It's not about dominating one market. It's about options being available, AND people actually making use of the options.
I'm sure I could write a mission critical application using the Atari 2600, thereby making sure that someone doesn't "dominate" the market. Whether or not anyone will actually use it.....
Rushing a port of this thing out is exactly the wrong thing to do. Having a buggy piece of software available will delight few, and alienate most. You want to be best to market, not first to market.
ConsumerReports.org. Charges something like $2.50 for every month that I use the service, plus an annual fee.
But, most sites try to do it via advertising. And even if I do micropay, I still have to see those damned banner ads. And once I micropay, then they can more easily track me and my habits. If some site like NYTimes would ditch banner ads for paying subscribers, I'd sign up in a flash (even though it's currently free).
Every time a new magazine shows up in the mail, the first thing I do is go through it and rip out all the blow cards and mailin cards. After that, I read the magazine.
Um, if you'd actually had kids, you'd realise that the point of Legos is to give small kids (the type who'd promptly eat all those little nuts and bolts) something that takes some motor skills, but not that many motor skills. It's one step up from building blocks. After Legos, you progress to Tinker Toys, then to Meccanos (called "Erector Sets" in the States).
The failure of the British Rail System is political in nature. Let's not shift the failings of politicians off onto engineers, and let's not get any more of that "you younger generations are causing the decline of civilisation" nonsense. The younger set didn't invent nukes, spread herpes and aids, or listen to Bryan Ferry.
That way, more people would read it, and that way there'd be a large drop in the RC5 and OGR rates on Tuesday with everyone madly uninstalling their DNet clients from all the machines they've installed it on at work.
I'm betting that the RC5 rate drops noticably this week.
You'll have to search for it (I can't get to http://www.545studios.com) but they used to make a lot of really cool, small utils. PixelTransformer was Windows based, but free. 545 Studios also churned out a lot of skins for different programs.
Here's part of my scanlogd output, on my SuSE Linux box, when I did some package updating:
May 15 07:12:33 boxen scanlogd: 192.168.1.90 to 202.58.118.12 ports 4385, 4391, 4397, 4409, 4413, 4424, 4425,..., ??rp?uxy, TOS 00, TTL 64 @07:12:17
May 29 06:28:05 boxen scanlogd: 192.168.1.90 to 202.58.118.12 ports 1510, 1514, 1520, 1523, 1525, 1527, 1532,..., ??rp?uxy, TOS 00, TTL 64 @06:27:56
Jun 3 22:07:02 boxen scanlogd: 192.168.1.90 to 202.58.118.12 ports 1741, 1743, 1745, 1747, 1748, 1750, 1752,..., ??rp?uxy, TOS 00, TTL 64 @22:06:52
Jun 10 14:54:39 boxen scanlogd: 192.168.1.90 to 202.58.118.12 ports 3226, 3228, 3230, 3233, 3237, 3242, 3244,..., ??rp?uxy, TOS 00, TTL 64 @14:54:30
202.58.118.12 is ftp2.suse.com -- but if I'm dumb, I won't know why an FTP session went through that many ports. Post something big on your website, at the very top, saying something like "click here if you think this box is attacking you."
But, face it. People are getting downright racist about packets. Any unknown packet is a bad packet, and it's just there to do something evil, and unimaginably bad.
10% of my time was budgeted specifically for the purpose of staying abreast of change. That meant reading, classes, and just monkeying around with new technology.
I'm now a consultant, so I can't really bill the clients for keeping current. However, the company I consult for does provide for money and some time (not nearly 10% per year) for classes and education. It was supposed to be a dollar amount for college classes, but they've realized that sending someone to a 5 day java or Cisco class often has a faster, more specific pay-off than taking an Ada refresher.
Having said all that, I do bill the clients for the time they expect me to spend learning a new technology, and that's reasonable. I'll bet there are existing programs at your company that involve education (be it finishing an MBA, refreshers, adult education, and business seminars). If only the programmers aren't getting training (which a business seminar is) then you can present a good case to your boss. Just make sure it's not "you get to, so why can't I?" If they feel that more highly trained people will instead flee to higher-paying jobs, point out that it's a problem with all jobs (talent = money), and that you don't think most employee retention issues are a matter of money. (When I've thought seriously of quitting, it was never about money or benefits. It was about abusive treatment by managers and/or people of higher rank.)
Point is, this whole thing is changing. [begin manage speak] Everything you learn and everything you know saves your company money. You need to make sure that the benefits of that knowledge and of those skills provides greater monetary gain for the company than the expense of gaining that knowledge and those skills [end manage speak].
If Ashcroft really wants to make a difference, he should go after political graft and corruption in a city such as Chicago (and the non-Chicago parts of Illinois are begging for an honest prosecutor from the Feds to clean Chicago up).
The only thing that this latest effort is going to result in is some smaller pornsites having to shell out big bucks for legal bills. After much money is spent, 3-5 people will have some smears on their records, and the Feds will have spent millions. Perhaps 2-3 people will actually spend time in jail.
It's just a registry dump from my computer from this morning. I really need to automate it.
Anyway, that's my list. Would love to compare.
Installed it, and got the OSDN bug on this article
on
Web Bug Detector
·
· Score: 4
In the realm of cosmic irony, I installed the web bug tracker, then went into this full article, and promptly got the OSDN web bug.
If you're among the folks like me that have to use IE, use that Restricted Sites setting under the security tab (and while you're in there, crank that restricted zone up to disallow derned near everything). Also set your browser to warn you when you get cookies. Add entire that want to set cookies to your restricted zone. None of the muss and fuss of an ad filter (which breaks everything when I have to VPN to the office).
For the first couple of weeks, you'll be adding a few sites per week. I also added to mine the list someone posted of the sites that track users the most. I don't get cookies now, unless I'm actually shopping online.:-) If someone wants a copy of the list, I could find a home for it.
For those not willing to click, rumour out of Apple is that Jobs has fired several people for riding the elevator with him. There's more to it than that. The MacWorld.com link is probably best (in the search results).
Leaders, as in, the people who have followers, aren't boring people, so I guess I should amend my statements. (Where's the edit function on old comments here?). Leaders rant a bit, they are quirky, they get in trouble, they make mistakes, they say things they shouldn't have, and on and on. But they're usually pretty interesting, and entertaining, to pay attention to.
No one wants to follow a boring person. Charisma is optional (mcnealy).
We're all excitement junkies, and we seek out interesting people to be with.
Let's take a look around at the other big companies. Oracle has an egomaniac for a CEO. Apple, yeah, ditto for their CEO (or whaver Jobs' title is these days), whom it's apparently not safe to be with in an elevator.
The companies that have the biggest following of loyalist fans also have these sort of banana-republic dictator personalities running the company. In order to gain new territory, you sometimes have to rally the troops (employees) and your allies (investors) by making bold, outrageous statements. Usually it's limited to something like, "we're going to make a lot of money this year," or "our new product is The Next Big Thing."
CEO's are really politicians. And like everyone in power, they know a little secret: the masses don't want to hear the truth. People enjoy being lied to, and deluded, and misled. There's so much evil, selfishness, and contempt in the world that the masses don't want to hear it. An investor doesn't want to hear that another stock they own is going to tank. They want to hear that their stocks have all gone bullish. Customers don't want to know that they've purchased another mediocre product. They want to beleive that it will actually work as advertised, and cure the common cold.
Repeat after me. It's propoganda. It's not the truth.
Linux shifts the economy from product-based to service based (since the product is free + your time). IBM sells services, and they like Linux. Microsoft sells products, and feels their bottom line is being threatened. They have a right to make a product, and people have a right to buy, or not to buy, their product.
This is a plain theft-of-identity case. They used your name, engaged in public activity that made you look bad, and it's going to cost you time and money to clean it up. (Start keeping a diary of when you work on something, and how long.) Also start contacting ISP's. Yours is a great first stop. Have them pull logs and such, and archive them. That's part of the proof that you did nothing.
Civil suit is fastest, as the Police in some parts of the country are either "duh" or "we're understaffed." Jourisdiction is another one. Civil suits have a wonderful way of cutting across boundaries.
Yeah, you'll spend a coupla grand on a lawyer, but I'll pledge $100 for your lawyer fund, right now.
Now that I see your responses to other posts here, I don't think you have need for much of what I'm pitching. ISPs have decidedly different needs than businesses.
I think the first step is to break your systems up a bit. A small-ish Linux box accepts deliveries from the world, and filters incoming (which can even be two boxes, with the second box doing virus filtering). Another small-ish Linux box makes outgoing deliveries. One mega-server is your IMAP server, and handles POP, and actually has the mail files on it. Another server is the web interface, and does all the CGI stuff, and makes the IMAP connections back to your mail server.
I think the real solution here is to break up your tasks. Handling everything on one box is troublesome. If it's multiple boxes, you can actually swap something out for maintenance if you need to.
It has all that, and more. Server runs on Linux, AS/400, S/390, AIX, OS/2, Sun Solaris, NT/2000, and HP-UX. Supports POP, IMAP, HTTP access, and also Notes native client (port 1352) if you're running a Mac or a PC with a Bill Gates OS (and even plagued Outlook will connect). It can be administered from the PC client, the web, or even from a command console (telnet/ssh). Includes clustering (amongst different OS's, even), failover, load balancing, transaction logging.....
Also nicely throws calendaring and scheduling into the ring, along with WebSphere unified login, and you can synch your PDA with it.
I think this is a blatant attempt to get the social restrictions on one area to apply to other areas. More simply, the "godless" regions of the U.S. (usually referred to as "California") would be forced to be as conservative and religious as, say, Knoxville, Tennessee (which tried to convict the cast and crew of the XXX movie "Deep Throat" on the assumption that the film was onboard a plane as it flew over Knoxville, thus violating local community standards. If you don't beleive me, search the web.).
Because there is such a strong, frequent mention of "local community standards" and of "States' Rights", I find that this law is flawed. Both LCS and SR have been used in the past to justify slavery, segregation, polygamy, gambling, prohibition, and to try to thwart such things as womens' suffrage. In the recent past it has been used to defend the removal of Darwin from the Kansas classroom, to keep flying the confederate flag over southern states, and to make a national election completely vulnerable to the whims and the manipulations of local political hacks (both Illinois and Florida). Still think local community standards and State's Rights is a good thing?
One of the founding principles of America is Self-Interest, "Rightly Understood." Each person has rights, but those rights end where another individual's rights begin. Local communities have the right to be as wild or as conservative as they wish, but they have no right to enforce their standards upon individuals who are not a part of that community.
One group enforcing their will upon another is exactly why most people fled to America.
And note that I've managed to completely ignore whether this involves pornography, murder, election laws, speed limits, or anything else. If you remove one part of the principle, you make it easier to remove the entire principle.
It's a waste byproduct if you can't sell it. Or get it to market.
That's the short version. The longer version is that natural gas in North America comes primarily from Canada, and from the United states. Very little of it is ever shipped by boat from one country to another. Natural gas is expensive to ship, it requires cryogenic/high pressure storage, special ships, and on and on (but they're trying to increase safety and lower expense all the time). The cost of shipping natural gas is quite low by pipeline, and higher for petroleum and oil because you must heat the oil so that it's thin enough to be pumpable. The lowest grade crude oil is thicker than peanut butter.
If all of the Alaska Wildlife Refuge were tapped and drilled, it would produce a maximum of something like 600,000 barrels of oil per day, starting in about 8-10 years. The current global oil production is around 75,000,000 barrels per day, with the U.S. sucking about 15-20,000,000 of that down. For a good reference to read on this topic, see here. Overall, because the U.S. hasn't modernized at the same pace as Europe, we consume roughly 25% more energy to perform the same tasks (both at home and in industry). If we had modernized over the past years at the same rate Europe did, we would currently have a 10-20% energy surplus, compared to what we consume right now. And we wouldn't have to build a single power line, power plant, or drill a single well to get it. Energy companies would have to invest no new money in risky exploration and development. They would earn more, and their stockholders would achieve higher returns. There is no long term downside to conservation. In the short term, energy sales goes down. Lower sales drives process efficiences, and the companies learn to make more money on less effort.
Back to natural gas. Because of the specialized equipment required in shipping natural gas, and the expense of moving it long distances, almost no one will buy it who's not living on that continent. That means that NG in Saudi Arabia doesn't get sold to the U.S. If there is no market, it is not transported. If it is not transported or sold, then there is no reason to store it locally, as that is another expense. Thus it is burned onsite as a waste product.
It's a fact of doing any task. What you consider waste product might not be considered waste if someone else had a use for it. Very few people these days have use for the bones and hides of the animals they consume (or even see the bones and hides).
The short truth is that it will take years, even at a frantic war-time pace, to develop the oil that's under the Alaska's wildlife refuges. There's the surveying, getting equipment there, infrastructure, finding laborers, moving the prodcut -- it all takes time.
Conservation, on the other hand, can have an effect right now. Rolling blackouts are a form of forced conservation. Much less drastic measures are tax breaks/incentives, and new taxes on consumption to affect behaviour. While that sounds evil, it's already done quite a bit. Taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, gasoline, furs and diamonds, expensive cars, SUV's (low miles-per-gallon tax), airport gate taxes.... The list goes on. If President Bush had made an impassioned plea to the people of California to conserve, and to set their air conditioning three degrees warmer, and so on, there would have been an overnight change. America conserved all it could during World War II, because it needed to. It needs to again, and the enemy is ourselves.
If it's a new house, meaning you haven't broken ground yet and you're still talking to the architect, then you can make the energy savings work. If it's an existing house, then there's quickly diminishing returns.
The Canadians experimented years ago with super-insulated houses located up on Hudson Bay. When I say superinsulated, I mean four-foot thick insulated walls with foot-thick panels that closed over windows at night. It wound up being that the body heat from the occupants almost heated the house. If you cooked, even in the dead of winter, you had to open a window. Some of the solar heating panels were disconnected because it actually overheated the house. If you insulated a Florida or Arizona house that much, you could keep it nice and cold inside. (Insulation doesn't just keep heat in.)
If it's solar power you want, well, that kinda works. You can live off it, but it takes a lifestyle change, and some rewiring. No distributed.net cracking for you, and you'll need to get rid of all those appliances (microwave, stove, VCR) that use power when they're not on (those little clocks and indicator lights add up). The Chicago Tribune ran an article a few months ago about apartment dwellers, in urban Chicago, who had gone solar. It can be done, it costs money, and a lifestyle change is mandatory. No blow-drying your hair, no clothes dryer, no electric oven.
Wind works pretty well, depending upon where you live, and depending upon zoning laws (neighbors may not want one looming over everything). There's some concern that wind power kills birds, but since they tend to place those flailing blades in prime bird habitat (open grassy fields), then it may not be a causal relationship. All the old windmills and wind-powered water pumps don't kill birds, so someone needs to get a big grant and do more research. It might be habitat/proximity, and it might be blade design. Maybe noisier blades would help.
What alternative energy for an existing home does do is cut down peak use, and perhaps spin your meter backwards sometimes. There's tax breaks for alternative energy sources, but basically be prepared to write the whole expense of installation off, and consider it paying off Mom Nature's bills. Figure $10-20k to get anything significant going. You'll need a big bank of batteries to store that peak power to consume during off times (like nighttime), or just spin the meter backwards and sell it to the local utility.
If you're lucky enough to have a running stream nearby, there are companies that sell mini-hydro devices. It's not a small dam, but just a small turbine that a head of water spins.
Contrary to Bush's pathetic energy plan, the real solution is (in order), Lifestyle change, convervation, and consumption limiters (insulation, efficiency changes [better appliances]). Drilling for Alaskan oil won't create one watt of power for California since California doesn't have any commerical power plants that use Petrol as a power source. They may augment power generation with these things, but it's not really what you build a power plant from.
I went from sysadmining for a university to being an industry consultant. (The 3x pay increase was nice.) The U job was OK, but the abuse by grad students who wanted me to make their 486 run like a Pentium/print porn on the color printer/(un)install whatever they wanted, and especially by faculty who considered themselves gods, and considered me their personal whipping boy, "stop by my house, my computer won't run my daughters educational games..." Well, I was ready to move to a new job.
I was very lucky to get placed at a client site that's been almost perfect. I only had one major page, which was when a helpful unix admin decided to "fix" the permissions on a production server. That was an interesting 14 hours of work, after spending six hours on the cell phone (trying to tell someone how to execute unix commands) while I was trying to get back to the client site.
After that, I went back to programming, and doing systems architecture work. I don't get paged, I get to be as creative as I can be, I get to play with the new stuff, and I get called in to help figure out the big, strange problems. I don't carry a pager, and I never get called at home. I'm going on 2 weeks vacation next month, and I'll actually be left totally alone.
The security job that another poster suggested is OK, so long as you're not supposed to be the prosecutor, too. Having a job where you bring employees into a meeting to scold them for doing something wrong is best left to the HR people, and not to the computer security people. Nothing sucks more than a user with an attitude, and who wants revenge.
Main point is, switch companies. Some companies want as many firemen as they can hire, since they seem hell-bent to give all the users matches and gasoline to play with. Other companies fireproof everything, and actually send the users to fireman school.
Geez, there, A.C., go back and re-read my post. It was heavily anti-piracy. My agenda, plain and simple, is anti-pay-per-view.
As for CNET testing things (got a link? Their search engine turns up nil), I've tested it, too. Soundblaster Live, with the 5.1 surround, and Cambridge Soundworks speakers. Played the 300-something rate against the CD, and alternately muted. There were audible differences, and the audio spectrum thing I had showed diff's, too. Not double-blind, but enough that I could hear it, but not enough that I care. MPEG is lossy compression, so it's going to lose information no matter what the bitrate is. It shows in DVDs (rarely), it shows on digital cable, and you can hear it.
And, even if MP3 is a digital format, it's not a perfect digital copy. I'll call it the generic version of a prescription consumer good.
Considering the number of brilliant programmers out there (me being at the pathetic end of programmers), I'm betting someone can figure out how to design a game that prevents see-through walls from working. It might take more CPU load, or increase latency, but I'm betting it can be done.
Until then, who cares. Don't take it personally. Not everyone can be a quake god, and some can't be one even if they cheat.
First, most of the music that is distributed over the internet (music wise), is MP3 files, which are not perfect digital copies of the original. They are highly compressed, high-loss, low-quality versions of the original. In short, they are sort of an analog copy of the digital original.
Second, pirates do not, will never, need to break encryption to create pirate copies. Pirates get copies of originals (that's from inside the industry), be it film negative, multi-track studio tapes, or whatever, and make their copies from that. That is exactly how songs and films appear in public before they have even reached, or gone beyond, their debut.
Third, a pirate just needs the same mastering equipment that the studio owns. And a factory to churn out those copies.
Fourth, the digital nature of things has not changed the laws. The laws about copyright are stronger now than they ever have been, and somehow that's not enough. I beleive that the ultimate goal is pay-per-view, with the retention of ownership and all rights in perpetuity, which may go against the U.S. Constitution, but certainly seeks to reverse a few Supreme Court rulings.
Fifth (and finally), if there is piracy, pass new laws to increase the number of police officers. Pass new laws to stiffen existing penalties. We have a legal system. The legislative branch creates law, the executive branch enforces the law, and the judicial branch does political favors to their appointers. Be that as it is, this is a problem of enforcement of existing laws, not the lack of laws.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about dominating one market. It's about options being available, AND people actually making use of the options.
I'm sure I could write a mission critical application using the Atari 2600, thereby making sure that someone doesn't "dominate" the market. Whether or not anyone will actually use it.....
Rushing a port of this thing out is exactly the wrong thing to do. Having a buggy piece of software available will delight few, and alienate most. You want to be best to market, not first to market.
Who knew that skirts that short could trip women up sooo easily? You'd think long dresses would trip women up more.
ConsumerReports.org. Charges something like $2.50 for every month that I use the service, plus an annual fee.
But, most sites try to do it via advertising. And even if I do micropay, I still have to see those damned banner ads. And once I micropay, then they can more easily track me and my habits. If some site like NYTimes would ditch banner ads for paying subscribers, I'd sign up in a flash (even though it's currently free).
Every time a new magazine shows up in the mail, the first thing I do is go through it and rip out all the blow cards and mailin cards. After that, I read the magazine.
Um, if you'd actually had kids, you'd realise that the point of Legos is to give small kids (the type who'd promptly eat all those little nuts and bolts) something that takes some motor skills, but not that many motor skills. It's one step up from building blocks. After Legos, you progress to Tinker Toys, then to Meccanos (called "Erector Sets" in the States).
The failure of the British Rail System is political in nature. Let's not shift the failings of politicians off onto engineers, and let's not get any more of that "you younger generations are causing the decline of civilisation" nonsense. The younger set didn't invent nukes, spread herpes and aids, or listen to Bryan Ferry.
That way, more people would read it, and that way there'd be a large drop in the RC5 and OGR rates on Tuesday with everyone madly uninstalling their DNet clients from all the machines they've installed it on at work.
I'm betting that the RC5 rate drops noticably this week.
You'll have to search for it (I can't get to http://www.545studios.com) but they used to make a lot of really cool, small utils. PixelTransformer was Windows based, but free. 545 Studios also churned out a lot of skins for different programs.
Here's part of my scanlogd output, on my SuSE Linux box, when I did some package updating:
May 15 07:12:33 boxen scanlogd: 192.168.1.90 to 202.58.118.12 ports 4385, 4391, 4397, 4409, 4413, 4424, 4425,May 29 06:28:05 boxen scanlogd: 192.168.1.90 to 202.58.118.12 ports 1510, 1514, 1520, 1523, 1525, 1527, 1532,
Jun 3 22:07:02 boxen scanlogd: 192.168.1.90 to 202.58.118.12 ports 1741, 1743, 1745, 1747, 1748, 1750, 1752,
Jun 10 14:54:39 boxen scanlogd: 192.168.1.90 to 202.58.118.12 ports 3226, 3228, 3230, 3233, 3237, 3242, 3244,
202.58.118.12 is ftp2.suse.com -- but if I'm dumb, I won't know why an FTP session went through that many ports. Post something big on your website, at the very top, saying something like "click here if you think this box is attacking you."
But, face it. People are getting downright racist about packets. Any unknown packet is a bad packet, and it's just there to do something evil, and unimaginably bad.
Yes, I do work for a company that contracts me out.
But thanks for giving the rest of us a heads-up. Geez, the tax code is complex.
10% of my time was budgeted specifically for the purpose of staying abreast of change. That meant reading, classes, and just monkeying around with new technology.
I'm now a consultant, so I can't really bill the clients for keeping current. However, the company I consult for does provide for money and some time (not nearly 10% per year) for classes and education. It was supposed to be a dollar amount for college classes, but they've realized that sending someone to a 5 day java or Cisco class often has a faster, more specific pay-off than taking an Ada refresher.
Having said all that, I do bill the clients for the time they expect me to spend learning a new technology, and that's reasonable. I'll bet there are existing programs at your company that involve education (be it finishing an MBA, refreshers, adult education, and business seminars). If only the programmers aren't getting training (which a business seminar is) then you can present a good case to your boss. Just make sure it's not "you get to, so why can't I?" If they feel that more highly trained people will instead flee to higher-paying jobs, point out that it's a problem with all jobs (talent = money), and that you don't think most employee retention issues are a matter of money. (When I've thought seriously of quitting, it was never about money or benefits. It was about abusive treatment by managers and/or people of higher rank.)
Point is, this whole thing is changing. [begin manage speak] Everything you learn and everything you know saves your company money. You need to make sure that the benefits of that knowledge and of those skills provides greater monetary gain for the company than the expense of gaining that knowledge and those skills [end manage speak].
If Ashcroft really wants to make a difference, he should go after political graft and corruption in a city such as Chicago (and the non-Chicago parts of Illinois are begging for an honest prosecutor from the Feds to clean Chicago up).
The only thing that this latest effort is going to result in is some smaller pornsites having to shell out big bucks for legal bills. After much money is spent, 3-5 people will have some smears on their records, and the Feds will have spent millions. Perhaps 2-3 people will actually spend time in jail.
http://ideageek.com/security/iecookies
It's just a registry dump from my computer from this morning. I really need to automate it.
Anyway, that's my list. Would love to compare.
In the realm of cosmic irony, I installed the web bug tracker, then went into this full article, and promptly got the OSDN web bug.
:-) If someone wants a copy of the list, I could find a home for it.
If you're among the folks like me that have to use IE, use that Restricted Sites setting under the security tab (and while you're in there, crank that restricted zone up to disallow derned near everything). Also set your browser to warn you when you get cookies. Add entire that want to set cookies to your restricted zone. None of the muss and fuss of an ad filter (which breaks everything when I have to VPN to the office).
For the first couple of weeks, you'll be adding a few sites per week. I also added to mine the list someone posted of the sites that track users the most. I don't get cookies now, unless I'm actually shopping online.
Google search for Steve Jobs and elevator
For those not willing to click, rumour out of Apple is that Jobs has fired several people for riding the elevator with him. There's more to it than that. The MacWorld.com link is probably best (in the search results).
Leaders, as in, the people who have followers, aren't boring people, so I guess I should amend my statements. (Where's the edit function on old comments here?). Leaders rant a bit, they are quirky, they get in trouble, they make mistakes, they say things they shouldn't have, and on and on. But they're usually pretty interesting, and entertaining, to pay attention to.
No one wants to follow a boring person. Charisma is optional (mcnealy).
We're all excitement junkies, and we seek out interesting people to be with.
Let's take a look around at the other big companies. Oracle has an egomaniac for a CEO. Apple, yeah, ditto for their CEO (or whaver Jobs' title is these days), whom it's apparently not safe to be with in an elevator.
The companies that have the biggest following of loyalist fans also have these sort of banana-republic dictator personalities running the company. In order to gain new territory, you sometimes have to rally the troops (employees) and your allies (investors) by making bold, outrageous statements. Usually it's limited to something like, "we're going to make a lot of money this year," or "our new product is The Next Big Thing."
CEO's are really politicians. And like everyone in power, they know a little secret: the masses don't want to hear the truth. People enjoy being lied to, and deluded, and misled. There's so much evil, selfishness, and contempt in the world that the masses don't want to hear it. An investor doesn't want to hear that another stock they own is going to tank. They want to hear that their stocks have all gone bullish. Customers don't want to know that they've purchased another mediocre product. They want to beleive that it will actually work as advertised, and cure the common cold.
Repeat after me. It's propoganda. It's not the truth.
Linux shifts the economy from product-based to service based (since the product is free + your time). IBM sells services, and they like Linux. Microsoft sells products, and feels their bottom line is being threatened. They have a right to make a product, and people have a right to buy, or not to buy, their product.
This is a plain theft-of-identity case. They used your name, engaged in public activity that made you look bad, and it's going to cost you time and money to clean it up. (Start keeping a diary of when you work on something, and how long.) Also start contacting ISP's. Yours is a great first stop. Have them pull logs and such, and archive them. That's part of the proof that you did nothing.
Civil suit is fastest, as the Police in some parts of the country are either "duh" or "we're understaffed." Jourisdiction is another one. Civil suits have a wonderful way of cutting across boundaries.
Yeah, you'll spend a coupla grand on a lawyer, but I'll pledge $100 for your lawyer fund, right now.
Now that I see your responses to other posts here, I don't think you have need for much of what I'm pitching. ISPs have decidedly different needs than businesses.
I think the first step is to break your systems up a bit. A small-ish Linux box accepts deliveries from the world, and filters incoming (which can even be two boxes, with the second box doing virus filtering). Another small-ish Linux box makes outgoing deliveries. One mega-server is your IMAP server, and handles POP, and actually has the mail files on it. Another server is the web interface, and does all the CGI stuff, and makes the IMAP connections back to your mail server.
I think the real solution here is to break up your tasks. Handling everything on one box is troublesome. If it's multiple boxes, you can actually swap something out for maintenance if you need to.
Lotus Domino Server (aka, "Lotus Notes").
http://www.lotus.com/domino
It has all that, and more. Server runs on Linux, AS/400, S/390, AIX, OS/2, Sun Solaris, NT/2000, and HP-UX. Supports POP, IMAP, HTTP access, and also Notes native client (port 1352) if you're running a Mac or a PC with a Bill Gates OS (and even plagued Outlook will connect). It can be administered from the PC client, the web, or even from a command console (telnet/ssh). Includes clustering (amongst different OS's, even), failover, load balancing, transaction logging.....
Also nicely throws calendaring and scheduling into the ring, along with WebSphere unified login, and you can synch your PDA with it.
I think this is a blatant attempt to get the social restrictions on one area to apply to other areas. More simply, the "godless" regions of the U.S. (usually referred to as "California") would be forced to be as conservative and religious as, say, Knoxville, Tennessee (which tried to convict the cast and crew of the XXX movie "Deep Throat" on the assumption that the film was onboard a plane as it flew over Knoxville, thus violating local community standards. If you don't beleive me, search the web.).
Because there is such a strong, frequent mention of "local community standards" and of "States' Rights", I find that this law is flawed. Both LCS and SR have been used in the past to justify slavery, segregation, polygamy, gambling, prohibition, and to try to thwart such things as womens' suffrage. In the recent past it has been used to defend the removal of Darwin from the Kansas classroom, to keep flying the confederate flag over southern states, and to make a national election completely vulnerable to the whims and the manipulations of local political hacks (both Illinois and Florida). Still think local community standards and State's Rights is a good thing?
One of the founding principles of America is Self-Interest, "Rightly Understood." Each person has rights, but those rights end where another individual's rights begin. Local communities have the right to be as wild or as conservative as they wish, but they have no right to enforce their standards upon individuals who are not a part of that community.
One group enforcing their will upon another is exactly why most people fled to America.
And note that I've managed to completely ignore whether this involves pornography, murder, election laws, speed limits, or anything else. If you remove one part of the principle, you make it easier to remove the entire principle.
It's a waste byproduct if you can't sell it. Or get it to market.
That's the short version. The longer version is that natural gas in North America comes primarily from Canada, and from the United states. Very little of it is ever shipped by boat from one country to another. Natural gas is expensive to ship, it requires cryogenic/high pressure storage, special ships, and on and on (but they're trying to increase safety and lower expense all the time). The cost of shipping natural gas is quite low by pipeline, and higher for petroleum and oil because you must heat the oil so that it's thin enough to be pumpable. The lowest grade crude oil is thicker than peanut butter.
If all of the Alaska Wildlife Refuge were tapped and drilled, it would produce a maximum of something like 600,000 barrels of oil per day, starting in about 8-10 years. The current global oil production is around 75,000,000 barrels per day, with the U.S. sucking about 15-20,000,000 of that down. For a good reference to read on this topic, see here. Overall, because the U.S. hasn't modernized at the same pace as Europe, we consume roughly 25% more energy to perform the same tasks (both at home and in industry). If we had modernized over the past years at the same rate Europe did, we would currently have a 10-20% energy surplus, compared to what we consume right now. And we wouldn't have to build a single power line, power plant, or drill a single well to get it. Energy companies would have to invest no new money in risky exploration and development. They would earn more, and their stockholders would achieve higher returns. There is no long term downside to conservation. In the short term, energy sales goes down. Lower sales drives process efficiences, and the companies learn to make more money on less effort.
Back to natural gas. Because of the specialized equipment required in shipping natural gas, and the expense of moving it long distances, almost no one will buy it who's not living on that continent. That means that NG in Saudi Arabia doesn't get sold to the U.S. If there is no market, it is not transported. If it is not transported or sold, then there is no reason to store it locally, as that is another expense. Thus it is burned onsite as a waste product.
It's a fact of doing any task. What you consider waste product might not be considered waste if someone else had a use for it. Very few people these days have use for the bones and hides of the animals they consume (or even see the bones and hides).
The short truth is that it will take years, even at a frantic war-time pace, to develop the oil that's under the Alaska's wildlife refuges. There's the surveying, getting equipment there, infrastructure, finding laborers, moving the prodcut -- it all takes time.
Conservation, on the other hand, can have an effect right now. Rolling blackouts are a form of forced conservation. Much less drastic measures are tax breaks/incentives, and new taxes on consumption to affect behaviour. While that sounds evil, it's already done quite a bit. Taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, gasoline, furs and diamonds, expensive cars, SUV's (low miles-per-gallon tax), airport gate taxes.... The list goes on. If President Bush had made an impassioned plea to the people of California to conserve, and to set their air conditioning three degrees warmer, and so on, there would have been an overnight change. America conserved all it could during World War II, because it needed to. It needs to again, and the enemy is ourselves.
If it's a new house, meaning you haven't broken ground yet and you're still talking to the architect, then you can make the energy savings work. If it's an existing house, then there's quickly diminishing returns.
The Canadians experimented years ago with super-insulated houses located up on Hudson Bay. When I say superinsulated, I mean four-foot thick insulated walls with foot-thick panels that closed over windows at night. It wound up being that the body heat from the occupants almost heated the house. If you cooked, even in the dead of winter, you had to open a window. Some of the solar heating panels were disconnected because it actually overheated the house. If you insulated a Florida or Arizona house that much, you could keep it nice and cold inside. (Insulation doesn't just keep heat in.)
If it's solar power you want, well, that kinda works. You can live off it, but it takes a lifestyle change, and some rewiring. No distributed.net cracking for you, and you'll need to get rid of all those appliances (microwave, stove, VCR) that use power when they're not on (those little clocks and indicator lights add up). The Chicago Tribune ran an article a few months ago about apartment dwellers, in urban Chicago, who had gone solar. It can be done, it costs money, and a lifestyle change is mandatory. No blow-drying your hair, no clothes dryer, no electric oven.
Wind works pretty well, depending upon where you live, and depending upon zoning laws (neighbors may not want one looming over everything). There's some concern that wind power kills birds, but since they tend to place those flailing blades in prime bird habitat (open grassy fields), then it may not be a causal relationship. All the old windmills and wind-powered water pumps don't kill birds, so someone needs to get a big grant and do more research. It might be habitat/proximity, and it might be blade design. Maybe noisier blades would help.
What alternative energy for an existing home does do is cut down peak use, and perhaps spin your meter backwards sometimes. There's tax breaks for alternative energy sources, but basically be prepared to write the whole expense of installation off, and consider it paying off Mom Nature's bills. Figure $10-20k to get anything significant going. You'll need a big bank of batteries to store that peak power to consume during off times (like nighttime), or just spin the meter backwards and sell it to the local utility.
If you're lucky enough to have a running stream nearby, there are companies that sell mini-hydro devices. It's not a small dam, but just a small turbine that a head of water spins.
Try http://www.homepower.com as a great starting point.
Contrary to Bush's pathetic energy plan, the real solution is (in order), Lifestyle change, convervation, and consumption limiters (insulation, efficiency changes [better appliances]). Drilling for Alaskan oil won't create one watt of power for California since California doesn't have any commerical power plants that use Petrol as a power source. They may augment power generation with these things, but it's not really what you build a power plant from.
I went from sysadmining for a university to being an industry consultant. (The 3x pay increase was nice.) The U job was OK, but the abuse by grad students who wanted me to make their 486 run like a Pentium/print porn on the color printer/(un)install whatever they wanted, and especially by faculty who considered themselves gods, and considered me their personal whipping boy, "stop by my house, my computer won't run my daughters educational games..." Well, I was ready to move to a new job.
I was very lucky to get placed at a client site that's been almost perfect. I only had one major page, which was when a helpful unix admin decided to "fix" the permissions on a production server. That was an interesting 14 hours of work, after spending six hours on the cell phone (trying to tell someone how to execute unix commands) while I was trying to get back to the client site.
After that, I went back to programming, and doing systems architecture work. I don't get paged, I get to be as creative as I can be, I get to play with the new stuff, and I get called in to help figure out the big, strange problems. I don't carry a pager, and I never get called at home. I'm going on 2 weeks vacation next month, and I'll actually be left totally alone.
The security job that another poster suggested is OK, so long as you're not supposed to be the prosecutor, too. Having a job where you bring employees into a meeting to scold them for doing something wrong is best left to the HR people, and not to the computer security people. Nothing sucks more than a user with an attitude, and who wants revenge.
Main point is, switch companies. Some companies want as many firemen as they can hire, since they seem hell-bent to give all the users matches and gasoline to play with. Other companies fireproof everything, and actually send the users to fireman school.
Geez, there, A.C., go back and re-read my post. It was heavily anti-piracy. My agenda, plain and simple, is anti-pay-per-view.
As for CNET testing things (got a link? Their search engine turns up nil), I've tested it, too. Soundblaster Live, with the 5.1 surround, and Cambridge Soundworks speakers. Played the 300-something rate against the CD, and alternately muted. There were audible differences, and the audio spectrum thing I had showed diff's, too. Not double-blind, but enough that I could hear it, but not enough that I care. MPEG is lossy compression, so it's going to lose information no matter what the bitrate is. It shows in DVDs (rarely), it shows on digital cable, and you can hear it.
And, even if MP3 is a digital format, it's not a perfect digital copy. I'll call it the generic version of a prescription consumer good.
Considering the number of brilliant programmers out there (me being at the pathetic end of programmers), I'm betting someone can figure out how to design a game that prevents see-through walls from working. It might take more CPU load, or increase latency, but I'm betting it can be done.
Until then, who cares. Don't take it personally. Not everyone can be a quake god, and some can't be one even if they cheat.
First, most of the music that is distributed over the internet (music wise), is MP3 files, which are not perfect digital copies of the original. They are highly compressed, high-loss, low-quality versions of the original. In short, they are sort of an analog copy of the digital original.
Second, pirates do not, will never, need to break encryption to create pirate copies. Pirates get copies of originals (that's from inside the industry), be it film negative, multi-track studio tapes, or whatever, and make their copies from that. That is exactly how songs and films appear in public before they have even reached, or gone beyond, their debut.
Third, a pirate just needs the same mastering equipment that the studio owns. And a factory to churn out those copies.
Fourth, the digital nature of things has not changed the laws. The laws about copyright are stronger now than they ever have been, and somehow that's not enough. I beleive that the ultimate goal is pay-per-view, with the retention of ownership and all rights in perpetuity, which may go against the U.S. Constitution, but certainly seeks to reverse a few Supreme Court rulings.
Fifth (and finally), if there is piracy, pass new laws to increase the number of police officers. Pass new laws to stiffen existing penalties. We have a legal system. The legislative branch creates law, the executive branch enforces the law, and the judicial branch does political favors to their appointers. Be that as it is, this is a problem of enforcement of existing laws, not the lack of laws.