I'm sure that if you read the fine print on the agreements for most (if not all) set top box services like TiVo, Hulu, Netflix, your cable agreements, you'll find that they grant permission to collect viewing data and resell it. It's pure gold to ratings organizations or anyone else wanting to prove how many people are watching one thing or another.
Yes, in theory you could look for the magic A record returned, but to do so is something of an operational nightmare, and impossible to do with most current MTAs.
Or you can use an MTA that rejects any mail from a sender that cannot be mailed to.
We really get to worry when Verisign does the same thing to MX records and issues 250s for everything.
195F is the temperature at which coffee brews best.
full 50 degrees over what people usually heat their coffee at home
No, home coffee makers also brew coffee best at about 1950. Almost every home automatic drip coffee maker uses the steam from boiling water to force almost-but-not-quite boiling water up the little tube inside and onto the grounds. There aren't little elves in there with handpumps.
(something to do with flavour lasting longer when super heated)
Nope, it's that ideal drinking temperature for coffee is about 150F. However, pouring the coffee cools it as it falls throught the air, the cold cup cools it (through trivially, in a foam cup), and the reasonable expectation (especially with carryout and drive through) that someone's going to be drinking the coffee in a few minutes rather than immediately allows it to cool further. Storing coffee at drinking temperature means drinking it tepid.
McDonalds knows all this, as does anyone else that spends the time looking at and experimenting with the full process of making and serving coffee. They know how fast coffee cools when going into the cups, and the average amount of time between the coffee being served and the coffee being drunk is, as well as how fast it cools in the cup. Their goal in studying this is to make the most satifying cup of coffee that they can given what they have to work with, and hit that satisfaction point on average, over millions of cups of coffee per day. Millions of cups, and undoubtedly thousands of risky spills daily, and how many lawsuits? Where's the anomolous spike in this pattern?
I have a very addictive personality. I avoid drugs because I'm relatively certain I couldn't stop. The only games I play on the computer are ones like Freecell, Tetris, etc, for the same reason. I try not to criticize people who become addicted to things, but I think that if I can foresee an addiction than other people should be able to also.
Behold an excellent point here, folks. Some people get addicted. Some people don't. Some people don't have much problem quitting smoking, others never manage it. What's important to learn from all this is what sort of people you yourself are, so as to be able to avoid the things that are bad for you and uncontrollable before you find yourself sucked into them. Secondarily, remember that other people's experiences are not necessarily like your own. If you're the sort that hungers for EQ, it may be a bad idea for you to buy SWG.
The teacher could have used the public defender for free
The question of being able to afford a lawyer is one determined by income, and most places have the limit set insanely low, on the order of less than US$250 per month of income.
If the internet kiosk is runing a version of windows, clicking on the "putty.exe" download link offers an interesting and useful option, even to those at kiosks without start buttons and task bars... The remaineder is left as an exercise to the reader.
Money is not the problem... no matter what they say. The problem is incompetence and FUD. they liked how the 30 year old computer+program worked.. Sally, dan's sister and married to the chief, in the accouning department doesnt like change... we have to keep her happy... and Steve, the brother of dan, knows how to work the AS/400 and is allowed to do that every other thursday unless the hallways need waxing...
There's nothing inherantly wrong with how the program worked. And that IBM was willing to maintain the machine for $850 per month, that means it's not a terribly old one. (Despite the wheeze in the article claiming the AS/400 was 20 years old, that cannot be true if the machine was on a maintenance agreement last year. It's got to be at at least V4R4 for IBM to be supporting the box at all. And none of the CISC boxes can run any of the V4 levels of OS/400, which means the thing is less than 8 years old, and is probably less than 5.) Even the first generation RISC boxes are at the end of the supported life. There doesn't sound like there was any real reason to change, except someone convinced them that the $850 a month they were paying IBM as (effectively) insurance against the AS/400 failing was a waste of money. It turned out differently.
The number of platforms supported and the FTP/wget/rsync availability are completely besides the point. I realize functionally equivalent duplicates are possible and I know how to make them. I'm interested in sharing an exact duplicate with my friends, not a functional equivalent.
Why an exact duplicate?
I'm serious. What the fsck does it matter if the bits are all in the same position?
Several of the early portable MD units did have optical out, but the feature kind of stopped happening on portables after about 1998, probably for cost reasons. I'd imagine that most people prior to about 2000 or so that had access to something other than the portable that had a digital in also had something that fed it other than the MD, a cd or dvd player for example. Portables are supposed to be... er. portered. If you want something jacked in at home, a home MD deck is probably a better choice.
*shrug* I wouldn't say that MD is dead in the US. It's availible (players, recorders, and media) in just about any big electronics store (eg. Best Buy) and many discounters (eg Target, Wal*Mart). The only place that there isn't much equipment availible is in mass market automobile sound, where there's a lack of mass market mp3 equipment also.
Functionally, as has been pointed out copiously, DataPlay and MD are about equal, and the "even smaller" media size of DataPlay seems like it may even be a hinderence in terms of us. How often do people lose quarters in the bottoms of bags or under things? And how small are the labels on those things going to be? I can barely write small enough to put a edge label on a MD as it is.
This is more what companies like IBM are for, being able to take advantage of the strengths and cost-benefits of open-source, putting them to work on custom software, built to specification, and not for distribution.
In all debates about free and open software, a giant omission recurrs. There's no admission that the vast majority of software written *isn't* for distribution at all. It's custom work, for one installation, and the money paid is for the work, not the software. And the best reading I can see is that the GPL largely doesn't apply to that kind of work, because it never goes anywhere else. Does the user get the source code? Yup. Can they make changes to it? Sure. (If they do, it may break something that they'll have to pay to get fixed, but they're allowed to.) Can the user distribute it? Sure, but they're responsible for it thereafter, not the developer.
Yes, I do work for IBM. But this isn't an endorsement of a particular vendor, just that there's a whole market huge market that hasn't reeally been connected to free software before because the organizations doing the requesting haven't really wrapped their minds around the idea that they can buy work instead of software.
Regardless of the technological mumbo-jumbo, one thing remains clear to me: all humans are essentially similar.
Humans are generally narrow-minded, self-centered, jealous assholes. I'm not happy about that fact, but there it is. There's little joy in finding out more about people far away, only to learn that they're just like people that irritate me close to home.
And, I expect, they feel exactly the same about me.
They already have the mainframe, for other reasons. So, they got a mail server for 700 users for the price of setting it up. No additional hardware, no additional license, no new box to buy electricity and maintenance plans for, and it's already included in their current backup plans. All it cost Winnebago is some time and education, that they would have had to spend otherwise, and probably saved them $5000 over the course of the next two years.
They can do the same thing with other services too, that they may otherwise have to buy equipment for or farm out to consulting and hosting services.
ObDisclaim: I work for IBM, but didn't have anything to do with this deal.
Note two parts of this patent that are different from what I remember at least about the MS stick:
Two buses for handing input and output separately to the peripheral. The patent mentions RS-232 for input to the peripheral and Game Port for output from peripheral. No mention of a single, bidirectional bus, such as USB.
The use of a safety switch operated by weight. IIRC, the MS joystick uses no safety switch, and the Logitech stick uses an IR-based one.
Bottom line is, as far as I can see Telocity was a competitive company, offering way better service than any other DSL provider in the area, but the market didn't help them much. Maybe the market *was* the reason they decided to sell out. Maybe deregulation can only help the big sharks...
Telocity sold out to DirecTV basically because they couldn't generate revenue fast enough at the price point they had chosen. My impression is that they *did* choose the point at which they'd make the most money overall, but unfortunately, it wasn't enough without more outside funding, and DirecTV was there with a checkbook.
However, this wasn't the end of the problems because of the loss of two of the three CLECs I know that Telocity worked with, and the third is on shaky ground also. This, to me, is a bigger problem to me because I am willing to pay more for my DSL service than I am now. I'm even willing to double what I'm paying to keep the service that I have. But I can't, because the price points for consumer service is lower than that and the service providers and CLECs are dropping like flies at that price, and my willingness to pay more can't save them. I can't even find a provider that does charge more for any benefit in stability, because the CLECs are dying, and the ILECs sell DSL on their own terms and nothing but those terms...
Subscriptions -- These work. They do have to balance value over time, though. A subscription for $2 for a month falls back in to the "why bother" category, though, and $20 per month that renews unless I cancel is too much. $20 per year, on the other hand, is worth doing if I'm likely to stay interested for a whole year.
Lots Of Content -- especially with a dimishing rate, making the amount of stuff received "worth it" makes a payment system work. As an example, pretend United Media would send an HTML email daily with up to 10 comic strips embedded in it for $10 per month, and a subscriber could add blocks of up to 10 more for $5 more for each block of 10. Subscriber can change which strips or add or drop strips at any time, they just wouldn't ever get a credit for unused strips below what they paid for, and during the last week of the month there are [CANCEL] and [RENEW] buttons that instruct United Media whether this person wants to continue. An additional possibility would be a cd with a 100 ringtones for $7.
Tools, not Content -- To return to the ringtone example given in the heading article, paying $15 for a tool to load any WAV or AIFF into a phone as a ringtone and let me find my own content.
I'd say the secret is to make the amount worth the trouble, and the return worth the money.
The clerk charged me the pre-change price (on her own initiative) on the theory that I had agreed to the previous price by picking up the nozzle and not to the new price.
It sounds like that's exactly what the previous poster did, committing to an expiring higher price as the price was being changed to a lower one. He could have saved that four cents a gallon by waiting a couple of minutes for the price on his pump to change before picking up the hose.
And that savings on a tank of gas plus another four bits might have bought him a cup of gas station coffee.
I can understand why the concern might be greater on a purchase of a fleet of Xeon servers, where the difference might be a couple thousand dollars, but that difference level makes it worthwhile to take advantage of reverse-auction tools, PriceWatch, or indeed, just picking up the phone and calling your assigned sales rep.
Slashdot Mirror
Punchcards. So you can physically review the data to be entered.
(I'm only half kidding.)
I'm sure that if you read the fine print on the agreements for most (if not all) set top box services like TiVo, Hulu, Netflix, your cable agreements, you'll find that they grant permission to collect viewing data and resell it. It's pure gold to ratings organizations or anyone else wanting to prove how many people are watching one thing or another.
Yes, in theory you could look for the magic A record returned, but to do so is something of an operational nightmare, and impossible to do with most current MTAs.
Or you can use an MTA that rejects any mail from a sender that cannot be mailed to.
We really get to worry when Verisign does the same thing to MX records and issues 250s for everything.
Hack appeal of writing one's own games for an obsolete platform? I know there are people still mucking about writing things for Amigas....
Let the flames begin!
195F is the temperature at which coffee brews best.
full 50 degrees over what people usually heat their coffee at home
No, home coffee makers also brew coffee best at about 1950. Almost every home automatic drip coffee maker uses the steam from boiling water to force almost-but-not-quite boiling water up the little tube inside and onto the grounds. There aren't little elves in there with handpumps.
(something to do with flavour lasting longer when super heated)
Nope, it's that ideal drinking temperature for coffee is about 150F. However, pouring the coffee cools it as it falls throught the air, the cold cup cools it (through trivially, in a foam cup), and the reasonable expectation (especially with carryout and drive through) that someone's going to be drinking the coffee in a few minutes rather than immediately allows it to cool further. Storing coffee at drinking temperature means drinking it tepid.
McDonalds knows all this, as does anyone else that spends the time looking at and experimenting with the full process of making and serving coffee. They know how fast coffee cools when going into the cups, and the average amount of time between the coffee being served and the coffee being drunk is, as well as how fast it cools in the cup. Their goal in studying this is to make the most satifying cup of coffee that they can given what they have to work with, and hit that satisfaction point on average, over millions of cups of coffee per day. Millions of cups, and undoubtedly thousands of risky spills daily, and how many lawsuits? Where's the anomolous spike in this pattern?
Which begets a simple answer. Write a better game for addicts, and you'll get the money instead of Sony.
Behold an excellent point here, folks. Some people get addicted. Some people don't. Some people don't have much problem quitting smoking, others never manage it. What's important to learn from all this is what sort of people you yourself are, so as to be able to avoid the things that are bad for you and uncontrollable before you find yourself sucked into them. Secondarily, remember that other people's experiences are not necessarily like your own. If you're the sort that hungers for EQ, it may be a bad idea for you to buy SWG.
The teacher could have used the public defender for free
The question of being able to afford a lawyer is one determined by income, and most places have the limit set insanely low, on the order of less than US$250 per month of income.
If the internet kiosk is runing a version of windows, clicking on the "putty.exe" download link offers an interesting and useful option, even to those at kiosks without start buttons and task bars... The remaineder is left as an exercise to the reader.
There's nothing inherantly wrong with how the program worked. And that IBM was willing to maintain the machine for $850 per month, that means it's not a terribly old one. (Despite the wheeze in the article claiming the AS/400 was 20 years old, that cannot be true if the machine was on a maintenance agreement last year. It's got to be at at least V4R4 for IBM to be supporting the box at all. And none of the CISC boxes can run any of the V4 levels of OS/400, which means the thing is less than 8 years old, and is probably less than 5.) Even the first generation RISC boxes are at the end of the supported life. There doesn't sound like there was any real reason to change, except someone convinced them that the $850 a month they were paying IBM as (effectively) insurance against the AS/400 failing was a waste of money. It turned out differently.
The number of platforms supported and the FTP/wget/rsync availability are completely besides the point. I realize functionally equivalent duplicates are possible and I know how to make them. I'm interested in sharing an exact duplicate with my friends, not a functional equivalent.
Why an exact duplicate?
I'm serious. What the fsck does it matter if the bits are all in the same position?
Several of the early portable MD units did have optical out, but the feature kind of stopped happening on portables after about 1998, probably for cost reasons. I'd imagine that most people prior to about 2000 or so that had access to something other than the portable that had a digital in also had something that fed it other than the MD, a cd or dvd player for example. Portables are supposed to be ... er. portered. If you want something jacked in at home, a home MD deck is probably a better choice.
Britney Spears's new album (with her new hit - yuck, I wish I was dead)
"Yuck, I Wish I Was Dead"? When did Britney go Goth?
*shrug* I wouldn't say that MD is dead in the US. It's availible (players, recorders, and media) in just about any big electronics store (eg. Best Buy) and many discounters (eg Target, Wal*Mart). The only place that there isn't much equipment availible is in mass market automobile sound, where there's a lack of mass market mp3 equipment also.
Functionally, as has been pointed out copiously, DataPlay and MD are about equal, and the "even smaller" media size of DataPlay seems like it may even be a hinderence in terms of us. How often do people lose quarters in the bottoms of bags or under things? And how small are the labels on those things going to be? I can barely write small enough to put a edge label on a MD as it is.
This is more what companies like IBM are for, being able to take advantage of the strengths and cost-benefits of open-source, putting them to work on custom software, built to specification, and not for distribution.
In all debates about free and open software, a giant omission recurrs. There's no admission that the vast majority of software written *isn't* for distribution at all. It's custom work, for one installation, and the money paid is for the work, not the software. And the best reading I can see is that the GPL largely doesn't apply to that kind of work, because it never goes anywhere else. Does the user get the source code? Yup. Can they make changes to it? Sure. (If they do, it may break something that they'll have to pay to get fixed, but they're allowed to.) Can the user distribute it? Sure, but they're responsible for it thereafter, not the developer.
Yes, I do work for IBM. But this isn't an endorsement of a particular vendor, just that there's a whole market huge market that hasn't reeally been connected to free software before because the organizations doing the requesting haven't really wrapped their minds around the idea that they can buy work instead of software.
Regardless of the technological mumbo-jumbo, one thing remains clear to me: all humans are essentially similar.
Humans are generally narrow-minded, self-centered, jealous assholes. I'm not happy about that fact, but there it is. There's little joy in finding out more about people far away, only to learn that they're just like people that irritate me close to home.
And, I expect, they feel exactly the same about me.
Like "Crisis-driven" is a good thing to be. I'd be much happier with a "proactivly crisis-avoident" company.
I may be totally misreading what they're doing, but isn't the total review of code exactly the point of the OpenBSD project?
They already have the mainframe, for other reasons. So, they got a mail server for 700 users for the price of setting it up. No additional hardware, no additional license, no new box to buy electricity and maintenance plans for, and it's already included in their current backup plans. All it cost Winnebago is some time and education, that they would have had to spend otherwise, and probably saved them $5000 over the course of the next two years.
They can do the same thing with other services too, that they may otherwise have to buy equipment for or farm out to consulting and hosting services.
ObDisclaim: I work for IBM, but didn't have anything to do with this deal.
Note two parts of this patent that are different from what I remember at least about the MS stick:
Sounds inapplicable to me.
Well, there were 64 survivors from the Hindenburg "Disaster". When was the last time an airliner crashed and 2/3 of those aboard survive?
Bottom line is, as far as I can see Telocity was a competitive company, offering way better service than any other DSL provider in the area, but the market didn't help them much. Maybe the market *was* the reason they decided to sell out. Maybe deregulation can only help the big sharks...
Telocity sold out to DirecTV basically because they couldn't generate revenue fast enough at the price point they had chosen. My impression is that they *did* choose the point at which they'd make the most money overall, but unfortunately, it wasn't enough without more outside funding, and DirecTV was there with a checkbook.
However, this wasn't the end of the problems because of the loss of two of the three CLECs I know that Telocity worked with, and the third is on shaky ground also. This, to me, is a bigger problem to me because I am willing to pay more for my DSL service than I am now. I'm even willing to double what I'm paying to keep the service that I have. But I can't, because the price points for consumer service is lower than that and the service providers and CLECs are dropping like flies at that price, and my willingness to pay more can't save them. I can't even find a provider that does charge more for any benefit in stability, because the CLECs are dying, and the ILECs sell DSL on their own terms and nothing but those terms...
Pong was the first stand-alone commercial game that accepted money for play. In short, the first that marketers care about.
I'd say the secret is to make the amount worth the trouble, and the return worth the money.
The clerk charged me the pre-change price (on her own initiative) on the theory that I had agreed to the previous price by picking up the nozzle and not to the new price.
It sounds like that's exactly what the previous poster did, committing to an expiring higher price as the price was being changed to a lower one. He could have saved that four cents a gallon by waiting a couple of minutes for the price on his pump to change before picking up the hose.
And that savings on a tank of gas plus another four bits might have bought him a cup of gas station coffee.
I can understand why the concern might be greater on a purchase of a fleet of Xeon servers, where the difference might be a couple thousand dollars, but that difference level makes it worthwhile to take advantage of reverse-auction tools, PriceWatch, or indeed, just picking up the phone and calling your assigned sales rep.