rimshot --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Re:Some FAR more interesting underwater structures
on
Pillars Underwater
·
· Score: 2
Me, too... I think the key phrase is this one:
"As you know, we have financing problems. This is a very expensive activity. They give us technology and financing. We provide historical and ocean expertise," said Eddy Fernandez, vice president of [ the Cuban partner company ] Geomar.
Riiiiight...OK. I think I see how those sonar images might have been, uh, misinterpreted...
Though if it really is a human settlement which is now 800m below sealevel, something we thought we knew is wrong.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
>A lof of people know that our Sun will be a red
>giant in about 15 billions years
I thought that was about 8 billion years? Anyone?
>know that the Andromeda Galaxy will collide >with our Milky Way in about 3 billions years, >a first time, then another time after 1 >billions years to merge themselves,
This is indeed highly cool and it's nice to see some astronomy on/.... it's now comonly accepted that our galaxy has already borged many smaller less-fortunate ones in the local group; shreds of their corpses (I'm not making this up! have been located in our galaxy by looking for stars with anomalous motions, ie fossilised fragments of things we ate long ago.
Thing that gets me is, given that the Sloan Digital Sky Survey just found a quasar at redshift 6.2 (ie about 10 billion years old)... this is getting pretty close to the Big Bang... this doesn't give much time for our galaxy (or any others) to actually form, before we're switched on, full of stars, and eating our neighbours.
The more I write, the more this sounds like some sick geek in-joke...
[*1 10 points if you spot the reference --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I'm just dipping into the first coffee of the day when I notice this submission was actually posted... *fouteen hours ago*. And to think, I was actually in front of my computer for 6 of those hours, reading the damn bugtraq backlog. Damn, slashdot needs a pager alert option... "Your submission accepted! Perpare for the anonymous trollfest!"
I suppose there's always next time. Now to wade thru' the (currently) 319 comments... --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
granted, X is somewhat, um, experimental at present... but the coolness factor makes it well worthwhile.
I've had some problems along the way (currently I can't get Mutt going, presumably [I'm fairly clueless about how mail works in Linuxland] because it's looking for Sendmail, rather than my existing local (nonfree) mail server.
Hmmm, now there's a thought - isn't Sendmail ported to win32?
There's a ton of other s/w that will run under win32 outwith cygwin - Bind, for instance, which I'm now running here (as a cacheing only server of course), and the aforesaid Sendmail, Apache, mod_perl, etc. The most frustrating thing is how much of that kind of stuff requires MS VC++; I was most disappointed that moz wouldn't build with gcc , though I suppose it makes sense.
Now all we need is for the FreeNT project to come through and voila, a Microsoft-free Windows...:) --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Other good reasons for Free software on Windows are (a) if you've got 5 years' worth of Windows skills paying your rent, but want to move over to Linux or BSD, it lets you get familiar with shells, GNU utils etc (and, to some extenrt, the Think Unix philosophy of everything's a file, pipes, redirection etc) without dropping you in at the deep end; and (b) it lets you do what I did, subvert a clsoed All-Microsoft shop from within. The Partner in charge of IT at Bain, London, wasn't too happy when he discovered that our intranet was now powered by Apache and Perl... oh look, we haven't had to reboot the machine for six months! spooky... --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Cygwin gives you many of the most familiar commandline utils from the unix and Free Software worlds: (at random, ottomh) bash, tcsh, ash, sh, cron, mutt, grep, ls, ps, less, hell Ieven got gpg to compile under it. If you want to go the full distance XFree86 now compiles and runs, as does WindowMaker. "Be the envy of other major governments! Wopw, this is big league stuff...";)
HTH... --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Yeah, that looks nice - could do with some tidying up on the RHS and some more kit to actually justify the thing... otherwise, pretty schweet.
Is that a 12-port 10/100 Bay switch I see there, below the patch panel? How many actual boxen do you have - are you ever likely to actually fill the rack up?
I have a [day]dream of getting together 3-4 geeks and building the hacienda, uh, that is, the ultimate geekhaus... pooling the cost of a *real* net connection (none o' that cable modem crap!), proper cabling, LAN parties, no need to actually *speak* to one's housemates - just IRC them...
One day.
*sigh* --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Wildly off-topic, but then what's to say about a dead Mac? This
seems as good a place as any to deposit this idea... seems like
some of you extreme case nutters might be here?
I've always been too chickenshit (and short of time) to do anything
more radical than add stickers to my PC case. What I've always wanted
to do, though, is this:
take the entire machine to pieces
suspend each component from very thin, very strong wires (cheesewire?)
from the ceiling.
Behold, a real-life 'exploded PC' like an technical illustration...
The bits would be placed further apart from each
other than in the actual case, assuming ribbon cables etc would
stretch.
Problems:
dusting
inserting and removing floppies and CDs
if the wires broke or gave way, it could get really
messy...
RFI shielding
potential (sorry!) for bad puns, I mean, acccidental
electrocution when it's on.
Fuckit, I'm going to do it. This weekend.
[1] I learned Technical Drawing in school...isometric projections,
etc. And I learned mathematics without a calculator. And we wrote
with *pens*... Yes, I remember the 20th Century.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
>Why should Microsoft pay someone to port.net >when the community will do it for free and get >a much higher quality port than Microsoft would >if they did it themselves.
What, you mean, the way that
samba is "
much more reliable" than Microsoft's implementation of SMB?
(Hint: select 'bugtraq', search for 'samba': I get more than 150 hits... althogh the articles themselves aren't available, I'm getting this error: "Sql.sql(): Couldn't connect using the mysql database"... irony, gotta love it)
Don't be so sure that all Microsoft software is complete rubbish, or that an open source or free implementation would automatically be better. The only way in which all free software is better than all Microsoft software is in it's freedom. That's the important factor to me, but most PHBs could care less about freedom (if they even understood the concept.) Yet when their expectations of Linux and free software are set by that sort of unthinking hype - Linux is far more secure than Windows, Linux is much more reliable than Windows, you know the tune - all that happens is that when they try it out, and it dumps core, or their local MS astroturfer points out tha bugtraq carries tens of posts a DAY listing remote root exploits in all sorts of Unix software, they decide never to trust those weird communist amateur hippy types.
That's why I've come down on the FSF point of view rather than the Open Source Institute's point of view.
(Of course, it goes without saying that quite a lot of Free software *is* more reliable / secure / etc than the MS version... which isn't the point I'm making)
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
>They aren't ALLOWED to have exclusionary contracts. >It's Against The Law!
I fear you are mistaken. It appears that Microsoft are allowed to do whatever the hell they want to. If they had any serious expectation that they'd suffer punitive consequences, they'd have adapted their behaviour. In fact, over the past year, it's just been more of the same - to the point that they're becoming beyond parody.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
...and you're NOT the $bad_person they think you are, can you sue for wrongful arrest, malicious proesecution or whatever? We have such a law in the UK; surely the US, where it seems people sue if they catch a cold, has something like that on the statute books?
Oh yeah - another question - do you have a scheme like
legal aid? (that is, state funded legal cases where there's a reasonable case to answer)? I always wondered. If not, what prevents the police from using arrests as a form of harrassment of those too poor to afford the cost of a legal case?
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Not sure why the police would be interested in me, unless you're implying I'm using myself (think I'd be wasting time on/. if I was using??;) or that I'm dealing, or pimping them or something. *shrug* I'm keeping her off the streets & oiut of trouble, I think they'd be grateful for reducing their workload...
Anyway... this is totally off-topic, but yeah, in general you're completely right about "never trust a junkie". It's complicated by the fact that she's my girlfriend & is making genuine attempts to get clean. OTOH she's stolen money in the past, & lied consistently to me when about being clean when she obviously wasn't.
OTOH she paid the money back (from earnings - she holds a job down, no not that kind of job, one in an office, honestly!!... and she's been honest lately. (Yes, I can tell. She's a very bad liar... ) If she wanted to screw me over for money, she's had ample opportunity to do so & it hasn't happened.
Obviously I realise that I'm taking several enormous risks*[1], on the other hand I couldn't sleep at night if I threw her out on the street. *shrug* Perhaps I'll look back in a few years & curse my stupidity; perhaps not. It just seems the best thing to do at present.
[1]: When she first told me, right after we met, I thought about it... "why, what could possibly go wrong?" I thought. "I mean, what's the absolute *worst* thing that could happen?" *pause* "Uh,.. oh, fuck!"
We now return you to your normal programme of flamewars and ill-informed ranting from zealots:-) --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I live in Brixton, an area of South London known for a very high level of street drug dealing (smack, crack). A very close friend of mine has the misfortune to be a heroin addict. I went down with her once when she went to score. In a five minute walk around this particular area (which is also the heart of Brixton's new-found fashionable status,. with lots of new clubs and bars, very much part of the London scene[tm]) she was approached *by* no less than eight dealers, most of whom were part of groups of three or four.
For some reason (more yuppies in the area?), the police have decided that open crack dealing is a Bad Thing. As part of a new campaign to *cough* crack down on the problem, CCTV was installed a year ago, the whole length of the street.
It has made no difference at all as far as I can see.
In the last three months, however, the residents of the estate where I live - about a ten minute walk from this inferno - have been kicking up a fuss because prostitutes and junkies bean to come up here after they'd scored / picked up a client. There are lots of young kids round here, & it's not very nice to find used works in your apartment stairwell in the morning. So, CCTV to the rescue again; another few dozen cameras now cover the entire estate. This has actually helped. The reason the dealers can't be busted even when they're seen on video clearly dealing, is that actual drugs are needed to get a conviction - and of course they swallow it immediately if the cops show up. It's harder for a junkie to swallow a syringe, however;)
Ironically I then met someone who works for the local council on the second scheme. Although when it's completed, only the police will have access to the pictures, she has a stack of monitors on her desk at present for 'debugging' purposes - and she sure as hell uses it for personal use (checking up on her S.O. to make sure he goes to the shops when he said he would, for instance.)
She was also attacked on the street a few weeks ago. She called her boss afterwards, who took the tapes straight to the cops 20 minutes after the incident, and the attacker was picked up 30 mins after that. As she herself said, however, this was only because of who she was... if she was a random member of the public, the service would have been much, much slower.
I just remembered another anecdotal data point... another junkie, friend of the above-mentioned one, was beaten up just outside his apartment block. This block is staffed 24/7 and, yep, they have CCTV which is supposed to be monitored. Surpise, they happened to be "looking the other way" at the time... he's apparently talking of sueing them (IIRC it's a criminal offence not to respond in such a situation) - but what's the betting that teh relevant tapes get "lost" or "accidentally wiped"? --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
In six years working in IT, I've had formal training courses in:
Helpdesk Pro
MS Access
lots of revolting Oracle client app IDEs
some Cognos drilldown nonsense
I earn my living with Perl, Apache, Linux, and security. Total formal training in those areas: nil. What I spend my evenings and weekends doing:
at present, I'm reading:
Object Oriented Perl (Conway)
Network Intrustion Detection (Northcutt, Novak)
Cisco CCNA Exam Notes (slim volume, just to get a feel for how much I'd need to learn to make it worth paying to take the exam)
The Eagle Book (Apache Modules in Perl and C)
UML Distilled (can't recall authors OTTOMH)
a million and one white papers, study guides,
briefings, tutorials etc printed out from the web, covering areas including (from the small subset puiled on my desk as I type): Linux and BSD sysadmin, secure programming practices, IPSec, ftp logs, BIND v9 config, CISSP study guide, IBM Developer Works paper on firewalls, Apache mod_proxy.
Perl Journal #20
Linux Journal, July 2001
I spend on average a couple of hours a day keeping up with Bugtraq, NT Bugtraq, the Incidents list, nanog, CERT and SANS digests/alerts, Security Focus bulletins...
Three guesses which type of education has been the most valuable to me.
My current employer has been maknig vague hand-waving promises of "training" ever since I started, nine months ago; I've given up trying to get anything from them. But now I'm wondering whether that's such a big deal. Can you really learn more in (say) a week's formal classroom training, than in the same length of time spread over several months , albeit in `real life'? And isn't the value of stuff you're motivated enough to learn yourself greater than some tedious classroom, which (as I recall from those days I actually got sent on real courses) are invariably on non-free, proprietary garbage, which will be redundant within a couple of years anyway? (Perhaps it's just the courses I've been sent on...)
Seriously though, isn't this what *everyone* has to do? Even if you have a stunning academic record, new stuff will always come along and need to be absorbed (even if you're in an area where the basic principles change only very slowly - say, database design.)
Ob self-promotion... if anyone's hiring in London, UK, mail me at the address above... I wouldn't say no to getting a bit of my life back, one day.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I just heard courtesy of the BBC. Oddly enough the story is right below the absolutely wonderful (but completely off-topic) news that Milosevic has been extradited to the Hague. My Serbian girlfriend's day has just been made, and I'm happy for her,too. Perhaps now we can think of one day visiting all the places she's told me about...
Re: Microsoft... I'm sure this is a redundant comment, but wtf, there are 900-odd equally redundant comments up there so wtf?;)
* It's very depressing news. Clear proof, if any were needed, that big business controls the US government.
* As a non-American citizen, my righteous wrath is tempered by the fact that they control everywhere else, too, except some of the more enthusiastic theocracies and the two remaining communist nations (Cuba and North Korea).
* It's not exactly unexpected
* It now down to us. No-one else is going to beat these creeps.
We have to work and work and work to promote Free software. And, for those who are skilled enough and lucky enough to have the time & energy, help to improve it, spread it around. Read the evangelism FAQs. Get your facts straight (don't claim NT/2000 BSODs every day, or every month even. You just lose credibility with the people who need to understand why Freedom is important.
Incidentally, to all the Slashdotters who work for the Beast... LEAVE! Seriously, how do you folks justify working for these people to yourselves? Do you think...
There's nothing wrong with what Microsoft do, or
if they didn't do it, someone else will, or
screw the ethics, show me the money, or
something else entirely?
Just interested...
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
How about a Windows port? Actually, a full-scale rewrite would probably be needed. Sure would get used a lot, though, and it'd be yet another foot-in-the-door for the GPL in Microsoft shops, which can only be a good thing. --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
The Leonids are likely to produce a really spectacular show this November. You may recall that there's been considerable hype over this shower in the last few years. This is because the Earth's orbit intersects the densest part of the stream once every 33 years, and we're at that point roughly now. In addition, every few hundred years the Leonids produce a truly awesome outburst - rates of the order of 100,000 per hour. The last few years' results have allowed various models of the stream dynamics to firm up their numbers; the best model's predictions for last year were spot on. This same model predicts a large outburst in 2001.
NAMN
(the North American Meteor Network) or
the IMO (International Meteor Organisation, which is actually amateur - same as NAMN) are good starting points, or try the
Google Directory or
DMOZ Open Directory meteor sections for much more background reading.
I strongly, strongly recommend doing some research before November, getting a bit of practice in, then do what I've done - book some time off work!:-)
Judeging from the screenshots, this is the game that's finally force me to upgrade my P2-233 to something with a bit more poke. --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
If this is for real, you did the right thing. That's a disgusting way to talk to co-workers - and do so to the network tech who's trying to fix your site and help you out is, frankly, completely stupid as well as unprofessional.
Where I work, that sort of language is very close to an instant dismissal offence. Any of the Slashdot crew care to comment on Anne's allegations?
(I'm not holding my breath.) --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I'm not very familiar with US trading laws but I'm guessing that would be Very Naughty Indeed in a legal sense. Besides, I'm gnerally disposed towards the incompetence, rather than conspiracy, wave harmonic theory of temporal perception >thwack! --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Linux (and various BSDs) run on some fairly exotic architectures; wouldn't some of the higher-end machines be capable of far more IO bandwidth? Say, S/390?
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Someone in the nanog thread I just linked to (see merit.edu for the archives, search for 'Exodus down') raised an interesting point. There are now lots of Free / Open eggs in one, commercially backed, basket. Whilst it's undoubtedly a Good Thing for well-meaning corporations to subsidise operations like Soureforge, it does make for a single point of failure. In the highly unlikely event that, for some random reason, these commercial organisations were unable to continue funding, what would happen? Would all that hard work be lost?
What would happen to Slashdot if VA had to cut off funding? As it's not set up as a non-profit, it wouldn't be easy to just drop-in a community-supported infrastructure - volunteers to run the thing, a mixture of private and corporate donations from many sources to pay for hosting, bandwidth etc... just getting the voluntary infrastructure in place to *start* collecting sponsorship and donations would probably take months.
This has to be a Bad Thing. --
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Slashdot Mirror
rimshot
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I thought that was about 8 billion years? Anyone?
This is indeed highly cool and it's nice to see some astronomy on /. ... it's now comonly accepted that our galaxy has already borged many smaller less-fortunate ones in the local group; shreds of their corpses (I'm not making this up! have been located in our galaxy by looking for stars with anomalous motions, ie fossilised fragments of things we ate long ago.
Thing that gets me is, given that the Sloan Digital Sky Survey just found a quasar at redshift 6.2 (ie about 10 billion years old)... this is getting pretty close to the Big Bang... this doesn't give much time for our galaxy (or any others) to actually form, before we're switched on, full of stars, and eating our neighbours.
The more I write, the more this sounds like some sick geek in-joke... [*1 10 points if you spot the reference
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I suppose there's always next time. Now to wade thru' the (currently) 319 comments...
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Hmmm, now there's a thought - isn't Sendmail ported to win32?
There's a ton of other s/w that will run under win32 outwith cygwin - Bind, for instance, which I'm now running here (as a cacheing only server of course), and the aforesaid Sendmail, Apache, mod_perl, etc. The most frustrating thing is how much of that kind of stuff requires MS VC++; I was most disappointed that moz wouldn't build with gcc , though I suppose it makes sense.
Now all we need is for the FreeNT project to come through and voila, a Microsoft-free Windows... :)
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Other good reasons for Free software on Windows are (a) if you've got 5 years' worth of Windows skills paying your rent, but want to move over to Linux or BSD, it lets you get familiar with shells, GNU utils etc (and, to some extenrt, the Think Unix philosophy of everything's a file, pipes, redirection etc) without dropping you in at the deep end; and (b) it lets you do what I did, subvert a clsoed All-Microsoft shop from within. The Partner in charge of IT at Bain, London, wasn't too happy when he discovered that our intranet was now powered by Apache and Perl... oh look, we haven't had to reboot the machine for six months! spooky...
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
HTH...
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Is that a 12-port 10/100 Bay switch I see there, below the patch panel? How many actual boxen do you have - are you ever likely to actually fill the rack up?
I have a [day]dream of getting together 3-4 geeks and building the hacienda, uh, that is, the ultimate geekhaus... pooling the cost of a *real* net connection (none o' that cable modem crap!), proper cabling, LAN parties, no need to actually *speak* to one's housemates - just IRC them...
One day. *sigh*
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I've always been too chickenshit (and short of time) to do anything more radical than add stickers to my PC case. What I've always wanted to do, though, is this:
The bits would be placed further apart from each other than in the actual case, assuming ribbon cables etc would stretch.
Problems:
- dusting
- inserting and removing floppies and CDs
- if the wires broke or gave way, it could get really
messy...
- RFI shielding
- potential (sorry!) for bad puns, I mean, acccidental
electrocution when it's on.
Fuckit, I'm going to do it. This weekend.[1] I learned Technical Drawing in school...isometric projections, etc. And I learned mathematics without a calculator. And we wrote with *pens*... Yes, I remember the 20th Century.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
>Why should Microsoft pay someone to port
>when the community will do it for free and get
>a much higher quality port than Microsoft would
>if they did it themselves.
What, you mean, the way that samba is " much more reliable" than Microsoft's implementation of SMB? (Hint: select 'bugtraq', search for 'samba': I get more than 150 hits... althogh the articles themselves aren't available, I'm getting this error: "Sql.sql(): Couldn't connect using the mysql database"... irony, gotta love it)
Don't be so sure that all Microsoft software is complete rubbish, or that an open source or free implementation would automatically be better. The only way in which all free software is better than all Microsoft software is in it's freedom. That's the important factor to me, but most PHBs could care less about freedom (if they even understood the concept.) Yet when their expectations of Linux and free software are set by that sort of unthinking hype - Linux is far more secure than Windows, Linux is much more reliable than Windows, you know the tune - all that happens is that when they try it out, and it dumps core, or their local MS astroturfer points out tha bugtraq carries tens of posts a DAY listing remote root exploits in all sorts of Unix software, they decide never to trust those weird communist amateur hippy types.
That's why I've come down on the FSF point of view rather than the Open Source Institute's point of view.
(Of course, it goes without saying that quite a lot of Free software *is* more reliable / secure / etc than the MS version... which isn't the point I'm making)
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
here's a good story about an ED-209.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
>It's Against The Law!
I fear you are mistaken. It appears that Microsoft are allowed to do whatever the hell they want to. If they had any serious expectation that they'd suffer punitive consequences, they'd have adapted their behaviour. In fact, over the past year, it's just been more of the same - to the point that they're becoming beyond parody.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Slow news day, innit.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Oh yeah - another question - do you have a scheme like legal aid? (that is, state funded legal cases where there's a reasonable case to answer)? I always wondered. If not, what prevents the police from using arrests as a form of harrassment of those too poor to afford the cost of a legal case?
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Anyway... this is totally off-topic, but yeah, in general you're completely right about "never trust a junkie". It's complicated by the fact that she's my girlfriend & is making genuine attempts to get clean. OTOH she's stolen money in the past, & lied consistently to me when about being clean when she obviously wasn't.
OTOH she paid the money back (from earnings - she holds a job down, no not that kind of job, one in an office, honestly!!... and she's been honest lately. (Yes, I can tell. She's a very bad liar... ) If she wanted to screw me over for money, she's had ample opportunity to do so & it hasn't happened.
Obviously I realise that I'm taking several enormous risks*[1], on the other hand I couldn't sleep at night if I threw her out on the street. *shrug* Perhaps I'll look back in a few years & curse my stupidity; perhaps not. It just seems the best thing to do at present.
[1]: When she first told me, right after we met, I thought about it... "why, what could possibly go wrong?" I thought. "I mean, what's the absolute *worst* thing that could happen?" *pause* "Uh,.. oh, fuck!"
We now return you to your normal programme of flamewars and ill-informed ranting from zealots :-)
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I live in Brixton, an area of South London known for a very high level of street drug dealing (smack, crack). A very close friend of mine has the misfortune to be a heroin addict. I went down with her once when she went to score. In a five minute walk around this particular area (which is also the heart of Brixton's new-found fashionable status,. with lots of new clubs and bars, very much part of the London scene[tm]) she was approached *by* no less than eight dealers, most of whom were part of groups of three or four.
For some reason (more yuppies in the area?), the police have decided that open crack dealing is a Bad Thing. As part of a new campaign to *cough* crack down on the problem, CCTV was installed a year ago, the whole length of the street.
It has made no difference at all as far as I can see.
In the last three months, however, the residents of the estate where I live - about a ten minute walk from this inferno - have been kicking up a fuss because prostitutes and junkies bean to come up here after they'd scored / picked up a client. There are lots of young kids round here, & it's not very nice to find used works in your apartment stairwell in the morning. So, CCTV to the rescue again; another few dozen cameras now cover the entire estate. This has actually helped. The reason the dealers can't be busted even when they're seen on video clearly dealing, is that actual drugs are needed to get a conviction - and of course they swallow it immediately if the cops show up. It's harder for a junkie to swallow a syringe, however ;)
Ironically I then met someone who works for the local council on the second scheme. Although when it's completed, only the police will have access to the pictures, she has a stack of monitors on her desk at present for 'debugging' purposes - and she sure as hell uses it for personal use (checking up on her S.O. to make sure he goes to the shops when he said he would, for instance.) She was also attacked on the street a few weeks ago. She called her boss afterwards, who took the tapes straight to the cops 20 minutes after the incident, and the attacker was picked up 30 mins after that. As she herself said, however, this was only because of who she was... if she was a random member of the public, the service would have been much, much slower.
I just remembered another anecdotal data point... another junkie, friend of the above-mentioned one, was beaten up just outside his apartment block. This block is staffed 24/7 and, yep, they have CCTV which is supposed to be monitored. Surpise, they happened to be "looking the other way" at the time... he's apparently talking of sueing them (IIRC it's a criminal offence not to respond in such a situation) - but what's the betting that teh relevant tapes get "lost" or "accidentally wiped"?
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I earn my living with Perl, Apache, Linux, and security. Total formal training in those areas: nil. What I spend my evenings and weekends doing: at present, I'm reading:
Three guesses which type of education has been the most valuable to me.
My current employer has been maknig vague hand-waving promises of "training" ever since I started, nine months ago; I've given up trying to get anything from them. But now I'm wondering whether that's such a big deal. Can you really learn more in (say) a week's formal classroom training, than in the same length of time spread over several months , albeit in `real life'? And isn't the value of stuff you're motivated enough to learn yourself greater than some tedious classroom, which (as I recall from those days I actually got sent on real courses) are invariably on non-free, proprietary garbage, which will be redundant within a couple of years anyway? (Perhaps it's just the courses I've been sent on...)
Seriously though, isn't this what *everyone* has to do? Even if you have a stunning academic record, new stuff will always come along and need to be absorbed (even if you're in an area where the basic principles change only very slowly - say, database design.)
Ob self-promotion... if anyone's hiring in London, UK, mail me at the address above... I wouldn't say no to getting a bit of my life back, one day.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Re: Microsoft... I'm sure this is a redundant comment, but wtf, there are 900-odd equally redundant comments up there so wtf? ;)
* It's very depressing news. Clear proof, if any were needed, that big business controls the US government.
* As a non-American citizen, my righteous wrath is tempered by the fact that they control everywhere else, too, except some of the more enthusiastic theocracies and the two remaining communist nations (Cuba and North Korea).
* It's not exactly unexpected
* It now down to us. No-one else is going to beat these creeps.
We have to work and work and work to promote Free software. And, for those who are skilled enough and lucky enough to have the time & energy, help to improve it, spread it around. Read the evangelism FAQs. Get your facts straight (don't claim NT/2000 BSODs every day, or every month even. You just lose credibility with the people who need to understand why Freedom is important.
Incidentally, to all the Slashdotters who work for the Beast... LEAVE! Seriously, how do you folks justify working for these people to yourselves? Do you think...
-
There's nothing wrong with what Microsoft do, or
- if they didn't do it, someone else will, or
- screw the ethics, show me the money, or
- something else entirely?
Just interested...--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
How about a Windows port? Actually, a full-scale rewrite would probably be needed. Sure would get used a lot, though, and it'd be yet another foot-in-the-door for the GPL in Microsoft shops, which can only be a good thing.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
NAMN (the North American Meteor Network) or the IMO (International Meteor Organisation, which is actually amateur - same as NAMN) are good starting points, or try the Google Directory or DMOZ Open Directory meteor sections for much more background reading. I strongly, strongly recommend doing some research before November, getting a bit of practice in, then do what I've done - book some time off work! :-)
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Judeging from the screenshots, this is the game that's finally force me to upgrade my P2-233 to something with a bit more poke.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Where I work, that sort of language is very close to an instant dismissal offence. Any of the Slashdot crew care to comment on Anne's allegations?
(I'm not holding my breath.)
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I'm not very familiar with US trading laws but I'm guessing that would be Very Naughty Indeed in a legal sense. Besides, I'm gnerally disposed towards the incompetence, rather than conspiracy, wave harmonic theory of temporal perception >thwack!
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Linux (and various BSDs) run on some fairly exotic architectures; wouldn't some of the higher-end machines be capable of far more IO bandwidth? Say, S/390?
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
What would happen to Slashdot if VA had to cut off funding? As it's not set up as a non-profit, it wouldn't be easy to just drop-in a community-supported infrastructure - volunteers to run the thing, a mixture of private and corporate donations from many sources to pay for hosting, bandwidth etc... just getting the voluntary infrastructure in place to *start* collecting sponsorship and donations would probably take months.
This has to be a Bad Thing.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"