"That's the sort of English up with which we will not put"
As someone who was standing in the room at the time, um, well, I can't help you. But from the quotes on my wall, I'd put it as: "This is an impertinence up with which I will not put."
Are they planning to restore the threaded interface?
Deja.com never had a threaded interface. It just tossed things together by subject header. A threaded interface would draw a tree based on the References: headers.
The choice is not between a bunch of 'FBC' missions and a bunch of Battlestar Galactica class missions. The choice is between several FBC missions a year, vs. one Galactica per decade.
Um, this is a no-brainer.
If we have to choose between (A) annually landing dozens of $150 million widgets on cold lumps of rock a few miles overhead, or (B) developing the technology to animate robotic daggits while we frolic in the Triad courts and sail merrily through the skies aboard our Viper craft, only the most hardcore geeks would choose the former.
The NEAR team has members from both NASA and Johns Hopkins
And I'll give a free nose goblin to anyone who can figure out who's in charge. The orgchart reads like a hedge maze.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise.
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I'm not even going to bother mentioning details for your perusal, because I know it's commonplace.
Well, if some random anonymous person on Slashdot "knows" it's true, that's all the proof I need.
Re:How do they select partner businesses?
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Looking at most of the assignments listed on the Geekhalla page, I'm interested to see that they're primarily working with for-profit businesses. I wonder both why they aren't doing more for technology infrastructure in the non-profit sector (schools & hospitals & governments) and on what basis they select their partners.
The point of these programs is to help the economy to get a leg up. They tend to work with small businesses run by people who have demonstrated a commitment to bringing new approaches to troubled economies: Using new technology, employing workers from underutilized components of the labor pool, perhaps even avoiding the too-typical sly relationships with corrupt officials.
Those are exactly the people you want to be helping if you're trying to improve a country's self-sufficiency.
Furthermore, the government, healthcare sector, etc., already have plenty of mega-pocketed institutional sources of aid (from the World Bank and UN on down). The indigenous private sector has no such luck - except programs like this.
And to everyone else, dissing any sort of aid that presupposes Africans are intelligent enough to do anything but eat food dropped out of a helicopter: There are all sorts of aid programs. Some provide food. Some provide medicine. Some provide expertise. The fact that food is needed (though not particularly in Ghana) does not mean that other aid is not also useful - perhaps more in the long run.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise.
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How completely idiotic is this? They build it, installed it, but they can't plug it into a 110 volt outlet in the wall.
How can this be scored +4, Informative, when it's fictional?
Stories like this abound. I generally investigate when they come up in organizations I'm supposed to be helping.
Invariably, they come back to some manager who wanted to save $500 from his budget by having his secretary run to Office Depot and buy 7 or 8 power strips, when code (and common sense) required installation of additional outlets. Someone reports it as a fire hazard, the manager gets all up in a huff, makes up some ridiculous story like that quoted above, and it passes into legend.
Never yet have I seen a situation where people were not allowed to plug 110v plugs into outlets, or move things around on their desks, because of "union rules". And until you can provide concrete proof (Lord knows I've tried to find it), I'll assume you just like the sound of the fairy tales so thought you'd pass them on to the kids here.
Re:Unions are bad, mmmkay?
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But those very people are making choices about how they live. No one forces them to get married, have children, or remain skill-less. Americans are bombarded every day with opportunities for advancement, self improvement, etc. Have you watched American television in the last twenty years? Who is to blame if someone ignores all of those opportunities and settles for a simple life of simple means?
Guess what?
Our society needs people to have children and to take low-skill jobs. Without children, the economy will fall apart as we age, and we'll all starve. Without people in low-skill jobs, we wouldn't have roads and clean offices and daily lunch specials.
And as long as our society needs people in those roles, depends on them, can't exist without them, we are obligated to make sure that they enjoy the same rights as the rest of us.
I don't see any reason that we shouldn't have to customize websites for persons with disabilities.
I can.
A properly-designed web site does not need any customization for persons with disabilities.
A web site which is not universally accessible is an indication of gross incompetence on the part of its designer.
Obviously, not every adornment and photo needs to be described in painstaking detail. But - and this is particularly important on government sites, which exist to make important information available to the public - there should be no frivolous impediments to the transmission of information. And this goes from Day One.
A couple years ago I was with a government agency which, to its credit, decided to get an early move on this and get all its pages accessible.
It was a tremendously valuable project, because running all the pages through Bobby and other validators not only highlighted the pointless inaccessiblities that riddled the web site, but called attention to all the other coding errors and other latent problems lying beneath the surface.
It also made it very clear which of the web developers knew what they were doing, and which were utterly useless goldbrickers, tossing together nonsense using FrontPage when they had claimed to know HTML.
Many of these same people thought it was impossible to have pages that are visually engaging and accessible at the same time. This is precisely because they did not know HTML, and thought that the only things that could show up on the web were the fetid oozings from the back end of FrontPage and its ilk.
So, here's the Rapid Accessibility plan:
Conduct spot checks and immediately fire anyone on whose computer FrontPage shows up in the recently-used applications
Use a tool like Bobby to get a detailed review of problem areas
Study these to determine patterns (missing Alt attributes, etc.).
Assemble tools (using Perl or some other rapid-development language) to automate the repair of the patterned problems. For instance, for the missing Alt attributes, write a program that presents each image on each page, asks an operator to write a label for it, and then writes the page back out with the labels added.
Conduct another spot check to see if you missed any of the FrontPage users the first time around.
The accessibility concerns are fully dependent on the equipment used to communicate and receive the information at the users end and this is not within your power nor should it be your concern.
I can't tell whether you're trolling, or what.
User equipment cannot turn a graphical navigation imagemap into something a blind person can use. Only the site's creator can do that.
You might as well say that we don't need ramps at the library because some paraplegic's inability to climb the stairs is an end-user equipment problem.
I don't object to the FBI investigation. I don't think anyone should do time for this or anything, you can't arrest people for having poor taste, but maybe it would encourage people to rethink their parody and humor sites.
You have got to be kidding me.
Why should people "rethink" their parody and humor sites? And moreover, why should the federal law enforcement agency be the organization that prompts such rethinking?
In what broken, perverse society is the propriety of parody determined by those being parodied?
Precisely because crazy cat people (I love cats, but I am - apparently unlike some - not an idiot about it) are so offended by this and so unable to see it for what it is, it stands as an example of fine parody, a paragon of the art, and should be displayed far and wide. Schoolchildren should be shown this page when they're learning about forms of expression.
Anyone who thinks that there is anyone out there who wants a cube-shaped cat needs a good long session with a humor therapist. It is precisely because of this modern disease - the absolute inability to exercise even the slightest amount of skepticism, to critically evaluate, to put aside sentiment and open one's eyes - that our culture is losing what faint traces of subtlety it once had. We are no longer allowed to make jokes, to poke fun, to invite someone to look at something a new way. Instead, we have to label our jokes with "This is a joke", run a laugh track behind them, and clear them with a phalanx of focus groups to ensure not a single person in the audience will feel that the joke's creator has for some inconceivable reason singled them out as a target.
You make me sick. It is people like you who will destroy art, will reduce us inexorably to the lowest common denominator.
What would be more interesting would be to arrange something like this as a wireless service. Would work nicely in cities, anyway.
I suspect there are some sort of 900 MHz or 2.4GHz consumer handsets that can be programmed or modified to carry unique IDs.
The transmission equipment for these is cheap; decent digital cordless phones cost US$40.
Participants in the project who have broadband set up a box connected to their network.
When someone wants to call you, they dial a number that goes to a room full of voice cards. The participating wireless base stations are notified. They see if they can find the phone with the appropriate unique ID. The call is thus completed.
Phones could probably most easily be located using a roaming system similar to what the cell phone companies use today.
The major obstacles are (1) potentially, the availability of suitable affordable hardware; (2) someone forking over the dough for the hardware to receive calls, (3) cost recovery for placed calls - hopefully this could be solved through cooperation with an existing landline freephone project, (4) getting enough base stations in the areas where users congregate
If done for free, this should be legal under the provisions of the 2.4GHz rules
I can't help but feel that this is yesterdays news. I already have a cheap international phone service, and furthermore I can use it anywhere - on the bus, the train, while driving my car. Its called my mobile phone.
GSM roaming is cheap like George Bush is on his way to discovering a cure for cancer. There's just no comparison.
Fact is, landline phone service is and will remain for the forseeable future cheaper to provide in the long term than mobile for a simple reason: There is an infinite amount of wire capacity available, while airspace is already under severe contention. Furthermore, the major investment in wiring is already paid off in most developed countries.
In the United States, phone companies can profitably provide unlimited, unmetered landline phone service for $15/month. Ain't nobody can do that with mobile.
This is not to mention the fact that landline telephony provides better voice quality, and comparatively huge data bandwidth (I've got 1-megabit DSL riding on top of my phone calls).
Mobile is an interesting novelty/status toy, and is genuinely useful for some, and in developing countries without the cash in the bank to cable everyone's home, it's a viable short-term approach. But a rational substitute for landline it's not.
The US economy is definately on its way down. The turn actually came about three or four years ago, but the dot-com boom masked it to some extent and the liberal biased press masked it the rest of the way. Large amounts of mismanagement during the past presidency were the real root of the problem, with a lack of foreign policy being one of the main issues.
Any non-partisan numbers to back this up, or does it just sound nice?
Or wait, I know, there's been a conspiracy to cover up the real data and in all the world only you and the man who lost both the popular and electoral votes know the truth.
Perhaps the real underlying problem is weak academic programs at Texas universities?
> The Internet runs Unix.
Unfortunately, 99% of the people using it don't.
And so?
99% of the people don't know how to fly a 747 but that doesn't mean that Chevy's the name to watch in aerospace.
Just because someone doesn't like/know/use Unix doesn't make them less "31337", and it certainly doesn't mean that they can't get a good job.
You can get a good job without knowing how to spell your name, too.
While you can certainly get a good job without knowing Unix, you would get a better job (on average; this is not a call for stories from Visual Basic programmers making 25 million dollars a week) if you learned it.
People who suicide-bomb school buses are usually very righteous, "pure" fanatics, the same kind of fanatic that bomb abortion clinics in the west.
You're completely right. However, the people who suicide-bomb school buses are the low men on the totem pole, the weakest-minded of all, the people so caught up by the leaders' rhetoric that the leaders find it better to have them dead than alive.
Every movement has its leaders and its followers. It is the leaders who are doing the planning and communicating (and encrypting), and the followers who are manipulated into carrying out the acts that increase the leaders' power.
These people will not only follow all their religious beliefs, they will follow those beliefs to the exact letter.
There is no place in the Quran or any other religious text that I'm aware of that recommends killing busloads of innocent children to complain about political acts halfway around the world. This stuff does not come from religion per se; it comes from people whose slavish and unconsidered devotion to religion allows them to follow the words of anyone who claims to authoritatively represent that religion.
By their prior zealotry displayed in the temple, the church, or the mosque, the footsoldiers of "religious" terrorism have proven themselves to be willingly manipulated. So clever people come along and manipulate them, tossing in some irrelevant crumbs of spiritual mumbo-jumbo to speed the process along.
I will happily grant that art instruction shows absolutely no value this week. You can't eat it. It doesn't keep you dry in the rain. If an animal bites you, you can't use it to cover the hole.
Well, it's quite clear that you don't know the first damn thing about art or art education.
Step out of your ivory tower and into a classroom sometime. Half the kids are eating paste. All students are given smocks which, by the middle of the quarter are covered with a waterproof layer of tempera paint. And there's nothing quite like a papier-mâché band-aid to keep your insides in after a gut bite from a ravenous woodland grue.
"Hidden in the X-rated pictures on several pornographic Web sites". The article starts with this major culturally ignorant phrase. All "bad men" quoted afterwards are fundamentalist muslins. These guys are as likely to found in pornographic sites as Mrs. Barbara Bush is likely to be photographed burning the flag
Don't be fooled by the religious rhetoric - it's bad enough that thousands of weak-minded teenagers (who happen to be Muslims) in the middle east are. Political Islam has nothing to do with religion. The Quran is an expedient tool used to manipulate people into following cynical leaders. In the US they would use the Bible.
A tricky thing with religion is that its reliance on the unseeable and unprovable makes it and its followers fairly ripe for manipulation. Once someone has demonstrated that they're willing to believe something just because a book says they should, any wanna-be despots have a ready-made self-selected audience to focus on.
Even then, the majority of people are sensible enough to recognize bargain-bin demagogery as just that, and steer well clear.
Just as most professed Christians are nice people you'd be happy to have as next-door neighbors, most Muslims are ordinary folks who want nothing more than to get through the day, have a good job, feed their family, and have an excuse to smile from time to time.
Anyway, the point is that anyone who manipulates a religion as a tool for motivating others to commit acts that stand against that religion's doctrines (as terrorism does against Islam), has already shown where they stand, and there's no particular reason to believe they're not watching the Playboy channel with a cold 40-ouncer sitting atop their copy of the Quran right this very moment.
I'm surprised that no one else in this thread has mentioned the fact that encrypted transmissions have been hidden in newspapers at least since world war 2
I was going to but then my office was invaded by marketing people, sucking up the rest of my afternoon.
The key similarity is that reception of the message is anonymous; only general-interest web sites or chat rooms with lots of traffic are really viable. As you say, classified ads in the newspaper are still better. The problem is that the data payload is much smaller.
Transmission doesn't need to be so anonymous, because unwitting third parties can be maneuvered into doing it, and in any case by the time the message is discovered the transmitter has long vanished - and the identity used has been scrapped.
Other than newspapers and parts of the internet, there are not many anonymous-receiver channels into which it's relatively easy to inject an arbitrary message. Shortwave radio? Not enough potential listeners to hide the target. Wearing different-colored T-shirts outside the Today Show window? Not enough bandwidth.
So basically it's a duopoly. Do you suppose the media companies are pushing this story because the newspapers they own are losing valuable classified ad revenue in the absence of encoded spy messages?
Okay, well, this only makes sense if you have several machines (I've never seen the appeal of dual-booting unix), but there are definitely comparative advantages to each OS.
For mail servers, DHCP, DNS, NFS, firewall, NAT, etc., FreeBSD means less headaches. I've got plenty of FreeBSD boxes that have never been down except for OS upgrades or hardware moves. You can lock them in a closet and never think about it again - it's like the golden days of Novell Netware all over again. And under intense loads, say, a well-utilized IMAP or Samba server, FreeBSD keeps its chin up far longer than Linux.
However, the problem with FreeBSD is that, let's face it, the userland is just not as friendly as that in Linux. You spend days installing all the happy-fun GNU tools with useful command-line arguments and post-1970 approaches to system management, and by the time you've done that, you've kluged together a system only a mother could love. So, for day-to-day messing around, Linux can be much friendlier.
Perhaps even more importantly, the new generation of commercial software is largely just not available for FreeBSD. Want to run Oracle? Domino? You can try to shoehorn them into FreeBSD's Linux emulation environment, but I can tell you from painful experience, it's not pretty - if it works at all. And when you try to do things like linking other third-party software against the Oracle libraries under Linux emulation, you'll spend weeks up to your eyeballs in Makefiles and header files. Not worth the trouble, even for the incremental improvement in stability.
So they both have their places, and they're both well-worth learning about. But I'd be quite suspicious of someone who claims that one is a "better" OS than the other - it depends far too much on one's specific needs.
That's what they said when we added this nifty alphabet thing. "Kids today," they said, "Next thing you know, they won't be able to recite 10,000 line epics from memory."
Yeah, like that happened...
You know any kids that can recite 10,000 line epics from memory?
I didn't think so.
What's happening is that we're using our brains for other things (for instance, learning how to operate the equipment that takes the place of memory, and in many cases is far more useful than memory - you can beam your address book to someone and then they have it forever; can't do that with phone numbers in your head). Problem, I guess, is that some people get so optimized for certain tasks that they start losing the ability to do other things that are in fact useful some of the time.
A similar example is physical activity. These days I know people who get winded walking a few blocks or a few flights of stairs, and gasp in shock at the idea of walking a couple miles rather than driving or taking a cab.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to regard these people as pathetic lazy schlubs, much as the Times-quoted researchers who used words like "stupid". On the other, though, they're still nice people, and productive members of society. Technology has enabled them to optimize for other tasks.
Perhaps that's the case for Microsoft users who have little option but to deliver all their mail to a smarthost, but it's certainly not the case for Unix/Linux/BSD users.
So what? Reconfigure your box. Surely you have the 30 seconds to spare, if you can manage it for Slashdot. You have to configure the gateway and netmask and NNTP server, configure an SMTP smarthost as well.
The norm there is for their MTAs to manage their own queues and to deliver direct to the destination mail exchangers in accordance with DNS/MX, not only because that is the default for Unix machines out of the box, but also because that's the normal method of delivery for MTAs on the Internet, as opposed to those on internal networks.
Since I've been doing this internet stuff (about 15 years now) it's never been the "norm" for individual boxes to deliver mail straight to the destination MX. Back when we were creaming our collective pants over new clusters of Apollo workstations with 4M (wow!) of RAM, mail was forwarded to a central machine for delivery. Now that the kids are creaming their collective pants over 1.3GHz barnstormers running the latest Gatesware, mail is forwarded to a central machine for delivery.
I don't understand your distinction between "internal networks" and "machines on the internet" unless you mean to distinguish between those machines which potentially - due to the lack of intervening proxy servers or to intermittent connectivity - have the capability of end-to-end contact with remote MXes and those which don't, in which case please refer to my paragraph above.
They are paying to be on the Internet, so blocking their MTAs from delivering outbound traffic in the normal way for Internet machinery is definitely stopping totally legitimate activity.
The activity these people are trying to engage in is the delivery of mail, not the communication between their MTA and a specific SMTP server. You might as well complain that UUnet is no longer sending your packets through 200.at-6-0-0.XR1.ATL1.ALTER.NET, which has always been your favorite backbone router since you were a child. As long as they provide a mail relay that gets the mail there immediately and reliably, you are none the worse off (except, perhaps, that you have to wait for bounces rather than looking in your logs to identify certain short-term delivery problems which are out of your hands anyway).
Just because some people are criminals, you don't put everyone in jail on the offchance that they might commit a crime.
Just because most people aren't criminals, doesn't mean you give them all keys to the bank vault. Sorry, what are these homilies supposed to prove again?
what's the more accurate price for Oracle in the wild?
You can go to their web site and price it for yourself. As others have mentioned, their pricing-scheme-of-the-month involves adding up the speed of the processors that will be running it and multiplying by some magic numbers.
The last Oracle installation I shepherded came to about $2000/year. That was for 8i on a single-processor, 600Mhz machine. In fact, that's enough power to handle a fair amount of traffic as back-end to a web site that doesn't do anything hugely complicated. In a case like that, throw money at hardware: fast multi-channel storage in particular.
The trick comes when you want to scale too much beyond that. To use multiple servers you need features of Oracle Enterprise Edition, which is about 5 times as much (per server).
But the fact is, it may well be worth it. The software runs well, is pretty fast these days, can do everything under the sun, and it's the easiest serious database to find qualified staff for.
On the other hand, it's not the sort of thing you install one morning and then start merrily using that afternoon, like MySQL. Factor in your costs that you'll either need to hire experienced people (recommended) or spend many weeks with piles of expensive books making false starts before you start getting productive return.
Moving to a frac T is a signifigant jump in complexity. Perhaps they should have (gasp) HIRED someone full time to maintain it? Would be lots lots cheaper in the long run.
Are you one of these consultants everyone's complaining about? What's complex about a T1? A little box like a Cisco 2600 can be remotely configured by the ISP, or configured on-site using the supplied documentation, and then will quietly hum for years.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who was standing in the room at the time, um, well, I can't help you. But from the quotes on my wall, I'd put it as: "This is an impertinence up with which I will not put."
Deja.com never had a threaded interface. It just tossed things together by subject header. A threaded interface would draw a tree based on the References: headers.
Um, this is a no-brainer.
If we have to choose between (A) annually landing dozens of $150 million widgets on cold lumps of rock a few miles overhead, or (B) developing the technology to animate robotic daggits while we frolic in the Triad courts and sail merrily through the skies aboard our Viper craft, only the most hardcore geeks would choose the former.
And I'll give a free nose goblin to anyone who can figure out who's in charge. The orgchart reads like a hedge maze.
Well, if some random anonymous person on Slashdot "knows" it's true, that's all the proof I need.
The point of these programs is to help the economy to get a leg up. They tend to work with small businesses run by people who have demonstrated a commitment to bringing new approaches to troubled economies: Using new technology, employing workers from underutilized components of the labor pool, perhaps even avoiding the too-typical sly relationships with corrupt officials.
Those are exactly the people you want to be helping if you're trying to improve a country's self-sufficiency.
Furthermore, the government, healthcare sector, etc., already have plenty of mega-pocketed institutional sources of aid (from the World Bank and UN on down). The indigenous private sector has no such luck - except programs like this.
And to everyone else, dissing any sort of aid that presupposes Africans are intelligent enough to do anything but eat food dropped out of a helicopter: There are all sorts of aid programs. Some provide food. Some provide medicine. Some provide expertise. The fact that food is needed (though not particularly in Ghana) does not mean that other aid is not also useful - perhaps more in the long run.
How can this be scored +4, Informative, when it's fictional?
Stories like this abound. I generally investigate when they come up in organizations I'm supposed to be helping.
Invariably, they come back to some manager who wanted to save $500 from his budget by having his secretary run to Office Depot and buy 7 or 8 power strips, when code (and common sense) required installation of additional outlets. Someone reports it as a fire hazard, the manager gets all up in a huff, makes up some ridiculous story like that quoted above, and it passes into legend.
Never yet have I seen a situation where people were not allowed to plug 110v plugs into outlets, or move things around on their desks, because of "union rules". And until you can provide concrete proof (Lord knows I've tried to find it), I'll assume you just like the sound of the fairy tales so thought you'd pass them on to the kids here.
Guess what?
Our society needs people to have children and to take low-skill jobs. Without children, the economy will fall apart as we age, and we'll all starve. Without people in low-skill jobs, we wouldn't have roads and clean offices and daily lunch specials.
And as long as our society needs people in those roles, depends on them, can't exist without them, we are obligated to make sure that they enjoy the same rights as the rest of us.
I don't see any reason that we shouldn't have to customize websites for persons with disabilities.
I can.
A properly-designed web site does not need any customization for persons with disabilities.
A web site which is not universally accessible is an indication of gross incompetence on the part of its designer.
Obviously, not every adornment and photo needs to be described in painstaking detail. But - and this is particularly important on government sites, which exist to make important information available to the public - there should be no frivolous impediments to the transmission of information. And this goes from Day One.
A couple years ago I was with a government agency which, to its credit, decided to get an early move on this and get all its pages accessible.
It was a tremendously valuable project, because running all the pages through Bobby and other validators not only highlighted the pointless inaccessiblities that riddled the web site, but called attention to all the other coding errors and other latent problems lying beneath the surface.
It also made it very clear which of the web developers knew what they were doing, and which were utterly useless goldbrickers, tossing together nonsense using FrontPage when they had claimed to know HTML.
Many of these same people thought it was impossible to have pages that are visually engaging and accessible at the same time. This is precisely because they did not know HTML, and thought that the only things that could show up on the web were the fetid oozings from the back end of FrontPage and its ilk.
So, here's the Rapid Accessibility plan:
The accessibility concerns are fully dependent on the equipment used to communicate and receive the information at the users end and this is not within your power nor should it be your concern.
I can't tell whether you're trolling, or what.
User equipment cannot turn a graphical navigation imagemap into something a blind person can use. Only the site's creator can do that.
You might as well say that we don't need ramps at the library because some paraplegic's inability to climb the stairs is an end-user equipment problem.
I don't object to the FBI investigation. I don't think anyone should do time for this or anything, you can't arrest people for having poor taste, but maybe it would encourage people to rethink their parody and humor sites.
You have got to be kidding me.
Why should people "rethink" their parody and humor sites? And moreover, why should the federal law enforcement agency be the organization that prompts such rethinking?
In what broken, perverse society is the propriety of parody determined by those being parodied?
Precisely because crazy cat people (I love cats, but I am - apparently unlike some - not an idiot about it) are so offended by this and so unable to see it for what it is, it stands as an example of fine parody, a paragon of the art, and should be displayed far and wide. Schoolchildren should be shown this page when they're learning about forms of expression.
Anyone who thinks that there is anyone out there who wants a cube-shaped cat needs a good long session with a humor therapist. It is precisely because of this modern disease - the absolute inability to exercise even the slightest amount of skepticism, to critically evaluate, to put aside sentiment and open one's eyes - that our culture is losing what faint traces of subtlety it once had. We are no longer allowed to make jokes, to poke fun, to invite someone to look at something a new way. Instead, we have to label our jokes with "This is a joke", run a laugh track behind them, and clear them with a phalanx of focus groups to ensure not a single person in the audience will feel that the joke's creator has for some inconceivable reason singled them out as a target.
You make me sick. It is people like you who will destroy art, will reduce us inexorably to the lowest common denominator.
What would be more interesting would be to arrange something like this as a wireless service. Would work nicely in cities, anyway.
I suspect there are some sort of 900 MHz or 2.4GHz consumer handsets that can be programmed or modified to carry unique IDs.
The transmission equipment for these is cheap; decent digital cordless phones cost US$40.
Participants in the project who have broadband set up a box connected to their network.
When someone wants to call you, they dial a number that goes to a room full of voice cards. The participating wireless base stations are notified. They see if they can find the phone with the appropriate unique ID. The call is thus completed.
Phones could probably most easily be located using a roaming system similar to what the cell phone companies use today.
The major obstacles are (1) potentially, the availability of suitable affordable hardware; (2) someone forking over the dough for the hardware to receive calls, (3) cost recovery for placed calls - hopefully this could be solved through cooperation with an existing landline freephone project, (4) getting enough base stations in the areas where users congregate
If done for free, this should be legal under the provisions of the 2.4GHz rules
I can't help but feel that this is yesterdays news. I already have a cheap international phone service, and furthermore I can use it anywhere - on the bus, the train, while driving my car. Its called my mobile phone.
GSM roaming is cheap like George Bush is on his way to discovering a cure for cancer. There's just no comparison.
Fact is, landline phone service is and will remain for the forseeable future cheaper to provide in the long term than mobile for a simple reason: There is an infinite amount of wire capacity available, while airspace is already under severe contention. Furthermore, the major investment in wiring is already paid off in most developed countries.
In the United States, phone companies can profitably provide unlimited, unmetered landline phone service for $15/month. Ain't nobody can do that with mobile.
This is not to mention the fact that landline telephony provides better voice quality, and comparatively huge data bandwidth (I've got 1-megabit DSL riding on top of my phone calls).
Mobile is an interesting novelty/status toy, and is genuinely useful for some, and in developing countries without the cash in the bank to cable everyone's home, it's a viable short-term approach. But a rational substitute for landline it's not.
The US economy is definately on its way down. The turn actually came about three or four years ago, but the dot-com boom masked it to some extent and the liberal biased press masked it the rest of the way. Large amounts of mismanagement during the past presidency were the real root of the problem, with a lack of foreign policy being one of the main issues.
Any non-partisan numbers to back this up, or does it just sound nice?
Or wait, I know, there's been a conspiracy to cover up the real data and in all the world only you and the man who lost both the popular and electoral votes know the truth.
Perhaps the real underlying problem is weak academic programs at Texas universities?
> The Internet runs Unix.
Unfortunately, 99% of the people using it don't.
And so?
99% of the people don't know how to fly a 747 but that doesn't mean that Chevy's the name to watch in aerospace.
Just because someone doesn't like/know/use Unix doesn't make them less "31337", and it certainly doesn't mean that they can't get a good job.
You can get a good job without knowing how to spell your name, too.
While you can certainly get a good job without knowing Unix, you would get a better job (on average; this is not a call for stories from Visual Basic programmers making 25 million dollars a week) if you learned it.
People who suicide-bomb school buses are usually very righteous, "pure" fanatics, the same kind of fanatic that bomb abortion clinics in the west.
You're completely right. However, the people who suicide-bomb school buses are the low men on the totem pole, the weakest-minded of all, the people so caught up by the leaders' rhetoric that the leaders find it better to have them dead than alive.
Every movement has its leaders and its followers. It is the leaders who are doing the planning and communicating (and encrypting), and the followers who are manipulated into carrying out the acts that increase the leaders' power.
These people will not only follow all their religious beliefs, they will follow those beliefs to the exact letter.
There is no place in the Quran or any other religious text that I'm aware of that recommends killing busloads of innocent children to complain about political acts halfway around the world. This stuff does not come from religion per se; it comes from people whose slavish and unconsidered devotion to religion allows them to follow the words of anyone who claims to authoritatively represent that religion.
By their prior zealotry displayed in the temple, the church, or the mosque, the footsoldiers of "religious" terrorism have proven themselves to be willingly manipulated. So clever people come along and manipulate them, tossing in some irrelevant crumbs of spiritual mumbo-jumbo to speed the process along.
I will happily grant that art instruction shows absolutely no value this week. You can't eat it. It doesn't keep you dry in the rain. If an animal bites you, you can't use it to cover the hole.
Well, it's quite clear that you don't know the first damn thing about art or art education.
Step out of your ivory tower and into a classroom sometime. Half the kids are eating paste. All students are given smocks which, by the middle of the quarter are covered with a waterproof layer of tempera paint. And there's nothing quite like a papier-mâché band-aid to keep your insides in after a gut bite from a ravenous woodland grue.
"Hidden in the X-rated pictures on several pornographic Web sites". The article starts with this major culturally ignorant phrase. All "bad men" quoted afterwards are fundamentalist muslins. These guys are as likely to found in pornographic sites as Mrs. Barbara Bush is likely to be photographed burning the flag
Don't be fooled by the religious rhetoric - it's bad enough that thousands of weak-minded teenagers (who happen to be Muslims) in the middle east are. Political Islam has nothing to do with religion. The Quran is an expedient tool used to manipulate people into following cynical leaders. In the US they would use the Bible.
A tricky thing with religion is that its reliance on the unseeable and unprovable makes it and its followers fairly ripe for manipulation. Once someone has demonstrated that they're willing to believe something just because a book says they should, any wanna-be despots have a ready-made self-selected audience to focus on.
Even then, the majority of people are sensible enough to recognize bargain-bin demagogery as just that, and steer well clear.
Just as most professed Christians are nice people you'd be happy to have as next-door neighbors, most Muslims are ordinary folks who want nothing more than to get through the day, have a good job, feed their family, and have an excuse to smile from time to time.
Anyway, the point is that anyone who manipulates a religion as a tool for motivating others to commit acts that stand against that religion's doctrines (as terrorism does against Islam), has already shown where they stand, and there's no particular reason to believe they're not watching the Playboy channel with a cold 40-ouncer sitting atop their copy of the Quran right this very moment.
I'm surprised that no one else in this thread has mentioned the fact that encrypted transmissions have been hidden in newspapers at least since world war 2
I was going to but then my office was invaded by marketing people, sucking up the rest of my afternoon.
The key similarity is that reception of the message is anonymous; only general-interest web sites or chat rooms with lots of traffic are really viable. As you say, classified ads in the newspaper are still better. The problem is that the data payload is much smaller.
Transmission doesn't need to be so anonymous, because unwitting third parties can be maneuvered into doing it, and in any case by the time the message is discovered the transmitter has long vanished - and the identity used has been scrapped.
Other than newspapers and parts of the internet, there are not many anonymous-receiver channels into which it's relatively easy to inject an arbitrary message. Shortwave radio? Not enough potential listeners to hide the target. Wearing different-colored T-shirts outside the Today Show window? Not enough bandwidth.
So basically it's a duopoly. Do you suppose the media companies are pushing this story because the newspapers they own are losing valuable classified ad revenue in the absence of encoded spy messages?
It'd limit stupid posts to the people with extra cash to throw around while also limiting useful posts from those who don't have the extra cash.
Just make the fee reverse-indexed to one's karma. The more/better your posts are received, the less you pay.
Okay, well, this only makes sense if you have several machines (I've never seen the appeal of dual-booting unix), but there are definitely comparative advantages to each OS.
For mail servers, DHCP, DNS, NFS, firewall, NAT, etc., FreeBSD means less headaches. I've got plenty of FreeBSD boxes that have never been down except for OS upgrades or hardware moves. You can lock them in a closet and never think about it again - it's like the golden days of Novell Netware all over again. And under intense loads, say, a well-utilized IMAP or Samba server, FreeBSD keeps its chin up far longer than Linux.
However, the problem with FreeBSD is that, let's face it, the userland is just not as friendly as that in Linux. You spend days installing all the happy-fun GNU tools with useful command-line arguments and post-1970 approaches to system management, and by the time you've done that, you've kluged together a system only a mother could love. So, for day-to-day messing around, Linux can be much friendlier.
Perhaps even more importantly, the new generation of commercial software is largely just not available for FreeBSD. Want to run Oracle? Domino? You can try to shoehorn them into FreeBSD's Linux emulation environment, but I can tell you from painful experience, it's not pretty - if it works at all. And when you try to do things like linking other third-party software against the Oracle libraries under Linux emulation, you'll spend weeks up to your eyeballs in Makefiles and header files. Not worth the trouble, even for the incremental improvement in stability.
So they both have their places, and they're both well-worth learning about. But I'd be quite suspicious of someone who claims that one is a "better" OS than the other - it depends far too much on one's specific needs.
That's what they said when we added this nifty alphabet thing. "Kids today," they said, "Next thing you know, they won't be able to recite 10,000 line epics from memory."
Yeah, like that happened...
You know any kids that can recite 10,000 line epics from memory?
I didn't think so.
What's happening is that we're using our brains for other things (for instance, learning how to operate the equipment that takes the place of memory, and in many cases is far more useful than memory - you can beam your address book to someone and then they have it forever; can't do that with phone numbers in your head). Problem, I guess, is that some people get so optimized for certain tasks that they start losing the ability to do other things that are in fact useful some of the time.
A similar example is physical activity. These days I know people who get winded walking a few blocks or a few flights of stairs, and gasp in shock at the idea of walking a couple miles rather than driving or taking a cab.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to regard these people as pathetic lazy schlubs, much as the Times-quoted researchers who used words like "stupid". On the other, though, they're still nice people, and productive members of society. Technology has enabled them to optimize for other tasks.
Perhaps that's the case for Microsoft users who have little option but to deliver all their mail to a smarthost, but it's certainly not the case for Unix/Linux/BSD users.
So what? Reconfigure your box. Surely you have the 30 seconds to spare, if you can manage it for Slashdot. You have to configure the gateway and netmask and NNTP server, configure an SMTP smarthost as well.
The norm there is for their MTAs to manage their own queues and to deliver direct to the destination mail exchangers in accordance with DNS/MX, not only because that is the default for Unix machines out of the box, but also because that's the normal method of delivery for MTAs on the Internet, as opposed to those on internal networks.
Since I've been doing this internet stuff (about 15 years now) it's never been the "norm" for individual boxes to deliver mail straight to the destination MX. Back when we were creaming our collective pants over new clusters of Apollo workstations with 4M (wow!) of RAM, mail was forwarded to a central machine for delivery. Now that the kids are creaming their collective pants over 1.3GHz barnstormers running the latest Gatesware, mail is forwarded to a central machine for delivery.
I don't understand your distinction between "internal networks" and "machines on the internet" unless you mean to distinguish between those machines which potentially - due to the lack of intervening proxy servers or to intermittent connectivity - have the capability of end-to-end contact with remote MXes and those which don't, in which case please refer to my paragraph above.
They are paying to be on the Internet, so blocking their MTAs from delivering outbound traffic in the normal way for Internet machinery is definitely stopping totally legitimate activity.
The activity these people are trying to engage in is the delivery of mail, not the communication between their MTA and a specific SMTP server. You might as well complain that UUnet is no longer sending your packets through 200.at-6-0-0.XR1.ATL1.ALTER.NET, which has always been your favorite backbone router since you were a child. As long as they provide a mail relay that gets the mail there immediately and reliably, you are none the worse off (except, perhaps, that you have to wait for bounces rather than looking in your logs to identify certain short-term delivery problems which are out of your hands anyway).
Just because some people are criminals, you don't put everyone in jail on the offchance that they might commit a crime.
Just because most people aren't criminals, doesn't mean you give them all keys to the bank vault. Sorry, what are these homilies supposed to prove again?
what's the more accurate price for Oracle in the wild?
You can go to their web site and price it for yourself. As others have mentioned, their pricing-scheme-of-the-month involves adding up the speed of the processors that will be running it and multiplying by some magic numbers.
The last Oracle installation I shepherded came to about $2000/year. That was for 8i on a single-processor, 600Mhz machine. In fact, that's enough power to handle a fair amount of traffic as back-end to a web site that doesn't do anything hugely complicated. In a case like that, throw money at hardware: fast multi-channel storage in particular.
The trick comes when you want to scale too much beyond that. To use multiple servers you need features of Oracle Enterprise Edition, which is about 5 times as much (per server).
But the fact is, it may well be worth it. The software runs well, is pretty fast these days, can do everything under the sun, and it's the easiest serious database to find qualified staff for.
On the other hand, it's not the sort of thing you install one morning and then start merrily using that afternoon, like MySQL. Factor in your costs that you'll either need to hire experienced people (recommended) or spend many weeks with piles of expensive books making false starts before you start getting productive return.
Moving to a frac T is a signifigant jump in complexity. Perhaps they should have (gasp) HIRED someone full time to maintain it? Would be lots lots cheaper in the long run.
Are you one of these consultants everyone's complaining about? What's complex about a T1? A little box like a Cisco 2600 can be remotely configured by the ISP, or configured on-site using the supplied documentation, and then will quietly hum for years.