If you think telemarketers are bad, here in Australia there are people called "blowers" (a consumer affairs bureau term, not sure if there is an equivalent in the U.S. although most likely) that call up businesses asking for payment of imaginary advertising, saying something like "I'm calling from the (rescue/police/fire/etc) magazine, and just wanted to follow up on your offer a few months ago to help us out with an advert in our magazine.. how would you like to pay for it?"
The amounts are usually something like $200, and it is all very illegal.. but it's amazing how many of these groups are out there - with some of them getting very insistent and rude if you try to deny having agreed to pay.
Do yourself a favour and save your sanity.. don't read "The Number of the Beast". I got about 2/3 through it and then just found it too hard to suffer through the remaining pages - worst Heinlein novel ever in my opinion. I much prefer stuff like "Door into Summer" and let's hope this new (old?) novel is of a similar standard.
Is this Ian Taylor the person who wrote "Taylor UUCP"? If so, then it is interesting that he is writing about SCO.. as way back when I was originally doing some admin work on SCO Unix, the SCO UUCP software was the first thing I replaced with Taylor UUCP as the SCO version was an absolute pile of rubbish (whereas Taylor UUCP was fast and error-free, more than twice the speed).
A lot of problems at NASA tend to be more hardware and operational related.. the software that was referred to is actually extremely reliable. The group that writes it is certified at "Capability Maturity Model" level 5, a software engineering standard that is very strict on planning, specifications, testing etc. They spend months determining exactly what needs to be programmed before even touching a single line of code.
I once saw the opposite - a piece of code that specifically referred to swear words. The code routine created a 4-letter code that was sequentially updated and shown to a user, and the code specifically filtered out any bad word so all the 4-letter words not to be used were checked for.
I worked as a team leader in software development for a number of years, and in my experience - far more important than knowledge of specific languages is knowledge of software engineering techniques.
Being able to write a decent technical specification, do code inspections, set up thorough test plans and help with documentation updates is what will result in usable code.
The one thing that doesn't seem to have changed over many years, is the need for people experienced with setting up large database systems and keeping them running smoothly - from the days of the big IBM mainframe databases (IMS I think it was) to the Oracle databases of current times. Even if you don't want to be a DBA, having some basic knowledge is always helpful and appealing to a future employer (especially if you combine it with a bit of server/network experience).
Far better than their 'Bollocks' album was their film "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle" - an interesting satire of themselves, and including a lot of footage about how they swapped between record companies after their exploits with each. Classic parts being the song with Ronald Biggs (the train robber) and the version of 'My Way' by Sid Vicious.
Fermi's Paradox implies that aliens would live on every habitable planet in the galaxy.. however, they may have reasons for staying away from some in a similar way to why Antarctica hasn't been colonised/mined or why we have lots of national forests etc. Could be aliens need different living conditions, or that they have respect for other species.
Also, let's not forget that we are on the edge of the universe away from the centre.. when an alien species reaches us, they would start to think "oops, we're running out of space - time to start thinking about zero population growth!"
And the prize for most stupid and un-informed comment goes to..
Brittney Spears! "Would you go into a CD store and steal a CD? It's the same thing, people going into the computers and logging on and stealing our music. It's the exact same thing, so why do it?"
Brittney, considering how much the record company controls the song, your looks, the music videos etc, I don't think it ever was 'your' music.
Quality may be an issue with movies and songs, but e-book versions of novels are 99% text so as long as you get all the correct letters and punctuation you have all the content. Why would you need high-quality multimedia content with your novel when the best picture is that formed by your imagination..
If you want to see an example of why investors might be afraid of Terry Gilliam, obtain the Criterion Collection 3-DVD edition of "Brazil" (one of his best films) which shows how studios wanted to modify the film to suit a bigger audience and Terry Gilliam faced up to them and refused to budge. A quality film is far more important to Gilliam than large profits.
A while ago, I purchased a CD album released by a small independent company called 'Fax' (that had a policy of direct payments to artists without the usual recording company politics) - it was a 4-CD album but Fax wanted it to be value for money and priced it at the normal 2-CD album price. On the CD cover is printed "If you pay more than the normal Fax double-cd price for this album you are being ripped off !!!!!"
It's not like the internet created music sharing.. the way I started getting interested in music many years ago, was by getting friends to tape music for me so I could listen to it and I later started buying CDs of what I liked. Many people did the same thing then. Sometimes I will purchase music based on one song I have heard, but too often that is unreliable. You can't base a decision based on listening to the radio or watching video clips - you really need to listen to the whole album.
Back when I was at university (this was years ago, before the PC was released), there was a group of us who played multi-user text based games in the computer lab. We had managed to "obtain" some accounts using a sneaky little fake login program on terminals, and chewed up hours of time each day. We had to rely on one of us being a lookout, and the game had a command which if selected by any of us would pop up a randomly selected screen for everyone - a directory listing, fake command prompt, program listing, etc. The guy who wrote the game even chatted online at one point to one of the system administrators about the game. They finally caught up with us one day, although had no proof.. and grabbed the name from one guy, who proceeded to say his name was "Jim Hendricks" (with the rest of us trying hard not to laugh).
I have no idea how I ever managed to pass all my subjects..
I have always been a serious vim fan, and have used unix and linux for many years.. however, the menus/mouse/buttons/etc in "gvim" (and I assume "kvim" will be similar) makes many functions significantly easier. Cut-and-paste is quick with a mouse, changing the size of windows is fast, and the scrollbar is very useful. If I want to quickly write a small file, plain vim is best - but for lengthy editing sessions, gvim/kvim is the best!
I personally consider winmodems to be very annoying, even with Windows. When I bought my most recent PC, it had a winmodem as part of the package, but I used an external modem instead and ignored the winmodem - it's comforting seeing the modem lights and knowing I can reset the modem any time I want. Even with the low cost of winmodems, there have always been plenty of external modems available.. I'm sure the same will apply with WiFi
Xmodem may have been something that filled a need, but Kermit was by far the more widespread protocol (and to a certain extent still is) - it handled errors well, and has been written for just about EVERY operating system that ever existed.
Considering that Usenet is also used on many different systems, then we need a "kermit" not an "xmodem".
Yes Xenix on a 386 ran quite well.. but the earlier versions of Xenix were basically garbage. Many years ago I worked for a company writing unix/xenix applications, and the xenix 286 machine was the one we all dreaded using the most - with all the other unix machines being far superior (although I admit that was a combination of hardware and operating system).
Also, Xenix had the WORST version of UUCP I had ever seen.. I very quickly replaced it with Taylor UUCP.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think telemarketers are bad, here in Australia there are people called "blowers" (a consumer affairs bureau term, not sure if there is an equivalent in the U.S. although most likely) that call up businesses asking for payment of imaginary advertising, saying something like "I'm calling from the (rescue/police/fire/etc) magazine, and just wanted to follow up on your offer a few months ago to help us out with an advert in our magazine.. how would you like to pay for it?"
The amounts are usually something like $200, and it is all very illegal.. but it's amazing how many of these groups are out there - with some of them getting very insistent and rude if you try to deny having agreed to pay.
Do yourself a favour and save your sanity.. don't read "The Number of the Beast". I got about 2/3 through it and then just found it too hard to suffer through the remaining pages - worst Heinlein novel ever in my opinion. I much prefer stuff like "Door into Summer" and let's hope this new (old?) novel is of a similar standard.
Is this Ian Taylor the person who wrote "Taylor UUCP"? If so, then it is interesting that he is writing about SCO.. as way back when I was originally doing some admin work on SCO Unix, the SCO UUCP software was the first thing I replaced with Taylor UUCP as the SCO version was an absolute pile of rubbish (whereas Taylor UUCP was fast and error-free, more than twice the speed).
It could be interesting having them fight each
other..
ITAA vs MPAA
ITAA vs RIAA
Yes, that's some death-matches I'd like to see!
I just tried searching for my name,
and got 3540 matches!
But that could be because my name is the same as
a locality in Australia..
(from "Black Adder 3 - Ink and Incapability")
"Here it is, sir. The very cornerstone of English scholarship. This book, sir, contains every word in our beloved english language"
"Every single one, sir?"
"Every single one, sir."
"Oh, well in that case sir, I hope you will not object if I also offer the doctor my most enthusiastic contifibularities."
"What?"
"Contifibularities, sir? It is a common word down our way."
"Damn."
"Oh, I'm sorry sir. I'm anaspeptic, frasmotic, even compuctuous to have caused you such pericombobulations."
"What what what??"
"What are you on about, Blackadder? This is beginning to sound a bit like dago talk to me."
"I'm sorry sir. I merely wished to congratulate the doctor on not having missed out a single word."
A lot of problems at NASA tend to be more hardware and operational related.. the software that was referred to is actually extremely reliable. The group that writes it is certified at "Capability Maturity Model" level 5, a software engineering standard that is very strict on planning, specifications, testing etc. They spend months determining exactly what needs to be programmed before even touching a single line of code.
I once saw the opposite - a piece of code that specifically referred to swear words. The code routine created a 4-letter code that was sequentially updated and shown to a user, and the code specifically filtered out any bad word so all the 4-letter words not to be used were checked for.
I worked as a team leader in software development for a number of years, and in my experience - far more important than knowledge of specific languages is knowledge of software engineering techniques.
Being able to write a decent technical specification, do code inspections, set up thorough test plans and help with documentation updates is what will result in usable code.
An article from slashdot about a year ago predicted this very situation with the FCC.
(of course at the time no-one seemed interested in it, and the article was hidden in a sub-section off the main page)
Do you find that your own mail drowns in
incoming spam?
Not only that.. but the latest spam is getting sneaky. Using titles like "Re: Refund payment", "Hi", etc to trick you into reading the message.
The one thing that doesn't seem to have changed over many years, is the need for people experienced with setting up large database systems and keeping them running smoothly - from the days of the big IBM mainframe databases (IMS I think it was) to the Oracle databases of current times. Even if you don't want to be a DBA, having some basic knowledge is always helpful and appealing to a future employer (especially if you combine it with a bit of server/network experience).
Information Awareness Office?
Sounds like something from the movie Brazil..
Far better than their 'Bollocks' album was their
film "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle" - an interesting satire of themselves, and including a lot of footage about how they swapped between record companies after their exploits with each. Classic parts being the song with Ronald Biggs (the train robber) and the version of 'My Way' by Sid Vicious.
Fermi's Paradox implies that aliens would live on every habitable planet in the galaxy.. however, they may have reasons for staying away from some in a similar way to why Antarctica hasn't been colonised/mined or why we have lots of national forests etc. Could be aliens need different living conditions, or that they have respect for other species.
Also, let's not forget that we are on the edge of the universe away from the centre.. when an alien species reaches us, they would start to think "oops, we're running out of space - time to start thinking about zero population growth!"
And the prize for most stupid and un-informed comment goes to..
Brittney Spears! "Would you go into a CD store and steal a CD? It's the same thing, people going into the computers and logging on and stealing our music. It's the exact same thing, so why do it?"
Brittney, considering how much the record company controls the song, your looks, the music videos etc, I don't think it ever was 'your' music.
Quality may be an issue with movies and songs, but e-book versions of novels are 99% text so as long as you get all the correct letters and punctuation you have all the content. Why would you need high-quality multimedia content with your novel when the best picture is that formed by your imagination..
If you want to see an example of why investors might be afraid of Terry Gilliam, obtain the Criterion Collection 3-DVD edition of "Brazil" (one of his best films) which shows how studios wanted to modify the film to suit a bigger audience and Terry Gilliam faced up to them and refused to budge. A quality film is far more important to Gilliam than large profits.
A while ago, I purchased a CD album released by a small independent company called 'Fax' (that had a policy of direct payments to artists without the usual recording company politics) - it was a 4-CD album but Fax wanted it to be value for money and priced it at the normal 2-CD album price. On the CD cover is printed "If you pay more than the normal Fax double-cd price for this album you are being ripped off !!!!!"
It's not like the internet created music sharing.. the way I started getting interested in music many years ago, was by getting friends to tape music for me so I could listen to it and I later started buying CDs of what I liked. Many people did the same thing then. Sometimes I will purchase music based on one song I have heard, but too often that is unreliable. You can't base a decision based on listening to the radio or watching video clips - you really need to listen to the whole album.
Back when I was at university (this was years ago,
before the PC was released), there was a group of us who played multi-user text based games in the computer lab. We had managed to "obtain" some accounts using a sneaky little fake login program on terminals, and chewed up hours of time each day. We had to rely on one of us being a lookout, and the game had a command which if selected by any of us would pop up a randomly selected screen for everyone - a directory listing, fake command prompt, program listing, etc. The guy who wrote the game even chatted online at one point to one of the system administrators about the game. They finally caught up with us one day, although had no proof.. and grabbed the name from one guy, who proceeded to say his name was "Jim Hendricks" (with the rest of us trying hard not to laugh).
I have no idea how I ever managed to pass all my subjects..
I have always been a serious vim fan, and have used unix and linux for many years.. however, the menus/mouse/buttons/etc in "gvim" (and I assume "kvim" will be similar) makes many functions significantly easier. Cut-and-paste is quick with a mouse, changing the size of windows is fast, and the scrollbar is very useful.
If I want to quickly write a small file, plain vim is best - but for lengthy editing sessions, gvim/kvim is the best!
I personally consider winmodems to be very annoying, even with Windows. When I bought my most recent PC, it had a winmodem as part of the package, but I used an external modem instead and ignored the winmodem - it's comforting seeing the modem lights and knowing I can reset the modem any time I want.
Even with the low cost of winmodems, there have always been plenty of external modems available.. I'm sure the same will apply with WiFi
Xmodem may have been something that filled a need, but Kermit was by far the more widespread protocol (and to a certain extent still is) - it handled errors well, and has been written for just about EVERY operating system that ever existed.
Considering that Usenet is also used on many different systems, then we need a "kermit" not an "xmodem".
Yes Xenix on a 386 ran quite well.. but the earlier versions of Xenix were basically garbage. Many years ago I worked for a company writing unix/xenix applications, and the xenix 286 machine was the one we all dreaded using the most - with all the other unix machines being far superior (although I admit that was a combination of hardware and operating system).
Also, Xenix had the WORST version of UUCP I had ever seen.. I very quickly replaced it with Taylor UUCP.