Why?
The channels themselves are paid for by advertising (minus premium channels).
And by the fees that cable companies pay for them. Surely you didn't think that Comcast gets all that content free of charge? Or that they just swallow that cost?
Furthermore, that advertising revenue is based on viewership. An advertiser is likely to pay more for time on a channel that's available in every cable-connected home in America (e.g. a common freebie like TBS) than they are to one that would be only available in the fraction of homes that specifically ordered it. Advertisers are trolling for channel-surfing eyeballs, and they don't get those if the channel isn't on everyone's dial. So they have to get the money from the cable companies, who'll pass that cost on to the subscribers.
If not enough people are watching the Avocado Channel to support it, I daresay it should wither on the vine.
OK, if you're a strict mercantile darwinist, that makes sense. But there's a school of thought that specialised programming aimed at certain smallish segments of society is a Good Thing. How would you feel if Slashdot just weren't cutting it financially and had to shut down?
I'd much prefer a system wherein The Office Supplies Channel and Left-Handed Epileptic Aluminum Siding Consultant Television would disappear and be replaced by something that more than three people have an interest in.
If your local cable provider knew of any such programming, they would have replaced TOSC and LHEASCTV a long time ago. It doesn't exist because there isn't a financially viable market for it.
As enticing as it would be to be able to pick any number of channels for $x/month each, a la carte pricing wouldn't work that way. Prices for each channel would vary dramatically, to the point that you may prefer buying a bundle to save money.
One of the things that makes the multitude of channels on cable possible is the fact that they're packaged together. Few people would ever subscribe to the Avocado Channel by itself, but they'll take it as part of a package... and once in a while they might watch something on it, like the Miss Avocado pageant. And over time they might find they like some of the other Avacado programming and become regular watchers. That would never happen with a la carte pricing.
So we could end up with a dozen or so least-common-denominator channels that a strong plurality subscribes to (ESPN, EmptyV, Cartoon, Spike, HBO) being successful, and the more specialised niche channels (some of which would be some people's personal favorites)unable to get a large enough casual subscriber base and withering on the vine.
The very fact that this showed up on the front page of/. shows that they've given up all pretense of caring what they publish here.
Or they think that pointing out incredible claims for scrutiny is a good way to test them. Note the "from the skeptical-eye-on-the-science-guy dept." tag on the article rather than, say, "from the holy-shit-give-this-guy-a-Nobel-quickly dept."
I'm not talking about for recruiting developers, but for marketing the software to users. Make it a status symbol to be part of the "cute and sexy" crowd behind Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc. We can still recruit aging and ordinary geeks to work on the stuff, but make sure to send the babes and stud puppies to public events.;)
And by the way, both Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza's April 12th blog entry have a picture of Miguel and Nat dancing with David Vaskevitch, CTO of Microsoft.
Which just provides further evidence that people who use Linux tend to be cuter than those who work for Microsoft. (We really should use this fact as a marketing tool.)
port knocking is like having a deliberate hole in your carefully constructed secure zone.
Well, yes. That's the point: to enable access to a secured system. It's often a necessary evil. The issue is that most people implement these deliberate holes by leaving certain ports open to simple direct access. They're easy to find, and not all that difficult to exploit. Adding a layer of obscurity and another layer of security on those holes - in effect putting a concealed combination lock on them - would be a more secure way of doing that.
Do not under any circumstances use this knowledge of vulnerabilities to actually sniff passwords, gain access to information you're not intended to have, etc. If your college's Acceptable Use policy is anything like ours, doing so will be a violation. Full stop. AU policies never include an "unless you're doing it for a noble reason" or "didn't do any harm by it" exception. And if you were to catch me with my pants down, you can be sure that I'm not going to thank you for it; I'm going to throw the book at you, to make sure that no one else gets the idea of trying something similar. It doesn't matter if I'm negligent or not; that's just the prudent IT fear-mongering to discourage genuinely malicious hacking (of the kind you're worried about).
Instead if you know people in IT, you can try going to them with your concerns, from a "hey did you know... it worries me...." perspective. If they're good people and well managed (but just didn't stop to think about it), that should help. If you don't have a friend there, or you hear that IT are a bunch of bozos, your best bet is to bypass them and take your concerns (as "I know enough about it to suspect this could happen", not "I know how to do this") directly to one of the offices charged with handling your student data (e.g. registrar, business office, financial aid). They're the ones who ought to be most alarmed over confidentiality problems (because they've had in-services driving the point home), and it'll be their bosses in the administration who'll have the authority to put the pressure on IT to do their job.
Bar tending... will make any computing employer think you are an alcoholic
Most employers are smart enough to understand that someone with an active drinking problem wouldn't last very long in a job behind the bar. I can see potential employers questioning the technical aptitude or professionalism of someone who works as a bartender, but not his sobriety.
Whenever I'm trying to make a tough decision, I make a spreadsheet that lists every factor that goes into the choice (e.g. job security, time with GF/BF, pay). I include a space to assign a numerical weight to each factor, and for each option there's a space to assign a score, indicating whether it (for example) would provide really good job security or really bad job security. There's a live formula at the bottom of each column to total the weighted scores for each option.
Then I step back and watch myself assigning weights and scores, and tweaking them. I usually find myself adjusting the values to make one of the options come out on top. That's the one I go with.
I did the two-jobs-at-once thing for 4 years as a practical necessity. It wasn't bad, because the day job was something I sorta enjoyed, and the other was generally innocuous. They were both really steady, reliable work, but nothing that would advance my career. Then I got laid off from the day job (not so reliable after all). I finally ended up at a single job that pays better, but ranges from frustrating to boring. My job security is OK. I'd rather go back to the way things were. I'm coming to the conclusion that money and time and security aren't the things that will determine whether I'm happy in a job; enjoying the job itself seems to matter most.
How many people still swear about the good old days of Wordperfect 5.1?
I frequently miss WP5. (Fortunately I have WP11, which preserves much of what was good about it.) It was the pinnacle of DOS word processing, and despite a user interface that begged for... nay, demanded a keyboard template, it was used very effectively by many a non-technical secretary and early-adopter geek alike. The WP5 users I supported often called with "how do I..." questions, but they rarely called with the same such question twice. My boss at the time used WP like many unix hackers use Emacs: for everything.
For me the decision to handle my own DNS boiled down to the principle of self-sufficiency. Why pay/trust someone to do something I could do myself. When I first started hosting, I used Granite Canyon's free service, but became disillusioned with it when they had a prolonged outage. I figured I could handle it at least as well, so I did. (Which is how I got into hosting in the first place.) I like the control and immediacy of having my own stuff.
Now Register.com offers DNS with domains registered through them, and they are more reliable by far than GC's volunteer service. I still run my own (which gives me immediate reloads of new data), and use them as my failsafe.
Re:My daughter has her own computer
on
A Babe in Tuxland
·
· Score: 1
"My daughter is 4.5 now and my son is 2.2"
Versions 4.5 and 2.2? My kids are still in the alpha stage.
Mine are vaporware. "Sure Mom, I'm gonna have some grandkids for you Real Soon Now. I'm gonna call the first one Duke... Duke Nukem."
While this was something of a answered-your-own-question question, I'm glad it was posted because it knocked me out of the box my mind was in, trying to figure out a good solution to my own situation. My last for-legacy-apps Windows machine at home is a laptop with a busted LCD, and I've been fighting with its VGA-out port (which is overly fond of acting as a second display instead of mirroring) and a video switch connected to my server's cheapo monitor to keep using it. It was already accessing shared directories via Samba, and now that I've got VNC going, I can use the nice keyboard and display on my Linux box or Mac to access it, and lean the laptop out of the way against the wall.
Note: Any place in this discussion where you find someone saying that HardRadio or their lawyers are just mean, spiteful people, insert "I am not a lawyer, and in fact no almost nothing about trademark law."
U.S. trademark law pretty much requires the owners of trademarks to bitch and whine about people who might be weakening those trademarks, or they'll lose them. Those laws may very well be a conspiracy involving the Intellectual Property Law industry to ensure more work for them, but nonetheless that's how the laws work.
What you should do when/if you receive this kind of cease-and-desist letter depends on whether you think their trademark is worth overturning or not. If you really want the right to use their trademark in your metatags and feel their claim to it is invalid, then get your own member of the IPLaw guild and fight it. If not, then do what they ask and apologize. Because if you fight it, they'll be forced to fight to win, because what's at stake for them isn't just the metatags on your web site, but their ownership of the name they're doing business under. With them having more money, and more at stake, the only way you'd win is if you're clearly in the right and have the drive to prove it.
To the best of my knowledge, no company in recent memory has lost a trademark due to dilution from generic usage. Not Xerox, not Kimberly-Clark (makers of Kleenex brand facial tissues), not Johnson & Johnson (makers of Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages).
Your knowledge is incomplete. They may not all necessarily fit your definition of "modern" but refrigerator, escalator, cellophane, shredded wheat, thermos, yo-yo, murphy bed, and nylon are terms which have lost some or all of their trademark protection. There are fewer examples in modern times precisely because Xerox, Kleenex, and Band-Aid were all aggressively promoted as trademarks.
how can you assert that these are heterosexual caucasian males?
OK, one of them looks like he might be asian. But as for "heterosexual", it's an assumption that's both statistically likely and... oh come on, everyone knows that gay guys can dance better than that! Even gay geeks! And even the badgerbadgerbadger dance!:)
But of course the main thing is that one have fun with one's life, and I'd rather see a bunch of young men badgerbadgerbadgering badly with smiles on their faces than standing sullenly along the wall at a school dance.
In related news, Daksh announced that it would be closing its domestic operations and laying off 5,500 Indian workers, in favor of opening offices overseas, in the developing world. Offices in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), Pitcairn Island (South Pacific), Ashgabat (Turkmenistan) and Hickory-Flat (Mississippi, USA) are planned.
In hopes of finding a server with their new name as its domain I started doing reverse lookups on the IP's near www.lindows.com. (They gotta have it registered already, but I'm not much of a WHOIS hacker.) I only got a few IPs in each direction before they started coming up null.
But remember that "servers" != "web servers". Who knows what they have that isn't facing the internet. They might be using an internal domain such as lindows.local, and if they're completely rebranding, that'd part of their transition.
I thought that phones were not modular (able to be plugged in and out) until recently. I read that the phones were hard wired until the last 30 years or so. True/Not True?
I'm no expert on this, but I believe the modern RJ11 wall jack came into widespread use in the U.S. in the 1960's or 70's. (I remember seeing them for the first time as a kid.) Before that the standard removable connector was a largish plug with four round prongs in a trapezoidal arrangement (so it could only go on one way). In Bell's day, a typical phone would have been hard-wired, and certainly didn't look like any modern phone (with the possible exception of a wall-mounted pay phone).
Perhaps the saddest aspect of this video is the fact that most of them do the badger dance so... poorly. The tall one on the right has the right instincts for synching up the arm waving and knee bending, so I give him credit for that, but it's not how the badgers actually do it. And the rest of them do very little to dispel certain stereotypes about the lack of rhythm in the heterosexual caucasian male. If these guys fail to reproduce (which seems likely), it's not because they're cruising the dance floor of their local gay bar.
That's frighteningly similar to what Kyle MacLachlan said about Dune. I remember reading a pre-release interview with him, in which he said that he'd loved the books as a teenager, then heard that a movie was in the works, and was disappointed that he was too young to play Paul Atreides. By the time the movie actually got to casting, however, he was the right age (and got the part, of course). Could be a good omen, Wil.
Not to rehash a years-old argument (how did you miss it?), but Jar-Jar reminded some viewers of how Jamaicans and African Americans have been caricatured in popular entertainment (e.g. loping, dim-witted, exaggerated mouths, speaking pidgin English). Some of the other aliens in SW:TPM were bore some resemblance to racial stereotypes as well (e.g. the trade federation reps =~ Chinese, Anakin's master Watto =~ Jewish), leading to some spirited debates about the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? The channels themselves are paid for by advertising (minus premium channels).
And by the fees that cable companies pay for them. Surely you didn't think that Comcast gets all that content free of charge? Or that they just swallow that cost?
Furthermore, that advertising revenue is based on viewership. An advertiser is likely to pay more for time on a channel that's available in every cable-connected home in America (e.g. a common freebie like TBS) than they are to one that would be only available in the fraction of homes that specifically ordered it. Advertisers are trolling for channel-surfing eyeballs, and they don't get those if the channel isn't on everyone's dial. So they have to get the money from the cable companies, who'll pass that cost on to the subscribers.
OK, if you're a strict mercantile darwinist, that makes sense. But there's a school of thought that specialised programming aimed at certain smallish segments of society is a Good Thing. How would you feel if Slashdot just weren't cutting it financially and had to shut down?
I'd much prefer a system wherein The Office Supplies Channel and Left-Handed Epileptic Aluminum Siding Consultant Television would disappear and be replaced by something that more than three people have an interest in.
If your local cable provider knew of any such programming, they would have replaced TOSC and LHEASCTV a long time ago. It doesn't exist because there isn't a financially viable market for it.
One of the things that makes the multitude of channels on cable possible is the fact that they're packaged together. Few people would ever subscribe to the Avocado Channel by itself, but they'll take it as part of a package... and once in a while they might watch something on it, like the Miss Avocado pageant. And over time they might find they like some of the other Avacado programming and become regular watchers. That would never happen with a la carte pricing.
So we could end up with a dozen or so least-common-denominator channels that a strong plurality subscribes to (ESPN, EmptyV, Cartoon, Spike, HBO) being successful, and the more specialised niche channels (some of which would be some people's personal favorites)unable to get a large enough casual subscriber base and withering on the vine.
Or they think that pointing out incredible claims for scrutiny is a good way to test them. Note the "from the skeptical-eye-on-the-science-guy dept." tag on the article rather than, say, "from the holy-shit-give-this-guy-a-Nobel-quickly dept."
And how is this criticism relevant to port-knocking? It's an additional layer of security, not a way to avoid it. RTFA.
I'm not talking about for recruiting developers, but for marketing the software to users. Make it a status symbol to be part of the "cute and sexy" crowd behind Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc. We can still recruit aging and ordinary geeks to work on the stuff, but make sure to send the babes and stud puppies to public events. ;)
Which just provides further evidence that people who use Linux tend to be cuter than those who work for Microsoft. (We really should use this fact as a marketing tool.)
Well, yes. That's the point: to enable access to a secured system. It's often a necessary evil. The issue is that most people implement these deliberate holes by leaving certain ports open to simple direct access. They're easy to find, and not all that difficult to exploit. Adding a layer of obscurity and another layer of security on those holes - in effect putting a concealed combination lock on them - would be a more secure way of doing that.
Instead if you know people in IT, you can try going to them with your concerns, from a "hey did you know... it worries me...." perspective. If they're good people and well managed (but just didn't stop to think about it), that should help. If you don't have a friend there, or you hear that IT are a bunch of bozos, your best bet is to bypass them and take your concerns (as "I know enough about it to suspect this could happen", not "I know how to do this") directly to one of the offices charged with handling your student data (e.g. registrar, business office, financial aid). They're the ones who ought to be most alarmed over confidentiality problems (because they've had in-services driving the point home), and it'll be their bosses in the administration who'll have the authority to put the pressure on IT to do their job.
Most employers are smart enough to understand that someone with an active drinking problem wouldn't last very long in a job behind the bar. I can see potential employers questioning the technical aptitude or professionalism of someone who works as a bartender, but not his sobriety.
Then I step back and watch myself assigning weights and scores, and tweaking them. I usually find myself adjusting the values to make one of the options come out on top. That's the one I go with.
The moral: trust your guts, not your analysis.
I did the two-jobs-at-once thing for 4 years as a practical necessity. It wasn't bad, because the day job was something I sorta enjoyed, and the other was generally innocuous. They were both really steady, reliable work, but nothing that would advance my career. Then I got laid off from the day job (not so reliable after all). I finally ended up at a single job that pays better, but ranges from frustrating to boring. My job security is OK. I'd rather go back to the way things were. I'm coming to the conclusion that money and time and security aren't the things that will determine whether I'm happy in a job; enjoying the job itself seems to matter most.
I frequently miss WP5. (Fortunately I have WP11, which preserves much of what was good about it.) It was the pinnacle of DOS word processing, and despite a user interface that begged for... nay, demanded a keyboard template, it was used very effectively by many a non-technical secretary and early-adopter geek alike. The WP5 users I supported often called with "how do I..." questions, but they rarely called with the same such question twice. My boss at the time used WP like many unix hackers use Emacs: for everything.
Now Register.com offers DNS with domains registered through them, and they are more reliable by far than GC's volunteer service. I still run my own (which gives me immediate reloads of new data), and use them as my failsafe.
Versions 4.5 and 2.2? My kids are still in the alpha stage.
Mine are vaporware. "Sure Mom, I'm gonna have some grandkids for you Real Soon Now. I'm gonna call the first one Duke... Duke Nukem."
While this was something of a answered-your-own-question question, I'm glad it was posted because it knocked me out of the box my mind was in, trying to figure out a good solution to my own situation. My last for-legacy-apps Windows machine at home is a laptop with a busted LCD, and I've been fighting with its VGA-out port (which is overly fond of acting as a second display instead of mirroring) and a video switch connected to my server's cheapo monitor to keep using it. It was already accessing shared directories via Samba, and now that I've got VNC going, I can use the nice keyboard and display on my Linux box or Mac to access it, and lean the laptop out of the way against the wall.
U.S. trademark law pretty much requires the owners of trademarks to bitch and whine about people who might be weakening those trademarks, or they'll lose them. Those laws may very well be a conspiracy involving the Intellectual Property Law industry to ensure more work for them, but nonetheless that's how the laws work.
What you should do when/if you receive this kind of cease-and-desist letter depends on whether you think their trademark is worth overturning or not. If you really want the right to use their trademark in your metatags and feel their claim to it is invalid, then get your own member of the IPLaw guild and fight it. If not, then do what they ask and apologize. Because if you fight it, they'll be forced to fight to win, because what's at stake for them isn't just the metatags on your web site, but their ownership of the name they're doing business under. With them having more money, and more at stake, the only way you'd win is if you're clearly in the right and have the drive to prove it.
Your knowledge is incomplete. They may not all necessarily fit your definition of "modern" but refrigerator, escalator, cellophane, shredded wheat, thermos, yo-yo, murphy bed, and nylon are terms which have lost some or all of their trademark protection. There are fewer examples in modern times precisely because Xerox, Kleenex, and Band-Aid were all aggressively promoted as trademarks.
OK, one of them looks like he might be asian. But as for "heterosexual", it's an assumption that's both statistically likely and... oh come on, everyone knows that gay guys can dance better than that! Even gay geeks! And even the badgerbadgerbadger dance! :)
But of course the main thing is that one have fun with one's life, and I'd rather see a bunch of young men badgerbadgerbadgering badly with smiles on their faces than standing sullenly along the wall at a school dance.
In related news, Daksh announced that it would be closing its domestic operations and laying off 5,500 Indian workers, in favor of opening offices overseas, in the developing world. Offices in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), Pitcairn Island (South Pacific), Ashgabat (Turkmenistan) and Hickory-Flat (Mississippi, USA) are planned.
But remember that "servers" != "web servers". Who knows what they have that isn't facing the internet. They might be using an internal domain such as lindows.local, and if they're completely rebranding, that'd part of their transition.
I'm no expert on this, but I believe the modern RJ11 wall jack came into widespread use in the U.S. in the 1960's or 70's. (I remember seeing them for the first time as a kid.) Before that the standard removable connector was a largish plug with four round prongs in a trapezoidal arrangement (so it could only go on one way). In Bell's day, a typical phone would have been hard-wired, and certainly didn't look like any modern phone (with the possible exception of a wall-mounted pay phone).
Perhaps the saddest aspect of this video is the fact that most of them do the badger dance so... poorly. The tall one on the right has the right instincts for synching up the arm waving and knee bending, so I give him credit for that, but it's not how the badgers actually do it. And the rest of them do very little to dispel certain stereotypes about the lack of rhythm in the heterosexual caucasian male. If these guys fail to reproduce (which seems likely), it's not because they're cruising the dance floor of their local gay bar.
That's frighteningly similar to what Kyle MacLachlan said about Dune. I remember reading a pre-release interview with him, in which he said that he'd loved the books as a teenager, then heard that a movie was in the works, and was disappointed that he was too young to play Paul Atreides. By the time the movie actually got to casting, however, he was the right age (and got the part, of course). Could be a good omen, Wil.
Not to rehash a years-old argument (how did you miss it?), but Jar-Jar reminded some viewers of how Jamaicans and African Americans have been caricatured in popular entertainment (e.g. loping, dim-witted, exaggerated mouths, speaking pidgin English). Some of the other aliens in SW:TPM were bore some resemblance to racial stereotypes as well (e.g. the trade federation reps =~ Chinese, Anakin's master Watto =~ Jewish), leading to some spirited debates about the subject.