The Five Talents program turns "poor" into self supporting entreprenuers with dignity. Each participant in the program supports not only themselves, but their employees and extended family (not everyone is cut out to be an entreprenuer). Proceeds from the loans are ploughed back into the program. I am a little concerned about the program starting to resemble the World Bank if it gets too big, but right now they are doing a wonderful job of helping the worlds poor become self sufficient.
When your work involves staring at the screen all day, your break should certainly not involve the same. I recommend getting some good cubicle toys. These same employers who had me remove computer games, had no problem with desk toys (swinging balls, swinging magnets, hand exercisers, etc).
I don't have a separate interface for cable router at home. I identify incoming cable traffic by MAC address of the router (regardless of source ip), and outgoing cable traffic by dest ip. Those two rules have packet and byte counts that are exactly what I need - except that they get reset whenever I tweak the firewall. There is a way to preserve the counts for just those two rules (or everything except the rules I changed), but it is not trivial. If there was an simple way to save the counts for a specific chain/table - that would be easy to work in to the firewall.
Two of my clients had a no games policy. However, they had me remove all games from the computers. This way, there was no temptation. One went further, and had me install squid with a list of approved websites needed for business. Everything else was blocked.
It really is unreasonable to have such policies without some kind of technical help to enforce them. It doesn't need to be bullet proof - it just makes things easier for the employees honestly trying to follow the policy.
A related issue is the monthly limit on total bytes transferred with my cable company TOS. I wouldn't mind it, if only they provided a meter on their website somewhere where I could see how much I had left for the month. Without that, I am just guessing and hoping they don't get strict on me all of a sudden. I know I could build a system to track it myself using iptables - but haven't got around to it yet.
It must vary by area. Here in Fairfax, VA, it is $55/mo for unbundled low tier internet, $80/mo for static IP, no usage limits, and port 25 unblocked at the same bandwidth. If you also get Cox cable, basic home internet is $40/mo.
I've had it down a few days when they were upgrading lines, and it gets slow in the early evening when most people are browsing. But the rest of the day it is super fast.
On Cox cable, my "home" account has silver, gold, and platinum levels which vary how high the bandwidth cap on the cable modem is set. Furthermore, there are usage limits (total upload bytes and total download bytes per month), which vary with service tier. And for only $25/mo more (for "business" account), you can get a static IP plus no usage limits and port 25 to the world is no longer blocked.
The problem with the proposed schemes is that they want to meter *applications*, not bandwidth and usage. This is just wrong for any application. But it especially burns for email given the spam problem. I just installed an authentication filter for a client with a business class Cox cable account. He was getting 65000+ emails per day per domain for 20 domains, eating 3MB download bandwidth (they were just getting appended to a rotating log file since he couldn't even begin to try to find the legit mail in all the crap). All but 20 emails per day per domain are forgeries (and now get rejected in SMTP envelope thanks to the filter). Imagine the ISP charging per email SYN packet. Talk about unjust. Most of the 20 are still spam, but at least those spammers will say who they are (and so are closer to a "cold call").
Normally, the bull would be butchered out of sight and made into steaks and hamburgers. Hopefully, the butcher tries to make this relatively painless for the bull. However, at a bull fight, while the bull usually dies a more painful death, it is also more exciting - and there is a small but significant chance that he can gore the bull fighter first.
Questions for you as a Spaniard:
What happens to the bull when it wins? Do they kill it anyway, or does it get to go out to pasture or something?
What happens to the bull when it loses? Does it get eaten, or thrown away.
While I would rather skip the bullfight also, my ethical sense says that a winning bull should go to pasture (like a few lucky turkeys here in the States that get a "pardon" from the President every year), and that a losing bull should get eaten rather than wasted - as pet food if health regulations won't allow it for human consumption.
I liked the policy of the NSA when I worked on a project there. You could
bring in all the portable media, diskettes, etc, you want. But you can't take
anything out.
All media
and active devices had to be preapproved. So whatever software upgrades you
needed to install for them, you made copies of first. There were no outside
network connections, and the building was wrapped in copper foil. So planting
tiny embedded computers as spies wouldn't help you (unless your goal was
simply destruction, and the device could carry out that goal autonomously).
They didn't have USB thumb drives then, and I don't know whether they would count as "active" or "passive".
I never saw what they did to ensure that the trash, both
computers and media, was data wiped before leaving the building. Could
have been interesting.
Their system doesn't attempt to decode or interpret the signal. It digitizes designated RF bands from analog receivers and sends the digitized RF waveform over fiber where it is converted back to analog and retransmitted. This is supposed to make the system immune to changes in Cell protocols. However, I wonder how it would handle spread spectrum?
it sounds like they are talking about QOS (quality of service) charges. It would be entirely reasonable to offer a new level of service with priority QOS tags for extra dough. This could be worth paying for VOIP or other real-time applications. I can't believe they would get by with charging other ISPs customers just for internet access. (But I've underestimated greed before.)
Do you object to using shell scripts? Do you always write small C programs to avoid depending on an sh compatible shell? When shell scripts get to a certain level of complexity (I know I've gotten there when I have to turn to my coworkers and ask, "Did I get the quoting right in this script?"), you will save lots of development and maintenance time by using a scripting language with more large program features. I see Python, Perl, and Ruby as the major competitors for that slot. I could go into why I prefer Python to Perl or Ruby, but that would be an unneccesary flame war. I would absolutely respect any distro based on either. But it is nice when you can standardize on one language for complex system level scripts.
Think of someone with average intelligence. Now think 1/2 the world is dumber than that guy.
You are talking about median intelligence. Half the world is dumber that the guy of median intelligence by definition. All it takes is a few really smart guys and a lot of mediocre ones, and 90% of the world can be dumber than someone with average intelligence.
It means that in my 30 years experience as a customer of thousands of companies, I have yet to encounter one that did everything perfectly. The only one that came close was Motorola Computer Systems - which won all kinds of public awards for their amazingly close to zero defects quality on both products and service, so it wasn't just me. But Motorola shut that division down because it wasn't profitable enough. Sigh.
So it was just a bit of weary cynicism leaking into my fingers. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I have a Blockbuster account. The killer feature with Blockbuster Online is the two free store rentals each month. We queue up all the obscure titles in the online queue (ever seen "Children of Heaven" from Iran, or "Primer"?), and get popular stuff at the store.
The thing that tempts me to switch to Netflix is their bigger selection (while both collections are growing, Netflix consistenly has about 10000 more). They have lots of BBC titles (including BBC Shakespeare performances on DVD) that Blockbuster just doesn't have.
I am tempted to sign up for both on the $10/month plan. That would get me 2 DVDs at a time (one from each), plus 2 in store rentals from BlockBuster for $20/month. But then, the $15/month I spend now is already a luxury.
The thing that irritates me about Blockbuster is that their DVD event email is screwed up. They forge custhelp.com as the MAIL FROM, despite repeated complaints from me and from custhelp.com (according to the custhelp.com postmaster). Since custhelp.com publishes an SPF record, I have to list Blockbuster.com as a "forwarder" so that the event mail isn't rejected.
I haven't actually tried Netflix yet, but I'm sure they have something messed up also.
This is a bit of a misrepresentation. Even under the most arch-conservative proposal, gays and lesbians are free to get married in the classic sense of one man, one woman. They are even free to do other things more in line with their lifestyle. What conservatives object to is redefining "marriage". They also want the freedom of speech to disapprove of the gay lifestyle while tolerating it. They believe that it is unhealthy - even more so than smoking. They resent gay promotions in the same way some resent cigarette ads and yet others resent liquor ads. And yes, they believe that a gay lifestyle (as opposed to homosexuality) is acquired behaviour. They sincerely believe that even a homosexual is better off avoiding a gay lifestyle.
You might disagree with them. You might sincerely believe that a gay lifestyle is healthier for a homosexual than celibacy or a warped marriage. You might feel that an individual should be able to choose to be gay or to drink or smoke regardless of the cost to the rest of society. But redefining terms is not helpful when it comes to scientific studies of how healthy or unhealthy various lifestyles are. It makes it hard to word the questionaires when you are looking for correlations. It makes it hard to even talk about the subject without both sides misunderstanding what the other is saying.
I like Google stories on slashdot because ...
on
Google Zeitgeist '05
·
· Score: 1
google.com is immune to the slashdot effect. I can RTFA even with the story at the top of the summary page.
We are not poor, and have health insurance, but we were a small recipient of something like this. My 3 year old daughter had her shoulder dislocated in a playground accident. Not too big a deal - just needed to be reset and take it easy for a week. However, the X-ray machine was incredibly scary for her. We finally got her to hold still when the hospital staff got a teddy bear from some toys for sick kids (sorry, I forgot the name), and I stayed in the room. (Just one dose for me is not as bad as multiple daily doses for hospital staff.) She wouldn't let go of that bear for weeks.
It also checks the software running on the computer to make sure it hasn't been altered to act malevolently when it connects to other machines: that it can, in short, be trusted.
We all know whose software will be "trusted". If this catches on, it will be the end of free (libre) software on the internet. Sure, there could be an alternative free (libre) internet, but using it will likely make you a terrorist suspect.
Using a nuke is evil. Period. It does not matter what your justifications are, unless you're blowing an asteroid out of orbit or something equally improbable, the nuke has been built with the explicit goal of threatening people with destruction.
I don't care *which* monospaced font it is. Just that it is actually monospaced.
I want to draw each line of the legacy app screen with a single drawChars(). This only works if the monospaced font is actually monospaced. Windows programs like Putty seem to have actual monospaced fonts, but perhaps they have to bring their own as you suggest.
OT:
I know how to manually install a Java font in font.properties, but I was not aware that an applet could do this. I will research how to provide fonts with an applet, but wouldn't mind a hint. Does it require special signed applet privileges? Does it require Java 2 in the browser?
Funny you should mention this. Yes, I routinely run Java on AIX, Linux, and Windows and JVM incompatibilities are very rare. However, I just ran into one on Windows, and it has me steamed. It seems that the "monospaced" font isn't. That is, the characters have varying lengths. Well, some of them. The ones the block mode legacy app I am displaying in an applet uses the most (line drawing). The solution is to check the charsWidth of each string, and when it doesn't match len * charWidth('M'), loop over each individual character and position it manually. Yucky. And slow. But only on Windows.
From a user perspective, I like them both. But I was put off when it came to development for Qt (KDE). At that time, you needed a special preprocessor, and had to write the GUI code in C++. I don't know if things have changed since then. Gtk (Gnome) lets you code in any language that can call C, including C++, Python, Scheme, etc.
Very often, people asking me for technical help have problems that refuse to manifest themselves when I am present. My wife calls this my "aura". It is not just computers. The DVD player doesn't work? As soon as I say, "Let me take a look", those circuits start quaking in their solder boots, and by the time I walk over they have shaped up and start working perfectly - and will keep working for another 6 months at least. But I clean the lens to keep it in a good mood. Refrigerator on the blink? A few comments about it getting old and time for a replacement, and the thing shapes up in a hurry. Of course, cleaning out the blocked air intake helps keep up its morale.
Seriously, anthropomorphizing machines is a powerful technique. It gives you an approximate but effective mental model of a complex system. "Primitive" cultures are not dumb when they attribute personalities to objects. Our brains are wired to use personality to predict complex behaviour.
My Mother had no technical skills or knowlege - but she treated the automobile like a pet. She was alert to the tiniest change in sound or vibration of the machine, and very often alerted my Dad to problems long before he was aware of anything. One time, driving across country, my Mom said the right front wheel "didn't sound right". We were cruising along at 70, and everything seemed fine. But she insisted, so my Dad pulled over and checked all the tires. No sign of a problem. He pulled the hub cap off the right front wheel - and noticed that the cotter pin had broken! A few more miles and the wheel would have come off. My Dad panicked, since we didn't have any cotter pins in his repair kit. But my Mom dug in her purse and offered a bobby pin. My Dad didn't want to use it, because it was the wrong kind of metal and would break easily. My Mom said she had more, so he put it in. That bobby pin took us another 5000 miles.
My Dad does all his own work on his cars - at least he did until he ruined the valves on his Honda Accord a few years ago. Now he lets a mechanic do some stuff for him. I learned to be in tune with machines from my Mom, and learned to fix them from my Dad. When designing file system software back in the '70s, the rhythmic sounds of the disk access mechanism was my best feedback on its efficiency. Those were the days of 14" disk platters.
Computer technology is the perfect opportunity to buck the "timeless" aspect if they do it right. This year, sell 8-bit controllers. Next year, sell 16-bit controllers, more memory, more software, more sensors. There are so many cool features that have already been delveloped, and just need packaging in the Lego form factor. Sensor networks. Two years from now, sell swarms of 8-bit controllers for kids (and adults) to experiment with ant-like behaviour. The problem with mindstorms is that they are thinking of it in the same "timeless" fashion as the bricks. Instead, they should have at least 5 years of new paradigms in the queue to roll out. When they run out of ideas, then they have 5 years to adjust their product line.
Slashdot Mirror
The Five Talents program turns "poor" into self supporting entreprenuers with dignity. Each participant in the program supports not only themselves, but their employees and extended family (not everyone is cut out to be an entreprenuer). Proceeds from the loans are ploughed back into the program. I am a little concerned about the program starting to resemble the World Bank if it gets too big, but right now they are doing a wonderful job of helping the worlds poor become self sufficient.
When your work involves staring at the screen all day, your break should certainly not involve the same. I recommend getting some good cubicle toys. These same employers who had me remove computer games, had no problem with desk toys (swinging balls, swinging magnets, hand exercisers, etc).
I don't have a separate interface for cable router at home. I identify incoming cable traffic by MAC address of the router (regardless of source ip), and outgoing cable traffic by dest ip. Those two rules have packet and byte counts that are exactly what I need - except that they get reset whenever I tweak the firewall. There is a way to preserve the counts for just those two rules (or everything except the rules I changed), but it is not trivial. If there was an simple way to save the counts for a specific chain/table - that would be easy to work in to the firewall.
It really is unreasonable to have such policies without some kind of technical help to enforce them. It doesn't need to be bullet proof - it just makes things easier for the employees honestly trying to follow the policy.
A related issue is the monthly limit on total bytes transferred with my cable company TOS. I wouldn't mind it, if only they provided a meter on their website somewhere where I could see how much I had left for the month. Without that, I am just guessing and hoping they don't get strict on me all of a sudden. I know I could build a system to track it myself using iptables - but haven't got around to it yet.
I've had it down a few days when they were upgrading lines, and it gets slow in the early evening when most people are browsing. But the rest of the day it is super fast.
The problem with the proposed schemes is that they want to meter *applications*, not bandwidth and usage. This is just wrong for any application. But it especially burns for email given the spam problem. I just installed an authentication filter for a client with a business class Cox cable account. He was getting 65000+ emails per day per domain for 20 domains, eating 3MB download bandwidth (they were just getting appended to a rotating log file since he couldn't even begin to try to find the legit mail in all the crap). All but 20 emails per day per domain are forgeries (and now get rejected in SMTP envelope thanks to the filter). Imagine the ISP charging per email SYN packet. Talk about unjust. Most of the 20 are still spam, but at least those spammers will say who they are (and so are closer to a "cold call").
Questions for you as a Spaniard:
While I would rather skip the bullfight also, my ethical sense says that a winning bull should go to pasture (like a few lucky turkeys here in the States that get a "pardon" from the President every year), and that a losing bull should get eaten rather than wasted - as pet food if health regulations won't allow it for human consumption.
They didn't have USB thumb drives then, and I don't know whether they would count as "active" or "passive". I never saw what they did to ensure that the trash, both computers and media, was data wiped before leaving the building. Could have been interesting.
Their system doesn't attempt to decode or interpret the signal. It digitizes designated RF bands from analog receivers and sends the digitized RF waveform over fiber where it is converted back to analog and retransmitted. This is supposed to make the system immune to changes in Cell protocols. However, I wonder how it would handle spread spectrum?
it sounds like they are talking about QOS (quality of service) charges. It would be entirely reasonable to offer a new level of service with priority QOS tags for extra dough. This could be worth paying for VOIP or other real-time applications. I can't believe they would get by with charging other ISPs customers just for internet access. (But I've underestimated greed before.)
Do you object to using shell scripts? Do you always write small C programs to avoid depending on an sh compatible shell? When shell scripts get to a certain level of complexity (I know I've gotten there when I have to turn to my coworkers and ask, "Did I get the quoting right in this script?"), you will save lots of development and maintenance time by using a scripting language with more large program features. I see Python, Perl, and Ruby as the major competitors for that slot. I could go into why I prefer Python to Perl or Ruby, but that would be an unneccesary flame war. I would absolutely respect any distro based on either. But it is nice when you can standardize on one language for complex system level scripts.
You are talking about median intelligence. Half the world is dumber that the guy of median intelligence by definition. All it takes is a few really smart guys and a lot of mediocre ones, and 90% of the world can be dumber than someone with average intelligence.
So it was just a bit of weary cynicism leaking into my fingers. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The thing that tempts me to switch to Netflix is their bigger selection (while both collections are growing, Netflix consistenly has about 10000 more). They have lots of BBC titles (including BBC Shakespeare performances on DVD) that Blockbuster just doesn't have.
I am tempted to sign up for both on the $10/month plan. That would get me 2 DVDs at a time (one from each), plus 2 in store rentals from BlockBuster for $20/month. But then, the $15/month I spend now is already a luxury.
The thing that irritates me about Blockbuster is that their DVD event email is screwed up. They forge custhelp.com as the MAIL FROM, despite repeated complaints from me and from custhelp.com (according to the custhelp.com postmaster). Since custhelp.com publishes an SPF record, I have to list Blockbuster.com as a "forwarder" so that the event mail isn't rejected.
I haven't actually tried Netflix yet, but I'm sure they have something messed up also.
You might disagree with them. You might sincerely believe that a gay lifestyle is healthier for a homosexual than celibacy or a warped marriage. You might feel that an individual should be able to choose to be gay or to drink or smoke regardless of the cost to the rest of society. But redefining terms is not helpful when it comes to scientific studies of how healthy or unhealthy various lifestyles are. It makes it hard to word the questionaires when you are looking for correlations. It makes it hard to even talk about the subject without both sides misunderstanding what the other is saying.
google.com is immune to the slashdot effect. I can RTFA even with the story at the top of the summary page.
We are not poor, and have health insurance, but we were a small recipient of something like this. My 3 year old daughter had her shoulder dislocated in a playground accident. Not too big a deal - just needed to be reset and take it easy for a week. However, the X-ray machine was incredibly scary for her. We finally got her to hold still when the hospital staff got a teddy bear from some toys for sick kids (sorry, I forgot the name), and I stayed in the room. (Just one dose for me is not as bad as multiple daily doses for hospital staff.) She wouldn't let go of that bear for weeks.
The orion engine uses nuclear bombs. It tosses them behind the spaceship and detonates them. Bam - powerful impulse.
We all know whose software will be "trusted". If this catches on, it will be the end of free (libre) software on the internet. Sure, there could be an alternative free (libre) internet, but using it will likely make you a terrorist suspect.
How about a Project Orion spaceship?
OT: I know how to manually install a Java font in font.properties, but I was not aware that an applet could do this. I will research how to provide fonts with an applet, but wouldn't mind a hint. Does it require special signed applet privileges? Does it require Java 2 in the browser?
Funny you should mention this. Yes, I routinely run Java on AIX, Linux, and Windows and JVM incompatibilities are very rare. However, I just ran into one on Windows, and it has me steamed. It seems that the "monospaced" font isn't. That is, the characters have varying lengths. Well, some of them. The ones the block mode legacy app I am displaying in an applet uses the most (line drawing). The solution is to check the charsWidth of each string, and when it doesn't match len * charWidth('M'), loop over each individual character and position it manually. Yucky. And slow. But only on Windows.
From a user perspective, I like them both. But I was put off when it came to development for Qt (KDE). At that time, you needed a special preprocessor, and had to write the GUI code in C++. I don't know if things have changed since then. Gtk (Gnome) lets you code in any language that can call C, including C++, Python, Scheme, etc.
Seriously, anthropomorphizing machines is a powerful technique. It gives you an approximate but effective mental model of a complex system. "Primitive" cultures are not dumb when they attribute personalities to objects. Our brains are wired to use personality to predict complex behaviour.
My Mother had no technical skills or knowlege - but she treated the automobile like a pet. She was alert to the tiniest change in sound or vibration of the machine, and very often alerted my Dad to problems long before he was aware of anything. One time, driving across country, my Mom said the right front wheel "didn't sound right". We were cruising along at 70, and everything seemed fine. But she insisted, so my Dad pulled over and checked all the tires. No sign of a problem. He pulled the hub cap off the right front wheel - and noticed that the cotter pin had broken! A few more miles and the wheel would have come off. My Dad panicked, since we didn't have any cotter pins in his repair kit. But my Mom dug in her purse and offered a bobby pin. My Dad didn't want to use it, because it was the wrong kind of metal and would break easily. My Mom said she had more, so he put it in. That bobby pin took us another 5000 miles.
My Dad does all his own work on his cars - at least he did until he ruined the valves on his Honda Accord a few years ago. Now he lets a mechanic do some stuff for him. I learned to be in tune with machines from my Mom, and learned to fix them from my Dad. When designing file system software back in the '70s, the rhythmic sounds of the disk access mechanism was my best feedback on its efficiency. Those were the days of 14" disk platters.
Computer technology is the perfect opportunity to buck the "timeless" aspect if they do it right. This year, sell 8-bit controllers. Next year, sell 16-bit controllers, more memory, more software, more sensors. There are so many cool features that have already been delveloped, and just need packaging in the Lego form factor. Sensor networks. Two years from now, sell swarms of 8-bit controllers for kids (and adults) to experiment with ant-like behaviour. The problem with mindstorms is that they are thinking of it in the same "timeless" fashion as the bricks. Instead, they should have at least 5 years of new paradigms in the queue to roll out. When they run out of ideas, then they have 5 years to adjust their product line.