Yea, not to blame the victim but the way you hold yourself goes a long way to whether you're picked out as a target (it won't stop all the shit that may come your way but it can certainly limit it). Unfortunately I can't say what, exactly, it is that works well, but I used to walk around spanish harlem at 3 am all the time and never had any real problem. The people who lived in my place before me were mugged 3 times in 6 months. Confidence, minding your own business, and a genuine lack of fear (sometimes it helps to bringing some sort of talisman or gewgaw, like a rabbits foot or a big knife or something. Myself I found carying a 40 around was nice as it provided a) beer and b) a big heavy club).
Lastly, know your neighborhood. A lot of crime happens close to home, if you're recognized and respected (not liked, just respected) then people will look out for you. I've had help from unexpected places on several occasions... so be a decent bloke and your neighbors will have your back.
And excactly why did they build it so high? I was expecting something spanning a huge gorge or other apocolyptic gash in the earth, but this thing seems to just be running over a valley. WTF? Why exactly did they build a bridge here? what's it... well, bridging? that is, couldn't say, a 20m hight bridge, or even a plain old roadway have done just fine?
I just finished my first WordPress install (win2ksrv) and it was a breeze. Only two problems I've had, the CSS seems to get lost occasionally (the page displays w/o any formatting, but I'm sure it'l be easy to solve, I screwed around w/ the file system and probably broke something) and the default display of the comments is a little hard to read (but I've not yet started playing around with other display templates).
I wish the comparison gave a ranking of setup complexity, or a general 'ease of maintenance' score... from my experience I'd give WordPress and 8 or 9 out of 10 in both categories.
I get spam complaints on a regular basis from confirmed addresses, therefore there is no corellation between spam complaints and confirmation.
If someone signs up for a mailing list, then decides they don't want to be on the list, and an unsubscibe feature (a really easy one) is available but they don't avail themselves of it, then they're getting emails they don't want but those emails aren't spam.
I suppose the only thing to do is not send any emails out even when people request them and confirm their request since someone may decide they no longer want to get the emails and instead of unsubscribing will simply say "spam." in fact, in the past 60 days, precisely 12 people on our 5.5k member list have done exactly that. Nonetheless, having a record of confirmation protects us, legally, so we'll probably dump the older, unconfirmed names with an email asking them to resubscribe. The thing is, this won't appreciably reduce our spam complaints (since most come from confirmed addresses.) Seems silly but...
spam spam spam spam and eggs.
On a side note, the spam museum (in some midwestern state in the US, they all kind of blur together) is one of the most amazing museums I've ever been in, at least in terms of production values. They even have a little corner setup like the diner in the monte python spam skit, tables, counter, walls, the works, and the skit is playing from suspended TVs above the diorama (is that the right word?) Muy slick.
lol i'm open about this b/c i really don't think i'm spamming. At all. Every single spam complaint we get, 100%, come from aol (we've had a single complaint in 4 years from anywhere else) and most are confirmed addresses. Therefore I conclude that most people who complain about us sending spam are simply not telling the truth. Just because they say it's spam doesn't make it spam.
That is an interesting question though, what does make spam? Anyway, since I've established as fact that most AOL users who say we're spamming are clearly lying about it, and since very few of the compaints from aol are from our original unconfirmed list, then the few who weren't confirmed and are saying we're spamming are most likely lying as well.
And with an opt-in list with a real reply to (it goes into a subflder of my main account, I check it daily!), a real, working unsubscibe link, listed phone numbers and addressess of the businesses we're representing, a send rate of less than 4 emails a month and having never shared their email address with anyone else, I can barely imagine a less spam-like thing. It's just because it's regarding adult clubs (read: strip clubs) that it automatically get's seen as spam.
*sigh*
Recently I was given another 4,000 names from a club the client bought, they were unconfirmed (same thing that we used to do years ago, the website just asked for the users' email address) so I sent one email to the list saying it was being discontinued and asked them to confirm on our new list.... Maybe it's time to cull the older names... not sure, it would elliminate the only possible line of accusation. but is seems so unnecessary, annoying thousands of our users, making them re-sign up, because there MAY be one person somewhere in the list who didn't sign themselves up at our website and have been suffering silently under our email yoke ever since. Something about that is just wrong... but I probably don't have a choice...
I'll believe that this stupid law is having a positive effect when I start getting less spam.
And I'll believe it's good when I don't get arrested. I run a small (5,500 subscribers) list for local adult clubs. It's all opt-in, we never bought (or sold) a list, we use a real, monitored reply-to address and our unsubscribe works. The list is generated from people signing up on the website explicitly for mailings and access to discount passes. However, we've only had confirmation since 2002, before that we simply asked people for their email and added them to our list (without a second email confirming they requested sign up.)
Every month we get 10+ spam complaints, all (literally 100%) from AOL users (using that little "check this box if it's spam") most are fully confirmed, meaning these idiots signed up, confirmed, then still turned us in for spamming! some, however, are from the old list, pre confirmation.
Are we sending "solicited" or "unsolicited" email?
It drives me nuts, I've been very careful to be both moral and legal, I send like 4 emails a month to an opt-in list and I'm scared some asshole will come after me after his wife catches him getting passes to strip clubs, honey, I never asked for those, and, at best, we get shut down for days and hauled into court to prove our innocence.
Anyone who has any info on how "solicited" and "sexually explicit" are defined please respond. Yes, I've already written the FTC.
I posted this same question downthread as well... how do you prove your addresses are "solicited"? how do you deterime what is "sexually explicit"? I run a 5,500 member mailing list for local adult entertainment clubs, all our addresses are from people signing up for mailings at our website (we don't try to fake people into giving us thier email address), and since 2002 they're all confirmed with a second mailing to the sign-up address but a few years ago we just took people's word for it, we didn't confirm the email address they provided.
We always unsubscribed anyone who requested and have always used a legitmate, human-monitored "from" address. If someone signed up another person to our list 3 years ago, if that person never requested an unsubscribe but now decided that they've been receiving "unsolicted pornography" from us, am I going to jail?
I'm very serious, any info is apprecaited. I just know someone will do it, we get 10+ spam complaints a month, all from AOL members (using that "this is spam" button) and almost all are confirmed email addressess. These dumbasses are signing up to our list, confirming the sign up from their email address, then instead of unsubscribing they're reporting us as spammers to AOL. It's really, really silly, you think it's black and white but it's not and if these things aren't reasonably defined, well-meaning and, i think, innocent people like myself will get screwed and not a single real spammer will ever be touched.
Any idea about the definition of unsolicited and sexually explicit? I'm serious, for example, of someone has a sign-up list that at some point (say 5 years ago) had no confirmation so people could sign up to their list without having to prove the email address they were signing up was in fact theirs, and if the company has unsubscribed people as they've requested (hrm, can the company prove that though?) and has since moved to a confirmed sign up system, if someone complains they've received unsolicted porn what would happen?
I run one list giving discout admission coupons to adult venues, we get 10-20 spam complaints a month, all from AOL users (with that "this is spam" checkbox) and 90% are fully confirmed addresses, the remainder are from the original import of unconfirmed addresses - never bought, never tricked, never sold, we used to just ask people who signed up what email address they wanted to send the mailing to... it was a more innocent age.
You see my point? Someone could royally mess with us, hell, I could go to jail, and I don't think I've done anything wrong. I supposed I could throw out those old, unconfirmed addresses, seems a bit drastic though. Our reply-to address is legit and monitored, our unsubscribe link works, our real mailing address is listed, it's so god-damn above-the-board it makes me ill, but i'm still worried.
I'm sure there are other examples, how do you know if the addressee is considered solicited or unsolicited? And I'm not even starting on how to know if something is sexually explicit. My god, certainly no advert featuring the cover of any teen-or-older women's magazine could pass for nonsexually explicit...
Re:Spinder Award Winner!
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Safe and Insecure?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember looking into this issue when I was with speakeasy, they very clearly stated that anything going though your connection is your responsibility, so while the cops may have a harder time dragging you into court on _______ charges, your ISP will probably have no problem at all dropping you like a hot potato.
On a side note I use megapath now and am much, much happier (though I'm sure the TOS regarding this kind of thing is the same, they just have better service...)
Boycott PayPal? While it's difficult for some PayPal clients to just drop them any PP user whose primary role is technological (and therefore is equipped to do the work needed to replace them) should cease their relationship with PP as soon as possible. It would be offensive if Slashdot continued to use them after such an outlandish stunt.
Now, having said that, I'd like to hear Pay Pal's side of the story first...
What amazed me the most, the utter arrogance of management to think they could pull off a huge project on the backs of workers that were about to receive a choice part of management's anatomy once the project was over.
As another poster mentioned, where was mention of D&T in the article? I can only wonder if the arrogance didn't start there and just kind of honey-coat AT&T's top management, some sort of golf course power orgy no doubt with the D&T suits out spinning tales of the far east, cheap educated unorganized labor as far as the eyes can see and, you know those indians, fertile people, there is no end to this bounty. Imagine all the fat bonuses as productivity skyrockets. You see, it will actually drop but the costs will drop even more, making the department more productive by any measure management will make...
Purring along while back in the basement little tribes of coders were all amuk, running up against eachother while their replacements followed them around peppering questions in british-accented englindian, erm, englian? indlish? I was going to say I'm glad i wasn't there but the more I think about it, after a while it must have gotten kind of funny and surreal, mabye it was a blast, everyone fiddling away while the crm dbs burned.
the first thing I thought was man, I hope pot doesn't damage this area of the brain. It's supposed to effect short term memory (insert obligatory...or something... comment) but I've never found anything that clarifies if this is the really really short term memory or the 'what did I eat two days ago' short term memory. The latter, meh, not so important, the former, well, very very important.
Anyone who talks about gambling and 'flows' raises my warning bells - sensing the flow, or finding patterns, in what is essentially a chaotic system is part of what ppl like about gambling, and a strident belief in one's flow sensing abilities is part of the reason why ppl loose so much money.
Still, interesting story... back jack dealers can feel a flow of a deck for or against the house and can change that flow with specific shuffles? You have to find something to back this up, it's just too fantastic. But very cool sounding none the less.
Also according to the rackspace sales guy (when i asked him why he thought it was ok to pop up a chat window) that 'many companies are doing this'
I ended up not picking rackspace just because the sales force was SO overeager, I grew suspect of the company because they were trying to sell me their services so enthusiastically. I did let my super-fanatic-sales-guy know i felt this way...
Sprint used to offer DSL w/o a live land line coming into the building - unfortunately they stopped doing this for residential service. Too bad, they had a really amazing deal for medium-high bandwidth packages, much cheaper than the competition and no additional phone charges!
We bought 8-10 death stars (mostly 40 gig) and 5 failed within the first year. We managed to find the rest and send them back rather than wait and see what happens. Really dissapointed in IBM, cost our very small company thousands of dollars in down time, tech work, data recovery, etc. I was surprised more of a stink didn't come out of this though! When we returned them they had the nerve to try and reject them b/c we'd written FAILED in perminant marker on each one (a little rubbing alcohol and a rag took care of most of that)!!!!
They were very pretty drives, the machining on the outside was particularly nice, probably the most aesthetically pleasing hard drive I've ever seen. Shame about the insides being so rotten.
hrm, not so much exploits but there are some pretty damn good root kits out there right now, can you imagine how much better the next batch will be? just replace a couple windows binaries... it could be possible to make a rootkit that literally can not be detected without an uncompromised system to scan.
Now THAT will make for some interesting tricks. Just when i was getting bored of computers, a new fun thing comes up! I might stick around another year just to see how far some clever hacker w/ a political agenda takes this...
because moderation had no "+1 tin foil hat-ty" i reply instead. yea, it could be a 250k safe bet since they know who wrote the virus but, but, but, I mean, it IS more likely that it was someone who wanted to write a virus and thought they'd get more attention if they tied it to the SCO problem, or maybe even a horribly, horribly misguided linux supporter. It COULD be SCO wrote it but PROBABLY they didn't:)
No shit! I fired dell over a year ago when I got a shipment of 3 boxes with what was absolutely the *worst* software build I have ever seen in a prebuilt system (barring the free pcs that briefly flared a few years ago). I mean, I couldn't believe we paid for this crap, ads, buggy & gimped shareware that actually bluescreened XP when certain photos were opened, terrible MS Office install, buggy wireless encryption, fucked up symantec sales pitch. Really, really horrible. I've had good experiences with Dell's hardware support though, so I'd think about Dell again if I could buy plain old $300 boxes from them... If I can get over how pissed I am about the crap they've done w/ software in the past.
I've bought a dozen or more of those lindows Wallmart PCs, $200 u get 20-40gig hd, cd, basic video/audio, 128meg ram and a 1.2 ghz duron. The dells might have significantly better hardware for the additional 100 (couldn't find the n-series on the dell website so i'm just going on a previous poster's info). The wallmart pcs are great low end boxes though, msi motherboards, award bios, all totally open and 'normal' (compared to,say, some of the weird shit you get used to get in emachines, etc.).
it's a bit OT but I have to reply, you miss the point. It's not that at the Nike plant the workers make 6 cents a day but they have a job and therefore don't have to go into prostitution, and they actually make 1 cent a day more than the non-nike-sweatshop workers. The point is that if Nike took a miniscule hit to thier profits, or if we paid $.25 more fore each pair of shoes, those workers at the Nike plant would have enough money to have a relatively (to their countrymen) decent living, not one where they maybe get enough food every day.
If the job is just one step above 3rd world prostitution (note: 1st world prostitution is a different story, I know many women who think it's quite good work, they often make over $15k a month, but I digress) then it's a hellish, inhumane job. Companies that run these places COULD pay more but they don't simply because they don't have to (due to the overwhelming general poverty).
Please don't buy these arguements that sweatshops are better for the local population than no sweat shops. They're wrong, saying something is better than something even more horrible is not really saying anything at all.
I was hoping I'd find a thread for me. Basement, unventalated, 9x6 server room with a dozen PII and PIII servers on breadracks with several consoles, all patched together by a tranny race car driver who used to work for DARPA, each one a genuine rube goldberg machine with so many special quirks, caveats and interlinks to other similarly precariously balanced (literally and figuratively) machines that it took me 3 months just to learn how not to break something, no less fix it.
Outside the server room stretched the downstairs of a gay sex club, including an internet lounge (I was, and am, responsible for upkeep). So long as they remember to put the red, not black, lights in there you can't see all the lovely substances on the chairs, keyboards, etc. Plowing through the ravages another evil porn site has left on one of the PCs while beside me a grampa-like figure in nothing but socks and shoes warms his nethers while watching a middle aged guy go down on the same is nothing compared to the upstairs, an internet video and magazine publishing center, another dozen PCs and our compressed-air crazed mascot (who lived in a corner of the upstairs offices) standing naked ontop his chair to better position the relative parts in front of the webcam I'd just installed on his PC saying 'Hey, Look, 30 of my friends are watching me right now!' while I try to sort through the spaghetti code deliverd by a speed-sniffing hippie who wrote (in 3 days, without sleep) a coupon creation/redemption program that refused to run on our commerce server.
Hrm. I guess I have a lot of blog material at least. To be honest finding a frothy naked boy behind me as I wrote code was really no weirder than finding a lawyer in a suit (previous job). The server room really was hell though.
It's true that the fish probably pose no risk to the environement. I heard an interview with one of the guys responsible for banning the glowfish in California (from the CA fish and wildlife board) - he was refreshingly candid and said they appraised the risk to the ecosystem (due to release into the wild) as next-to-nil (pointing out that the fish freaking GLOW so they'd probably be eaten by preditors long before they could become any kind of problem). He said, however, that the board has a moral as well as technical responsiblity and he felt casually toying with gene manipulation to make interesting pets is simply a Bad Idea (tm) and thus they banned 'em from CA.
I totally disagree but at least he was honest about why they were banned!
Actually, like other posters I refuse to build systems for people since that makes me responsible, no matter what they say, for hardware maintenance (i can handle the software side of things... they call me for that no matter). I used to recommend Dell until I received a shipment, about 1 year ago, with their new OS build, full of adds (this is not a friggin' PeoplePC!) and buggy crippleware, one nasty peice that leads to a blue screen under XP if.jpg pictures are viewed, I've reproduced this across multiple computers and called Dell tech support to no avail. At that point I fired them.
I've yet to find a replacement however. Currently I buy from wallmart (lindows PCs $200) and recently from Envision (link?) and in both cases I do the software build myself (I have a nice sys'd ghost of a standard office computer).
If anyone has recommendations on good, low to medium end PC vendors that include nice software builds (windows I'm afraid) please post here!
" Do you load up each socket with a 10+ port power strip (or battery backup as it may be) and pray that you don't knock-out the circuit everytime you start burning a CD?"
Short answer yes with an '...um', long answer definately with a *blush*. Now we just chain powerstrips together (only noticable impact - the lights in the house pulseate whenever the LaserJet 4 gets cranking) but this is much, much better than in college when my neighbor and friend had his outlets jury-rigged with one plug barely making contact hanging from the outlet and another plug (taped) across the exposed tongs of the first. Of course that guy rigged his car electircal system with paperclips and pennies (ressulting in a dramatic car-retiring fire in the student parking lot).
Electricity is here to serve us. For Some it just has to work harder than for others.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, not to blame the victim but the way you hold yourself goes a long way to whether you're picked out as a target (it won't stop all the shit that may come your way but it can certainly limit it). Unfortunately I can't say what, exactly, it is that works well, but I used to walk around spanish harlem at 3 am all the time and never had any real problem. The people who lived in my place before me were mugged 3 times in 6 months. Confidence, minding your own business, and a genuine lack of fear (sometimes it helps to bringing some sort of talisman or gewgaw, like a rabbits foot or a big knife or something. Myself I found carying a 40 around was nice as it provided a) beer and b) a big heavy club).
... so be a decent bloke and your neighbors will have your back.
Lastly, know your neighborhood. A lot of crime happens close to home, if you're recognized and respected (not liked, just respected) then people will look out for you. I've had help from unexpected places on several occasions
And excactly why did they build it so high? I was expecting something spanning a huge gorge or other apocolyptic gash in the earth, but this thing seems to just be running over a valley. WTF? Why exactly did they build a bridge here? what's it ... well, bridging? that is, couldn't say, a 20m hight bridge, or even a plain old roadway have done just fine?
I just finished my first WordPress install (win2ksrv) and it was a breeze. Only two problems I've had, the CSS seems to get lost occasionally (the page displays w/o any formatting, but I'm sure it'l be easy to solve, I screwed around w/ the file system and probably broke something) and the default display of the comments is a little hard to read (but I've not yet started playing around with other display templates).
... from my experience I'd give WordPress and 8 or 9 out of 10 in both categories.
I wish the comparison gave a ranking of setup complexity, or a general 'ease of maintenance' score
I get spam complaints on a regular basis from confirmed addresses, therefore there is no corellation between spam complaints and confirmation.
...
If someone signs up for a mailing list, then decides they don't want to be on the list, and an unsubscibe feature (a really easy one) is available but they don't avail themselves of it, then they're getting emails they don't want but those emails aren't spam.
I suppose the only thing to do is not send any emails out even when people request them and confirm their request since someone may decide they no longer want to get the emails and instead of unsubscribing will simply say "spam." in fact, in the past 60 days, precisely 12 people on our 5.5k member list have done exactly that. Nonetheless, having a record of confirmation protects us, legally, so we'll probably dump the older, unconfirmed names with an email asking them to resubscribe. The thing is, this won't appreciably reduce our spam complaints (since most come from confirmed addresses.) Seems silly but
spam spam spam spam and eggs.
On a side note, the spam museum (in some midwestern state in the US, they all kind of blur together) is one of the most amazing museums I've ever been in, at least in terms of production values. They even have a little corner setup like the diner in the monte python spam skit, tables, counter, walls, the works, and the skit is playing from suspended TVs above the diorama (is that the right word?) Muy slick.
lol i'm open about this b/c i really don't think i'm spamming. At all. Every single spam complaint we get, 100%, come from aol (we've had a single complaint in 4 years from anywhere else) and most are confirmed addresses. Therefore I conclude that most people who complain about us sending spam are simply not telling the truth. Just because they say it's spam doesn't make it spam.
... Maybe it's time to cull the older names ... not sure, it would elliminate the only possible line of accusation. but is seems so unnecessary, annoying thousands of our users, making them re-sign up, because there MAY be one person somewhere in the list who didn't sign themselves up at our website and have been suffering silently under our email yoke ever since. Something about that is just wrong... but I probably don't have a choice...
That is an interesting question though, what does make spam? Anyway, since I've established as fact that most AOL users who say we're spamming are clearly lying about it, and since very few of the compaints from aol are from our original unconfirmed list, then the few who weren't confirmed and are saying we're spamming are most likely lying as well.
And with an opt-in list with a real reply to (it goes into a subflder of my main account, I check it daily!), a real, working unsubscibe link, listed phone numbers and addressess of the businesses we're representing, a send rate of less than 4 emails a month and having never shared their email address with anyone else, I can barely imagine a less spam-like thing. It's just because it's regarding adult clubs (read: strip clubs) that it automatically get's seen as spam.
*sigh*
Recently I was given another 4,000 names from a club the client bought, they were unconfirmed (same thing that we used to do years ago, the website just asked for the users' email address) so I sent one email to the list saying it was being discontinued and asked them to confirm on our new list.
I'll believe that this stupid law is having a positive effect when I start getting less spam.
And I'll believe it's good when I don't get arrested. I run a small (5,500 subscribers) list for local adult clubs. It's all opt-in, we never bought (or sold) a list, we use a real, monitored reply-to address and our unsubscribe works. The list is generated from people signing up on the website explicitly for mailings and access to discount passes. However, we've only had confirmation since 2002, before that we simply asked people for their email and added them to our list (without a second email confirming they requested sign up.)
Every month we get 10+ spam complaints, all (literally 100%) from AOL users (using that little "check this box if it's spam") most are fully confirmed, meaning these idiots signed up, confirmed, then still turned us in for spamming! some, however, are from the old list, pre confirmation.
Are we sending "solicited" or "unsolicited" email?
It drives me nuts, I've been very careful to be both moral and legal, I send like 4 emails a month to an opt-in list and I'm scared some asshole will come after me after his wife catches him getting passes to strip clubs, honey, I never asked for those, and, at best, we get shut down for days and hauled into court to prove our innocence.
Anyone who has any info on how "solicited" and "sexually explicit" are defined please respond. Yes, I've already written the FTC.
I posted this same question downthread as well... how do you prove your addresses are "solicited"? how do you deterime what is "sexually explicit"? I run a 5,500 member mailing list for local adult entertainment clubs, all our addresses are from people signing up for mailings at our website (we don't try to fake people into giving us thier email address), and since 2002 they're all confirmed with a second mailing to the sign-up address but a few years ago we just took people's word for it, we didn't confirm the email address they provided.
We always unsubscribed anyone who requested and have always used a legitmate, human-monitored "from" address. If someone signed up another person to our list 3 years ago, if that person never requested an unsubscribe but now decided that they've been receiving "unsolicted pornography" from us, am I going to jail?
I'm very serious, any info is apprecaited. I just know someone will do it, we get 10+ spam complaints a month, all from AOL members (using that "this is spam" button) and almost all are confirmed email addressess. These dumbasses are signing up to our list, confirming the sign up from their email address, then instead of unsubscribing they're reporting us as spammers to AOL. It's really, really silly, you think it's black and white but it's not and if these things aren't reasonably defined, well-meaning and, i think, innocent people like myself will get screwed and not a single real spammer will ever be touched.
Any idea about the definition of unsolicited and sexually explicit? I'm serious, for example, of someone has a sign-up list that at some point (say 5 years ago) had no confirmation so people could sign up to their list without having to prove the email address they were signing up was in fact theirs, and if the company has unsubscribed people as they've requested (hrm, can the company prove that though?) and has since moved to a confirmed sign up system, if someone complains they've received unsolicted porn what would happen?
... it was a more innocent age.
I run one list giving discout admission coupons to adult venues, we get 10-20 spam complaints a month, all from AOL users (with that "this is spam" checkbox) and 90% are fully confirmed addresses, the remainder are from the original import of unconfirmed addresses - never bought, never tricked, never sold, we used to just ask people who signed up what email address they wanted to send the mailing to
You see my point? Someone could royally mess with us, hell, I could go to jail, and I don't think I've done anything wrong. I supposed I could throw out those old, unconfirmed addresses, seems a bit drastic though. Our reply-to address is legit and monitored, our unsubscribe link works, our real mailing address is listed, it's so god-damn above-the-board it makes me ill, but i'm still worried.
I'm sure there are other examples, how do you know if the addressee is considered solicited or unsolicited? And I'm not even starting on how to know if something is sexually explicit. My god, certainly no advert featuring the cover of any teen-or-older women's magazine could pass for nonsexually explicit...
I remember looking into this issue when I was with speakeasy, they very clearly stated that anything going though your connection is your responsibility, so while the cops may have a harder time dragging you into court on _______ charges, your ISP will probably have no problem at all dropping you like a hot potato.
On a side note I use megapath now and am much, much happier (though I'm sure the TOS regarding this kind of thing is the same, they just have better service...)
Boycott PayPal? While it's difficult for some PayPal clients to just drop them any PP user whose primary role is technological (and therefore is equipped to do the work needed to replace them) should cease their relationship with PP as soon as possible. It would be offensive if Slashdot continued to use them after such an outlandish stunt.
Now, having said that, I'd like to hear Pay Pal's side of the story first...
What amazed me the most, the utter arrogance of management to think they could pull off a huge project on the backs of workers that were about to receive a choice part of management's anatomy once the project was over.
As another poster mentioned, where was mention of D&T in the article? I can only wonder if the arrogance didn't start there and just kind of honey-coat AT&T's top management, some sort of golf course power orgy no doubt with the D&T suits out spinning tales of the far east, cheap educated unorganized labor as far as the eyes can see and, you know those indians, fertile people, there is no end to this bounty. Imagine all the fat bonuses as productivity skyrockets. You see, it will actually drop but the costs will drop even more, making the department more productive by any measure management will make...
Purring along while back in the basement little tribes of coders were all amuk, running up against eachother while their replacements followed them around peppering questions in british-accented englindian, erm, englian? indlish? I was going to say I'm glad i wasn't there but the more I think about it, after a while it must have gotten kind of funny and surreal, mabye it was a blast, everyone fiddling away while the crm dbs burned.
the first thing I thought was man, I hope pot doesn't damage this area of the brain. It's supposed to effect short term memory (insert obligatory ...or something... comment) but I've never found anything that clarifies if this is the really really short term memory or the 'what did I eat two days ago' short term memory. The latter, meh, not so important, the former, well, very very important.
Anyone who talks about gambling and 'flows' raises my warning bells - sensing the flow, or finding patterns, in what is essentially a chaotic system is part of what ppl like about gambling, and a strident belief in one's flow sensing abilities is part of the reason why ppl loose so much money.
Still, interesting story... back jack dealers can feel a flow of a deck for or against the house and can change that flow with specific shuffles? You have to find something to back this up, it's just too fantastic. But very cool sounding none the less.
Also according to the rackspace sales guy (when i asked him why he thought it was ok to pop up a chat window) that 'many companies are doing this'
I ended up not picking rackspace just because the sales force was SO overeager, I grew suspect of the company because they were trying to sell me their services so enthusiastically. I did let my super-fanatic-sales-guy know i felt this way...
Sprint used to offer DSL w/o a live land line coming into the building - unfortunately they stopped doing this for residential service. Too bad, they had a really amazing deal for medium-high bandwidth packages, much cheaper than the competition and no additional phone charges!
We bought 8-10 death stars (mostly 40 gig) and 5 failed within the first year. We managed to find the rest and send them back rather than wait and see what happens. Really dissapointed in IBM, cost our very small company thousands of dollars in down time, tech work, data recovery, etc. I was surprised more of a stink didn't come out of this though! When we returned them they had the nerve to try and reject them b/c we'd written FAILED in perminant marker on each one (a little rubbing alcohol and a rag took care of most of that)!!!!
They were very pretty drives, the machining on the outside was particularly nice, probably the most aesthetically pleasing hard drive I've ever seen. Shame about the insides being so rotten.
hrm, not so much exploits but there are some pretty damn good root kits out there right now, can you imagine how much better the next batch will be? just replace a couple windows binaries... it could be possible to make a rootkit that literally can not be detected without an uncompromised system to scan.
...
Now THAT will make for some interesting tricks. Just when i was getting bored of computers, a new fun thing comes up! I might stick around another year just to see how far some clever hacker w/ a political agenda takes this
because moderation had no "+1 tin foil hat-ty" i reply instead. yea, it could be a 250k safe bet since they know who wrote the virus but, but, but, I mean, it IS more likely that it was someone who wanted to write a virus and thought they'd get more attention if they tied it to the SCO problem, or maybe even a horribly, horribly misguided linux supporter. It COULD be SCO wrote it but PROBABLY they didn't :)
No shit! I fired dell over a year ago when I got a shipment of 3 boxes with what was absolutely the *worst* software build I have ever seen in a prebuilt system (barring the free pcs that briefly flared a few years ago). I mean, I couldn't believe we paid for this crap, ads, buggy & gimped shareware that actually bluescreened XP when certain photos were opened, terrible MS Office install, buggy wireless encryption, fucked up symantec sales pitch. Really, really horrible. I've had good experiences with Dell's hardware support though, so I'd think about Dell again if I could buy plain old $300 boxes from them... If I can get over how pissed I am about the crap they've done w/ software in the past.
I've bought a dozen or more of those lindows Wallmart PCs, $200 u get 20-40gig hd, cd, basic video/audio, 128meg ram and a 1.2 ghz duron. The dells might have significantly better hardware for the additional 100 (couldn't find the n-series on the dell website so i'm just going on a previous poster's info). The wallmart pcs are great low end boxes though, msi motherboards, award bios, all totally open and 'normal' (compared to,say, some of the weird shit you get used to get in emachines, etc.).
it's a bit OT but I have to reply, you miss the point. It's not that at the Nike plant the workers make 6 cents a day but they have a job and therefore don't have to go into prostitution, and they actually make 1 cent a day more than the non-nike-sweatshop workers. The point is that if Nike took a miniscule hit to thier profits, or if we paid $.25 more fore each pair of shoes, those workers at the Nike plant would have enough money to have a relatively (to their countrymen) decent living, not one where they maybe get enough food every day.
If the job is just one step above 3rd world prostitution (note: 1st world prostitution is a different story, I know many women who think it's quite good work, they often make over $15k a month, but I digress) then it's a hellish, inhumane job. Companies that run these places COULD pay more but they don't simply because they don't have to (due to the overwhelming general poverty).
Please don't buy these arguements that sweatshops are better for the local population than no sweat shops. They're wrong, saying something is better than something even more horrible is not really saying anything at all.
I was hoping I'd find a thread for me. Basement, unventalated, 9x6 server room with a dozen PII and PIII servers on breadracks with several consoles, all patched together by a tranny race car driver who used to work for DARPA, each one a genuine rube goldberg machine with so many special quirks, caveats and interlinks to other similarly precariously balanced (literally and figuratively) machines that it took me 3 months just to learn how not to break something, no less fix it.
Outside the server room stretched the downstairs of a gay sex club, including an internet lounge (I was, and am, responsible for upkeep). So long as they remember to put the red, not black, lights in there you can't see all the lovely substances on the chairs, keyboards, etc. Plowing through the ravages another evil porn site has left on one of the PCs while beside me a grampa-like figure in nothing but socks and shoes warms his nethers while watching a middle aged guy go down on the same is nothing compared to the upstairs, an internet video and magazine publishing center, another dozen PCs and our compressed-air crazed mascot (who lived in a corner of the upstairs offices) standing naked ontop his chair to better position the relative parts in front of the webcam I'd just installed on his PC saying 'Hey, Look, 30 of my friends are watching me right now!' while I try to sort through the spaghetti code deliverd by a speed-sniffing hippie who wrote (in 3 days, without sleep) a coupon creation/redemption program that refused to run on our commerce server.
Hrm. I guess I have a lot of blog material at least. To be honest finding a frothy naked boy behind me as I wrote code was really no weirder than finding a lawyer in a suit (previous job). The server room really was hell though.
It's true that the fish probably pose no risk to the environement. I heard an interview with one of the guys responsible for banning the glowfish in California (from the CA fish and wildlife board) - he was refreshingly candid and said they appraised the risk to the ecosystem (due to release into the wild) as next-to-nil (pointing out that the fish freaking GLOW so they'd probably be eaten by preditors long before they could become any kind of problem). He said, however, that the board has a moral as well as technical responsiblity and he felt casually toying with gene manipulation to make interesting pets is simply a Bad Idea (tm) and thus they banned 'em from CA.
I totally disagree but at least he was honest about why they were banned!
Actually, like other posters I refuse to build systems for people since that makes me responsible, no matter what they say, for hardware maintenance (i can handle the software side of things... they call me for that no matter). I used to recommend Dell until I received a shipment, about 1 year ago, with their new OS build, full of adds (this is not a friggin' PeoplePC!) and buggy crippleware, one nasty peice that leads to a blue screen under XP if .jpg pictures are viewed, I've reproduced this across multiple computers and called Dell tech support to no avail. At that point I fired them.
I've yet to find a replacement however. Currently I buy from wallmart (lindows PCs $200) and recently from Envision (link?) and in both cases I do the software build myself (I have a nice sys'd ghost of a standard office computer).
If anyone has recommendations on good, low to medium end PC vendors that include nice software builds (windows I'm afraid) please post here!
" Do you load up each socket with a 10+ port power strip (or battery backup as it may be) and pray that you don't knock-out the circuit everytime you start burning a CD?"
Short answer yes with an '...um', long answer definately with a *blush*. Now we just chain powerstrips together (only noticable impact - the lights in the house pulseate whenever the LaserJet 4 gets cranking) but this is much, much better than in college when my neighbor and friend had his outlets jury-rigged with one plug barely making contact hanging from the outlet and another plug (taped) across the exposed tongs of the first. Of course that guy rigged his car electircal system with paperclips and pennies (ressulting in a dramatic car-retiring fire in the student parking lot).
Electricity is here to serve us. For Some it just has to work harder than for others.