I noticed the interview kept mentioning that the 'middle class' in India constituted only 10-15% of the entire population of India. Well at 1 billion people +, that equates to 100,000,000 - 150,000,000 middle class Indians. When the US only has a population of 350,000,000 (a guesstimate) TOTAL, that Indian middle-class appears quite large in comparison. With the college tuition rates, government subsidies, and other factors in effect in India, it appears to me that they are primed to quickly over-take the U.S. as the premier investment opportunity for the world within the next 10 years or less. Those of us in America had better not become too comfortable with our posh standards of living as they currently are. I fear they will not last much longer.
Why don't you ask an extremely knowledgeable professional or two if you work for such a money-rich company?!?! You're asking a bunch of/.'ers how we've dealt with structuring a Fortune 500's OSS strategy??? You're either crazy, or just plain stupid. You're going to get hundreds of disparate answers from this crowd. If you're hoping to save some money, why don't you first spend some to make a lot more? (in cost savings)
Better yet, do your own research to find this stuff out! These 'Ask Slashdot' questions sometimes truly amaze me. The poster of this 'Ask Slashdot' probably makes 2-3 times what I make (if not 10x-20x in stock options alone) and yet he's willing to listen to my poorly informed ideas on such an important matter?! Truly hilarious!
They certainly can. That is if you consider shooting the patrons a crime.
There have been several instances of violence at Night Club's, mainly from playing makeout games.
One instance that happened here at a local club:
Club A is at one physical address, Club B at another. Player at A kisses player at B's girlfriend. Player B gets P.O.'d and finds where the other player is partying nightly. Player B then looks up who owns the club, and finds Club A's address. Player B drives to Club A and asks manager where player "A" is. Player B lies in wait in the parking lot and frags Player A (for real) when he leaves.
---------- So explain to me again how cyber cafe's *cause* crime?
All of this "advice" coming from a seasoned, some might even say: jaded, software company executive.
You seem to think that the "big" firms are more well established, have more experience, and can undercut the "little guy" whenever they need to just to make a point. You know what? You're absolutely right!
However you forget about the fact that all of the "little players" in the business world of the USA continue to innovate, grow, and generally bolster the economy. How is that possible? Well maybe it's because all of those little players know how to take care of the little corner grocery store, the laundry shop, the small home business consultant, and others who needs some very specific software code to help them do their job. The little player can also move far more quickly to take care of those customers because the overhead due to internal politics and budgetary infighting of the big players tends to slow down the responsiveness of the Microsoft's, IBM's, and Apple's of the US.
I found your post to be NOT Insightful as modded, and just had to respond. Yes, there are a great many obstacles to be had for the small business owner, but that does not mean they are insurmountable. If they were, then we'd be living in a far more socialistic country with far less innovation and creativity than we do today. Your attitude is exactly the kind of attitude that gets you referred to as a 'PHB,' and quite frankly, I think you deserve it.
Faith in your government, faith in your own abilities, faith in the economy, etc.
Do all of you slashdotters love the USA so much that although we've got crappy laws like the DMCA, contadictory rulings in the court systems, and politicians more skilled in slick speech making than in actual governance and leadership that you wouldn't change your place of living, living standards, or other things to do what it is you want to do?
If halving your salary so you can stay near your family is most important to you, then do it!
If moving to India (or wherever) to "go where the jobs are" so you can keep up with that posh living standard you're so accustomed to, then do it!
If putting yourself through med. school, law school, or a PhD program to make yourself a more desirable US job candidate is what you've got to do these days to stay afloat in the U.S. job market, then do it!
Quit being so freakin' selfish and pretending that millions of immigrants to the United States of America weren't doing exactly the same thing: seeking a better life for themselves and their families! Just because the US has been the dominating governmental figure in the world for the past ~150 years doesn't mean that that too is not subject to change.
If it's India, or China, or wherever's time to shine, let 'em shine! Yes, I too want America to continue to shine, and I think it will for quite some time, but that doesn't mean I think it will last forever, and I'm willing to adapt to that change should the time come.
I have a 1.33GHz Athlon, an nVidia GeForceFX 5600, and the bare essentials (crappy joystick) to run Falcon 4.0 (which I bought the week it was first released). I can tell you that my computer STILL struggles with the graphics engine if I crank everything all the way up. This game was completely ground-breaking in terms of realism when it first came out, and it is still an amazingly detailed game. It has a pretty steep learning curve (expect to do about 40 hours of flight training just to fly the plane properly in easy combat situations), but it has a truly robust combat 'theatre' mode where your missions directly affects (or indirectly affects, depending on the situation) the overall campaign to neutralize the enemy forces. The 'net connection code still remains a rather pathetic process of finding players online, but I haven't played with that in a couple years so the hackers may have made a lot of improvements over the years.
The AI is pretty advanced too. Former and then-current F-16 fighter pilots test flew the crap out of the game engine before it was released as well as acted as a big part of the development process, so you know this sim is realistic.
I should reload this game and play with it on WinXP (if I can) again. If you want to see your fancy video card put out some amazing in-game 3D graphics, load up Falcon 4.0.
If only they could release a ground war FPS game on par with Falcon 4.0, I'd be in gaming heaven.
Same here, her poor story makes me angry too. And I guarantee if I had a nickel for every time some asshole said things like that to my wife when I wasn't around (because jerks like that really make her feel inferior even when I know she's smarter than them by far), I'd be semi-retired by now! I agree with those who have posted that it's best to practice whipping out the 180 bitch-slap and just sell him back a load of crap to let him know he's inferior.
Like telling him that you were going to buy that brand new $3000 plasma screen w/ accompanying $2000 system for your husband's birthday, but since maybe you don't know that much that you'd better go get a second opinion from BestBuy first. You know, really stick it to him. Now I realize that some women feel intimidated by losers like the dude in the post, in which case I would simply do that about face, call up the manager of the store when you get home, start a little fake crying, explain the situation and abruptly hang up. I'm pretty sure the store manager will get so pissed that that employee will be on "unload the truck and clean the bathrooms" patrol for the next month!
Wow, so now all the Divx rippers will have to chop a few frames off of each divx they rip so each hash is different. Companies should really stop worrying about what their customers do with the materials they have purchased and figure out a way to actually encourage them to purchase said materials in the first place. And no, I'm not just talking about pr0n, but CD's and DVD's in general. If it's a quality movie or CD I'll buy it because I know I'll want to watch it over and over and add to my 'collection.' I've spent more on Peter Jackson's works in the past two years than I have on any other media combined. (at least that I own... not counting all the Blockbuster rentals)
I mean seriously, how much money is Blockbuster making right now renting movies (some of which get ripped by the Divx kiddies 'cause they have way too much time on their hands) while the music industry bemoans their inability to sell records like they did in the late 90's?
AND SUCKS! Sametime is ugly, barely configurable for the end-user (graphics, font sizes, smileys, etc.), and a cheap AIM knockoff anyways. (Before our Lotus Notes got upgraded to R6 you could still use Sametime to connect to an external AIM server if you had a login; it was that obvious)
Give your users Jabber. I've tried it out and it's probably the most built for Enterprise usage. Granted, I'm no IT manager, just an end user, but AIM, Yahoo!, and Sametime all more or less suck IMO. Trillian is great for home usage, but I don't think it's really meant to be an enterprise IM solution.
And btw, although I hate USING Sametime it is a godsend of a new communication tool. Sometimes it's much easier to use than email or the phone when working with fellow IT workers to send internal website addresses, shared folder directory locations, etc.
While I may not be able to speak to the drug pros/cons of someone with ADD, and I may not have direct evidence of neural feedback being useful in curing or helping someone with ADD, I can say that there is something to be said for neural feedback...
Case in point:
3 years ago I tore my ACL (knee ligament). After having surgery (while awake, they gave me an epideral to numb me up) I was sitting in the 'phase 1' recovery room on a bed, facing a wall with an EKG monitoring device. Quite boring I can assure you, as I had to sit in this incredibly cold hospital room for about an hour all by myself while I 'recovered'. Mind you, I was fully awake and aware at this time. Anyways, to pass the time I started 'playing' with the EKG machine. I would concentrate on the heartbeat monitor, and using nothing more than breathing and mental exercise I was able to somewhat control my heartrate. I could keep it at a steady 64 bpm, lower it to 45 bpm, or increase it to 75 bpm, all using the feedback of where my heartrate was at as displayed by the EKG. While this was more of a mental 'keep myself preoccupied' exercise, I was indeed able to alter my body's operation of an automatic function (my heart beating) using my mind alone. Just an example of how I think neural feedback *could* be useful in your daughter's case.
OK, so about a year and a half ago I was a software tester working on testing out the mainframe billing engine that used COBOL, JCL, stored procedures, and a whole ton of other stuff to send out automated online billing to our customers.
One day I am required by my coworker to test 'the dinosaur' by setting up some generic bill requests to send through the API's to test the billing engine. So I input all the parameters a few times (there were like 30+ that you had to hand-key into each API call) and start getting bored. Now when she had told me input these parameters, I was supposed to use the reference website "www.testbills123.com/index.html" (just an example of our actual URL) as the 'view your bill' field setting since that would use that URL in the bill when it was sent, so that if you viewed this online bill in your email inbox it and tried to click on the link it would just resolve back to our home webpage.
Well she didn't really explain that reason for using that particular URL to me in detail. So after a few API calls, I'm getting bored and decide to at least make my mundane software testing life that day at least enjoyable. Being the sarcastic dork that I am, I start inputting "www.thedinosaursucks.com" and "blowme.org" as the URL's in the 'view your bill' field. Yeah, I thought I was pretty funny, because these would show up on her report of all the 'bills' sent through the billing engine and make her chuckle.
Well, later that day I'm looking at the test bills through our online email viewing site. My URL's don't appear, but the link button that uses those URLs does. For some reason I thought that my URL's didn't matter and were just there to satisfy the API calls.
You probably know how the story ends. 1 minute later I'm in a panic and thinking that our system is somehow resolving addresses incorrectly and redirecting 'view bills' requests to japanese pr0n sites. 20 minutes later I am still very red in the face because everyone in my 40+ person department now knows of my "pr0n habit" when testing software. I still get razzed about that to this day.
I was having the same problems too, until I started searching with +forum in my searches. Almost all corporate entities are rightfully VERY afraid of ever hosting a forum for their customers because they could never effectively control it to be nothing more than ra-ra-sis-koom-ba comments. In fact, I've found that when I need a factual review of a product these days, nothing beats searching a few forums to find some balanced reviews by users. Sure, people may troll forums, and often do *cough* slashdot *cough*, but the majority of the comments come from people generally interested in discussing the topic, product, etc.
So far I've *mostly* read two books that I thoroughly enjoy:
1. Enemy at the Gates - Yes, the book that the movie was based upon. However the movie (I believe - haven't seen it yet) deals with a very small (but important) portion of the overall battle. Very gripping details of the mundane soldier's life in battle to the grandiose schemes of Hitler and Stalin. Very good.
2. AI Application Programming - While this is meant to give any programmer the basics for how to program AI code that works in software, I find it to actually be a good overview w/ source code of the various AI research areas out there right now. Pick it up if you're ready for some thinking, but be forewarned, the author uses C only. Maybe not the best choice for AI programming in general, but it's still quite readable.
One book I wouldn't recommend:
The Purpose Driven Life - While I don't have any major theological issues with Mr. Warren's writing style, I found this to be a rather simplistic, and therefore dumb, book. You'll find much more depth and thought provoking reading going through the Old (or New Testament;) ) of the Bible. (As mentioned by a previous poster.;) ) Besides, 40 chapters of mindless drivel about all types of topics that the Bible is much more capable of handling on its own (because it does), and in more depth than Rick Warren does, seems like a waste of time to me. I skimmed this book and found that reading his little blurbs of 3 sentences each at the end of each chapter completely captured the drivel of each chapter in full. And if you happen to go to a Christian church and they happen to be using this book across all sectors of the church, make sure you know what this book is about before you decide to commit yourself to enduring it's lengthy drivel.
The "ant analogy" that MUTE is referring to is actually a rather well-known AI programming algorithm technique known as the ANT Algorithm. So although Freenet may be routing stuff through everyone, I don't think it's doing any optimization of the routing, thereby slowing the "travel time" to a crawl over long distances (i.e. lots of nodes). Although I think it would be possible for MUTE to be circumvented, at this time that would be a really difficult task given the following two benefits of MUTE:
1) randomized initialization of the 'virtual IP' as they call it. This will effectively KILL current companies tracking abilities who are in league with the RIAA.
2) RSA encryption of the traffic in and out of each node. I wouldn't be surprised if John Ashcroft finds out about this one and really gets pissed, because a native file transfer encryption scheme over a real-time random path through constantly changing nodes makes it REAL hard to track traffic.
Mind you, I haven't tried MUTE out yet, but I will be this weekend for SURE!!! This tech looks like a real gold-mine for finally moving files around the internet much more securely than current P2P systems. And using an AI optimization system for the file transfers. Nice!
"Microsoft is strategy, Ellison is just plain psycho. Think of the villian in the movies who cuts down his own henchmen with a machine gun to make a point."
Read any of the Chinese classic military works, such as "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. You'll find that hacking off the head of an insurgent who threatens to throw the army/citizenry/etc. into a panic can be an effective tool to keep the entire rest of the army following orders.
Oracle and Microsoft are just sacrificing a few lambs now and then to keep the rest of the sheep in line.
But you'll also notice in those works that a smaller army can easily defeat a numerically superior and more powerful army through smarter use of the resources at their disposal. Much like how open source software methodologies have been cutting into Microsoft and Oracle more and more for the past 10 years.
An article in the student magazine that the IEEE puts out a while back talked about this. You can actually apply for a Security clearance cert, but the backlog is so bad that you may end up waiting a year or more to get it. Apparently companies with big government contracts can get that same paperwork pushed through faster because they actually have a job to do NOW, vs. your request merely to have a US government security clearance just for the sake of having it.
So yes, you can apply for one, but it's an expensive, long process doing it on your own vs. having a company pay for it to get you hired on for their government contract.
Thanks a lot! I just spewed scalding hot coffee all over my already "messy" keybaord due to the 2.6.0 kernel release announcement! I gotta go, it smells like ammonia-drenched Starbucks at my desk now...
Are you kidding? Customer demographics is a gold-mine for the marketing department! That is why they ask for your address, or at the very least your zip. If I'm a retailer of fine clothing and can determine that my biggest customer base is located in the richest part of the city, why waste time marketing to the homeless downtown?! I'm gonna send my flyers to those suburbs where all my customer's come from. Don't underestimate the power of data. Knowledge is indeed power, which is why it is sometimes misused in pursuit of additional power.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed the interview kept mentioning that the 'middle class' in India constituted only 10-15% of the entire population of India. Well at 1 billion people +, that equates to 100,000,000 - 150,000,000 middle class Indians. When the US only has a population of 350,000,000 (a guesstimate) TOTAL, that Indian middle-class appears quite large in comparison. With the college tuition rates, government subsidies, and other factors in effect in India, it appears to me that they are primed to quickly over-take the U.S. as the premier investment opportunity for the world within the next 10 years or less. Those of us in America had better not become too comfortable with our posh standards of living as they currently are. I fear they will not last much longer.
Well, while I fully agree with you, I do think there are much more informed (and reliable) sources of information than here on slashdot.
Why don't you ask an extremely knowledgeable professional or two if you work for such a money-rich company?!?! You're asking a bunch of /.'ers how we've dealt with structuring a Fortune 500's OSS strategy??? You're either crazy, or just plain stupid. You're going to get hundreds of disparate answers from this crowd. If you're hoping to save some money, why don't you first spend some to make a lot more? (in cost savings)
Better yet, do your own research to find this stuff out! These 'Ask Slashdot' questions sometimes truly amaze me. The poster of this 'Ask Slashdot' probably makes 2-3 times what I make (if not 10x-20x in stock options alone) and yet he's willing to listen to my poorly informed ideas on such an important matter?! Truly hilarious!
No sense of humor either. It's sad, really.
Aw crap! When is /. gonna implement Bayesian based spam filters for spam posts?
Andy? Andy! A virus is on my computer, come home!
Andy? Andy! A virus is on my computer, come home!
They certainly can. That is if you consider shooting the patrons a crime.
There have been several instances of violence at Night Club's, mainly from playing makeout games.
One instance that happened here at a local club:
Club A is at one physical address, Club B at another.
Player at A kisses player at B's girlfriend.
Player B gets P.O.'d and finds where the other player is partying nightly.
Player B then looks up who owns the club, and finds Club A's address.
Player B drives to Club A and asks manager where player "A" is.
Player B lies in wait in the parking lot and frags Player A (for real) when he leaves.
----------
So explain to me again how cyber cafe's *cause* crime?
Cue Zoolander quotation device:
... Bioinformatics."
"That bioinformatics is so hot right now!
Hey, especially if Bush gets reelected!
More wars = More lost limbs = more demand for prosthetics = Profit!
ERROR!
Undefined logic in substring line 2.
"More lost limbs = Profit!"
All of this "advice" coming from a seasoned, some might even say: jaded, software company executive.
You seem to think that the "big" firms are more well established, have more experience, and can undercut the "little guy" whenever they need to just to make a point. You know what? You're absolutely right!
However you forget about the fact that all of the "little players" in the business world of the USA continue to innovate, grow, and generally bolster the economy. How is that possible? Well maybe it's because all of those little players know how to take care of the little corner grocery store, the laundry shop, the small home business consultant, and others who needs some very specific software code to help them do their job. The little player can also move far more quickly to take care of those customers because the overhead due to internal politics and budgetary infighting of the big players tends to slow down the responsiveness of the Microsoft's, IBM's, and Apple's of the US.
I found your post to be NOT Insightful as modded, and just had to respond. Yes, there are a great many obstacles to be had for the small business owner, but that does not mean they are insurmountable. If they were, then we'd be living in a far more socialistic country with far less innovation and creativity than we do today. Your attitude is exactly the kind of attitude that gets you referred to as a 'PHB,' and quite frankly, I think you deserve it.
Faith in your government, faith in your own abilities, faith in the economy, etc.
Do all of you slashdotters love the USA so much that although we've got crappy laws like the DMCA, contadictory rulings in the court systems, and politicians more skilled in slick speech making than in actual governance and leadership that you wouldn't change your place of living, living standards, or other things to do what it is you want to do?
If halving your salary so you can stay near your family is most important to you, then do it!
If moving to India (or wherever) to "go where the jobs are" so you can keep up with that posh living standard you're so accustomed to, then do it!
If putting yourself through med. school, law school, or a PhD program to make yourself a more desirable US job candidate is what you've got to do these days to stay afloat in the U.S. job market, then do it!
Quit being so freakin' selfish and pretending that millions of immigrants to the United States of America weren't doing exactly the same thing: seeking a better life for themselves and their families! Just because the US has been the dominating governmental figure in the world for the past ~150 years doesn't mean that that too is not subject to change.
If it's India, or China, or wherever's time to shine, let 'em shine! Yes, I too want America to continue to shine, and I think it will for quite some time, but that doesn't mean I think it will last forever, and I'm willing to adapt to that change should the time come.
I have a 1.33GHz Athlon, an nVidia GeForceFX 5600, and the bare essentials (crappy joystick) to run Falcon 4.0 (which I bought the week it was first released). I can tell you that my computer STILL struggles with the graphics engine if I crank everything all the way up. This game was completely ground-breaking in terms of realism when it first came out, and it is still an amazingly detailed game. It has a pretty steep learning curve (expect to do about 40 hours of flight training just to fly the plane properly in easy combat situations), but it has a truly robust combat 'theatre' mode where your missions directly affects (or indirectly affects, depending on the situation) the overall campaign to neutralize the enemy forces. The 'net connection code still remains a rather pathetic process of finding players online, but I haven't played with that in a couple years so the hackers may have made a lot of improvements over the years.
The AI is pretty advanced too. Former and then-current F-16 fighter pilots test flew the crap out of the game engine before it was released as well as acted as a big part of the development process, so you know this sim is realistic.
I should reload this game and play with it on WinXP (if I can) again. If you want to see your fancy video card put out some amazing in-game 3D graphics, load up Falcon 4.0.
If only they could release a ground war FPS game on par with Falcon 4.0, I'd be in gaming heaven.
Same here, her poor story makes me angry too. And I guarantee if I had a nickel for every time some asshole said things like that to my wife when I wasn't around (because jerks like that really make her feel inferior even when I know she's smarter than them by far), I'd be semi-retired by now! I agree with those who have posted that it's best to practice whipping out the 180 bitch-slap and just sell him back a load of crap to let him know he's inferior.
Like telling him that you were going to buy that brand new $3000 plasma screen w/ accompanying $2000 system for your husband's birthday, but since maybe you don't know that much that you'd better go get a second opinion from BestBuy first. You know, really stick it to him. Now I realize that some women feel intimidated by losers like the dude in the post, in which case I would simply do that about face, call up the manager of the store when you get home, start a little fake crying, explain the situation and abruptly hang up. I'm pretty sure the store manager will get so pissed that that employee will be on "unload the truck and clean the bathrooms" patrol for the next month!
Wow, so now all the Divx rippers will have to chop a few frames off of each divx they rip so each hash is different. Companies should really stop worrying about what their customers do with the materials they have purchased and figure out a way to actually encourage them to purchase said materials in the first place. And no, I'm not just talking about pr0n, but CD's and DVD's in general. If it's a quality movie or CD I'll buy it because I know I'll want to watch it over and over and add to my 'collection.' I've spent more on Peter Jackson's works in the past two years than I have on any other media combined. (at least that I own... not counting all the Blockbuster rentals)
I mean seriously, how much money is Blockbuster making right now renting movies (some of which get ripped by the Divx kiddies 'cause they have way too much time on their hands) while the music industry bemoans their inability to sell records like they did in the late 90's?
AND SUCKS! Sametime is ugly, barely configurable for the end-user (graphics, font sizes, smileys, etc.), and a cheap AIM knockoff anyways. (Before our Lotus Notes got upgraded to R6 you could still use Sametime to connect to an external AIM server if you had a login; it was that obvious)
Give your users Jabber. I've tried it out and it's probably the most built for Enterprise usage. Granted, I'm no IT manager, just an end user, but AIM, Yahoo!, and Sametime all more or less suck IMO. Trillian is great for home usage, but I don't think it's really meant to be an enterprise IM solution.
And btw, although I hate USING Sametime it is a godsend of a new communication tool. Sometimes it's much easier to use than email or the phone when working with fellow IT workers to send internal website addresses, shared folder directory locations, etc.
While I may not be able to speak to the drug pros/cons of someone with ADD, and I may not have direct evidence of neural feedback being useful in curing or helping someone with ADD, I can say that there is something to be said for neural feedback...
Case in point:
3 years ago I tore my ACL (knee ligament). After having surgery (while awake, they gave me an epideral to numb me up) I was sitting in the 'phase 1' recovery room on a bed, facing a wall with an EKG monitoring device. Quite boring I can assure you, as I had to sit in this incredibly cold hospital room for about an hour all by myself while I 'recovered'. Mind you, I was fully awake and aware at this time. Anyways, to pass the time I started 'playing' with the EKG machine. I would concentrate on the heartbeat monitor, and using nothing more than breathing and mental exercise I was able to somewhat control my heartrate. I could keep it at a steady 64 bpm, lower it to 45 bpm, or increase it to 75 bpm, all using the feedback of where my heartrate was at as displayed by the EKG. While this was more of a mental 'keep myself preoccupied' exercise, I was indeed able to alter my body's operation of an automatic function (my heart beating) using my mind alone. Just an example of how I think neural feedback *could* be useful in your daughter's case.
OK, so about a year and a half ago I was a software tester working on testing out the mainframe billing engine that used COBOL, JCL, stored procedures, and a whole ton of other stuff to send out automated online billing to our customers.
One day I am required by my coworker to test 'the dinosaur' by setting up some generic bill requests to send through the API's to test the billing engine. So I input all the parameters a few times (there were like 30+ that you had to hand-key into each API call) and start getting bored. Now when she had told me input these parameters, I was supposed to use the reference website "www.testbills123.com/index.html" (just an example of our actual URL) as the 'view your bill' field setting since that would use that URL in the bill when it was sent, so that if you viewed this online bill in your email inbox it and tried to click on the link it would just resolve back to our home webpage.
Well she didn't really explain that reason for using that particular URL to me in detail. So after a few API calls, I'm getting bored and decide to at least make my mundane software testing life that day at least enjoyable. Being the sarcastic dork that I am, I start inputting "www.thedinosaursucks.com" and "blowme.org" as the URL's in the 'view your bill' field. Yeah, I thought I was pretty funny, because these would show up on her report of all the 'bills' sent through the billing engine and make her chuckle.
Well, later that day I'm looking at the test bills through our online email viewing site. My URL's don't appear, but the link button that uses those URLs does. For some reason I thought that my URL's didn't matter and were just there to satisfy the API calls.
You probably know how the story ends. 1 minute later I'm in a panic and thinking that our system is somehow resolving addresses incorrectly and redirecting 'view bills' requests to japanese pr0n sites. 20 minutes later I am still very red in the face because everyone in my 40+ person department now knows of my "pr0n habit" when testing software. I still get razzed about that to this day.
I was having the same problems too, until I started searching with +forum in my searches. Almost all corporate entities are rightfully VERY afraid of ever hosting a forum for their customers because they could never effectively control it to be nothing more than ra-ra-sis-koom-ba comments. In fact, I've found that when I need a factual review of a product these days, nothing beats searching a few forums to find some balanced reviews by users. Sure, people may troll forums, and often do *cough* slashdot *cough*, but the majority of the comments come from people generally interested in discussing the topic, product, etc.
They linked to an 'About.com' article, and therefore must have been drinking too much beer this afternoon.
Thank you.
So far I've *mostly* read two books that I thoroughly enjoy:
;) ) of the Bible. (As mentioned by a previous poster. ;) ) Besides, 40 chapters of mindless drivel about all types of topics that the Bible is much more capable of handling on its own (because it does), and in more depth than Rick Warren does, seems like a waste of time to me. I skimmed this book and found that reading his little blurbs of 3 sentences each at the end of each chapter completely captured the drivel of each chapter in full. And if you happen to go to a Christian church and they happen to be using this book across all sectors of the church, make sure you know what this book is about before you decide to commit yourself to enduring it's lengthy drivel.
1. Enemy at the Gates - Yes, the book that the movie was based upon. However the movie (I believe - haven't seen it yet) deals with a very small (but important) portion of the overall battle. Very gripping details of the mundane soldier's life in battle to the grandiose schemes of Hitler and Stalin. Very good.
2. AI Application Programming - While this is meant to give any programmer the basics for how to program AI code that works in software, I find it to actually be a good overview w/ source code of the various AI research areas out there right now. Pick it up if you're ready for some thinking, but be forewarned, the author uses C only. Maybe not the best choice for AI programming in general, but it's still quite readable.
One book I wouldn't recommend:
The Purpose Driven Life - While I don't have any major theological issues with Mr. Warren's writing style, I found this to be a rather simplistic, and therefore dumb, book. You'll find much more depth and thought provoking reading going through the Old (or New Testament
The "ant analogy" that MUTE is referring to is actually a rather well-known AI programming algorithm technique known as the ANT Algorithm. So although Freenet may be routing stuff through everyone, I don't think it's doing any optimization of the routing, thereby slowing the "travel time" to a crawl over long distances (i.e. lots of nodes). Although I think it would be possible for MUTE to be circumvented, at this time that would be a really difficult task given the following two benefits of MUTE:
1) randomized initialization of the 'virtual IP' as they call it. This will effectively KILL current companies tracking abilities who are in league with the RIAA.
2) RSA encryption of the traffic in and out of each node. I wouldn't be surprised if John Ashcroft finds out about this one and really gets pissed, because a native file transfer encryption scheme over a real-time random path through constantly changing nodes makes it REAL hard to track traffic.
Mind you, I haven't tried MUTE out yet, but I will be this weekend for SURE!!! This tech looks like a real gold-mine for finally moving files around the internet much more securely than current P2P systems. And using an AI optimization system for the file transfers. Nice!
"Microsoft is strategy, Ellison is just plain psycho. Think of the villian in the movies who cuts down his own henchmen with a machine gun to make a point."
Read any of the Chinese classic military works, such as "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. You'll find that hacking off the head of an insurgent who threatens to throw the army/citizenry/etc. into a panic can be an effective tool to keep the entire rest of the army following orders.
Oracle and Microsoft are just sacrificing a few lambs now and then to keep the rest of the sheep in line.
But you'll also notice in those works that a smaller army can easily defeat a numerically superior and more powerful army through smarter use of the resources at their disposal. Much like how open source software methodologies have been cutting into Microsoft and Oracle more and more for the past 10 years.
An article in the student magazine that the IEEE puts out a while back talked about this. You can actually apply for a Security clearance cert, but the backlog is so bad that you may end up waiting a year or more to get it. Apparently companies with big government contracts can get that same paperwork pushed through faster because they actually have a job to do NOW, vs. your request merely to have a US government security clearance just for the sake of having it.
So yes, you can apply for one, but it's an expensive, long process doing it on your own vs. having a company pay for it to get you hired on for their government contract.
Thanks a lot! I just spewed scalding hot coffee all over my already "messy" keybaord due to the 2.6.0 kernel release announcement! I gotta go, it smells like ammonia-drenched Starbucks at my desk now...
Are you kidding? Customer demographics is a gold-mine for the marketing department! That is why they ask for your address, or at the very least your zip. If I'm a retailer of fine clothing and can determine that my biggest customer base is located in the richest part of the city, why waste time marketing to the homeless downtown?! I'm gonna send my flyers to those suburbs where all my customer's come from. Don't underestimate the power of data. Knowledge is indeed power, which is why it is sometimes misused in pursuit of additional power.