I'll bet my life savings this, like many (most?) other advancements in computers, will be first utilized to the max by the adult entertainment industry. Hell, half the internet now is pr0n, why would it change?
IMHO, Ask Slashdot is a forum to ask anything about the computer/geek world in general. This man isn't asking us to write his business plan, he already has a partial business plan (note that for just about every question he provides his current solution). Perhaps he wants some feedback to reassure himself that he's taking the correct steps. Maybe someone will suggest something he hasn't thought of. Either way, Ask Slashdot is exactly the forum for this question.
Let's say he DOES want us to create a business plan for him...what's wrong with that? Feel like it's giving away company secrets? Don't post. Feel like he should be doing the research himself? Don't post. Were I starting a business that revolved around computer people as the main clientele, Slashdot would be one of the first places I checked for resources, if for no other reason than because it has a large base of intelligent users.
My $.02, that's all...where would you suggest he go to find this information?
I'm not sure you're looking the correct target audience. Kids (under 18/still living at home) don't have the ability to order a high speed connection, and many times their parents don't feel like one is necessary. Couple this with the fact that 13-18 year olds have one of the highest amounts of disposable income, and you have a pretty profitable business.
Dude, the same could be said of asking 'What OS should I be using for '. That's what Slashdot is about. If you want everyone to have to pay for information and have nothing be free, I believe the RIAA is looking for high quality employees...
Check me if I'm wrong, but the Earth had plenty of plant life back before hydrocarbons were used/burned for energy. I think it's a little egotistical to think that WE'RE the reason plants have survived, and not vice versa.
"The conduct which underlies the indictment includes ElcomSoft's offering its AEBPR program for sale over the Internet, from a computer server physically located in the United States," the judge wrote. "Purchasers obtained copies of the program in the United States... Payments were directed to, and received by, an entity in the United States."
Go ahead and mod me down, but if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but has papers saying it's an ostrich, I'd say it's still a duck...
First, some background: I'm a Programmer/System Administrator with a heavy bias towards Open Source software.
And this guy's article got posted on Slashdot? Wow, whoda thunk...
Honestly, this guy isn't in the arena to buy a Mac. In the same sense, my roommate who is a graphics art/animation major in college is dying for a new iMac/Powerbook. Everyone in her classes seems to use them and love them. Myself, very similar to this guy (programmer/general computer geek), I would never even consider a Mac...more likely I would piece components together into one of the three have/fully built cases I have already sitting around my office.
When I worked at a video store we ran into this problem occasionally...people would complain that they didn't have a driver's license because they didn't drive anywhere. Our answer was pretty simple: go get an id card. You can get an id card that looks exactly like a driver's license (at least in Virginia) except instead of 'Driver's License' at the top it says 'State Id' or something to that effect. I would imagine that since it's issued by the state it will have the same magnetic strip.
Either way, I don't think it's asking too much to have a state issued id if you're over 21.
Passing electricity through the coil causes the piece of Terfonal to slightly expand, resulting in a force of 400 pounds, explained Newlands Scientific managing director Brian Smith.
What would happen if you put this on someone's chest? They always said heavy metal caused violence and death, guess they were right.
>This site has exceeded its limit of 3 Gigabytes >of transfer for the month. You may buy extra >Gigabytes of transfer by logging in to the user >menu and choosing "upgrade". > >Thank you, >0catch.com
Maybe I'm missing the point here, but couldn't they just add duplicate CD-key checking into bnetd? That's all that blizzard checks for, isn't it? You have to have a valid CD-key to play the game at all, single or multi-player, right?
I agree, the bnetd project isn't really getting around CD-keys since you have to have one to play the game, but I could see a problem where multiple people have the same key. If it's possible to check that key (which it may not be, depending on how it's encrypted/sent), that would make bnetd legal I think.
I don't see the similarity in the arguments. I would liken it to leaving the keys in my car in my driveway and having kids come by, steal the car, and drive through my neighbors yards doing doughnuts. Sue me for negligence, it's MY car on MY property and THEY weren't invited in. Now, if part of the restriction of the neighborhood was 'Don't leave your keys in your car unattended', yeah, I'm guilty. But if Verio doesn't have that in their clause, I don't see a darn thing wrong with him leaving a relay open.
Would you want someone telling you how to run your server?
After that, good luck doing the packet reconstruction
While difficult, it's (obviously) not impossible. You'd essentially have to have a light detector hooked up to some homebrewed device that would translate those signals into bits along a tcp/ip stream. Connect that to a network card and you've got the same information coming into your computer that they do.
I'm not sure how you would resolve receipt vs transfer of data, but this is solved if the person is using a modem that utilizes NRZ-L. Most modems have separate send/receive LEDs, so the most difficult part of the parsing is done for you.
They were also great because, unlike today's games, most of them didn't have a 'bottom line' they had to worry about. They weren't worried about getting the game out as quick as possible so they could turn a profit. They'd beta test for as long as it took, get a bunch of people to help sort out buggy code, add on stuff that people asked for, etc.
I think the best example of any MUD/BBS game I ever played was Tradewars. I played the original, 2002, just about every version in there and they were all great. Martech just kept adding stuff on that people asked for. By the last release of TW2002, you practially had a MUD...there was experience, NPCs, hidden stuff (the underground? the grimy trader?) and an entire game layered on top of that that involved trading, planet building and defending from the Ferrengi. Wonderful game, and it didn't require a speck of graphics (as a matter of fact, graphics would have HURT the gameplay something fierce).
It's logical, it's easy to do and he didn't use any of the following words: Linux, Unix, Sun, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Linus, Microsoft, Slashdot, Katz, monopoly, sucks, goatse.cx, Stalman, IANAL...
A good project manager will make sure to ask developers for their own estimates and make use of that information
...and...
Good people are hard to find, but the project manager can be reasonably expected to know who is working on the project and how competant they are, and plan accordingly.
...are DREAM statements in my experience. When contracts are bid, most (many?) are bid before the team has been completely assembled. The project I'm currently on I came in on as a sub contractor years after the start and 6 months before we delivered a release (which ended up being about 7-8 months late). Our staff has changed a bit even since I came on board. Hirings, firings, quitting, etc, change the way a project not only delivers, but works together. You get an annoying QA guy that rejects everything you want to implement, that's bad. You get an annoying QA guy that implements EVERYTHING everybody implements, that's just as bad.
One idealogy that contracts (government contracts especially) seem to embrace is "If we put more people on the project, it looks like we're trying to produce more work." AND THIS ACTUALLY PASSIFIES GOV. AGENCIES! My project was a good case in point, we added a ton of people around the same time I came on and the productivity...dropped, because not only did we have to do our work but the work of the other people (who aren't on the project anymore, I might add).
...estimate the amount of time it will take...then reduce that by 20%.
Let me rephrase/clarify...you bid X amount of time. (because to be honest, the people that place these bids ALWAYS underbid time...they're competing, after all, on who has the lowest cost/time/best design, and extensions are easy to get than contracts). You then have an internal deliverable schedule that is reduced by 80%. IME, people will always be late, but they will try to hit the mark, so if you attempt to finish at 80% time, you may actually make it by 100%.
Maybe if you had a reliable team ahead of time, could garantee they were all sticking around from the beginning to the end, had competent managers and especially designers and a time frame that was reasonable, you could apply an algorithm to find out what kind of schedule you could deliver within. And if you ever find that, please email me...I want in:)
A problem that seems to come up in scheduling and time estimation is that the people producing the estimates aren't the people doing the actual work. Add onto that the customer giving additional requirements, changing requirements mid project, putting together a team that doesnt have the skills necessary to produce on time deliverables, etc...that's a LOT of variables.
I don't want to sound like that programmer who makes excuses for why their project isn't delivered on time ("That other guy was a moron", "Management is horrible", "We didn't have solid requirements") but IMHO, if you want a program delivered on time, pick a good team and then try to estimate the amount of time it will take...then reduce that by 20%. It seems like every project is late by about 25% or more, so if you reduce it initially, perhaps it will be delivered closer to when you really expected it.
Site Server is pretty great as far as I can tell. It looks like IIS, as a matter of fact installing the MMC stuff let's you control your IIS web servers under the same tool as your LDAP servers, create membership directories, assign them, etc.
Caveat...read the MSKB, especially article Q235132. There's a limitation defaulted in the LDAP directories that specifies only 500 rows returned. Why they did this, I don't know, but our (stupid) DBAs kept trying to figure out why we had only 500 users when they were SURE that we had many more than that. There isn't great documentation on this problem, but it's a simple fix.
For those of you who, like me, got forced into adminning an already running LDAP, please sympathize with this comment and don't spout "Use a *nix LDAP implementation." We're using MS Site Server with a SQL Server database. It's not elegant, nor is it particularly straightforward, but after getting past the (steep) learning curve, I've gotten pretty handy with our LDAP system.
Our biggest problem was migration...ie, we have 'this' tree, we want 'that' tree in the next release. 'That' tree has a 50% different organization with groups/users added/removed, so what we ended up doing was writing a big ol' VB script that migrated between the two. I hate VB, but being a script (read: Perl) person it's nice to have a non-GUI interface to do automated migrations with. VB contains all the necessary objects with which to create/modify LDAP structures.
Our project's back end is all java on Unix boxes, and since we needed to authenticate against the MS LDAP, we used the Java LDAP API distributed by Netscape. I've noticed a few glitches, one involving padding strings longer than 128 chars with garbage, but otherwise it's relatively fast and easy.
Lastly, for simple browsing/adminning, MS Site Server's tools are pretty handy. Again, not the best interface (and read MSKB article# Q235132!! We were bit in the ass for months until I found this out...) but it's a GUI and you can do everything you need to.
Not a glowing recommendation, but considering it's a MS product and I've got scripts automating everything, Site Server really isn't a horrible product choice for Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet my life savings this, like many (most?) other advancements in computers, will be first utilized to the max by the adult entertainment industry. Hell, half the internet now is pr0n, why would it change?
-- trb
advertising overlays on your shows every three minutes that you can only get rid of by pressing a special key combo on your xbox controller
I only hope that combo is up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start (select, start for 2 people watching)
sick thought: would this be copyright infringement on Konamai?
--trb
IMHO, Ask Slashdot is a forum to ask anything about the computer/geek world in general. This man isn't asking us to write his business plan, he already has a partial business plan (note that for just about every question he provides his current solution). Perhaps he wants some feedback to reassure himself that he's taking the correct steps. Maybe someone will suggest something he hasn't thought of. Either way, Ask Slashdot is exactly the forum for this question.
Let's say he DOES want us to create a business plan for him...what's wrong with that? Feel like it's giving away company secrets? Don't post. Feel like he should be doing the research himself? Don't post. Were I starting a business that revolved around computer people as the main clientele, Slashdot would be one of the first places I checked for resources, if for no other reason than because it has a large base of intelligent users.
My $.02, that's all...where would you suggest he go to find this information?
--trb
I'm not sure you're looking the correct target audience. Kids (under 18/still living at home) don't have the ability to order a high speed connection, and many times their parents don't feel like one is necessary. Couple this with the fact that 13-18 year olds have one of the highest amounts of disposable income, and you have a pretty profitable business.
--trb
Dude, the same could be said of asking 'What OS should I be using for '. That's what Slashdot is about. If you want everyone to have to pay for information and have nothing be free, I believe the RIAA is looking for high quality employees...
--trb
Check me if I'm wrong, but the Earth had plenty of plant life back before hydrocarbons were used/burned for energy. I think it's a little egotistical to think that WE'RE the reason plants have survived, and not vice versa.
--trb
Damn, I'm out of moderator points...someone else, mod this (+1, Funny)
--trb
"The conduct which underlies the indictment includes ElcomSoft's offering its AEBPR program for sale over the Internet, from a computer server physically located in the United States," the judge wrote. "Purchasers obtained copies of the program in the United States ... Payments were directed to, and received by, an entity in the United States."
Go ahead and mod me down, but if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but has papers saying it's an ostrich, I'd say it's still a duck...
--trb
Would that be AOL, the spammers, or the lawyers?
I think you were trying to post to a different Slashdot topic, "Which is the lesser of three evils?"
--trb
First, some background: I'm a Programmer/System Administrator with a heavy bias towards Open Source software.
And this guy's article got posted on Slashdot? Wow, whoda thunk...
Honestly, this guy isn't in the arena to buy a Mac. In the same sense, my roommate who is a graphics art/animation major in college is dying for a new iMac/Powerbook. Everyone in her classes seems to use them and love them. Myself, very similar to this guy (programmer/general computer geek), I would never even consider a Mac...more likely I would piece components together into one of the three have/fully built cases I have already sitting around my office.
--trb
It's hard for me to validate this survey's results after reloading /. for the 10th time already today...
When I worked at a video store we ran into this problem occasionally...people would complain that they didn't have a driver's license because they didn't drive anywhere. Our answer was pretty simple: go get an id card. You can get an id card that looks exactly like a driver's license (at least in Virginia) except instead of 'Driver's License' at the top it says 'State Id' or something to that effect. I would imagine that since it's issued by the state it will have the same magnetic strip.
Either way, I don't think it's asking too much to have a state issued id if you're over 21.
--trb
Passing electricity through the coil causes the piece of Terfonal to slightly expand, resulting in a force of 400 pounds, explained Newlands Scientific managing director Brian Smith.
What would happen if you put this on someone's chest? They always said heavy metal caused violence and death, guess they were right.
--trb
From the linked site...
>This site has exceeded its limit of 3 Gigabytes
>of transfer for the month. You may buy extra
>Gigabytes of transfer by logging in to the user
>menu and choosing "upgrade".
>
>Thank you,
>0catch.com
Here's a good use for subscription money...
Maybe I'm missing the point here, but couldn't they just add duplicate CD-key checking into bnetd? That's all that blizzard checks for, isn't it? You have to have a valid CD-key to play the game at all, single or multi-player, right?
I agree, the bnetd project isn't really getting around CD-keys since you have to have one to play the game, but I could see a problem where multiple people have the same key. If it's possible to check that key (which it may not be, depending on how it's encrypted/sent), that would make bnetd legal I think.
--trb
I don't see the similarity in the arguments. I would liken it to leaving the keys in my car in my driveway and having kids come by, steal the car, and drive through my neighbors yards doing doughnuts. Sue me for negligence, it's MY car on MY property and THEY weren't invited in. Now, if part of the restriction of the neighborhood was 'Don't leave your keys in your car unattended', yeah, I'm guilty. But if Verio doesn't have that in their clause, I don't see a darn thing wrong with him leaving a relay open.
Would you want someone telling you how to run your server?
--trb
After that, good luck doing the packet reconstruction
While difficult, it's (obviously) not impossible. You'd essentially have to have a light detector hooked up to some homebrewed device that would translate those signals into bits along a tcp/ip stream. Connect that to a network card and you've got the same information coming into your computer that they do.
I'm not sure how you would resolve receipt vs transfer of data, but this is solved if the person is using a modem that utilizes NRZ-L. Most modems have separate send/receive LEDs, so the most difficult part of the parsing is done for you.
-- trb
...to be a gargoyle.
--trb
They were also great because, unlike today's games, most of them didn't have a 'bottom line' they had to worry about. They weren't worried about getting the game out as quick as possible so they could turn a profit. They'd beta test for as long as it took, get a bunch of people to help sort out buggy code, add on stuff that people asked for, etc.
I think the best example of any MUD/BBS game I ever played was Tradewars. I played the original, 2002, just about every version in there and they were all great. Martech just kept adding stuff on that people asked for. By the last release of TW2002, you practially had a MUD...there was experience, NPCs, hidden stuff (the underground? the grimy trader?) and an entire game layered on top of that that involved trading, planet building and defending from the Ferrengi. Wonderful game, and it didn't require a speck of graphics (as a matter of fact, graphics would have HURT the gameplay something fierce).
--trb
> Remind me why that is immoral again.
Because that's not the nature of the economic system of the country we have chosen to live in.
It's logical, it's easy to do and he didn't use any of the following words: Linux, Unix, Sun, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Linus, Microsoft, Slashdot, Katz, monopoly, sucks, goatse.cx, Stalman, IANAL...
Mod this man up, for a change of pace!
--trb
A good project manager will make sure to ask developers for their own estimates and make use of that information
...estimate the amount of time it will take...then reduce that by 20%.
:)
...and...
Good people are hard to find, but the project manager can be reasonably expected to know who is working on the project and how competant they are, and plan accordingly.
...are DREAM statements in my experience. When contracts are bid, most (many?) are bid before the team has been completely assembled. The project I'm currently on I came in on as a sub contractor years after the start and 6 months before we delivered a release (which ended up being about 7-8 months late). Our staff has changed a bit even since I came on board. Hirings, firings, quitting, etc, change the way a project not only delivers, but works together. You get an annoying QA guy that rejects everything you want to implement, that's bad. You get an annoying QA guy that implements EVERYTHING everybody implements, that's just as bad.
One idealogy that contracts (government contracts especially) seem to embrace is "If we put more people on the project, it looks like we're trying to produce more work." AND THIS ACTUALLY PASSIFIES GOV. AGENCIES! My project was a good case in point, we added a ton of people around the same time I came on and the productivity...dropped, because not only did we have to do our work but the work of the other people (who aren't on the project anymore, I might add).
Let me rephrase/clarify...you bid X amount of time. (because to be honest, the people that place these bids ALWAYS underbid time...they're competing, after all, on who has the lowest cost/time/best design, and extensions are easy to get than contracts). You then have an internal deliverable schedule that is reduced by 80%. IME, people will always be late, but they will try to hit the mark, so if you attempt to finish at 80% time, you may actually make it by 100%.
Maybe if you had a reliable team ahead of time, could garantee they were all sticking around from the beginning to the end, had competent managers and especially designers and a time frame that was reasonable, you could apply an algorithm to find out what kind of schedule you could deliver within. And if you ever find that, please email me...I want in
--trb
A problem that seems to come up in scheduling and time estimation is that the people producing the estimates aren't the people doing the actual work. Add onto that the customer giving additional requirements, changing requirements mid project, putting together a team that doesnt have the skills necessary to produce on time deliverables, etc...that's a LOT of variables.
I don't want to sound like that programmer who makes excuses for why their project isn't delivered on time ("That other guy was a moron", "Management is horrible", "We didn't have solid requirements") but IMHO, if you want a program delivered on time, pick a good team and then try to estimate the amount of time it will take...then reduce that by 20%. It seems like every project is late by about 25% or more, so if you reduce it initially, perhaps it will be delivered closer to when you really expected it.
--trb
Site Server is pretty great as far as I can tell. It looks like IIS, as a matter of fact installing the MMC stuff let's you control your IIS web servers under the same tool as your LDAP servers, create membership directories, assign them, etc.
Caveat...read the MSKB, especially article Q235132. There's a limitation defaulted in the LDAP directories that specifies only 500 rows returned. Why they did this, I don't know, but our (stupid) DBAs kept trying to figure out why we had only 500 users when they were SURE that we had many more than that. There isn't great documentation on this problem, but it's a simple fix.
--trb
For those of you who, like me, got forced into adminning an already running LDAP, please sympathize with this comment and don't spout "Use a *nix LDAP implementation." We're using MS Site Server with a SQL Server database. It's not elegant, nor is it particularly straightforward, but after getting past the (steep) learning curve, I've gotten pretty handy with our LDAP system.
Our biggest problem was migration...ie, we have 'this' tree, we want 'that' tree in the next release. 'That' tree has a 50% different organization with groups/users added/removed, so what we ended up doing was writing a big ol' VB script that migrated between the two. I hate VB, but being a script (read: Perl) person it's nice to have a non-GUI interface to do automated migrations with. VB contains all the necessary objects with which to create/modify LDAP structures.
Our project's back end is all java on Unix boxes, and since we needed to authenticate against the MS LDAP, we used the Java LDAP API distributed by Netscape. I've noticed a few glitches, one involving padding strings longer than 128 chars with garbage, but otherwise it's relatively fast and easy.
Lastly, for simple browsing/adminning, MS Site Server's tools are pretty handy. Again, not the best interface (and read MSKB article# Q235132!! We were bit in the ass for months until I found this out...) but it's a GUI and you can do everything you need to.
Not a glowing recommendation, but considering it's a MS product and I've got scripts automating everything, Site Server really isn't a horrible product choice for Windows.
--trb