it's only $169 million: in beltway terms, this isn't a whole lot of money.
Are you kidding? It's a total waste of money! My DSL account only costs $50 a month, and unlike TIA, it gives me real PPP, not some dumb emulated SLIP.
(Sorry, but somebody had to do this one, for the old-timers.)
Any good search engine should ignore "robots.txt". If you don't want it read, don't put it up on the web in the first place.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning here. Sure, it's possible that some Web spider will go and access the content that you'd rather not have cached on a search engine -- but why create a world where we have to assume that's what's happening? If I happen to have sex with the blinds open, should I have to assume that somebody like you is standing in the building across the street with binoculars? Maybe I should... but what kind of jerk would want to actively create a world where that was the case (which is what you seem to be advocating)? Your reasoning seems about as specious as the old "if you didn't want to read spam and learn about my valuable products, you wouldn't have an email address."
Agreed that this is bad, but the root user is disabled by default on OSX.
How so? OK, so the user called root is disabled by default. But the username you're asked to enter when you install the OS has all kinds of privileges, including the ability to install software into privileged areas.
In-line red-squiggle spell checking has changed some things but does little for spell checking the text box I am writing into right now.
I guess it's time for you to switch to Safari. In Apple's browser, all you have to do is right click on the text box and select "Check Spelling As You Type."
Re:The Bug is a metaphor...
on
The Bug
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· Score: 1
But I'll go out on a limb here and guess that The Bug is not just in the computer. Some of the characters are also trying to debug their personal lives. Sorry if that is off the mark or just too obvious. But some of the comments about "I don't need to read about work" might be missing the mark.
That's true, and there's also a very stretched metaphor of cellular automata as compared to the lives of Ethan and the other characters.
I didn't really like the book. It wasn't enjoyable because, as others have said, it's basically the story of one man's joyless existence. It ends badly. As a story, it's an ugly one, an enjoyable read but ultimately no fun at all once you see where it's going. And once you're done, you realize that the message is actually pretty trite: Don't work too hard, or you'll suffer for it.
Ultimately, this book had nothing to do with computers, or bugs, or anything else tech-related. Sure, she liberally sprinkled the text with C code, but who cares? It's a story about a loser. Don't be him. The end.
Comics on the web are just great, but I don't think we should make too much of an effort making connections between them and their print counterparts...
Indeed... I'm a big comics fan myself, but all this talk we've heard about moving comics to the Internet always smacks me a little bit like radio drama fans concocting schemes to move radio drama over to television.
It's sort of ironic. People here are saying the school district should have some sort of financial liability for the negligence of allowing public access to this psychological/medical data. I'd tend to agree -- plus, I'd concur with those who say they have no business conducting (almost assuredly bogus) "psychological examinations" of students to begin with.
On the other hand, the reason they started doing psychological examinations of students is probably because, after the Columbine shootings, they'd probably risk financial liability if they didn't.
The author basically has final say over the content of the book -- meaning that a tech reviewer/editor can be completely ignored no matter how much they complain about the content of the book or how much it doesn't address what it should.
If there's a single techincal book publisher out there that operates in this way, I'd be surprised to see them in business for long. That's like me giving you a business loan so you can staff your company with hamsters.
While I liked FP, I think that the already over-mentioned Illuminatus Trilogy edges it out, by refusing to take itself seriously.
I think a lot of people underestimate the amount of humor that goes into Eco's writing. You just have to be prepared for how dry his wit is. I wouldn't call Foucault's Pendulum a book that "takes itself too seriously," though, by any means. Read his latest, Baudolino, if you think he's never poking fun.
For example, Apple flooded the school systems 15 years ago with pretty good little systems. They were used to teach typing, accounting, and basic computer skills... What did all that effort earn Apple?
Well, in any article that mentions Apple's key markets, education is always foremost. I'd have to imagine that Apple's outreach programs to the education market have something to do with that.
I agree with the other posters, though -- unless Microsoft tries to use some kind of licensing muscle that tells the nonprofits they can't use free software at the same time, then there's no harm done here. It's just tax write-offs and some good PR for Microsoft.
I was always curious about this. By this rule some engineer at MS with access to windows code could add it to some open source project and all of windows would be GPL?
The difference here is that it was actually Caldera that released the code. They distributed it, they wrote the press release. Once that's done, the fact that they failed to verify what it was that they released seems like their own problem.
The better example would be if an MS engineer with access to Windows code dropped a Trojan horse in there that would wipe out people's hard drives on his birthday. Does MS turn around and tell its customers, "Sorry! We can't help you get rid of the Trojan... that part of Windows isn't covered under our support agreement, because we didn't know it was in there when we released it"?
...
...OK, never mind.:-)
Re:client filtering is just wrong approach
on
I, Spammer
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· Score: 1
That spam email should never be sent, period. It should not ever proceed across the internet whose bandwidth is being paid for by millions of users, providing benefit to the sender.
Sounds good, but how is it different from dead-tree junk mail?
When you get a flyer announcing discounts at your local supermarket, the supermarket paid rock-bottom bulk rate postage to get it there. Doubtless part of the actual cost of getting it to your home is taken up by taxpayer dollars, which fund the USPS.
Likewise, when a spammer sends spam, he's paid for the bandwidth he needs to send that spam -- and that's the only part of it that he even knows how to pay for. You may think he should pay for his own bandwidth, your ISP's bandwidth, and the bandwidth from the ISP to your inbox -- but there's no way to account for that. Nobody can present him with a bill for it, just like nobody can present an invoice for the number of blocks a mail carrier had to walk with a bag full of junk mail.
Note that I'm not talking about using open relays here. I think spammers who do that are doing something wrong. But I also believe that the practices used in closing up a mail relay are well-known and that everybody running a mail server needs to familiarize themselves with those practices.
Still, there's a real argument to be made that there's nothing wrong with the technical aspects of sending spam. If there were, then what's next? You send a (presumably unwanted) email to your ex-girlfriend, and she sues you?
Tough scenario, man. I think you hit it on the head when you said this:
Granted, this situation is partly the result of internal politics at my corporation, but i think that if the ground work for ROI was done more thoroughly up front during the delivery of this CMS this would not be much of an issue.
I've seen too many groups go through a six-month-plus evaluation, specification and implementation cycle on a CMS... only to discover that it doesn't actually do what they wanted it to do and the people trying to use it are hamstrung by its quirks. Productivity goes down, everyone gets annoyed, but the money's still spent.
I suspect he is right about
the fact that the GPL can't make code free if the original
author didn't make it free, however the fact that they as the
original authors *were* distributing it under the GPL
complicates that claim greatly.
From the article, it sounds like what he's suggesting is that whomever originally distributed the code under the GPL was not a legal, designated agent of Caldera Inc. Basically, he seems to be saying that the engineering team included code in a GPL'ed release that they weren't supposed to, and that until any code released has been vetted by Caldera's legal department, the license doesn't apply.
Personally, I think they'll have a real hard time making that argument stick. I mean, what's next? "The guy who uploaded that tarball to our public server was just an intern we hired over the summer. Unless the Executive VP of Intellectual Property personally fired up an FTP client, the license doesn't apply..."
A good sign of how well CD distribution is dying is the ill fated "Wherehouse" music stores. To my knowledge here in san jose, they are all gone. CD sales just slipped into the toilet and all their stores have just vanished.
The Wherehouse chain filed for bankruptcy in January, blaming "illegal music downloads" and CD burners. They also cited slow holiday sales and increased competition from large discount retailers (Best Buy, WalMart).
But make no mistake: it wasn't their inability to compete based on the profits the record industry allowed them to make... it was the Internet that did it.
It couldn't be that there's anything wrong with the company itself, could it?
Could that explain why this is actually the second time they filed for bankruptcy? The first time was in 1995.
As someone aptly pointed out about seven PHP/MySQL book reviews ago: There are three things the world doesn't need more of - cars, people and "Developing webapps with PHP and MySQL" books.
Your timing is funny, because I was thinking of writing one.:-) Sort of. Seriously, there are, at least, publishers out there who think there is still a market for books on this subject.
All kidding aside, can anybody say what they would like to see in an introductory book on PHP/MySQL etc., maybe that hasn't been done before?
Re:Go to a pedestrian-friendly city
on
Rent a Segway
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· Score: 1
One notable PF city (San Francisco) has gone and banned the Segway.
Totally false. San Francisco has banned Segways from the sidewalks. You can take them on the street, if you're brave enough -- just like a bicycle. It seems completely appropriate to me that the burden of bravery should be on you, for riding a Segway, rather than on me, just trying to walk down the street without getting run over by some yuppie who'd rather ride a $5,000 electric scooter than use the legs god gave him.
Younger coders tend to be (erroneously) hired because many people think they're on top of the newest technologies.
I doubt that's true. I think younger coders get hired more quickly because:
they'll accept lower compensation, and
you can work them harder
Older coders are much more likely to have families, children, and (dare we say it?) lives than fresh cannon-fodder from the universities. They're going to want to spend the weekend helping the wife paint the nursery, and they're going to want to go home before somebody yells at them because dinner's cold. They're also going to raise more of a stink when the pointy-haired boss decides to cut corners on the healthcare policy yet again, and they're more likely to notice that company-wide salary freeze plus ever-decreasing benefits equals less compensation every year. They might be wise enough to realize that those paper stock options aren't going to mean as much as, say, money. Et cetera.
the Monkees, manufactured as they were, still managed to be self-effacing to a certain degree. There was even an episode with Frank Zappa as a special guest where the issue of their manufacturedness is brought up and made humorous.
Thus the majority of Kubrick films are correctly in 4:3 on DVD and video, but actually slightly off in the theater.
Eehhh, this is becoming something of an urban legend. It's true, Kubrick shot many of his films "open matte," so that they could be transferred to 4:3 TV without losing any information (in fact, they gain some, like you say). But that doesn't mean that the TV format is the correct format. If anything, it's still something of a compromise. In the opening sequence of The Shining, for example, on the open-matte DVD version you can faintly see the rotors of the helicopter that filmed the car driving up the winding mountain road. Not so in the theatrical version, where that part of the screen gets matted out. Kubrick took measures to make sure his films wouldn't be mangled when they went to video, but the aspect ratios at which they were originally projected are probably still the "correct" ones.
Doesn't that make it hard to use? Since you cannot expose it to light, and the reader MUST use LASER light?
I'll assume you're not just being a wise guy and point out that the real problem is ultraviolet light, which tends to damage all forms of dyes (think of the movie posters turning blue in the window of the video store), and is present in much greater quantity in sunlight than in incandescent light.
The problem with "converting it to DVD" is that what you probably REALLY mean is "converting it to DVD-R"... and, say what you want, but I haven't actually seen much evidence that says a piece of DVD-R media is going to last any longer than a VHS tape. Those in the know say you want to be really careful about scratching it, and especially about exposing it to light.
There's plenty of DVD players on the market that don't support it, besides... even the DVD-ROM drive on my old PowerBook G3 won't read it.
DVD-R is a nice development, but it's yet to prove itself as a viable archival format, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
(Sorry, but somebody had to do this one, for the old-timers.)
...a baseball cap.
Back has little Slashdot logo. Front reads, "Karma Cap."
Thankew, thankewverymuch, I'll be here all week...
I didn't really like the book. It wasn't enjoyable because, as others have said, it's basically the story of one man's joyless existence. It ends badly. As a story, it's an ugly one, an enjoyable read but ultimately no fun at all once you see where it's going. And once you're done, you realize that the message is actually pretty trite: Don't work too hard, or you'll suffer for it.
Ultimately, this book had nothing to do with computers, or bugs, or anything else tech-related. Sure, she liberally sprinkled the text with C code, but who cares? It's a story about a loser. Don't be him. The end.
It's sort of ironic. People here are saying the school district should have some sort of financial liability for the negligence of allowing public access to this psychological/medical data. I'd tend to agree -- plus, I'd concur with those who say they have no business conducting (almost assuredly bogus) "psychological examinations" of students to begin with.
On the other hand, the reason they started doing psychological examinations of students is probably because, after the Columbine shootings, they'd probably risk financial liability if they didn't.
I agree with the other posters, though -- unless Microsoft tries to use some kind of licensing muscle that tells the nonprofits they can't use free software at the same time, then there's no harm done here. It's just tax write-offs and some good PR for Microsoft.
The better example would be if an MS engineer with access to Windows code dropped a Trojan horse in there that would wipe out people's hard drives on his birthday. Does MS turn around and tell its customers, "Sorry! We can't help you get rid of the Trojan ... that part of Windows isn't covered under our support agreement, because we didn't know it was in there when we released it"?
When you get a flyer announcing discounts at your local supermarket, the supermarket paid rock-bottom bulk rate postage to get it there. Doubtless part of the actual cost of getting it to your home is taken up by taxpayer dollars, which fund the USPS.
Likewise, when a spammer sends spam, he's paid for the bandwidth he needs to send that spam -- and that's the only part of it that he even knows how to pay for. You may think he should pay for his own bandwidth, your ISP's bandwidth, and the bandwidth from the ISP to your inbox -- but there's no way to account for that. Nobody can present him with a bill for it, just like nobody can present an invoice for the number of blocks a mail carrier had to walk with a bag full of junk mail.
Note that I'm not talking about using open relays here. I think spammers who do that are doing something wrong. But I also believe that the practices used in closing up a mail relay are well-known and that everybody running a mail server needs to familiarize themselves with those practices.
Still, there's a real argument to be made that there's nothing wrong with the technical aspects of sending spam. If there were, then what's next? You send a (presumably unwanted) email to your ex-girlfriend, and she sues you?
Personally, I think they'll have a real hard time making that argument stick. I mean, what's next? "The guy who uploaded that tarball to our public server was just an intern we hired over the summer. Unless the Executive VP of Intellectual Property personally fired up an FTP client, the license doesn't apply..."
But make no mistake: it wasn't their inability to compete based on the profits the record industry allowed them to make... it was the Internet that did it. It couldn't be that there's anything wrong with the company itself, could it? Could that explain why this is actually the second time they filed for bankruptcy? The first time was in 1995.
All kidding aside, can anybody say what they would like to see in an introductory book on PHP/MySQL etc., maybe that hasn't been done before?
- they'll accept lower compensation, and
- you can work them harder
Older coders are much more likely to have families, children, and (dare we say it?) lives than fresh cannon-fodder from the universities. They're going to want to spend the weekend helping the wife paint the nursery, and they're going to want to go home before somebody yells at them because dinner's cold. They're also going to raise more of a stink when the pointy-haired boss decides to cut corners on the healthcare policy yet again, and they're more likely to notice that company-wide salary freeze plus ever-decreasing benefits equals less compensation every year. They might be wise enough to realize that those paper stock options aren't going to mean as much as, say, money. Et cetera.I mean, he writes comics, he's in an interview. WTF did he think people were going to ask him questions about? Oh, I dunno ... comics, maybe?
(Then again, I know a lot of people who have met Warren Ellis and most agree that, yes, he is a dick. So, no harm, no foul.)
The problem with "converting it to DVD" is that what you probably REALLY mean is "converting it to DVD-R" ... and, say what you want, but I haven't actually seen much evidence that says a piece of DVD-R media is going to last any longer than a VHS tape. Those in the know say you want to be really careful about scratching it, and especially about exposing it to light.
... even the DVD-ROM drive on my old PowerBook G3 won't read it.
There's plenty of DVD players on the market that don't support it, besides
DVD-R is a nice development, but it's yet to prove itself as a viable archival format, IMHO.