as Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" is the defining "clones" (replicants) film, and it was both film noir and serious, with tech taken for granted. Lucas will have a hard time surpassing it with any space opera or FX tricks. And his film will be measured against it, and likely found very wanting. At the very best, he might get parity, but I don't think he's that good. He does fairy tales set in the far future with whizbang high tech. Even he know's he's not a serious auteur - his films are just so many not-so-cheap cheezy circuses.
Er, a bit dodgy if well-meaning. In many jurisdictions, using the CR2 backdoor at all would make you potentially liable for a cracking offense, no matter that you disabled a zombied server out of the best intentions for greater good. Unauthorized access is... felony.
Suppose the infected system provided suicide-prevention access, or battered-women's services, and your code shut it down completely, and someone got hurt, or dead - your little hack could get you in a major civil or even criminal hole that you'd regret.
Think twice before messing with anyone else's server, especially through any automated script. But that said - if you could shut down the worm, patch the server, remove the backdoors, and post a message to/var/log/messages to notify the admin - that _might_ be helpful and low risk. But you'd have to remain prepared to defend yourself and _prove_ that you didn't add a backdoor.
At minimum, you'd have to keep complete TCP/IP traffic logs for such interdictions for seven years or whatever the longest Federal, State, or Local statute of limitations requires. You'd also need to escrow these and all your code with your attorney immediately.
Yeah, The Register has been unreachable since sometime yesterday, but I did get to it *once* during this time. Something fishy... Other networks have been, um... "indisposed" today. Instructions for disabling or patching IIS are flying around corporate nets.
You're normal. No one (well, _very_ few) can listen well and do other language processing simultaneously. Listening well is a critical skill that mostly requires paying close attention. Many people use that time, not really listening, but thinking about what they're going to say next, or worse, interrupting the person speaking before they finish their thoughts (this is inexcusable, but all too common).
But hell, I can't read fine manual print and see a projector screen at the same time - I need two different pairs of glasses, and have to switch back and forth. (I also hate fuzzy PDFs onscreen, so boycotting Adobe 'til Dimitry's actually released is just fine with me!)
Because I'm *waiting* for things to happen. Waiting for that 3 minute web page to load, waiting for that 10 minute compile, waiting for a reply to an ICQ, or whatever.
Right on. However, the researchers here seem to have a rather simplistic, one-dimensional view of multitasking.
(OK, sound research starts by validating a few simple concepts, then building more complex structures later. But seriously, eight years of research, for merely this? I guess they've got to keep some ideas in their back pockets, ready for a next round of grants.)
There are two ways multitasking can happen: chosen swapout of tasks (you mention waiting for something to finish, but it might be waiting for anything - email reply, phone callback, etc.), and imposed interruptions (phone, instant-message, chatty boss/coworker, and so on). Swapouts are like enqueue-wait swaps on a mainframe - you know it's going to be awhile before you can resume that task, so you turn to something else. Interruptions are like, well... I/O interrupts - they demand immediate attention, whether or not its convenient at the moment. Swapouts tend to _improve_ efficiency generally, and so does minimal servicing of trivial I/O interrupts. Continuing the mainframe analogy, a first-level I/O interrupt handler merely fills a buffer and posts an ACK, then exits; these don't seriously degrade scheduling. What hurts productivity are interrupts that are forced as untimely swapouts of important, hard tasks.
A long time ago, I did some applications programming in COBOL for a S&L. (Yeah, I know COBOL sucks, but it paid the mortgage and I also taught myself IBM S/360 ASM during the same period.) Anyway, I was easily the most productive programmer in the shop, because I always had at least three and sometimes half a dozen projects ongoing at once. This was back when you were lucky to get two compilations of any one program per day. So, I'd code in one program, submit it for compile, and go on to coding in another program. It was quite effective, swapping tasks that way. Of course, it also helped that the programs were usually related.
As with many things, the real issue here is empowerment. Workers who can choose when to swap out tasks and turn to other ones will always be more productive (and happier) than those who are constantly interrupt-driven and never get to take anything to a "stopping point." This seems obvious: it's why you don't have the Help Desk do any network engineering or complex programming.
Still, the access software I use now seems to be specific to the Mandrake 8.0 distribution, and I'm not sure if other distributions have such easy DSL access software.
Mandrake uses Roaring-Penguin PPPoE (package rp-pppoe...). It's not distribution specific, since it hooks to kernel ppp services.
ECS makes a micro-ATX MB - K7S5A, I think - with an onboard NIC (and audio) and 2 PCI slots. You can find it on pricewatch by clicking on Motherboards and SIS 735 - $66. Add a little DDRAM (64MB should be plenty), another NIC, and a cheap IDE disk, put it in some small case, load Linux and set up the Bastille firewall (which does IPsec VPN) and you've got a fairly cheap VPN firewall.
And... your users can load the HD with MP3s and listen to music of their choice, from their little DSL/Cable gateway!
The Bastille iptables firewall in 2.4+ distributions is good to go, out of the box (so to speak). It's slick - even does IPsec VPN through NAT for one client behind the firewall. I use it to firewall my work Thinkpad into my company. Invisible to the 'net, too.
I'm running cups and webmin, so I edited the cfg file to lock down several listening ports from external sources, but it was easy.
I know. I worked there as an IT consultant right about the time the Mars Rover made them look good - for a couple of brief months.
But the management incompetence I witnessed at JPL was truly monumental. They are a poster child for how not to manage IT. No one is really responsible for anything (at least, not in their IT support division). It's all management by committee, leavened with lots of capriciousness and internal politics. Their IT "support" staff is doing well to show up for work at all, much less for meetings - they simply overschedule meetings and only go to the ones with the most powerful chairperson. It is a nightmare trying to get anything done at JPL because everyone has their own Machiavellian loyalties and agendas, and these are all hidden. What does is say that JPL actually flew _two_ payloads right into the ground on Mars - at $millions of _your_ taxpayor dollars apiece? JPL is too bloated.
NASA should just fire everyone in "management" at JPL, void all their IT support contracts, then start over hiring "the best and the brightest" again, and rebid the IT support to firms who care. If NASA needs to save money, they should strip down JPL, seriously.
The New Mexico AG simply doesn't want to have a say in further proceedings. If she can get M$ to pay the State's costs so far and retain the right to share in any eventual settlement extracted by the DoJ and the rest of the States, then it's just a management decision about where to allocate her staff, no matter how she or M$ might spin this. It won't have any affect on the rest of this case.
Remember the important things:
* The Appeals Court found Microsoft in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. This won't just go away, no matter what Gates does.
* One of the reasons for vacating the breakup was uncertainty it would be an effective remedy to prevent future Microsoft misdeeds.
* Another Judge could impose a breakup into _more_ pieces (OS Client, OS Server, Browser, Office, and Media); it could happen.
* Conduct remedies could be imposed, with or without breakup; this would burden Microsoft greatly with DoJ oversight procedures.
* The DoJ has to satisfy 18 States, some of which are still "very troubled" (read, pissed off) at Microsoft's recent actions and plans.
* If not finally reversed, the Court's decision will fuel a storm of civil suits in the US alone. AOL Netscape has a solid foundation.
* Europe's antitrust commission hasn't even _started_ in on Microsoft yet, and the US guilty verdict may influence their thinking.
Microsoft is dead, everybody knows this... except them.
And it's not _just_ DirecTV - that's just a little of the Hughes presence in El Segundo. Hughes sits on about a square mile of real estate there, and their tax bills - and those of their highly-paid engineers - are certainly not insigifigant for LA.
Hughes should just pull up stakes and move to some friendly state (like Texas - "Hey, we gotta Prez, for a couple years.") or maybe the Research Triangle, like Boeing just got fed up with WA and announced moving to Chicago. That would serve this particular pol bastard right. Let him be known as the (one-term) Assessor who chased Hughes off. This is one of the worst over-reachings ever.
He's just gotten laughed out of the CA State Board of Equalization (which is usually not unsympathetic to taxing entities). Later, he will get foreclosed in State and Federal courts. Guess what, the taxpayors in LA will pay for his folly. They should recall this idiot!
It'll take about five minutes for someone (probably many) to figure out that all you have to do to avoid M$ (re)activation hassles is let it figure out your "new" hardware configuration key, then replace the saved "original" with that, and you're nearly done - just cycle through all the possible combinations of a couple of "random" bytes, and all their fancy cryptography is finally toast - as it should be.
Asia will be cloning millions of copies of WinXP the morning after its released, and M$ won't be getting any product activation calls.
WinXP and OfficeXP CD's will cost about $1 each in Asia (and that's more than they're really worth). M$ code is just a commodity.
Try the new iptables (which replaces/supplements ipchains), it's great. I run an IPsec connection through Bastille firewall using iptables for my work Thinkpad, and it just works out of the box! You don't need FreeSwan to just masquerade one IPsec via Bastille.
This is on a DSL connection (Covad/Earthlink-Mindspring, yet I still have my old Netcom email address), but Time-Warner RoadRunner cable service uses PPPoE here, too. (PPPoE assigns a new ip-address at connect too, but it doesn't use DHCP.)
The Bastille firewall is pretty good as distributed, but you might need to tweak it some. If you're running any local services (CUPS, Webmin, etc.), you'll want to add rules to block access to those ports from the public interfaces.
Run Portsentry too, for detecting portscans, etc. It will tell you what ports it ignores so you can audit those too, if you wish.
These are all in Mandrake 8.0, but they are also available elsewhere.
"So is this kind of like Big Blue, I mean if I were to play some of the best poker players with this little programs assistance would I win a majority of matches?"
In college we played hi-low poker for table stakes and it was... interesting. $100 might change hands in a single "tap" - a lot of money, then. Later I played 5-stud in $2 limit games (that's a loser to the house rake). Win some, lose some, but I do like poker. Haven't played much for years, though. If it's recreation, then don't count the chips. If it's for real money, it takes as much focused concentration as any profession. And as professions go, it's a fairly stressful one. Hacking MVS, networks, Linux is lots easier.
It's also an unfortunate fact that people do cheat at poker. I sat in a low-ball game once where the guy to my left said "watch this" before dealing me a low wheel (A2345, perfect hand). I raised the open and everyone folded; I took the pot and left. When there's real money on the table, the odds of people cheating in various ways go way up. Be aware. There's even more danger of cheating online in virtual casinos, where you don't know which "players" are shills and which aren't; the server (house) knows your cards.
Poker isn't like chess, in that it's not just a deterministic game. A simple poker 'bot will be too predictable (below 50% fold, above 75% raise, etc.). The reason it's an interesting game is that human strategies, emotions, and intuition all play at some times in any session. Poker, like playing the stock markets, is 50% money management and 50% picking plays. The similarities are very striking.
Poker 'bots have been written and played against each other by academics for decades. Best results are obtained by heuristic routines that analyze the moves of all other players and learn from the progression of play, building a 'book' on each from which to calculate odds about bluff or hold. There are many books out about poker (most published to scam wannabe winners out of a few dollars), and not a few academic papers - use Google to find them. Probabilities are easy, strategies are hard, for many reasons.
But poker is a complex game, especially with human factors added. The complexities are infinite and arguably incalculable. There is no perfect way to play. One of the best session strategies is to bluff on small pots early, have 'em on big ones, then later "on towards morning" reverse the strategy - but like all poker, it's risky and won't work repeatedly with the same group of players, like most poker session strategies. Or, one could reverse the above strategy. These are the two basic possibilities for any one game. If one plays consistently though, others will see it and learn when to duck or push. There are levels within levels, in each session and venue.
I've been killed at poker, and I've also shut down a small poker parlor by taking every player until no one would sit down with me (400% profit). One good piece of advice I'll offer is... don't play for blood with friends, or especially, coworkers. Those relationships are more valuable than money, and some people take lasting offense at a sandbag. If they give you hands, OK - but don't extract it.
intersect in this topic. To name a few: the laid-off overpaid and underskilled former dot-commers who too quickly got used to living beyond their real means in the white-hot bubble economy of the Bay Area dysfunctional region; what it means to have lost a job (for whatever reason, due to no moral fault of one's own), and dealing with that, going through recovering and getting on with it - first surviving, and then finding the next viable situation - and succeeding; and, how to search for and find the right new job effectively. These are all interesting topics to discuss at some length here, because everyone reading this has or will someday deal with such issues in their own life (well, maybe not being overpaid and underskilled then abruptly fired).
The days of employment-for-life are over in the post-industrial economy. It's simply a fact that everyone in the first-world countries will very likely pursue multiple careers within their lifetime (as an aside, this is why continuing to learn throughout one's life is healthy and good). There are some exceptions to this, of course - some academic, science, clergy, military, and bureaucratic careers come to mind - but even many of these aren't forever, or change a lot over time. But, for most of us, we'll change careers two to five times during the course of our lives, and we'll like the changes.
I've had over a dozen jobs so far. Some of the earlier ones weren't paid, or paid rather little (how'd you like to make $1.25/hour for a 12-hour harvest shift on a ranch, then have them deduct 25 cents per hour for your room & board? I rode my motorcycle 300 miles each way to take that job for a couple of months when I was 17... it was the best summer job I could find at the time, and I even went back the next year - to drive a forklift. I learned some things there, saw a culture previously foreign to me, and had interesting times. Some friends found the Peace Corps of value for similar reasons).
OK - here's my jobs list, in chronological order: paper boy (afternoon), paper boy (morning), HS projectionist (carbon arcs!), HS radio announcer and disc-jockey, summer field-hand, commercial announcer, materials handling office-manager / salesman / driver, coffee shop short-order cook, data-processing operator (tape-ape), DP night manager, H200 assembly and COBOL programmer, DEC TOPS-10 computer operator, DOS/VS computer operator, DP supervisor, COBOL Programmer trainee (twice, let's not get into that), network install manager, network support manager and programmer, OS/VS1 systems programmer, MVS systems programmer (three different companies), Big-8 IT senior consultant, Big-5 IT manager, IT consultant for a small private firm, and now an IT management consultant for a large multi-national firm). It's not just a single career, is the point (though I'll admit it's been IT focused for quite a while, and is likely to remain so - but not in the same position for longer than a couple years at a time).
I was laid off once, and I've been fired a couple of times too. Some suck-ass managers can't handle honest communications, so what else can I say? (With few exceptions, don't trust an IT tech manager who's never been fired - (s)he's more politician than honest, won't work with you when you're right; (s)he will likely stab you in the back at the first opportunity that may present itself. Ah, here's another juicy topic - IT politics rears its ugly head.)
Early in one's career it's easy to find the next job. That's all it is, then - a next position - and all you need are the technical skills on your resume and showing up (clean, rested, and well-dressed) to convince the hiring manager and her technical interviewer that you've got the chops and want to work for them. However, as your career evolves (and one hopes it will) other factors beyond mere technical skills start to become increasingly more and more important for finding that next right position: things like appropriate presentation and personal style, smooth people skills, fitting into a company culture and ecology, good communication and negotiation skills, management judgement, thinking on your feet, and coolness under fire. These factors all become more important in your job as you (and your pay scale) rise in IT management. No dot-com buzzword lamers need apply.
Losing a job unexpectedly is emotionally devastating. Personally, I'm not sure I'd keep a position where my next task would be to tell people they were simply being laid-off. I guess it would depend upon how well it was going to be done and what accommodations the company would make available to them. (Working through the process of shedding an obviously bad employee is another matter though, as they will get ample warnings to shape up or ship out in that process.) Still, it's a hard thing to lose a job. I believe it's harder on most men than most women, because many guys tend to define themselves through their work, whereas most women are a little more balanced about working to live rather than living to work, in my experience.
Losing a job is a high stress event in anyone's life. It ranks right up there with a death in one's own family, or a divorce. As such, it's not something one just deals with rationally at first - or even for some period of time. (This might go a way to understanding why a few former dot-com staffers are now staying in homeless shelters in the Bay Area.) The process of dealing with the loss of a job is a lot like the one that is inevitable for any other major loss - impending divorce, death of a spouse or child, even the imminent prospect of one's own death. It's the progression through denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and finally, acceptance. I've been through it, have you? If you have, it wasn't very much fun at the time, was it? Like those other major life changing events, it's a time to draw close one's supports, find a way to get through the darkness, and seek another path to peace with what is, and go on to what's next, whatever that may be. (I lost both parents to cancer in the late '70s - it took years, a failed marriage, and a good friend, for my grief.)
However, when one gets laid off - you're supposed to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and then get back in the race. Yeah, I know it's not much fun at the time, but that's the only way you're going to find your next position, so you might as well get with the program. There are more free or low-cost job finding resources out there now than ever in the entire history of this planet. Want to work in Saudi Arabia? You can find that job today! Like the idea of Las Vegas? There are all kinds of IT jobs seeking your skills there. South Florida, Manhattan, Chicago - same thing there. If you're presently unemployed and willing to relocate and make a new life, there are lots of jobs available. And we haven't scratched the surface of all the independent contracting yet. There's work out there, just waiting for your shining self and skills. If you need a job, go out and get one real soon, or quit your snivelin'.
You're both kind of missing the point (but don't feel bad, religions long claimed knowledge of first origins (some still do) and one branch of science - Cosmology - puzzles over the mystery of creation with the jury still out (and likely to remain so forever) so questions remain.
A good view doesn't pit science and religion against each other - it's not an either/or issue (Kansas Board of Education notwithstanding). Look, science is a _method_ not a set of beliefs. Religion is a socio-political construct - and I don't care _which_ religion one might choose, they're all the same in this very fundamental way. BTW - the separation of Church and State is a Very Good Thing in the US.
Religion is all about telling the mass population what to believe along the way to influencing how they _behave_. Everyone has to believe _something_, even if it's that they don't know what they believe (but that's a precarious state, not at all recommended for folks who get up and go to work every day, care for their families, etc.). But religion is mostly ethics in drag - fairie tales with moral points, plus some do's and don'ts (the 10 Commandments in Christianity, other rules in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.). Some of the rules are practical (not eating pork avoids trichinosis), pragmatic (not seducing one's neighbor's wife promotes civil peace, not to mention personal longevity), or simply self-reinforcing ("Thou shalt have no other God before me, sayeth the Lord." - well of course, what else would you expect the priests to say?). But mostly, religion is about ethics - how to act: care for your parents, love your spouse, raise the kids, help neighbors, deal fairly in business - all the stuff that _should_ be automatic for any rational person but that people somehow need reminding about.
Religion is also a social mileau in communities - hitch-hike into Salt Lake City and go to a Mormon church, let them know that you need work, you'll find a job - do the same without going to church, you'll be on welfare before you find a job at McDonalds. One might surmise that similar conditions govern life in Tel Aviv and Tehran (except those countries don't have US model immigration and unemployment safety-nets, so one might actually starve there first, unless luckily deported). But the point is religion is a venue for positive social interaction. Go to any place in the Third World without money or highly marketable skills (drug-dealing, gun-running, pimping), and avoid the local churches, and you'll soon wish you'd robbed a bank in the US and gone to a nice clean, warm, and dry prison instead.
Enough said - I've likely offended some Mormans, Israilies, Iranians, and perhaps others, all in one post - so I'll quit while I'm ahead.
I once _had_ an (OK, used) RX7 Turbo that unfortunately developed a sticky fuel injector. I didn't get it fixed in time, so the car burned up one day.
However, water-cooling systems are _much_ simpler. I wouldn't hesitate to water-cool a hot Athlon chip. Swiftech (www.swiftnets.com) markets wicked air-cooling heatsink/fan assemblies and water-cooling (block-only, pieces, kit, or bare-bones system) - with or without Peltier assist with water-cooling - that have gotten good reviews. I'm running an old 500 mhz Athlon at 700 mhz right now as I post this, with a Swiftech heatsink/fan and Peltier.
Bear in mind, though - a Peltier won't help much at high thermal loads such as recent Athlons throw off. At most, you might see 5% chip efficiency improvement from adding a 155-watt TEC, and you'll have to dissipate over 180 watts from the system!
If you want to really cool a system well - and quietly too - look at evaporative water cooling (think of nuclear plant cooling towers) or vapor phase-change cooling, perhaps with a liquid (50/50 to 80/20 water/glycol) buffer stage: cpusite.exmedia.nl/sections/steve/its-cooling-time.html . . . There _are_ ways to get your chip die down to -40 C.
IBM recently made available a tablet-notebook PC. I believe it does tablet handwriting capture, if not recognition (i.e., digitizing). Since you sound like you know what you want, in some detail, and have real linux based applications waiting for satisfaction in the academic/scientific community, I would expect that the folks at IBM's labs might be glad to correspond with you.
as expounded by Watts S. Humphrey of SEI in "Managing the Software Process" (c) 1989, Addison-Wesley, p. 218:
"Severity 1: An error that prevents the accomplishment of an operational or mission-essential function, prevents the operator/user from performing a mission-essential function, or jeopardizes personnel safety.
Severity 2: An error that adversely affects the accomplishment of an operational or mission-essential function and for which no acceptable alternative workarounds are available.
Severity 3: An error that adversely affects the accomplishment of an operational or mission-essential function for which acceptable alternative workarounds are available.
Severity 4: An error that is an operator/user inconvenience and affects operational or mission-essential functions.
Businesses should not artificialy restricted through government intervention, to do so is in violation of the US Constitution and highly un-American.... Six individual "Baby Bells" is almost too much choice for the consumer anyway.
Dismantling monopolies is both constitutional and pro-competition. Read some antitrust history and law to temper your kneejerk libertarianism and neo-McCarthyism.
It also might be a good idea to learn something about the industry at issue before commenting. The "Baby Bells" are _regional monopolies_! The only "choice" of local telecomm provisioning that a consumer has in the US is where to live.
this was announced several weeks ago internally (no surprise, this). I surmise a common reaction within IBM was something like "At least it's not recycled OS/2 Nuns."
"Peace, Love, Linux" - it's not the subliminal sex, drugs, and rock&roll message of the Windows95 launch, but then again, IBM would _never_ do that (I hope). I believe IBM is communicating the message that it "gets" the synergy of Open Source cooperation, especially about Internet and software standards. I also believe IBM is sincere.
Consolidation of news media is a concern, but not a very critical one. As fast as interesting, successful competitors get bought up, new outfits spring up to take their places as upstart new media. As the formerly fresh lose their chops and glitter and begin to take on the bland aspects of homogenized corporate mind control, smaller and nimbler startups start getting attention, taking marketshare from the older and slower organizations, and growing revenues (advertising _always_ follows circulation/hit numbers).
And the media mix evolves over time, as new channels become popular. To see this, just look at the evolution of news delivery over the last twenty years or so. When I was 12 I had a paper route - about 50 customers at first, after school - then 100+, early morning. In my town that paid me about $1/month per customer, not bad for a kid. Almost _everybody_ took the newspaper. Not every house had a TV, then. We would canvas poorer neighborhoods regularly to sign up folks who'd just moved in, got a regular job, etc. (I once tried to solicit a subscription at a rundown whorehouse, 11 AM on a Saturday morning. The "lady" at the door was sweetly disappointed that I was too young for what they could trade. So was I, as I recall....) Ahem! Where was I - oh yes, media progression...
(I didn't read newspapers or watch TV at college - too busy with drugs, sex, and rock&roll, I guess... Or maybe it was the physics, chemistry, protest marches, philosophy, falling in love, working computer operations, getting dumped, programming, being depressed, changing jobs, recovering, all those things we all do in our early to mid 20s.)
Then everyone got TVs, even the poor people (who usually paid _more_ for them due to time-payment deals) and there were only three major networks, plus an independant station in my town. About this time there was a bitter union strike/lockout at one of the newspapers, which resulted in a busted union and only one newspaper with any mass circulation (a situation that persists to this very day in the tight little Northwest city where I was raised - and I knew it very well - dated a lady Mayor's daughter who lived a couple blocks away (those were many _nice_ summer nights), later narrowly avoided getting assaulted by some local asshole power-broker when his paid-for candidate lost an election, knew the tavern owner (now former) Mayor,and so on). But looking back, it's clear that the media gravity, and the political power structure changed, there. But it wasn't TV that levered the political change. What made the difference was a little alternative rag of a weekly newspaper. They dug up enough dirt to force the major newspaper to cover the real issues (which it did, professionally well), and the result was a political pendulum-swing that this particular small state is still recovering from.
OK, so there were three, count 'em, only three major networks, plus this hodge-podge of local independant local stations. Then, cable TV got rolled out (and how _that_ happened is a really nasty story in itself - major money skullduggery is buried back there). Somewhere in the early to mid 80s CNN got traction through cable and started _humiliating_ the big networks! The 1990 Gulf War was telecast on CNN, much of it _live_! ABC, NBC, CBS had their faces pushed in the dirt by CNN! (I was interested, since I'd been in Kuwait only six months before. But, I was in Phoenix when the air war started, and heard the CNN guy while watching the realtime AA fire over Baghdad.)
So, then Ted Turner sold out to Time Warner. And then AOL took advantage of the NASDAQ stock bubble (can you say "Tulip Mania? - I knew you could) to swallow Time Warner whole. But nothing's changed, just the players, and their chances, now. There's new media out there, bubbling up, sharp and fresh and struggling for market share, which _will_ come....
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as Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" is the defining "clones" (replicants) film, and it was both film noir and serious, with tech taken for granted. Lucas will have a hard time surpassing it with any space opera or FX tricks. And his film will be measured against it, and likely found very wanting. At the very best, he might get parity, but I don't think he's that good. He does fairy tales set in the far future with whizbang high tech. Even he know's he's not a serious auteur - his films are just so many not-so-cheap cheezy circuses.
Er, a bit dodgy if well-meaning. In many jurisdictions, using the CR2 backdoor at all would make you potentially liable for a cracking offense, no matter that you disabled a zombied server out of the best intentions for greater good. Unauthorized access is... felony.
/var/log/messages to notify the admin - that _might_ be helpful and low risk. But you'd have to remain prepared to defend yourself and _prove_ that you didn't add a backdoor.
Suppose the infected system provided suicide-prevention access, or battered-women's services, and your code shut it down completely, and someone got hurt, or dead - your little hack could get you in a major civil or even criminal hole that you'd regret.
Think twice before messing with anyone else's server, especially through any automated script. But that said - if you could shut down the worm, patch the server, remove the backdoors, and post a message to
At minimum, you'd have to keep complete TCP/IP traffic logs for such interdictions for seven years or whatever the longest Federal, State, or Local statute of limitations requires. You'd also need to escrow these and all your code with your attorney immediately.
Yeah, The Register has been unreachable since sometime yesterday, but I did get to it *once* during this time. Something fishy... Other networks have been, um... "indisposed" today. Instructions for disabling or patching IIS are flying around corporate nets.
You're normal. No one (well, _very_ few) can listen well and do other language processing simultaneously. Listening well is a critical skill that mostly requires paying close attention. Many people use that time, not really listening, but thinking about what they're going to say next, or worse, interrupting the person speaking before they finish their thoughts (this is inexcusable, but all too common).
But hell, I can't read fine manual print and see a projector screen at the same time - I need two different pairs of glasses, and have to switch back and forth. (I also hate fuzzy PDFs onscreen, so boycotting Adobe 'til Dimitry's actually released is just fine with me!)
Right on. However, the researchers here seem to have a rather simplistic, one-dimensional view of multitasking.
(OK, sound research starts by validating a few simple concepts, then building more complex structures later. But seriously, eight years of research, for merely this? I guess they've got to keep some ideas in their back pockets, ready for a next round of grants.)
There are two ways multitasking can happen: chosen swapout of tasks (you mention waiting for something to finish, but it might be waiting for anything - email reply, phone callback, etc.), and imposed interruptions (phone, instant-message, chatty boss/coworker, and so on). Swapouts are like enqueue-wait swaps on a mainframe - you know it's going to be awhile before you can resume that task, so you turn to something else. Interruptions are like, well... I/O interrupts - they demand immediate attention, whether or not its convenient at the moment. Swapouts tend to _improve_ efficiency generally, and so does minimal servicing of trivial I/O interrupts. Continuing the mainframe analogy, a first-level I/O interrupt handler merely fills a buffer and posts an ACK, then exits; these don't seriously degrade scheduling. What hurts productivity are interrupts that are forced as untimely swapouts of important, hard tasks.
A long time ago, I did some applications programming in COBOL for a S&L. (Yeah, I know COBOL sucks, but it paid the mortgage and I also taught myself IBM S/360 ASM during the same period.) Anyway, I was easily the most productive programmer in the shop, because I always had at least three and sometimes half a dozen projects ongoing at once. This was back when you were lucky to get two compilations of any one program per day. So, I'd code in one program, submit it for compile, and go on to coding in another program. It was quite effective, swapping tasks that way. Of course, it also helped that the programs were usually related.
As with many things, the real issue here is empowerment. Workers who can choose when to swap out tasks and turn to other ones will always be more productive (and happier) than those who are constantly interrupt-driven and never get to take anything to a "stopping point." This seems obvious: it's why you don't have the Help Desk do any network engineering or complex programming.
Mandrake uses Roaring-Penguin PPPoE (package rp-pppoe...). It's not distribution specific, since it hooks to kernel ppp services.
ECS makes a micro-ATX MB - K7S5A, I think - with an onboard NIC (and audio) and 2 PCI slots. You can find it on pricewatch by clicking on Motherboards and SIS 735 - $66. Add a little DDRAM (64MB should be plenty), another NIC, and a cheap IDE disk, put it in some small case, load Linux and set up the Bastille firewall (which does IPsec VPN) and you've got a fairly cheap VPN firewall.
And... your users can load the HD with MP3s and listen to music of their choice, from their little DSL/Cable gateway!
OTOH, maybe you can find a NetWinder on Ebay....
The Bastille iptables firewall in 2.4+ distributions is good to go, out of the box (so to speak). It's slick - even does IPsec VPN through NAT for one client behind the firewall. I use it to firewall my work Thinkpad into my company. Invisible to the 'net, too.
I'm running cups and webmin, so I edited the cfg file to lock down several listening ports from external sources, but it was easy.
I know. I worked there as an IT consultant right about the time the Mars Rover made them look good - for a couple of brief months.
But the management incompetence I witnessed at JPL was truly monumental. They are a poster child for how not to manage IT. No one is really responsible for anything (at least, not in their IT support division). It's all management by committee, leavened with lots of capriciousness and internal politics. Their IT "support" staff is doing well to show up for work at all, much less for meetings - they simply overschedule meetings and only go to the ones with the most powerful chairperson. It is a nightmare trying to get anything done at JPL because everyone has their own Machiavellian loyalties and agendas, and these are all hidden. What does is say that JPL actually flew _two_ payloads right into the ground on Mars - at $millions of _your_ taxpayor dollars apiece? JPL is too bloated.
NASA should just fire everyone in "management" at JPL, void all their IT support contracts, then start over hiring "the best and the brightest" again, and rebid the IT support to firms who care. If NASA needs to save money, they should strip down JPL, seriously.
The New Mexico AG simply doesn't want to have a say in further proceedings. If she can get M$ to pay the State's costs so far and retain the right to share in any eventual settlement extracted by the DoJ and the rest of the States, then it's just a management decision about where to allocate her staff, no matter how she or M$ might spin this. It won't have any affect on the rest of this case.
Remember the important things:
* The Appeals Court found Microsoft in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. This won't just go away, no matter what Gates does.
* One of the reasons for vacating the breakup was uncertainty it would be an effective remedy to prevent future Microsoft misdeeds.
* Another Judge could impose a breakup into _more_ pieces (OS Client, OS Server, Browser, Office, and Media); it could happen.
* Conduct remedies could be imposed, with or without breakup; this would burden Microsoft greatly with DoJ oversight procedures.
* The DoJ has to satisfy 18 States, some of which are still "very troubled" (read, pissed off) at Microsoft's recent actions and plans.
* If not finally reversed, the Court's decision will fuel a storm of civil suits in the US alone. AOL Netscape has a solid foundation.
* Europe's antitrust commission hasn't even _started_ in on Microsoft yet, and the US guilty verdict may influence their thinking.
Microsoft is dead, everybody knows this... except them.
And it's not _just_ DirecTV - that's just a little of the Hughes presence in El Segundo. Hughes sits on about a square mile of real estate there, and their tax bills - and those of their highly-paid engineers - are certainly not insigifigant for LA.
Hughes should just pull up stakes and move to some friendly state (like Texas - "Hey, we gotta Prez, for a couple years.") or maybe the Research Triangle, like Boeing just got fed up with WA and announced moving to Chicago. That would serve this particular pol bastard right. Let him be known as the (one-term) Assessor who chased Hughes off. This is one of the worst over-reachings ever.
He's just gotten laughed out of the CA State Board of Equalization (which is usually not unsympathetic to taxing entities). Later, he will get foreclosed in State and Federal courts. Guess what, the taxpayors in LA will pay for his folly. They should recall this idiot!
it's just a links-and-discussion forum. If you want to see a web journalism site, visit Wired or better, The Register or The Inquirer.
All Slashdot does is verify submitted links (if they remember) and add a bit of spin to the story.
The real action happens in the discussions later, and I think even the principals would concur....
It'll take about five minutes for someone (probably many) to figure out that all you have to do to avoid M$ (re)activation hassles is let it figure out your "new" hardware configuration key, then replace the saved "original" with that, and you're nearly done - just cycle through all the possible combinations of a couple of "random" bytes, and all their fancy cryptography is finally toast - as it should be.
Asia will be cloning millions of copies of WinXP the morning after its released, and M$ won't be getting any product activation calls.
WinXP and OfficeXP CD's will cost about $1 each in Asia (and that's more than they're really worth). M$ code is just a commodity.
Try the new iptables (which replaces/supplements ipchains), it's great. I run an IPsec connection through Bastille firewall using iptables for my work Thinkpad, and it just works out of the box! You don't need FreeSwan to just masquerade one IPsec via Bastille.
This is on a DSL connection (Covad/Earthlink-Mindspring, yet I still have my old Netcom email address), but Time-Warner RoadRunner cable service uses PPPoE here, too. (PPPoE assigns a new ip-address at connect too, but it doesn't use DHCP.)
The Bastille firewall is pretty good as distributed, but you might need to tweak it some. If you're running any local services (CUPS, Webmin, etc.), you'll want to add rules to block access to those ports from the public interfaces.
Run Portsentry too, for detecting portscans, etc. It will tell you what ports it ignores so you can audit those too, if you wish.
These are all in Mandrake 8.0, but they are also available elsewhere.
"So is this kind of like Big Blue, I mean if I were to play some of the best poker players with this little programs assistance would I win a majority of matches?"
In college we played hi-low poker for table stakes and it was... interesting. $100 might change hands in a single "tap" - a lot of money, then. Later I played 5-stud in $2 limit games (that's a loser to the house rake). Win some, lose some, but I do like poker. Haven't played much for years, though. If it's recreation, then don't count the chips. If it's for real money, it takes as much focused concentration as any profession. And as professions go, it's a fairly stressful one. Hacking MVS, networks, Linux is lots easier.
It's also an unfortunate fact that people do cheat at poker. I sat in a low-ball game once where the guy to my left said "watch this" before dealing me a low wheel (A2345, perfect hand). I raised the open and everyone folded; I took the pot and left. When there's real money on the table, the odds of people cheating in various ways go way up. Be aware. There's even more danger of cheating online in virtual casinos, where you don't know which "players" are shills and which aren't; the server (house) knows your cards.
Poker isn't like chess, in that it's not just a deterministic game. A simple poker 'bot will be too predictable (below 50% fold, above 75% raise, etc.). The reason it's an interesting game is that human strategies, emotions, and intuition all play at some times in any session. Poker, like playing the stock markets, is 50% money management and 50% picking plays. The similarities are very striking.
Poker 'bots have been written and played against each other by academics for decades. Best results are obtained by heuristic routines that analyze the moves of all other players and learn from the progression of play, building a 'book' on each from which to calculate odds about bluff or hold. There are many books out about poker (most published to scam wannabe winners out of a few dollars), and not a few academic papers - use Google to find them. Probabilities are easy, strategies are hard, for many reasons.
But poker is a complex game, especially with human factors added. The complexities are infinite and arguably incalculable. There is no perfect way to play. One of the best session strategies is to bluff on small pots early, have 'em on big ones, then later "on towards morning" reverse the strategy - but like all poker, it's risky and won't work repeatedly with the same group of players, like most poker session strategies. Or, one could reverse the above strategy. These are the two basic possibilities for any one game. If one plays consistently though, others will see it and learn when to duck or push. There are levels within levels, in each session and venue.
I've been killed at poker, and I've also shut down a small poker parlor by taking every player until no one would sit down with me (400% profit). One good piece of advice I'll offer is... don't play for blood with friends, or especially, coworkers. Those relationships are more valuable than money, and some people take lasting offense at a sandbag. If they give you hands, OK - but don't extract it.
intersect in this topic. To name a few: the laid-off overpaid and underskilled former dot-commers who too quickly got used to living beyond their real means in the white-hot bubble economy of the Bay Area dysfunctional region; what it means to have lost a job (for whatever reason, due to no moral fault of one's own), and dealing with that, going through recovering and getting on with it - first surviving, and then finding the next viable situation - and succeeding; and, how to search for and find the right new job effectively. These are all interesting topics to discuss at some length here, because everyone reading this has or will someday deal with such issues in their own life (well, maybe not being overpaid and underskilled then abruptly fired).
The days of employment-for-life are over in the post-industrial economy. It's simply a fact that everyone in the first-world countries will very likely pursue multiple careers within their lifetime (as an aside, this is why continuing to learn throughout one's life is healthy and good). There are some exceptions to this, of course - some academic, science, clergy, military, and bureaucratic careers come to mind - but even many of these aren't forever, or change a lot over time. But, for most of us, we'll change careers two to five times during the course of our lives, and we'll like the changes.
I've had over a dozen jobs so far. Some of the earlier ones weren't paid, or paid rather little (how'd you like to make $1.25/hour for a 12-hour harvest shift on a ranch, then have them deduct 25 cents per hour for your room & board? I rode my motorcycle 300 miles each way to take that job for a couple of months when I was 17... it was the best summer job I could find at the time, and I even went back the next year - to drive a forklift. I learned some things there, saw a culture previously foreign to me, and had interesting times. Some friends found the Peace Corps of value for similar reasons).
OK - here's my jobs list, in chronological order: paper boy (afternoon), paper boy (morning), HS projectionist (carbon arcs!), HS radio announcer and disc-jockey, summer field-hand, commercial announcer, materials handling office-manager / salesman / driver, coffee shop short-order cook, data-processing operator (tape-ape), DP night manager, H200 assembly and COBOL programmer, DEC TOPS-10 computer operator, DOS/VS computer operator, DP supervisor, COBOL Programmer trainee (twice, let's not get into that), network install manager, network support manager and programmer, OS/VS1 systems programmer, MVS systems programmer (three different companies), Big-8 IT senior consultant, Big-5 IT manager, IT consultant for a small private firm, and now an IT management consultant for a large multi-national firm). It's not just a single career, is the point (though I'll admit it's been IT focused for quite a while, and is likely to remain so - but not in the same position for longer than a couple years at a time).
I was laid off once, and I've been fired a couple of times too. Some suck-ass managers can't handle honest communications, so what else can I say? (With few exceptions, don't trust an IT tech manager who's never been fired - (s)he's more politician than honest, won't work with you when you're right; (s)he will likely stab you in the back at the first opportunity that may present itself. Ah, here's another juicy topic - IT politics rears its ugly head.)
Early in one's career it's easy to find the next job. That's all it is, then - a next position - and all you need are the technical skills on your resume and showing up (clean, rested, and well-dressed) to convince the hiring manager and her technical interviewer that you've got the chops and want to work for them. However, as your career evolves (and one hopes it will) other factors beyond mere technical skills start to become increasingly more and more important for finding that next right position: things like appropriate presentation and personal style, smooth people skills, fitting into a company culture and ecology, good communication and negotiation skills, management judgement, thinking on your feet, and coolness under fire. These factors all become more important in your job as you (and your pay scale) rise in IT management. No dot-com buzzword lamers need apply.
Losing a job unexpectedly is emotionally devastating. Personally, I'm not sure I'd keep a position where my next task would be to tell people they were simply being laid-off. I guess it would depend upon how well it was going to be done and what accommodations the company would make available to them. (Working through the process of shedding an obviously bad employee is another matter though, as they will get ample warnings to shape up or ship out in that process.) Still, it's a hard thing to lose a job. I believe it's harder on most men than most women, because many guys tend to define themselves through their work, whereas most women are a little more balanced about working to live rather than living to work, in my experience.
Losing a job is a high stress event in anyone's life. It ranks right up there with a death in one's own family, or a divorce. As such, it's not something one just deals with rationally at first - or even for some period of time. (This might go a way to understanding why a few former dot-com staffers are now staying in homeless shelters in the Bay Area.) The process of dealing with the loss of a job is a lot like the one that is inevitable for any other major loss - impending divorce, death of a spouse or child, even the imminent prospect of one's own death. It's the progression through denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and finally, acceptance. I've been through it, have you? If you have, it wasn't very much fun at the time, was it? Like those other major life changing events, it's a time to draw close one's supports, find a way to get through the darkness, and seek another path to peace with what is, and go on to what's next, whatever that may be. (I lost both parents to cancer in the late '70s - it took years, a failed marriage, and a good friend, for my grief.)
However, when one gets laid off - you're supposed to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and then get back in the race. Yeah, I know it's not much fun at the time, but that's the only way you're going to find your next position, so you might as well get with the program. There are more free or low-cost job finding resources out there now than ever in the entire history of this planet. Want to work in Saudi Arabia? You can find that job today! Like the idea of Las Vegas? There are all kinds of IT jobs seeking your skills there. South Florida, Manhattan, Chicago - same thing there. If you're presently unemployed and willing to relocate and make a new life, there are lots of jobs available. And we haven't scratched the surface of all the independent contracting yet. There's work out there, just waiting for your shining self and skills. If you need a job, go out and get one real soon, or quit your snivelin'.
You're both kind of missing the point (but don't feel bad, religions long claimed knowledge of first origins (some still do) and one branch of science - Cosmology - puzzles over the mystery of creation with the jury still out (and likely to remain so forever) so questions remain.
A good view doesn't pit science and religion against each other - it's not an either/or issue (Kansas Board of Education notwithstanding). Look, science is a _method_ not a set of beliefs. Religion is a socio-political construct - and I don't care _which_ religion one might choose, they're all the same in this very fundamental way. BTW - the separation of Church and State is a Very Good Thing in the US.
Religion is all about telling the mass population what to believe along the way to influencing how they _behave_. Everyone has to believe _something_, even if it's that they don't know what they believe (but that's a precarious state, not at all recommended for folks who get up and go to work every day, care for their families, etc.). But religion is mostly ethics in drag - fairie tales with moral points, plus some do's and don'ts (the 10 Commandments in Christianity, other rules in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.). Some of the rules are practical (not eating pork avoids trichinosis), pragmatic (not seducing one's neighbor's wife promotes civil peace, not to mention personal longevity), or simply self-reinforcing ("Thou shalt have no other God before me, sayeth the Lord." - well of course, what else would you expect the priests to say?). But mostly, religion is about ethics - how to act: care for your parents, love your spouse, raise the kids, help neighbors, deal fairly in business - all the stuff that _should_ be automatic for any rational person but that people somehow need reminding about.
Religion is also a social mileau in communities - hitch-hike into Salt Lake City and go to a Mormon church, let them know that you need work, you'll find a job - do the same without going to church, you'll be on welfare before you find a job at McDonalds. One might surmise that similar conditions govern life in Tel Aviv and Tehran (except those countries don't have US model immigration and unemployment safety-nets, so one might actually starve there first, unless luckily deported). But the point is religion is a venue for positive social interaction. Go to any place in the Third World without money or highly marketable skills (drug-dealing, gun-running, pimping), and avoid the local churches, and you'll soon wish you'd robbed a bank in the US and gone to a nice clean, warm, and dry prison instead.
Enough said - I've likely offended some Mormans, Israilies, Iranians, and perhaps others, all in one post - so I'll quit while I'm ahead.
And _damn_ slashcode for inserting a space where a post linewraps - if I'd wanted a space byte there, then I would have _typed_ one, dammit!
Um, the actual reference is: cpusite.examedia.nl/sections/steve/its-cooling-tim e .html
I once _had_ an (OK, used) RX7 Turbo that unfortunately developed a sticky fuel injector. I didn't get it fixed in time, so the car burned up one day.
e .html . . . There _are_ ways to get your chip die down to -40 C.
However, water-cooling systems are _much_ simpler. I wouldn't hesitate to water-cool a hot Athlon chip. Swiftech (www.swiftnets.com) markets wicked air-cooling heatsink/fan assemblies and water-cooling (block-only, pieces, kit, or bare-bones system) - with or without Peltier assist with water-cooling - that have gotten good reviews. I'm running an old 500 mhz Athlon at 700 mhz right now as I post this, with a Swiftech heatsink/fan and Peltier.
Bear in mind, though - a Peltier won't help much at high thermal loads such as recent Athlons throw off. At most, you might see 5% chip efficiency improvement from adding a 155-watt TEC, and you'll have to dissipate over 180 watts from the system!
If you want to really cool a system well - and quietly too - look at evaporative water cooling (think of nuclear plant cooling towers) or vapor phase-change cooling, perhaps with a liquid (50/50 to 80/20 water/glycol) buffer stage: cpusite.exmedia.nl/sections/steve/its-cooling-tim
IBM recently made available a tablet-notebook PC. I believe it does tablet handwriting capture, if not recognition (i.e., digitizing). Since you sound like you know what you want, in some detail, and have real linux based applications waiting for satisfaction in the academic/scientific community, I would expect that the folks at IBM's labs might be glad to correspond with you.
as expounded by Watts S. Humphrey of SEI in "Managing the Software Process" (c) 1989, Addison-Wesley, p. 218:
"Severity 1: An error that prevents the accomplishment of an operational or mission-essential function, prevents the operator/user from performing a mission-essential function, or jeopardizes personnel safety.
Severity 2: An error that adversely affects the accomplishment of an operational or mission-essential function and for which no acceptable alternative workarounds are available.
Severity 3: An error that adversely affects the accomplishment of an operational or mission-essential function for which acceptable alternative workarounds are available.
Severity 4: An error that is an operator/user inconvenience and affects operational or mission-essential functions.
Severity 5: All other errors."
Any other questions?...
Businesses should not artificialy restricted through government intervention, to do so is in violation of the US Constitution and highly un-American. ... Six individual "Baby Bells" is almost too much choice for the consumer anyway.
Dismantling monopolies is both constitutional and pro-competition. Read some antitrust history and law to temper your kneejerk libertarianism and neo-McCarthyism.
It also might be a good idea to learn something about the industry at issue before commenting. The "Baby Bells" are _regional monopolies_! The only "choice" of local telecomm provisioning that a consumer has in the US is where to live.
this was announced several weeks ago internally (no surprise, this). I surmise a common reaction within IBM was something like "At least it's not recycled OS/2 Nuns."
"Peace, Love, Linux" - it's not the subliminal sex, drugs, and rock&roll message of the Windows95 launch, but then again, IBM would _never_ do that (I hope). I believe IBM is communicating the message that it "gets" the synergy of Open Source cooperation, especially about Internet and software standards. I also believe IBM is sincere.
Consolidation of news media is a concern, but not a very critical one. As fast as interesting, successful competitors get bought up, new outfits spring up to take their places as upstart new media. As the formerly fresh lose their chops and glitter and begin to take on the bland aspects of homogenized corporate mind control, smaller and nimbler startups start getting attention, taking marketshare from the older and slower organizations, and growing revenues (advertising _always_ follows circulation/hit numbers).
And the media mix evolves over time, as new channels become popular. To see this, just look at the evolution of news delivery over the last twenty years or so. When I was 12 I had a paper route - about 50 customers at first, after school - then 100+, early morning. In my town that paid me about $1/month per customer, not bad for a kid. Almost _everybody_ took the newspaper. Not every house had a TV, then. We would canvas poorer neighborhoods regularly to sign up folks who'd just moved in, got a regular job, etc. (I once tried to solicit a subscription at a rundown whorehouse, 11 AM on a Saturday morning. The "lady" at the door was sweetly disappointed that I was too young for what they could trade. So was I, as I recall....) Ahem! Where was I - oh yes, media progression...
(I didn't read newspapers or watch TV at college - too busy with drugs, sex, and rock&roll, I guess... Or maybe it was the physics, chemistry, protest marches, philosophy, falling in love, working computer operations, getting dumped, programming, being depressed, changing jobs, recovering, all those things we all do in our early to mid 20s.)
Then everyone got TVs, even the poor people (who usually paid _more_ for them due to time-payment deals) and there were only three major networks, plus an independant station in my town. About this time there was a bitter union strike/lockout at one of the newspapers, which resulted in a busted union and only one newspaper with any mass circulation (a situation that persists to this very day in the tight little Northwest city where I was raised - and I knew it very well - dated a lady Mayor's daughter who lived a couple blocks away (those were many _nice_ summer nights), later narrowly avoided getting assaulted by some local asshole power-broker when his paid-for candidate lost an election, knew the tavern owner (now former) Mayor,and so on). But looking back, it's clear that the media gravity, and the political power structure changed, there. But it wasn't TV that levered the political change. What made the difference was a little alternative rag of a weekly newspaper. They dug up enough dirt to force the major newspaper to cover the real issues (which it did, professionally well), and the result was a political pendulum-swing that this particular small state is still recovering from.
OK, so there were three, count 'em, only three major networks, plus this hodge-podge of local independant local stations. Then, cable TV got rolled out (and how _that_ happened is a really nasty story in itself - major money skullduggery is buried back there). Somewhere in the early to mid 80s CNN got traction through cable and started _humiliating_ the big networks! The 1990 Gulf War was telecast on CNN, much of it _live_! ABC, NBC, CBS had their faces pushed in the dirt by CNN! (I was interested, since I'd been in Kuwait only six months before. But, I was in Phoenix when the air war started, and heard the CNN guy while watching the realtime AA fire over Baghdad.)
So, then Ted Turner sold out to Time Warner. And then AOL took advantage of the NASDAQ stock bubble (can you say "Tulip Mania? - I knew you could) to swallow Time Warner whole. But nothing's changed, just the players, and their chances, now. There's new media out there, bubbling up, sharp and fresh and struggling for market share, which _will_ come....