You laugh, but it's happened. A north NJ manufacturer of cologne bottles was prosecuted as a drug paraphernalia manufacturer. His little bottles had become the container of choice for crack. I think he got 30 years.
--
How very ironic that you would dismiss concerns about thought crime while posting as an A.C.
And yet some little schmoe from Asshole, Indiana thinks that he is so important...
200+ years ago, a government was founded on the basis of the idea that rights were retained by the people - "We The People" - making those Indiana schmoes the center of government power. Simply acknowledging that the government is not representative of the people should be a red flag to you. Why is it not?
By expressing worries, they've expressed that they are probably doing something illegal or extralegal. This is why I am (more or less) in favor of Carnivore.
How interesting -- that is precisely why I am dead-set against Carnivore. How many in law enforcement or in the courts take this sort of prejudicial approach?
And again, by posting anonymously, you have expressed a concern that you, too, could be a target. Perhaps not a government-OKd target -- well not THIS time, anyway. But who knows? In a decade or so, perhaps YOUR opinions will become politically unpopular. Good luck -- with the government you've asked for, you'll certainly need it. Or maybe then you'll thank me, and those like me, for what we sometimes call "eternal vigilance". --
My biggest beef isn't encoding, since my computer area is noisy enough to offset any differences between the encoders that I can hear. No, my copmplaint is with people who have ugly ripping errors, gaps, skips, bad intros/outros and whatnot. For chrissakes, people, LISTEN to your freaking rips before you encode, or at least listen to your mp3s before sharing. --
rhf (on one of its rare funny moments) had a list of reasons why Santa must be a Sysadmin, and I added to it, and people archived it... and here it is.
Why Santa is a System Administrator
Santa is bearded, corpulent, and dresses funny. (KM)
When you ask Santa for something, the odds of receiving what you wanted are infinitesimal. (KM)
Santa seldom answers your mail. (KM)
When you ask Santa where he gets all the stuff he's got, he says, "Elves make it for me." (KM)
Santa doesn't care about your deadlines. (KM)
Your parents ascribed supernatural powers to Santa, but did all the work themselves. (KM)
Nobody knows who Santa has to answer to for his actions. (KM)
Santa laughs entirely too much. (KM)
Santa thinks nothing of breaking into your $HOME. (KM)
Only a lunatic says bad things about Santa in his presence. (KM)
Santa is forced to do all his work when his users are in down time. (TS)
He's forced to work even on observed holidays. (TS)
He claims he's unique, but you see people just like him at the mall. (TS)
Users make an incredible number of unreasonable demands, but in the end, the only thing that really interests them are new toys. (TS)
Somehow, somewhere, by some unknown process, he found a wife just like him. (TS)
Where people don't believe in him, inevitably there are other people who do the same job, just with a different title. (TS)
Users aren't happy enough to see the results of his work. They keep asking perstering questions about how he manages to do it. They can't accept that it's just some sort of "magic". (TS)
Even the non-religious pray for him to arrive. (TS)
He's the only one who laughs at his message of the day. (TS)
He'll never get another job; his resume is too specific to the job he currently has. (TS)
Some of the users who make requests are kind of sophisticated, but most of them are having a good day when they avoid peeing their pants in his presence. (TS)
He's forced to crawl into unreasonably small, dirty spaces to do his job... even when he's wearing a nice suit. (TS)
Even if his work is really mostly spiritual, the world is a better place because of his existence!!! (TS)
People expect everything from him, within 24 hours, and at no cost. (SS)
Credits: KM = Keith Meidling TS = Tony Shepps SS = Steve Simmons
Where Delphi web modules can compile to traditional CGIs or ISAPIs, Kylix web modules will compile to traditional CGIs or Apache modules. The level of integration between Kylix and Apache is impressive.
I'm sorry: can someone dumb this down for me, a traditional web developer using Perl, PHP, and.shtml and very few other bells/whistles?
(I know it's not geek to admit you don't know something, but I suspect there's a lot more to this than I can grok.) --
That wasn't a troll; it was a carefully-constructed combination of insightful metaphor and playfully insolent criticism. If it comes across as rude, that's intentional; sometimes rudeness is called-for, for the purpose of poking fun at. It is as much a troll as Oscar Wilde's witticisms. --
...instead of destroying it, wash it with some form of anti-bacterial soap. I know that's what I do, all the time, to make sure that my hands are clean. In fact, I've washed my hands 12 times this morning. You can't be too careful with bacteria! But wait -- there are STILL bacteria there! Dammit, get off my hands, you damn bacteria! I know you've survived the vacuum of space, ultra-low and ultra-high temperatures, steam, solvents, and everything else, just GET OFF MY FILTHY STINKING HANDS! WASH OFF, DAMN YOU! I AM CONTAMINATED! GET AWAY FROM ME - SAVE YOURSELVES! AAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! --
The/. 1-pixel image is a weird one. It's right at the top of the page, in a 2-pixel wide table to the left of the banner ad (from doubleclick.net BTW). There are two single-pixel images in that table; one's the off-site "bug" and the other is images.slashdot.org/pagecount which you'd think would have a valid purpose. There's another 2-pixel wide table to the right of the banner ad, with a single pixel image referencing images.slashdot.org.
I'll be generous and suggest that these images are there to count doubleclick banner impressions, and that the third-party off-site bug is a third-party offsite counter of banner impressions. But who knows? It doesn't resolve any reverse DNS. Traceroute has it going through Verio. It could be anything.
Andover has a privacy policy linked from every page which reads in part: "If you choose to give us personal information via the Internet that we or our business partners may need -- to correspond with you, process an order or provide you with a subscription, for example -- it is our intent to let you know how we will use such information. If you tell us that you do not wish to have this information used as a basis for further contact with you, we will respect your wishes."
I'll give them the benefit of doubt and not block it, but it is curious. --
I had one of those PDAs, and the memory on it was the worst I've ever seen. It was completely write-once! Once you used that section of memory, you could never use it again! No thanks. --
"Multiple OC3s! Automatic Halon systems! Passkeys and dead-space entryways!" Very geek of everyone to require highly expensive but ultra-cool setups of their providers.
Did anyone see Jurassic Park? OK, dumb question, everyone saw Jurassic Park.
All these ultra-complicated solutions sound very Jurassic-Park-ish to me. There is, it seems, a turning point where you have such a complex setup that it is guaranteed to fail; and when it fails, it will fail in unpredictable but spectacular ways.
Like, as someone else pointed out, the colo that was so secure that he couldn't get in with a valid ID card. Doesn't it defeat the purpose of security if the people who should be able to get in cannot get in? Isn't that just as much of a danger?
And what's faster -- multiple T3s that are saturated, or single T1s that aren't?
And exactly how long does it take Cisco's biggest router to boot? And how many of them are between you and the rest of the world? And why would you want that?
The biggest difference between ALL co-los, in my opinion, is customer service. THAT is the value added that really makes a difference. Your system is unavailable at 3 AM. DOES ANYBODY CARE? This means so much more than all the geeky stats, hops off the 'bone, etc. If they CARE, they will put you right, no matter what their situation; if they DON'T care, you will be unhappy even if they have all the gear in the world.
So, evaluate your potential providers the old-fashioned way: ask other customers if they are satisfied. --
Like advances in the past, the most important aspect is that productivity increases -- not that we can suddenly play Quake at good ping times, or email grandpa instead of snail mailing him.
Productivity increases lead to higher and higher standards of living, which mean fewer poor people, more choices for everyone, etc.
It can also lead to such things as improved ecology, as by definition higher productivity means making more out of fewer resources.
It's so hard to measure how much recent increases in productivity are due to computing and the net. If you build a bridge, you know that the bridge doesn't actually create things, but it helps people get places where they can create things. If you build cyberspace, it doesn't build anything at all physically, but it helps other people to be more productive as they see fit.
Knowing that I can order from outpost.com at 11pm and receive what I ordered at 10am the next day has led to changes in how I work. Knowing that I can get the news/outlook I need from Slashdot has led to massive changes in how I think. (I run a web development business, and I now refuse to take Microsoft work.)
Look at the 40s and 50s. They had rooms full of *typists* for pete's sake. People whose only job was to type up what people wanted to communicate. Those jobs are now all gone, replaced with jobs that *must* be more productive. And the modern economy sucked in all the cheap labor from welfare reform *without* having those people sit in a room typing.
What's more, the marketplace is now so ultra-competitive that no money in a business can possibly be wasted. In the 70s and early 80s, businesses were full of fat. Projects went nowhere. People made money for doing nothing. When that happens today, there's more likely to be real consequences, IMO. I like that; it means that bad management is punished and ludicrous waste is avoided. Usually. --
Ah, yes, a "hapless tourist" fell for that scheme, and definitely not you yourself, the teller of the tale. Just some "hapless tourist" who shall remain nameless (except that it's a/. editor whose name begins with "r").
I want a digital camera integrated with my cell phone. That way, I don't have to store much of the images -- I can just upload as I go. Take it a step further and integrate that with the digital photo album websites out there, and even mom-mom and pop-pop can participate quickly and easily. --
The Penguin ad, for which I have the poster (and 5 mousepads earned through buying/recommending their hardware to various clients), is the perfect kind of advocacy: humorous double-entendre, making its point by promoting Tux.
And what exactly is wrong with 30-person companies full of geeks? What exactly is wrong with allowing a little attitude in your purchasing? I suppose your preference is a cold corporate just-the-facts approach, where companies trot out bogus benchmarks a-plenty, and marketing means deciding once again to make the cases putty-colored. Penguin Computing gives their T-shirts away with purchases instead of solely at trade shows where half the browsers are there for the free stuff.
As long as they put together excellent products, (and Penguin Computing does, IMO,) a company gets many bonus points with me if they have an attitude and a sense of humor. --
Salon details a record-setting week in CD sales, highlighting Britney Spears' debut at #1 and breaking Mariah Carey's record of most first-week sales by a female artist by almost DOUBLE. These incredible sales figures are expected to remain high this week with the release of Eminem'sThe Marshall Mathers LP. ("It may be the biggest rap record we've ever sold," says one CD chain operator.)
But I suppose that college kids don't really like Britney or Eminem, and you can't find anything from either of those artists on Napster. (giggle. snort. guffaw.) --
Look man, what you and people like you are rebelling against is not even modern standards for readability, but standards that have developed over HUNDREDS of years.
I agree with your ranting against bad javascript, frames, shockwave et al. However, if you take a completely unformatted HTML document with default fonts, and display it on 1600x1200 full screen, you suffer a serious readability problem.
When your eyes reach the end of a line, you have to scan back to the left to find where the next line begins. At that point, if the line is too long, you are temporarily lost while you try to figure out what line to read next.
If you're young and sharp your brain doesn't get too mungled in the process. Otherwise, you get a headache quickly and find it hard to read anything longer than a few paragraphs.
Compare this to the experience of reading the printed word. These are the conventions that history has brought us. Books, with their white pages and highly-readable serifed fonts, have lines that average probably 5 inches across. Newspapers, with a less contrast and poor type quality, have columns so small that often each line is about 2 inches wide. (Modern newspapers with higher-quality type, such as USA Today, can have wider columns.)
So now the highly-qualified web designer steps up to try to do you a favor by preventing your eyes from traveling too far. And tries to offer good typography, layout that improves your understanding of the material, images that accompany the text at certain places, graphics that guide you to what you're looking for... and is rewarded by people such as yourself, and the weenie who moderated me down, saying they'll run at any resolution they like. The only answer then is to design fixed-width pages, and screw YOU man, it's for your own good and you don't even know why.
Ideally, in the long run, HTTP returns a screen size and other such information about the client, and web publishers offer wide-style pages so you can check your favorite team's standing on the same screen as you check the scores, stats and stories. And with Dynamic HTML, related stories are displayed at the same time the current/. story is shown, in a separate pane, according to your preferences.
In the meantime, do YOURSELF a favor and size your browser window for healthy readability. --
I just know you weenies out there would run a 2400x1350 browser window, full screen, making everything look like total crap. It's bad enough some of you are reading this at 1024x768 full screen, forcing yourselves to endure 12 inches of eye travel per line. (The only books this size have pop-up cardboard cutouts in the middle of each page.) --
I'd stop worrying about the hardware and software to run something like this, and hire a firm to worry about it for you.
Say for example Listbox or there's always Egroups. My own company's mailing list services aren't really ready for prime-time yet, but I do operate the announcements-only mail list for the Philadelphia Eagles, and that is about 11000 subscribers although it is one-way only. --
Slashdot Mirror
It's *slightly* related. I'm told that artists like Henley have quit doing movie soundtracks because they lose (half? all?) the publishing rights.
--
You laugh, but it's happened. A north NJ manufacturer of cologne bottles was prosecuted as a drug paraphernalia manufacturer. His little bottles had become the container of choice for crack. I think he got 30 years.
--
And yet some little schmoe from Asshole, Indiana thinks that he is so important...
200+ years ago, a government was founded on the basis of the idea that rights were retained by the people - "We The People" - making those Indiana schmoes the center of government power. Simply acknowledging that the government is not representative of the people should be a red flag to you. Why is it not?
By expressing worries, they've expressed that they are probably doing something illegal or extralegal. This is why I am (more or less) in favor of Carnivore.
How interesting -- that is precisely why I am dead-set against Carnivore. How many in law enforcement or in the courts take this sort of prejudicial approach?
And again, by posting anonymously, you have expressed a concern that you, too, could be a target. Perhaps not a government-OKd target -- well not THIS time, anyway. But who knows? In a decade or so, perhaps YOUR opinions will become politically unpopular. Good luck -- with the government you've asked for, you'll certainly need it. Or maybe then you'll thank me, and those like me, for what we sometimes call "eternal vigilance".
--
My biggest beef isn't encoding, since my computer area is noisy enough to offset any differences between the encoders that I can hear. No, my copmplaint is with people who have ugly ripping errors, gaps, skips, bad intros/outros and whatnot. For chrissakes, people, LISTEN to your freaking rips before you encode, or at least listen to your mp3s before sharing.
--
Why Santa is a System Administrator
- Santa is bearded, corpulent, and dresses funny. (KM)
- When you ask Santa for something, the odds of receiving what you wanted are infinitesimal. (KM)
- Santa seldom answers your mail. (KM)
- When you ask Santa where he gets all the stuff he's got, he says, "Elves make it for me." (KM)
- Santa doesn't care about your deadlines. (KM)
- Your parents ascribed supernatural powers to Santa, but did all the work themselves. (KM)
- Nobody knows who Santa has to answer to for his actions. (KM)
- Santa laughs entirely too much. (KM)
- Santa thinks nothing of breaking into your $HOME. (KM)
- Only a lunatic says bad things about Santa in his presence. (KM)
- Santa is forced to do all his work when his users are in down time. (TS)
- He's forced to work even on observed holidays. (TS)
- He claims he's unique, but you see people just like him at the mall. (TS)
- Users make an incredible number of unreasonable demands, but in the end, the only thing that really interests them are new toys. (TS)
- Somehow, somewhere, by some unknown process, he found a wife just like him. (TS)
- Where people don't believe in him, inevitably there are other people who do the same job, just with a different title. (TS)
- Users aren't happy enough to see the results of his work. They keep asking perstering questions about how he manages to do it. They can't accept that it's just some sort of "magic". (TS)
- Even the non-religious pray for him to arrive. (TS)
- He's the only one who laughs at his message of the day. (TS)
- He'll never get another job; his resume is too specific to the job he currently has. (TS)
- Some of the users who make requests are kind of sophisticated, but most of them are having a good day when they avoid peeing their pants in his presence. (TS)
- He's forced to crawl into unreasonably small, dirty spaces to do his job... even when he's wearing a nice suit. (TS)
- Even if his work is really mostly spiritual, the world is a better place because of his existence!!! (TS)
- People expect everything from him, within 24 hours, and at no cost. (SS)
Credits:KM = Keith Meidling
TS = Tony Shepps
SS = Steve Simmons
--
That selects all the text on the page, making for a higher-contrast color combination on pages written by design-clueless weenies.
--
I'm sorry: can someone dumb this down for me, a traditional web developer using Perl, PHP, and .shtml and very few other bells/whistles?
(I know it's not geek to admit you don't know something, but I suspect there's a lot more to this than I can grok.)
--
That wasn't a troll; it was a carefully-constructed combination of insightful metaphor and playfully insolent criticism. If it comes across as rude, that's intentional; sometimes rudeness is called-for, for the purpose of poking fun at. It is as much a troll as Oscar Wilde's witticisms.
--
...instead of destroying it, wash it with some form of anti-bacterial soap. I know that's what I do, all the time, to make sure that my hands are clean. In fact, I've washed my hands 12 times this morning. You can't be too careful with bacteria! But wait -- there are STILL bacteria there! Dammit, get off my hands, you damn bacteria! I know you've survived the vacuum of space, ultra-low and ultra-high temperatures, steam, solvents, and everything else, just GET OFF MY FILTHY STINKING HANDS! WASH OFF, DAMN YOU! I AM CONTAMINATED! GET AWAY FROM ME - SAVE YOURSELVES! AAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
--
I'll be generous and suggest that these images are there to count doubleclick banner impressions, and that the third-party off-site bug is a third-party offsite counter of banner impressions. But who knows? It doesn't resolve any reverse DNS. Traceroute has it going through Verio. It could be anything.
Andover has a privacy policy linked from every page which reads in part: "If you choose to give us personal information via the Internet that we or our business partners may need -- to correspond with you, process an order or provide you with a subscription, for example -- it is our intent to let you know how we will use such information. If you tell us that you do not wish to have this information used as a basis for further contact with you, we will respect your wishes."
I'll give them the benefit of doubt and not block it, but it is curious.
--
I had one of those PDAs, and the memory on it was the worst I've ever seen. It was completely write-once! Once you used that section of memory, you could never use it again! No thanks.
--
Firstly, that's not proper syntax. It would have had to have been either:
grep "s.m.b." /usr/dict/words
consumable
presumably
resumable
somebody
Or maybe it was
grep "^s.*m.*b.*" /usr/dict/words
scramble
scrambled
scrambler
scrambles
scrambling
semblance
shambles
slumber
slumbered
smokable
smoothbore
somber
somberly
somebody
steamboat
steamboats
stumble
stumbled
stumbles
stumbling
succumb
succumbed
succumbing
succumbs
symbiosis
symbiotic
symbol
symbolic
symbolically
symbolics
symbolism
symbolization
symbolize
symbolized
symbolizes
symbolizing
symbols
No "samba" in my /usr/dict/words. Maybe it was a custom entry, or maybe this is must a myth.
--
.
.
--
Did anyone see Jurassic Park? OK, dumb question, everyone saw Jurassic Park.
All these ultra-complicated solutions sound very Jurassic-Park-ish to me. There is, it seems, a turning point where you have such a complex setup that it is guaranteed to fail; and when it fails, it will fail in unpredictable but spectacular ways.
Like, as someone else pointed out, the colo that was so secure that he couldn't get in with a valid ID card. Doesn't it defeat the purpose of security if the people who should be able to get in cannot get in? Isn't that just as much of a danger?
And what's faster -- multiple T3s that are saturated, or single T1s that aren't?
And exactly how long does it take Cisco's biggest router to boot? And how many of them are between you and the rest of the world? And why would you want that?
The biggest difference between ALL co-los, in my opinion, is customer service. THAT is the value added that really makes a difference. Your system is unavailable at 3 AM. DOES ANYBODY CARE? This means so much more than all the geeky stats, hops off the 'bone, etc. If they CARE, they will put you right, no matter what their situation; if they DON'T care, you will be unhappy even if they have all the gear in the world.
So, evaluate your potential providers the old-fashioned way: ask other customers if they are satisfied.
--
Productivity increases lead to higher and higher standards of living, which mean fewer poor people, more choices for everyone, etc.
It can also lead to such things as improved ecology, as by definition higher productivity means making more out of fewer resources.
It's so hard to measure how much recent increases in productivity are due to computing and the net. If you build a bridge, you know that the bridge doesn't actually create things, but it helps people get places where they can create things. If you build cyberspace, it doesn't build anything at all physically, but it helps other people to be more productive as they see fit.
Knowing that I can order from outpost.com at 11pm and receive what I ordered at 10am the next day has led to changes in how I work. Knowing that I can get the news/outlook I need from Slashdot has led to massive changes in how I think. (I run a web development business, and I now refuse to take Microsoft work.)
Look at the 40s and 50s. They had rooms full of *typists* for pete's sake. People whose only job was to type up what people wanted to communicate. Those jobs are now all gone, replaced with jobs that *must* be more productive. And the modern economy sucked in all the cheap labor from welfare reform *without* having those people sit in a room typing.
What's more, the marketplace is now so ultra-competitive that no money in a business can possibly be wasted. In the 70s and early 80s, businesses were full of fat. Projects went nowhere. People made money for doing nothing. When that happens today, there's more likely to be real consequences, IMO. I like that; it means that bad management is punished and ludicrous waste is avoided. Usually.
--
Ah, yes, a "hapless tourist" fell for that scheme, and definitely not you yourself, the teller of the tale. Just some "hapless tourist" who shall remain nameless (except that it's a /. editor whose name begins with "r").
</joke>
--
Wasn't that Al Gore's idea? To mount a camera in space and broadcast the image of Earth on cable TV?
--
I want a digital camera integrated with my cell phone. That way, I don't have to store much of the images -- I can just upload as I go. Take it a step further and integrate that with the digital photo album websites out there, and even mom-mom and pop-pop can participate quickly and easily.
--
And what exactly is wrong with 30-person companies full of geeks? What exactly is wrong with allowing a little attitude in your purchasing? I suppose your preference is a cold corporate just-the-facts approach, where companies trot out bogus benchmarks a-plenty, and marketing means deciding once again to make the cases putty-colored. Penguin Computing gives their T-shirts away with purchases instead of solely at trade shows where half the browsers are there for the free stuff.
As long as they put together excellent products, (and Penguin Computing does, IMO,) a company gets many bonus points with me if they have an attitude and a sense of humor.
--
Or sometimes I just get wacky:
The other approach is creative "self-documenting code":
$ridiculous_index =
while ($LoopUntilWeDie)
--
But I suppose that college kids don't really like Britney or Eminem, and you can't find anything from either of those artists on Napster. (giggle. snort. guffaw.)
--
I suppose, but I just went full-screen 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor with /. and reading was *extremely* uncomfortable with huge-ass fonts.
--
I agree with your ranting against bad javascript, frames, shockwave et al. However, if you take a completely unformatted HTML document with default fonts, and display it on 1600x1200 full screen, you suffer a serious readability problem.
When your eyes reach the end of a line, you have to scan back to the left to find where the next line begins. At that point, if the line is too long, you are temporarily lost while you try to figure out what line to read next.
If you're young and sharp your brain doesn't get too mungled in the process. Otherwise, you get a headache quickly and find it hard to read anything longer than a few paragraphs.
Compare this to the experience of reading the printed word. These are the conventions that history has brought us. Books, with their white pages and highly-readable serifed fonts, have lines that average probably 5 inches across. Newspapers, with a less contrast and poor type quality, have columns so small that often each line is about 2 inches wide. (Modern newspapers with higher-quality type, such as USA Today, can have wider columns.)
So now the highly-qualified web designer steps up to try to do you a favor by preventing your eyes from traveling too far. And tries to offer good typography, layout that improves your understanding of the material, images that accompany the text at certain places, graphics that guide you to what you're looking for... and is rewarded by people such as yourself, and the weenie who moderated me down, saying they'll run at any resolution they like. The only answer then is to design fixed-width pages, and screw YOU man, it's for your own good and you don't even know why.
Ideally, in the long run, HTTP returns a screen size and other such information about the client, and web publishers offer wide-style pages so you can check your favorite team's standing on the same screen as you check the scores, stats and stories. And with Dynamic HTML, related stories are displayed at the same time the current /. story is shown, in a separate pane, according to your preferences.
In the meantime, do YOURSELF a favor and size your browser window for healthy readability.
--
I just know you weenies out there would run a 2400x1350 browser window, full screen, making everything look like total crap. It's bad enough some of you are reading this at 1024x768 full screen, forcing yourselves to endure 12 inches of eye travel per line. (The only books this size have pop-up cardboard cutouts in the middle of each page.)
--
Say for example Listbox or there's always Egroups. My own company's mailing list services aren't really ready for prime-time yet, but I do operate the announcements-only mail list for the Philadelphia Eagles, and that is about 11000 subscribers although it is one-way only.
--