If I am a spammer and I train my robot to send out 1% of the spamload as appearing to genuinely advertise each random UK site then I can very quickly make this initiative unworkable.
The point would not be to hide an innocent URL within an otherwise normal spam, but to make a spam specifically intended to result in complaints against the innocent site.
Having a foot in the anti-spam business myself, I'd say this is pretty much guaranteed to happen as soon as the first shutdown causes a spammer any real inconvenience.
I think the problem will solve itself when people finally figure out that cost-per-click is bullshit.
Even if I take out a teensy ad in a regular print journal, I pay a fixed price... and that is probably the one case where I am going to track, more or less accurately, what revenue that specific ad generated. Whether it's compelling enough to generate traffic is my problem, not the journal's.
If you make visually compelling, non-annoying display ads, people will remember your brand. They might even click, if it's an ad for something that is more of an instant deal (like the free iPods for example).
But whether people remember you, or click on you, is absolutely not my problem as a content provider, and CPC advertising schemes are simply banking on ignorance.
The dude is reportedly rolling in money; one of his former business parters sold out to Ebay; now there's a big messy lovefest and Ebay is about "building community?"
it should be possible to have an absolutely-positioned input box of a fixed width and a drop-down button (or more likely a linked gif) to its right.
Clicking that button makes the input box invisible and makes a same-position but higher-Z dropdown visible. The onChange for that dropdown puts the value in the textbox and swaps the visibility again.
You could also use a more complicated dynamic menu approach instead of the dropdown if you were very worried about the dropdown's non-stylable chrome.
In either case you'll probably need a little padding to deal with the different sizes of the widgets.
There might be some issues around swapping visibility inside the form, but you could always use a more complicated document structure to get around that. And the neat thing is that it *might* still work as a textbox without the javascript.
Anyway that should work in theory, though I haven't done it. I'd be happy to try it but I have a job I have to get back to...
tsearch2 (full-text search) is included in the contrib directory of the official distribution.
Documentation is a bit slim but it's very nice and only takes a couple hours to figure it out the first time, and a few minutes to set up in future installs.
License: Stable version, included into PostgreSQL distribution, is released under BSD license. Development version, available from this site, is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (June 1991).
I use lots of record-set-returning functions, quite complex ones, in Postgres at the moment.
There are simpler ways to go but for me the nicest is to create a TYPE which looks like a table when you're accessing it, and then make my function return a SETOF that TYPE. (Of course you don't need to make a TYPE if your result set is column-identical to a table.)
If you want to return a set you can't just select my_function(), you must select * from my_function() or select some_field from my_function(some_param) or whatever. You can nest, you can join, all kinds of goodies, all in pure SQL or pgPL/SQL according to your preference (or Perl or C or whatever if you're into that).
Dig through the documentation on that... I know there aren't as many nice books on PG as on ORA or MSSQL but once you grok it it's really very, very powerful.
Have you considered one of the user mode linux hosts like JVDS?
They have BSD as well as Linux, and you're in complete control for about the same price as a space/bandwidth-equivalent shared hosting setup.
The BSD machines obviously don't run um-Linux, but the equivalent mode of BSD that apparently works very well and has been around a long time.
I've been using them for a while to host a bunch of small websites. I don't know how PHP performs in that environment, but I've been super happy with Perl/apache2/PostgreSQL, all set up *exactly* the way I want them because of course I'm root.
I was really surprised how good the performance is even with the relatively small CPU share.
I make my living as a programmer and database designer, though my formal education is in German literature and fine art.
Among the many great computer people I've worked with in the last 11ish years, about half had computer science (or for that matter engineering) degrees.
My brother writes insanely complex software for NASA, and his degrees are in aerospace engineering, not CS.
We all "played computers" back in the 70s, and now many of us work with them. Seems pretty natural to me.
TFA is really a FA (at USAToday? gasp!) in that it draws a scary picture based on very little real information.
Of course CS and related enrollment is down.... for the same reason it was up during the dot-comedy. These are perfectly normal cycles, and have precious little to do with the actual talent pool.
If you want to blame the lack of interest in engineering and science on something, blame it on the miserable quality of public schools in the US.
Several people have made this point... and the reply posted by Katie T. (a form reply? it was posted several times) suggests the opposite.
In either case Penguin should bear the brunt of the negative publicity, in order to set a precedent: Don't blithely hijack people's domain names just because your lawyers think you can get away with it.
Penguin is clearly in the wrong. The lawyer in question is probably also in the wrong, and Katie T. may be as well, but we haven't seen enough information to make a strong judgement there.
Start by pressuring Penguin. The rest will follow their lead (as they have so far).
Write to Penguin. Write to Pearson. Or call.
on
The Saga of Katie.com
·
· Score: 4, Informative
At this point the best hope for justice is a publicity backlash. Penguin is already well on their way to getting more negative publicity than they can stomach over this screw-up.
We should all write (preferably in dead-tree form) to Penguin, and to their corporate masters, Pearson.
Be polite but be firm. Ask specific questions and ask specifically for a reply (this will keep the letter alive and consuming resources in the bureaucracy much longer). Make it clear that this arrogant action, if uncorrected, will negatively affect your purchases and recommendations in the future.
Penguin:
Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street New York, NY 10014
Pearson:
Pearson Headquarters 3 Burlington Gardens London W1X 1LE, United Kingdom Phone: +44-20-7411-2000 Fax: +44-20-7411-2390
Or, if you're in the US and just feel like ranting, try Penguin Customer Service: (800) 631-8571
I agree that the right thing to do would have been to make an offer on the name prior to publication.
But having read the notice on katie.com, it doesn't sound like she would've accepted (and I doubt Penguin would have offered some astronomical sum).
It gets even weirder when you factor in that the katie.com Katie actually makes her living in the chat business, meaning the association with the book is potentially harmful to her business as well.
I do hope that this generates enough of a publicity backlash that Penguin sees the light and changes the title.
It doesn't strike me as illegal per se to name a book after someone else's (owned but not trademarked) personal domain name, but it certainly is crass. To then try, after the fact, to intimidate the legitimate owner into "donating" (or selling or anything else) is just absurd.
Of course the most just of ironies would be for Penguin to change the name back to "girl.com," which is apparently what they originally wanted -- and I'm sure the owners of girl.com have a price in mind. At least at the moment that's not a porn site but rather one of those parked/pseudo-search sites.
I'm writing this on my P-2000 series under RedHat 9. It took me a long time and a lot of playing with knoppix before I had the guts to try setting up dual-boot but in the end it worked like a dream. Even the sleep mode works from the power button. I didn't have to tweak anything at all, the installer just did the job. (Though I switched to fluxbox as my window manager to speed things up later, as KDE was a bit slow.)
Most of the latest knoppixes work fine, but the lasest Suse LiveCD wouldn't boot; otherwise I was going to shell out for Suse.
Now that I've got it set up though I kinda wish I'd used Fedora Core or maybe Debian.
I had a look at the IBM product page and found this:
Supports complex SQL, transactions and JDBC so that your applications can be migrated to DB2 UDB when they need to grow.
...which makes me wonder whether this is part of a strategy to get the foundation and community to do the work maintaining something that may not have been profitable but was something their service division could get people using as a baby step towards DB2.
In any case it's cool they donated it. Being a database developer myself, I'm extremely wary of the "you don't need a DBA" claim, but regardless of the hype it looks like an interesting product that will fit in well with the Apache lineup.
For a couple years now I've been one of two de-facto sysadmins in a small operation, and I've definitely come to appreciate sysadmins much more than I did before.
It's hard work and the vast majority of it is tedious. Of course a really good sysadmin doesn't have to do much of anything on a day-to-day basis (having scripted everything up nicely), but when something tricky needs doing it's soooo much better to have a real admin on hand to spend the day doing it.
Next time I have a sysadmin who's not me, I'm definitely buying him/her a t-shirt and a beer on S.A.A.D.
(...though it would be nice to have a happier acronym)
...throughout the book, Siva contrasts two very different regimes of information control: oligarchy and anarchy.
Perhaps this is explained in the book, but I don't think it's obvious how anarchy is a "regime of information control."
If you have that messy sort of anarchy - the type that usually just means no central authority in what people still want to consider a state - then it's not really the anarchy that's controlling your information, it's the control structures that have taken hold in the absence of central power.
This is probably just a case of lazy writing, but I wish there were an explanation of what the reviewer meant here.
However, there are a couple of things I just can't figure out.
Like why Nokia didn't include a Java-based HTML browser and e-mail client. If a third party can make them, you'd think Nokia would give it a shot as well.
Or why there is only *one* game pre-installed, and not a very fun one at that ("Chess Puzzle").
I can make up for these deficiencies with a few Euros and a few downloads, but it strikes me as odd that Nokia didn't bother updating their phone software on that particular model, which where I live (Hungary) is being pushed as a sophisticated low-price handset (I paid about 80 EUR with a contract.)
On September 30, Bobby Fischer began his rematch with Boris Spassky in Sveti Stefan, Yugoslavia.
Interesting. I was just down in Montenegro for some vacation (in Kotor) and had a look at Sveti Stefan from the road. (It's in Montenegro.)
Sveti Stefan is basically a little island covered by a big classy hotel. It's the most exclusive tourist spot in Montenegro, and possibly the most exclusive in the former Yugoslavia.
Other trivia: Fischer was hanging out in Budapest for I don't know how long (but a good while), being secretive and paranoid and anti-semitic and all those other nice BF things. A friend of mine claimed to have gone to repair his computer, and to have swiped a copy of his work-in-progress (a giant anti-semitic and anti-US paranoid rant, surprise surprise).
I offered to post it on the Net but the friend was afraid he'd get in trouble. I never did read it.
There's an interesting, if weirdly-formatted, article on BF in the Atlantic - a bit old though.
And here's a site almost as weird as the man himself, with radio interview downloads.
While all credit is due the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla developers, one of the reasons it's so much more successful than the average good OSS project is the type of software they make.
1) Web browsing. Nearly everyone does it. Firefox runs on most platforms. It's better than the competition. It's not geeky unless you want it to be. And with IE stagnant, more and more people are interested in the alternatives, regardless of whether they're open source.
2) E-mail. Thunderbird is great but it's not as much greater than the other mail clients as Firefox is greater than the other browsers. But it's coming along very nicely and could have enormous success - even though people are likely to use more webmail and less client-based mail in the future.
Both of these programs fit common needs that are not as well-served by big software companies as one might expect.
If other projects want to achieve that level of success, they should take lessons from the Mozilla Foundation for sure -- but it's not a fair measure if the other projects aren't making standard consumer apps.
There is a free online edition, which is cool. But it would probably be considered a political act to link directly to the PDF's;-)
In case you want to buy the dead-tree edition, the site's "Order Now" link didn't work for me. There's always Amazon which should also stay up in case the main site goes down.
Over on the Democrat political site MoveOn.org they are also pushing for voting with a paper trail.
They have a petition to sign... it would be nice to see a corresponding Republican site do their own petition, since I doubt any Republicans would sign a petition on MoveOn.org but at the same time I imagine there are plenty of Republicans who also see the dangers of closed-source, paperless e-voting.
There are a lot of conflict of interest issues here (as mentioned in the article) but I think these would actually be lessened if there were grassroots pressure from both major parties to use more secure and auditable voting systems.
If you don't want to be in management it doesn't mean your career is a dead end.
If it's strictly about money then in most organizations you won't make more than your manager even if you deserve it - but then, if you're in it for the money you should probably start your own company. A consulting company, for example.
But it's probably not strictly about money for this person, or he would've taken the management position. Lots of tech workers are much happier doing tech work than doing bureaucracy, and find greater rewards in challenging projects and creative freedom than in a slightly larger paycheck.
As for the resentment, it's possible, but hopefully the manager they hire will not be one who is insecure about their choice of career path, or about someone else deciding against it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you missed the point there.
If I am a spammer and I train my robot to send out 1% of the spamload as appearing to genuinely advertise each random UK site then I can very quickly make this initiative unworkable.
The point would not be to hide an innocent URL within an otherwise normal spam, but to make a spam specifically intended to result in complaints against the innocent site.
Having a foot in the anti-spam business myself, I'd say this is pretty much guaranteed to happen as soon as the first shutdown causes a spammer any real inconvenience.
I think the problem will solve itself when people finally figure out that cost-per-click is bullshit.
Even if I take out a teensy ad in a regular print journal, I pay a fixed price... and that is probably the one case where I am going to track, more or less accurately, what revenue that specific ad generated. Whether it's compelling enough to generate traffic is my problem, not the journal's.
If you make visually compelling, non-annoying display ads, people will remember your brand. They might even click, if it's an ad for something that is more of an instant deal (like the free iPods for example).
But whether people remember you, or click on you, is absolutely not my problem as a content provider, and CPC advertising schemes are simply banking on ignorance.
For what it's worth, here's a sloppy little mirror of the Hush ATX review from Silent PC Review (from April), in case that gets slashdotted too.
Not sure what the submitter was smoking, but the Hush ATX has been around for a while now, and was reviewed in April by SilentPCReview.
After "TrustedReviews" recovers from the slashdotting I will have a look though...
The dude is reportedly rolling in money; one of his former business parters sold out to Ebay; now there's a big messy lovefest and Ebay is about "building community?"
Sure it's all possible...
Off the top of my head...
it should be possible to have an absolutely-positioned input box of a fixed width and a drop-down button (or more likely a linked gif) to its right.
Clicking that button makes the input box invisible and makes a same-position but higher-Z dropdown visible. The onChange for that dropdown puts the value in the textbox and swaps the visibility again.
You could also use a more complicated dynamic menu approach instead of the dropdown if you were very worried about the dropdown's non-stylable chrome.
In either case you'll probably need a little padding to deal with the different sizes of the widgets.
There might be some issues around swapping visibility inside the form, but you could always use a more complicated document structure to get around that. And the neat thing is that it *might* still work as a textbox without the javascript.
Anyway that should work in theory, though I haven't done it. I'd be happy to try it but I have a job I have to get back to...
Good luck with it.
Documentation is a bit slim but it's very nice and only takes a couple hours to figure it out the first time, and a few minutes to set up in future installs.
Here's a link.
From that site:
I use lots of record-set-returning functions, quite complex ones, in Postgres at the moment.
There are simpler ways to go but for me the nicest is to create a TYPE which looks like a table when you're accessing it, and then make my function return a SETOF that TYPE. (Of course you don't need to make a TYPE if your result set is column-identical to a table.)
If you want to return a set you can't just select my_function(), you must select * from my_function() or select some_field from my_function(some_param) or whatever. You can nest, you can join, all kinds of goodies, all in pure SQL or pgPL/SQL according to your preference (or Perl or C or whatever if you're into that).
Dig through the documentation on that... I know there aren't as many nice books on PG as on ORA or MSSQL but once you grok it it's really very, very powerful.
Posting way too late here, but for bsd4me:
Have you considered one of the user mode linux hosts like JVDS?
They have BSD as well as Linux, and you're in complete control for about the same price as a space/bandwidth-equivalent shared hosting setup.
The BSD machines obviously don't run um-Linux, but the equivalent mode of BSD that apparently works very well and has been around a long time.
I've been using them for a while to host a bunch of small websites. I don't know how PHP performs in that environment, but I've been super happy with Perl/apache2/PostgreSQL, all set up *exactly* the way I want them because of course I'm root.
I was really surprised how good the performance is even with the relatively small CPU share.
I make my living as a programmer and database designer, though my formal education is in German literature and fine art.
Among the many great computer people I've worked with in the last 11ish years, about half had computer science (or for that matter engineering) degrees.
My brother writes insanely complex software for NASA, and his degrees are in aerospace engineering, not CS.
We all "played computers" back in the 70s, and now many of us work with them. Seems pretty natural to me.
TFA is really a FA (at USAToday? gasp!) in that it draws a scary picture based on very little real information.
Of course CS and related enrollment is down.... for the same reason it was up during the dot-comedy. These are perfectly normal cycles, and have precious little to do with the actual talent pool.
If you want to blame the lack of interest in engineering and science on something, blame it on the miserable quality of public schools in the US.
What exactly is a Cyberlawyer anyway?
Is that some kind of half-human, half-robot lawyer?
Several people have made this point... and the reply posted by Katie T. (a form reply? it was posted several times) suggests the opposite.
In either case Penguin should bear the brunt of the negative publicity, in order to set a precedent: Don't blithely hijack people's domain names just because your lawyers think you can get away with it.
Penguin is clearly in the wrong. The lawyer in question is probably also in the wrong, and Katie T. may be as well, but we haven't seen enough information to make a strong judgement there.
Start by pressuring Penguin. The rest will follow their lead (as they have so far).
At this point the best hope for justice is a publicity backlash. Penguin is already well on their way to getting more negative publicity than they can stomach over this screw-up.
We should all write (preferably in dead-tree form) to Penguin, and to their corporate masters, Pearson.
Be polite but be firm. Ask specific questions and ask specifically for a reply (this will keep the letter alive and consuming resources in the bureaucracy much longer). Make it clear that this arrogant action, if uncorrected, will negatively affect your purchases and recommendations in the future.
Penguin:
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
Pearson:
Pearson Headquarters
3 Burlington Gardens
London W1X 1LE, United Kingdom
Phone: +44-20-7411-2000
Fax: +44-20-7411-2390
Or, if you're in the US and just feel like ranting, try Penguin Customer Service: (800) 631-8571
I agree that the right thing to do would have been to make an offer on the name prior to publication.
But having read the notice on katie.com, it doesn't sound like she would've accepted (and I doubt Penguin would have offered some astronomical sum).
It gets even weirder when you factor in that the katie.com Katie actually makes her living in the chat business, meaning the association with the book is potentially harmful to her business as well.
I do hope that this generates enough of a publicity backlash that Penguin sees the light and changes the title.
It doesn't strike me as illegal per se to name a book after someone else's (owned but not trademarked) personal domain name, but it certainly is crass. To then try, after the fact, to intimidate the legitimate owner into "donating" (or selling or anything else) is just absurd.
Of course the most just of ironies would be for Penguin to change the name back to "girl.com," which is apparently what they originally wanted -- and I'm sure the owners of girl.com have a price in mind. At least at the moment that's not a porn site but rather one of those parked/pseudo-search sites.
Way to go Penguin! Dumbasses.
Totally late post, but just in case tezzer cares:
I'm writing this on my P-2000 series under RedHat 9. It took me a long time and a lot of playing with knoppix before I had the guts to try setting up dual-boot but in the end it worked like a dream. Even the sleep mode works from the power button. I didn't have to tweak anything at all, the installer just did the job. (Though I switched to fluxbox as my window manager to speed things up later, as KDE was a bit slow.)
Most of the latest knoppixes work fine, but the lasest Suse LiveCD wouldn't boot; otherwise I was going to shell out for Suse.
Now that I've got it set up though I kinda wish I'd used Fedora Core or maybe Debian.
But anyway it works fine, fear not the dual boot!
In any case it's cool they donated it. Being a database developer myself, I'm extremely wary of the "you don't need a DBA" claim, but regardless of the hype it looks like an interesting product that will fit in well with the Apache lineup.
For a couple years now I've been one of two de-facto sysadmins in a small operation, and I've definitely come to appreciate sysadmins much more than I did before.
It's hard work and the vast majority of it is tedious. Of course a really good sysadmin doesn't have to do much of anything on a day-to-day basis (having scripted everything up nicely), but when something tricky needs doing it's soooo much better to have a real admin on hand to spend the day doing it.
Next time I have a sysadmin who's not me, I'm definitely buying him/her a t-shirt and a beer on S.A.A.D.
(...though it would be nice to have a happier acronym)
...throughout the book, Siva contrasts two very different regimes of information control: oligarchy and anarchy.
Perhaps this is explained in the book, but I don't think it's obvious how anarchy is a "regime of information control."
If you have that messy sort of anarchy - the type that usually just means no central authority in what people still want to consider a state - then it's not really the anarchy that's controlling your information, it's the control structures that have taken hold in the absence of central power.
This is probably just a case of lazy writing, but I wish there were an explanation of what the reviewer meant here.
How universal can any kind of "identity system" be before it gets scary and/or illegal? (Illegal in countries with data protection laws anyway.)
Nokia is on board with this, and as more and more of my personal information gets concentrated on my phone I'll probably end up using it.
Eventually we'll probably all have a digital "passport" of some kind - and much better this way than the Microsoft way - but it's still a bit creepy.
I just got a 6100, and I like it a lot.
However, there are a couple of things I just can't figure out.
Like why Nokia didn't include a Java-based HTML browser and e-mail client. If a third party can make them, you'd think Nokia would give it a shot as well.
Or why there is only *one* game pre-installed, and not a very fun one at that ("Chess Puzzle").
I can make up for these deficiencies with a few Euros and a few downloads, but it strikes me as odd that Nokia didn't bother updating their phone software on that particular model, which where I live (Hungary) is being pushed as a sophisticated low-price handset (I paid about 80 EUR with a contract.)
On September 30, Bobby Fischer began his rematch with Boris Spassky in Sveti Stefan, Yugoslavia.
Interesting. I was just down in Montenegro for some vacation (in Kotor) and had a look at Sveti Stefan from the road. (It's in Montenegro.)
Sveti Stefan is basically a little island covered by a big classy hotel. It's the most exclusive tourist spot in Montenegro, and possibly the most exclusive in the former Yugoslavia.
Quite nice. There are some pictures here.
Other trivia: Fischer was hanging out in Budapest for I don't know how long (but a good while), being secretive and paranoid and anti-semitic and all those other nice BF things. A friend of mine claimed to have gone to repair his computer, and to have swiped a copy of his work-in-progress (a giant anti-semitic and anti-US paranoid rant, surprise surprise).
I offered to post it on the Net but the friend was afraid he'd get in trouble. I never did read it.
There's an interesting, if weirdly-formatted, article on BF in the Atlantic - a bit old though.
And here's a site almost as weird as the man himself, with radio interview downloads.
While all credit is due the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla developers, one of the reasons it's so much more successful than the average good OSS project is the type of software they make.
1) Web browsing.
Nearly everyone does it. Firefox runs on most platforms. It's better than the competition. It's not geeky unless you want it to be. And with IE stagnant, more and more people are interested in the alternatives, regardless of whether they're open source.
2) E-mail.
Thunderbird is great but it's not as much greater than the other mail clients as Firefox is greater than the other browsers. But it's coming along very nicely and could have enormous success - even though people are likely to use more webmail and less client-based mail in the future.
Both of these programs fit common needs that are not as well-served by big software companies as one might expect.
If other projects want to achieve that level of success, they should take lessons from the Mozilla Foundation for sure -- but it's not a fair measure if the other projects aren't making standard consumer apps.
The book discussed in the article has its own site, which might as well get its own slashdotting:
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
There is a free online edition, which is cool. But it would probably be considered a political act to link directly to the PDF's
In case you want to buy the dead-tree edition, the site's "Order Now" link didn't work for me. There's always Amazon which should also stay up in case the main site goes down.
Over on the Democrat political site MoveOn.org they are also pushing for voting with a paper trail.
They have a petition to sign... it would be nice to see a corresponding Republican site do their own petition, since I doubt any Republicans would sign a petition on MoveOn.org but at the same time I imagine there are plenty of Republicans who also see the dangers of closed-source, paperless e-voting.
There are a lot of conflict of interest issues here (as mentioned in the article) but I think these would actually be lessened if there were grassroots pressure from both major parties to use more secure and auditable voting systems.
There are other ways to move up.
If you don't want to be in management it doesn't mean your career is a dead end.
If it's strictly about money then in most organizations you won't make more than your manager even if you deserve it - but then, if you're in it for the money you should probably start your own company. A consulting company, for example.
But it's probably not strictly about money for this person, or he would've taken the management position. Lots of tech workers are much happier doing tech work than doing bureaucracy, and find greater rewards in challenging projects and creative freedom than in a slightly larger paycheck.
As for the resentment, it's possible, but hopefully the manager they hire will not be one who is insecure about their choice of career path, or about someone else deciding against it.