This is a tax. Flat dollar rates for taxes are NOT egalitarian, percentages of income are.
In what sense? Are you suggesting that the utility provided by n% of one person's income is the same as that provided by n% percent of another person's income, even when those incomes are different? If so, what do you base this on?
Clearly the answer is that we should teach assembly.
Well, yes.
Among other languages, of course. In my CS program, we used a variety of languages, depending on what we were trying to accomplish. For our computer architecture courses, we did use assembly language. Data structures was C++. Languages and compilers was ML (with a little bit of APL for good measure), plus tools like yacc and flex. Operating systems was Java (seems like an odd choice, but the JVM's handling of multi-threading, monitors, etc. is pretty handy for illustrating certain concepts.) Numerical methods was Matlab. Algorithms generally could be written in pseudocode, though I think for the rare actual programming assignment, we could choose our language.
Computer science involves an understanding of how the computer works, from the low level on up. Different languages are appropriate for different things.
And as a result, I choose to live in a place where I don't have to drive to go everywhere: a small town where walking actually gets me places instead of an endless sea of other residences.
I too choose to live in a place where I don't have to drive to go everywhere: a large town where walking actually gets me places instead of an endless sea of other residences.
I also choose to live in a place where I don't have to drive to go everywhere: a large city where walking, biking, and public transit all get me places instead of an endless sea of other residences.
Really, I think all you're saying is "life sucks for those in suburban hell.":)
In EVERY case it was a person who loaded up the torrents or eMule and let them run 24/7 at full blast. Gee, wonder why the ISP might get a little annoyed with that.
I wonder why the ISP would be annoyed with that. If I'm paying for an unlimited, x Mb/sec connection, what's the problem with me using the bandwidth I paid for?
I'm making the assumption that you're talking about creating a database-driven website that's going to need a lot of the CRUD functionality that web dev frameworks facilitate; if this isn't true, the answer is probably "none of the above".
Given that: hand-coding PHP to do this kind of site is almost certainly going to be a painful mistake. You're either going to end up reimplementing your own web development framework, or repeating yourself a huge amount and generating error-ridden and unmaintainable code. Especially if you're going to go with a PHP-based solution, you want to use some kind of framework to minimize the amount of code you have to write. (PHP is, after all, training wheels without the bike:) ).
I'm leery of CakePHP; it's written in PHP 4, which pretty much guarantees bad coding practices. (Oh, you wanted/objects/? Ha!) I've had very positive results with symfony, as several others have mentioned. One thing in particular that it has that's been super-handy is, in addition to scaffolding à la Ruby on Rails, the ability to generate highly customizable "admin" interfaces on the fly, based on a configuration file. This makes interface creation more declarative than programmatic, which IME does wonders for maintainability.
For example, there is something called Hungarian Notation. There are lots of flavors of this, but the basic idea is that you put a tag at the beginning of a variable name saying what type it is.
I wish he'd included a link to the Wikipedia article on Hungarian notation and specifically referenced "Apps Hungarian". Hungarian notation is essentially a cheap way to create programmer-enforced "types". When these are truly new types ("dirty string", "null-terminated string", etc.) not known to the compiler/interpreter, it might be reasonable; this is "Apps Hungarian". However, prefixing an unsigned int with "ul" (i.e., "Systems Hungarian") is silly; your compiler should warn you/error out if you're trying to do something inappropriate with it, since it knows what an unsigned int is. Hungarian notation will be a useful thing until it's as easy to define new types in common programming languages as it is in, say, Haskell, but it should be used judiciously.
First, make sure that you're clear on what you're doing, and why. You should always be able to explain why what you're working on is important and why you have prioritized it the way you have. Keep records of how you spend your time. When you're up for review, this is critical for justifying your raise/continued employment. Similarly, when someone is complaining about how you're not solving their problem, you need to be able to point to all the other higher-priority problems in front of theirs. Periodically review what you're doing with your boss to make sure that it's what (s)he thinks you're supposed to be doing.
Second, never lose sight of the chain of command and responsibility. Your boss is the one who's responsible for what you do or fail to do -- that why (s)he is the one who gets to tell you what you're doing. Resist any attempts at the creation of "dotted lines" (i.e, situations where you're answerable to more than one person); failing that, make sure that you document who allowed the dotted line to be created. If anyone tries to get you to do something that's not already covered by what you're supposed to be doing, have them talk to your boss and get his/her approval -- you are your boss's resource, no one else's. If someone higher up in the chain wants you to do something, push back/gently/ ("You might want to talk to [boss] about that; he's got me on some really important projects, and you might decide that you'd want me working on them after all.") Failing that, make sure that your boss is kept aware that you've been reappropriated so that (s)he knows why you're not working on the work that (s)he expects you to do.
Re:Email is mostly broken
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Ending Spam
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· Score: 0
In a word: yes.
It doesn't require extreme centralization of control. All it takes is a moderately sized list of commonly trusted authorities.
We already have this for websites; look at how HTTPS works. There's a list of well-known CAs that are installed on most browsers/OSes. It's generally accepted that the folks on that list (Thawte, Verisign, etc.) do at least a cursory evaluation of identity before handing out a cert. And if you don't like the criteria one CA uses, you can drop them from your trusted CA list.
In fact, it seems to me that S/MIME could be a significant tool in fighting spam. There's an already-extant group of at least moderately trustworthy CAs. All common mail clients support it out of the box. It can grow incrementally, from being used for advisory spam tagging to out-and-out rejection of unsigned mail at the MTA. I'd love to see it expand in use in the coming years.
I don't agree. First off, read 17 USC 512. A coffeeshop with an open WAP isn't going to be held monetarily liable for something some user does (section (a)); about all a court could do is say "don't let Jim Q. User on your network" (section (j)), provided they can ID Jim Q. User, which they probably can't. Legal issues aside, a coffeeshop isn't a place where major distribution of copyrighted materials is going to occur, because the users are transient. It's not worth anyone's time to go after one.
As for the tech support side, all you need to do is get DSL/Cable, plug your $30 wireless router into the modem, and change your WEP key periodically. That's all the tech savvy you need.
Look around. Lots of coffeeshops apparently think it's well worth the trouble.
While it's nice to know that this will make it more difficult for the **AA to come knocking on your door, this removes one of the three big A's in security: auditing. If a machine with a dynamic IP address is engaging in malicious behavior, this makes it much more difficult for the ISP to identify the account associated with the behavior. This is a real problem if you want to disable machines that are compromised and are being used for spamming/DDOS/whatever. I hope that there are provisions for the ISP to keep the data for a short period of time and/or keep interesting data available for investigative purposes.
Uh-oh. If you're right, this is a pretty big problem, AC. You'd better contact Cisco, 'cause they sure think it does:
(From http://www.cisco.com/en/US/learning/le3/le2/le23/l earning_certification_level_home.html) "Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) is the most rigorous of Cisco's Career Certifications..."
For that matter, I think you've got a letter to write to Merriam-Webster, too, because apparently they misspelled "genius" in their last dictionary!
For all you who are bemoaning the CCNA as a "paper cert," I'm going to point out what is apparently an oft-overlooked fact: CCNA stands for Cisco Certified Network/Associate./ It's not the CCNP (Professional) or CCIE (Internetwork Expert.) Yes, the exam is easy; of course, it's easy to pass on the first try with a little bit of studying. However, you still have to know a few basic things going into the exam to pass it: you have to have a basic understanding of how IP internetworks function, a rough concept of how a few routing protocols work, and the appropriate commands to use on a Cisco router to configure common types of network interfaces. That's all they're trying to assess your ability to do. You don't look for a CCNA if you need a network architect; you hire a CCNA to help configure a network that someone else has designed. Some companies will undoubtedly misunderstand this, hire a CCNA, and feel misled when they get someone who knows how to type "interface ethernet0/0, ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0, no shut," but the failure is on their end -- they did not look into what the certification covers. It's all there on Cisco's webpage.
I can't quite agree with Apple's support being particularly helpful.
Apple's been making a huge push to get businesses (outside of visual design and their other niche markets) to use their products, and I bought into it and recently purchased a 17" PowerBook G4 laptop to use for my consulting work. Since I purchased it (about four months ago,) it has failed twice, necessitating a mainboard replacement each time. However, Apple has no provision for on-site or even at-the-store replacement of notebook parts, so the machine has to be shipped back to a depot for repairs. This process takes at least five days if everything goes perfectly. Five days without my primary business machine is a lot of money gone, plus delays foisted off onto unhappy clients. When I called Apple, they were unable to amelioriate the situation in any fashion (for instance, by providing me with a notebook to use in the meantime,) nor would they consider replacing the unit, despite two complete failures in two months, and they were quite snippy about it to boot.
If I had purchased from Dell or Sony, I could have had a repaired or new computer in one or two days. At this point, I'm considering the notebook expendable, and if it breaks again, I'm going to purchase one from a company that can provide business-class support.
This is excellent news for the quality of software running on computers worldwide, even if it does mean that you'll have to upgrade that old Pentium-II 400 because you can't buy a copy of Win98 to run on it. The entire Windows 9x line (95, 98, ME) was a disaster; fundamentally, there's no real architectural difference between these products and Windows 3.1. (You can even get your computer to boot up into DOS without loading Windows automatically, and then start Windows by typing 'win' at the C:\ prompt, just like the old days, if you go into msdos.sys and change "bootgui' to zero.) By contrast, the WinNT line (NT, 2000, XP, 2003) was designed from the ground up to make use of protected mode, multitasking, and all the other good stuff that makes your computer less likely to crash and actually be able to more efficiently support all the new "features" Microsoft will throw into their next Office suite.
As a CCNA, I find it rather unlikely that you could have passed the exam without basic knowledge of how to configure a Cisco router and how TCP, UDP, and IP work at a not-too-detailed level, being as that's what's on the exam. Maybe you're not a network design g00r00, but that's why it's an "associate" cert, not a "professional" cert. If the job was for a position where they had you designing networks, and you weren't qualified, I'd say they probably didn't understand what the certifications meant.
There is such a job: grad school. After I get bored with life outside the ivory tower, I'm going to head back there for good.
It's pretty unreasonable to expect to find a job with such requirements (outside of a few highly-coveted nearly-academic positions, like a language designer for MS or Sun.) A business generally doesn't need to hire people to be Really Smart; they hire people to do some particular thing. If they can do that, bully.
A friend of mine and I were debating which we would hire if were in the position to do so: someone with a degree from a well-respected university CS program, or someone with a certification relevant to the position we'd be hiring him for. I chose the latter, hands down. I'm not really concerned if, say, my router person can prove a problem NP-complete. I am concerned about whether or not he can set up ACLs correctly. A CCNP I can be reasonably sure of competance in, but a college degree is an unknown when it comes to ability to implement.
This isn't meant as a disparagement of academic CS; I think anyone who wants to enter the field should at least have a BS to ensure that they have some understanding of the basics of what goes on in computers. However, a real CS program doesn't teach you how to implement things with current technologies in use in the business market. That's something you need to pick up to make that academic background relevant to a business, which is only going to make direct use of one part of it.
I'm not kidding about academia as a job, either. If you really want to keep learning and applying a broad variety of things, go to grad school, get a job as a T.A., and aim for a professorship. You'll be happy you did.
Unless I missed something, the TCPA is still valid law, and it explicitly prohibits telemarketing of cellular phones, or any service where you have to pay by the minute.
(47CFR64.1200) (a) No person may:
(1) Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice,
(iii) To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call;
Violation of this constitutes an automatic $500 in statutory damages, for which you can sue the caller. Plus, a judge can triple the damage award if you show that the caller knowingly violated the law.
Also, if the person in the article was getting prerecorded messages advertising something, that's probably not legit either:
(47CFR64.1200) (2) Initiate any telephone call to any residential telephone line using an artificial or prerecorded voice to deliver a message without the prior express consent of the called party, unless the call is initiated for emergency purposes or is exempted by Sec. 64.1200(c) of this section.
With all the hoopla about the do-not-call list these days, people seem to have forgotten about how powerful the TCPA is. You can actually sue and extract money from the people who pester you, typically in a small claims court, which makes it easy. With the do-not-call list, you file a complaint with the federal gov't, which passes the complaint on to your state's attorney general's offices, which may act on the complaint when they get around to it, and the state keeps the fine. Tell me which one sounds better to you?:)
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Don't take this as legal advice.)
Reading articles like this brings a serious question to mind: why don't ISP's monitor for suspicious behavior and sue spammers and others who cause disruption and/or damage to infrastructure by abusing resources? It's trivial to set up software to look at the rate of port 25 connections coming from an address and alert ops staff when something out of the ordinary is happening. It would almost certainly be in the best interest of the ISP to do so, because these are not people they want on their networks, given how much they make their service undesirable to other users and force them to spend to upgrade infrastructure. After a while, spammers really would be relegated to only spammer-friendly ISPs, who can then be blacklisted.
One problem that Apple still needs to resolve before they can really be a serious contender for enterprise-level use is the speed with which they service machines. When a machine needs a replacement part (e.g., when your mainboard up and dies on you,) it can take up to two weeks to get it back. First, Apple ships you a return box. You box up your machine and send it off to the depot. The depot takes a day to check it in. Once it's in the depot, it'll take a handful of days to repair it. Finally, they ship it back.
Unfortunately, they have no policy for getting you a replacement in the meantime. For a consultant like myself, sitting without a computer for a week and losing $$$ of billable time, not to mention getting behind on deadlines, is wholly unacceptable. The major PC-based laptop manufacturers (e.g., Dell and Sony) will get you a new machine pronto if your current one breaks down; until Apple can do the same, as far as I'm concerned, their machines shouldn't be used for any sort of time-critical activity.
One thing to keep in mind about illicit telemarketing is that, despite all the hoopla about the Do-Not-Call list, the TCPA is still alive and well. The TCPA provides a lot of ground rules by which telemarketers must abide, irrespective of whether or not the person they're calling is on the Do-Not-Call list. They can only call between 8:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M. local time, they must identify themselves, they have to have a do-not-call list policy in place and must send you a copy upon request, etc.
Unlike the Do-Not-Call list, you're not just reporting a company to a federal agency for them to delegate to a state Attorney General's office when they get around to it, who will in turn maybe file a complaint against the company, when they get around to it. The TCPA provides $500 statutory damages against the person called, which can be tripled by a judge if the caller was knowingly violating it. In most cases, that's a small enough value to go after the company in small claims court, which is a relatively painless process.
For more information, check out the text of the law at 47USC227 and 47CFR12.6400.
ObDisclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
A useful tool that I just discovered recently and woefully few people seem to know about, and one that would have been helpful to the poster, is *57. On most if not all phone systems in the U.S., dialing *57 immediately after you terminate a call with someone will initiate a call trace. The phone company will keep the information for a fixed period of time so that it can be used if you file a complaint against someone. (They won't just give it out without a complaint being filed, though.) Typically, the charge for the service is small (like $1.)
Yes. Telemarketing a cell phone is a vioation of the FCC's telemarketing rules, which assign $500 in statutory damages to the person being called. (IANAL.)
From 47CFR64.1200:
(a) No person may:
(1) Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice,
(iii) To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call;
One thing that would really be an excellent feature in such a processor would be giving each OS running on there a choice of whether or not to use the legacy x86 instruction set or to directly code against the RISC core of the chip. I would think that that would offer some serious speed boosts to OSes like Linux, which are relatively easy to compile on new architectures (well, once someone writes a cross-compiler.) Without instructions having to undergo a CISC-to-RISC decoding and with compilers able to optimize directly for the core, we might be able to get a lot more out of the chip.
Re:There's another problem this could help with.
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Spoofed From: Prevention
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Presumably, the body responsible for the domain would be responsible for authenticating users to ensure that they are not spoofing before it comes out of their domain. Unfortunately, this would lead to even more ISPs taking the AOL-esque tactic of stopping anyone from setting up a mail server, forcing all outbound mail to pass through the ISP's servers.
This would also cause serious problems for mobile users -- if I'm on the road, who knows what ISP I'll be connecting to. However, I probably want my From: address to stay the same no matter where I'm connected.
This solution doesn't seem likely to make a serious dent in the flow of spam, and would likely add unwanted restrictions to the actions of users. As such, it seems unwise.
Slashdot Mirror
In what sense? Are you suggesting that the utility provided by n% of one person's income is the same as that provided by n% percent of another person's income, even when those incomes are different? If so, what do you base this on?
Well, yes.
Among other languages, of course. In my CS program, we used a variety of languages, depending on what we were trying to accomplish. For our computer architecture courses, we did use assembly language. Data structures was C++. Languages and compilers was ML (with a little bit of APL for good measure), plus tools like yacc and flex. Operating systems was Java (seems like an odd choice, but the JVM's handling of multi-threading, monitors, etc. is pretty handy for illustrating certain concepts.) Numerical methods was Matlab. Algorithms generally could be written in pseudocode, though I think for the rare actual programming assignment, we could choose our language.
Computer science involves an understanding of how the computer works, from the low level on up. Different languages are appropriate for different things.
I also choose to live in a place where I don't have to drive to go everywhere: a large city where walking, biking, and public transit all get me places instead of an endless sea of other residences.
Really, I think all you're saying is "life sucks for those in suburban hell." :)
I wonder why the ISP would be annoyed with that. If I'm paying for an unlimited, x Mb/sec connection, what's the problem with me using the bandwidth I paid for?
I'm making the assumption that you're talking about creating a database-driven website that's going to need a lot of the CRUD functionality that web dev frameworks facilitate; if this isn't true, the answer is probably "none of the above".
Given that: hand-coding PHP to do this kind of site is almost certainly going to be a painful mistake. You're either going to end up reimplementing your own web development framework, or repeating yourself a huge amount and generating error-ridden and unmaintainable code. Especially if you're going to go with a PHP-based solution, you want to use some kind of framework to minimize the amount of code you have to write. (PHP is, after all, training wheels without the bike :) ).
I'm leery of CakePHP; it's written in PHP 4, which pretty much guarantees bad coding practices. (Oh, you wanted /objects/? Ha!) I've had very positive results with symfony, as several others have mentioned. One thing in particular that it has that's been super-handy is, in addition to scaffolding à la Ruby on Rails, the ability to generate highly customizable "admin" interfaces on the fly, based on a configuration file. This makes interface creation more declarative than programmatic, which IME does wonders for maintainability.
I wish he'd included a link to the Wikipedia article on Hungarian notation and specifically referenced "Apps Hungarian". Hungarian notation is essentially a cheap way to create programmer-enforced "types". When these are truly new types ("dirty string", "null-terminated string", etc.) not known to the compiler/interpreter, it might be reasonable; this is "Apps Hungarian". However, prefixing an unsigned int with "ul" (i.e., "Systems Hungarian") is silly; your compiler should warn you/error out if you're trying to do something inappropriate with it, since it knows what an unsigned int is. Hungarian notation will be a useful thing until it's as easy to define new types in common programming languages as it is in, say, Haskell, but it should be used judiciously.
Two keys that I've found:
/gently/ ("You might want to talk to [boss] about that; he's got me on some really important projects, and you might decide that you'd want me working on them after all.") Failing that, make sure that your boss is kept aware that you've been reappropriated so that (s)he knows why you're not working on the work that (s)he expects you to do.
First, make sure that you're clear on what you're doing, and why. You should always be able to explain why what you're working on is important and why you have prioritized it the way you have. Keep records of how you spend your time. When you're up for review, this is critical for justifying your raise/continued employment. Similarly, when someone is complaining about how you're not solving their problem, you need to be able to point to all the other higher-priority problems in front of theirs. Periodically review what you're doing with your boss to make sure that it's what (s)he thinks you're supposed to be doing.
Second, never lose sight of the chain of command and responsibility. Your boss is the one who's responsible for what you do or fail to do -- that why (s)he is the one who gets to tell you what you're doing. Resist any attempts at the creation of "dotted lines" (i.e, situations where you're answerable to more than one person); failing that, make sure that you document who allowed the dotted line to be created. If anyone tries to get you to do something that's not already covered by what you're supposed to be doing, have them talk to your boss and get his/her approval -- you are your boss's resource, no one else's. If someone higher up in the chain wants you to do something, push back
In a word: yes.
It doesn't require extreme centralization of control. All it takes is a moderately sized list of commonly trusted authorities.
We already have this for websites; look at how HTTPS works. There's a list of well-known CAs that are installed on most browsers/OSes. It's generally accepted that the folks on that list (Thawte, Verisign, etc.) do at least a cursory evaluation of identity before handing out a cert. And if you don't like the criteria one CA uses, you can drop them from your trusted CA list.
In fact, it seems to me that S/MIME could be a significant tool in fighting spam. There's an already-extant group of at least moderately trustworthy CAs. All common mail clients support it out of the box. It can grow incrementally, from being used for advisory spam tagging to out-and-out rejection of unsigned mail at the MTA. I'd love to see it expand in use in the coming years.
IANAL, but IAASA*
I don't agree. First off, read 17 USC 512. A coffeeshop with an open WAP isn't going to be held monetarily liable for something some user does (section (a)); about all a court could do is say "don't let Jim Q. User on your network" (section (j)), provided they can ID Jim Q. User, which they probably can't. Legal issues aside, a coffeeshop isn't a place where major distribution of copyrighted materials is going to occur, because the users are transient. It's not worth anyone's time to go after one.
As for the tech support side, all you need to do is get DSL/Cable, plug your $30 wireless router into the modem, and change your WEP key periodically. That's all the tech savvy you need.
Look around. Lots of coffeeshops apparently think it's well worth the trouble.
* I Am A System Administrator
Seeking a bit of clarification: where are meta refreshes involved in this? Or should the article title read "Google AdSense 302 Redirect Hijacked"?
While it's nice to know that this will make it more difficult for the **AA to come knocking on your door, this removes one of the three big A's in security: auditing. If a machine with a dynamic IP address is engaging in malicious behavior, this makes it much more difficult for the ISP to identify the account associated with the behavior. This is a real problem if you want to disable machines that are compromised and are being used for spamming/DDOS/whatever. I hope that there are provisions for the ISP to keep the data for a short period of time and/or keep interesting data available for investigative purposes.
Uh-oh. If you're right, this is a pretty big problem, AC. You'd better contact Cisco, 'cause they sure think it does:
l earning_certification_level_home.html)
(From http://www.cisco.com/en/US/learning/le3/le2/le23/
"Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) is the most rigorous of Cisco's Career Certifications..."
For that matter, I think you've got a letter to write to Merriam-Webster, too, because apparently they misspelled "genius" in their last dictionary!
For all you who are bemoaning the CCNA as a "paper cert," I'm going to point out what is apparently an oft-overlooked fact: CCNA stands for Cisco Certified Network /Associate./ It's not the CCNP (Professional) or CCIE (Internetwork Expert.) Yes, the exam is easy; of course, it's easy to pass on the first try with a little bit of studying. However, you still have to know a few basic things going into the exam to pass it: you have to have a basic understanding of how IP internetworks function, a rough concept of how a few routing protocols work, and the appropriate commands to use on a Cisco router to configure common types of network interfaces. That's all they're trying to assess your ability to do. You don't look for a CCNA if you need a network architect; you hire a CCNA to help configure a
network that someone else has designed. Some companies will undoubtedly misunderstand this, hire a CCNA, and feel misled when they get someone who knows how to type "interface ethernet0/0, ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0, no shut," but the failure is on their end -- they did not look into what the certification covers. It's all there on Cisco's webpage.
I can't quite agree with Apple's support being particularly helpful.
Apple's been making a huge push to get businesses (outside of visual design and their other niche markets) to use their products, and I bought into it and recently purchased a 17" PowerBook G4 laptop to use for my consulting work. Since I purchased it (about four months ago,) it has failed twice, necessitating a mainboard replacement each time. However, Apple has no provision for on-site or even at-the-store replacement of notebook parts, so the machine has to be shipped back to a depot for repairs. This process takes at least five days if everything goes perfectly. Five days without my primary business machine is a lot of money gone, plus delays foisted off onto unhappy clients. When I called Apple, they were unable to amelioriate the situation in any fashion (for instance, by providing me with a notebook to use in the meantime,) nor would they consider replacing the unit, despite two complete failures in two months, and they were quite snippy about it to boot.
If I had purchased from Dell or Sony, I could have had a repaired or new computer in one or two days. At this point, I'm considering the notebook expendable, and if it breaks again, I'm going to purchase one from a company that can provide business-class support.
This is excellent news for the quality of software running on computers worldwide, even if it does mean that you'll have to upgrade that old Pentium-II 400 because you can't buy a copy of Win98 to run on it. The entire Windows 9x line (95, 98, ME) was a disaster; fundamentally, there's no real architectural difference between these products and Windows 3.1. (You can even get your computer to boot up into DOS without loading Windows automatically, and then start Windows by typing 'win' at the C:\ prompt, just like the old days, if you go into msdos.sys and change "bootgui' to zero.) By contrast, the WinNT line (NT, 2000, XP, 2003) was designed from the ground up to make use of protected mode, multitasking, and all the other good stuff that makes your computer less likely to crash and actually be able to more efficiently support all the new "features" Microsoft will throw into their next Office suite.
As a CCNA, I find it rather unlikely that you could have passed the exam without basic knowledge of how to configure a Cisco router and how TCP, UDP, and IP work at a not-too-detailed level, being as that's what's on the exam. Maybe you're not a network design g00r00, but that's why it's an "associate" cert, not a "professional" cert. If the job was for a position where they had you designing networks, and you weren't qualified, I'd say they probably didn't understand what the certifications meant.
There is such a job: grad school. After I get bored with life outside the ivory tower, I'm going to head back there for good.
.
It's pretty unreasonable to expect to find a job with such requirements (outside of a few highly-coveted nearly-academic positions, like a language designer for MS or Sun.) A business generally doesn't need to hire people to be Really Smart; they hire people to do some particular thing. If they can do that, bully.
A friend of mine and I were debating which we would hire if were in the position to do so: someone with a degree from a well-respected university CS program, or someone with a certification relevant to the position we'd be hiring him for. I chose the latter, hands down. I'm not really concerned if, say, my router person can prove a problem NP-complete. I am concerned about whether or not he can set up ACLs correctly. A CCNP I can be reasonably sure of competance in, but a college degree is an unknown when it comes to ability to implement.
This isn't meant as a disparagement of academic CS; I think anyone who wants to enter the field should at least have a BS to ensure that they have some understanding of the basics of what goes on in computers. However, a real CS program doesn't teach you how to implement things with current technologies in use in the business market. That's something you need to pick up to make that academic background relevant to a business, which is only going to make direct use of one part of it
I'm not kidding about academia as a job, either. If you really want to keep learning and applying a broad variety of things, go to grad school, get a job as a T.A., and aim for a professorship. You'll be happy you did.
Unless I missed something, the TCPA is still valid law, and it explicitly prohibits telemarketing of cellular phones, or any service where you have to pay by the minute.
:)
(47CFR64.1200)
(a) No person may:
(1) Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for
emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called
party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or
prerecorded voice,
(iii) To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio
common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is
charged for the call;
Violation of this constitutes an automatic $500 in statutory damages, for which you can sue the caller. Plus, a judge can triple the damage award if you show that the caller knowingly violated the law.
Also, if the person in the article was getting prerecorded messages advertising something, that's probably not legit either:
(47CFR64.1200)
(2) Initiate any telephone call to any residential telephone line
using an artificial or prerecorded voice to deliver a message without
the prior express consent of the called party, unless the call is
initiated for emergency purposes or is exempted by Sec. 64.1200(c) of
this section.
With all the hoopla about the do-not-call list these days, people seem to have forgotten about how powerful the TCPA is. You can actually sue and extract money from the people who pester you, typically in a small claims court, which makes it easy. With the do-not-call list, you file a complaint with the federal gov't, which passes the complaint on to your state's attorney general's offices, which may act on the complaint when they get around to it, and the state keeps the fine. Tell me which one sounds better to you?
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Don't take this as legal advice.)
Reading articles like this brings a serious question to mind: why don't ISP's monitor for suspicious behavior and sue spammers and others who cause disruption and/or damage to infrastructure by abusing resources? It's trivial to set up software to look at the rate of port 25 connections coming from an address and alert ops staff when something out of the ordinary is happening. It would almost certainly be in the best interest of the ISP to do so, because these are not people they want on their networks, given how much they make their service undesirable to other users and force them to spend to upgrade infrastructure. After a while, spammers really would be relegated to only spammer-friendly ISPs, who can then be blacklisted.
One problem that Apple still needs to resolve before they can really be a serious contender for enterprise-level use is the speed with which they service machines. When a machine needs a replacement part (e.g., when your mainboard up and dies on you,) it can take up to two weeks to get it back. First, Apple ships you a return box. You box up your machine and send it off to the depot. The depot takes a day to check it in. Once it's in the depot, it'll take a handful of days to repair it. Finally, they ship it back.
Unfortunately, they have no policy for getting you a replacement in the meantime. For a consultant like myself, sitting without a computer for a week and losing $$$ of billable time, not to mention getting behind on deadlines, is wholly unacceptable. The major PC-based laptop manufacturers (e.g., Dell and Sony) will get you a new machine pronto if your current one breaks down; until Apple can do the same, as far as I'm concerned, their machines shouldn't be used for any sort of time-critical activity.
One thing to keep in mind about illicit telemarketing is that, despite all the hoopla about the Do-Not-Call list, the TCPA is still alive and well. The TCPA provides a lot of ground rules by which telemarketers must abide, irrespective of whether or not the person they're calling is on the Do-Not-Call list. They can only call between 8:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M. local time, they must identify themselves, they have to have a do-not-call list policy in place and must send you a copy upon request, etc.
Unlike the Do-Not-Call list, you're not just reporting a company to a federal agency for them to delegate to a state Attorney General's office when they get around to it, who will in turn maybe file a complaint against the company, when they get around to it. The TCPA provides $500 statutory damages against the person called, which can be tripled by a judge if the caller was knowingly violating it. In most cases, that's a small enough value to go after the company in small claims court, which is a relatively painless process.
For more information, check out the text of the law at 47USC227 and 47CFR12.6400. ObDisclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.A useful tool that I just discovered recently and woefully few people seem to know about, and one that would have been helpful to the poster, is *57. On most if not all phone systems in the U.S., dialing *57 immediately after you terminate a call with someone will initiate a call trace. The phone company will keep the information for a fixed period of time so that it can be used if you file a complaint against someone. (They won't just give it out without a complaint being filed, though.) Typically, the charge for the service is small (like $1.)
Yes. Telemarketing a cell phone is a vioation of the FCC's telemarketing rules, which assign $500 in statutory damages to the person being called. (IANAL.)
From 47CFR64.1200:
(a) No person may:
(1) Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for
emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called
party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or
prerecorded voice,
(iii) To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular
telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio
common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is
charged for the call;
One thing that would really be an excellent feature in such a processor would be giving each OS running on there a choice of whether or not to use the legacy x86 instruction set or to directly code against the RISC core of the chip. I would think that that would offer some serious speed boosts to OSes like Linux, which are relatively easy to compile on new architectures (well, once someone writes a cross-compiler.) Without instructions having to undergo a CISC-to-RISC decoding and with compilers able to optimize directly for the core, we might be able to get a lot more out of the chip.
Presumably, the body responsible for the domain would be responsible for authenticating users to ensure that they are not spoofing before it comes out of their domain. Unfortunately, this would lead to even more ISPs taking the AOL-esque tactic of stopping anyone from setting up a mail server, forcing all outbound mail to pass through the ISP's servers.
This would also cause serious problems for mobile users -- if I'm on the road, who knows what ISP I'll be connecting to. However, I probably want my From: address to stay the same no matter where I'm connected.
This solution doesn't seem likely to make a serious dent in the flow of spam, and would likely add unwanted restrictions to the actions of users. As such, it seems unwise.