Companies that are owned by stock holders are only interested in profits, and then only as a way to boost stock share prices enough for them to sell for a gain. That means companies with stock holders do stupid things like fire 30% of their staff to make a profit or create short term gains at the cost of long term growth, thus threatening everyone's jobs.
I used to work for a company in the healthcare industry that was very big and very successful. They had a reputation for always hitting or exceeding their quarterly earnings estimates, which caused their stocks to be highly valued. How did they do it? Every quarter they would go on a spending freeze a month or more before the end of it to ensure that their spend didn't cause them to miss estimates. Stockholders loved it. Employees hated it.
That same company also had annual reviews that were company wide. That means that you wouldn't get your annual review on your anniversary date, but instead everyone got their reviews at the same time. That way they could keep closer track of pay increases. A manager would be told that the salaries for their department could only increase by a total of x% that year (usually around 2 percent), and that they had to divide the increases among their people. So the entire team would either get a miniscule raise, or if there was a standout team member that person might get a higher (but still small) raise, and the other team members would get even more miniscule raises (or none at all). Being good at your job really sucked if you were only second best on the team.
The entire experience has soured me on publicly traded companies. I often wonder how Google will manage to get by with all of Wall Street complaining that they aren't playing ball by Wall Street's expectations. Sometimes I think that they may have just been better off staying private but going with the SEC's public reporting requirements that were about to kick in.
Tell me why again, you feel you deserve a raise? You agreed to a certain wage - why, all of the sudden, do you feel you deserve more? To buy a new calendar? It doesn't make sense to me that you feel you deserve more money simply because another year went by.
Becuase our employers (generally speaking) would like to retain our services and ensure that we are productive. If I don't get a raise this year, or if I get a raise that is smaller than the cost of living increase in my area, then my effective salary has been reduced. My same wage has less purchasing power from year to year. If you go several years without a raise, your purchasing power could be seriously reduced. $50,000 a year in 1996 dollars isn't the same as $50,000 a year in 2006 dollars. So if compensation is effectively reduced (if not numerically), then you have less incentive to work at the same level. Over time you may find it more profitable to go work somewhere else.
At that point the employer incurs significant costs in hiring and trianing a replacement worker, and since average wages have increased over the past few years the odds are pretty good that they won't be able to hire someone to fulfill your job at the same low rate they were paying you. So in the end it ends up costing them more money in the long run to not give you a raise.
While it's true that you agreed to perform a specific job for a specific wage, I don't know anyone whose job descriptions (or at least actual performed duties) didn't change over the course of a year. Most people are required to take on a higher workload or level of responsibility as time goes by. Most of us are willing to do it, but not if we aren't to be compensated. Every time your boss asks you to do something that is not in your job description you could stop and negotiate additional fees for services, but most employers and employees would prefer a regular review process with compensation increases.
And the most important thing that you left out is that after a year goes by of doing a specific job, you now have one more year's experience doing that job. Most people will have increased thier skillsets or become more skillful in an existing skillset. Which is worth more, a Java developer fresh out of college or a Java developer who has 3-5 years of experience on successful projects? Or to make it more personal, if you needed medical treatment for a condition would you prefer to have a general practitioner right out of residency or a specialist who had been treating similar cases for years? Most people (employers and employees) would agree that having more experience is worth more.
And hey, I'm a liberal and proud of it, but you're going to have to explain to me how smaller pay increases for workers who are already in the top 5% of earners is going to cause the collapse of our economy. People are complaining that $75k a year starting salary for a new graduate are too LOW? A schoolteacher with 40 years experience and an M.A. doesn't make nearly that much.
It's all relative. $75,000 sounds like a pretty big salary to someone who lives in Indiana, but if you live in New York City it's peanuts. Also keep in mind that the "$75,000 starting salary" didn't clearly state if they had a BS, or an MS, or an MBA. Nor did it state where the job would be located. Microsoft has offices all over the United States, not just in Redmond, and while the article may have been talking about Redmond salaries there is no guarantee that the poster with the job offer was speaking about the same thing.
How so? All of the information requested in the assignement can be gotten from any server running a compliant web server, including Windows XP Personal Web Server, with a combination of port scanning tools, netstat, ping, and GRC's webhost.
From the article:
He wants them to write an evaluation of what they find: what ports are open and what service could be running on them, Host names and IP addresses, OS, version, last update, patch status, what shares are available, what kind of network traffic and what vulnerabilities they see.
I'm no expert on port scanning, but I don't think that you can find out patch status, what shares are available, etc from a simple portscan.
Does that mean if I go to someone's website without being explicitly authorized, I can be sued? Okay, clearly not. How about if I ping the web site? Iffy. What if my browser pings the site automatically for some diagnostic purpose? What if it's running echo, chargen, discard, or any of the other traditional diagnostic daemons? Surely they haven't authorized me to use them, but they offered them. I guess my question is like the unsecured WiFi =?= public WiFi one... at what point does opening an address or specific port to the public constitute authorization to at least try to connect to it?
There are a couple of principles at work here. If you publish a web site, you are expecting and inviting http traffic on port 80. Depending on your level of skill, you may also be expecting traffic on other ports, but you may not be inviting it. The inability of a server owner/operator to properly secure their computer does not constitute permission to use that computer for purposes that were not intended (otherwise botnets would be 100% legal). Intent weighs heavily in this case, and not just the intent of the individual scanning but also the intent of the server owners.
Furthermore, in some states port scanning actually is illegal. As long as the students are in a state where port scanning is not illegal and they were sure not to scan a server that is in a state where port scanning is illegal, they might be OK legally. But the university obviously takes a dim view of the activity since they don't want students scanning the university servers. I wonder how they would feel about a flood of complaints from business and other organizations about unauthorized port scanning from their network? The bad publicity could be a nightmare.
But more to the point, the assignment involved more than port scanning. At least that's what SANS has said in one of several updates to the original story.
OK. But the page doesn't actually use the terms active or passive. What it says is:
The Act prohibits any person from willfully or maliciously interfering with the radio communications of any station licensed or authorized under the Act or operated by the U.S. government.
As I indicated, at the beginning it talks about operating transmitters, but then it references "willfully or maliciously interfering", and I would say that installing RF blocking paint for the purpose of blocking reception would be willfully interfering. But it's unclear from the info page whether the standard of the law is either a) willfully or maliciously interfering, or b) willfully or maliciously operating a transmitter that interferes.
I wouldn't take that web page as the law in this case. It is an information page from the FCC, and it states that the relevant law is the Communications Act of 1934. It starts off saying that the act prohibits the use of transmitters to jam or block, but then it says that it probhibits anyone from willfully or maliciously blocking or jamming. Without reviewing the actual text of the act it would be hard to say whether it addresses passive (non-transmitter) techniques, of even if the act of putting up the paint would be considered active blocking.
I second that, RT is great. You set it up to query a POP account every 5 minutes and it automatically grabs issues emailed to you, creates a ticket, and sends a response to the requestor with the ticket number. It has a nice web-based front end so that your customers can log in an open tickets or review the status of cases, and it does everything that you would want from a ticket tracking system.
Best of all it's open source, so it costs you nothing and you can modify it to fit your needs (though it is highly configurable without having to dig under the hood and learn perl).
There is a sort of a Windows port of it if you're into that thing, but it still runs on Cygwin in part so it's not truly native.
To me, that does not sound like a fair comparison. I believe that the comparison to California's crime rate is invalid because cybercrime may or may not involve actual physical contact. And, if it doesn't involve physical contact (for example, a dirty phone conversation), then it may not be reported.
This is incorrect. They are not comparing crime rates, they are comparing the number of cases of statutory rape attributed to each community. Statutory rape, by definition, does involve and require physical contact. They are saying that the number of statutory rape cases between members of the community of MySpace are proportionally much smaller than the number of statutory rape cases between members of the community of California.
While I realize that some worries of MySpace are overblown, I would like to point out there are dangers. These dangers include the fact that you can easily find out alot of personal information about someone. And, that information is readily available to millions of people on the web.
This is also incorrect. You can only find out a lot of personal information about someone if that individual actively chooses to publish that information with the other 56,999,999 MySpace users. If someone chooses to publish that same information in the newspaper's classified ads then there is just as much potential danger, but nobody argues about how dangerous newspapers are.
The problem has nothing to do with MySpace, and everything to do with the people using it. I suppose we could always pass legislation to outlaw stupid people (and I would certainly vote for it), but I fear it would never pass.
I don't think they ever claimed that it was fact or fiction. In an interview with one of the authors he claims that from their research they came to the conclusion that the story was possible. Whatever that means.
This is correct. The theories from HBHG are not presented as fact, but merely aas conjecture or possibilities that fit the information available from primary sources (many of which are taken the be factual). However, their main primary sources are documents regarding the "Priory of Sion" that were supposedly planted to begin with, and which may not be authentic at all. What Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln did was take the primary source of the Priory documents and try to match them up with known historical realities to see if they could be accurate. Where discrepancies arose they tried to resolve them or account for them in a reasonable fashion. They did a pretty good job of this.
That being said, none of the three are historians. They are investigative journalists, so rather than relating the "historical facts" that can be corroborated, they are presenting a narrative.
Do I think that they should be suing Dan Brown (or his publishers)? No. He certainly took some of the ideas from the non-fiction book HBHG and used them as a central theme in a work of fiction, but I think that probably comes under the heading of fair use, or inspiration. He certainly cited them as a source, giving credit where credit is due.
I personally think that this is solely about the money. Had The DaVinci Code not been such a hit they would have been content to let things go. But since it has raked in tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars, the temptation for them to not try to take a cut of that is just too much. I mean, let's face it, HBHG has been cited as a primary source for dozens of other books in the past 25 years which truly are far more derivative of their work than TDC, yet they haven't been sued.
authors, the events described in the book are factual. Since facts cannot be copywritten, (last time I checked), that should mean they are out of luck.
This is incorrect. Having actually read "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", (holy shit, someone on Slashdot who actually reads what they talk about!) I am in a position to point out that the authors state repeatedly that they are not stating facts, but are merely presenting conjecture about one possibility that seems to be supported by many and various primary sources. They put together a theory to explain certain "mysteries", but nowhere in the book is it presented as fact.
I've always loved customer reviews of stuff (like newegg, amazon, and even ePinions), since it can give a more joe schmoe look at the product, and it is not of a sample of the product that a manufacturer may have hand-picked and inspected for a reviewer to review because it will not have problems (it isn't always that way, but I'm sure sometimes it is).
A wonderful notion, except that allowing you to post 3-5 sentences about the product on a web site hardly qualifies as a review. Most of the reviews I see on NewEgg indicate that they "just got the product and it is awesome". I'm not sure how thoroughly you can determine a product's awesomeness in the first 24 hours of use, but after using something for a couple weeks I almost always find little differences that I don't like or areas that can be improved.
And then there's the lack of technical knowledge that is usually displayed. If someone can't get something to work correctly it is always the product that is wrong. It couldn't possibly be operator error or lack of knowledge. Then there's the guys who say "I bought this video card and now I hit 9000 in 3DMark 2005!" Of course, without knowing what their system specs are, or what 3DMark score they got with their old card, that knowledge is mostly useless. And finally their's the braggers who post an 7 line review, and 5 of those lines look like this:
Athlon 64 FX-57 (overclocked to 3 GHz!)
4 GB Corsair super-premium CL 1.5 PC3200 memory
ASUS Deluxe Ultra gold NF4 SLI
2x GeForce 7800 GTX 512 in SLI
4x WD Raptor X 150 GB drives in RAID 0+1 (at 10000 rpm)
And I doubt the reviewer has even touched anything like the hardware listed, let alone assembled it and gotten it working as described. No, I say leave the reviewing to the reviewers, and let them be skeptical and pay for their own hardware to review.
Funny. Much like this situation, only one of those spellings is actually correct. But there is more than a semantic difference here. If you actually tried to install the "64-bit Edition" on your PC, you would know that they are not the same thing at all. The "64-bit Edition" only runs on the Itanium line of CPUs, whereas the "x64 Edition" runs only on CPUs that support the AMD64 instruction set.
I have (by your terminology) x64-- it's different functionality, believe me...
It's not my terminology, it's Microsofts. Go look it up. And while we're beating our chests about our x64 creds, I was in the technical beta test for x64 (the one that you actually have to apply for, not the CPP that anyone can sign up for and everyone referred to as "the beta"), and I assure you that other than support for AMD64 and larger addressable memory space, the functionality is the same. In fact, the functionality is so identical that most of the non-core applications that ship with the OS are still the same 32-bit binaries from the original Windows XP and run in WOW64.
including I believe (not applicable to 32bit) the ability to run 2 multicore processors
(for 4 cores total)
This is incorrect. You can run two dual core CPUs on 32-bit Windows XP Pro as well, though XP Home only supports a single dual-core CPU. Windows XP Pro has always supported two physical CPUs, and Microsoft has made it clear many times that for the purposes of licensing and support they count physical CPUs, not CPU cores.
But if you don't believe it from me, check with Microsoft yourself:
Q. How does this licensing policy affect products such as Microsoft Windows XP Professional?
A. Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Windows XP Home are not affected by this policy as they are licensed per installation and not per processor. Windows XP Professional can support up to two processors regardless of the number of cores on the processor. Microsoft Windows XP Home supports one processor.
Now, if you're still convinced that the x64 edition of Windows provides different functionality from the 32-bit edition (other than the previously mentioned architectural changes to support the new instruction set), then by all means list some factual examples. Otherwise just admit that the ability to buy and install an OEM copy of a niche market operating system doesn't make you an expert on the subject.
Microsoft isn't shipping Windows XP Pro 64-bit Edition anymore, they killed it a couple months back. Instead they are focusing their Itanium efforts on server products.
They are still shipping Windows XP Pro x64 Edition, but I didn't include that because:
1. There will be (presumably) x64 Editions of Vista as well,
2. Other than architecural differences to support the AMD64 instruction set and larger addressable memory space, it is functionally the same as the 32-bit Edition of XP Pro. If you haven't noticed, the different "editions" listed here all provide different functionality.
First, the author demonstrates a lack of understanding of the current situation with the following quote:
Web companies and civil libertarians have bitterly criticized this idea, calling for "network neutrality" that doesn't relegate other content to a slow lane, or pass along costs to consumers.
Nobody is calling for network neutrality. The FCC already requires network neutrality. The telcos are calling for network neutrality requirements to be overturned so that they can charge more money for a tiered Internet that relegates "other content" (which will be essentially free content) to a slow lane.
Now about the marketing strategy at work here...
Step 1, identify the problem that your product solves:
The amount of video online is skyrocketing, whether it's "Lost" episodes or movie trailer mash-ups. The phenomenon is putting new stress on ISP networks, which are seeing the demands on their bandwidth burgeon.
Business and entertainment content worth billions of dollars now flows over ordinary ISP networks. Internet voice calls, which can be garbled by any network congestion, are increasingly common. Serious online hiccups could be as irritating, and potentially economically damaging, as persistent L.A. traffic jams.
Step 2, introduce yourself and your idea for fixing it:
"Everyone loses in the current scenario," said Michel Billard, a former HP executive who recently joined start-up Itiva, one of the companies offering video-speeding technology. "What we need is a way to amplify the bandwidth that's available."
Step 3, identify your competition (aka, alternatives) and point out their problems:
Big ISPS such as AT&T have already argued that they should be able to charge companies such as Google or Yahoo for an extra tier of service, ensuring their content arrives swiftly at its destination. Web companies and civil libertarians have bitterly criticized this idea, calling for "network neutrality" that doesn't relegate other content to a slow lane, or pass along costs to consumers.
Step 4, elaborate on your solution for fixing the problem (make sure that you get your product/technology name in here):
From P2P to Quantum streaming...
Step 5, sum it up with a nice simile comparing your product to something that is already familiar to your audience:
Very popular audio podcasts can cause some issues for small ISPs also. I own one such ISP that hosts a website with a podcast that has become very popular. Being able to deliver that much content to so many people hasn't yet maxed out our bandwidth, but it definately is using a majority of the total that we see right now.
Assuming that you haven't already, it sounds like it's time that your customer "upgrade" to a plan that allows for higher bandwidth. I'm sure that it's all in the ToS.
Anyway, it's still 8.:-) And I agree it's too many. It confuses more than it clarifies.
There's at least seven variants available now:
XP Starter Edition
XP Home N
XP Home
XP Pro N
XP Pro
XP Media Center Edition
XP Tablet PC Edition
The only thing that they've added is the Ultimate and Enterprise Editions, and they dropped Tablet edition. The Ultimate is targetted at hardcore gaming enthusiasts (from pervious articles) and the Enterprise Edition is targetted at business and is only available to Software Assurance purchasers.
So for those of you in the US, your options are:
Vista Home Basic (for general use)
Vista Home Premium (roughly analogous to Media Center Edition)
Vista Business
Vista Ultimate (premium priced, more of an ego-stroking edition for people who pay $3000 for Alienware-style systems)
So there's nothing new here. Your choices are essentially the same, the names have just changed. Oh yeah, it also must have been a slow news day.
I am writing this on a VIA C3 machine running at 866. While I suspect that my memory config may be sub-optimal (128+128+512, 512+512 would probably be better) this machine is *not* fast enough to play videos.
Really? I was able to play back video on my K6-III 450 MHz system. What video chipset are you using? Does it have hardware assisted MPEG playback?
I'm not sure why more people aren't interested in the VIA offerrings, unless it's the typical "I want something exotic and fast, but still low powered". If you want truly low power VIA is a better way to go. Sure the CPUs aren't as fast, but they're fast enough to play back MP3s and video. And if you're encoding video on your HTPC you're going to rely on the tuner/encoder card for that processing. To me it seems like a no-brainer.
Colasacco is accused of communicating with the boy through the Internet on three separate dates, starting on Jan. 14 when he allegedly met the boy at a movie theater and fondled him.
He also met with the boy again on Feb. 8 through the computer and gave him pornographic materials, the indictment said.
On Sunday, he again communicated with the boy through the computer and gave him two magazines and a DVD showing naked men and sex acts, according to the indictment and a police affidavit.
From the article it sounds like he originally met the kid at the movies, and then moved to communicating online. So is the whole Myspace part just added hysteria? Before the days of Myspace how do you think this man would have communicated with the kid? Telephone? Meet him in other semi-public places?
way to make the world seem uglier than it really is i dont believe this is as big of a problem as made seem millions of contacts and conversations going on via the internet/myspace everyday without problem/
There was this interesting experiment done recently that had a "demo" available on the web about human perception. Basically, they were experimenting on the effects of graphic images on human perception. The demo showed a slide show of neutral images, displaying each image for around a second. Then somewhere in the sequence were two images shown back to back. The first was a picture of a severed arm or something similar, and the second was a picture of a tower that was rotated 90 degrees to the left or right, so that the building was on it's side. Almost none of the people in the experiment could tell which way the picture of the building was rotated. In fact, most of them never even "saw" the picture of the building.
They were actually able to determine that an image can be so shocking that you are actually temporarily "blinded" to the mundane. I think that something like this happens on a larger level. The "13 year old whorish girls" stand out on Myspace because they are (relatively) shocking. Nobody remembers the 2 million 13 year old girls who post about how they hate their math class because it is mundane. Everyone remembers the one story of an abduction, but doesn't think twice about the 46 million stories about people on Myspace who weren't abducted that day.
I have mixed feelings about MySpace... As a father of a little girl, I don't want censorship but I also don't want her to be exposing herself and revealing personal information that could be used against her by predators. Of course, I could block myspace.com at my firewall but this doesn't stop her from accessing it at her friend's houses. Basically my thoughts on the subject have come down to this: there's really no redeeming qualities about myspace and so much to be abused.
I empathize with your situation, however, I think that you're going about it all wrong. You are looking for a technological solution for a (potential) social problem. That's a pretty common mistake among us techies (and even more common amoung non-techies), but if you take that approach then you will never get a solution that works (even with censorship). If Myspace is nerfed, people will simply gravitate to other services that are not as restrictive. Myspace will become uncool, and your kids will want to go to whatever the "cool new site" is.
What you need is a social solution. That means educating our children about the dangers of exposing personal information on the Internet. Teach them now while they are young so that it stays with them for the rest of their lives. Help them develop good habits for using web services. This will require supervision. You'll still need to monitor what web sites your child visits, and if they put up a Myspace or similar page you will need to review it periodically to make sure that your child is staying within the boundaries that you set, and enforce those boundaries.
No, it will not be easy or convenient. But it will probably be far more effective and less intrusive than technological alternatives.
Awesome game. They had a version for the C64 that had a soundtrack by Devo. The closest thing that I've found to Neuromancer today is called Uplink, put out by a small indy game company. It's fun, but it's nowhere near as captivating as Neuromancer was.
Whats the point of this? First off, anyone who wanted Halo 2 has it for Xbox. Secondly, Halo isn't that good a game- it got a big name as a great Xbox game because Xbox had jack shit else to play. Thirdly, noone is going to upgrade their OS just to buy a praticular game. This isn't going to push VIsta sales, its just going to kill sales of Halo 2 PC.
I agree. I liked Halo on the Xbox (I played on friends' systems) because it was a good console shooter. When teh PC release came out someone gave it to me for my birthday, and I played it for about 3 hours then quit. It was pretty much just another console port on the PC, with all of the annoyances of a console game (except that it was on a platform that didn't have the limitations of a console, so there was no need for them). I never did bother finishing it because it fell far short of what it was capable of being on the PC. I doubt that Halo 2 will be any different.
I'm not asking for a free (beer or speech) DB2, though that's got its own merits. I'm asking for a free (beer) migration tool, and an open source testing tool to reduce my risks when considering deploying to a commercial database.
I think that the reason you got the responses that you did were simply because most people are of the opinion that you should develop for the target platform on the target platform. Not only is it easier, it saves steps, and it makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies that are owned by stock holders are only interested in profits, and then only as a way to boost stock share prices enough for them to sell for a gain. That means companies with stock holders do stupid things like fire 30% of their staff to make a profit or create short term gains at the cost of long term growth, thus threatening everyone's jobs.
I used to work for a company in the healthcare industry that was very big and very successful. They had a reputation for always hitting or exceeding their quarterly earnings estimates, which caused their stocks to be highly valued. How did they do it? Every quarter they would go on a spending freeze a month or more before the end of it to ensure that their spend didn't cause them to miss estimates. Stockholders loved it. Employees hated it.
That same company also had annual reviews that were company wide. That means that you wouldn't get your annual review on your anniversary date, but instead everyone got their reviews at the same time. That way they could keep closer track of pay increases. A manager would be told that the salaries for their department could only increase by a total of x% that year (usually around 2 percent), and that they had to divide the increases among their people. So the entire team would either get a miniscule raise, or if there was a standout team member that person might get a higher (but still small) raise, and the other team members would get even more miniscule raises (or none at all). Being good at your job really sucked if you were only second best on the team.
The entire experience has soured me on publicly traded companies. I often wonder how Google will manage to get by with all of Wall Street complaining that they aren't playing ball by Wall Street's expectations. Sometimes I think that they may have just been better off staying private but going with the SEC's public reporting requirements that were about to kick in.
Tell me why again, you feel you deserve a raise? You agreed to a certain wage - why, all of the sudden, do you feel you deserve more? To buy a new calendar? It doesn't make sense to me that you feel you deserve more money simply because another year went by.
Becuase our employers (generally speaking) would like to retain our services and ensure that we are productive. If I don't get a raise this year, or if I get a raise that is smaller than the cost of living increase in my area, then my effective salary has been reduced. My same wage has less purchasing power from year to year. If you go several years without a raise, your purchasing power could be seriously reduced. $50,000 a year in 1996 dollars isn't the same as $50,000 a year in 2006 dollars. So if compensation is effectively reduced (if not numerically), then you have less incentive to work at the same level. Over time you may find it more profitable to go work somewhere else.
At that point the employer incurs significant costs in hiring and trianing a replacement worker, and since average wages have increased over the past few years the odds are pretty good that they won't be able to hire someone to fulfill your job at the same low rate they were paying you. So in the end it ends up costing them more money in the long run to not give you a raise.
While it's true that you agreed to perform a specific job for a specific wage, I don't know anyone whose job descriptions (or at least actual performed duties) didn't change over the course of a year. Most people are required to take on a higher workload or level of responsibility as time goes by. Most of us are willing to do it, but not if we aren't to be compensated. Every time your boss asks you to do something that is not in your job description you could stop and negotiate additional fees for services, but most employers and employees would prefer a regular review process with compensation increases.
And the most important thing that you left out is that after a year goes by of doing a specific job, you now have one more year's experience doing that job. Most people will have increased thier skillsets or become more skillful in an existing skillset. Which is worth more, a Java developer fresh out of college or a Java developer who has 3-5 years of experience on successful projects? Or to make it more personal, if you needed medical treatment for a condition would you prefer to have a general practitioner right out of residency or a specialist who had been treating similar cases for years? Most people (employers and employees) would agree that having more experience is worth more.
And hey, I'm a liberal and proud of it, but you're going to have to explain to me how smaller pay increases for workers who are already in the top 5% of earners is going to cause the collapse of our economy. People are complaining that $75k a year starting salary for a new graduate are too LOW? A schoolteacher with 40 years experience and an M.A. doesn't make nearly that much.
It's all relative. $75,000 sounds like a pretty big salary to someone who lives in Indiana, but if you live in New York City it's peanuts. Also keep in mind that the "$75,000 starting salary" didn't clearly state if they had a BS, or an MS, or an MBA. Nor did it state where the job would be located. Microsoft has offices all over the United States, not just in Redmond, and while the article may have been talking about Redmond salaries there is no guarantee that the poster with the job offer was speaking about the same thing.
How so? All of the information requested in the assignement can be gotten from any server running a compliant web server, including Windows XP Personal Web Server, with a combination of port scanning tools, netstat, ping, and GRC's webhost.
From the article:
He wants them to write an evaluation of what they find: what ports are open and what service could be running on them, Host names and IP addresses, OS, version, last update, patch status, what shares are available, what kind of network traffic and what vulnerabilities they see.
I'm no expert on port scanning, but I don't think that you can find out patch status, what shares are available, etc from a simple portscan.
Does that mean if I go to someone's website without being explicitly authorized, I can be sued? Okay, clearly not. How about if I ping the web site? Iffy. What if my browser pings the site automatically for some diagnostic purpose? What if it's running echo, chargen, discard, or any of the other traditional diagnostic daemons? Surely they haven't authorized me to use them, but they offered them. I guess my question is like the unsecured WiFi =?= public WiFi one... at what point does opening an address or specific port to the public constitute authorization to at least try to connect to it?
There are a couple of principles at work here. If you publish a web site, you are expecting and inviting http traffic on port 80. Depending on your level of skill, you may also be expecting traffic on other ports, but you may not be inviting it. The inability of a server owner/operator to properly secure their computer does not constitute permission to use that computer for purposes that were not intended (otherwise botnets would be 100% legal). Intent weighs heavily in this case, and not just the intent of the individual scanning but also the intent of the server owners.
Furthermore, in some states port scanning actually is illegal. As long as the students are in a state where port scanning is not illegal and they were sure not to scan a server that is in a state where port scanning is illegal, they might be OK legally. But the university obviously takes a dim view of the activity since they don't want students scanning the university servers. I wonder how they would feel about a flood of complaints from business and other organizations about unauthorized port scanning from their network? The bad publicity could be a nightmare.
But more to the point, the assignment involved more than port scanning. At least that's what SANS has said in one of several updates to the original story.
OK. But the page doesn't actually use the terms active or passive. What it says is:
The Act prohibits any person from willfully or maliciously interfering with the radio communications of any station licensed or authorized under the Act or operated by the U.S. government.
As I indicated, at the beginning it talks about operating transmitters, but then it references "willfully or maliciously interfering", and I would say that installing RF blocking paint for the purpose of blocking reception would be willfully interfering. But it's unclear from the info page whether the standard of the law is either a) willfully or maliciously interfering, or b) willfully or maliciously operating a transmitter that interferes.
I wouldn't take that web page as the law in this case. It is an information page from the FCC, and it states that the relevant law is the Communications Act of 1934. It starts off saying that the act prohibits the use of transmitters to jam or block, but then it says that it probhibits anyone from willfully or maliciously blocking or jamming. Without reviewing the actual text of the act it would be hard to say whether it addresses passive (non-transmitter) techniques, of even if the act of putting up the paint would be considered active blocking.
I second that, RT is great. You set it up to query a POP account every 5 minutes and it automatically grabs issues emailed to you, creates a ticket, and sends a response to the requestor with the ticket number. It has a nice web-based front end so that your customers can log in an open tickets or review the status of cases, and it does everything that you would want from a ticket tracking system. Best of all it's open source, so it costs you nothing and you can modify it to fit your needs (though it is highly configurable without having to dig under the hood and learn perl). There is a sort of a Windows port of it if you're into that thing, but it still runs on Cygwin in part so it's not truly native.
To me, that does not sound like a fair comparison. I believe that the comparison to California's crime rate is invalid because cybercrime may or may not involve actual physical contact. And, if it doesn't involve physical contact (for example, a dirty phone conversation), then it may not be reported.
This is incorrect. They are not comparing crime rates, they are comparing the number of cases of statutory rape attributed to each community. Statutory rape, by definition, does involve and require physical contact. They are saying that the number of statutory rape cases between members of the community of MySpace are proportionally much smaller than the number of statutory rape cases between members of the community of California.
While I realize that some worries of MySpace are overblown, I would like to point out there are dangers. These dangers include the fact that you can easily find out alot of personal information about someone. And, that information is readily available to millions of people on the web.
This is also incorrect. You can only find out a lot of personal information about someone if that individual actively chooses to publish that information with the other 56,999,999 MySpace users. If someone chooses to publish that same information in the newspaper's classified ads then there is just as much potential danger, but nobody argues about how dangerous newspapers are.
The problem has nothing to do with MySpace, and everything to do with the people using it. I suppose we could always pass legislation to outlaw stupid people (and I would certainly vote for it), but I fear it would never pass.
I don't think they ever claimed that it was fact or fiction. In an interview with one of the authors he claims that from their research they came to the conclusion that the story was possible. Whatever that means.
This is correct. The theories from HBHG are not presented as fact, but merely aas conjecture or possibilities that fit the information available from primary sources (many of which are taken the be factual). However, their main primary sources are documents regarding the "Priory of Sion" that were supposedly planted to begin with, and which may not be authentic at all. What Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln did was take the primary source of the Priory documents and try to match them up with known historical realities to see if they could be accurate. Where discrepancies arose they tried to resolve them or account for them in a reasonable fashion. They did a pretty good job of this.
That being said, none of the three are historians. They are investigative journalists, so rather than relating the "historical facts" that can be corroborated, they are presenting a narrative.
Do I think that they should be suing Dan Brown (or his publishers)? No. He certainly took some of the ideas from the non-fiction book HBHG and used them as a central theme in a work of fiction, but I think that probably comes under the heading of fair use, or inspiration. He certainly cited them as a source, giving credit where credit is due.
I personally think that this is solely about the money. Had The DaVinci Code not been such a hit they would have been content to let things go. But since it has raked in tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars, the temptation for them to not try to take a cut of that is just too much. I mean, let's face it, HBHG has been cited as a primary source for dozens of other books in the past 25 years which truly are far more derivative of their work than TDC, yet they haven't been sued.
authors, the events described in the book are factual. Since facts cannot be copywritten, (last time I checked), that should mean they are out of luck.
This is incorrect. Having actually read "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", (holy shit, someone on Slashdot who actually reads what they talk about!) I am in a position to point out that the authors state repeatedly that they are not stating facts, but are merely presenting conjecture about one possibility that seems to be supported by many and various primary sources. They put together a theory to explain certain "mysteries", but nowhere in the book is it presented as fact.
I've always loved customer reviews of stuff (like newegg, amazon, and even ePinions), since it can give a more joe schmoe look at the product, and it is not of a sample of the product that a manufacturer may have hand-picked and inspected for a reviewer to review because it will not have problems (it isn't always that way, but I'm sure sometimes it is).
A wonderful notion, except that allowing you to post 3-5 sentences about the product on a web site hardly qualifies as a review. Most of the reviews I see on NewEgg indicate that they "just got the product and it is awesome". I'm not sure how thoroughly you can determine a product's awesomeness in the first 24 hours of use, but after using something for a couple weeks I almost always find little differences that I don't like or areas that can be improved.
And then there's the lack of technical knowledge that is usually displayed. If someone can't get something to work correctly it is always the product that is wrong. It couldn't possibly be operator error or lack of knowledge. Then there's the guys who say "I bought this video card and now I hit 9000 in 3DMark 2005!" Of course, without knowing what their system specs are, or what 3DMark score they got with their old card, that knowledge is mostly useless. And finally their's the braggers who post an 7 line review, and 5 of those lines look like this:
Athlon 64 FX-57 (overclocked to 3 GHz!)
4 GB Corsair super-premium CL 1.5 PC3200 memory
ASUS Deluxe Ultra gold NF4 SLI
2x GeForce 7800 GTX 512 in SLI
4x WD Raptor X 150 GB drives in RAID 0+1 (at 10000 rpm)
And I doubt the reviewer has even touched anything like the hardware listed, let alone assembled it and gotten it working as described. No, I say leave the reviewing to the reviewers, and let them be skeptical and pay for their own hardware to review.
x64 64-bit potato, potatoe
Funny. Much like this situation, only one of those spellings is actually correct. But there is more than a semantic difference here. If you actually tried to install the "64-bit Edition" on your PC, you would know that they are not the same thing at all. The "64-bit Edition" only runs on the Itanium line of CPUs, whereas the "x64 Edition" runs only on CPUs that support the AMD64 instruction set.
I have (by your terminology) x64-- it's different functionality, believe me...
It's not my terminology, it's Microsofts. Go look it up. And while we're beating our chests about our x64 creds, I was in the technical beta test for x64 (the one that you actually have to apply for, not the CPP that anyone can sign up for and everyone referred to as "the beta"), and I assure you that other than support for AMD64 and larger addressable memory space, the functionality is the same. In fact, the functionality is so identical that most of the non-core applications that ship with the OS are still the same 32-bit binaries from the original Windows XP and run in WOW64.
including I believe (not applicable to 32bit) the ability to run 2 multicore processors (for 4 cores total)
This is incorrect. You can run two dual core CPUs on 32-bit Windows XP Pro as well, though XP Home only supports a single dual-core CPU. Windows XP Pro has always supported two physical CPUs, and Microsoft has made it clear many times that for the purposes of licensing and support they count physical CPUs, not CPU cores.
But if you don't believe it from me, check with Microsoft yourself:
Q. How does this licensing policy affect products such as Microsoft Windows XP Professional?
A. Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Windows XP Home are not affected by this policy as they are licensed per installation and not per processor. Windows XP Professional can support up to two processors regardless of the number of cores on the processor. Microsoft Windows XP Home supports one processor.
You can find that info on Microsoft's Multicore Licensing FAQ page.
Now, if you're still convinced that the x64 edition of Windows provides different functionality from the 32-bit edition (other than the previously mentioned architectural changes to support the new instruction set), then by all means list some factual examples. Otherwise just admit that the ability to buy and install an OEM copy of a niche market operating system doesn't make you an expert on the subject.
xp pro 64 bit edition. trust me, it's different.
Microsoft isn't shipping Windows XP Pro 64-bit Edition anymore, they killed it a couple months back. Instead they are focusing their Itanium efforts on server products.
They are still shipping Windows XP Pro x64 Edition, but I didn't include that because:
1. There will be (presumably) x64 Editions of Vista as well, 2. Other than architecural differences to support the AMD64 instruction set and larger addressable memory space, it is functionally the same as the 32-bit Edition of XP Pro. If you haven't noticed, the different "editions" listed here all provide different functionality.
First, the author demonstrates a lack of understanding of the current situation with the following quote:
Web companies and civil libertarians have bitterly criticized this idea, calling for "network neutrality" that doesn't relegate other content to a slow lane, or pass along costs to consumers.
Nobody is calling for network neutrality. The FCC already requires network neutrality. The telcos are calling for network neutrality requirements to be overturned so that they can charge more money for a tiered Internet that relegates "other content" (which will be essentially free content) to a slow lane.
Now about the marketing strategy at work here...
Step 1, identify the problem that your product solves:
The amount of video online is skyrocketing, whether it's "Lost" episodes or movie trailer mash-ups. The phenomenon is putting new stress on ISP networks, which are seeing the demands on their bandwidth burgeon.
Business and entertainment content worth billions of dollars now flows over ordinary ISP networks. Internet voice calls, which can be garbled by any network congestion, are increasingly common. Serious online hiccups could be as irritating, and potentially economically damaging, as persistent L.A. traffic jams.
Step 2, introduce yourself and your idea for fixing it:
"Everyone loses in the current scenario," said Michel Billard, a former HP executive who recently joined start-up Itiva, one of the companies offering video-speeding technology. "What we need is a way to amplify the bandwidth that's available."
Step 3, identify your competition (aka, alternatives) and point out their problems:
Big ISPS such as AT&T have already argued that they should be able to charge companies such as Google or Yahoo for an extra tier of service, ensuring their content arrives swiftly at its destination. Web companies and civil libertarians have bitterly criticized this idea, calling for "network neutrality" that doesn't relegate other content to a slow lane, or pass along costs to consumers.
Step 4, elaborate on your solution for fixing the problem (make sure that you get your product/technology name in here):
From P2P to Quantum streaming...
Step 5, sum it up with a nice simile comparing your product to something that is already familiar to your audience:
"It's like BitTorrent for ISPs,"
Step 6, profit!!!
Very popular audio podcasts can cause some issues for small ISPs also. I own one such ISP that hosts a website with a podcast that has become very popular. Being able to deliver that much content to so many people hasn't yet maxed out our bandwidth, but it definately is using a majority of the total that we see right now.
Assuming that you haven't already, it sounds like it's time that your customer "upgrade" to a plan that allows for higher bandwidth. I'm sure that it's all in the ToS.
Anyway, it's still 8. :-) And I agree it's too many. It confuses more than it clarifies.
There's at least seven variants available now:
XP Starter Edition
XP Home N
XP Home
XP Pro N
XP Pro
XP Media Center Edition
XP Tablet PC Edition
The only thing that they've added is the Ultimate and Enterprise Editions, and they dropped Tablet edition. The Ultimate is targetted at hardcore gaming enthusiasts (from pervious articles) and the Enterprise Edition is targetted at business and is only available to Software Assurance purchasers.
So for those of you in the US, your options are:
Vista Home Basic (for general use)
Vista Home Premium (roughly analogous to Media Center Edition)
Vista Business
Vista Ultimate (premium priced, more of an ego-stroking edition for people who pay $3000 for Alienware-style systems)
So there's nothing new here. Your choices are essentially the same, the names have just changed. Oh yeah, it also must have been a slow news day.
I am writing this on a VIA C3 machine running at 866. While I suspect that my memory config may be sub-optimal (128+128+512, 512+512 would probably be better) this machine is *not* fast enough to play videos.
Really? I was able to play back video on my K6-III 450 MHz system. What video chipset are you using? Does it have hardware assisted MPEG playback?
I'm not sure why more people aren't interested in the VIA offerrings, unless it's the typical "I want something exotic and fast, but still low powered". If you want truly low power VIA is a better way to go. Sure the CPUs aren't as fast, but they're fast enough to play back MP3s and video. And if you're encoding video on your HTPC you're going to rely on the tuner/encoder card for that processing. To me it seems like a no-brainer.
Colasacco is accused of communicating with the boy through the Internet on three separate dates, starting on Jan. 14 when he allegedly met the boy at a movie theater and fondled him.
He also met with the boy again on Feb. 8 through the computer and gave him pornographic materials, the indictment said.
On Sunday, he again communicated with the boy through the computer and gave him two magazines and a DVD showing naked men and sex acts, according to the indictment and a police affidavit.
From the article it sounds like he originally met the kid at the movies, and then moved to communicating online. So is the whole Myspace part just added hysteria? Before the days of Myspace how do you think this man would have communicated with the kid? Telephone? Meet him in other semi-public places?
way to make the world seem uglier than it really is i dont believe this is as big of a problem as made seem millions of contacts and conversations going on via the internet/myspace everyday without problem/
There was this interesting experiment done recently that had a "demo" available on the web about human perception. Basically, they were experimenting on the effects of graphic images on human perception. The demo showed a slide show of neutral images, displaying each image for around a second. Then somewhere in the sequence were two images shown back to back. The first was a picture of a severed arm or something similar, and the second was a picture of a tower that was rotated 90 degrees to the left or right, so that the building was on it's side. Almost none of the people in the experiment could tell which way the picture of the building was rotated. In fact, most of them never even "saw" the picture of the building.
They were actually able to determine that an image can be so shocking that you are actually temporarily "blinded" to the mundane. I think that something like this happens on a larger level. The "13 year old whorish girls" stand out on Myspace because they are (relatively) shocking. Nobody remembers the 2 million 13 year old girls who post about how they hate their math class because it is mundane. Everyone remembers the one story of an abduction, but doesn't think twice about the 46 million stories about people on Myspace who weren't abducted that day.
Most human males are true perverts.
Yeah, I agree 100%. Just don't tell my wife.
I have mixed feelings about MySpace... As a father of a little girl, I don't want censorship but I also don't want her to be exposing herself and revealing personal information that could be used against her by predators. Of course, I could block myspace.com at my firewall but this doesn't stop her from accessing it at her friend's houses. Basically my thoughts on the subject have come down to this: there's really no redeeming qualities about myspace and so much to be abused.
I empathize with your situation, however, I think that you're going about it all wrong. You are looking for a technological solution for a (potential) social problem. That's a pretty common mistake among us techies (and even more common amoung non-techies), but if you take that approach then you will never get a solution that works (even with censorship). If Myspace is nerfed, people will simply gravitate to other services that are not as restrictive. Myspace will become uncool, and your kids will want to go to whatever the "cool new site" is.
What you need is a social solution. That means educating our children about the dangers of exposing personal information on the Internet. Teach them now while they are young so that it stays with them for the rest of their lives. Help them develop good habits for using web services. This will require supervision. You'll still need to monitor what web sites your child visits, and if they put up a Myspace or similar page you will need to review it periodically to make sure that your child is staying within the boundaries that you set, and enforce those boundaries.
No, it will not be easy or convenient. But it will probably be far more effective and less intrusive than technological alternatives.
Awesome game. They had a version for the C64 that had a soundtrack by Devo. The closest thing that I've found to Neuromancer today is called Uplink, put out by a small indy game company. It's fun, but it's nowhere near as captivating as Neuromancer was.
Whats the point of this? First off, anyone who wanted Halo 2 has it for Xbox. Secondly, Halo isn't that good a game- it got a big name as a great Xbox game because Xbox had jack shit else to play. Thirdly, noone is going to upgrade their OS just to buy a praticular game. This isn't going to push VIsta sales, its just going to kill sales of Halo 2 PC.
I agree. I liked Halo on the Xbox (I played on friends' systems) because it was a good console shooter. When teh PC release came out someone gave it to me for my birthday, and I played it for about 3 hours then quit. It was pretty much just another console port on the PC, with all of the annoyances of a console game (except that it was on a platform that didn't have the limitations of a console, so there was no need for them). I never did bother finishing it because it fell far short of what it was capable of being on the PC. I doubt that Halo 2 will be any different.
I'm not asking for a free (beer or speech) DB2, though that's got its own merits. I'm asking for a free (beer) migration tool, and an open source testing tool to reduce my risks when considering deploying to a commercial database.
I think that the reason you got the responses that you did were simply because most people are of the opinion that you should develop for the target platform on the target platform. Not only is it easier, it saves steps, and it makes sense.