Because the media's stance against Gore and for Bush has been extremely prevalent and incredibly consistent. This seems to me to be a perfect example of an "Emperor Wears No Clothes" kind of event: the media is by and large conservative, not liberal, and this campaign season only serves to prove this.
Interesting. The media I've seen has been their typically shallow selves regarding both candidates. They're falling all over themselves to report on any tidbit about either candidate.
Yes, there have been attacks from both sides. But by and large Bush has gotten off the hook on several major issues (such as the death penalty and other problems with the Texas
How has he "gotten off the hook" regarding the death penalty? Who doesn't know that Texas leads the nation in executions? Who doesn't know of the controversy regarding the mental competency of some of these prisoners? It seems like this, and misstatements by Bush regarding health insurance, education, etc. have been highlighted by the media very well.
The conventional wisdom is that Gore is a liar, facts be damned, and this portrait keeps getting reinforced by the media. Meanwhile, GWB's own misstatements and/or lies get almost wholly ignored.
Al Gore has serious credibility problems due to his association with Clinton. Whether that's fair or not, it's the way things are. Add in Gore's penchant for taking credit for things, and his seemingly daily personality transformations by his campaign advisors, and people wonder if they can trust him.
If you think the media is going out of their way to trash Gore, why aren't they bringing up things like his financial interests in oil and mining (the Dems assail Bush and Cheney for their ties to oil); his published extreme environmental views, which he suddenly doesn't say much about; the fact that Tipper led a campaign for music censorship; etc.
IMHO, Bush and Gore are both about at the bottom of the barrel as far as candidates are concerned. It's too bad that Nader's vague anti-corporatism and Buchanan's hatred for all have consumed all the media attention that could have been paid to the Libertarians....
Uh, if you're going to post this, why not post something balanced, or at least post something comparable about the dirty tricks of the other side? Both major parties constantly participate in this kind of crap. The Republicans are harping on Gore's misstatements, the Dems are harping on Bush's misstatements. It's been going on for a long time, and both sides are guilty. How long did we have to hear about Qualye's "potatoe"?
Follow the link from the Discover blurb to the project web site, and you'll see that they mention both of these methods and the applications for which RFP may be superior.
So is that why my 'nads feel funny after having my Thinkpad in my lap for an hour or two looking at pr0n?
It's only scientific if you have a control group sleeping on laptops that aren't running. And I'd wager that whether it's running or not, using a laptop as a pillow is gonna make you feel funny.
Well, you can tell he's a lawyer by his content-free answers...
It is very unusual for a federal agency to acquiesce in a third party review of an important system. Having commissioned such a review, the interests of the Justice Department would not be served by censoring the review or otherwise acting so as to compromise its integrity and credibility. The review team, institutionally and personally, has an interest in preserving their reputations for professional independence, analytical competence, and candor. None of these interests are tied to future dealings with the Justice Department or the FBI. They are more closely tied to reputation in many of the communities which have been critical of Carnivore. It is counterintuitive to suppose that the review team would sacrifice these interests by undertaking a "whitewash."
Justice has every incentive to cover up anything that may be damaging to their case. Given government abuses of the past, it's not out of the question that Justice has commissioned this review simply to create the impression that we have nothing to worry about from Carnivore. And the fact that the review team does not want to compromise their reputations, etc. is a pretty poor guarantee of a proper review. If they present a whitewash report (or Justice turns it into one), the truth will likely be hidden for many years, until long after the team members' careers are over.
I have been assured by senior officials at the Justice Department that a complete review, with honest conclusions freely expressed, is desired.
And senior government officials tend to get to their levels of power by officially saying one thing and then doing another.....
Re:Does anyone take these people seriously anymore
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
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· Score: 1
...but going into cafes and demanding money from every patron...
This has nothing to do with the RIAA. The RIAA deals with audio recordings. Performance licenses are handled by ASCAP and BMI. Performance licenses cover live music, as well as the public playing of recorded music.
TIGER is the starting point from which most other mapping databases are derived, but it has a lot of limitations. It was developed by the Census Bureau to aid in their assigned tasks. But since it was really the only nationwide streets database out there, it quickly became the basis for all sorts of electronic maps.
Problems with TIGER include positional accuracy, missing road segments, etc. Census would love to make corrections, enhancements, and improvements to the basic TIGER data, but Congress won't allocate the funds, since making navigational databases isn't part of the Census Bureau's job...
First off CmdrTaco, good comments. Second, these guys are absolutely clueless about IP...you don't have to 'defend' against reverse engineering, and in fact, you can't. Third, it took them 5 years to bring this product/business model to fruition? Fourth, the letter was signed by two high level people in the company, and they couldn't bother to review it for correct grammar and spelling?
My suspicion about their business model is this: The company is heavily pushing their device through deals with print media, such as Parade magazine. Those who are chronically unable to correctly type a URL will request the CueCat, and use it. Those who wouldn't use one won't order one. So that means most of the hardware they give away will be used as they intended, which will generate revenue for them when someone scans a URL bar code. Except now you have a bunch of geeks who have figured out the hardware and are developing other ways for it to be used. So now other geeks are going to request their free CueCats, and they're never going to use the bundled driver. So a lot more hardware is going to be given out that will never generate any scanning revenue for them.
Some days I wonder if we're headed toward a society where you can't even wipe your own butt for yourself, instead of having some corporation do it for you (for a nominal fee).
That wouldn't be it. You would simply be subject to cease and desist letters and lawsuits if you used the paper contrary to their current licensing scheme...which takes the term 'sneak-wrap' licensing to a whole new realm....
Just imagine...Charmin sues your ass (so to speak) because you used their product to blow your nose with, or because you hung the roll the wrong way. I suppose the TPing of houses is forbidden too. (To go the other way, I wonder if the TP makers have been sued yet because someone's house got TPed...the manufacturers should have forseen this and put a warning on the product..)
Maybe we should get some toilet paper printed up with pictures of Lars on it...err...maybe just the name 'Metallica'...I'm not sure if I want Lars' face coming at my sensitive areas....
We were trying to buy a Dell laptop the other day, and the salesman said the system wasn't let him place the order...it was an invalid configuration. The reason? We wanted the DVD drive and NT4. DVDs won't work under NT4 he said. Our quick reply was that we have a bunch of Thinkpads with NT4 and DVDs that work just fine.
The problem is that DVDs themselves work fine under NT, you just can watch movies with them. We don't want to watch movies, just read data. I can understand their ordering system throwing up a warning about the limited functionality under NT, but to completely block that configuration probably just lost them a sale.
Well, I went to the site, and looked at their wares. Basically, all they're providing for free are the abstracts, which are taken from the UMI database. Most university libraries have this type of database available for student research. If the abstract indicates the paper may be useful for your own research, you either try to get it through interlibrary loan, or you buy a copy.
I don't see how this is any different from before, except that it's on a web page.
...in 1996 and thought..."Man, why does this look a lot like a perverted cross between MacOS and Win95?"
Having used NeXTs at school around 1992, and then not seeing them again until I bought a few at an auction a year or so ago, I quickly realized how much of the Win95 UI was ripped off from NeXT.
By the way, any NeXT users should take a look at this letter from Apple regarding support:
Also, if you don't yet have NEXTSTEP 3.3, Apple was upgrading NeXT owners for free as part of their Y2K effort. I don't know if they're still making this available, but the details are still at:
Re:Wonder if this could be dangerous?
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
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· Score: 1
There are also some VBS files being served up with different searches. Of course, you'd have to be a complete idiot to blindly download and open a VBS file, but apparenlty a lot of people are. When run, it copies itself to a whole bunch of filenames, including porn names, various music artist names, and even a couple of Gnutella 'upgrade' names.
It then modifies the INI file to make sure you're set to share the VBS files.
Nothing terribly destructive here, but it would be pretty trivial to make it nasty...
But it's chock full of errors, contradictions, and lunacies.
"Why me, Lord? Where have I gone wrong? I've always been nice to people. I don't drink or dance or swear. I've even kept Kosher just to be on the safe side. I've done everything the bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff."
-Ned Flanders in The Simpsons episode 4F07
This is the communications protocol, in case you want to do things like set waypoints. If you're simply looking for a moving map or something, NMEA is the simplest way to go.
NMEA simply spews out a simple ASCII stream, which is easily handled. And if you do write your own software, it will work with pretty much every other GPS out there, since NMEA is an industry standard. Trying to implement anyone's proprietary protocol becomes a PITA really quick, as you're relying on what is frequently poor documentation.
I used to work for an independent oil and gas company. There was extreme paranoia there about what went in and out on a computer. The new Dell's all came with CD-ROM drives, which they removed. Floppy drive cables were removed, and the floppy disabled in the BIOS, which was password protected. Decent protection against viruses on floppy and illegal software coming in. Easy enough to circumvent, but there would be a trail of evidence. So if you needed something from a floppy or CD or to a floppy, you had to go to the helpdesk and have them load it. What a waste of time.
Net access from your desktop PC was limited to only those sites which were explicitly allowed (i.e. CNN). Full access to the net was provided on a single PC per floor that was not connected to the rest of the LAN. Even this was filtered in some way, but apparently only by keywords in the URL.
E-mail was filtered by a lovely product from Norton that held certain attachments until they could be reviewed by a human. Naturally, it stopped EXEs, but they also included most graphics files. Norton would also look inside zip files. Of course, I soon discovered that most "contraband" non-EXE files could be snuck in by simply changing the extension.
Desktop boxes had sound cards and speakers, so you could hear all the default windows sounds...whee.
Oh, and when they set up some new high-powered PCs in a common work area, they left the CD-ROMs hooked up, but disabled the devices in WinNT. Minor detail was that they made our accounts local admins, so a few clicks was all it took to be able to listen to CDs...
In the meantime, the people in IS had full access to anything on the net and e-mail attachments, and were frequently passing around novelty EXEs that could have been hellacious trojans (and they had all kinds of admin access to the whole enterprise).
Anyway, the futility of this system, and the fact that it greatly interefered with accessing the resources that I needed, was a sore point with me the whole time I was there.
Unless, of course, the electricity is provided by solar power, wind power, geothermal power, or a hydroelectric dam.
Uh, yeah. Let's see....sufficient electricity for this kind of application requires huge fields of solar cells, and isn't cost-effective. Geothermal is only applicable in certain places, and I don't think even the eco-nazis would allow a power plant to be built in Yellowstone. Hydroelectric is politically incorrect at this time...the salmon can't swim upstream, the natural floods downstream are stopped (i.e. the Grand Canyon), and areas above the dam are *gasp* flooded. Currently, the cleanest, most efficient method for electrical generation is burning natural gas. That's why utilities are building gas-fired plants all over the place right now. (Nuclear would be better from a long term/environmental perspective, but the anti-nuclear shrills have basically killed nuclear power for now.)
A) Hydrogen isn't as unstable as you seem to think it is.
True, hydrogen in itself isn't that bad, and in many respects, is a safer fuel than gasoline. But like nuclear power, it's a PR problem...all people think of when they hear the word hydrogen is the Hindenberg, and maybe H-bombs.
B) Even if you could mine for hydrogen, why go to all that effort? In case you forgot, water is easily cracked into hydrogen and oxygen, and that is far from the only source of hydrogen around. Hydrogen is fairly plentiful, certainly more so than petroleum.
But how do you crack water? With electricity! The economies simply aren't there.
Well, start looking at the sites that host the packages for these protocols and tools. They typically have pretty good info.
Also, I'm in the middle of reading the new 2nd edition of "Building Internet Firewalls" from O'Reilly. It provides good information about insecure protocols and their secure alternatives.
SBC has been busy advertising the hell out of DSL service in the areas where they are the ILEC. Unfortunately, most people are disappointed to find out that they're either too far away from the switch, or there's too many load coils, splices, etc. in the line. Of course, SBC isn't really sure of this either, and will frequently tell people that they'll try to give them DSL service, but they won't know if it will work or not until they attempt it. To make matters worse, Bell isn't being very forthcoming to the CLECs who offer DSL, in terms of letting them know the line conditions, distances, etc.
Many who have gotten DSL from SBC are now complaining about frequent outages and poor service from customer support.
Customers are being made to wait a long time for installation, largely because they don't have enough install technicians. So it's not a suprise that they're making the "roll your own" service available.
SBC is trying to recreate the old AT&T several times over. They now push products like home security systems and DirecTV. The marketing department is trying to sell anything they can, frequently before they're actually ready to provide it.
If you live in an area served by SBC, I highly recommend looking at the services your CLECs have to offer...you'll usually get better service at a lower price.
3) There was advertising. The guy who ran it lost $100,000, and probably $30-40k of that was spent on radio and television ads. Targetted terribly
The only way I had heard of the event was from a half page ad in the June issue of Linux Journal. And the ad wasn't even that eye-catching. I could have easily skimmed right over it.
Yep. STL would probably work better (assuming it's properly advertised). You've got a centrally located airport (instead of having to drive halfway to Iowa to catch a plane), light-rail from the airport to downtown, and plenty of other smaller conference centers spread throughout the suburbs.
There are a lot of companies here with a large, technical workforce, and/or a large IT department: Boeing, Monsanto, Ralston, Anheuser-Busch, TWA, etc. STL is 4th in the US as a headquarters location for Fortune 500 companies, and consistently ranks in the top 10 as a place for small businesses.
As for activities outside of a conference, there's the Arch, the Zoo, the Art Museum, the casinos, shopping, multi-use trails, good drinking establishments that serve products other than those from Busch, Six Flags if you're into the amusement park scene, and lots and lots of nearby wineries....
Being in St. Louis, I was quite excited to see a Linux event this close to me. However, the only way I knew it was happening was through the small ad they placed in Linux Journal.
The actual seminar subjects seemed very oriented towards business types who wanted to learn something about Linux. The speaker schedule wasn't posted on the web site until the week or so before the show. I have to give Greg Palmer credit here. I e-mailed about the speaker schedule, he replied to me quickly about it, and he even sent another message when the schedule wasn't posted as planned.
With the seminar descriptions, I didn't figure it was going to be worth it for me to go. However, I was planning on spending the weekend in KC anyway, and thought it might be nice to go to the exhibit portion. Well, the only thing the web site seemed to indicate about admission to the exhibit portion was that it was free with seminar registration. Well, I didn't want to pay the one-day seminar fee just to go see the exhibits on Saturday. Not seeing any of the attending vendors promoting the free "exhibits-only" passes that they usually do for trade shows, I figured I was out of luck and gave up.
Since I was on the way to KC Friday night, I didn't see the info in this story that Emmett was going to be there on Saturday (along with the info that the exhibits would be free). Had I known this in advance, I would have attended on Saturday.
Had this whole thing been better planned and promoted, it would have done a lot better. Several of us at work were interested in being able to attended a Linux show close to home, but the apparent disorganization and lack of useful (for us) seminar content made us decide against it.
I bought this book right after it came out, and it helped out quite a bit. Granted, I hadn't used DBI before, only ODBC. I agree that there's nothing earth-shattering in the book, but I find it to be a good tutorial and reference, especially for those who prefer dead tree docs.
Of course, what's really funny is that the CNN link ended up pointing me to the MS web site to read the ruling....where all the subsections are numbered, rather than 1,a,ii....so you can't follow the references. The GPO link has the HTML done correctly.....
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, if you're going to post this, why not post something balanced, or at least post something comparable about the dirty tricks of the other side? Both major parties constantly participate in this kind of crap. The Republicans are harping on Gore's misstatements, the Dems are harping on Bush's misstatements. It's been going on for a long time, and both sides are guilty. How long did we have to hear about Qualye's "potatoe"?
Follow the link from the Discover blurb to the project web site, and you'll see that they mention both of these methods and the applications for which RFP may be superior.
So is that why my 'nads feel funny after having my Thinkpad in my lap for an hour or two looking at pr0n?
It's only scientific if you have a control group sleeping on laptops that aren't running. And I'd wager that whether it's running or not, using a laptop as a pillow is gonna make you feel funny.
Justice has every incentive to cover up anything that may be damaging to their case. Given government abuses of the past, it's not out of the question that Justice has commissioned this review simply to create the impression that we have nothing to worry about from Carnivore. And the fact that the review team does not want to compromise their reputations, etc. is a pretty poor guarantee of a proper review. If they present a whitewash report (or Justice turns it into one), the truth will likely be hidden for many years, until long after the team members' careers are over.
And senior government officials tend to get to their levels of power by officially saying one thing and then doing another.....
This has nothing to do with the RIAA. The RIAA deals with audio recordings. Performance licenses are handled by ASCAP and BMI. Performance licenses cover live music, as well as the public playing of recorded music.
TIGER is the starting point from which most other mapping databases are derived, but it has a lot of limitations. It was developed by the Census Bureau to aid in their assigned tasks. But since it was really the only nationwide streets database out there, it quickly became the basis for all sorts of electronic maps.
Problems with TIGER include positional accuracy, missing road segments, etc. Census would love to make corrections, enhancements, and improvements to the basic TIGER data, but Congress won't allocate the funds, since making navigational databases isn't part of the Census Bureau's job...
First off CmdrTaco, good comments. Second, these guys are absolutely clueless about IP...you don't have to 'defend' against reverse engineering, and in fact, you can't. Third, it took them 5 years to bring this product/business model to fruition? Fourth, the letter was signed by two high level people in the company, and they couldn't bother to review it for correct grammar and spelling?
My suspicion about their business model is this: The company is heavily pushing their device through deals with print media, such as Parade magazine. Those who are chronically unable to correctly type a URL will request the CueCat, and use it. Those who wouldn't use one won't order one. So that means most of the hardware they give away will be used as they intended, which will generate revenue for them when someone scans a URL bar code. Except now you have a bunch of geeks who have figured out the hardware and are developing other ways for it to be used. So now other geeks are going to request their free CueCats, and they're never going to use the bundled driver. So a lot more hardware is going to be given out that will never generate any scanning revenue for them.
Some days I wonder if we're headed toward a society where you can't even wipe your own butt for yourself, instead of having some corporation do it for you (for a nominal fee).
That wouldn't be it. You would simply be subject to cease and desist letters and lawsuits if you used the paper contrary to their current licensing scheme...which takes the term 'sneak-wrap' licensing to a whole new realm....
Just imagine...Charmin sues your ass (so to speak) because you used their product to blow your nose with, or because you hung the roll the wrong way. I suppose the TPing of houses is forbidden too. (To go the other way, I wonder if the TP makers have been sued yet because someone's house got TPed...the manufacturers should have forseen this and put a warning on the product..)
Maybe we should get some toilet paper printed up with pictures of Lars on it...err...maybe just the name 'Metallica'...I'm not sure if I want Lars' face coming at my sensitive areas....
We were trying to buy a Dell laptop the other day, and the salesman said the system wasn't let him place the order...it was an invalid configuration. The reason? We wanted the DVD drive and NT4. DVDs won't work under NT4 he said. Our quick reply was that we have a bunch of Thinkpads with NT4 and DVDs that work just fine.
The problem is that DVDs themselves work fine under NT, you just can watch movies with them. We don't want to watch movies, just read data. I can understand their ordering system throwing up a warning about the limited functionality under NT, but to completely block that configuration probably just lost them a sale.
Well, I went to the site, and looked at their wares. Basically, all they're providing for free are the abstracts, which are taken from the UMI database. Most university libraries have this type of database available for student research. If the abstract indicates the paper may be useful for your own research, you either try to get it through interlibrary loan, or you buy a copy.
I don't see how this is any different from before, except that it's on a web page.
...in 1996 and thought..."Man, why does this look a lot like a perverted cross between MacOS and Win95?"
Having used NeXTs at school around 1992, and then not seeing them again until I bought a few at an auction a year or so ago, I quickly realized how much of the Win95 UI was ripped off from NeXT.
By the way, any NeXT users should take a look at this letter from Apple regarding support:
http://www.apple.com/enterprise/letter. html
Also, if you don't yet have NEXTSTEP 3.3, Apple was upgrading NeXT owners for free as part of their Y2K effort. I don't know if they're still making this available, but the details are still at:
http://www.apple.com/enterprise/y2k/
There are also some VBS files being served up with different searches. Of course, you'd have to be a complete idiot to blindly download and open a VBS file, but apparenlty a lot of people are. When run, it copies itself to a whole bunch of filenames, including porn names, various music artist names, and even a couple of Gnutella 'upgrade' names.
It then modifies the INI file to make sure you're set to share the VBS files.
Nothing terribly destructive here, but it would be pretty trivial to make it nasty...
But it's chock full of errors, contradictions, and lunacies.
"Why me, Lord? Where have I gone wrong? I've always been nice to people. I don't drink or dance or swear. I've even kept Kosher just to be on the safe side. I've done everything the bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff."
-Ned Flanders in The Simpsons episode 4F07
in conjunction with Los Alamos National Labs called the High School SuperComputer challenge.
Heh...they challenge the students to find the missing hard drives....
See:
http://www.garmin.com/support/commProtocol.html
This is the communications protocol, in case you want to do things like set waypoints. If you're simply looking for a moving map or something, NMEA is the simplest way to go.
NMEA simply spews out a simple ASCII stream, which is easily handled. And if you do write your own software, it will work with pretty much every other GPS out there, since NMEA is an industry standard. Trying to implement anyone's proprietary protocol becomes a PITA really quick, as you're relying on what is frequently poor documentation.
I used to work for an independent oil and gas company. There was extreme paranoia there about what went in and out on a computer. The new Dell's all came with CD-ROM drives, which they removed. Floppy drive cables were removed, and the floppy disabled in the BIOS, which was password protected. Decent protection against viruses on floppy and illegal software coming in. Easy enough to circumvent, but there would be a trail of evidence. So if you needed something from a floppy or CD or to a floppy, you had to go to the helpdesk and have them load it. What a waste of time.
Net access from your desktop PC was limited to only those sites which were explicitly allowed (i.e. CNN). Full access to the net was provided on a single PC per floor that was not connected to the rest of the LAN. Even this was filtered in some way, but apparently only by keywords in the URL.
E-mail was filtered by a lovely product from Norton that held certain attachments until they could be reviewed by a human. Naturally, it stopped EXEs, but they also included most graphics files. Norton would also look inside zip files. Of course, I soon discovered that most "contraband" non-EXE files could be snuck in by simply changing the extension.
Desktop boxes had sound cards and speakers, so you could hear all the default windows sounds...whee.
Oh, and when they set up some new high-powered PCs in a common work area, they left the CD-ROMs hooked up, but disabled the devices in WinNT. Minor detail was that they made our accounts local admins, so a few clicks was all it took to be able to listen to CDs...
In the meantime, the people in IS had full access to anything on the net and e-mail attachments, and were frequently passing around novelty EXEs that could have been hellacious trojans (and they had all kinds of admin access to the whole enterprise).
Anyway, the futility of this system, and the fact that it greatly interefered with accessing the resources that I needed, was a sore point with me the whole time I was there.
Unless, of course, the electricity is provided by solar power, wind power, geothermal power, or a hydroelectric dam.
Uh, yeah. Let's see....sufficient electricity for this kind of application requires huge fields of solar cells, and isn't cost-effective. Geothermal is only applicable in certain places, and I don't think even the eco-nazis would allow a power plant to be built in Yellowstone. Hydroelectric is politically incorrect at this time...the salmon can't swim upstream, the natural floods downstream are stopped (i.e. the Grand Canyon), and areas above the dam are *gasp* flooded. Currently, the cleanest, most efficient method for electrical generation is burning natural gas. That's why utilities are building gas-fired plants all over the place right now. (Nuclear would be better from a long term/environmental perspective, but the anti-nuclear shrills have basically killed nuclear power for now.)
A) Hydrogen isn't as unstable as you seem to think it is.
True, hydrogen in itself isn't that bad, and in many respects, is a safer fuel than gasoline. But like nuclear power, it's a PR problem...all people think of when they hear the word hydrogen is the Hindenberg, and maybe H-bombs.
B) Even if you could mine for hydrogen, why go to all that effort? In case you forgot, water is easily cracked into hydrogen and oxygen, and that is far from the only source of hydrogen around. Hydrogen is fairly plentiful, certainly more so than petroleum.
But how do you crack water? With electricity! The economies simply aren't there.
Well, start looking at the sites that host the packages for these protocols and tools. They typically have pretty good info.
Also, I'm in the middle of reading the new 2nd edition of "Building Internet Firewalls" from O'Reilly. It provides good information about insecure protocols and their secure alternatives.
SBC has been busy advertising the hell out of DSL service in the areas where they are the ILEC. Unfortunately, most people are disappointed to find out that they're either too far away from the switch, or there's too many load coils, splices, etc. in the line. Of course, SBC isn't really sure of this either, and will frequently tell people that they'll try to give them DSL service, but they won't know if it will work or not until they attempt it. To make matters worse, Bell isn't being very forthcoming to the CLECs who offer DSL, in terms of letting them know the line conditions, distances, etc.
Many who have gotten DSL from SBC are now complaining about frequent outages and poor service from customer support.
Customers are being made to wait a long time for installation, largely because they don't have enough install technicians. So it's not a suprise that they're making the "roll your own" service available.
SBC is trying to recreate the old AT&T several times over. They now push products like home security systems and DirecTV. The marketing department is trying to sell anything they can, frequently before they're actually ready to provide it.
If you live in an area served by SBC, I highly recommend looking at the services your CLECs have to offer...you'll usually get better service at a lower price.
The only way I had heard of the event was from a half page ad in the June issue of Linux Journal. And the ad wasn't even that eye-catching. I could have easily skimmed right over it.
Yep. STL would probably work better (assuming it's properly advertised). You've got a centrally located airport (instead of having to drive halfway to Iowa to catch a plane), light-rail from the airport to downtown, and plenty of other smaller conference centers spread throughout the suburbs.
There are a lot of companies here with a large, technical workforce, and/or a large IT department: Boeing, Monsanto, Ralston, Anheuser-Busch, TWA, etc. STL is 4th in the US as a headquarters location for Fortune 500 companies, and consistently ranks in the top 10 as a place for small businesses.
As for activities outside of a conference, there's the Arch, the Zoo, the Art Museum, the casinos, shopping, multi-use trails, good drinking establishments that serve products other than those from Busch, Six Flags if you're into the amusement park scene, and lots and lots of nearby wineries....
Being in St. Louis, I was quite excited to see a Linux event this close to me. However, the only way I knew it was happening was through the small ad they placed in Linux Journal.
The actual seminar subjects seemed very oriented towards business types who wanted to learn something about Linux. The speaker schedule wasn't posted on the web site until the week or so before the show. I have to give Greg Palmer credit here. I e-mailed about the speaker schedule, he replied to me quickly about it, and he even sent another message when the schedule wasn't posted as planned.
With the seminar descriptions, I didn't figure it was going to be worth it for me to go. However, I was planning on spending the weekend in KC anyway, and thought it might be nice to go to the exhibit portion. Well, the only thing the web site seemed to indicate about admission to the exhibit portion was that it was free with seminar registration. Well, I didn't want to pay the one-day seminar fee just to go see the exhibits on Saturday. Not seeing any of the attending vendors promoting the free "exhibits-only" passes that they usually do for trade shows, I figured I was out of luck and gave up.
Since I was on the way to KC Friday night, I didn't see the info in this story that Emmett was going to be there on Saturday (along with the info that the exhibits would be free). Had I known this in advance, I would have attended on Saturday.
Had this whole thing been better planned and promoted, it would have done a lot better. Several of us at work were interested in being able to attended a Linux show close to home, but the apparent disorganization and lack of useful (for us) seminar content made us decide against it.
I bought this book right after it came out, and it helped out quite a bit. Granted, I hadn't used DBI before, only ODBC. I agree that there's nothing earth-shattering in the book, but I find it to be a good tutorial and reference, especially for those who prefer dead tree docs.
Of course, what's really funny is that the CNN link ended up pointing me to the MS web site to read the ruling....where all the subsections are numbered, rather than 1,a,ii....so you can't follow the references. The GPO link has the HTML done correctly.....