Wait, you mean this isn't a joke RFC?
on
RFC for Spammers
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· Score: 1
Ugh, people, do we really want to validate spamming by writing an RFC on it? I'm sure some spamhaus president could squeeze an extra mil or two out of some hapless VC's by slapping a printout of this RFC on their desk. (I mean, clearly VC don't really read the business plans they're presented anyway, just skim.)
I actually interviewed to work at a company that spams for a living (they called it "e-marketing".)
Thank goodness I didn't end up working there.
Then again, maybe spam and pr0n are the only viable money-makers left on the 'net. Sigh.
No mention of
Jerkcity, either. What a half-assed article this was. The Chicago Tribune's really gone downhill since I was a kid.
Yeah, Jerkcity's not exactly classy or sophisticated, but even they get a couple good shots in at UF and other stupid web comix. (Start with the oldest ones and work your way to the present.:)
No kidding. I did the lame coat-hanger-wire and revolving-foam-planets project myself(for lack of a better idea), and I think I got a 2nd place ribbon. Even I knew it was lame at the time, but it wasn't like our science classes encouraged us to think, just memorize.
It's also interesting that she did a sociological experiment/project rather than "hard" science. Most grade schools don't even mention that type of inquiry as part of science, it's lumped in with history/civics/government classes.
Obviously, kudos to this bright little girl for her insightful choice of topic. I wonder if her parents didn't anticipate this reaction to the project, though.
The lines "it's Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to Never Never Land" is from the Grateful Dead's "The Other One" This lyric paraphases scenes from both Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which chronicles a cross-country bus trip undertaken by the Merry Pranksters, during which Neal served as the driver of their bus Furthur(yes, this is how it was spelled.) AND certain chapters of On the Road and Dharma Bums by Kerouac.
Of course the song Cassidy also refers to both Neal Cassady and Cassidy, a baby girl born to a member of the extended GDead family around the same time as Neal's death.
So there you have it. Now you know what I was studying in college.:)
Now, here's my question for CowboyNeal: Can I have your baby? If not, how about a hug?;)
Requisite cute girl model notwithstanding, this thing looks a bit tricky to manuever. From what I saw of college kids' ability to pilot a simple bicycle down a street, this thing looks like a road-rash in the making. How would you keep your pants legs from getting caught in the wheels?
And sure, it has a throttle, but where are the brakes??
Guess I'm not seeing how this is an improvement over those gas-powered scooters....
Re:These are customer service types
on
The Jungle
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· Score: 1
Exactly right. I live in Seattle and personally know at least 3 of the customer service folks at Amazon who were shown the door in the call-center closing, and although they are all fine, upstanding people, not a one of them had a lick of technical experience coming into the job. One of them had worked as a mechanic, another was an actress/student, another used to work in retail.
They were just as opportunistic as Amazon was in seizing the moment. None of them viewed the job as a long-term career move, just something that beat making mall wages. Plus, they got to sit down to work and occasionally websurf from their desks. Not such a bad gig.
Speaking as the child of two unionized factory workers, I and my whole family agree that they have mostly negative effects, ie keeping undeserving slackers employed. And anyone who doesn't think that union working regulations were responsible for the completely embarassing quality-control standards in the American auto industry in the 70's and 80's is kidding themselves. Unions do not encourage hard work or excellence.
Re:GO KILL YOURSELF, WANNABE TOOL BOY
on
DSL Woes
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· Score: 1
gee, I don't recall claiming cl00.
Which part of NO ACCESS TO THE COPPER wasnt clear?
I also didnt think my landlord would appreciate me ripping the POTS jack out of the wall to experiment. (Especially since the Covad guy had just specifically wired a pair to a separate wall jack.)
I also somehow think that the bitrate is gonna suffer from homemade Tim the ToolMan re-wiring jobs.
If YOU want to fuck around with live power, you go right ahead. Sounds like the right amount of chlorine in the gene pool to me.
Yeah, and if I had *access* to the telco closet in my building, I might have taken such McGyver-ish measures. Only the telco has a key to it, and besides, I'm not a fan of sticking my fingers into anything with live voltage, nor a fan of pissing off my neighbors by accidentally shorting out all their POTS lines. If the Covad tech (who was quite clued), wasn't able to figure out where along in the wire the tap was located, how exactly would I have done it? Sorry, but I don't have my own personal Bert tester. Dork.
Covad is always gonna be a CLEC.
on
DSL Woes
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· Score: 1
Until something major changes in the national telco structure, Covad's always going to be playing catch-up to the local RBOCs. I tried getting Covad/Speakeasy DSL when I first moved to Seattle, in an apartment building less than 5000 feet (yes, you read that right) from the CO, well within SDSL range. The Covad tech did all the inside wiring he could, but after an hour of head-scratching and calling his office to have tests run, his hands were tied because USWest had inexplicably installed copper taps that boosted the voltage on the line to boost the signal. Now, why there would need to be *any* voltage on SDSL (dry copper) is beyond me. It still took Covad 2 months of hassling USWest before they'd even agree to come out and futz with the copper going to my building. No one in my neighborhood should have needed a tap like that, but it was undoubtedly just something they put in place to stymie competition from CLECs like Covad.
Between Covad, Speakeasy(who were very responsive and kept me in the loop, but were helpless to change the situation), and USWorst, it was going to be at least 3 months before any bits were gonna pass on that copper. The day I accepted this fate, a @Home flyer appeared in my mail announcing that they had service in my area. I called, and 6 days later had cable modem in my house. They even ran 20 feet of coax and drilled into the next room so that I could have the access in my office instead of my bedroom.
Sure, you can't host a server off @Home, but for a single user, it's crazy fast, and I could count on my fingers the nuimber of times it's blinked out. (even after there was a fire in my building!)
Well, it's hard for anyone other than Daimler's board members to answer that, but since I have two family members who work for Chrysler, I can tell you that within the rank & file, no one at Chrysler wanted to be part of a German-run company. Almost immediately after the SEC approved the 'merger', the head of the board of directors (majority German) started firing American members who'd come from Chrysler, then tried to appyl monies that Chrysler had set aside for employee pensions to fun a new product line. That's when some big shareholders started suing.
I didn't necessarily think there was a close parallel, it was a mostly off-handed remark.:)
Geez, we really must be as lazy and unproductive as the Japanese said we were back in the 80's...this is exactly what the German members of DaimlerChrysler's trying to do to the American divisions they "merged with" last year.
Americans didn't invent Linux anyway, so what do we know?:)
PREACH ON, SISTER!!
My first real job right out of college was in the tech support department of a large networking vendor (who shall remain nameless, even if they do use pretty blue paint on everything...). I was 22 and a girl, and I used to get no end of shit from crusty old 45 year old IT Managers from places like Merrill-Lynch when they'd call in in a panic to get something working, and during a random moment they'd ask how old I was. After the first time I answered, I learned not to offer such information anymore. I really think that if I'd been a 22 yr old guy, they would have thought I was a prodigy.
A year later, working for another network-hardware vendor, I was frequently mistaken for a first-line customer service rep (all of whom were female) when the customer would get hot-transferred over to me. It went something like this:
Me: Tech Support, this is , how can I help you?
Customer: Oh, can you transfer me to a tech, please (some of the more redneck customer would tack a 'honey' to the end of this request. Grrr.)
Me: You're talking to one, what can I do for you?
Customer: Oh. Um, okay....
Only occasionally would they apologize. On a few occasions, I got baked goods sent to me after I fixed their problem. One of my fellow girltechs got flowers once. More than once I got a half-joking marriage proposal, but I'm still single, so go figure.
Point is: If you're young and getting no respect, just wait a few years, it'll pass. If you're a girl, just get used to taking shit for it. *sigh*
Re:Pitt, Ritchie (um, Kalifornia??)
on
'Snatch'
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· Score: 1
No kidding. Didn't anyone else see Kalifornia? Brad is so much skankier/scarier in that movie than he's been in Fight Club OR Snatch. Then again, to watch Kalifornia, you'd have to endure Juliette Lewis's annoying self, so maybe it's NOT worth it.
Oh wait, it also features a pre-X-Files David Duchovny. Definitely worth it.:)
For Women, Not for the Girlies
on
'Snatch'
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· Score: 1
Geezus, I'd think that/. boys wouldn't hang out with such weak/stupid females. I saw it with a group of about 10 friends, mostly women, and we all loved it. Maybe you guys should date women with a freaking sense of humor.
IMO, this was the movie that Quentin Tarantino WISH he'd made. Fantastic soundtrack, too(any movie with Massive Attack gets points with me).
Brad Pitt's accent wasn't THAT impenetrable. Hell, I've gotten in taxis in London driven by guys with thicker accents than that.
Last I checked, AOL *only* 'peers' at MAE East, and refuses to private-peer with anyone, with the possible exception of Exodus. So I doubt they'd wanna play ball with UUNet anyway.
As the previous posters have pointed out, there's LOTS of players in the backbone game, and more every day. What I don't see happening is everyone tearing up the pay-for-packets peering ( correct term is transit) agreements they've already signed with other big backbone companies (including UUNet.) After all, writing a check to a company every month usually comes with an actionable SLA, and people kinda of like being able to call up the other provider's NOC whenever they want, because they're treated like a CUSTOMER in most cases. Besides, in most BGP configurations, private peerings or customer routers are given higher precedence (local pref), and no one wants to give that up, either.
For anyone not bored by this story already, the Seattle Times has this update.
The monolith will get an official home at Magnuson Park, at least until 'kite season' begins in March.
It's good (as a Seattle resident) to see the Parks Dept being reasonable about it and legitimizing the work rather than just getting rid of it because it wasn't commisioned.
I'm not sure I'd trust SFGate to report anything accurately about Seattle, but that 'average' salary figure they quote of $129,330 is based on PAPER wealth from dotcom stock options. That meant next to nothing when they took that poll, and even less now, given market conditions. Yeah, it's certainly true that in parts of Bellevue and Redmond you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some Microsoft Millionaire looking for a way to spend money, usually in the most tacky and earth-polluting way possible (hello, fully-loaded SUV!), but they're definitely in the minority. (and I'd bet that their net worth's been brought low of late, too.)
I hate to side with Microsoft in ANYTHING, but I personally know (as does just about everyone else in the Seattle area) current and former MSFT temps who make considerably more per hour than their 'permanent' colleagues, and can change groups pretty easily. In fact, most of them wouldnt go permanent if they were asked, because they don't want to take a pay cut. The fact is, these people are all adults who knew what they were signing up for. Did their contract paperwork say "contract-to-hire"? Not bloody likely.
These folks need to realize that you don't get something for nothing. Take some responsibility and that extra hourly wage, and sign up for personal health insurance. There's a great organization here in Seattle called
Group Health Cooperative (www.ghc.org), which provides relatively cheap and easily accessible health care, at convenient locations.
As a former temp at Cisco (back in '95), who had no health insurance and also made less than the regular employees, I can tell you that MSFT's not the only place who gets away with this.
As a former resident of "Silicon Valley" (what *is* the zipcode of this mythical city?), and current resident of Seattle, I'm baffled as to what this admittedly colder-than-usual winter we're having in the Northwest has to do with the survival of PG&E half-assed infrastructure. Most of the major cities up here (including Seattle) have their own independent power supplied by the various salmon-chewing dams on the Snake and Columbia Rivers. Since when is PG&E using hydro from the PNW? I can see NoCal folks getting uppity about the power drain that is El Lay, but give me a break in pointing your fingers northward.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, people, do we really want to validate spamming by writing an RFC on it? I'm sure some spamhaus president could squeeze an extra mil or two out of some hapless VC's by slapping a printout of this RFC on their desk. (I mean, clearly VC don't really read the business plans they're presented anyway, just skim.) I actually interviewed to work at a company that spams for a living (they called it "e-marketing".) Thank goodness I didn't end up working there. Then again, maybe spam and pr0n are the only viable money-makers left on the 'net. Sigh.
No mention of Jerkcity, either. What a half-assed article this was. The Chicago Tribune's really gone downhill since I was a kid. Yeah, Jerkcity's not exactly classy or sophisticated, but even they get a couple good shots in at UF and other stupid web comix. (Start with the oldest ones and work your way to the present. :)
No kidding. I did the lame coat-hanger-wire and revolving-foam-planets project myself(for lack of a better idea), and I think I got a 2nd place ribbon. Even I knew it was lame at the time, but it wasn't like our science classes encouraged us to think, just memorize.
It's also interesting that she did a sociological experiment/project rather than "hard" science. Most grade schools don't even mention that type of inquiry as part of science, it's lumped in with history/civics/government classes.
Obviously, kudos to this bright little girl for her insightful choice of topic. I wonder if her parents didn't anticipate this reaction to the project, though.
You! with the Spock ears! Have you ever kissed a girl???
The lines "it's Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to Never Never Land" is from the Grateful Dead's "The Other One" This lyric paraphases scenes from both Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which chronicles a cross-country bus trip undertaken by the Merry Pranksters, during which Neal served as the driver of their bus Furthur(yes, this is how it was spelled.) AND certain chapters of On the Road and Dharma Bums by Kerouac.
Of course the song Cassidy also refers to both Neal Cassady and Cassidy, a baby girl born to a member of the extended GDead family around the same time as Neal's death.
So there you have it. Now you know what I was studying in college. :)
Now, here's my question for CowboyNeal: Can I have your baby? If not, how about a hug? ;)
Requisite cute girl model notwithstanding, this thing looks a bit tricky to manuever. From what I saw of college kids' ability to pilot a simple bicycle down a street, this thing looks like a road-rash in the making. How would you keep your pants legs from getting caught in the wheels? And sure, it has a throttle, but where are the brakes??
Guess I'm not seeing how this is an improvement over those gas-powered scooters....
They were just as opportunistic as Amazon was in seizing the moment. None of them viewed the job as a long-term career move, just something that beat making mall wages. Plus, they got to sit down to work and occasionally websurf from their desks. Not such a bad gig.
Speaking as the child of two unionized factory workers, I and my whole family agree that they have mostly negative effects, ie keeping undeserving slackers employed. And anyone who doesn't think that union working regulations were responsible for the completely embarassing quality-control standards in the American auto industry in the 70's and 80's is kidding themselves. Unions do not encourage hard work or excellence.
gee, I don't recall claiming cl00.
Which part of NO ACCESS TO THE COPPER wasnt clear?
I also didnt think my landlord would appreciate me ripping the POTS jack out of the wall to experiment. (Especially since the Covad guy had just specifically wired a pair to a separate wall jack.)
I also somehow think that the bitrate is gonna suffer from homemade Tim the ToolMan re-wiring jobs.
If YOU want to fuck around with live power, you go right ahead. Sounds like the right amount of chlorine in the gene pool to me.
Yeah, and if I had *access* to the telco closet in my building, I might have taken such McGyver-ish measures. Only the telco has a key to it, and besides, I'm not a fan of sticking my fingers into anything with live voltage, nor a fan of pissing off my neighbors by accidentally shorting out all their POTS lines. If the Covad tech (who was quite clued), wasn't able to figure out where along in the wire the tap was located, how exactly would I have done it? Sorry, but I don't have my own personal Bert tester. Dork.
Until something major changes in the national telco structure, Covad's always going to be playing catch-up to the local RBOCs. I tried getting Covad/Speakeasy DSL when I first moved to Seattle, in an apartment building less than 5000 feet (yes, you read that right) from the CO, well within SDSL range. The Covad tech did all the inside wiring he could, but after an hour of head-scratching and calling his office to have tests run, his hands were tied because USWest had inexplicably installed copper taps that boosted the voltage on the line to boost the signal. Now, why there would need to be *any* voltage on SDSL (dry copper) is beyond me. It still took Covad 2 months of hassling USWest before they'd even agree to come out and futz with the copper going to my building. No one in my neighborhood should have needed a tap like that, but it was undoubtedly just something they put in place to stymie competition from CLECs like Covad. Between Covad, Speakeasy(who were very responsive and kept me in the loop, but were helpless to change the situation), and USWorst, it was going to be at least 3 months before any bits were gonna pass on that copper. The day I accepted this fate, a @Home flyer appeared in my mail announcing that they had service in my area. I called, and 6 days later had cable modem in my house. They even ran 20 feet of coax and drilled into the next room so that I could have the access in my office instead of my bedroom. Sure, you can't host a server off @Home, but for a single user, it's crazy fast, and I could count on my fingers the nuimber of times it's blinked out. (even after there was a fire in my building!)
Well, it's hard for anyone other than Daimler's board members to answer that, but since I have two family members who work for Chrysler, I can tell you that within the rank & file, no one at Chrysler wanted to be part of a German-run company. Almost immediately after the SEC approved the 'merger', the head of the board of directors (majority German) started firing American members who'd come from Chrysler, then tried to appyl monies that Chrysler had set aside for employee pensions to fun a new product line. That's when some big shareholders started suing. I didn't necessarily think there was a close parallel, it was a mostly off-handed remark. :)
Geez, we really must be as lazy and unproductive as the Japanese said we were back in the 80's...this is exactly what the German members of DaimlerChrysler's trying to do to the American divisions they "merged with" last year. Americans didn't invent Linux anyway, so what do we know? :)
PREACH ON, SISTER!! My first real job right out of college was in the tech support department of a large networking vendor (who shall remain nameless, even if they do use pretty blue paint on everything...). I was 22 and a girl, and I used to get no end of shit from crusty old 45 year old IT Managers from places like Merrill-Lynch when they'd call in in a panic to get something working, and during a random moment they'd ask how old I was. After the first time I answered, I learned not to offer such information anymore. I really think that if I'd been a 22 yr old guy, they would have thought I was a prodigy. A year later, working for another network-hardware vendor, I was frequently mistaken for a first-line customer service rep (all of whom were female) when the customer would get hot-transferred over to me. It went something like this: Me: Tech Support, this is , how can I help you? Customer: Oh, can you transfer me to a tech, please (some of the more redneck customer would tack a 'honey' to the end of this request. Grrr.) Me: You're talking to one, what can I do for you? Customer: Oh. Um, okay.... Only occasionally would they apologize. On a few occasions, I got baked goods sent to me after I fixed their problem. One of my fellow girltechs got flowers once. More than once I got a half-joking marriage proposal, but I'm still single, so go figure. Point is: If you're young and getting no respect, just wait a few years, it'll pass. If you're a girl, just get used to taking shit for it. *sigh*
No kidding. Didn't anyone else see Kalifornia? Brad is so much skankier/scarier in that movie than he's been in Fight Club OR Snatch. Then again, to watch Kalifornia, you'd have to endure Juliette Lewis's annoying self, so maybe it's NOT worth it. Oh wait, it also features a pre-X-Files David Duchovny. Definitely worth it. :)
Geezus, I'd think that /. boys wouldn't hang out with such weak/stupid females. I saw it with a group of about 10 friends, mostly women, and we all loved it. Maybe you guys should date women with a freaking sense of humor.
IMO, this was the movie that Quentin Tarantino WISH he'd made. Fantastic soundtrack, too(any movie with Massive Attack gets points with me).
Brad Pitt's accent wasn't THAT impenetrable. Hell, I've gotten in taxis in London driven by guys with thicker accents than that.
Last I checked, AOL *only* 'peers' at MAE East, and refuses to private-peer with anyone, with the possible exception of Exodus. So I doubt they'd wanna play ball with UUNet anyway. As the previous posters have pointed out, there's LOTS of players in the backbone game, and more every day. What I don't see happening is everyone tearing up the pay-for-packets peering ( correct term is transit) agreements they've already signed with other big backbone companies (including UUNet.) After all, writing a check to a company every month usually comes with an actionable SLA, and people kinda of like being able to call up the other provider's NOC whenever they want, because they're treated like a CUSTOMER in most cases. Besides, in most BGP configurations, private peerings or customer routers are given higher precedence (local pref), and no one wants to give that up, either.
For anyone not bored by this story already, the Seattle Times has this update. The monolith will get an official home at Magnuson Park, at least until 'kite season' begins in March. It's good (as a Seattle resident) to see the Parks Dept being reasonable about it and legitimizing the work rather than just getting rid of it because it wasn't commisioned.
I'm not sure I'd trust SFGate to report anything accurately about Seattle, but that 'average' salary figure they quote of $129,330 is based on PAPER wealth from dotcom stock options. That meant next to nothing when they took that poll, and even less now, given market conditions. Yeah, it's certainly true that in parts of Bellevue and Redmond you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some Microsoft Millionaire looking for a way to spend money, usually in the most tacky and earth-polluting way possible (hello, fully-loaded SUV!), but they're definitely in the minority. (and I'd bet that their net worth's been brought low of late, too.)
I hate to side with Microsoft in ANYTHING, but I personally know (as does just about everyone else in the Seattle area) current and former MSFT temps who make considerably more per hour than their 'permanent' colleagues, and can change groups pretty easily. In fact, most of them wouldnt go permanent if they were asked, because they don't want to take a pay cut. The fact is, these people are all adults who knew what they were signing up for. Did their contract paperwork say "contract-to-hire"? Not bloody likely.
These folks need to realize that you don't get something for nothing. Take some responsibility and that extra hourly wage, and sign up for personal health insurance. There's a great organization here in Seattle called Group Health Cooperative (www.ghc.org), which provides relatively cheap and easily accessible health care, at convenient locations.
As a former temp at Cisco (back in '95), who had no health insurance and also made less than the regular employees, I can tell you that MSFT's not the only place who gets away with this.
As a former resident of "Silicon Valley" (what *is* the zipcode of this mythical city?), and current resident of Seattle, I'm baffled as to what this admittedly colder-than-usual winter we're having in the Northwest has to do with the survival of PG&E half-assed infrastructure. Most of the major cities up here (including Seattle) have their own independent power supplied by the various salmon-chewing dams on the Snake and Columbia Rivers. Since when is PG&E using hydro from the PNW? I can see NoCal folks getting uppity about the power drain that is El Lay, but give me a break in pointing your fingers northward.