Dude, the answering machine ALLOWED you to make long recordings. The voicemails FORCE you to listen, unless you know the secret cheat code. Now that I know it I'll use it, but why don't the companies tell me what the code is easily? Why must I read about it on slashdot instead? That is the point.
The debian page itself lists releases by number and code name. So does Mac OS X, of course they are all referred to by code name too, leopard, tiger, etc. The Windows world has it easy, Windows 7 comes after windows 95, as per standard numbering schemes. Don't forget that in number based versioning schemes 2.1 is different than 2.10, and that 2.1 is before 2.9, which in turn is before 2.10. In debian of course you could just replace codenames with stable, testing and unstable and be done with it.
I can think of a couple of reasons its a government issue.
* The government has computers on the internet. If our taxpayer money is being spent on government security, it might as well go to benefit infrastructure as well.
* In the last couple of years there has been a major increase in how comfortable "normal" people are with doing business on the internet, with potential negative impact gaining greatly.
* People are starting to take notice at how little security has been designed into a lot of critical infrastructure. For instance I work in the power grid space, and the "security" there is scary bad.
* There is a new administration, meaning different priorities. This idea has been talked about for years, now with a new boss things are gonna "change".[1]
There are probably other reasons too. I personally think it is long overdue. I think there may be some over-hype to it lately, because the * i didnt do is: The media decided they need something new for us to fear.
1. No position regarding our president is implied by my irony quotes, i just wanted to note that this may qualify as change.
Whoever modded this as redundant needs to re-read this, keeping in mind SVO order* and the meaning of "sucks" in porn. It is Friday, get your mind closer to the gutter people!
* If english is not your first language, the legosucks implies lego is bad, suckslegos implies someone performing oral sex on legos.
These roads are rural. Not in the city. Lots of people seem to think this will make life dangerous for people, or cause more expense in maintenance since the cars will wear them out faster, and on and on. Seems to me one major point is being missed: My driveway probably sees more traffic/day than these roads, and I don't even own a car. There are lots of roads out in rural farm country that are used for 2 reasons:
1. Shortcut when the weather is nice, since these roads don't get plowed anyway. Those taking the shortcut are driving pickup trucks, no exceptions.
2. Tractors, combines, and similar heavy equipment. They go from field to field on these back roads. It prevents farmers from having to drive over each others' crops to get to uncontigous fields. It also reduces the impact on fields, allowing for minimal driving over them (surprisingly important when it comes to field yield).
Neither of the above really requires a paved road. Stop acting like it's the end of the world. Ever since I got to know some farmers, and how this works, I've been wondering why a lot of roads are paved in the first place.
In rural areas they dont need to be closed. They aren't even needed in winter, as no one is moving tractors around when there are no crops to plant/harvest/tend.
So in most rural places, there are plenty of roads which never get plowed no matter what. These roads just aren't used in the winter because they only exist to begin with for the purpose of having heavy farm machinery move around between farm and fields. Other uses, such as farmer bob taking the backroad shortcut to town, just aren't considered important. Those roads shouldn't be paved at my (taxpayer) expense to begin with.
My g/f grew up on a farm, they have 2 approaches across the fields. One is paved, one is not. When the county was paving roads the family was given a choice about which to pave. (20something years ago) and that is proably the way it will remain for at least the next decade. When I asked if they wanted the other road paved, and why the county didn't pave more of the gravel I got the usual "stupid city boy" treatment. From that I gathered that for such rural roads, no one who will ever need to use them actually cares much.
Your grandparents' info hangs out on computers. SSN, CC, etc all live in some computer system somewhere. Further that info is accessible by other, virus prone computers. These computers are in the hands of bankers and merchants and whatnot, not your grandparents. So whether or not grandma does online bill-pay, she still benefits from a higher level of computer security.
Conversely since they won't be paying the tax, I demand that their info is put on less secure systems since: 1. security is not cheap, and 2. I will not shoulder the cost of freeloading old people.
I have NEVER heard any net neutrality argument against using proper QoS to manage limited bandwidth. I expect a competent Network Operations Admin at an ISP to implement some sort of priority queuing. What I should NOT expect from an ISP is for them to launch a man-in-the-middle Denial of Service against me, when I pay for a service that I expect to actually use.
I used to get it all the time. Many people decided that what we were doing was morally the same as Comcast. Im actually shocked at your stance, not you specifically, just in my experience there are not a lot of people who are willing to think reasonably about it (its become a modern day vi/emacs). As for man-in-the-middle, how do you feel about us doing transparent squid caching for our metro-e sites?
As a side rant, our biggest problems came when game companies would convince the users that we were blocking ports and other evil things to the games' traffic, even though we could show graphs saying that the user's traffic past our routers was just fine.
I applaud your company for doing the right thing. You listened to your customers. Your company came to a reasonable compromise which made your customers happy, and made for a more efficient use of a limited resource. As a bonus, it probably bought you a good bit of loyalty from happy customers, who will spread the word about your service, never a bad thing. One of my colleagues once told a customer,
No matter how much bandwidth you guys throw in your small office, it won't keep the problem from growing. It won't keep your office users from using up the extra bandwidth you throw their way. The best thing you guys can do with a limited amount of resource is to use the bandwidth you have, but use it more efficiently.
We did a bit of Linux 'tc' shaping for that customer. After a bit of testing, and a few tweaks, their boss was much, much happier. He probably saved quite a bit of money, instead of wasting it on a bigger pipe for roughly a dozen users.
tc is a beautiful thing, or if you're a bsd type, altq/dummynet. I cant imagine networking without it anymore.
These discussions always seem to ignore one part of the equation. Specifically net neutrality stops GOOD QoS too. I worked at a small ISP. Over-selling capacity is strictly necessary in most cases where staying in business is a priority*. Most of the time no one notices. During certain peak hours however, everyone noticed. We received many complaints about voip and game quality.
Our solution was to implement packet inspection and QoS. What we did was identify VOIP packets, and give them a very high priority. Same with game packets. A few others too, like syns and acks are very cheap, so we gave them high priority too (because it does matter and will enhance the end user experience)**. We also identified video from youtube, cnn, etc (all places where there are BUFFERING players). With those video sites we lowered priority after the first.5MB since buffering is intended to make jitter irrelevant. We did NOT slow video down, we just made introduced latency sometimes so gamers and voipers got a better experience.
After doing that, our customers complained much less frequently, and many thanked us for getting more bandwidth.
Essentially, bandwidth should be measured on 2 axis, Throughput and Latency. Some apps dont need much bandwidth when they have low latency (voip), others don't suffer from latency as long as throughput is good (torrents). Most cries I see for net-neutrality ignore this. I find it sad because I would not mind my isp guaranteeing low latency for voip and games and high throughput for downloads (if i would be a pal and let them add a 100ms delay here and there).
I know that a lot of the issue hinges around the above being used to double charge, and other evil tactics, however legislating away the good because of potential for evil seems plain silly. Perhaps some sort of middle ground could one day be reached, in which destination filtering/prioritizing is strictly off limits, but content type filtering can be allowed as long as overall throughput remains at the rate sold. (not necessarily a good solution, just a talking point).
*This refers to places where the infrastructure is not well built up, and metro-e is not available.
** DNS at highest priority is surprisingly important. The day we did this speed related call dropped a large percent, and stayed dropped.
I agree, though I'm just saying that you could do the same thing (much better) by "doing it yourself" so that it takes on a more personalized and/or stylistic touch.
Remember back in the early days of the "bubble" when geocities came online? It was hearalded as the greatest thing. Everyone could have a webpage. (This was before most ISPs offered a webpage with an account). I bet you, or your equivelant was there complaining about how all these web pages would dilute the web. Now you say, lets keep with the geocities approach.
That being said, I disagree that doing it yourself is a better idea. Have you ever wandered through geocities, or visited a friends homepage? Personal and stylized pages that are guady and impossible to navigate. Light text on light background eye killers, blink tags, marquee text, bad javascript or html that only works with x browser, and my favorite permanent under construction graphics.
That is why blogs are great. They form a clear concise way for people to express their thoughts, and many allow for some stylizing and customization. All of a sudden all those people with bad web pages can have blogs that are at least readable. They follow a fairly standard format, so you can keep up with you pals without dealing with eyesores or broken pages half the time. Its one step closer to this universal connectedness at our fingertips. It may be bad but its a step above.
Maybe they aren't revolutionary, hell blogs existed long before the term. Many people had "home pages" with the news section on the front page. The news even displayed in a backwards order. A blog. Years and years back. Its crazy. The new and revolutionary thing is that they are now easily doable, and everyone can get one, and they are fun for some people. If you don't like it, dont choose to participate. It's your right, and to fight against it when instead you can ignore it with out any effort or detrimental effect is inefficient.
I am partial to a drink called the JagerBomb. (actually I like all "bomb" drinks*, its so rediculous).
Ingredients:
1 can of Red Bull
1 shot of Jagermeister.
Pour the can of Red Bull into a pint glass. Use a glass shot glass for the Jagermeister, keep the jager meister there untill ready to drink.
When its time to drink, drop the shot glass into the pint glass and chug. Tastes yummy, and gives a really interesting kick. Much more so than equivelant amounts of vodka and Red Bull mixed. Its a fun one when with friends.
*Bomb drinks are fun... all use the same processes described above for instance
Irish Car Bomb:
1/2 pint guiness, 1/2 shot bailey's, and 1/2 shot Jameson (a frat boy favorite)
BoilerMaker:
1/2 pint light beer, 1 shot whiskey
Lunch Box:
1/2 pint of miller light, some Orange Juice on top, no specific amount 2-4 ounces is best. 1 shot of amarreto
Those are my favorites.
PS: Im not an alchoholic, Im a bartender at a college bar. What a great way to pay for school.
There is a whole bunch of yelling about this every year at the University of Illinois at textbook purchase time, because so many of the professors here require a different new edition of the text book every semester. The only thing that changes are the problems after each chapter, and some of the irrelevant photographs are changed or recaptioned. and a page nubmer shift or two to make it confusing.
It will probably cost alot of money. They want us to start saving now.
Or these types of things have always been shaky to say the least, so maybe they want to start the hype early. That way by the time CNN hears about it, your 2 month lead time is about right. Also if they get interest going, say on this geek site, anyone who does a search for it will find that geeks are already buzzing about it, and it must be cool.
I ran into the same problem you did - the reset line isn't accessible from the front panel. So I called HP, explained what I was trying to do, 10 minutes later a tech had emailed me what I needed to know. (not that it mattered - the watchdog cards have never been needed.)
I also have found HP tech support to be extremely helpful. I recently bought an ancient hp hub (ethertwist HubPlus) from the store where the university sends old equipment to be recycled (a separate rant is how they used to just keep it in a warehouse to die... sad really). Anyway I couldnt find any documentation about the hub (other than reccomended upgrade paths), so I called tech support. Instead of being fed a "we dont support that anymore" line, and being told that I really should upgrade (nevermind that Im a poor student), the tech pulled the doc from thier document server and made it available thru ftp from one of thier public servers. No hassle, no tech saying I didnt know what I was talking about, just someone listening to what I could explain, and then answering my questions without just being a fancy bio-robotic interface to the tech support database.
The follow-up email from the tech to make sure I had gotten everything working and assuring me she would willing to help if I had any more problems was way unexpected and way cool too. It was kind of funny too, it had a line something similar to: While Hewlett-Packard is certain that our products are high quality and should last a long time, the equipment you are using is aging, and may be prone to failure. This is fine for your home network, but we urge you to consider newer HP solutions in a mission critical setting. (or some other corporatese meaning the same thing).
Hopefully theyll keep the same level of support with the influx of Compaq customers
War is regarded to be the only thing that can generate so much hysteria that people will give up all freedoms.
Along a similar line of thought (I can only speak from my experience in the US):
The hysteria you speak of also causes those who want to take away rights to sound rational. I see a few things happening here. First the US constitution is about protecting rights, many laws are made to protect people, the police protect us from criminals, the common theme being protect. Protect protect protect.
Along these lines, protection is everywhere, theres a subtle indoctrination towards the idea that everyone and everything needs to be protected. This is dangerous.
Every time someone wants to impose more controll over anything, they just invoke the magic protection backdoor. Suddenly its a rational thing to do, these people simply want to protect us, or their stuff, or the country and W. We should let them do it, its for PROTECTION!
Then someone sees how bad of an idea this is, and says, "no way, this is terrible!" Of course by then this great idea has been vaunted for its unheard of levels of protection. The naysayer is just a "far left" or "far right" (exactly opposite of your stance actually no matter where (s)he actually lies on the spectrum) crazy.
I find myself feeling this sometimes. I can rationally agree with the "crazy", and even feel that they are in the utmost right, but for some reason in the back of my mind, the dark part where conditioned responses lie, there is a little voice shouting "NUTCASE SHE WANTS TO TAKE YOUR PROTECTION!". And when I hear this voice I am afraid.
It extends even further though. Even though I am infuriated by the person who is stealing my rights and defending his point by not answering questions and instead uttering his invocations "for your protection. Yes mam, this means you will be forced to have sex with any police officer to prove you aren't a terrrorist, but it only for protection. Yes sir, you can't read any book without registering with the FBI first, but its for your protection, protection, protection." THe intellectual fury I have for this person is offset by that little voice saying, this guy is being calm and RATIONAL (yes the feeling that this guy is rational). Then I wish the person opposing this would be rational, but then I realize that they are, not shouting, not ranting, but being calm and cool. Then I am terrified.
Im not trying to wax conspiracy theorist, I just feel that this is good intentions gone wrong. There initially was no intentional evil, but then once the people trying to do good had made protection a warm fuzzy word, the evil got a hold of it and abused it. Scarey neh?
Oh well, sorry that my rant isnt better organized, Im still struggling to identify this concept more than a fleeting thought and a few moments of metacognition. I hear Canada is pretty this time of year, maybe Ill move there.
Somehow, Americans have managed to convince themselves that any elevated railway must necessarily be a monorail.
Unless youre from Chicago. We have an elevated train thats built the old fashoined way. With tracks. And let me tell you a little about it: It huge, basically making a roof over the streets it travels. It is VERY noisey, if you are waking near the "L" you cant really hear the person next to you when a train passes.
Give me a nice quiet rubber wheel monorail. Besides they look way cooler.
But-- to take a counter-example-- consider engines. We've been using internal combustion engines for a long time. To come up with a better engine-- one that runs on water, or chained hamsters, or the moral power of virginity-- would be a huge effort. Ten years and three billion dollars. Why bother doing it? Because you can patent your invention, and for a period of time you can have the exclusive right to build it, or you can collect royalties from other folks who build it. Without patent protection (so the theory goes) nobody would bother building new kinds of engines.
So my go-kart company buys your engine, and connects a drive train to it. Now my product is a go-kart powered by a foobar104 model 1 engine. This is fine. Software companies do this all the time. I don't neccesarily mind this, credit where it is due, you get a return on your investment.
Now if i want optimise my go-kart. I put a supercharger on your engine. I use special high performance spark plugs. I bore out the cylenders, and put in brand x valves that have less chance of sticking under the conditions my go-kart will experience. Its still a go-kart powered by a foobar104 model 1 engine. But the engine was modified. You still get your return. Its not a new product. Im allowed to do this.
Joe down the street decides that my modifications are perfect in his dune buggy. He doesnt know how to modify the engine himself, so he buys the engines ive modified to put in his dune buggies. This is still allowed. Joe now makes dune buggies powered by the foobar104 model 1 engine. You still get your return.
foobar104 is also a songwriter. (S)he (sorry not sure of your gender) has an extremely popular song called foo love. I can't buy a copy of foo love, and change the tempo and the fix the grammer, and sell it on my CD. Thats protected by copyright law. Joe cant buy my cd singles, and use the modified song in his CD. That too breaks the same copyright rule.
If foo love covers new ground conceputally, say he expresses his love for misquitos. I can write a new song called I love misquitos, only i explore further into it, say i love gay misquitos. I use his concepts, in my own original way. this is allowable.
Joe loves this. He writes a song about loving gay misquitos. This is still allowed. The concept transfers. loving misquitos (straight or gay) is not patentable.
This is where patents get sticky with software under the current system. Software is both patentable and copyrightable. I buy foobar104soft's misquitolove engine (c) US patent number baz. I can't make a gaymisquitolove engine mod and sell it to joe, because i violate his copyright. Fine, is cool, foobar104 doesnt like it, i respect it.
So I engineer the new gaymisquitolove engine that uses the misquitolove concepts. and get my ass sued because i violated his patent. So because of this foobar104 has his cake and eats it too. Unless i pay him lots and lots of money, I can't make my gaymisquitolove engine. This is where the problem lies. Software is the only industry that allows this. Its fairly rediculous.
This is why US intelligence gathering has failed, obviously it is a lot easier to penetrate the US with guerrilla tactics then it is for the US to penetrate 3rd world countries with billion dollar budgets.
You're comparing apples and oranges. The guerrilla tactics that you are talking about are the tactics of getting "operatives" (terrorists, whatever) into the general population. They also act on the general population, and on public infrastructure. This is very hard to screen against. For instance, if the US wanted to terrorise N. Korea, then you just have a person of Korean descent to get a visa to "visit relatives" and smuggle supplies to them. The N. korean gov't would have a fairly hard time monitoring this. Especially if the official reason for the visit is very plausible.
The billion dollar agencies you are talking about, operate on governments and close knit groups. These are much harder to infultrate, because people know each other and there are much more extensive safegaurds in place to hide sensative material (like plans for attacks on the US).
I know my examples are a little weak, but the basic idea is apples and oranges.
Something that you two have been overlooking for this thread is the nested option. I personally hate clicking for comments, so I put it on nested and just read down, scrolling past the threads im not interested in. Im sure it saves on alot of page views.
I also barely notice the slashdot ads. As long as they aren't pop-ups, they're not a big deal. The way its set up, I barely look at the sidebar and area that has all the story categories on the top. Those make a good enough buffer that even the most annoying ads (like the open projects one thats changing colors) are mentally filterable.
As soon as I get a paycheck im sure ill be putting down some money. I like slashdot. Im willing to pay $5 for it. Hell whats the difference? next week ill buy a couple of cases of presidents choice cola instead of coke and break even.
Slashdot Mirror
And a many communication failures.
Dude, the answering machine ALLOWED you to make long recordings. The voicemails FORCE you to listen, unless you know the secret cheat code. Now that I know it I'll use it, but why don't the companies tell me what the code is easily? Why must I read about it on slashdot instead? That is the point.
The debian page itself lists releases by number and code name. So does Mac OS X, of course they are all referred to by code name too, leopard, tiger, etc. The Windows world has it easy, Windows 7 comes after windows 95, as per standard numbering schemes. Don't forget that in number based versioning schemes 2.1 is different than 2.10, and that 2.1 is before 2.9, which in turn is before 2.10. In debian of course you could just replace codenames with stable, testing and unstable and be done with it.
I can think of a couple of reasons its a government issue.
* The government has computers on the internet. If our taxpayer money is being spent on government security, it might as well go to benefit infrastructure as well.
* In the last couple of years there has been a major increase in how comfortable "normal" people are with doing business on the internet, with potential negative impact gaining greatly.
* People are starting to take notice at how little security has been designed into a lot of critical infrastructure. For instance I work in the power grid space, and the "security" there is scary bad.
* There is a new administration, meaning different priorities. This idea has been talked about for years, now with a new boss things are gonna "change".[1]
There are probably other reasons too. I personally think it is long overdue. I think there may be some over-hype to it lately, because the * i didnt do is: The media decided they need something new for us to fear.
1. No position regarding our president is implied by my irony quotes, i just wanted to note that this may qualify as change.
2) Shell companies.
Fail -- even at those prices big oil could afford it.
Whoever modded this as redundant needs to re-read this, keeping in mind SVO order* and the meaning of "sucks" in porn. It is Friday, get your mind closer to the gutter people!
* If english is not your first language, the legosucks implies lego is bad, suckslegos implies someone performing oral sex on legos.
These roads are rural. Not in the city. Lots of people seem to think this will make life dangerous for people, or cause more expense in maintenance since the cars will wear them out faster, and on and on. Seems to me one major point is being missed: My driveway probably sees more traffic/day than these roads, and I don't even own a car. There are lots of roads out in rural farm country that are used for 2 reasons:
1. Shortcut when the weather is nice, since these roads don't get plowed anyway. Those taking the shortcut are driving pickup trucks, no exceptions.
2. Tractors, combines, and similar heavy equipment. They go from field to field on these back roads. It prevents farmers from having to drive over each others' crops to get to uncontigous fields. It also reduces the impact on fields, allowing for minimal driving over them (surprisingly important when it comes to field yield).
Neither of the above really requires a paved road. Stop acting like it's the end of the world. Ever since I got to know some farmers, and how this works, I've been wondering why a lot of roads are paved in the first place.
In rural areas they dont need to be closed. They aren't even needed in winter, as no one is moving tractors around when there are no crops to plant/harvest/tend.
So in most rural places, there are plenty of roads which never get plowed no matter what. These roads just aren't used in the winter because they only exist to begin with for the purpose of having heavy farm machinery move around between farm and fields. Other uses, such as farmer bob taking the backroad shortcut to town, just aren't considered important. Those roads shouldn't be paved at my (taxpayer) expense to begin with.
My g/f grew up on a farm, they have 2 approaches across the fields. One is paved, one is not. When the county was paving roads the family was given a choice about which to pave. (20something years ago) and that is proably the way it will remain for at least the next decade. When I asked if they wanted the other road paved, and why the county didn't pave more of the gravel I got the usual "stupid city boy" treatment. From that I gathered that for such rural roads, no one who will ever need to use them actually cares much.
Your grandparents' info hangs out on computers. SSN, CC, etc all live in some computer system somewhere. Further that info is accessible by other, virus prone computers. These computers are in the hands of bankers and merchants and whatnot, not your grandparents. So whether or not grandma does online bill-pay, she still benefits from a higher level of computer security.
Conversely since they won't be paying the tax, I demand that their info is put on less secure systems since: 1. security is not cheap, and 2. I will not shoulder the cost of freeloading old people.
I have NEVER heard any net neutrality argument against using proper QoS to manage limited bandwidth. I expect a competent Network Operations Admin at an ISP to implement some sort of priority queuing. What I should NOT expect from an ISP is for them to launch a man-in-the-middle Denial of Service against me, when I pay for a service that I expect to actually use.
I used to get it all the time. Many people decided that what we were doing was morally the same as Comcast. Im actually shocked at your stance, not you specifically, just in my experience there are not a lot of people who are willing to think reasonably about it (its become a modern day vi/emacs). As for man-in-the-middle, how do you feel about us doing transparent squid caching for our metro-e sites?
As a side rant, our biggest problems came when game companies would convince the users that we were blocking ports and other evil things to the games' traffic, even though we could show graphs saying that the user's traffic past our routers was just fine.
I applaud your company for doing the right thing. You listened to your customers. Your company came to a reasonable compromise which made your customers happy, and made for a more efficient use of a limited resource. As a bonus, it probably bought you a good bit of loyalty from happy customers, who will spread the word about your service, never a bad thing. One of my colleagues once told a customer,
We did a bit of Linux 'tc' shaping for that customer. After a bit of testing, and a few tweaks, their boss was much, much happier. He probably saved quite a bit of money, instead of wasting it on a bigger pipe for roughly a dozen users.
tc is a beautiful thing, or if you're a bsd type, altq/dummynet. I cant imagine networking without it anymore.
These discussions always seem to ignore one part of the equation. Specifically net neutrality stops GOOD QoS too. I worked at a small ISP. Over-selling capacity is strictly necessary in most cases where staying in business is a priority*. Most of the time no one notices. During certain peak hours however, everyone noticed. We received many complaints about voip and game quality.
Our solution was to implement packet inspection and QoS. What we did was identify VOIP packets, and give them a very high priority. Same with game packets. A few others too, like syns and acks are very cheap, so we gave them high priority too (because it does matter and will enhance the end user experience)**. We also identified video from youtube, cnn, etc (all places where there are BUFFERING players). With those video sites we lowered priority after the first .5MB since buffering is intended to make jitter irrelevant. We did NOT slow video down, we just made introduced latency sometimes so gamers and voipers got a better experience.
After doing that, our customers complained much less frequently, and many thanked us for getting more bandwidth.
Essentially, bandwidth should be measured on 2 axis, Throughput and Latency. Some apps dont need much bandwidth when they have low latency (voip), others don't suffer from latency as long as throughput is good (torrents). Most cries I see for net-neutrality ignore this. I find it sad because I would not mind my isp guaranteeing low latency for voip and games and high throughput for downloads (if i would be a pal and let them add a 100ms delay here and there).
I know that a lot of the issue hinges around the above being used to double charge, and other evil tactics, however legislating away the good because of potential for evil seems plain silly. Perhaps some sort of middle ground could one day be reached, in which destination filtering/prioritizing is strictly off limits, but content type filtering can be allowed as long as overall throughput remains at the rate sold. (not necessarily a good solution, just a talking point).
*This refers to places where the infrastructure is not well built up, and metro-e is not available.
** DNS at highest priority is surprisingly important. The day we did this speed related call dropped a large percent, and stayed dropped.
Read Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. It's very much this thread.
I agree, though I'm just saying that you could do the same thing (much better) by "doing it yourself" so that it takes on a more personalized and/or stylistic touch.
Remember back in the early days of the "bubble" when geocities came online? It was hearalded as the greatest thing. Everyone could have a webpage. (This was before most ISPs offered a webpage with an account). I bet you, or your equivelant was there complaining about how all these web pages would dilute the web. Now you say, lets keep with the geocities approach.
That being said, I disagree that doing it yourself is a better idea. Have you ever wandered through geocities, or visited a friends homepage? Personal and stylized pages that are guady and impossible to navigate. Light text on light background eye killers, blink tags, marquee text, bad javascript or html that only works with x browser, and my favorite permanent under construction graphics.
That is why blogs are great. They form a clear concise way for people to express their thoughts, and many allow for some stylizing and customization. All of a sudden all those people with bad web pages can have blogs that are at least readable. They follow a fairly standard format, so you can keep up with you pals without dealing with eyesores or broken pages half the time. Its one step closer to this universal connectedness at our fingertips. It may be bad but its a step above.
Maybe they aren't revolutionary, hell blogs existed long before the term. Many people had "home pages" with the news section on the front page. The news even displayed in a backwards order. A blog. Years and years back. Its crazy.
The new and revolutionary thing is that they are now easily doable, and everyone can get one, and they are fun for some people. If you don't like it, dont choose to participate. It's your right, and to fight against it when instead you can ignore it with out any effort or detrimental effect is inefficient.
I am partial to a drink called the JagerBomb. (actually I like all "bomb" drinks*, its so rediculous).
Ingredients:
1 can of Red Bull
1 shot of Jagermeister.
Pour the can of Red Bull into a pint glass. Use a glass shot glass for the Jagermeister, keep the jager meister there untill ready to drink.
When its time to drink, drop the shot glass into the pint glass and chug. Tastes yummy, and gives a really interesting kick. Much more so than equivelant amounts of vodka and Red Bull mixed. Its a fun one when with friends.
*Bomb drinks are fun... all use the same processes described above for instance
Irish Car Bomb:
1/2 pint guiness, 1/2 shot bailey's, and 1/2 shot Jameson (a frat boy favorite)
BoilerMaker:
1/2 pint light beer, 1 shot whiskey
Lunch Box:
1/2 pint of miller light, some Orange Juice on top, no specific amount 2-4 ounces is best. 1 shot of amarreto
Those are my favorites.
PS: Im not an alchoholic, Im a bartender at a college bar. What a great way to pay for school.
If GM pulls this off they just owned the market in Europe.
...they just 0w|\|3d the market in Europe.
Dude you missed the whole point. Cars are electronic now. I think you meant to say:
In a word, yes.
There is a whole bunch of yelling about this every year at the University of Illinois at textbook purchase time, because so many of the professors here require a different new edition of the text book every semester. The only thing that changes are the problems after each chapter, and some of the irrelevant photographs are changed or recaptioned. and a page nubmer shift or two to make it confusing.
It will probably cost alot of money. They want us to start saving now.
Or these types of things have always been shaky to say the least, so maybe they want to start the hype early. That way by the time CNN hears about it, your 2 month lead time is about right. Also if they get interest going, say on this geek site, anyone who does a search for it will find that geeks are already buzzing about it, and it must be cool.
Its a marketing tactic I'd use.
I ran into the same problem you did - the reset line isn't accessible from the front panel. So I called HP, explained what I was trying to do, 10 minutes later a tech had emailed me what I needed to know. (not that it mattered - the watchdog cards have never been needed.)
I also have found HP tech support to be extremely helpful. I recently bought an ancient hp hub (ethertwist HubPlus) from the store where the university sends old equipment to be recycled (a separate rant is how they used to just keep it in a warehouse to die... sad really). Anyway I couldnt find any documentation about the hub (other than reccomended upgrade paths), so I called tech support. Instead of being fed a "we dont support that anymore" line, and being told that I really should upgrade (nevermind that Im a poor student), the tech pulled the doc from thier document server and made it available thru ftp from one of thier public servers. No hassle, no tech saying I didnt know what I was talking about, just someone listening to what I could explain, and then answering my questions without just being a fancy bio-robotic interface to the tech support database.
The follow-up email from the tech to make sure I had gotten everything working and assuring me she would willing to help if I had any more problems was way unexpected and way cool too. It was kind of funny too, it had a line something similar to: While Hewlett-Packard is certain that our products are high quality and should last a long time, the equipment you are using is aging, and may be prone to failure. This is fine for your home network, but we urge you to consider newer HP solutions in a mission critical setting. (or some other corporatese meaning the same thing).
Hopefully theyll keep the same level of support with the influx of Compaq customers
War is regarded to be the only thing that can generate so much hysteria that people will give up all freedoms.
Along a similar line of thought (I can only speak from my experience in the US):
The hysteria you speak of also causes those who want to take away rights to sound rational. I see a few things happening here. First the US constitution is about protecting rights, many laws are made to protect people, the police protect us from criminals, the common theme being protect. Protect protect protect.
Along these lines, protection is everywhere, theres a subtle indoctrination towards the idea that everyone and everything needs to be protected. This is dangerous.
Every time someone wants to impose more controll over anything, they just invoke the magic protection backdoor. Suddenly its a rational thing to do, these people simply want to protect us, or their stuff, or the country and W. We should let them do it, its for PROTECTION!
Then someone sees how bad of an idea this is, and says, "no way, this is terrible!" Of course by then this great idea has been vaunted for its unheard of levels of protection. The naysayer is just a "far left" or "far right" (exactly opposite of your stance actually no matter where (s)he actually lies on the spectrum) crazy.
I find myself feeling this sometimes. I can rationally agree with the "crazy", and even feel that they are in the utmost right, but for some reason in the back of my mind, the dark part where conditioned responses lie, there is a little voice shouting "NUTCASE SHE WANTS TO TAKE YOUR PROTECTION!". And when I hear this voice I am afraid.
It extends even further though. Even though I am infuriated by the person who is stealing my rights and defending his point by not answering questions and instead uttering his invocations "for your protection. Yes mam, this means you will be forced to have sex with any police officer to prove you aren't a terrrorist, but it only for protection. Yes sir, you can't read any book without registering with the FBI first, but its for your protection, protection, protection." THe intellectual fury I have for this person is offset by that little voice saying, this guy is being calm and RATIONAL (yes the feeling that this guy is rational). Then I wish the person opposing this would be rational, but then I realize that they are, not shouting, not ranting, but being calm and cool. Then I am terrified.
Im not trying to wax conspiracy theorist, I just feel that this is good intentions gone wrong. There initially was no intentional evil, but then once the people trying to do good had made protection a warm fuzzy word, the evil got a hold of it and abused it. Scarey neh?
Oh well, sorry that my rant isnt better organized, Im still struggling to identify this concept more than a fleeting thought and a few moments of metacognition. I hear Canada is pretty this time of year, maybe Ill move there.
Somehow, Americans have managed to convince themselves that any elevated railway must necessarily be a monorail.
Unless youre from Chicago. We have an elevated train thats built the old fashoined way. With tracks. And let me tell you a little about it:
It huge, basically making a roof over the streets it travels. It is VERY noisey, if you are waking near the "L" you cant really hear the person next to you when a train passes.
Give me a nice quiet rubber wheel monorail. Besides they look way cooler.
But we just CAN'T have a 3rd party with a lot of power. That would ruin the binary political system.
But-- to take a counter-example-- consider engines. We've been using internal combustion engines for a long time. To come up with a better engine-- one that runs on water, or chained hamsters, or the moral power of virginity-- would be a huge effort. Ten years and three billion dollars. Why bother doing it? Because you can patent your invention, and for a period of time you can have the exclusive right to build it, or you can collect royalties from other folks who build it. Without patent protection (so the theory goes) nobody would bother building new kinds of engines.
So my go-kart company buys your engine, and connects a drive train to it. Now my product is a go-kart powered by a foobar104 model 1 engine. This is fine. Software companies do this all the time. I don't neccesarily mind this, credit where it is due, you get a return on your investment.
Now if i want optimise my go-kart. I put a supercharger on your engine. I use special high performance spark plugs. I bore out the cylenders, and put in brand x valves that have less chance of sticking under the conditions my go-kart will experience. Its still a go-kart powered by a foobar104 model 1 engine. But the engine was modified. You still get your return. Its not a new product. Im allowed to do this.
Joe down the street decides that my modifications are perfect in his dune buggy. He doesnt know how to modify the engine himself, so he buys the engines ive modified to put in his dune buggies. This is still allowed. Joe now makes dune buggies powered by the foobar104 model 1 engine. You still get your return.
foobar104 is also a songwriter. (S)he (sorry not sure of your gender) has an extremely popular song called foo love. I can't buy a copy of foo love, and change the tempo and the fix the grammer, and sell it on my CD. Thats protected by copyright law. Joe cant buy my cd singles, and use the modified song in his CD. That too breaks the same copyright rule.
If foo love covers new ground conceputally, say he expresses his love for misquitos. I can write a new song called I love misquitos, only i explore further into it, say i love gay misquitos. I use his concepts, in my own original way. this is allowable.
Joe loves this. He writes a song about loving gay misquitos. This is still allowed. The concept transfers. loving misquitos (straight or gay) is not patentable.
This is where patents get sticky with software under the current system. Software is both patentable and copyrightable. I buy foobar104soft's misquitolove engine (c) US patent number baz. I can't make a gaymisquitolove engine mod and sell it to joe, because i violate his copyright. Fine, is cool, foobar104 doesnt like it, i respect it.
So I engineer the new gaymisquitolove engine that uses the misquitolove concepts. and get my ass sued because i violated his patent. So because of this foobar104 has his cake and eats it too. Unless i pay him lots and lots of money, I can't make my gaymisquitolove engine. This is where the problem lies. Software is the only industry that allows this. Its fairly rediculous.
This is why US intelligence gathering has failed, obviously it is a lot easier to penetrate the US with guerrilla tactics then it is for the US to penetrate 3rd world countries with billion dollar budgets.
You're comparing apples and oranges. The guerrilla tactics that you are talking about are the tactics of getting "operatives" (terrorists, whatever) into the general population. They also act on the general population, and on public infrastructure. This is very hard to screen against. For instance, if the US wanted to terrorise N. Korea, then you just have a person of Korean descent to get a visa to "visit relatives" and smuggle supplies to them. The N. korean gov't would have a fairly hard time monitoring this. Especially if the official reason for the visit is very plausible.
The billion dollar agencies you are talking about, operate on governments and close knit groups. These are much harder to infultrate, because people know each other and there are much more extensive safegaurds in place to hide sensative material (like plans for attacks on the US).
I know my examples are a little weak, but the basic idea is apples and oranges.
Something that you two have been overlooking for this thread is the nested option. I personally hate clicking for comments, so I put it on nested and just read down, scrolling past the threads im not interested in. Im sure it saves on alot of page views.
I also barely notice the slashdot ads. As long as they aren't pop-ups, they're not a big deal. The way its set up, I barely look at the sidebar and area that has all the story categories on the top. Those make a good enough buffer that even the most annoying ads (like the open projects one thats changing colors) are mentally filterable.
As soon as I get a paycheck im sure ill be putting down some money. I like slashdot. Im willing to pay $5 for it. Hell whats the difference? next week ill buy a couple of cases of presidents choice cola instead of coke and break even.