If each developer had their own server (albeit, in their own worksation), they could offload processes to it (have it compile while you're busy fragging), or just use it as a server to test things on. You could also give novice admins their own server to learn with.
The main thing is, the marketroids have already figured out who the audience is, and have figured out they can make money. It's up to us to come up with new/novel uses. Like, an overly expensive MP3 player for your car.
I use a palm pilot (one of the old Pilots, before there were 1000's and 5000's) combined with a GoType keyboard. Small, fits in my bag, runs off AAA size batteries. Sync it up to my computer, and I've got searchable notes.
'Course I can type pretty fast, so that helps. If you're a keyboard poke-er, then this might be slower.
I mean, it's an unpaid bill. You then basically turn the whole thing over to a collection agency. Tell the agency they get half. The ISP then gets some money for its troubles, and someone else gets to be the pit bull. I mean, they already do that with some of the unpaid or underpaid bills.
I'm serious. I've run into a situation several times before when pay phones wouldn't accept calls. Best example was near Butte, Montana, when I had car problems, and had to phone a friend. I gave them the pay phone number, and they said they'd call me back (they were coming to help). After an hour, I called back, collect (having blown all my quarters calling them), only to be told they had been trying and trying. They finally called the phone company, who matter-of-factly said, "yeah, none of our payphones accept incoming calls."
So, yeah, most pay phones accept incoming phone calls, but a few don't. Thankfully, I can afford a cell phone, and I now live in an area with cell service.
Disparaging comments about Milwaukee aside, they have the oldest, best, most complete GIS system for any city,/in the world/.
http://www.gis.ci.mil.wi.us/
And what's GIS? Geographic Information Systems. In really overly-simplified terms, it's like a computer-aided drawing system (CAD) linked to a relational database. http://www.esri.com is the largest vendor of this sort of stuff.
Anyway, the City of Milwaukee has used this system for urban forestry management, crime analysis, poverty analysis, slum analysis, and a whooole lotta other things. If you ain't got a GIS system involved in your process (meaning you're dealing with spatial information -- information that has a specific location in space), then you're seriously not approaching things correctly.
You don't need to put it all in one database. That's the whole point of a relational database. Doing that allows you to compartmentalize things.
And compartmentalizing is what you'll have to do. I'm sure the parents will be up in arms if they knew you were posting how many kids, of what age, lived in which houses. Likewise, if you're posting phone numbers that are unlisted, or names differing from how people have chosen to list them in the phone directory, then you'll hit problems.
The strange thing is, you really need to talk with a lawyer that works for the same group you do. They'll be able to tell you what's legal, and what isn't. If you can't find a lawyer, then start talking to judges (who'll either answer, or refer you to someone they think well of).
Having said all that, I'll now take a step back. WHY do you need all this information? How will fine-grained information help? What reports will you generate based upon this data? How much will collecting, filtering, correcting, updating, maintaining, hosting, backing up, and searching this information cost? If you make a business case, meaning, it's gonna cost $X to do this, then the management folks may back down, or change their plans.
Big, meaty trackball. Natural shape. It's like resting your hand on a tennis ball. Some wrist support thrown in. No wrist fatigue.
It also rocks for games, since you can spin that thing every which way. There's no running out of mouse area. Four buttons, so you can program them to do extra things in games.
I have one email address on my ISP's POP box, and another on my own mail server hooked to my DSL line. If I want to send mail, then using my ISP's SMTP server works great.
However, when my wife wants to use her email (at a university), then mail sent via my ISP's SMTP server is rejected. Why? Because they're doing really, really strict addressing rules. If it's not from ******@verizon.net (Verizon being my DSL ISP), then it gets rejected. So, thankfully, Verizon isn't [yet] blocking port 25, 'cause then my mail server would be worthless -- and my wife wouldn't be able to reply to any emails she receives.
Yeah, she could use the reply-to (which is what I do so I can use my @acm.org address), but that'd mean folks would often reply to the wrong address, or CC the wrong address, and that I'd have to pay Verizon for another email address.
As for @Home, I know around here that they scan for FTP, HTTP, and SMTP servers -- so you can't argue that it's an anti-spam campaign. Someone has decided that those are "commercial" activities, and that you thus must pay the extra $75/month (or whatever) for that priviledge.
Without the ability to run your own servers, then @Home (and others) are essentially putting pay phones in our houses. We pay for outgoing calls, but we are unable to receive telephone calls.
(And if that last part seems like a mystery to some folks, most of the pay phones I've seen won't accept incoming calls.)
The real thing @Home and other ISP's ought to do is put a simple clause in the contract. If you cause a problem, then @Home gets to bill you for the expense of causing that problem. If you send out a million spam messages, then @Home gets to bill you for all the effort it took to deal with that problem. Most ISPs just cancel your account. That's not a deterrent.
Warn the good folks there that you're going to bail -- then do it. Make sure you get their email addresses, and tell them that you'd like to keep them in mind when you land your next job.
Loyalty is a good thing. It's part of who you are. It's part of a strong code of ethics. And sine it's part of the ethics, you know when unethical behaviour by management (sinking the company) perfectly justifies ethical behaviour by you (e.g., bailing, and now!).
Since you put Marketing's "informational" message in quotes -- you, me, that park bench, and everyone else, ASIDE FROM MARKETING, realize that it wasn't informational at all. Marketing, however, sees it all as a message that the customer needs to see.
What's the goal of the message? To notify of a product recall? To announce a sale? To offer customers 20% off the next purchase? Building brand identity? Announcing a new VP of sales? Some of those are messages I/might/ welcome, and others are dubious, self-masturbatory marketing practices. As an example of companies that engage in masturbatory and mindless marketing spam to their customers, look no further than Verizon or Register.com -- both of whom have spammed me in the past 10 hours.
Here's an approach I'm recommended to my current customer site, for the purpose of spamming internal folks only. The marketing folks who will be spamming non-employees didn't like my pitch.
1. Accept that many folks view unsolicited email as a rude interruption, and a few of those will want to carve bombs out of pine cones, and mail them to the company. It's/their/ email, not yours.
2. If someone opts out, then they have opted out for life. Do not contact them unless your product will kill them. (Hear that, Verizon!)
3. Include a URL in the message to refer everyone back to. That URL is customized per-recipient, and you use that to control what they want to see. On all future mailings, if they want to unsubscribe, or change what sorts of mailings they get, you can then include it as a standard header and footer in your email.
4. If they don't click the URL, don't email them again for at least 6 months, but preferably not for a year. Once a year is plenty. We renew our magazine subscriptions annually, so this is kinda the same.
5. Replies to your spam go to a real, live person, whose sole job it is to protrate themselves before irate folks, and to assist them.
Finally, and this is the bix 6, MAKE SURE YOUR EMAIL HAS CONTENT. If it's just self-promotion, brand-awareness, or any other hyphenated-activity, then save the company some money and the hassle, and the customer the interruption, and don't @#!! send it. If the words "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE" are any where on it, then it's not content. If the information will not make the customer happier, healthier, wealthier, or more productive, then it's not content.
To do it any other way is to treat your customers the same way passengers are treated by airlines.
I have to use Win98, NT 4, and Win 2000 daily, and Real always crashes if you close the application rather than taking the time to poke the Stop button first. About half the time it'll force a reboot in Win98.
It's a flaming piece of shit. The folks at Real need to stop throwing newer versions out, and put some error checking into the existing versions. The whole thing feels like it's still in early beta testing.
I shoulda known someone much better than I'll ever be would read that, and post.
Thanks for the correction. I don't want to mislead people. Guess I shoulda checked the hardware compatibility list for the components, and not just the CPU.
I figure if a bunch of us throw in a bit of money, Slashdot could join this exclusive club, and then we'd get access to the reports on all the unpublished, undiscovered holes and bugs that the marketroids are hiding from us.
Yeah, I didn't say it'd be cheap. But if they're going to do this, you may as well pay someone who's got engineers who fantasize about data striping and mirroring.
Folks like EMC make their living selling, servicing, upgrading, and guaranteeing uptime for big systems like this.
Put the word out that you need a some RAID, and a service contract to go with it. Start talking with other folks who have similar sized solutions, and see who their vendor is.
No matter how they want to spin it, none of these methods are copy protection or anti-piracy. Macrovision is anti-piracy. An encoded, and easily decoded system is meant for PAY PER VIEW.
Once these systems are out there, everywhere, THEN THEY WILL CHARGE YOU FOR EVERY SINGLE @#!! THING YOU WATCH.
Channel surfing, and accidentally view 1 second of the progam? They'll bill you.
If this were copy protection, then there would be stiffer fines, longer jail sentences, and some way of enforcing it on foreign soil. Since none of these are a part of copy protection, then it MUST be aimed at the consumer.
...things like the phone book, a dictionary, and a bible, but no one ever comments on those books being there.
Since I'm betting at least two of those would be found in the homes of most criminals, we should put all of those on the list of subversive literature, and promptly jail anyone who has more than one in their posession.
or can equal a monopoly. In this case, Uncle Sam has given nearly exclusive access to a group of people, who all use software that is controlled by that same group. The users will all be directed to media and content provided by the same group.
You're telling me that someone like, oh, MSNBC or the BBC, could get equal startup page area on AOL's home page?
Being a monopoly is not just about being first, or the biggest, or having the most customers. However, the FTC and FCC did just give exclusive drilling rights (bad metaphor) to 10% of the population of this country, to one group.
A monopoly exists in any of the following three cases:
1. you have exclusive control
2. you have a majority control (51%)
3. you can adversely affect the market, e.g., overrule the "invisible hand"
The FTC just gave T/W-AOL permission to do number 3, and AOL already has situation #1 over its users.
Like the FCC has opposed any merger. I'll bet the fund managers for the FCC secretly snap up stock every time one of these mergers gets proposed, and just before each merger is approved.
No matter how you spell it, it's still "M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y".
Complain to your upstream provider (the folks that provide that OC3 to your house), or better yet, complain to whomever provides network connectivity to that registrar. Also complain to your registrar about the other company's predatory practices.
You might try registering a complaint with ICANN, but I think they'd think this sort of activity isn't annoying enough.
We're a long distance from understanding most of it. So until it's understood, completely, then the bioengineers ought to do us all a favor and slow down.
I count "modern" bioengineers efforts to be no more scientific than the efforts of alchemists. More technology is involved, but there is still the innate lack of understanding about the overall complexity of the problem.
Simpler experimentation is the answer. As in, if I toggle the 2**12 amino in this DNA chain from G to A, what happens? I think engaging in any experimentation where genocide, even if it is of mice, is a possible outcome, is a violation of any ethical code. Once the virus is in the wild, _why_ won't it mutate and infect other animals? Mad cow disease started off in sheep. HIV might've started in monkeys. Malaria takes 3 different hosts for its cycle. Some bioengineered corn has pollen fatal to monarch butterflies.
The whole bio thing is so far beyond modern scientific understanding that they need to stop the random experimentation, and go back to traditional, slow, foundation-building experimentation. Just because it worked in the lab doesn't mean it'll work in the real world, and doesn't mean that things won't mutate in the long term.
Everything around us is the result of eons of slow mutation and interaction. To suddenly introduce an organism to the wild that hasn't had a few hundred year debugging period is psychotic at best.
...all this "delivery by virus" stuff isn't as exacting as the biologists want us to beleive it is. You throw a message in a bottle into the sea of humanity, and hope it's only read by the correct recipients.
These guys should start fiddling with computer models more, and with live tissue less, before one of them picks his nose, gets contaminated, goes home, and kills us all.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have named one after the RIAA. That's a /real/ dinosaur.
oh, and fp.
If each developer had their own server (albeit, in their own worksation), they could offload processes to it (have it compile while you're busy fragging), or just use it as a server to test things on. You could also give novice admins their own server to learn with.
The main thing is, the marketroids have already figured out who the audience is, and have figured out they can make money. It's up to us to come up with new/novel uses. Like, an overly expensive MP3 player for your car.
I use a palm pilot (one of the old Pilots, before there were 1000's and 5000's) combined with a GoType keyboard. Small, fits in my bag, runs off AAA size batteries. Sync it up to my computer, and I've got searchable notes.
'Course I can type pretty fast, so that helps. If you're a keyboard poke-er, then this might be slower.
I mean, it's an unpaid bill. You then basically turn the whole thing over to a collection agency. Tell the agency they get half. The ISP then gets some money for its troubles, and someone else gets to be the pit bull. I mean, they already do that with some of the unpaid or underpaid bills.
I'm serious. I've run into a situation several times before when pay phones wouldn't accept calls. Best example was near Butte, Montana, when I had car problems, and had to phone a friend. I gave them the pay phone number, and they said they'd call me back (they were coming to help). After an hour, I called back, collect (having blown all my quarters calling them), only to be told they had been trying and trying. They finally called the phone company, who matter-of-factly said, "yeah, none of our payphones accept incoming calls."
So, yeah, most pay phones accept incoming phone calls, but a few don't. Thankfully, I can afford a cell phone, and I now live in an area with cell service.
Disparaging comments about Milwaukee aside, they have the oldest, best, most complete GIS system for any city, /in the world/.
http://www.gis.ci.mil.wi.us/
And what's GIS? Geographic Information Systems. In really overly-simplified terms, it's like a computer-aided drawing system (CAD) linked to a relational database. http://www.esri.com is the largest vendor of this sort of stuff.
Anyway, the City of Milwaukee has used this system for urban forestry management, crime analysis, poverty analysis, slum analysis, and a whooole lotta other things. If you ain't got a GIS system involved in your process (meaning you're dealing with spatial information -- information that has a specific location in space), then you're seriously not approaching things correctly.
You don't need to put it all in one database. That's the whole point of a relational database. Doing that allows you to compartmentalize things.
And compartmentalizing is what you'll have to do. I'm sure the parents will be up in arms if they knew you were posting how many kids, of what age, lived in which houses. Likewise, if you're posting phone numbers that are unlisted, or names differing from how people have chosen to list them in the phone directory, then you'll hit problems.
The strange thing is, you really need to talk with a lawyer that works for the same group you do. They'll be able to tell you what's legal, and what isn't. If you can't find a lawyer, then start talking to judges (who'll either answer, or refer you to someone they think well of).
Having said all that, I'll now take a step back. WHY do you need all this information? How will fine-grained information help? What reports will you generate based upon this data? How much will collecting, filtering, correcting, updating, maintaining, hosting, backing up, and searching this information cost? If you make a business case, meaning, it's gonna cost $X to do this, then the management folks may back down, or change their plans.
Big, meaty trackball. Natural shape. It's like resting your hand on a tennis ball. Some wrist support thrown in. No wrist fatigue.
It also rocks for games, since you can spin that thing every which way. There's no running out of mouse area. Four buttons, so you can program them to do extra things in games.
I have one email address on my ISP's POP box, and another on my own mail server hooked to my DSL line. If I want to send mail, then using my ISP's SMTP server works great.
However, when my wife wants to use her email (at a university), then mail sent via my ISP's SMTP server is rejected. Why? Because they're doing really, really strict addressing rules. If it's not from ******@verizon.net (Verizon being my DSL ISP), then it gets rejected. So, thankfully, Verizon isn't [yet] blocking port 25, 'cause then my mail server would be worthless -- and my wife wouldn't be able to reply to any emails she receives.
Yeah, she could use the reply-to (which is what I do so I can use my @acm.org address), but that'd mean folks would often reply to the wrong address, or CC the wrong address, and that I'd have to pay Verizon for another email address.
As for @Home, I know around here that they scan for FTP, HTTP, and SMTP servers -- so you can't argue that it's an anti-spam campaign. Someone has decided that those are "commercial" activities, and that you thus must pay the extra $75/month (or whatever) for that priviledge.
Without the ability to run your own servers, then @Home (and others) are essentially putting pay phones in our houses. We pay for outgoing calls, but we are unable to receive telephone calls.
(And if that last part seems like a mystery to some folks, most of the pay phones I've seen won't accept incoming calls.)
The real thing @Home and other ISP's ought to do is put a simple clause in the contract. If you cause a problem, then @Home gets to bill you for the expense of causing that problem. If you send out a million spam messages, then @Home gets to bill you for all the effort it took to deal with that problem. Most ISPs just cancel your account. That's not a deterrent.
you gave me a good laugh!
Warn the good folks there that you're going to bail -- then do it. Make sure you get their email addresses, and tell them that you'd like to keep them in mind when you land your next job.
Loyalty is a good thing. It's part of who you are. It's part of a strong code of ethics. And sine it's part of the ethics, you know when unethical behaviour by management (sinking the company) perfectly justifies ethical behaviour by you (e.g., bailing, and now!).
Since you put Marketing's "informational" message in quotes -- you, me, that park bench, and everyone else, ASIDE FROM MARKETING, realize that it wasn't informational at all. Marketing, however, sees it all as a message that the customer needs to see.
/might/ welcome, and others are dubious, self-masturbatory marketing practices. As an example of companies that engage in masturbatory and mindless marketing spam to their customers, look no further than Verizon or Register.com -- both of whom have spammed me in the past 10 hours.
/their/ email, not yours.
What's the goal of the message? To notify of a product recall? To announce a sale? To offer customers 20% off the next purchase? Building brand identity? Announcing a new VP of sales? Some of those are messages I
Here's an approach I'm recommended to my current customer site, for the purpose of spamming internal folks only. The marketing folks who will be spamming non-employees didn't like my pitch.
1. Accept that many folks view unsolicited email as a rude interruption, and a few of those will want to carve bombs out of pine cones, and mail them to the company. It's
2. If someone opts out, then they have opted out for life. Do not contact them unless your product will kill them. (Hear that, Verizon!)
3. Include a URL in the message to refer everyone back to. That URL is customized per-recipient, and you use that to control what they want to see. On all future mailings, if they want to unsubscribe, or change what sorts of mailings they get, you can then include it as a standard header and footer in your email.
4. If they don't click the URL, don't email them again for at least 6 months, but preferably not for a year. Once a year is plenty. We renew our magazine subscriptions annually, so this is kinda the same.
5. Replies to your spam go to a real, live person, whose sole job it is to protrate themselves before irate folks, and to assist them.
Finally, and this is the bix 6, MAKE SURE YOUR EMAIL HAS CONTENT. If it's just self-promotion, brand-awareness, or any other hyphenated-activity, then save the company some money and the hassle, and the customer the interruption, and don't @#!! send it. If the words "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE" are any where on it, then it's not content. If the information will not make the customer happier, healthier, wealthier, or more productive, then it's not content.
To do it any other way is to treat your customers the same way passengers are treated by airlines.
I have to use Win98, NT 4, and Win 2000 daily, and Real always crashes if you close the application rather than taking the time to poke the Stop button first. About half the time it'll force a reboot in Win98.
It's a flaming piece of shit. The folks at Real need to stop throwing newer versions out, and put some error checking into the existing versions. The whole thing feels like it's still in early beta testing.
I shoulda known someone much better than I'll ever be would read that, and post.
Thanks for the correction. I don't want to mislead people. Guess I shoulda checked the hardware compatibility list for the components, and not just the CPU.
mea culpa.
http://www.ultralinux.org/ for starters, but you can bag it from SuSE: http://www.suse.com
I figure if a bunch of us throw in a bit of money, Slashdot could join this exclusive club, and then we'd get access to the reports on all the unpublished, undiscovered holes and bugs that the marketroids are hiding from us.
So, I pledge $5/year for this endeavour.
Yeah, I didn't say it'd be cheap. But if they're going to do this, you may as well pay someone who's got engineers who fantasize about data striping and mirroring.
Folks like EMC make their living selling, servicing, upgrading, and guaranteeing uptime for big systems like this.
Put the word out that you need a some RAID, and a service contract to go with it. Start talking with other folks who have similar sized solutions, and see who their vendor is.
No matter how they want to spin it, none of these methods are copy protection or anti-piracy. Macrovision is anti-piracy. An encoded, and easily decoded system is meant for PAY PER VIEW.
Once these systems are out there, everywhere, THEN THEY WILL CHARGE YOU FOR EVERY SINGLE @#!! THING YOU WATCH.
Channel surfing, and accidentally view 1 second of the progam? They'll bill you.
If this were copy protection, then there would be stiffer fines, longer jail sentences, and some way of enforcing it on foreign soil. Since none of these are a part of copy protection, then it MUST be aimed at the consumer.
...things like the phone book, a dictionary, and a bible, but no one ever comments on those books being there.
Since I'm betting at least two of those would be found in the homes of most criminals, we should put all of those on the list of subversive literature, and promptly jail anyone who has more than one in their posession.
or can equal a monopoly. In this case, Uncle Sam has given nearly exclusive access to a group of people, who all use software that is controlled by that same group. The users will all be directed to media and content provided by the same group.
You're telling me that someone like, oh, MSNBC or the BBC, could get equal startup page area on AOL's home page?
Being a monopoly is not just about being first, or the biggest, or having the most customers. However, the FTC and FCC did just give exclusive drilling rights (bad metaphor) to 10% of the population of this country, to one group.
A monopoly exists in any of the following three cases:
1. you have exclusive control
2. you have a majority control (51%)
3. you can adversely affect the market, e.g., overrule the "invisible hand"
The FTC just gave T/W-AOL permission to do number 3, and AOL already has situation #1 over its users.
Like the FCC has opposed any merger. I'll bet the fund managers for the FCC secretly snap up stock every time one of these mergers gets proposed, and just before each merger is approved.
No matter how you spell it, it's still "M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y".
Complain to your upstream provider (the folks that provide that OC3 to your house), or better yet, complain to whomever provides network connectivity to that registrar. Also complain to your registrar about the other company's predatory practices.
You might try registering a complaint with ICANN, but I think they'd think this sort of activity isn't annoying enough.
We're a long distance from understanding most of it. So until it's understood, completely, then the bioengineers ought to do us all a favor and slow down.
I count "modern" bioengineers efforts to be no more scientific than the efforts of alchemists. More technology is involved, but there is still the innate lack of understanding about the overall complexity of the problem.
Simpler experimentation is the answer. As in, if I toggle the 2**12 amino in this DNA chain from G to A, what happens? I think engaging in any experimentation where genocide, even if it is of mice, is a possible outcome, is a violation of any ethical code. Once the virus is in the wild, _why_ won't it mutate and infect other animals? Mad cow disease started off in sheep. HIV might've started in monkeys. Malaria takes 3 different hosts for its cycle. Some bioengineered corn has pollen fatal to monarch butterflies.
The whole bio thing is so far beyond modern scientific understanding that they need to stop the random experimentation, and go back to traditional, slow, foundation-building experimentation. Just because it worked in the lab doesn't mean it'll work in the real world, and doesn't mean that things won't mutate in the long term.
Everything around us is the result of eons of slow mutation and interaction. To suddenly introduce an organism to the wild that hasn't had a few hundred year debugging period is psychotic at best.
...all this "delivery by virus" stuff isn't as exacting as the biologists want us to beleive it is. You throw a message in a bottle into the sea of humanity, and hope it's only read by the correct recipients.
These guys should start fiddling with computer models more, and with live tissue less, before one of them picks his nose, gets contaminated, goes home, and kills us all.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be argumentative. I was pontificating for the benefit of the tin-eared masses. :-)
apologies to you
-5 to my karma