Disclaimer: I just got my Faradic account today, and in fact, I'm soaking in it.
As for your comments about them, I have to say that 30 MB is actually pretty good, and 0.25/meg is standard. (1 GB / user is insane imo, btw.) I went searching for a new ISP over the weekend and I have to say most of what I found was very poor. I saw rates as high as $1/meg for extra space, most accounts had only 10-15 MB, and almost never a shell account. Some didn't even have a true 24/7 plan, some had max connection times, etc. Yech.
I also have a FlexNet account. Cheapest vhost you can get that I know of. I don't even use the dialup access that comes with it, which is probably the bulk of their market. (Though I have had trying experiences with their technician/owner, which worked themselves out)
I used to work for an ISP that offered shell accounts. I won't mention who, because a) they don't want to sell shell accounts (or dialup for that matter) anymore, and b) they laid me off on Friday. But I can tell you that they had very good rates, and Faradic's beats theirs.
Only problem is that I had to wait three days for the account to be phone-verified and activated. Sigh, so much for realtime, but at least its here. (I suspect that it is a one-person operation or not much larger. I know FlexNet is. [Fine with me.]) But *all* Faradic accounts have shells -- its default.
FWIW, a friend used to run a basement ISP that offered cheap shell accounts (he still might, mail me for info), and advertised that he would offer component colocation; i.e. you could send him a disk drive and that would be your quota. So, you could go get yourself a ##GB disk and send it to him to mount. Unfortunately I don't know if he ever actually got that service in place.
Oh, and when I saw Faradic's special IRC charges, I was amused. Its a great idea. Unfortunately I doubt it helps Faradic's standing with EFnet ircops.
-- Keith "She sells C shells at the Shore.Net" Tyler
A member of a StarCraft clan was dealt a search warrant and is under investigation for 'tampering.' This is not a free speech suppression case. It's not a hate case.
Sounds a bit naive, no? Do you expect that if someone in this country is trying to suppress speech with the aid of police force, that they charge you with "undesirable expression of speech"?
But regardless of whether this case involves the First Amendment or not, this and many, many other stories leave the same questions open. Did the incident require the involvement of police? Did it require confiscation of equipment -- even equipment that has nothing to do with the network -- and the "related articles" (in billn's story), whatever those were?
Apparently not, because the actions they were initially going to take involved just a meeting with their RD and someone from ResNet or the academic IT. Something tells me that in the process of planning this meeting, someone in IT or ResLife called Campus Security to ask a quick question, and Campus Security decided to bust it open and take over. (Note that they haven't even let IT look at the box, and I really doubt that campus security has better computer experts than IT.) Apparently busting "hackers" makes college rentacops (remember, these departments are usually staffed with people who couldnt even get jobs as transit cops) look good.
I had my own share of geek-profiling in college, so I can't say that the bias isn't there. I hear even at MIT they are cracking down on undesired expression and other innocent tomfoolery by their brightest.
And I also know that what holds for the people who work for college police also holds for those who work for college IT: they tend to suck at it. I wouldn't be surprised if they left a no-password login as the default on their main server; hell, at my college, plenty of administrators' desktops were wide open on the campus network -- as in 'I can mount that drive, and if i hit delete, it will work.' (Hmm -- so thats how much the new building is going to cost!) And in my last job, we routinely got reports of 'hacking attempts' because someone running a jumpy network filter would catch someone pinging them.
As for BfD, one wonders why the hell they would want to post their own clan site on a server theyre not supposed to have access to. I dont suppose that the campus cops have thought about that -- at this point, with this press, they need to bring this guy 'down' to look good, regardless of how much it fscks this kid over.
I can't get the Stater's story (site is down?) so I can't argue the merits of the offical version (undoubtedly written by a green journalism student with an AOL-based knowledge of computers, if that). But billn, for his assurance that he knows the true motives behind this blip in the campus police log, doesn't have much to say about any of this in his rebuttal. It reads objectively enough, but to assume that what the campus cops say (or even what academic IT says) is necessarily the truth is an icy footing.
-- Keith "I used to be a journalism student too, but then i wised up" Tyler
The DAK catalog sold laser turntables about... 10 years ago? Not this quality either.
Hell, the display on that thing reminds me of my grandfather's Epson printer.
I'm also surprised at the lack of innovation in turntables, but I'm sure there isn't a big market for them. Only long-time audiophiles collect vinyl, and most people don't see the point in a high-end record player.
However, it strikes me as strange that Technics manages to hold such a monopoly on the DJ market, both for music entertainment and for hip-hop mixing/scratching. The brand name has become synonymous with "turntable" in those fields; I don't even think they have a competitor in that area. It's possible I guess that they've nailed the best possible design, but I find it hard to believe.
This is a great idea, socially and historically, but I hope they expand to other articles of clothing. My circa 1996 Yahoo! cap (contest runner up, baby!:) ) would probably go well there, not to mention a gaggle of nice polos and rugbys.
Anyway, Internet History is a good thing, and I love to see it collected and displayed.
I work for an once major ISP in the Northeast which was recently purchased by a large multinational. Here, we developed an internal solution, thanks to our in-house development department.
I should preface this by saying that I don't know if what I'm about to describe is patented. If not, it probably could be, and chances are the new parent company will patent it if they hear me. But have little fear; the parent company is not, by any reports, the sort that even knows about Slashdot.
Essentially the system runs out of Sybase (though could presumably run out of any other SQL db). The interface is a very nice (in terms of feature set) GUI which unfortunately is only for Windows (even though we are a Sun house; this is probably because its hard to find billing workers who are Unix savvy).
Anyway, the GUI is used to make any sort of changes to the account base. The data for any given account is arranged in multi-field windows, you can open individual services in an account to tweak them, search for an account by service name or account number, yadda yadda. The neat thing is that every time a change is made, a sequence of tasks (defined in the database for type of account and type of change) is initiated (by stored procedures), and these tasks connect to each of our production machines (as needed), which all run an internally developed server daemon. This daemon handles requests and parameters to run one or more Perl scripts (or whatever) which reside on those machines, to set up/modify/delete the service on the system.
The other beauty of having an internally developed billing system is that we were able to easily integrate this system with our Web site, and this has allowed us to provide instant online signup for certain services, as well as an online account manager for customers to tweak their accounts and services. And since the task system is a client-server model, you could easily adapt this for any server platform (in fact, I think we already have, for the NT hosting services we offer).
When the parent company was starting to figure out what they wanted to do with their new toy (i.e. us), they were going to go and buy a $30,000 billing system that I think ran in VB and didn't interface with anything (we would have probably ended up using both that and our internal system in the best case scenario). The development team (whose value was in question for some strange reason) then piped up and decided that a few suits needed an immersion course in our billing system. Needless to say they decided not to dump $30,000 into some hackneyed third pary solution.
Of course, most ISPs probably don't want to invest in a development department, but we were special in that we were founded by a computer programmer. For years (prior to the "merger") our company name was just a D/B/A for his tiny software company. He decided in '94 that the Internet was the future, and soon found himself running a rather successful independent regional ISP instead.
Most people are going to tell you to live where they do b/c that is where they are comfortable living...
Except, mostly, urban Americans. (like me.)
Personally I have considered moving to Canada many times. Cheaper standard of living, more space, more leftist society (and govt.), less warlike... Only bad thing I can think of is lower temperatures, but I can deal with that.
All that suggests is that we tend to slow things down wiin the absence any control. Which may explain why we have more procrastinators then hyperkinetics.
Heck, take a typical, unattached, advanced/expert programmer, tell him he doesn't have to come in at 8 o'clock every day anymore, and watch his personal schedule loosen waaay up.
I think you nailed the operative factor in your experiment description: give him "plenty of stuff to amuse himself with". That's why his "day" drags on -- the desire to extend play time. I'd theorize you could get a reverse effect if you changed the experiment such that he had an endless pipeline of generally unenjoyable goals to complete (to do, say, before sleeping, etc.) and I bet his behavioral period (en macro) would shrink up pretty good.
I am answering a bunch of questions that have been scored by someone as to how interesting they are. I am a bit concerned that this rating system tacitly implies the score is part of my response to their question, which kinda disturbs me.
Was the moderation system not at least briefly explained to him? He seems offended most that 1. one or a few god-like person(s) chose the scores, when in fact they are rather populistically derived, and 2. that we would assume the scores to be his even though nearly any reader knows what they mean.
Seems to me he would have been much less concerned if someone had told him how it works.
(Actually, his fear probably stems from experiences with shoddy fanboy pop-culture zines and/or repressively corporate cool-defining websites, and it's a smidge offensive to me that he would think Slashdot falls in the same category as either of those.)
Slide rules are still manufactured, and although they don't know it, probably every journalism student has used one. Except in that field, the device is called a "photo wheel."
I recall in my early college days taking a class in which the photo wheel was used. All students had to buy one (available in the arts section of the student store, and normally made of cardboard or plastic). The professor spent the better part of a three hour class repeatedly explaining how to use it, prefacing each time with "It's a little complicated, but you get the hang of it." This scene was remarkably disturbing for me (as was the computer-aided design & layout class), because it took me less time to do the necessary math in my head in less time than it took these media lackeys to do it with a tool specifically designed for the problem. (Which of course is why I soon changed majors.)
But I guess it just wouldn't do to have a scientific calculator in the newsroom. Though it would certainly help demonstrably in the accuracy department.
Well, it seems to me that they are going to have to upgrade/replace those anyway, when the measly 200 new area codes (from the 10-digit dialing idea) are exhausted after six months to a year, (seeing as weve gone through almost all the 800 new ones in less than six years, and the growth is better than linear) and they/we have to go to 11 digit dialing. So twelve months down the road, we all have to dial 11 digits all the time when it could be done now and we would only have to dial 8 digits for local calls for a good stretch longer. (Without annoying new area codes!)
I wonder where they will end up to adding the 11th digit anyway. Probably area codes. That wont be more annoying for people.
(Incidentally, I wonder if you can also tell me why they tend to keep exchanges in the same town close together numerically, but seem to put area codes in the same state as numerically far away as possible.)
However, any move to 11 or 12 digit phone numbers should be dialing the entire number,
See, there I don't agree either. IANAPT[*], but when they first proposed the current system of [2-9][0-9][0-9] for area codes (from the previous [2-9][2-9][0-9] system), I thought, why dont they increase the numbering system in a way the precludes a need for more area codes?
Initially the idea was go to 8-digit local dialing, and add a zero to the end of every number (which is a LOT easier than the current situation where practially everyone goes "What the hell area code is Grandma in now?").
A few years of evidence of the imbalance of urban expansion and suburban expansion shows this to be impractical, so the revised solution, is still go to 8 digit dialing, and add a 0 to the end of all existing exchanges. Practially anyone who has ever used a phone recognizes the significant relation of exchanges to localties. 599 is Lynn. 745 is Salem. 631 is Marblehead. Etc. etc. And when a locality starts to grow beyond the numbers it has within its exchanges, add a new exchange. (In the past ten years Lynn has gained 586 and 477, Marblehead gained 639, etc.) Moving exchanges to four digits then gives you scads of new exchanges
(9*10^3 to be exact) to throw around.
Fact is, people don't *like* new area codes. Its a pain for both callers and stations. Callers have to go through at least three months of dialing the wrong area code for a number they've dialed for years. And stations (businesses especially) have to go through the expense of changing stationery, signage, advertisements, etc. When Massachusetts decided to chop up 617, tossing the metro north area into a new area code, businesses balked, because they had done the presumably smart job of buying their stationery, etc. in bulk. The only market that benefited by the new area codes, besides phone companies, was printing shops. A sign on a storefront on Rte 1A just has a plastic shield over the 617 -- buying a whole new sign isn't worth it.
Granted, we can't avoid having to start having to change our dialing habits one wya or another, but it seems to me the changes that require the least amount of change, incompatibility problems, AND greatest increase in amount of numbers would be the sort of one to implement first.
Actually, the full DMTF spec calls for 16 tones, using a 4x4 keypad with A B C and D keys
Thats right! And I seem to remember that their original use (behind-the-scenes call routing) has been outdated.
I'm also pretty sure most modems can dial the ABCDs. Dunno about other equipment (like uh, phones).
But in any case, I wonder how much both the 7 digit system AND the NPA system would be increased by allowing ABCD into the numbering. Quick math says 10^7-2*10^6 is what we have now, under this we'd have 14^7-2*14^6. 10^7 is ten million; 14^7 is over 100 million. Even less 2*14^6 (~ 15 million), thats still a lot more than the measly 2*10^6 we would gain from being able to use 1 and 0 at the beginning of our exchanges and dialing ten numbers all the time.
I'm sure theres some reason that makes this *less* practical then the 10 digit dialing idea, but then again, its better than a tenfold increase over the latter.
Keith "and at 11 digits, they'll have to reinvent DNS for the phone system anyway" Tyler
...some of my friends are making about $1000-$1200/mo net... a dumpy apartment... will set you back at *least* 500$/mo... 100$/mo in heating costs, another 50$/mo in [electric]...
Sounds a lot like living in Boston! Where do I sign up?
(Mind you also that I was sharing a run-down 5BR Mission Hill apartment, which cut basic rent to a lucky $400. Cheapest apartment on Comm Ave [1BR] is $1050/mo!)
Keith "they better not start calling it Dot Comm Ave, either" Tyler
I remember wanting to do the exact same thing with my ThinkPad about a year or two ago (wow, that thing is that old???)
I did a fair amount of Google research and downloaded a few apps, none of which worked. I also did a Deja search, and learned that basically, with the exception of certain hardware (like HP Vectras I believe), PC IR ports are not suitable for emulating remote controls because the timing of the IR signals are very rigid, since your laptop's IR port is meant to function as a serial port, which has a certain (albeit selectable) frequency. OTOH remote controls can transmit at any frequency they want.
Initially I tried to perform the emulation in a poor-man's way: I set the IR port to act as COM2, then used Terminal (I think it was Terminal, pulled off an old WFW3.11 dist), and set Terminal to listen to COM2. Then I grabbed my RCA remote, set it right in front of the laptop IR port, and started hitting buttons.
Well, that made characters display in the Terminal window, so the laptop's port saw *something*, which was promising, But I also noticed that the characters displayed were not quite consistent. Which means to me, either there is IR interference coming from somewhere, or that the frequencies are out of sync just enough that I'm missing parts of the signal. Alas, I gave up after my attempts to copy the characters and paste them back into the COM2 terminal, with the IR port six inches from my VCR's LED window, caused nothing to happen.
I had much better success with some of the apps for the Palm; I have a Palm IIIe and I forget what the app was called but it was from a Japanese source. Unfortunately the range of the Palm's IR port is less than even that of my ThinkPad, and after all Palm's IR is only meant for ease of communication between two very mobile devices which are temporarily and willfully near each other (one benefit being, I guess, that the guy on the other end of the subway can't possibly hack your Palm). One (shareware) app I found did mention that the distributor built and sold IR booster devices which connected to the HotSync port and had its own AA power source, giving it a range similar to remote devices. Honestly I don't know why Palm's IR port is compatible with remote controls and laptops' aren't; perhaps either the Palm's port is more flexibly controllable, or the Palm uses the same IR technology as remote controls because it's cheaper.
As it is, the only use I can envision for the Palm's factory IR capabilities in remote control is to replace your VCRPlus+... which costs about a fifth as much as your Palm and is obsolete anyway.
Oh, and can we make a (beowulf) whole block of these?
You could definintely use one.... This is a great hack, but for any practical purpose (e.g. laser light shows at high end raves), have a pre-arranged game sequence around. Looking at the apparent refresh rate as viewed on the mpeg, most of these games would be difficult to play as half your playing-time is spent in darkness at one point or another. One imagines that as the screens get more "busy" that the refresh drops even more, making it impossible. Sorry, no Hackers arcade scene here, yet.
Now, if you got game source, and managed to tweak it so as to distribute the electron gun aim control among more than one laser, each with its own controlling cluster node, you might have better luck at making something thats visually playable.
Dont get me wrong, this is a fantastic visual stunt with great demonstration applications, but I think they'd better give up the Tempest-on-a-cloud idea.
(Although... mount this rig on a light helicopter on a calm day, and project Asteroids on a football field. That idea I like. Oh, and hook the rotation and thrust control up to a person in the middle of the field, holding another button to actuate the fire control. Now we're talking.)
...since Andover bought Slashdot, it has... become in the very real sense, a business entity. Since it is no longer a private endeavor... shouldn't Slashdot be held to the same standards as other 'news' agencies?
The argument there, as I grasp it, is that since Slashdot is now part of a business, it should be held accountable. And conversely, if it were not a business, it wouldn't have to be.
Explain to me: why wouldn't it? How does being part of a business change your responsibilities as a source of information? Is it okay, in the general (non-cynical) ethical sense, to be irresponsible with the information you spread if you are not owned by anyone? No. This sense of "we're a company now, we have to be ethical in our news" is only coming from a sense of corporate fear -- a sense of "we'll get fired if we're irresponsible and cause grief for the parent company" -- and has nothing to do with your actual responsibility to the reader -- which never changed.
In the two years that I've been reading Slashdot, even before it was bought by anyone, it has committed nearly every journalistic mistake a news outlet can make -- favoritism, sensationalism, inaccuracy, bias, even a few alleged cases of censorship. If being bought by Andover, and in turn by VA Linux, causes the staff to take their responsibilities more seriously, then great -- but in truth, being bought didnt change those responsibilities. It only hit the staffers on the head a bit harder.
Slashdot's responsibilities to present accurate and informative news (ignoring that they only really became a "news outlet" fairly recently) existed ever since the day they were quoted by another media source, and attracted a significant readership which began to rely on it for certain kinds of news. Just because the staffers have finally grown up enough, in that sense, to realize it, doesn't mean that those responsibilities have changed at all.
I use Corel Photopaint 8 for my Windows PC, and that doesn't have any perceptible loss.
Sure, for high quality JPEG, if you have to decompress and recompress, you wont see a noticeable loss, no matter what S/W you use.
But for a low quality JPEG, you'll have to recompress at a high quality rate in order to maintain the picture quality of the original with moderate safety.
If you have a low quality JPEG, which you want to rotate, and then maintain as a low quality JPEG, you're doomed.
Of course, this is all assuming your software will automatically re-compress on save, which is why the original question...
Sounds to me like this is something that could have been brought up, oh... about six years ago.
Look. If you come into the country on a six-year visa, you know when you get it that you're going back after six years.
When I get a one year subscription from Newsweek, I dont write them and complain after 13 months that they are now depriving me of some basic human right because one year of reading their magazine has turned it into an invaluable part of my life.
There is a generally acknowledged (or perhaps, generally alleged) shortage of programmers and other tech workers in the U.S.
Pah! So think nothing of leeching these workers away from other countries -- most of which are economically depressed to the point that they already have plenty of problems in trying to build an Internet infrastructure in order to keep up with a rapidly advancing first world.
It sounds to me like the six years of experience our H1Bs gained in the US is going to help their countries demonstrably when they go back -- which, I bet, was a big part of the original point:
The federal government is presently [trying to increase] the number of H1B workers... while simultaneously sending currently-employed workers home.
...which still supports that assertion. I mean, doesn't it make you think? Why would the government, citing a skilled labor shortage, not be lobbying for extension of the visas of existing H1Bs? Wouldn't that be a lot easier than trying to increase the current influx? It would certainly save the costs of sending the current ones back!
The point is the work visa program -- any work visa program -- is not solely for US benefit, so dont make it sound like it is. If some of them, they came here under a false hope that they would be given some sort of permanent tenure at the end of their six years, that's their own foolish fault.
Michael, as a presumed geek, you give the Web a remarkably short stick here.
There's a big difference between being able to put up a webpage which some students might see sometime and being able to publish something in a paper distributed in school.
How so? In fact, high school students today are beginning to outpace college students in their embracement of the Internet.
Think of it this way. You're a modern high school student. I don't care if you're a geek or a trendie. You're given a choice between: the four-page school paper that your boring teachers tell you to read, or the colorful web page that has all the stories they don't want you to read.
It doesn't take long, assuming quite reasonably that the web site is always in the same location, for students to know where to look to find the bits that wouldn't get put in the boring school paper (which is always plastered with articles saying how cool the bastard principal is).
In my high school, a story on teen pregnancy was kept out of the school paper. I went to a private school, which made things worse. Well, it didn't take more than a few dollars worth of nickels to have the objectionable story typed up and copied (luckily this was a small school). I dare say more people had held copies of that story in their hands than the corresponding issue of the school paper. And the fact that it hadn't been put in the school paper for unclear reasons made all the more reason for people to read it.
Plus I've seen plenty of students get "in trouble" at school for things done entirely on their own time.
Yes, well... as with geeks and computer companies, if no one bothers to legally challenge the abuses made against high school students, they are what the abusers want them to be. The whole idle victimization cry is getting a bit stale in both realms. If you assume something is legal (or illegal) simply because a high school principal says it is, then you deserve to live in a place like China. Shi* or get off the pot.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. This seminar you speak of gets zero credit from me if they did not mention Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier: http://www.splc.org/resources/high.school/hazelwoo d.html
and no, no lawyer would love to take your case unless he had lived his life in a sheltered suburban utopia before his years at Harvard Law, and had just got out.
College newspapers get more freedom, at least in past decisions, under the observation that free expression and though is essential to higher education. Additionally, it's been made mostly clear that high schools do not have control over student publications that are not funded by school money or other resources, i.e. underground or independent student publications. Such is the presumed case with these web sites.
In a capitalist economy, we have something more powerful than government: our dollars.
Until, of course, the only brand for sale is that of a solitary, large company.
Remember, in this democratic capitalist state of ours, monopolies are not de facto illegal.
Why do people think they need to government to protect them from companies?
Sean Kennedy made a great statement last night. He pointed out that governments are created to protect the weak from the abuses of the powerful. Such is the implication of "all men are created equal" that therefore all men (people) are to be afforded the same protections, as needed. You mention liberty and pursuit of happiness.
For those like us who live in the vocational spotlight, where our skills, mental capacities, and other qualities are in demand, such that we draw noteworthy salaries, the power of the dollar can be effective, assuming that enough can agree to use their dollar in a similar way such that a company cares to recover their business by changing their practices.
But this ignores those who dont have many dollars, and may in fact not have enough dollars among themselves that their discretion in using them makes a difference to the company. And its those people who need most the protections from the companies who would benefit from infringing their rights.
I've no faith in the free market; it is nearly as idealistic an ideal as a communist state in the sense that its supporters imagine, if it is carried out "correctly", there is no corruption and all mankind benefits. But in practice, free markets lead to social darwinism, working class repression, manufactural irresponsibility, and other sorts of conditions that lead to Marxen and Engeli.
There are pictures of the robots available there, plus videos (in MPEG, joy!) of the bots moving along a carpeted surface, and VRML models.
I might be dense, but some of these designs are actually interesting, in how the frictional physics of the carpeted surface are taken adavantage of in strange ways. Course, I'll be really impressed when the computer comes up with a top-heavy upright biped with two counter-balancing flagella.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I just got my Faradic account today, and in fact, I'm soaking in it.
As for your comments about them, I have to say that 30 MB is actually pretty good, and 0.25/meg is standard. (1 GB / user is insane imo, btw.) I went searching for a new ISP over the weekend and I have to say most of what I found was very poor. I saw rates as high as $1/meg for extra space, most accounts had only 10-15 MB, and almost never a shell account. Some didn't even have a true 24/7 plan, some had max connection times, etc. Yech.
I also have a FlexNet account. Cheapest vhost you can get that I know of. I don't even use the dialup access that comes with it, which is probably the bulk of their market. (Though I have had trying experiences with their technician/owner, which worked themselves out)
I used to work for an ISP that offered shell accounts. I won't mention who, because a) they don't want to sell shell accounts (or dialup for that matter) anymore, and b) they laid me off on Friday. But I can tell you that they had very good rates, and Faradic's beats theirs.
Only problem is that I had to wait three days for the account to be phone-verified and activated. Sigh, so much for realtime, but at least its here. (I suspect that it is a one-person operation or not much larger. I know FlexNet is. [Fine with me.]) But *all* Faradic accounts have shells -- its default.
FWIW, a friend used to run a basement ISP that offered cheap shell accounts (he still might, mail me for info), and advertised that he would offer component colocation; i.e. you could send him a disk drive and that would be your quota. So, you could go get yourself a ##GB disk and send it to him to mount. Unfortunately I don't know if he ever actually got that service in place.
Oh, and when I saw Faradic's special IRC charges, I was amused. Its a great idea. Unfortunately I doubt it helps Faradic's standing with EFnet ircops.
-- Keith "She sells C shells at the Shore.Net" Tyler
A member of a StarCraft clan was dealt a search warrant and is under investigation for 'tampering.' This is not a free speech suppression case. It's not a hate case.
Sounds a bit naive, no? Do you expect that if someone in this country is trying to suppress speech with the aid of police force, that they charge you with "undesirable expression of speech"?
But regardless of whether this case involves the First Amendment or not, this and many, many other stories leave the same questions open. Did the incident require the involvement of police? Did it require confiscation of equipment -- even equipment that has nothing to do with the network -- and the "related articles" (in billn's story), whatever those were?
Apparently not, because the actions they were initially going to take involved just a meeting with their RD and someone from ResNet or the academic IT. Something tells me that in the process of planning this meeting, someone in IT or ResLife called Campus Security to ask a quick question, and Campus Security decided to bust it open and take over. (Note that they haven't even let IT look at the box, and I really doubt that campus security has better computer experts than IT.) Apparently busting "hackers" makes college rentacops (remember, these departments are usually staffed with people who couldnt even get jobs as transit cops) look good.
I had my own share of geek-profiling in college, so I can't say that the bias isn't there. I hear even at MIT they are cracking down on undesired expression and other innocent tomfoolery by their brightest.
And I also know that what holds for the people who work for college police also holds for those who work for college IT: they tend to suck at it. I wouldn't be surprised if they left a no-password login as the default on their main server; hell, at my college, plenty of administrators' desktops were wide open on the campus network -- as in 'I can mount that drive, and if i hit delete, it will work.' (Hmm -- so thats how much the new building is going to cost!) And in my last job, we routinely got reports of 'hacking attempts' because someone running a jumpy network filter would catch someone pinging them.
As for BfD, one wonders why the hell they would want to post their own clan site on a server theyre not supposed to have access to. I dont suppose that the campus cops have thought about that -- at this point, with this press, they need to bring this guy 'down' to look good, regardless of how much it fscks this kid over.
I can't get the Stater's story (site is down?) so I can't argue the merits of the offical version (undoubtedly written by a green journalism student with an AOL-based knowledge of computers, if that). But billn, for his assurance that he knows the true motives behind this blip in the campus police log, doesn't have much to say about any of this in his rebuttal. It reads objectively enough, but to assume that what the campus cops say (or even what academic IT says) is necessarily the truth is an icy footing.
-- Keith "I used to be a journalism student too, but then i wised up" Tyler
The DAK catalog sold laser turntables about... 10 years ago? Not this quality either.
Hell, the display on that thing reminds me of my grandfather's Epson printer.
I'm also surprised at the lack of innovation in turntables, but I'm sure there isn't a big market for them. Only long-time audiophiles collect vinyl, and most people don't see the point in a high-end record player.
However, it strikes me as strange that Technics manages to hold such a monopoly on the DJ market, both for music entertainment and for hip-hop mixing/scratching. The brand name has become synonymous with "turntable" in those fields; I don't even think they have a competitor in that area. It's possible I guess that they've nailed the best possible design, but I find it hard to believe.
This is a great idea, socially and historically, but I hope they expand to other articles of clothing. My circa 1996 Yahoo! cap (contest runner up, baby! :) ) would probably go well there, not to mention a gaggle of nice polos and rugbys.
Anyway, Internet History is a good thing, and I love to see it collected and displayed.
I work for an once major ISP in the Northeast which was recently purchased by a large multinational. Here, we developed an internal solution, thanks to our in-house development department.
I should preface this by saying that I don't know if what I'm about to describe is patented. If not, it probably could be, and chances are the new parent company will patent it if they hear me. But have little fear; the parent company is not, by any reports, the sort that even knows about Slashdot.
Essentially the system runs out of Sybase (though could presumably run out of any other SQL db). The interface is a very nice (in terms of feature set) GUI which unfortunately is only for Windows (even though we are a Sun house; this is probably because its hard to find billing workers who are Unix savvy).
Anyway, the GUI is used to make any sort of changes to the account base. The data for any given account is arranged in multi-field windows, you can open individual services in an account to tweak them, search for an account by service name or account number, yadda yadda. The neat thing is that every time a change is made, a sequence of tasks (defined in the database for type of account and type of change) is initiated (by stored procedures), and these tasks connect to each of our production machines (as needed), which all run an internally developed server daemon. This daemon handles requests and parameters to run one or more Perl scripts (or whatever) which reside on those machines, to set up/modify/delete the service on the system.
The other beauty of having an internally developed billing system is that we were able to easily integrate this system with our Web site, and this has allowed us to provide instant online signup for certain services, as well as an online account manager for customers to tweak their accounts and services. And since the task system is a client-server model, you could easily adapt this for any server platform (in fact, I think we already have, for the NT hosting services we offer).
When the parent company was starting to figure out what they wanted to do with their new toy (i.e. us), they were going to go and buy a $30,000 billing system that I think ran in VB and didn't interface with anything (we would have probably ended up using both that and our internal system in the best case scenario). The development team (whose value was in question for some strange reason) then piped up and decided that a few suits needed an immersion course in our billing system. Needless to say they decided not to dump $30,000 into some hackneyed third pary solution.
Of course, most ISPs probably don't want to invest in a development department, but we were special in that we were founded by a computer programmer. For years (prior to the "merger") our company name was just a D/B/A for his tiny software company. He decided in '94 that the Internet was the future, and soon found himself running a rather successful independent regional ISP instead.
Most people are going to tell you to live where they do b/c that is where they are comfortable living...
Except, mostly, urban Americans. (like me.)
Personally I have considered moving to Canada many times. Cheaper standard of living, more space, more leftist society (and govt.), less warlike... Only bad thing I can think of is lower temperatures, but I can deal with that.
All that suggests is that we tend to slow things down wiin the absence any control. Which may explain why we have more procrastinators then hyperkinetics.
Heck, take a typical, unattached, advanced/expert programmer, tell him he doesn't have to come in at 8 o'clock every day anymore, and watch his personal schedule loosen waaay up.
I think you nailed the operative factor in your experiment description: give him "plenty of stuff to amuse himself with". That's why his "day" drags on -- the desire to extend play time. I'd theorize you could get a reverse effect if you changed the experiment such that he had an endless pipeline of generally unenjoyable goals to complete (to do, say, before sleeping, etc.) and I bet his behavioral period (en macro) would shrink up pretty good.
I am answering a bunch of questions that have been scored by someone as to how interesting they are. I am a bit concerned that this rating system tacitly implies the score is part of my response to their question, which kinda disturbs me.
Was the moderation system not at least briefly explained to him? He seems offended most that 1. one or a few god-like person(s) chose the scores, when in fact they are rather populistically derived, and 2. that we would assume the scores to be his even though nearly any reader knows what they mean.
Seems to me he would have been much less concerned if someone had told him how it works.
(Actually, his fear probably stems from experiences with shoddy fanboy pop-culture zines and/or repressively corporate cool-defining websites, and it's a smidge offensive to me that he would think Slashdot falls in the same category as either of those.)
Slide rules are still manufactured, and although they don't know it, probably every journalism student has used one. Except in that field, the device is called a "photo wheel."
I recall in my early college days taking a class in which the photo wheel was used. All students had to buy one (available in the arts section of the student store, and normally made of cardboard or plastic). The professor spent the better part of a three hour class repeatedly explaining how to use it, prefacing each time with "It's a little complicated, but you get the hang of it." This scene was remarkably disturbing for me (as was the computer-aided design & layout class), because it took me less time to do the necessary math in my head in less time than it took these media lackeys to do it with a tool specifically designed for the problem. (Which of course is why I soon changed majors.)
But I guess it just wouldn't do to have a scientific calculator in the newsroom. Though it would certainly help demonstrably in the accuracy department.
Well, it seems to me that they are going to have to upgrade/replace those anyway, when the measly 200 new area codes (from the 10-digit dialing idea) are exhausted after six months to a year, (seeing as weve gone through almost all the 800 new ones in less than six years, and the growth is better than linear) and they/we have to go to 11 digit dialing. So twelve months down the road, we all have to dial 11 digits all the time when it could be done now and we would only have to dial 8 digits for local calls for a good stretch longer. (Without annoying new area codes!)
I wonder where they will end up to adding the 11th digit anyway. Probably area codes. That wont be more annoying for people.
(Incidentally, I wonder if you can also tell me why they tend to keep exchanges in the same town close together numerically, but seem to put area codes in the same state as numerically far away as possible.)
However, any move to 11 or 12 digit phone numbers should be dialing the entire number,
See, there I don't agree either. IANAPT[*], but when they first proposed the current system of [2-9][0-9][0-9] for area codes (from the previous [2-9][2-9][0-9] system), I thought, why dont they increase the numbering system in a way the precludes a need for more area codes?
Initially the idea was go to 8-digit local dialing, and add a zero to the end of every number (which is a LOT easier than the current situation where practially everyone goes "What the hell area code is Grandma in now?").
A few years of evidence of the imbalance of urban expansion and suburban expansion shows this to be impractical, so the revised solution, is still go to 8 digit dialing, and add a 0 to the end of all existing exchanges. Practially anyone who has ever used a phone recognizes the significant relation of exchanges to localties. 599 is Lynn. 745 is Salem. 631 is Marblehead. Etc. etc. And when a locality starts to grow beyond the numbers it has within its exchanges, add a new exchange. (In the past ten years Lynn has gained 586 and 477, Marblehead gained 639, etc.) Moving exchanges to four digits then gives you scads of new exchanges
(9*10^3 to be exact) to throw around.
Fact is, people don't *like* new area codes. Its a pain for both callers and stations. Callers have to go through at least three months of dialing the wrong area code for a number they've dialed for years. And stations (businesses especially) have to go through the expense of changing stationery, signage, advertisements, etc. When Massachusetts decided to chop up 617, tossing the metro north area into a new area code, businesses balked, because they had done the presumably smart job of buying their stationery, etc. in bulk. The only market that benefited by the new area codes, besides phone companies, was printing shops. A sign on a storefront on Rte 1A just has a plastic shield over the 617 -- buying a whole new sign isn't worth it.
Granted, we can't avoid having to start having to change our dialing habits one wya or another, but it seems to me the changes that require the least amount of change, incompatibility problems, AND greatest increase in amount of numbers would be the sort of one to implement first.
Actually, the full DMTF spec calls for 16 tones, using a 4x4 keypad with A B C and D keys
Thats right! And I seem to remember that their original use (behind-the-scenes call routing) has been outdated.
I'm also pretty sure most modems can dial the ABCDs. Dunno about other equipment (like uh, phones).
But in any case, I wonder how much both the 7 digit system AND the NPA system would be increased by allowing ABCD into the numbering. Quick math says 10^7-2*10^6 is what we have now, under this we'd have 14^7-2*14^6. 10^7 is ten million; 14^7 is over 100 million. Even less 2*14^6 (~ 15 million), thats still a lot more than the measly 2*10^6 we would gain from being able to use 1 and 0 at the beginning of our exchanges and dialing ten numbers all the time.
I'm sure theres some reason that makes this *less* practical then the 10 digit dialing idea, but then again, its better than a tenfold increase over the latter.
Keith "and at 11 digits, they'll have to reinvent DNS for the phone system anyway" Tyler
...some of my friends are making about $1000-$1200/mo net... a dumpy apartment ... will set you back at *least* 500$/mo... 100$/mo in heating costs, another 50$/mo in [electric]...
Sounds a lot like living in Boston! Where do I sign up?
(Mind you also that I was sharing a run-down 5BR Mission Hill apartment, which cut basic rent to a lucky $400. Cheapest apartment on Comm Ave [1BR] is $1050/mo!)
Keith "they better not start calling it Dot Comm Ave, either" Tyler
I remember wanting to do the exact same thing with my ThinkPad about a year or two ago (wow, that thing is that old???)
I did a fair amount of Google research and downloaded a few apps, none of which worked. I also did a Deja search, and learned that basically, with the exception of certain hardware (like HP Vectras I believe), PC IR ports are not suitable for emulating remote controls because the timing of the IR signals are very rigid, since your laptop's IR port is meant to function as a serial port, which has a certain (albeit selectable) frequency. OTOH remote controls can transmit at any frequency they want.
Initially I tried to perform the emulation in a poor-man's way: I set the IR port to act as COM2, then used Terminal (I think it was Terminal, pulled off an old WFW3.11 dist), and set Terminal to listen to COM2. Then I grabbed my RCA remote, set it right in front of the laptop IR port, and started hitting buttons.
Well, that made characters display in the Terminal window, so the laptop's port saw *something*, which was promising, But I also noticed that the characters displayed were not quite consistent. Which means to me, either there is IR interference coming from somewhere, or that the frequencies are out of sync just enough that I'm missing parts of the signal. Alas, I gave up after my attempts to copy the characters and paste them back into the COM2 terminal, with the IR port six inches from my VCR's LED window, caused nothing to happen.
I had much better success with some of the apps for the Palm; I have a Palm IIIe and I forget what the app was called but it was from a Japanese source. Unfortunately the range of the Palm's IR port is less than even that of my ThinkPad, and after all Palm's IR is only meant for ease of communication between two very mobile devices which are temporarily and willfully near each other (one benefit being, I guess, that the guy on the other end of the subway can't possibly hack your Palm). One (shareware) app I found did mention that the distributor built and sold IR booster devices which connected to the HotSync port and had its own AA power source, giving it a range similar to remote devices. Honestly I don't know why Palm's IR port is compatible with remote controls and laptops' aren't; perhaps either the Palm's port is more flexibly controllable, or the Palm uses the same IR technology as remote controls because it's cheaper.
As it is, the only use I can envision for the Palm's factory IR capabilities in remote control is to replace your VCRPlus+... which costs about a fifth as much as your Palm and is obsolete anyway.
just how does the person get instantaneously transported to the other side when they move off the edge?
:)
Pause the game, run off into the exit in the stands, and run under (or around) the field to the other side.
Oh, and can we make a (beowulf) whole block of these?
You could definintely use one.... This is a great hack, but for any practical purpose (e.g. laser light shows at high end raves), have a pre-arranged game sequence around. Looking at the apparent refresh rate as viewed on the mpeg, most of these games would be difficult to play as half your playing-time is spent in darkness at one point or another. One imagines that as the screens get more "busy" that the refresh drops even more, making it impossible. Sorry, no Hackers arcade scene here, yet.
Now, if you got game source, and managed to tweak it so as to distribute the electron gun aim control among more than one laser, each with its own controlling cluster node, you might have better luck at making something thats visually playable.
Dont get me wrong, this is a fantastic visual stunt with great demonstration applications, but I think they'd better give up the Tempest-on-a-cloud idea.
(Although... mount this rig on a light helicopter on a calm day, and project Asteroids on a football field. That idea I like. Oh, and hook the rotation and thrust control up to a person in the middle of the field, holding another button to actuate the fire control. Now we're talking.)
Does that mean that all or even a majority of the native population speaks it at all, let alone as a first language?
Heh. No kidding. Some would say that significant portions of *the US* don't speak English as a first, or second, language.
...since Andover bought Slashdot, it has... become in the very real sense, a business entity. Since it is no longer a private endeavor... shouldn't Slashdot be held to the same standards as other 'news' agencies?
The argument there, as I grasp it, is that since Slashdot is now part of a business, it should be held accountable. And conversely, if it were not a business, it wouldn't have to be.
Explain to me: why wouldn't it? How does being part of a business change your responsibilities as a source of information? Is it okay, in the general (non-cynical) ethical sense, to be irresponsible with the information you spread if you are not owned by anyone? No. This sense of "we're a company now, we have to be ethical in our news" is only coming from a sense of corporate fear -- a sense of "we'll get fired if we're irresponsible and cause grief for the parent company" -- and has nothing to do with your actual responsibility to the reader -- which never changed.
In the two years that I've been reading Slashdot, even before it was bought by anyone, it has committed nearly every journalistic mistake a news outlet can make -- favoritism, sensationalism, inaccuracy, bias, even a few alleged cases of censorship. If being bought by Andover, and in turn by VA Linux, causes the staff to take their responsibilities more seriously, then great -- but in truth, being bought didnt change those responsibilities. It only hit the staffers on the head a bit harder.
Slashdot's responsibilities to present accurate and informative news (ignoring that they only really became a "news outlet" fairly recently) existed ever since the day they were quoted by another media source, and attracted a significant readership which began to rely on it for certain kinds of news. Just because the staffers have finally grown up enough, in that sense, to realize it, doesn't mean that those responsibilities have changed at all.
I use Corel Photopaint 8 for my Windows PC, and that doesn't have any perceptible loss.
Sure, for high quality JPEG, if you have to decompress and recompress, you wont see a noticeable loss, no matter what S/W you use.
But for a low quality JPEG, you'll have to recompress at a high quality rate in order to maintain the picture quality of the original with moderate safety.
If you have a low quality JPEG, which you want to rotate, and then maintain as a low quality JPEG, you're doomed.
Of course, this is all assuming your software will automatically re-compress on save, which is why the original question...
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Sounds to me like this is something that could have been brought up, oh... about six years ago.
Look. If you come into the country on a six-year visa, you know when you get it that you're going back after six years.
When I get a one year subscription from Newsweek, I dont write them and complain after 13 months that they are now depriving me of some basic human right because one year of reading their magazine has turned it into an invaluable part of my life.
There is a generally acknowledged (or perhaps, generally alleged) shortage of programmers and other tech workers in the U.S.
Pah! So think nothing of leeching these workers away from other countries -- most of which are economically depressed to the point that they already have plenty of problems in trying to build an Internet infrastructure in order to keep up with a rapidly advancing first world.
It sounds to me like the six years of experience our H1Bs gained in the US is going to help their countries demonstrably when they go back -- which, I bet, was a big part of the original point:
The federal government is presently [trying to increase] the number of H1B workers... while simultaneously sending currently-employed workers home.
...which still supports that assertion. I mean, doesn't it make you think? Why would the government, citing a skilled labor shortage, not be lobbying for extension of the visas of existing H1Bs? Wouldn't that be a lot easier than trying to increase the current influx? It would certainly save the costs of sending the current ones back!
The point is the work visa program -- any work visa program -- is not solely for US benefit, so dont make it sound like it is. If some of them, they came here under a false hope that they would be given some sort of permanent tenure at the end of their six years, that's their own foolish fault.
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Michael, as a presumed geek, you give the Web a remarkably short stick here.
There's a big difference between being able to put up a webpage which some students might see sometime and being able to publish something in a paper distributed in school.
How so? In fact, high school students today are beginning to outpace college students in their embracement of the Internet.
Think of it this way. You're a modern high school student. I don't care if you're a geek or a trendie. You're given a choice between: the four-page school paper that your boring teachers tell you to read, or the colorful web page that has all the stories they don't want you to read.
It doesn't take long, assuming quite reasonably that the web site is always in the same location, for students to know where to look to find the bits that wouldn't get put in the boring school paper (which is always plastered with articles saying how cool the bastard principal is).
In my high school, a story on teen pregnancy was kept out of the school paper. I went to a private school, which made things worse. Well, it didn't take more than a few dollars worth of nickels to have the objectionable story typed up and copied (luckily this was a small school). I dare say more people had held copies of that story in their hands than the corresponding issue of the school paper. And the fact that it hadn't been put in the school paper for unclear reasons made all the more reason for people to read it.
Plus I've seen plenty of students get "in trouble" at school for things done entirely on their own time.
Yes, well... as with geeks and computer companies, if no one bothers to legally challenge the abuses made against high school students, they are what the abusers want them to be. The whole idle victimization cry is getting a bit stale in both realms. If you assume something is legal (or illegal) simply because a high school principal says it is, then you deserve to live in a place like China. Shi* or get off the pot.
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Wrong, wrong, wrong. This seminar you speak of gets zero credit from me if they did not mention Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier: http://www.splc.org/resources/high.school/hazelwoo d.html
and no, no lawyer would love to take your case unless he had lived his life in a sheltered suburban utopia before his years at Harvard Law, and had just got out.
College newspapers get more freedom, at least in past decisions, under the observation that free expression and though is essential to higher education. Additionally, it's been made mostly clear that high schools do not have control over student publications that are not funded by school money or other resources, i.e. underground or independent student publications. Such is the presumed case with these web sites.
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In a capitalist economy, we have something more powerful than government: our dollars.
Until, of course, the only brand for sale is that of a solitary, large company.
Remember, in this democratic capitalist state of ours, monopolies are not de facto illegal.
Why do people think they need to government to protect them from companies?
Sean Kennedy made a great statement last night. He pointed out that governments are created to protect the weak from the abuses of the powerful. Such is the implication of "all men are created equal" that therefore all men (people) are to be afforded the same protections, as needed. You mention liberty and pursuit of happiness.
For those like us who live in the vocational spotlight, where our skills, mental capacities, and other qualities are in demand, such that we draw noteworthy salaries, the power of the dollar can be effective, assuming that enough can agree to use their dollar in a similar way such that a company cares to recover their business by changing their practices.
But this ignores those who dont have many dollars, and may in fact not have enough dollars among themselves that their discretion in using them makes a difference to the company. And its those people who need most the protections from the companies who would benefit from infringing their rights.
I've no faith in the free market; it is nearly as idealistic an ideal as a communist state in the sense that its supporters imagine, if it is carried out "correctly", there is no corruption and all mankind benefits. But in practice, free markets lead to social darwinism, working class repression, manufactural irresponsibility, and other sorts of conditions that lead to Marxen and Engeli.
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This was easy enough to find, but nevertheless:
http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem
There are pictures of the robots available there, plus videos (in MPEG, joy!) of the bots moving along a carpeted surface, and VRML models.
I might be dense, but some of these designs are actually interesting, in how the frictional physics of the carpeted surface are taken adavantage of in strange ways. Course, I'll be really impressed when the computer comes up with a top-heavy upright biped with two counter-balancing flagella.
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Reminds me of Soda Constructor:
/. a while ago)
http://www.sodaplay.com
(was posted on
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