that changing program features will affect market share and profitability, custom code will make a comeback. Constant change to fit market conditions will require as easy maintenance as possible, and hardware will just be a minor cost.
Besides, I miss the damned turtle...
When we program we deal with a large project, from a human's point of view. Even small programs are complex. Often thousands of different variables, not all of which are under our control, or even known to us affect what we do. We try to fix something that is immensely complex, and often, for no reason we can understand, it breaks, or fixes, itself.
When you put people into a system where the manipulations and results are not predictable, you are going to get some form of religion out. It is just that Lutheran ministers and Babtist preachers don't know what you are babbling about, and whatever it is, they can't help you with it. They also don't want you to infect their flock with thought, or ideas, or anything, and so programming folk are often pushed out to the edges of established religions (or any other social system, really.)
As this technology becomes better understood and more widespread (yes, computers are everywhere, but programming is not. How many of the actual public knows what a systems programmer looks like?)then I suspect a drop in alternative religion use by programmer folk. This may be what is happening.
Now, granted, they are still in use as tombs, which was at least the main function (aside from ceremonial uses) and they seem to have served the purpose really well. But they have suffered the ravages of time, even in a relatively lifeless desert. Like all good buildings, their builders relied on the three L's - Location, Location, Location.
To give you an example of what I am getting at, go look at a paved street. Then go find a paved street that has been cut off, no traffic and no maintenance, for a few years. Look at what plants do to it. How long do you think it will last?
Locating a huge tower/deorbit site would be even more difficult if you accept that it has to be on the equator, as this puts it near water (mostly) and a healthy ecosystem.
Troy was plenty newer than the pyramids. What shape was it in? I swear if I were to go out and sink a three foot thick solid titanium shaft into a piece of bedrock in the middle of a desert, the only fitting engravment would be "And this too, shall pass."
Web design has a lot more in common with video production than it does with print. About the only thing that seems to be a constant are the marketing rules: "if you don't see it in the first ten seconds, it doesn't matter", and "if it isn't on the first page it doesn't count".
I think the only solution is to have manufacturers build PC's and monitors that only display Pantone colors. We know what is good for the people...
This could be a godsend for those broadcasters in the USA who are having a hard time coming up with the considerable scratch needed to meet the FCC's deadlines for HDTV transmissions. Using Digital Video Broadcasting they can still create a revenue stream (info delivery) while avoiding the many equipment changes that they would have to pay for HDTV support. All they have to do is get connectivity and a digital transmitter, which they would have to purchase in any case. They drop out of the video production biz (studios, camera, lights, editing gear, etc. all have to be changed or modified to fit HDTV...) and just concentrate on delivery, and let the cable folks pick up the broadcast segement. After all, there is little broadcast penetration in major markets anyway. It is all cable.
Makes me wonder if Nokia is going to supply the back end of this. Anybody know?