I'm in Downtown Bellevue.... where is it free around here? (I'm thinking that free wifi may be available in the city of Seattle itself, but that it's harder to find out in the suburbs....)
I currently pay $11.95/month for the cometa alternative to TMobile which gets me in at Bell Square and Barnes and Noble (and the Starbucks attached to it:-) -- since I object to TMobile's usurious pricing of their service at $30 for non-users of TMobile cell phones.
Back on the IBM mainframe, there existed any number of utility programs for doing things like copying files or libraries (think: zip archives). This being the IBM mainframe, things tended to have funny names. The one which would copy a file was called "IEBGENER" ("GENER" for "generate a dataset (file) by copying this other one into it"... nice naming logic, huh? but "COPY" was already taken, so...).
OK, so back in the day, I was one of those students. You know, one of the ones they always worried about because it seemed that we tended to spend so much time on the system, exploring so much stuff that wasn't involved in a formal class assignment. And I, well, often used IEBGENER to, oh, let's say, browse the contents of various files on the system in locations other than my personal directory.
At some point, the lead hacker-tracker decided to attempt to convince me that this was Wrong. I persisted in my belief that, especially as far as system files belonging to no one person in particular go, IEBGENER'ing them might be "against rules", but it was NOT Wrong, because it caused no harm that I could see. This actually prompted much debate over the course of many months (I think the guy in question had a background in Philosophy, and he was intent on convincing me that his view of the ethics of this was Right).
He finally decided it was a lost cause when I stated simply, "Look. If I could IEBGENER a car, and leave the original right where I found it, I would, because no one's losing ANYTHING they would have had if I hadn't done so. Not the car companies since I wouldn't buy a car anyway, not the person to whom the car belongs because they've still got it. In fact, it'd be GOOD for the economy, because I'd have to buy gas, and have it repaired, and such."
(Yes, Ken, I still remember that I contended to Rikard that I'd IEBGENER a car if it were physically possible to do so. Most amazingly, I lived to tell about it.;-)
Here in the Seattle/Bellevue area, most Barnes and Noble bookstores tend to have Starbucks attached (rather than featuring a "Barnes and Noble cafe" inside). Seattle/Bellevue Barnes and Noble stores also feature inexpensive local area wifi -- $11.95/month -- via Cometa Networks. Quite convenient and cost-effective if you don't need the nationwide coverage provided by the likes of TMobile.:-)
I'm writing this message from the Starbucks attached to the downtown Bellevue Barnes and Noble, via a Cometa connection. Works JUST FINE, and often has signal strength better than Starbucks' own (more expensive) TMobile wifi.
The funny thing is, once you actually know what you're doing (as in undertanding relationships, SQL and what not), access is a pretty good tool...
A funnier thing is, some problems attributed to Access some years ago, WERE NOT ACTUALLY ACCESS ISSUES, but instead were attributable to the design of Windows File Sharing. Any product that did database updates via shared files had the same vulnerability.
Older versions of Windows File Sharing didn't quite do byte-level locking with, ahem, the temporal precision that computer scientists tend to expect when we think of the concept of byte locks.
So, under multi-user access, if two people happened to be updating information that happens to be in the same block of disk (or perhaps whose chunk of index is in the same block of disk), across the network, the.MDB would likely find itself in need of recovery.
Now imagine that your employer is developing a product that does similar database'y things across Windows File Sharing... and experiencing similar issues. Imagine that the information that WFS doesn't quite work well in that scenario IS available within MS, so that they can tell customers to upgrade to different versions of Windows or different database software... but is considered PROPRIETARY INFORMATION! Seriously, there was a private, non-customer-available knowledge base article. Somehow I discovered its existence and number (OK, it had something to do with my MS rep sending out a Word document newsletter to customers with the proprietary stuff deleted, and that old bug in Word/OLE where deleted stuff was still stored in the file, and my fondness for UNIX and "strings"... ahh, loved that one until everyone noticed it and it was fixed;-), but actually getting the contents of the article out of MS was a bit of a challenge.
I haven't dug into Access since they replaced the engine... so I don't know what's up with it lately... but back 5 years ago or so, that's the way it was, out in the ISV (indedepent software developer) trenches.
accepting the line from tech support that you have to get "used to the product"....
My brother actually got this line from a Fujitsu tech support guy when he complained that his laptop didn't always read the CD-rom when a new one was inserted
I had the same problem with a Fujitsu Lifebook also circa 1999. Funnythingbut, I put up with this for a couple years, then the month my warranty was expiring, included it on a list of about a dozen defects when returning my laptop for "repair" to CompUSA. They gave me a new Toshiba 5x faster than the Fujitsu.
Party on, extended warranty business for laptops! Putting up with the CD weirdness for a couple years, was worth it to gain myself a self-renewing laptop... which is, of course, itself protected by an extended warranty I bought for it (pay $350 every few years, get brand new laptop every few years for free? I can deal with it...)
[ For the record, I view extended warranties on just about anything EXCEPT laptops, and maybe your new Canon XL1 camcorder, to be evil. So don't interpret the above to be an endorsement of extended warranties for any time other than those FEW times when you actually stand to profit from buying them. ]
And it works even better than it would first appear. If YOU got a small check from *Knuth* for finding an error in some of his work, would you cash it.... or would you frame it and hang it in your office for the rest of eternity, for your peers and technical managers to see, as one of my friends did? (Knuth offered a bounty on some of his books as well.)
So, Knuth gets the bug report, spends the time to write a check, and never sees the $50 or whatever disappear from his checking account, because some geek out there thinks....
"Dollar varlue of my time spent sending note to Knuth about error in book: about $10. Getting check from Knuth for finding said error: $50. Hanging said check on wall for bragging rights: priceless.;-)"
Of course, I suppose a modern/.'er with more mercenary inclinations might see/say it differently:
1. Receive check from Knuth
2. Post ad on ebay
3. Profit
"Still relatively old and a pain to use" I suppose, but really, aside from probably still lacking things like pipes to connect commands, it's not that bad. TSO CLIST is really an OK scripting environment.
In uni 15-20 years ago, I used the raw TSO command-line interface to MVS (analogous to cmd.exe or/bin/sh). They also had a menu-driven interface available (ISPF) where one navigated to various menu panels with a hideous =3.1.4 syntax describing the path through menu options to get to the desired panel; panels did things like allocate disk space, copy files, submit jobs to run, etc. It seemed to save time for those who couldn't do TSO alloc's and stuff off the top of their heads, but it slowed me down because the time delays between panel displays made it obvious that ISPF was a bit of a lumbering hulk and the raw command line environment quite efficient.
Now sonny, you want hard to use... imagineif... you knew a little bit about IKJEFT01 (believe it or not, the load module that "ran" a TSO session under MVS, like/bin/sh runs a shell in UNIX)... and you knew that it limited the commands you could use in your interactive sessions based on your account's security designation... and you knew that if you started a separate copy of IKJEFT01, you could get it to execute any command defined in the command table regardless of security level required... THEN things get a little complex, because you had to write your own command interpreter that communicated between a copy of ikjeft01 and your terminal session -- and do it in such a way that it didn't eat up so much CPU time that the admins immediately came a-callin'.
Gack, I quite enjoyed hacking the school's mainframe via JCL and 370 ASM back when I was a teenage geek girl.... when school practiced the fine art of information-hiding and refused me access to certain manuals, I ran to my compuserve account and begged any mainframe systems folks in PROGFORUM for exactly the ones I needed, contentedly marching into school with them within a week. The lead systems programmer finally just gave up stressing over keeping me out of things, gave me access to some utility macro libraries, answered a question or two for me now and then, and promised to hold me accountable if I ever did one iota of damage. How well did I do at avoiding this? Well, when I did something (non-technical) to politically upset the school's computer center director and he pointed at me and said to the systems programmer, "Off with her head, use anything you've got on her to make her go away from here permanently"... his answer was NO.
For the record, I'm only 39, but I have been paid to program in COBOL, FORTRAN, ASM/370, C/370, SAS and PL/I (a lot like C), in addition to the usual suspects like C, C++, Visual Basic, perl, SQL, etc.
And what do you mean, can't get by on anything older than 5 years for a workstation? My 10+ year old Sparc 10 is still a darn fine UNIX desktop from which to manage a network.
I've been trying for tickets since 9:55am PDT and finally got through to customer service to ask "what's going on?".
In case you're wondering, too....
The scoop: Apparently movietickets.com (the only way to get trilogy tickets for Cinerama) is experiencing technical difficulties connecting to some or all AMC theaters. As of 10:35am PDT they are supposedly NOT yet sold out... they haven't been able to sell ANYTHING yet. The customer service rep advised me to try back every half hour.
He saw what is the biggest problem with the net at least five years before anybody else.... In the last three years alone, the net has become the focal point for every immature jackass on Earth
Ah, decay-of-Usenet time is relative to one's experience base. Last three years? Where were you before then? Back in the mid 1980's, Usenet was THE place to find the clued. You needed a BSD tape you were licensed for but could not obtain through official channels? A post would get you one. You wanted to discuss Pyramid computer assembly language? A few folks on Usenet would admit to knowing about it. Wanted to install a second hard drive on your 3B1? The only source for the required board and/or circuit diagram, depending on your preference, was a Usenet.denizen. And those who were clued, if they didn't have access to Usenet, sought out inexpensive ways to get it, with the same urgency that the hopeless among us today search out pr0n.;-) Yes, it WAS that valuable, that geeks would pay for it (not for the whole darn net, JUST for Usenet). Since my school was pretty clueless and wouldn't put up a Usenet feed, I (gulp, major disclosure here;-) subscribed to the PC Pursuit Telenet service (not telnet, telenet -- a sprint service that let you do after-hours datacalls for a flat monthly fee) and Portal (known even in the 1980's as "the portal potty", for being the place where anyone with a dollar could get online and contribute to the death of Usenet as we knew it;-) to get my Usenet access.
As of the mid-1990's, many/most of the clued had retreated to mailing lists, because Canter&Siegal (sp? I am NOT going to look up the proper name synonym for "spammer trash") had given those who hadn't yet realized it, ample warning in 1994 that the rest of the world had found our playground and would not treat it with the courtesy that we did.
Of course, many folks weren't even online until 1995 or so, so their "Usenet good old days" memories are different. And surely even 1995-or 2000- vintage Usenet looks good in comparison to today's. But believe me, Usenet was filled with absolute worthless rantings years before Y2K. Does that mean it's useless? No. I dejanews all the time (consider me a radical reactionary for refusing to adopt the google url, if you must), though when posting my own questions and answers, I'm much more likely to use mailing lists and web boards than the net, these days.
I really never thought I'd be saying *anything* like this, ever, but having recently been the target of a breaking-and-entering that was foiled when a certain geek (me) with an air rifle threatened consequences, I'm glad that piece of equipment was in my house. My roommate wasn't home that night, and I have no idea what *might* have happened, had I not been able to scare the intruder away. First person experience can change one's entire outlook. -- * Helen *
Was that the way out of the "all alike" or "all different" maze? (20 years after I last played it.... Frightening.)
That being said, with how slow the plumbing is around here (no, I can't call roto rooter, it's an apartment; it's at the whim of complex management), I wouldn't want to be adding anything to that pipe.
Dang, though. Just when there might've been a way to get high-speed Internet to this apartment. -- * Helen *
Keep the database on CD or on hardware-write-protected disk (if your OS supports this), with a minimal system using a very minimally sized hard disk, so at least it'd take a little bit more effort to replace with bogus entries. -- * Helen *
I read this. I paused. I didn't get it. I thunk about the alien lifestyle.
I looked immediately around me... at the TV, the laptop on my lap, the sofa I was sitting on, which I often fall asleep on, in this position, after too much tech writing or coding. Hmmm. I live in a 2BR apartment, and given the hectic pace of the last few weeks of my life as a freelancer, I might as well be living in a dorm room, because when deadlines get tight, I find a place that has almost everything I need and just stay put there -- because moving around unnecessarily takes time.
Much of the time, I'm in this mode, and wouldn't need a separate DivX player, but on those occasions where my electronic bits and pieces are spread out among several rooms, it might be handy and might be worth chipping my as-yet-unmodded PS2 for.
FYI: I got reacquainted with the rest of my apartment this past weekend, post-major-deadline... and then another deadline crunch hit. To be continued.... -- * Helen *
Many, Many compamies have software built for them that is so highly speicalized that it has no use to any one else, and is for internal use. Going to open source wouldn't hurt these compnaies in the slightest.
It certainly does have the potential to hurt those companies. Many companies view their software as a trade secret. For example, it may reveal things they track about customers that improve sales, or it may say a bit about how their distribution system works, or how they manage to keep their inventory turn quite as low as it is, etc.
What's interesting about business software is what it reveals about the business -- things that humans often have to sign NDA's to even hear about. Giving the code away could equal giving away competitive advantage, for many organizations.
--
* Helen *
Then again, it's Monday. Maybe we're supposed to be "for" MS in this suit, today;-), and someone was merely voicing the slashdot summary viewpoint of the day regarding anyone taking a contrarian position. (???)
Sorry you're still at 0 despite my request. FWIW, I wouldn't like to see more states join this, for a variety of reasons, but your observation about those who stood up and dissented is still valid.
Someone mod this guy back up to at least 1 if he's not back there already by the time I finish writing this....
If I had modpoints today, I'd undamage this one, currently at 0. Whether I agree with the comment or not, it's a valid sentiment for someone to express (that going against the flow, against both the government and a very successful corporation, takes guts) and didn't deserve to be modded down.
On another note, KI, last I heard all the other states had signed on... WV was the last of the "uncommitted" to be choosing a side. So I doubt there will be a "#3". -- * Helen *
Folks, I just spoke with Ron. He's under deadline and has only minutes left to finish his story. Remember what it was like when you had papers due in college? I think it's best to leave him alone on this even if you have the world's greatest comment to share.... -- * Helen *
Along these lines, I attended the Windows 95 launch carnival in Redmond in August, 1995. Say what you will about MS; they sure threw a nice geek party that day.
Among the activities there were carnival games whose prizes were things like disk drives. I mastered the Western Digital ring-toss. Sadly, not thoroughly enough to win the top prize of a 200meg WD disk drive. But well enough for duffle bags to be a lock for me. I won 3 for myself, and 2 for friends (there was no limit on the number of prizes a person could win).
I wonder how many people who won the 200meg disk drives are still using them. In contrast, I still use my duffle bags as carry-on and as that invaluable extra piece of luggage stuffed into one's luggage, should it be needed for the return trip. I daresay they've outlasted multiple pieces of luggage/totebag that I've actually purchased. (If whoever came up with the prizes for WD for that event is reading slashdot: GOOD JOB on picking that duffle bag supplier!) -- * Helen *
Many apps folks just want to get their line-of-business projects done under deadline, and find themselves severely restricted in how they can implementsolutions, by their organization's network security departments. No, we can't open any more ports on the firewall. No, B2B commerce is not an acceptable reason. You'll have to convince that Fortune 50 company to do e-commerce another way (from a staffer at a Fortune 1000) if you want on-line transactions with them.
Since almost all organizations allow HTTP through their routers, SOAP over HTTP is the way around this bureaucratic/political issue. I'm not defending this from a security standpoint, just explaining how apps folks (who tend to care more about pleasing their immediate stakeholders and bringing projects in under deadline, than security) tend to think.
I haven't played in the MAPI space in several years, so take this as direction but not The Definitive Word.
Outlook/Exchange USED TO require connection via a proprietary protocol, using MAPI. Since Exchange now supports POP3 and MAPI, in many cases, the lock-in may be as simple as the fact that apps are written using MAPI, and those apps are hardcoded to use the proprietary protocol, because they were written back in the day that there wasn't much other choice. (I can't think of any feature in the Outlook/Exchange connection that absolutely REQUIRES the use of a non-open protocol -- anyone??) [ That being said, Outlook's IMAP support could be better -- I don't think the same perf work has been done on their IMAP as on their POP3, which as another poster pointed out, has gotten a lot more efficient since the old days. ]
What is the proprietary protocol called? It's been 5 years, and I don't recall. It is not a typical MS "embrace and extend" of a standard protocol, though. When MS was designing Exchange, it had not yet noticed the Internet. The important thing to note is that merely coding to the MAPI API doesn't necessarily tie you to the proprietary protocol (unless you're using functions available in it and not in the open protocols, if any).
Using your nomenclature, where -- is a funcall and == is the wire protocol, the conversation basically looks like:
A transport provider is the interface between the MAPI functions and the wire protocol, be it the proprietary protocol, or SMTP, or POP3, or whatever. THEORETICALLY, the MAPI API was designed to allow drop-in replacement of the transport_provider.dll layer -- but I'm not sure how well that works in practice.
In addition to the proprietary protocol, there are other lock-in features to Exchange such as being able to access the message store as if it was a database, add any number of additional properties (think of them as headers, though that's not completely accurate) to messages for categorization/sorting/selection, etc.
The thing about creating a "drop in replacement" for Exchange is to remember that Exchange is an entire platform to code to, and different organizations have done this to greater and lesser extents. Do I know Exchange-based shops who run nothing but vanilla Exchange and Outlook clients? Yes -- most small ones I know. Do I know Exchange-based shops who run odd "connectors" between MAPI and mainframe email systems, custom desktop programs using MAPI to implement workflow apps, etc.? Yes -- most large ones I know.
So a not-completely-drop-in replacement may be fine for many smaller sites, and this may be what the "Exchange replacement" projects are targeting for starters. -- * Helen *
Slashdot Mirror
Grue?
....
Did somebody say grue?
> frotz lantern
There is no lantern here.
(oh shit, I dropped it back there)
> frotz me
You emit a bright white light. The room
(ah.... creativity is useful in a pinch, as is the proper spellbook memory)
Hi,
:-) -- since I object to TMobile's usurious pricing of their service at $30 for non-users of TMobile cell phones.
;-)
I'm in Downtown Bellevue.... where is it free around here? (I'm thinking that free wifi may be available in the city of Seattle itself, but that it's harder to find out in the suburbs....)
I currently pay $11.95/month for the cometa alternative to TMobile which gets me in at Bell Square and Barnes and Noble (and the Starbucks attached to it
I would of course rather pay $0.
OK, so back in the day, I was one of those students. You know, one of the ones they always worried about because it seemed that we tended to spend so much time on the system, exploring so much stuff that wasn't involved in a formal class assignment. And I, well, often used IEBGENER to, oh, let's say, browse the contents of various files on the system in locations other than my personal directory.
At some point, the lead hacker-tracker decided to attempt to convince me that this was Wrong. I persisted in my belief that, especially as far as system files belonging to no one person in particular go, IEBGENER'ing them might be "against rules", but it was NOT Wrong, because it caused no harm that I could see. This actually prompted much debate over the course of many months (I think the guy in question had a background in Philosophy, and he was intent on convincing me that his view of the ethics of this was Right).
He finally decided it was a lost cause when I stated simply, "Look. If I could IEBGENER a car, and leave the original right where I found it, I would, because no one's losing ANYTHING they would have had if I hadn't done so. Not the car companies since I wouldn't buy a car anyway, not the person to whom the car belongs because they've still got it. In fact, it'd be GOOD for the economy, because I'd have to buy gas, and have it repaired, and such."
(Yes, Ken, I still remember that I contended to Rikard that I'd IEBGENER a car if it were physically possible to do so. Most amazingly, I lived to tell about it. ;-)
As of last year, those same ancient Macs were STILL THERE in some Seattle branches. Don't know about now....
Here in the Seattle/Bellevue area, most Barnes and Noble bookstores tend to have Starbucks attached (rather than featuring a "Barnes and Noble cafe" inside). Seattle/Bellevue Barnes and Noble stores also feature inexpensive local area wifi -- $11.95/month -- via Cometa Networks. Quite convenient and cost-effective if you don't need the nationwide coverage provided by the likes of TMobile. :-)
I'm writing this message from the Starbucks attached to the downtown Bellevue Barnes and Noble, via a Cometa connection. Works JUST FINE, and often has signal strength better than Starbucks' own (more expensive) TMobile wifi.
A funnier thing is, some problems attributed to Access some years ago, WERE NOT ACTUALLY ACCESS ISSUES, but instead were attributable to the design of Windows File Sharing. Any product that did database updates via shared files had the same vulnerability.
Older versions of Windows File Sharing didn't quite do byte-level locking with, ahem, the temporal precision that computer scientists tend to expect when we think of the concept of byte locks.
So, under multi-user access, if two people happened to be updating information that happens to be in the same block of disk (or perhaps whose chunk of index is in the same block of disk), across the network, the .MDB would likely find itself in need of recovery.
Now imagine that your employer is developing a product that does similar database'y things across Windows File Sharing... and experiencing similar issues. Imagine that the information that WFS doesn't quite work well in that scenario IS available within MS, so that they can tell customers to upgrade to different versions of Windows or different database software... but is considered PROPRIETARY INFORMATION! Seriously, there was a private, non-customer-available knowledge base article. Somehow I discovered its existence and number (OK, it had something to do with my MS rep sending out a Word document newsletter to customers with the proprietary stuff deleted, and that old bug in Word/OLE where deleted stuff was still stored in the file, and my fondness for UNIX and "strings" ... ahh, loved that one until everyone noticed it and it was fixed ;-), but actually getting the contents of the article out of MS was a bit of a challenge.
I haven't dug into Access since they replaced the engine... so I don't know what's up with it lately... but back 5 years ago or so, that's the way it was, out in the ISV (indedepent software developer) trenches.
I had the same problem with a Fujitsu Lifebook also circa 1999. Funnythingbut, I put up with this for a couple years, then the month my warranty was expiring, included it on a list of about a dozen defects when returning my laptop for "repair" to CompUSA. They gave me a new Toshiba 5x faster than the Fujitsu.
Party on, extended warranty business for laptops! Putting up with the CD weirdness for a couple years, was worth it to gain myself a self-renewing laptop ... which is, of course, itself protected by an extended warranty I bought for it (pay $350 every few years, get brand new laptop every few years for free? I can deal with it...)
[ For the record, I view extended warranties on just about anything EXCEPT laptops, and maybe your new Canon XL1 camcorder, to be evil. So don't interpret the above to be an endorsement of extended warranties for any time other than those FEW times when you actually stand to profit from buying them. ]
So, Knuth gets the bug report, spends the time to write a check, and never sees the $50 or whatever disappear from his checking account, because some geek out there thinks....
"Dollar varlue of my time spent sending note to Knuth about error in book: about $10. Getting check from Knuth for finding said error: $50. Hanging said check on wall for bragging rights: priceless. ;-)"
Of course, I suppose a modern /.'er with more mercenary inclinations might see/say it differently:
1. Receive check from Knuth
2. Post ad on ebay
3. Profit
"Still relatively old and a pain to use" I suppose, but really, aside from probably still lacking things like pipes to connect commands, it's not that bad. TSO CLIST is really an OK scripting environment.
/bin/sh). They also had a menu-driven interface available (ISPF) where one navigated to various menu panels with a hideous =3.1.4 syntax describing the path through menu options to get to the desired panel; panels did things like allocate disk space, copy files, submit jobs to run, etc. It seemed to save time for those who couldn't do TSO alloc's and stuff off the top of their heads, but it slowed me down because the time delays between panel displays made it obvious that ISPF was a bit of a lumbering hulk and the raw command line environment quite efficient.
/bin/sh runs a shell in UNIX)... and you knew that it limited the commands you could use in your interactive sessions based on your account's security designation... and you knew that if you started a separate copy of IKJEFT01, you could get it to execute any command defined in the command table regardless of security level required... THEN things get a little complex, because you had to write your own command interpreter that communicated between a copy of ikjeft01 and your terminal session -- and do it in such a way that it didn't eat up so much CPU time that the admins immediately came a-callin'.
In uni 15-20 years ago, I used the raw TSO command-line interface to MVS (analogous to cmd.exe or
Now sonny, you want hard to use... imagineif... you knew a little bit about IKJEFT01 (believe it or not, the load module that "ran" a TSO session under MVS, like
Gack, I quite enjoyed hacking the school's mainframe via JCL and 370 ASM back when I was a teenage geek girl.... when school practiced the fine art of information-hiding and refused me access to certain manuals, I ran to my compuserve account and begged any mainframe systems folks in PROGFORUM for exactly the ones I needed, contentedly marching into school with them within a week. The lead systems programmer finally just gave up stressing over keeping me out of things, gave me access to some utility macro libraries, answered a question or two for me now and then, and promised to hold me accountable if I ever did one iota of damage. How well did I do at avoiding this? Well, when I did something (non-technical) to politically upset the school's computer center director and he pointed at me and said to the systems programmer, "Off with her head, use anything you've got on her to make her go away from here permanently"... his answer was NO.
For the record, I'm only 39, but I have been paid to program in COBOL, FORTRAN, ASM/370, C/370, SAS and PL/I (a lot like C), in addition to the usual suspects like C, C++, Visual Basic, perl, SQL, etc.
And what do you mean, can't get by on anything older than 5 years for a workstation? My 10+ year old Sparc 10 is still a darn fine UNIX desktop from which to manage a network.
I've been trying for tickets since 9:55am PDT and finally got through to customer service to ask "what's going on?".
In case you're wondering, too....
The scoop: Apparently movietickets.com (the only way to get trilogy tickets for Cinerama) is experiencing technical difficulties connecting to some or all AMC theaters. As of 10:35am PDT they are supposedly NOT yet sold out... they haven't been able to sell ANYTHING yet. The customer service rep advised me to try back every half hour.
As of the mid-1990's, many/most of the clued had retreated to mailing lists, because Canter&Siegal (sp? I am NOT going to look up the proper name synonym for "spammer trash") had given those who hadn't yet realized it, ample warning in 1994 that the rest of the world had found our playground and would not treat it with the courtesy that we did.
Of course, many folks weren't even online until 1995 or so, so their "Usenet good old days" memories are different. And surely even 1995-or 2000- vintage Usenet looks good in comparison to today's. But believe me, Usenet was filled with absolute worthless rantings years before Y2K. Does that mean it's useless? No. I dejanews all the time (consider me a radical reactionary for refusing to adopt the google url, if you must), though when posting my own questions and answers, I'm much more likely to use mailing lists and web boards than the net, these days.
I really never thought I'd be saying *anything* like this, ever, but having recently been the target of a breaking-and-entering that was foiled when a certain geek (me) with an air rifle threatened consequences, I'm glad that piece of equipment was in my house. My roommate wasn't home that night, and I have no idea what *might* have happened, had I not been able to scare the intruder away. First person experience can change one's entire outlook.
--
* Helen *
West-West-West-Up.
Was that the way out of the "all alike" or "all different" maze? (20 years after I last played it.... Frightening.)
That being said, with how slow the plumbing is around here (no, I can't call roto rooter, it's an apartment; it's at the whim of complex management), I wouldn't want to be adding anything to that pipe.
Dang, though. Just when there might've been a way to get high-speed Internet to this apartment.
--
* Helen *
Keep the database on CD or on hardware-write-protected disk (if your OS supports this), with a minimal system using a very minimally sized hard disk, so at least it'd take a little bit more effort to replace with bogus entries.
--
* Helen *
Guess they prefer people to eat burgers, since Red Robin (a burger chain well known in the Pacific Northwest) didn't make the list. ;-)
--
* Helen *
I read this. I paused. I didn't get it. I thunk about the alien lifestyle.
I looked immediately around me... at the TV, the laptop on my lap, the sofa I was sitting on, which I often fall asleep on, in this position, after too much tech writing or coding. Hmmm. I live in a 2BR apartment, and given the hectic pace of the last few weeks of my life as a freelancer, I might as well be living in a dorm room, because when deadlines get tight, I find a place that has almost everything I need and just stay put there -- because moving around unnecessarily takes time.
Much of the time, I'm in this mode, and wouldn't need a separate DivX player, but on those occasions where my electronic bits and pieces are spread out among several rooms, it might be handy and might be worth chipping my as-yet-unmodded PS2 for.
FYI: I got reacquainted with the rest of my apartment this past weekend, post-major-deadline... and then another deadline crunch hit. To be continued....
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* Helen *
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* Helen *
HELLO??!!
.sig. Looks pretty on-topic to me....
Read the last line above my
I think some moderator's having a bad day. Meta-moderators, party on.
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* Helen *
Then again, it's Monday. Maybe we're supposed to be "for" MS in this suit, today ;-), and someone was merely voicing the slashdot summary viewpoint of the day regarding anyone taking a contrarian position. (???)
Sorry you're still at 0 despite my request. FWIW, I wouldn't like to see more states join this, for a variety of reasons, but your observation about those who stood up and dissented is still valid.
Someone mod this guy back up to at least 1 if he's not back there already by the time I finish writing this....
If I had modpoints today, I'd undamage this one, currently at 0. Whether I agree with the comment or not, it's a valid sentiment for someone to express (that going against the flow, against both the government and a very successful corporation, takes guts) and didn't deserve to be modded down.
On another note, KI, last I heard all the other states had signed on... WV was the last of the "uncommitted" to be choosing a side. So I doubt there will be a "#3".
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* Helen *
Folks, I just spoke with Ron. He's under deadline and has only minutes left to finish his story. Remember what it was like when you had papers due in college? I think it's best to leave him alone on this even if you have the world's greatest comment to share....
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* Helen *
Somebody please mod up as Funny the immediate parent to this, that points out the algebraic nature of the slogan.
Sigh, I used up my mod points yesterday.
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* Helen *
Along these lines, I attended the Windows 95 launch carnival in Redmond in August, 1995. Say what you will about MS; they sure threw a nice geek party that day.
Among the activities there were carnival games whose prizes were things like disk drives. I mastered the Western Digital ring-toss. Sadly, not thoroughly enough to win the top prize of a 200meg WD disk drive. But well enough for duffle bags to be a lock for me. I won 3 for myself, and 2 for friends (there was no limit on the number of prizes a person could win).
I wonder how many people who won the 200meg disk drives are still using them. In contrast, I still use my duffle bags as carry-on and as that invaluable extra piece of luggage stuffed into one's luggage, should it be needed for the return trip. I daresay they've outlasted multiple pieces of luggage/totebag that I've actually purchased. (If whoever came up with the prizes for WD for that event is reading slashdot: GOOD JOB on picking that duffle bag supplier!)
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* Helen *
Many apps folks just want to get their line-of-business projects done under deadline, and find themselves severely restricted in how they can implementsolutions, by their organization's network security departments. No, we can't open any more ports on the firewall. No, B2B commerce is not an acceptable reason. You'll have to convince that Fortune 50 company to do e-commerce another way (from a staffer at a Fortune 1000) if you want on-line transactions with them.
Since almost all organizations allow HTTP through their routers, SOAP over HTTP is the way around this bureaucratic/political issue. I'm not defending this from a security standpoint, just explaining how apps folks (who tend to care more about pleasing their immediate stakeholders and bringing projects in under deadline, than security) tend to think.
I haven't played in the MAPI space in several years, so take this as direction but not The Definitive Word.
d ll ]===proto_of_choice===[transport_provider.dll]--[m api.dll]--[Exchange]
Outlook/Exchange USED TO require connection via a proprietary protocol, using MAPI. Since Exchange now supports POP3 and MAPI, in many cases, the lock-in may be as simple as the fact that apps are written using MAPI, and those apps are hardcoded to use the proprietary protocol, because they were written back in the day that there wasn't much other choice. (I can't think of any feature in the Outlook/Exchange connection that absolutely REQUIRES the use of a non-open protocol -- anyone??) [ That being said, Outlook's IMAP support could be better -- I don't think the same perf work has been done on their IMAP as on their POP3, which as another poster pointed out, has gotten a lot more efficient since the old days. ]
What is the proprietary protocol called? It's been 5 years, and I don't recall. It is not a typical MS "embrace and extend" of a standard protocol, though. When MS was designing Exchange, it had not yet noticed the Internet. The important thing to note is that merely coding to the MAPI API doesn't necessarily tie you to the proprietary protocol (unless you're using functions available in it and not in the open protocols, if any).
Using your nomenclature, where -- is a funcall and == is the wire protocol, the conversation basically looks like:
[application]--[mapi.dll]--[transport_provider.
A transport provider is the interface between the MAPI functions and the wire protocol, be it the proprietary protocol, or SMTP, or POP3, or whatever. THEORETICALLY, the MAPI API was designed to allow drop-in replacement of the transport_provider.dll layer -- but I'm not sure how well that works in practice.
In addition to the proprietary protocol, there are other lock-in features to Exchange such as being able to access the message store as if it was a database, add any number of additional properties (think of them as headers, though that's not completely accurate) to messages for categorization/sorting/selection, etc.
The thing about creating a "drop in replacement" for Exchange is to remember that Exchange is an entire platform to code to, and different organizations have done this to greater and lesser extents. Do I know Exchange-based shops who run nothing but vanilla Exchange and Outlook clients? Yes -- most small ones I know. Do I know Exchange-based shops who run odd "connectors" between MAPI and mainframe email systems, custom desktop programs using MAPI to implement workflow apps, etc.? Yes -- most large ones I know.
So a not-completely-drop-in replacement may be fine for many smaller sites, and this may be what the "Exchange replacement" projects are targeting for starters.
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* Helen *