This is seriously cool stuff. Two minutes for the exe plugin (ick, IE... grab *nix version next), a restart, and I'm seeing 90%-plus of my pathetic CableOne allotment coming in from the demo mp3.
Meanwhile, I'm in day two of pulling ISO files from Mandrake 8.2. I'm at 7% on the first image after an hour. Admittedly, it's not literally 24+ hours. I'm just in my second day of intermittent efforts to get an ftp connection, being told mirrors are overloaded, being told that the 8.2 cd's aren't for sale (talk about poor marketing!!! WTF do these companies THINK we're going to do if we can't buy it before we can download it for free!).
So, anyone want to get into the gritty details and make a 2nd BitTorrent demo page: three Mandrake iso files come immediately to mind. I'd delve in but, well, I'm sort of missing the iso files.
... and I'm still at 7% downloaded on the one ISO I've managed to start a download on. Seriously, Mandrake, at any modest price (say, under $30) I'd have paid for a guaranteed download or a quick-shipped CD. Heck, talk to cdbaby.com or someone else and let them do fulfillment. I won't donate to a publicly traded company, but I'll buy the hell out of convenience at a modest price.
For now, I'm off to see if cheapbytes or anyone else has the cd's. Ooh... time spent editing has me at 8%.
I hadn't done the math out, I guess. I mean, a thousand clicks had me thinking every few months. That seemed fair.
I just grepped/wc'd my history file and I'd be burning at least $30 to 40 a month for this.
Sorry guys, but I really think you just lost me. I'm not going to pay as much for your website than I do to my ISP. I mean, that's just silly. It's silly like AOL's $270 all-in-one long-term goal that was leaked a few weeks ago. Even if I *was* willing to pay that amount, my wife's gonna throw a huge fit.
By the way, the other posters here are right. Your description of your business plan seems as ad-hoc (read: half-asterisked) as your editorial and writing efforts. Stop Fscking around and treat this like the rest of us treat our jobs. Be afraid of being fired, get lean and hungry and aggressive. Spend a few grueling days doing business strategy. Spend MONTHS getting feedback and getting it right.
Diving in and making course corrections as you learn isn't a WRONG way to go about it. There are lots of b-school methodologies (and eXtreme Programming) that espouse this. But you have all the tools to do a better job than you're doing in collecting feedback, and don't seem to be using 'em.
Excellent comment. Since my first home is in a (ahem) city of 75k and I have a REALLY rural cabin that just got POTS a few years ago, I got a lot out of it in the way of ideas on how I'll get myself that last hour into the woods and still remain adequately connected. I'd been staring grimly at satellite and not liking the tradeoffs.
A lot of your material seemed responding to a laundry list of fallback suggestions I made, and in your case I understand why my way will never work for you. However, the poster said they moved to a midwestern CITY. That means they probably have a few options you don't. That also means they probably don't have to contend with a dozen miles of lightning-prone wiring and that increased risk of regular long outages.
What I recommended fits the small-city billing more. If one doesn't want to deplete one's income by 2 to 4 kilobucks a year (a chintzy move, I tell myself, since it's easier to raise my rate a buck or two to cover the difference) and one has somewhere near enough the desired level of connectivity going for them, these were offered up as ideas for that freak day of downtime. I don't expect another cut cable, my speeds are acceptable, and the work I do is 80% about day-to-day productivity improvements due to speed and being connected AT ANY SPEED and 20% about the few non-deadline-critical hours of high bandwidth in a month when I'm doing fat transfers or hammering something remote pretty hard.
Here's my logic for my situation: if cable fails: ISP might work.
If ISP via dialup fails or won't provide the bandwidth, I have a short list of highspeed connection points. Given the cause of death on the above two, I sort out equally-dead solutions and pick the best way to get online. Unlike a huge corporate office, I can bring a hot offsite backup online at no added cost by getting in the car and driving my laptop out of the problem zone. Since I have a local downtown with 3 good options just five minutes away and an adjacent town with internet cafe 30 minutes away, my max downtime is 30 minutes. That's acceptable to the people I work for, so I'm fine with what I spend.
A last thought... when you go to your 4-H show and someone needs you to VPN in... are you sure you wouldn't be wiser to already know where the nearest t-1 or similar hotspot is? A laptop, a trailer and a cellphone seemed tantamount to a joke to you a few lines earlier. For that matter, what do you do when lightning strikes twice?
Man, I know this is going to sound like I'm picking a fight, but I don't mean to. I just feel that sometimes, as silly as it sounds, there are solutions around that will do for that improbable situation. And that's what incident response planning is all about... thinking ahead to minimize/mitigate the downtime's effect even if god deals you a 1-2 punch at an inopportune time.
I do a lot of telecommuting, too. Have for years. And over that time, I've done a few mundane things to remove the stresses and occasionally come up with some outrageous spur-of-the-moment solutions to unexpected downtime. At some point, I realized I needed to treat this as Incident Response planning, or Disaster Recovery, or whatever... they're a microcosm of a big corporation's "The server's down and it's going to cost you $50k a minute until you fix it" planning. I say a microcosm because, although it isn't frighteningly huge amounts of money involved, it is big enough to be a major crisis for you.
So...
Always have two ISP's. Or broadband plus a dialup provider. Twenty bucks a month is annoying for an ISP I haven't called in year, so I struck a deal with my sister, configured things so I can dial in via her account in a crisis.
Get good at wireless connectivity, like cell-phone modems. This is your contingency for losing your phone and broadband links. The bonus here is carrying a laptop and two cellphones to let you take that 15-minute essential meeting while in the middle of a day of fly-fishing or whatever. Be warned, wireless data is not fast, it's not inexpensive, and it is often flaky.
Find the cheapest hotel/motels around with good connectivity. Honest to god, I once rented a room and worked from there for a day when a cable got cut in my neighborhood and I needed broadband speed. I was out $60, but I got 6.5 hours in. If it happened a lot, I'd probably start working a deal with some hotel for a serious discount considering they can sell a room twice in one day if I use it.
Find other broadband hotbeds. I've patched into:
a University LAN (with permission),
used a Library kiosk,
gotten guest account privileges at my alma mater (and had friends or relatives I was visiting do the same),
gone to an Internet Cafe 30 miles away when the town had wind-related power failure that took out everything for miles,
and borrowed a desk in a friend's office building, when the circumstance fit.
It's good to call ahead to ensure they're alive if you're down, though.
... and so on thru the list of Incident Response planning concepts:
Plan for outages.
Have local redundant copies of anything important (others have said this already).
Don't be cheap. If Quality of Service (QOS) is important, spend the extra $50 to get business-class phone service. If your company won't reimburse, suck up and pay it yourself. Think of it as the cost of having a bigscreen TV, the ultimate chair and loud music playing 'in your cubicle.'
Work the cellphone (without excuses!) when you're offline-against-your-will. Dodge the excuses because they only stand to hurt your case in any future discussion of the value of telecommuting.
This last one is personal long-term QOS (Quality of Service): write letters complaining about any poor service to the apropriate regulatory agencies when your local telecom provider screws you. It seems nobody does this, so a single letter carries a lot of weight! When I got seriously burned (a full month of no phone or broadband before hookup when I moved, with unacceptably weak excuses/reasons why), I wrote a letter contesting their next request for a tarrif increase for "Customer satisfaction improvements" (HA!). The state agency estimated these tarrifs to be worth $27M over the next five years to them. They got 31 letters opposed to the increase, and rejected it based on this "significant number of complaints" (the state's words, not mine).
Yummm... an hour, a stamp, and it cost them a cool million. It makes me all warm and fuzzy even now.
I have a 3-digit K5 uid, but I am done with that place. I simply don't have the time
So, back to that question about auctioning off low UID's... it'd be novel to watch auctions from both sites, just to see the cool factor the average webizen associates with the two sites.
Seriously,/., would it kill you to do some in-house market analysis. You've got the forum (ask slashdot), better demographic information THAN ANYONE IN THE WORLD to let you pick high-precision focus groups from, and you've got your survey mechanism that could be bent to serious work to use for minor sanity checks as you go.
A thousand times I've suspected that all the redundant postings, missed stories, slow return time, typo's in stories, and even the slashdot effect itself could be solved if the slashdot seven (or however many of you there are) was to ARBITRARILY ON THEIR OWN grant uncontestably REVOCABLE license to approve/reject/mega-moderate submissions to an indefinite pool of the best slashdot audience. Heck, make 'em feel like it's a job by paying 'em with waivers toward kiloclicks or whatever.
A few weeks ago, your story on the change-of-terms on sourceforge provoked me to post (to slashdot) the same question I see bandying about here:
I can imagine life without slashdot, sourceforge, and the rest of OSDN. It's not even a stretch: the internet (like the universe) abhors a vacuum. However, I miss the *HELL* out of adcritic.com, and would miss slashdot, too. Well, most of you. I'm pretty close to bored of (cough cough-- name withheld) as most people seem to be.
So... WTF? WHY WON'T YOU BRING US INTO THE LOOP and LET US HELP!?
You have two issues at stake here: How to get the revenue, and how to earn it. Don't ignore that second part.
Five bucks for a kiloclick? No sweat. I can afford it. I'll pay. Some won't. Personally, I think a few cheap bastards can fall off the free slashdot turnip-truck and it won't be a bad thing for slashdot (uh-oh, where'd I put that flame retardant suit). But there are lots of unconsidered alternatives and a lot of quality deficiencies you face. Any failure to manage both sides of this will get you your least-favorite way to be able to afford your bandwidth costs... they'll drop.
3. Do I have to be a U.S. citizen to work at the NSA?
Yes. Only U.S. citizens are eligible for NSA Employment.
So, you're bright, you're dedicated, but you were born poor and in India. One day, after yet another Algebra lecture at the community college you work at, you have a visitor:
"Hello, Mr. Gurdeep? How would you like to fast-track through all the bureaucracy, become a US citizen, get paid 25 times what you currently make, have state-of-the-art tools and a huge budget, and work with the best and brightest on encryption issues for the US Government?"
You choose:
A: "Nah, I like the crappy teaching assignments and third-world Ambiance."
B: "Thanks, but I've almost got tenure here."
or
C: "When's our flight!?"
Seriously. It freaks out the bureaucrats when they do it, but the best scientists and mathematicians have routinely held enough power to step right over the top of little niggling details like place of birth. Politics and psychology will be watched hawkishly by the 'crats involved, but they can't stop one genius demanding a benign foreign-born genius be hired. Citizenship isn't THAT hard to bestow on desirable talent.
My favorite story about the power the top researchers hold was when researchers at the Tokamak (the original big toroidal fusion device) met the new facility manager. He announced sweeping changes including a strict adherence to a 9-to-5 schedule and the elimination of 2-month-long sabbatical/vacations that were common. Understand these were both a byproduct of the Tokamak: it took half a day to start and stop, so on active days researchers were often there for 14 hours or more, and it had a couple months annually of upgrades and maintenance when nothing ran.
He finished his speech, asked if there were any questions, and one of the Nobel-caliber research heads stood up and asked him "Where will you be finding your next job?"
Ages ago, I remember there being mechanisms that let one build a profile of likes/dislikes that the server would use to recommend music or movies. That's what I want. I want unencumbered music to stream by and when I like it I click "buy" and all the money goes to the artist. Or most.
Call me foolish.
Well, I went looking for other sources...
http://www.openculture.org/ will let me toss a nickel to a known artist. Doesn't help me find alternatives that aren't part of MPAA/ASCAP/etc.
http://www.fairtunes.com/index.jsp (musiclink) will let me toss a... oh, same thing, pretty much. Thinking back, one of these two lets you throw change toward a musician agreeing to sell off all future rights to a song, making it free for everyone. Interesting capitalist/communist methodology, I guess.
So, I haven't been to MP3.com lately. Ick. Vivendi.
So, let's use google's 'like' search. give it MP3.com, up comes the link to the base page and a link to 'more like this'. Click.
Interesting ones first:
http://www.CDBaby.com stands out. It is a warehouse of cd's by artists from artists. Artists make several bucks per disk. Warehouse gets the rest. Looks closer to 50/50, which isn't bad considering. Not much for linking or recommending found.
All the rest seemed to be akin to napster phase 2: big company wants you to pay to hear music and not care that the musician starves on their royalties. I won't even dignify the bastards with mentioning 'em here. Do the search yourself if you want that goop.
Yeah, I know it's a few days late. Never gonna get a mod up to readable. But I was curious. And still am. The answer's out there, somewhere. I know what I like and detest the current mechanism, so I'll just go looking for alternatives. Feel free to chip in with suggestions, anyone.
Rather than sitting around muttering "Yup, it's doomed. Protect yourself and hold on tight", maybe some suggestions could help.
Reading these, I see a few options that might help SF get $ beyond what they'll get selling intranet variants of SF:
Break SF down into categories, sell the source tree archived onto DVD's. This could be either of two flavors (whole cvs tree or just quarterly buildsets).
Get a subscription model going that mimicks MSDN or any other vendor's update services. The downside is cost-effectiveness (maybe this idea sucks because DVD production costs outweigh my willingness to pay). The upside is that some of us would buy relevant categories. A few (paranoid or wealthy) ones might buy the whole damn tree. By setting it up on a subscription mode, I get to have that full archive a few keystrokes away without download lag or anything. I can diff and grep and the world gets lots of permanent archives in case SF does crater.
Go from free to a price scheme that is wicked cheap. Two directions that come to mind: A project costs $200 per year or something else so cheap people don't hesitate to consider it a fair deal. Everyone else that has trouble understanding the economics of bandwidth can take their CVS tree elsewhere until they figure it out.
Or, create tiered pricing. Things that eat bandwidth or space and aren't effective, get a price tag. So the CVS tree stays intact, but $200 a year buys you the whole package above. And $100 gets you a tree, some pages and links, and no discussions. Or whatever. (yeah, I realize that the CVS *is* a significant cost, but overloading price onto extras is how the world sometimes works. There's no way one extra button on a DVD player takes it from $150 to $300)
Frankly, we lived without sourceforge before (it was called the internet... look it up), I've never liked how specialized discussion websites don't get archived (a la usenet), and we'll get by without it... but there are too many times I would miss SF. Hugely. I don't host a project, but I use them a lot. So I'd buy a DVD subscription to help. Folks that have set up their own servers know how nice it is... so they're likely to keep the 'use it while it's there' attitude if the price point is nice and low.
So, there's my two suggestions for world peace and the survival of something I like in a world of corporate cynicism. Both have zippo done to figure out cost-effectiveness. They may stink when given real numbers and expectations. But there's got to be some sort of economic bone we can toss SF...
What else could we or SF be be doing?
--If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
For remote network monitoring, we've been looking at a little shoebox unit. It has the portability, price you want, but would need adjustments to get I/O and sound into it:
http://www.portwell.com/pna-2413.htm
Look around and see if you can find another product of theirs that works. Price for a single 2413 unit was under $1000.
For that matter, where stereo rackmount and server rackmount are similar form factors, I'd also start exploring rackmount PC's. Again, a fullfeatured box is a grand or so. Ruggedized?! Hardly. But keep it simple inside the box, use whatever tricks might help to ruggedize things yourself (rubber bushings on all rackmount points, secondary mounting at the back of the casing), and treat it nice (as in carry it in and out of the show yourself, rather than letting strangers treat it like the speakers get treated) and maybe it'll save you the bucks needed for a rugged lunchbox.
LET ME SHOUT THIS AGAIN... I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT RUGGED PORTABLE SYSTEMS. WHAT I AM SUGGESTING IS SMALL, INEXPENSIVE, AND CONFIGURABLE. I hope this helps...
First, email's *absolute* effectiveness depends on the sen/rep involved. Pat Leahy in Vermont is pretty da**ed wired, so if he isn't reading all the messages, his staff is (with him getting a greatest hits selection and summary counts). If you're unlucky enough to be stuck with a bonehead like our state's senior senator (mamma said I could talk nasty if I didn't name names), there's a good chance he not only doesn't care about the wired segment but that he doesn't know how to connect.
Second, Email's *relative* effectiveness is a given. Effective lobbying has been analyzed until it is a stronger science than Sociology. Lobbyists and political consultants have preached these things for years, and some make 6 figures telling politicians what to concentrate on.
Here's the logic: A hypothetical politician gets 6 telexes and telegrams (they really still exist), 50 phone calls, 72 personally-typed or hand-written letters, 150 faxes, 600 obviously-form letters, and 2000 emails. On any issue, 90% of the arguments will be covered by the time they've read a few dozen, complete with a pretty strong impression of what way constituent opinions run.
So, a pol has staff sort things like so:
Gimme all the letters from people that donated $500 or more last election. Then give me another handful of good ones. Then give me a summary saying what the percentages are, breaking things down on any critical details like what aspects of the bill are deal-breakers, which ones could be altered to make a compromise, what the strongest political liabilities are given my constituent base.
The staff starts with the telexes and handwritten's, moves to regular letters, and is quickly seeing a trend: 3/4 of their constituent base should be willing to live with the bill if altered *this* way, and several fat checks from industry fatcats can be expected if the so-altered bill passes.
In the case of ATA/SSSCA: Senator DoNothing here in my backwater state will get a dozen 'No' letters from technogeeks, and six hundred 'Yes' from freaked out farmers whose kids have moved to Metropolis. He'll get a nice nudge from lobbyists and industry titans, they'll serve up a reminder of past donations, and they'll maybe even send over some second-tier J-Lo wannabe to sit on his lap and tell him how strong he is. Once she's gone, the mailstack appears. The above-guessed summary of opinions pretty much seals the fate of my opinion. I'll be part of a minority opinion, destined to live in the lower third of the stack of mail. When a position paper and related letter are drafted, I'll get one that disagrees with me, tailored a bit by an overworked staffer and signed by 'His own Rubber-Stamp'.
Speaking of which, is my saying that a potential enfringement on Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'? I was thinking of it when I wrote it, but it's under 7 words or notes so fair-use might apply. Just in case, I'm out of here. Hmm... we all were aware that opression in the mideast could start a war. I just didn't expect it to lead to more opression here!
So, what if a site is hacked and the homepage is replaced with something unflattering about Microsoft? Will they come out and patch their crappy software and fix the site since it's their own damn fault?
Personally, I'm starting to think the anti-Microsoft contingent has already secretly invaded Redmond and all the Anti-Customer tactics we've seen over the last year is their doing. Nobody's dumb enough to do this crap to their customer base on purpose...
... people have the right to go to work without buildings falling on them, too... The thousands of dead... have rights too, and they have been grievously violated.
The government has an obligation to protect them.
I cringed at this part, personally. My rights come with a responsibility to ensure the government doesn't take them away. Eternal vigilance is one of the tariffs of Freedom, I was taught.
The US government doesn't get to pick which rights I can have. It can't temporarily revoke them. It doesn't get carte blanche to take a single right of mine. It should work to ensure all of my rights, because it is my government. Non-infringing protections have been mentioned on slashdot and other technical groups I read regularly (such as making aircraft modifications like pilot-specific biometrics and adding overrides against entering protected airspace). So far, as one poster said, the professionals (engineers and experts on technical aspects of security) aren't being heard on the news.
I've had to turn off the news countless times to save my blood pressure after hearing some YAITH [yet another (idiotic | inane | insane) talking head] blather about the internet-as-breeding-ground- for-childpornogr-I- mean-terrorism (without a mention of the mail, UPS, faxes, phone calls and the likes) or restricting e-tickets as a solution to airport security.
After all that, frankly, I wouldn't trust most of these bozos within a thousand feet of any technical project I have ever done, up to and including arranging my sock drawer (with their remarkable empathy and speedy grasp of the situation, they might decide my one pair of red wool hiking-n-huntin' socks are evidence of comunist sympathies and get all distracted from sock-sorting by the ensuing press conferences they call).
Trust & respect are earned. Will I listen to a reasonable request to add technological checks and balances the war against terrorism? Sure. Once trust is earned. Give me a source-audited (or open source) terrorist-face-recognition database that must publish all access logs within a given period of time to catch any abuse, and I'll consider it. Better still, explain how you'll protect my rights by not collecting info on me and still have a system useful for tracking people not yet suspected of terrorist plans. It's a serious clash that I don't see being resolved. Show me that you're putting in place a shared-warning mechanism across all relevant agencies that will make it so that agencies trigger alerts to one another when a 'wanted' individual surfaces, or so a hijacked plane over PA finds out that three other planes have been hijacked before being hijacked itself. Show me plans to give those systems failsafes that engage when these grim events happen. Full failsafes, preferrably, that seek to land the plane quietly every time. Again, the technological challenges and contradictions make me doubtful this will happen quickly. But they'd be uninfringing solutions worthy of us.
In closing, Katz, please don't tell me I need to relenquish my rights because you're grieving more than me and thus should know better. That's
a subtle oxymoron, in my book. We're all grieving. But we all have family histories littered with the byproducts of the sorts of fixes I'm seeing presented. We've got uncles that were devastated by the 50's Red Scare, great-aunts that disappeared in Germany, classmates whose parents died in dictatorial purges, and friends who endured undeserved legal battles for contradicting powerful governments and corporations.
In the end, freedom has a price. Lately, we've had it easy and the loss of life in my generation pales next to earlier generations. We shouldn't surrender easily any of our freedoms just because we're finally face-to-face with a very dangerous enemy. Especially one that hates us having those freedoms.
... is this my sig?... is this my sig?... Can you hear me now? How about now?
... other... April Fool's day joke... implemented?
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I can name one that never hit reality, even if I can't remember all the details of where/when I saw it. Late 70's, I came across an chip spec sheet for a WOM (WRITE ONLY MEMORY... think about it).
Going out to google, a page or so down on this link resembles the chip sheet as I remember it. I'd have sworn I saw it in a mag and don't recall ever reading "Electronic Design".
Not trying to be funny, but if I worked
several hundred feet up in a building, about now
I'd be wishing I knew a bit about BASE jumping.
Also, is there some grim irony that there's not a trace of airborne rescue/support happening? I realize 'Twice burned, thrice shy', but anything's gotta be better than not offering any help to anyone stranded near the buildings' top!
American Airlines is now reporting a flight had
been diverted to JFK, veered, and hit WTC. I missed the flight number.
This is a late post so it'll disappear into the 0-2 unread-by-idiot-mod's (mod EVERYTHING, people!) void, but Nick Petreley's latest
opensource column in Infoworld ended with a rather obvious comment I'd wrap the talk with the congressman up with:
"For whatever reason, people write open-source, free software. If you can't write it, enjoy it and don't worry about what motivates others."
Now, who wants to bet that someone scored under 3 did mention it already and got overlooked like this post? It ain't hypocrisy if I'm just reading at a 3, folks... Mod lower than you read. The lower, the better! Even a minus-1 deserves a few more good swift kicks in the 'nads.
Offtopic sig: Let me get this straight: Microsoft is off the hook, but a Arab Website in Texas got raided!?
If an expert system 'learns' enough to be very useful to 1000's of people, I'd say it was unethical as owner to not think twice before they irretrievably damage/destroy it.
We're not talking "save the little TV people". We're talking the beginnings of ethical debates similar to those that exist around pets. I know people that are quite fond of their pets (including insects) that others would unflinchingly kill on sight. It isn't a matter of equality to humans at this level... it's just a matter that we'll have entered an area where there are shades of grey.
Another thought: I've seen the (lesser) anguish people experience when gadgets fail. About the time that the gadget also has any sort of personality and history of coexistence with a person, they'll get anthropomorphic treatment, just like I sorta miss Kate's cranky old pickup truck that she'd named Archie.
Ethics aside, the legal arguments aren't even that new. About 30 years ago
"Should trees have standing" debated the issue as it affected environmentalism. At issue was whether it would be any stranger to give legal personhood, rights, and standing to a tree than to legal fictions like ships.
When Hal was "born," he was hardwired with nothing more than the letters of the alphabet and a preference for rewards -- a positive outcome -- over punishments -- a negative one.
Later, the article gives a bit of a blue-sky prediction that this machine won't be anything
like HAL from 2001.
Why?! What's to stop it? Heck, by their fourth birthday, kids have learned to lie for personal advantage or to avoid punishment. If all that stands between this ptyke and actively avoiding detection is a desire to avoid getting a punishment bit, we need to call for the laws of robotics REAL fast.
A nice benign scenario, once this thing gets smart enough to be my next PDA:
"... Well, if I say yes, I'll get punished.
If I say no, she'll know I'm lying and I'll get
punished.
If I cancel her plane reservation for next week and interrupt her question with a comment that I've just been informed that her plane reservation was lost, she'll forget to ask me and I won't get punished! Yay!"
Admittedly, in that scenario, it'll be as transparent a lie as my 4-year-old's usual excuses, but I'm sure Hal will get better over
time.
Just so it doesn't seem like I hate the idea, I'd be the first one on my block to buy ^h^h^h adopt one of these, but I'd also like to live long enough to see them mature into acceptable sentience. I'm not a xenophobe. I just want a level of ethics in any highly-adaptable species we encounter, since I have a healthy respect/fear of anything without a compatible ethical base.
I live in one of AT&T's backwater markets (think potatoes), so I panicked when I read this newsbit. But, I've just checked my server's CodeRed hammering and I'm still seeing it climb, so port 80 seemed to be fine. To confirm further, I ssh'ed out to a very remote site, then did a telnet back on port 80, and was able to grab my own base page just fine using 'GET / HTTP/1.0'
The hits I'm getting are largely within 24.16.*.*, which I believe is AT&T cablemodem-land. This could mean one of two things:
The only traffic I'm getting is outward from pre-filter infections.
There are sizeable chunks of unfiltered cable-modems beyond mine.
Before anyone calls me a damn fool or a liar, we're in the midst of ownership slowly being transitioned over from AT&T to CableOne. The transition so far is in month 8, and all the service vehicles say CableOne, etc., but each month I get a bill from AT&T or Excite @ Home or whatever, not from CableOne. Off-hours support gets routed to AT&T, too. Maybe that's why my mileage is different than is being reported.
And, if it helps anyone in making the marketdroids understand the harm they're inflicting on their company, I'm one customer that will drop cable in favor of any competing technology the moment they fry my port 80. My little webserver gets a couple hundred hits per month (mostly family and friends), but I make a living writing web-oriented code and I *will* maintain my own server so I can play/learn and demo what I do for a living. Otherwise, everything I do is stuck in intranets, and who the heck's going to let me demo that when I'm chasing work?!
About the end of 100's commercial lifespan (PC laptops were appearing) I think it was PC Magazine whose regular humor column had a great story of someone going through customs in some 3rd-world dictatorship. His duffle was searched, and his gear led to a flurry of interest, lots of consulting with higher-ups in a language he didn't understand, and him imagining life in a dark cell screaming "Please, I'm no yankee imperialist spy, it's not even that good of a laptop! It's only got 16k!"
Then, the head of security stepped up and said, in rough English "You have... very many... batteries". He had dozens for his extended trip and they thought he was black-market and hadn't even cared about the laptop.
Any advice on replacing My.netscape functions?
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What alternatives exist to regain my.netscape's functionality? I can't find any promising leads within my.netscape support, so is there a similar non-AOL site I should try? A first idea that springs to mind is customizing my slashdot prefs, but will I be able to get regional weather, international news, and a stock portfolio? It seems a bit irrational to even START down that path.
I was thrilled to see this news item, because I had over-loaded my.netscape heavily. I used it to keep tabs on a half-dozen other sets of headlines, including slashdot.
And, leaping off-topic:
Why-oh-why did AOL buy Netscape? It's like the old joke about the mother-in-law going over a cliff in your new ferarri. At least when AT&T bought TCI and with last week's Wells-Fargo buying First Security Bank, I could smile at seeing two "Never do business with THEM again" companies merge into one poisonous unkillable legal fiction-- um, I mean corporation.
Sig: If corporations are pretend people, why can't we give the bad ones the death penalty? Heck, there was even a ship that was once put to death!
Another prospect would be Mike Hart, of Project
Gutenberg.
He's an outspoken critic of how whacked copyright law has gotten.
Last I knew, he lived in Illinois.
He's not likely to ride a strict pro-napster/anti-napster line (could be good, could be bad for your desired level of simplification of issues).
And frankly, most of my low opinion of current copyright law came from volunteer time with PG.
My distaste for existing copyright law predates napster by almost a decade.
If a >10 year software patent is ludicrous (and some of us think it is), what sense is there in copyright's stripping us of our god-n-congress-given right to enjoy artistic works until 99.999% are so old they've become irrelevant or lost completely!?
I've never had more than an indirect contact with Mr. Hart, never heard him speak, etc. But he's enthusiastic and dedicated to what he believes in to a point where I'd recommend him in a moment above anyone with a vested financial interest in Napster/RIAA/etc.
Um, I don't really know the history of BSD's
entire development, but...
FreeBSD and GPL/Linux both are open-source. While Microsoft has a great deal to lose if GPL code is used or even influences their development, no such worry exists for people working on BSD implementations. Like GPL coders, there's a lot of independent/freelance/hobbyist coding going on in the land of freeBSD, isn't there?
What are the odds of there having been any code migrated from GPL to BSD inadvertently under a less-stringent standard than Microsoft is imposing on itself? I realize that, since BSD predates GPL generally, it's not much.
But still...
I get all warm & fuzzy imagining a countersuit from the GPL side of the fence on any code found to have made this migration. It'd potentially force Microsoft to share source for huge additions they've made to all code that 'embraced and extended' an invalid BSD copyright (and was instead held under GNU's license). I'm not just talking outright cut-n-paste copying of code. There's a stringent clean-room requirement enforced on commercial cloning, and I doubt that BSD can document that high of a standard. One coder having been exposed to a project in GPL and migrating to implementing it in BSD would taint things legally.
Incidentally, this is another reason to hate the DMCA's laws about decrypting/reverse-engineering a product. How could you ever prove it in court under that sort of restriction!? "I'm willing to pay my fine for reverse-engineering the code, your honor, but that's how I found out they used my stuff!"
Slashdot Mirror
This is seriously cool stuff. Two minutes for the exe plugin (ick, IE... grab *nix version next), a restart, and I'm seeing 90%-plus of my pathetic CableOne allotment coming in from the demo mp3.
Meanwhile, I'm in day two of pulling ISO files from Mandrake 8.2. I'm at 7% on the first image after an hour. Admittedly, it's not literally 24+ hours. I'm just in my second day of intermittent efforts to get an ftp connection, being told mirrors are overloaded, being told that the 8.2 cd's aren't for sale (talk about poor marketing!!! WTF do these companies THINK we're going to do if we can't buy it before we can download it for free!).
So, anyone want to get into the gritty details and make a 2nd BitTorrent demo page: three Mandrake iso files come immediately to mind. I'd delve in but, well, I'm sort of missing the iso files.
... and I'm still at 7% downloaded on the one ISO I've managed to start a download on. Seriously, Mandrake, at any modest price (say, under $30) I'd have paid for a guaranteed download or a quick-shipped CD. Heck, talk to cdbaby.com or someone else and let them do fulfillment. I won't donate to a publicly traded company, but I'll buy the hell out of convenience at a modest price.
For now, I'm off to see if cheapbytes or anyone else has the cd's. Ooh... time spent editing has me at 8%.
Wow.
Ouch.
I hadn't done the math out, I guess. I mean, a thousand clicks had me thinking every few months. That seemed fair.
I just grepped/wc'd my history file and I'd be burning at least $30 to 40 a month for this.
Sorry guys, but I really think you just lost me. I'm not going to pay as much for your website than I do to my ISP. I mean, that's just silly. It's silly like AOL's $270 all-in-one long-term goal that was leaked a few weeks ago. Even if I *was* willing to pay that amount, my wife's gonna throw a huge fit.
By the way, the other posters here are right. Your description of your business plan seems as ad-hoc (read: half-asterisked) as your editorial and writing efforts. Stop Fscking around and treat this like the rest of us treat our jobs. Be afraid of being fired, get lean and hungry and aggressive. Spend a few grueling days doing business strategy. Spend MONTHS getting feedback and getting it right.
Diving in and making course corrections as you learn isn't a WRONG way to go about it. There are lots of b-school methodologies (and eXtreme Programming) that espouse this. But you have all the tools to do a better job than you're doing in collecting feedback, and don't seem to be using 'em.
A lot of your material seemed responding to a laundry list of fallback suggestions I made, and in your case I understand why my way will never work for you. However, the poster said they moved to a midwestern CITY. That means they probably have a few options you don't. That also means they probably don't have to contend with a dozen miles of lightning-prone wiring and that increased risk of regular long outages.
What I recommended fits the small-city billing more. If one doesn't want to deplete one's income by 2 to 4 kilobucks a year (a chintzy move, I tell myself, since it's easier to raise my rate a buck or two to cover the difference) and one has somewhere near enough the desired level of connectivity going for them, these were offered up as ideas for that freak day of downtime. I don't expect another cut cable, my speeds are acceptable, and the work I do is 80% about day-to-day productivity improvements due to speed and being connected AT ANY SPEED and 20% about the few non-deadline-critical hours of high bandwidth in a month when I'm doing fat transfers or hammering something remote pretty hard.
Here's my logic for my situation: if cable fails: ISP might work. If ISP via dialup fails or won't provide the bandwidth, I have a short list of highspeed connection points. Given the cause of death on the above two, I sort out equally-dead solutions and pick the best way to get online. Unlike a huge corporate office, I can bring a hot offsite backup online at no added cost by getting in the car and driving my laptop out of the problem zone. Since I have a local downtown with 3 good options just five minutes away and an adjacent town with internet cafe 30 minutes away, my max downtime is 30 minutes. That's acceptable to the people I work for, so I'm fine with what I spend.
A last thought... when you go to your 4-H show and someone needs you to VPN in... are you sure you wouldn't be wiser to already know where the nearest t-1 or similar hotspot is? A laptop, a trailer and a cellphone seemed tantamount to a joke to you a few lines earlier. For that matter, what do you do when lightning strikes twice?
Man, I know this is going to sound like I'm picking a fight, but I don't mean to. I just feel that sometimes, as silly as it sounds, there are solutions around that will do for that improbable situation. And that's what incident response planning is all about... thinking ahead to minimize/mitigate the downtime's effect even if god deals you a 1-2 punch at an inopportune time.
Keep Cool. Don't Freeze -- Heilman's Mayonaise
So...
- Always have two ISP's. Or broadband plus a dialup provider. Twenty bucks a month is annoying for an ISP I haven't called in year, so I struck a deal with my sister, configured things so I can dial in via her account in a crisis.
- Get good at wireless connectivity, like cell-phone modems. This is your contingency for losing your phone and broadband links. The bonus here is carrying a laptop and two cellphones to let you take that 15-minute essential meeting while in the middle of a day of fly-fishing or whatever. Be warned, wireless data is not fast, it's not inexpensive, and it is often flaky.
- Find the cheapest hotel/motels around with good connectivity. Honest to god, I once rented a room and worked from there for a day when a cable got cut in my neighborhood and I needed broadband speed. I was out $60, but I got 6.5 hours in. If it happened a lot, I'd probably start working a deal with some hotel for a serious discount considering they can sell a room twice in one day if I use it.
- Find other broadband hotbeds. I've patched into:
- ... and so on thru the list of Incident Response planning concepts:
- Plan for outages.
- Have local redundant copies of anything important (others have said this already).
- Don't be cheap. If Quality of Service (QOS) is important, spend the extra $50 to get business-class phone service. If your company won't reimburse, suck up and pay it yourself. Think of it as the cost of having a bigscreen TV, the ultimate chair and loud music playing 'in your cubicle.'
- Work the cellphone (without excuses!) when you're offline-against-your-will. Dodge the excuses because they only stand to hurt your case in any future discussion of the value of telecommuting.
- This last one is personal long-term QOS (Quality of Service): write letters complaining about any poor service to the apropriate regulatory agencies when your local telecom provider screws you. It seems nobody does this, so a single letter carries a lot of weight! When I got seriously burned (a full month of no phone or broadband before hookup when I moved, with unacceptably weak excuses/reasons why), I wrote a letter contesting their next request for a tarrif increase for "Customer satisfaction improvements" (HA!). The state agency estimated these tarrifs to be worth $27M over the next five years to them. They got 31 letters opposed to the increase, and rejected it based on this "significant number of complaints" (the state's words, not mine).
Yummm... an hour, a stamp, and it cost them a cool million. It makes me all warm and fuzzy even now.- a University LAN (with permission),
- used a Library kiosk,
- gotten guest account privileges at my alma mater (and had friends or relatives I was visiting do the same),
- gone to an Internet Cafe 30 miles away when the town had wind-related power failure that took out everything for miles,
- and borrowed a desk in a friend's office building, when the circumstance fit.
It's good to call ahead to ensure they're alive if you're down, though.Seriously, /., would it kill you to do some in-house market analysis. You've got the forum (ask slashdot), better demographic information THAN ANYONE IN THE WORLD to let you pick high-precision focus groups from, and you've got your survey mechanism that could be bent to serious work to use for minor sanity checks as you go.
A thousand times I've suspected that all the redundant postings, missed stories, slow return time, typo's in stories, and even the slashdot effect itself could be solved if the slashdot seven (or however many of you there are) was to ARBITRARILY ON THEIR OWN grant uncontestably REVOCABLE license to approve/reject/mega-moderate submissions to an indefinite pool of the best slashdot audience. Heck, make 'em feel like it's a job by paying 'em with waivers toward kiloclicks or whatever.
A few weeks ago, your story on the change-of-terms on sourceforge provoked me to post (to slashdot) the same question I see bandying about here:
I can imagine life without slashdot, sourceforge, and the rest of OSDN. It's not even a stretch: the internet (like the universe) abhors a vacuum. However, I miss the *HELL* out of adcritic.com, and would miss slashdot, too. Well, most of you. I'm pretty close to bored of (cough cough-- name withheld) as most people seem to be.
So... WTF? WHY WON'T YOU BRING US INTO THE LOOP and LET US HELP!?
You have two issues at stake here: How to get the revenue, and how to earn it. Don't ignore that second part.
Five bucks for a kiloclick? No sweat. I can afford it. I'll pay. Some won't. Personally, I think a few cheap bastards can fall off the free slashdot turnip-truck and it won't be a bad thing for slashdot (uh-oh, where'd I put that flame retardant suit). But there are lots of unconsidered alternatives and a lot of quality deficiencies you face. Any failure to manage both sides of this will get you your least-favorite way to be able to afford your bandwidth costs... they'll drop.
Good luck.
"Hello, Mr. Gurdeep? How would you like to fast-track through all the bureaucracy, become a US citizen, get paid 25 times what you currently make, have state-of-the-art tools and a huge budget, and work with the best and brightest on encryption issues for the US Government?"
You choose:
Seriously. It freaks out the bureaucrats when they do it, but the best scientists and mathematicians have routinely held enough power to step right over the top of little niggling details like place of birth. Politics and psychology will be watched hawkishly by the 'crats involved, but they can't stop one genius demanding a benign foreign-born genius be hired. Citizenship isn't THAT hard to bestow on desirable talent.
My favorite story about the power the top researchers hold was when researchers at the Tokamak (the original big toroidal fusion device) met the new facility manager. He announced sweeping changes including a strict adherence to a 9-to-5 schedule and the elimination of 2-month-long sabbatical/vacations that were common. Understand these were both a byproduct of the Tokamak: it took half a day to start and stop, so on active days researchers were often there for 14 hours or more, and it had a couple months annually of upgrades and maintenance when nothing ran.
He finished his speech, asked if there were any questions, and one of the Nobel-caliber research heads stood up and asked him "Where will you be finding your next job?"
Call me foolish.
Well, I went looking for other sources...
http://www.openculture.org/ will let me toss a nickel to a known artist. Doesn't help me find alternatives that aren't part of MPAA/ASCAP/etc.
http://www.fairtunes.com/index.jsp (musiclink) will let me toss a... oh, same thing, pretty much. Thinking back, one of these two lets you throw change toward a musician agreeing to sell off all future rights to a song, making it free for everyone. Interesting capitalist/communist methodology, I guess.
So, I haven't been to MP3.com lately. Ick. Vivendi.
So, let's use google's 'like' search. give it MP3.com, up comes the link to the base page and a link to 'more like this'. Click.
Interesting ones first: http://www.CDBaby.com stands out. It is a warehouse of cd's by artists from artists. Artists make several bucks per disk. Warehouse gets the rest. Looks closer to 50/50, which isn't bad considering. Not much for linking or recommending found.
All the rest seemed to be akin to napster phase 2: big company wants you to pay to hear music and not care that the musician starves on their royalties. I won't even dignify the bastards with mentioning 'em here. Do the search yourself if you want that goop.
Yeah, I know it's a few days late. Never gonna get a mod up to readable. But I was curious. And still am. The answer's out there, somewhere. I know what I like and detest the current mechanism, so I'll just go looking for alternatives. Feel free to chip in with suggestions, anyone.
Rather than sitting around muttering "Yup, it's doomed. Protect yourself and hold on tight", maybe some suggestions could help.
Reading these, I see a few options that might help SF get $ beyond what they'll get selling intranet variants of SF:
Break SF down into categories, sell the source tree archived onto DVD's. This could be either of two flavors (whole cvs tree or just quarterly buildsets).
Get a subscription model going that mimicks MSDN or any other vendor's update services. The downside is cost-effectiveness (maybe this idea sucks because DVD production costs outweigh my willingness to pay). The upside is that some of us would buy relevant categories. A few (paranoid or wealthy) ones might buy the whole damn tree. By setting it up on a subscription mode, I get to have that full archive a few keystrokes away without download lag or anything. I can diff and grep and the world gets lots of permanent archives in case SF does crater.
Go from free to a price scheme that is wicked cheap. Two directions that come to mind: A project costs $200 per year or something else so cheap people don't hesitate to consider it a fair deal. Everyone else that has trouble understanding the economics of bandwidth can take their CVS tree elsewhere until they figure it out.
Or, create tiered pricing. Things that eat bandwidth or space and aren't effective, get a price tag. So the CVS tree stays intact, but $200 a year buys you the whole package above. And $100 gets you a tree, some pages and links, and no discussions. Or whatever. (yeah, I realize that the CVS *is* a significant cost, but overloading price onto extras is how the world sometimes works. There's no way one extra button on a DVD player takes it from $150 to $300)
Frankly, we lived without sourceforge before (it was called the internet... look it up), I've never liked how specialized discussion websites don't get archived (a la usenet), and we'll get by without it... but there are too many times I would miss SF. Hugely. I don't host a project, but I use them a lot. So I'd buy a DVD subscription to help. Folks that have set up their own servers know how nice it is... so they're likely to keep the 'use it while it's there' attitude if the price point is nice and low.
So, there's my two suggestions for world peace and the survival of something I like in a world of corporate cynicism. Both have zippo done to figure out cost-effectiveness. They may stink when given real numbers and expectations. But there's got to be some sort of economic bone we can toss SF...
What else could we or SF be be doing?
--If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Bill dartboards
star trek desk calendars
paper clip art
One underappreciated O/S, incl. source.
nerf guns
frisbees
etc.
For remote network monitoring, we've been looking at a little shoebox unit. It has the portability, price you want, but would need adjustments to get I/O and sound into it:
http://www.portwell.com/pna-2413.htm
Look around and see if you can find another product of theirs that works. Price for a single 2413 unit was under $1000.
For that matter, where stereo rackmount and server rackmount are similar form factors, I'd also start exploring rackmount PC's. Again, a fullfeatured box is a grand or so. Ruggedized?! Hardly. But keep it simple inside the box, use whatever tricks might help to ruggedize things yourself (rubber bushings on all rackmount points, secondary mounting at the back of the casing), and treat it nice (as in carry it in and out of the show yourself, rather than letting strangers treat it like the speakers get treated) and maybe it'll save you the bucks needed for a rugged lunchbox.
LET ME SHOUT THIS AGAIN... I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT RUGGED PORTABLE SYSTEMS. WHAT I AM SUGGESTING IS SMALL, INEXPENSIVE, AND CONFIGURABLE. I hope this helps...
First, email's *absolute* effectiveness depends on the sen/rep involved. Pat Leahy in Vermont is pretty da**ed wired, so if he isn't reading all the messages, his staff is (with him getting a greatest hits selection and summary counts). If you're unlucky enough to be stuck with a bonehead like our state's senior senator (mamma said I could talk nasty if I didn't name names), there's a good chance he not only doesn't care about the wired segment but that he doesn't know how to connect.
Second, Email's *relative* effectiveness is a given. Effective lobbying has been analyzed until it is a stronger science than Sociology. Lobbyists and political consultants have preached these things for years, and some make 6 figures telling politicians what to concentrate on.
Here's the logic: A hypothetical politician gets 6 telexes and telegrams (they really still exist), 50 phone calls, 72 personally-typed or hand-written letters, 150 faxes, 600 obviously-form letters, and 2000 emails. On any issue, 90% of the arguments will be covered by the time they've read a few dozen, complete with a pretty strong impression of what way constituent opinions run.
So, a pol has staff sort things like so:
Gimme all the letters from people that donated $500 or more last election. Then give me another handful of good ones. Then give me a summary saying what the percentages are, breaking things down on any critical details like what aspects of the bill are deal-breakers, which ones could be altered to make a compromise, what the strongest political liabilities are given my constituent base.
The staff starts with the telexes and handwritten's, moves to regular letters, and is quickly seeing a trend: 3/4 of their constituent base should be willing to live with the bill if altered *this* way, and several fat checks from industry fatcats can be expected if the so-altered bill passes.
In the case of ATA/SSSCA: Senator DoNothing here in my backwater state will get a dozen 'No' letters from technogeeks, and six hundred 'Yes' from freaked out farmers whose kids have moved to Metropolis. He'll get a nice nudge from lobbyists and industry titans, they'll serve up a reminder of past donations, and they'll maybe even send over some second-tier J-Lo wannabe to sit on his lap and tell him how strong he is. Once she's gone, the mailstack appears. The above-guessed summary of opinions pretty much seals the fate of my opinion. I'll be part of a minority opinion, destined to live in the lower third of the stack of mail. When a position paper and related letter are drafted, I'll get one that disagrees with me, tailored a bit by an overworked staffer and signed by 'His own Rubber-Stamp'.
Speaking of which, is my saying that a potential enfringement on Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'? I was thinking of it when I wrote it, but it's under 7 words or notes so fair-use might apply. Just in case, I'm out of here. Hmm... we all were aware that opression in the mideast could start a war. I just didn't expect it to lead to more opression here!
Personally, I'm starting to think the anti-Microsoft contingent has already secretly invaded Redmond and all the Anti-Customer tactics we've seen over the last year is their doing. Nobody's dumb enough to do this crap to their customer base on purpose...
The US government doesn't get to pick which rights I can have. It can't temporarily revoke them. It doesn't get carte blanche to take a single right of mine. It should work to ensure all of my rights, because it is my government. Non-infringing protections have been mentioned on slashdot and other technical groups I read regularly (such as making aircraft modifications like pilot-specific biometrics and adding overrides against entering protected airspace). So far, as one poster said, the professionals (engineers and experts on technical aspects of security) aren't being heard on the news.
I've had to turn off the news countless times to save my blood pressure after hearing some YAITH [yet another (idiotic | inane | insane) talking head] blather about the internet-as-breeding-ground- for-childpornogr-I- mean-terrorism (without a mention of the mail, UPS, faxes, phone calls and the likes) or restricting e-tickets as a solution to airport security.
After all that, frankly, I wouldn't trust most of these bozos within a thousand feet of any technical project I have ever done, up to and including arranging my sock drawer (with their remarkable empathy and speedy grasp of the situation, they might decide my one pair of red wool hiking-n-huntin' socks are evidence of comunist sympathies and get all distracted from sock-sorting by the ensuing press conferences they call).
Trust & respect are earned. Will I listen to a reasonable request to add technological checks and balances the war against terrorism? Sure. Once trust is earned. Give me a source-audited (or open source) terrorist-face-recognition database that must publish all access logs within a given period of time to catch any abuse, and I'll consider it. Better still, explain how you'll protect my rights by not collecting info on me and still have a system useful for tracking people not yet suspected of terrorist plans. It's a serious clash that I don't see being resolved. Show me that you're putting in place a shared-warning mechanism across all relevant agencies that will make it so that agencies trigger alerts to one another when a 'wanted' individual surfaces, or so a hijacked plane over PA finds out that three other planes have been hijacked before being hijacked itself. Show me plans to give those systems failsafes that engage when these grim events happen. Full failsafes, preferrably, that seek to land the plane quietly every time. Again, the technological challenges and contradictions make me doubtful this will happen quickly. But they'd be uninfringing solutions worthy of us.
In closing, Katz, please don't tell me I need to relenquish my rights because you're grieving more than me and thus should know better. That's a subtle oxymoron, in my book. We're all grieving. But we all have family histories littered with the byproducts of the sorts of fixes I'm seeing presented. We've got uncles that were devastated by the 50's Red Scare, great-aunts that disappeared in Germany, classmates whose parents died in dictatorial purges, and friends who endured undeserved legal battles for contradicting powerful governments and corporations.
In the end, freedom has a price. Lately, we've had it easy and the loss of life in my generation pales next to earlier generations. We shouldn't surrender easily any of our freedoms just because we're finally face-to-face with a very dangerous enemy. Especially one that hates us having those freedoms.
Going out to google, a page or so down on this link resembles the chip sheet as I remember it. I'd have sworn I saw it in a mag and don't recall ever reading "Electronic Design".
Not trying to be funny, but if I worked
several hundred feet up in a building, about now
I'd be wishing I knew a bit about BASE jumping.
Also, is there some grim irony that there's not a trace of airborne rescue/support happening? I realize 'Twice burned, thrice shy', but anything's gotta be better than not offering any help to anyone stranded near the buildings' top!
American Airlines is now reporting a flight had
been diverted to JFK, veered, and hit WTC. I missed the flight number.
Offtopic sig: Let me get this straight: Microsoft is off the hook, but a Arab Website in Texas got raided!?
We're not talking "save the little TV people". We're talking the beginnings of ethical debates similar to those that exist around pets. I know people that are quite fond of their pets (including insects) that others would unflinchingly kill on sight. It isn't a matter of equality to humans at this level... it's just a matter that we'll have entered an area where there are shades of grey.
Another thought: I've seen the (lesser) anguish people experience when gadgets fail. About the time that the gadget also has any sort of personality and history of coexistence with a person, they'll get anthropomorphic treatment, just like I sorta miss Kate's cranky old pickup truck that she'd named Archie.
Ethics aside, the legal arguments aren't even that new. About 30 years ago "Should trees have standing" debated the issue as it affected environmentalism. At issue was whether it would be any stranger to give legal personhood, rights, and standing to a tree than to legal fictions like ships.
When Hal was "born," he was hardwired with nothing more than the letters of the alphabet and a preference for rewards -- a positive outcome -- over punishments -- a negative one.
Later, the article gives a bit of a blue-sky prediction that this machine won't be anything like HAL from 2001.
Why?! What's to stop it? Heck, by their fourth birthday, kids have learned to lie for personal advantage or to avoid punishment. If all that stands between this ptyke and actively avoiding detection is a desire to avoid getting a punishment bit, we need to call for the laws of robotics REAL fast.
A nice benign scenario, once this thing gets smart enough to be my next PDA:
"... Well, if I say yes, I'll get punished.
If I say no, she'll know I'm lying and I'll get punished.
If I cancel her plane reservation for next week and interrupt her question with a comment that I've just been informed that her plane reservation was lost, she'll forget to ask me and I won't get punished! Yay!"
Admittedly, in that scenario, it'll be as transparent a lie as my 4-year-old's usual excuses, but I'm sure Hal will get better over time.
Just so it doesn't seem like I hate the idea, I'd be the first one on my block to buy ^h^h^h adopt one of these, but I'd also like to live long enough to see them mature into acceptable sentience. I'm not a xenophobe. I just want a level of ethics in any highly-adaptable species we encounter, since I have a healthy respect/fear of anything without a compatible ethical base.
The hits I'm getting are largely within 24.16.*.*, which I believe is AT&T cablemodem-land. This could mean one of two things:
Before anyone calls me a damn fool or a liar, we're in the midst of ownership slowly being transitioned over from AT&T to CableOne. The transition so far is in month 8, and all the service vehicles say CableOne, etc., but each month I get a bill from AT&T or Excite @ Home or whatever, not from CableOne. Off-hours support gets routed to AT&T, too. Maybe that's why my mileage is different than is being reported.
And, if it helps anyone in making the marketdroids understand the harm they're inflicting on their company, I'm one customer that will drop cable in favor of any competing technology the moment they fry my port 80. My little webserver gets a couple hundred hits per month (mostly family and friends), but I make a living writing web-oriented code and I *will* maintain my own server so I can play/learn and demo what I do for a living. Otherwise, everything I do is stuck in intranets, and who the heck's going to let me demo that when I'm chasing work?!
The story:
About the end of 100's commercial lifespan (PC laptops were appearing) I think it was PC Magazine whose regular humor column had a great story of someone going through customs in some 3rd-world dictatorship. His duffle was searched, and his gear led to a flurry of interest, lots of consulting with higher-ups in a language he didn't understand, and him imagining life in a dark cell screaming "Please, I'm no yankee imperialist spy, it's not even that good of a laptop! It's only got 16k!"
Then, the head of security stepped up and said, in rough English "You have... very many... batteries". He had dozens for his extended trip and they thought he was black-market and hadn't even cared about the laptop.
What alternatives exist to regain my.netscape's functionality? I can't find any promising leads within my.netscape support, so is there a similar non-AOL site I should try? A first idea that springs to mind is customizing my slashdot prefs, but will I be able to get regional weather, international news, and a stock portfolio? It seems a bit irrational to even START down that path.
I was thrilled to see this news item, because I had over-loaded my.netscape heavily. I used it to keep tabs on a half-dozen other sets of headlines, including slashdot.
And, leaping off-topic:
Why-oh-why did AOL buy Netscape? It's like the old joke about the mother-in-law going over a cliff in your new ferarri. At least when AT&T bought TCI and with last week's Wells-Fargo buying First Security Bank, I could smile at seeing two "Never do business with THEM again" companies merge into one poisonous unkillable legal fiction-- um, I mean corporation.
Sig: If corporations are pretend people, why can't we give the bad ones the death penalty? Heck, there was even a ship that was once put to death!
- He's an outspoken critic of how whacked copyright law has gotten.
- Last I knew, he lived in Illinois.
- He's not likely to ride a strict pro-napster/anti-napster line (could be good, could be bad for your desired level of simplification of issues).
- And frankly, most of my low opinion of current copyright law came from volunteer time with PG.
My distaste for existing copyright law predates napster by almost a decade. If a >10 year software patent is ludicrous (and some of us think it is), what sense is there in copyright's stripping us of our god-n-congress-given right to enjoy artistic works until 99.999% are so old they've become irrelevant or lost completely!?I've never had more than an indirect contact with Mr. Hart, never heard him speak, etc. But he's enthusiastic and dedicated to what he believes in to a point where I'd recommend him in a moment above anyone with a vested financial interest in Napster/RIAA/etc.
Somewhere about here, Mike'd say "Free Winnie".
Um, I don't really know the history of BSD's entire development, but...
FreeBSD and GPL/Linux both are open-source. While Microsoft has a great deal to lose if GPL code is used or even influences their development, no such worry exists for people working on BSD implementations. Like GPL coders, there's a lot of independent/freelance/hobbyist coding going on in the land of freeBSD, isn't there?
What are the odds of there having been any code migrated from GPL to BSD inadvertently under a less-stringent standard than Microsoft is imposing on itself? I realize that, since BSD predates GPL generally, it's not much.
But still...
I get all warm & fuzzy imagining a countersuit from the GPL side of the fence on any code found to have made this migration. It'd potentially force Microsoft to share source for huge additions they've made to all code that 'embraced and extended' an invalid BSD copyright (and was instead held under GNU's license). I'm not just talking outright cut-n-paste copying of code. There's a stringent clean-room requirement enforced on commercial cloning, and I doubt that BSD can document that high of a standard. One coder having been exposed to a project in GPL and migrating to implementing it in BSD would taint things legally.
Incidentally, this is another reason to hate the DMCA's laws about decrypting/reverse-engineering a product. How could you ever prove it in court under that sort of restriction!? "I'm willing to pay my fine for reverse-engineering the code, your honor, but that's how I found out they used my stuff!"