If you find they are in undersupply in the places where most of the engineering jobs are
Are they? I've got one, so I don't really pay attention to that anymore:-)
Also, outsourcing is good for more than just programming. I lived in Japan for a number of years, and these days more than a few Japanese males are finding wives in other countries in Asia. Women themselves are not in undersupply in Japan, although there is perhaps something of an undersupply of women that a growing percentage of Japanese men consider suitable.
Having gotten married during my long sojourn in Asia myself, I must say that outsourcing does have its benefits:-)
An interesting hypothesis, but let me throw this out as a potential counter-argument:
I work in IT, always have except for a brief foray into another career for about three years, but decided I liked IT better and came back. I and most of the IT workers over 30 I know are married or engaged, but most of those (including myself) are not married to people who work in IT, or any other engineering-like discipline. In fact, of all the IT workers and engineers I know, only one are an engineer-engineer couple. They are both semiconductor engineers who met at work. Come to think of it, they are the only couple I know who met at work.
In light of that, I think you might be putting too much weight on the issue of working in a mostly-male environment.
Do a whois on prosco.net. They've only registered it for one year. I guess they're not real confident they'll be still working this a year from now!
The registrar won't accept payment in SCO stock shares, IOUs, and probably especially not a personal check from Darl. They want actual payment, up front. The price of one year's registration is probably all the cash SCO had left:-)
I've been carrying my Thinkpad 600X around in a large Eastpack bag for ages with no problems at all. Sorry, I don't even know what model bag this is, but if you can stuff a 1U Cisco in it (just barely), you know you found the right one:-)
Shallow 1U Ciscos like a 19xx switch fit very easily. A deeper one like a 25xx or 26xx or 29xx is a very tight fit. A 2U one like a 2948 probably would not allow the zipper to close, although I haven't tried it to find out.
My Thinkpad has always dwelt very happily in this backpack, and because it's just a regular bag, it gives no one a hint that there's a notebook inside.
The bag itself has been quite durable, as well. I bought this one about four years ago and all the zippers still work perfectly. Before that, I owned two Trager bags, and the zippers crapped out on both of them. Sure, I routinely overloaded those bags and that doubtless contributed to their demise, but I have routinely overloaded this Eastpack too, and it has not only taken it all in stride, it's lasted longer than either of the Tragers I owned previously. The Tragers didn't suck, they were pretty good bags and would be fine under normal use, I'm sure. However, this East pack as stood up much better under abnormal use (or abuse, if you like).
I wouldn't switch (well, I'm already a Linux user, not a Windows user) because I prefer Gnome, KDE, and XFCE to Aqua, which would mean that I'd want to be running X and one of those (most likely KDE, which I run now) on OS X anyway. Since I already have a stable (and [Ff]ree) OS, I would have little or nothing to gain from switching to OS X on x86; it would just be more expense and less Freedom.
Would I switch my wife, ESR's Aunt Tillie, and others who cling to Windows over to it? Absolutely. The improvement in security and stability would be more than worth it.
As many have noted, it wouldn't be such a good deal for Apple, though; they make most of their money on hardware, and without the hardware cash cow, it would be really difficult for them to stand against Microsoft, even if they inked OEM deals with Dell, HP, IBM, Gateway, and every other major vendor. They'd still be going up against a huge installed Windows base, and they wouldn't have the applications available overnight.
Drivers wouldn't be that much of a problem, though, I think. The main thing that has taken Linux so long to get there on drivers has been vendor opposition and having to reverse engineer so many of the drivers. Apple, as a primarily proprietary vendor, would do what proprietary vendors do: sign the necessary NDAs, and release proprietary drivers. You'd also find many hardware vendors writing their own OS X/x86 drivers, since they could be proprietary and it would probably sell pretty well. While I myself would not switch, I don't think it would take OS X/x86 very long to surpass Linux in numbers as a desktop OS.
30, huh? Not too bad, if true. Of course, unless you're a Lance Armstrong, you can't *sustain* 30, even assuming clear roads, where as an ebike being pedaled can sustain higher speeds than that. Sounds like a speed advantage to me.
You can put away the strawman about denying user exercise now. First of all, we are talking relative to a car, not relative to a normal bike, and just about anything is more exercise than that. No matter how you look at it, it's a net gain in exercise and a net cut in pollution.
I somehow doubt you bike to work, and wonder if you even own a bike. How about backing up claims with facts? Maybe a URL of your bike logs? I don't seriously cycle anymore because I live too far from work to bicycle (it would take hours, and the return trip in the dark wouldn't be all that safe) and what free time I have is better spent with my kids. However, when I used to be serious, I kept a log, as did many others I knew. Surely if you are not just an AC trying to put down others who are doing something positive in order to inflate your own (unearned) sense of importance, you can present us with some evidence?
Oh, and do log in when you do it.
You'll excuse me now, I think I feel the need to go out and trade in my economy car for a nice big fat pickup with a V-8 to help use up the oil supply sooner:-)
(While that is a troll, it isn't, btw, as whacky as it sounds: what will it take to make the car companies and the oil companies and everybody get really, really, really serious about developing truly usable alternative energy sources for vehicles? The impending end of the oil supply; nothing less. Since there is still plenty of oil in the ground, a good century's worth or more, they aren't terribly serious about alternative fuels yet. When they only have ten or fifteen years of known reserves left, then you will Serious.)
Re:Good lord...welcome to slashdot
on
E-bike E-xperiences?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
You write like a person who has never ridden one, maybe even never seen one. E-bikes do:
- Confer a speed advantage
- Often need to be pedaled in addition to electric power.
Many others have already pointed these things out, perhaps you would do well to read a bit more.
You might also want to consider that a person who is planning to build/buy an e-bike to take to work at least some of the time is most definitely reducing pollution relative to taking a car to work every day. So what does he get instead of help with his plans and maybe a little praise for lowering pollution? Crap from people who think his good efforts are not good enough unless he's a triathlete.
Yeah, they can just have all that cold mountain air stuff:-p
One of the things I loved best about living in SE Asia was that lowest temperature I ever experienced there was probably about 23 degrees Celsius. Even at the coolest time of the year (late January/early February) you can ride a motorbike at night in a shortsleeved shirt without discomfort.
Don't let upper management know that you succeeding, though. They may want to get rid of the monkey.
Is that "Don't let (upper) management know you're succeeding" as in "Go around replacing the operating systems on your company's servers without permission?"
I don't know of many faster ways to get fired. I don't know how it is in the shop where you work (if you work in IT or ever have) but in the shops where I worked, I did not own the servers or any of the other equipment. Neither did my boss. Those things were the property of the company, and even in shops where we had incredible leeway over what we did and how we did it, going around and replacing OSes with other ones required at least approval from the CTO. That was in the liberal places. In the conservative places, approval for such things may be higher than that. When customers depend on your systems operating, stability is job one and they aren't going to allow you to take a potentially de-stabilizing action without approval. Even if you succeed in every way, you may still be fired for acting without authorization.
Now, about this time, some of you might be saying "Well, if it's stability they want, they should get *nix in and Windows out as fast as possible."
While I couldn't agree (in principle) with that sentiment more, and am glad that in my present position in email security (I miss being an admin, but I sure don't miss carrying a pager!) I am grateful that I have sufficient leeway over my tools that my workstation is one of the handful on our network that is not running Windows (Ubuntu, a Debian-based distro. Quite nice; but I digress). However, the fact remains that in any properly run shop (yes, properly run, as hard as that may be for anyone with little or no experience - especially in big operations - to accept, have controls in place is the proper way to do things), permission is required to go around re-architecting major systems and replacing OSes.
In smaller networks, the decision may go no higher than the CTO, and if further approval is formally required, whatever the CTO asks for is rubber-stamped.
In larger shops, such things will typically require a general management decision, requiring the COO, the CEO, and often the CFO (and maybe others) to sign off on it. Why the CFO? These things cost money directly, and if there are failures, those cost money too. Especially if you have SLAs with your customers.
So yes, we may know a better way (and we do run our hundreds of servers on Linux, thank you), it's not enough to know a better way. If you want to change to it, you have to make the business case, present it professionally, and get approval and support for it. If you go ahead without following these steps, in most shops you're onto a good way to find yourself unemployed.
Cheaper? Maybe. I'm not so sure about better. You may have noticed the studies recently, showing that a lot of CD-R(W)s are in pretty bad shape after just a couple years. If you go this way, update that thing on a fresh copy often.
Also, the emails are easily targetted to many people. How many different CDs do you want to keep track of in the drawer of your desk?
Oh, and let's not forget physical security. Your house could burn down or be burglarized and they are all gone (and this company could go out of business before you die, I know), so if you go the CD route, each CD should:
1) Be in a sealed and addressed mailer to the recipient; 2) Kept in a safety deposit box at your bank; 3) Be replaced once a year, to make sure there is a pretty good change it will actually work the year you kick of and it's needed.
And of course, make sure your executor(s) know where these CDs are and that you want them mailed promptly upon your death.
I seem to recall having explained it before, but maybe it was too complicated for you (BTW, scarecrow, it's amusing that you should accuse me of raising strawmen), but I'll take another shot at it:
You do not need a domain name to do P2P. This it not about P2P. It is about whois information.
No one - repeat, NO ONE - has a right to my whois information. The whois information associated with my domain is invalid and has been for several years. I am not going to do anything about that because the public does not have a right to know. Clear now?
To burn *your* strawmen even further, Miranda:
1) Has nothing to do with the public's right (or lack thereof) to know anything; it is about the individual's right to privacy;
2) Miranda specifically *upholds* the individual's right to privacy. In case you don't remember, allow me to refresh your memory. When the police Mirandize a suspect, they recite (from a card, if they are being very careful) boilerplate text that begins with the words "You have the right to remain silent." You don't have to tell them anything, get it? That's enshrined in the Constitution (Fifth Amendment).
To torch your final strawman, about the police looking at my face and using facial recognition to find out information about me, no, that is not a violation of privacy. Why? Because when you walk out in public, your right of privacy is significantly diminished. Pretty much anyone can observe you, photograph you, whatever, and there's not much you can do about it. That's how papparazzi make their living.
However, this was never about the government's right to know anything, or about law enforcement agencies' right to know anything. This is about the general public. Whois (do you even know what that is?!) is like a phone book. The general public does not have a right to know my phone number. The general public does not have a right to know my address. The general public does not have a right to know what state or even what country I live in. As I am not a public figure, they don't even have a right to know my true name. The general public has no right to know anything about me. I may choose - or not - to reveal information about myself, but the public has no right to know anything.
The unlisted phone number principle which I previously presented was most illustrative, it's a shame you apparently missed it (OK, I know you really just chose to ignore it because you have no counter). I keep my phone number unlisted. I will keep my whois info unlisted, too. Law or no law. The government can always find out, with a court order, my unlisted phone number. Heck, they can probably just call up my telco and the telco will spill the beans. I have no problem with that. If they want to pass a bill requiring registrars to have that information and hold it in escrow, I will support it. Then the registrars can just keep everyone's whois info secret directly. Will this make whois as a tool (a tool which I use in my work as an email security analyst) useless? Yes, it will. That's a price I'm willing to pay, though.
By the way, my condolences that your clexler dried up. A crying shame. Especially tragic that your brain appears to have dried up along with it.
I've been running Debian Unstable for over a year and a half (used to run Stable with tons of backported packages from Sid and eventually just decided to dist-upgrade the whole lot; made managing it easier). I do a dist-upgrade no less than four times a week and usually every day. Twice on a slow day:-) During that time, KDE has *never* broken. I don't know what you did to yours to make it break, but it sure wasn't Debian's fault. Indeed, Sid has been quite stable over the last year and a half. I've never had any serious breakage and not even very much minor trouble.
Right now I have:
-Unstable on my primary desktop machine at home; - Testing on my notebook; - Ubuntu on my workstation (a neat distro; a few rocky spots but overall very solid and I think we can expect great things from them).
I tried Yoper on my workstation (had Gentoo before that) and wow, the speed was impressive, no one is exaggerating it. I didn't stay with it for two reasons:
1) It has a relatively small package base, and I'm using to having practically everything available in Debian (over 12,000 packages now, a number that I'm sure will only grow);
2) apt-rpm is a huge boost in the usability of RPM-based distros, adding functionality that RPM lacked for years (I used Red from 4.2 through 7.3, and when I switched to Debian I loved the package management system, it was and is worlds ahead of RPM), however, apt-rpm does not cover all the functionality of a system actually using the Debian package management system. I constantly found myself wanting to use dpkg commands and having to remember various rpm switches instead.
Finally, between the small package base and step backwards (for me, at least) that RPM represents, I overwrote it with Ubuntu after about a week.
If you are a person currently using an RPM-based distro (especially if it's one that doesn't use apt-rpm) and you want to have a very fast distro with the advantages that apt-rpm brings, Yoper is certainly worth a look. It's a solid, fast, and well put-together distribution that you will probably like.
However, if you are currently using Debian or one of its derivatives, you'll probably find that you miss the full power of having dpkg and dselect available (unless you do everything in Synaptic, in which case you'll never know the difference, so go for it).
To the best of my knowledge (and yours, I'm sure), the person against whom you are leveling these (unfounded) copyright infringement claims has not unlawfully copied any movie, game, or music. That person does, however, have a personal domain, as have I. The general public does not have a right to that information. My whois info shows an address where I lived some year ago. It's in another country. I have no intention of updating it. My registrar contacts me by my email address. That is sufficient. The general public has neither a right nor a need to know.
Look at it this way: I have a wife and two young children. Placing valid whois information on the Internet potentially puts them in danger. I will not provide valid whois information to the pubic even if that becomes a federal crime. Nor will I relinquish my domain. I will use a service such as Domains by Proxy, I will get an overseas friend to register it with my friend's business address, or I will just plain lie. But I will not put that information in whois.
I keep an unlisted phone number for the same reason: no one to whom I do not personally choose to provide my address or phone number has either a right or need to know that, and freely providing that information puts you at greater risk of identify theft or worse. If the government has a need to know, they can find out without using whois. Or if they can't, all they have to do is email me and ask me. After verifying that it really is a representative of the government and finding out why they want to know, I will be happy to provide that information.
To further illustrate just how shallow - and what a red herring - your argument is, surely you must know that a registered domain is not necessary to either distribute or receive illegally copied music, movies, or games. You do realize, don't you, that P2P has nothing to do with having a domain name? All you need to do P2P file exchange is Internet access and some software. Heck, you can even run a warez FTP site without a domain name; all you need is an IP address on a zombie somewhere.
Your claim, that we do not have a right to privacy is just plain wrong, and none of your arguments support it, not even tangentially. All you have done is to throw out a bogus claim (maybe you were even just trolling, in which case I apologize to everyone for feeding a troll) with no support whatsoever.
We do have a right to privacy. A law banning unlisted phone numbers would probably be easily overturned. Whois information is no different, and a law forbidding it to be private is equally likely to be overturned. And even if it is not, enforcing a law that millions of people refuse to obey is pretty much impossible. The copyright infringement you cite is a good case in point; copyright infringement is against the law and has been for centuries, and despite the passage of even stricter laws against it, enforcement has never been more difficult because of the tens of millions of people who are violating those laws. If every holder of a vanity domain tells them to take their accurate whois info and shove it, well, they can't arrest us all.
Actually, in the 19th century they did first come up with a data network. It was called the telegraph and used Morse code. It was only later that they figured out how to put voice over the wires.
And after you find a suitably attractive title in IMDB, be sure to name your OSS project after it. Let them have the fun of sorting the sheep from the goats when there are 500 OSS projects named after movies:-)
Somebody actually used the word "synergy" in my company once. This was especially disturbing in light of the facts that this is actually a pretty good and generally rather enlightened place to work. Also, we're one of the top companies in our field (which happens to be corporate spam filtering and email archiving for compliance with ).
It was used as the reason why I couldn't work from home most of the time, despite the fact that I can actually get more work done on those rare occasions when I do work from home. Something about the "synergy" of people all coming together in a work place. This despite the fact that the team I lead is all in another country and we communicate exclusively by instant messaging and email, except for a conference call team meeting once a week (they're in another native English-speaking country and they are all native English speakers, or this would be really difficult).
It wasn't my boss who said this, of course. My boss would never say something like that and probably wouldn't care if the only time I ever came to the office was for the weekly conference call (b/c I don't have that kind of phone system at home). It was somebody higher up. My boss had actually taken the idea of having me work from home to the higher-ups. My position was that it's a win-win: I like it, I'm more productive because it's comfortable and quiet, it saves me commuting time and money and wear and tear on my car, it saves the company money because I will supply all of my own connectivity and necessary computer equipment and will bring my notebook on days when I work in the office, and finally - I would probably work forever for a company that let me work from home 3 or 4 days a week.
All those benefits for both sides, and instead of a view of tree-covered hills out my living room window as a I work, I have a view of the gray walls of a cubicle, and if I turn a round, I can see some skyscrapers in the distance out a window by some other cubicles. All in the name of synergy.
Ah, well. This is still a pretty good place to work, I have a bunch of cheap stock options that will likely pay off, and we're doing well against our competition. I still like working here, despite the view. There are lots of people who can't say that.
Dang, yesterday I had mod points but used them all up on post of relatively little value compared to yours. I majored in linguistics myself, but then went back into IT a few years after graduating (I'd been working in IT for some years before going go college, and majored in linguistics because I loved it; however, it just didn't pay very well and competition was fierce, so I'm back in IT).
The parent hits the nail on the head with his/her summary: these kids didn't make variations on an existing language, they developed a pidgin, which was creolized by the younger kids coming in, and soon developed into a full-blown language of its own.
Things like this are attested in the literature, of course. I recall reading an account of a pair of (hearing) twins who developed a language of their own. I'm not talking about the secret words from some things that we all have as children and typically share with our siblings of near age, but a full-blown language. They could speak it all day long and no one else in the world understood it.
No, it's not just you. As an ex-mainframer, like my father before me, I remember those days well. IBM's power over vendors and use of FUD against anyone they heard was even thinking about buying from a competitor was captured in the following two passages, well known among mainframers:
Boca Raton was an early center of telemarketing boiler rooms, that seems to be what attracted the spammers. I suspect that at least some of them are the same people. At the very least, they share the same (lack of) moral character.
--- From the article: But daily results posted by MessageLabs, Earthlink (ELNK), and Symantec (SYMC) showed little correlation.
And neither has anyone else. It was only a single institution that claimed their weekly spam traffic was down 100 million messages ---
That single institution was Postini, a more important source than the ones listed above. I work for another major filtering company, and Postini is one of our direct competitors. We do well over 100 million inbound messages per day, and I can also attest that there was a significant drop-off in spam (I'm not at liberty to give you a number, but it was millions of messages per day) over that hurricane weekend and the days immediately following it.
We and Postini have it right, the others don't. We, like Postini, focus our business on Enterprise clients. From this and our shared take on that major drop in spam, one could reasonably conclude that Florida spammers are more focused on the Enterprise as well, but from the other side.
Consider the ones who showed little (not "no") correlation: Earthlink is mostly used by home users, not Enterprise users. It's possible (I don't know) that ML and Symantec have a more mixed customer base than we do.
Also, note that while the article weakly claims that hurricanes weren't the cause, it advances no alternate theory.
Finally, an anecdotal piece of evidence: over that weekend, I tried to access a couple of mirror sites that were in Florida, and they were down. I'm sure a lot of spammers' servers also were, no matter what may be claimed publicly.
The article blew it. Really. The Florida spammers had to have been in evacuation shelters and/or without power for several days and couldn't spam effectively. It shows up very clearly in the stats. They are pretty much back to normal now.
HTF can something be redundant when no one else posted anything like it?! Oh, wait, this is Slashdot, where being on crack guarantees you mod points. Except for me. I'm not on crack and still get mod points all the time, and I use them to reward the intelligent and punish the foolish. M2 is also a very good weapon for that (note that these are not defined in terms of "agrees with me" and "doesn't agree with me." I have often modded up people with whom I vehemently disagreed b/c they presented a cogent and well-formed argument, even if I did not share their opinion and/or conclusions).
All crack-crazed mods, be forewarned that I M2 daily and have been doing so for years. I mark ALL Redundant mods unfair as a matter of policy. If you care what happens to your moderations in M2, *do not* mod anything Redundant. I will get you. You may, however, mod this as a troll, although I'm not trolling you. I'm completely serious.
This isn't really about the moderation, it's about the fact that some people are clearly too stupid to have mod points and yet get them anyway. OK, you can mod that flamebait if you like.
I have one mod point left, and if you were not already at +5, you would have it, good sir.
As the leader of the email security team on a 100 million+ message per day network (that is, someone who spends all his time doing battle with spammers and phishers), this made me laugh my ass off. Thanks!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
China or wherever strikes their fancy. Sure, why not?
Warfare? I doubt it, but do please expound.
Are they? I've got one, so I don't really pay attention to that anymore
Also, outsourcing is good for more than just programming. I lived in Japan for a number of years, and these days more than a few Japanese males are finding wives in other countries in Asia. Women themselves are not in undersupply in Japan, although there is perhaps something of an undersupply of women that a growing percentage of Japanese men consider suitable.
Having gotten married during my long sojourn in Asia myself, I must say that outsourcing does have its benefits
An interesting hypothesis, but let me throw this out as a potential counter-argument:
I work in IT, always have except for a brief foray into another career for about three years, but decided I liked IT better and came back. I and most of the IT workers over 30 I know are married or engaged, but most of those (including myself) are not married to people who work in IT, or any other engineering-like discipline. In fact, of all the IT workers and engineers I know, only one are an engineer-engineer couple. They are both semiconductor engineers who met at work. Come to think of it, they are the only couple I know who met at work.
In light of that, I think you might be putting too much weight on the issue of working in a mostly-male environment.
Do a whois on prosco.net. They've only registered it for one year. I guess they're not real confident they'll be still working this a year from now!
The registrar won't accept payment in SCO stock shares, IOUs, and probably especially not a personal check from Darl. They want actual payment, up front. The price of one year's registration is probably all the cash SCO had left
OK, Aunt Bertha. Pass me that box of .40 S&W hollow-points, will ya?
I've been carrying my Thinkpad 600X around in a large Eastpack bag for ages with no problems at all. Sorry, I don't even know what model bag this is, but if you can stuff a 1U Cisco in it (just barely), you know you found the right one :-)
Shallow 1U Ciscos like a 19xx switch fit very easily. A deeper one like a 25xx or 26xx or 29xx is a very tight fit. A 2U one like a 2948 probably would not allow the zipper to close, although I haven't tried it to find out.
My Thinkpad has always dwelt very happily in this backpack, and because it's just a regular bag, it gives no one a hint that there's a notebook inside.
The bag itself has been quite durable, as well. I bought this one about four years ago and all the zippers still work perfectly. Before that, I owned two Trager bags, and the zippers crapped out on both of them. Sure, I routinely overloaded those bags and that doubtless contributed to their demise, but I have routinely overloaded this Eastpack too, and it has not only taken it all in stride, it's lasted longer than either of the Tragers I owned previously. The Tragers didn't suck, they were pretty good bags and would be fine under normal use, I'm sure. However, this East pack as stood up much better under abnormal use (or abuse, if you like).
I wouldn't switch (well, I'm already a Linux user, not a Windows user) because I prefer Gnome, KDE, and XFCE to Aqua, which would mean that I'd want to be running X and one of those (most likely KDE, which I run now) on OS X anyway. Since I already have a stable (and [Ff]ree) OS, I would have little or nothing to gain from switching to OS X on x86; it would just be more expense and less Freedom.
Would I switch my wife, ESR's Aunt Tillie, and others who cling to Windows over to it? Absolutely. The improvement in security and stability would be more than worth it.
As many have noted, it wouldn't be such a good deal for Apple, though; they make most of their money on hardware, and without the hardware cash cow, it would be really difficult for them to stand against Microsoft, even if they inked OEM deals with Dell, HP, IBM, Gateway, and every other major vendor. They'd still be going up against a huge installed Windows base, and they wouldn't have the applications available overnight.
Drivers wouldn't be that much of a problem, though, I think. The main thing that has taken Linux so long to get there on drivers has been vendor opposition and having to reverse engineer so many of the drivers. Apple, as a primarily proprietary vendor, would do what proprietary vendors do: sign the necessary NDAs, and release proprietary drivers. You'd also find many hardware vendors writing their own OS X/x86 drivers, since they could be proprietary and it would probably sell pretty well. While I myself would not switch, I don't think it would take OS X/x86 very long to surpass Linux in numbers as a desktop OS.
Does that come before or after they check for dupes?
30, huh? Not too bad, if true. Of course, unless you're a Lance Armstrong, you can't *sustain* 30, even assuming clear roads, where as an ebike being pedaled can sustain higher speeds than that. Sounds like a speed advantage to me.
:-)
You can put away the strawman about denying user exercise now. First of all, we are talking relative to a car, not relative to a normal bike, and just about anything is more exercise than that. No matter how you look at it, it's a net gain in exercise and a net cut in pollution.
I somehow doubt you bike to work, and wonder if you even own a bike. How about backing up claims with facts? Maybe a URL of your bike logs? I don't seriously cycle anymore because I live too far from work to bicycle (it would take hours, and the return trip in the dark wouldn't be all that safe) and what free time I have is better spent with my kids. However, when I used to be serious, I kept a log, as did many others I knew. Surely if you are not just an AC trying to put down others who are doing something positive in order to inflate your own (unearned) sense of importance, you can present us with some evidence?
Oh, and do log in when you do it.
You'll excuse me now, I think I feel the need to go out and trade in my economy car for a nice big fat pickup with a V-8 to help use up the oil supply sooner
(While that is a troll, it isn't, btw, as whacky as it sounds: what will it take to make the car companies and the oil companies and everybody get really, really, really serious about developing truly usable alternative energy sources for vehicles? The impending end of the oil supply; nothing less. Since there is still plenty of oil in the ground, a good century's worth or more, they aren't terribly serious about alternative fuels yet. When they only have ten or fifteen years of known reserves left, then you will Serious.)
You write like a person who has never ridden one, maybe even never seen one. E-bikes do:
- Confer a speed advantage
- Often need to be pedaled in addition to electric power.
Many others have already pointed these things out, perhaps you would do well to read a bit more.
You might also want to consider that a person who is planning to build/buy an e-bike to take to work at least some of the time is most definitely reducing pollution relative to taking a car to work every day. So what does he get instead of help with his plans and maybe a little praise for lowering pollution? Crap from people who think his good efforts are not good enough unless he's a triathlete.
By they way, how do you get to work?
Yeah, they can just have all that cold mountain air stuff :-p
:-)
One of the things I loved best about living in SE Asia was that lowest temperature I ever experienced there was probably about 23 degrees Celsius. Even at the coolest time of the year (late January/early February) you can ride a motorbike at night in a shortsleeved shirt without discomfort.
Cold mountain air, bah! Humbug!
Is that "Don't let (upper) management know you're succeeding" as in "Go around replacing the operating systems on your company's servers without permission?"
I don't know of many faster ways to get fired. I don't know how it is in the shop where you work (if you work in IT or ever have) but in the shops where I worked, I did not own the servers or any of the other equipment. Neither did my boss. Those things were the property of the company, and even in shops where we had incredible leeway over what we did and how we did it, going around and replacing OSes with other ones required at least approval from the CTO. That was in the liberal places. In the conservative places, approval for such things may be higher than that. When customers depend on your systems operating, stability is job one and they aren't going to allow you to take a potentially de-stabilizing action without approval. Even if you succeed in every way, you may still be fired for acting without authorization.
Now, about this time, some of you might be saying "Well, if it's stability they want, they should get *nix in and Windows out as fast as possible."
While I couldn't agree (in principle) with that sentiment more, and am glad that in my present position in email security (I miss being an admin, but I sure don't miss carrying a pager!) I am grateful that I have sufficient leeway over my tools that my workstation is one of the handful on our network that is not running Windows (Ubuntu, a Debian-based distro. Quite nice; but I digress). However, the fact remains that in any properly run shop (yes, properly run, as hard as that may be for anyone with little or no experience - especially in big operations - to accept, have controls in place is the proper way to do things), permission is required to go around re-architecting major systems and replacing OSes.
In smaller networks, the decision may go no higher than the CTO, and if further approval is formally required, whatever the CTO asks for is rubber-stamped.
In larger shops, such things will typically require a general management decision, requiring the COO, the CEO, and often the CFO (and maybe others) to sign off on it. Why the CFO? These things cost money directly, and if there are failures, those cost money too. Especially if you have SLAs with your customers.
So yes, we may know a better way (and we do run our hundreds of servers on Linux, thank you), it's not enough to know a better way. If you want to change to it, you have to make the business case, present it professionally, and get approval and support for it. If you go ahead without following these steps, in most shops you're onto a good way to find yourself unemployed.
Cheaper? Maybe. I'm not so sure about better. You may have noticed the studies recently, showing that a lot of CD-R(W)s are in pretty bad shape after just a couple years. If you go this way, update that thing on a fresh copy often.
Also, the emails are easily targetted to many people. How many different CDs do you want to keep track of in the drawer of your desk?
Oh, and let's not forget physical security. Your house could burn down or be burglarized and they are all gone (and this company could go out of business before you die, I know), so if you go the CD route, each CD should:
1) Be in a sealed and addressed mailer to the recipient;
2) Kept in a safety deposit box at your bank;
3) Be replaced once a year, to make sure there is a pretty good change it will actually work the year you kick of and it's needed.
And of course, make sure your executor(s) know where these CDs are and that you want them mailed promptly upon your death.
I seem to recall having explained it before, but maybe it was too complicated for you (BTW, scarecrow, it's amusing that you should accuse me of raising strawmen), but I'll take another shot at it:
You do not need a domain name to do P2P. This it not about P2P. It is about whois information.
No one - repeat, NO ONE - has a right to my whois information. The whois information associated with my domain is invalid and has been for several years. I am not going to do anything about that because the public does not have a right to know. Clear now?
To burn *your* strawmen even further, Miranda:
1) Has nothing to do with the public's right (or lack thereof) to know anything; it is about the individual's right to privacy;
2) Miranda specifically *upholds* the individual's right to privacy. In case you don't remember, allow me to refresh your memory. When the police Mirandize a suspect, they recite (from a card, if they are being very careful) boilerplate text that begins with the words "You have the right to remain silent." You don't have to tell them anything, get it? That's enshrined in the Constitution (Fifth Amendment).
To torch your final strawman, about the police looking at my face and using facial recognition to find out information about me, no, that is not a violation of privacy. Why? Because when you walk out in public, your right of privacy is significantly diminished. Pretty much anyone can observe you, photograph you, whatever, and there's not much you can do about it. That's how papparazzi make their living.
However, this was never about the government's right to know anything, or about law enforcement agencies' right to know anything. This is about the general public. Whois (do you even know what that is?!) is like a phone book. The general public does not have a right to know my phone number. The general public does not have a right to know my address. The general public does not have a right to know what state or even what country I live in. As I am not a public figure, they don't even have a right to know my true name. The general public has no right to know anything about me. I may choose - or not - to reveal information about myself, but the public has no right to know anything.
The unlisted phone number principle which I previously presented was most illustrative, it's a shame you apparently missed it (OK, I know you really just chose to ignore it because you have no counter). I keep my phone number unlisted. I will keep my whois info unlisted, too. Law or no law. The government can always find out, with a court order, my unlisted phone number. Heck, they can probably just call up my telco and the telco will spill the beans. I have no problem with that. If they want to pass a bill requiring registrars to have that information and hold it in escrow, I will support it. Then the registrars can just keep everyone's whois info secret directly. Will this make whois as a tool (a tool which I use in my work as an email security analyst) useless? Yes, it will. That's a price I'm willing to pay, though.
By the way, my condolences that your clexler dried up. A crying shame. Especially tragic that your brain appears to have dried up along with it.
I've been running Debian Unstable for over a year and a half (used to run Stable with tons of backported packages from Sid and eventually just decided to dist-upgrade the whole lot; made managing it easier). I do a dist-upgrade no less than four times a week and usually every day. Twice on a slow day :-) During that time, KDE has *never* broken. I don't know what you did to yours to make it break, but it sure wasn't Debian's fault. Indeed, Sid has been quite stable over the last year and a half. I've never had any serious breakage and not even very much minor trouble.
Right now I have:
-Unstable on my primary desktop machine at home;
- Testing on my notebook;
- Ubuntu on my workstation (a neat distro; a few rocky spots but overall very solid and I think we can expect great things from them).
I tried Yoper on my workstation (had Gentoo before that) and wow, the speed was impressive, no one is exaggerating it. I didn't stay with it for two reasons:
1) It has a relatively small package base, and I'm using to having practically everything available in Debian (over 12,000 packages now, a number that I'm sure will only grow);
2) apt-rpm is a huge boost in the usability of RPM-based distros, adding functionality that RPM lacked for years (I used Red from 4.2 through 7.3, and when I switched to Debian I loved the package management system, it was and is worlds ahead of RPM), however, apt-rpm does not cover all the functionality of a system actually using the Debian package management system. I constantly found myself wanting to use dpkg commands and having to remember various rpm switches instead.
Finally, between the small package base and step backwards (for me, at least) that RPM represents, I overwrote it with Ubuntu after about a week.
If you are a person currently using an RPM-based distro (especially if it's one that doesn't use apt-rpm) and you want to have a very fast distro with the advantages that apt-rpm brings, Yoper is certainly worth a look. It's a solid, fast, and well put-together distribution that you will probably like.
However, if you are currently using Debian or one of its derivatives, you'll probably find that you miss the full power of having dpkg and dselect available (unless you do everything in Synaptic, in which case you'll never know the difference, so go for it).
To the best of my knowledge (and yours, I'm sure), the person against whom you are leveling these (unfounded) copyright infringement claims has not unlawfully copied any movie, game, or music. That person does, however, have a personal domain, as have I. The general public does not have a right to that information. My whois info shows an address where I lived some year ago. It's in another country. I have no intention of updating it. My registrar contacts me by my email address. That is sufficient. The general public has neither a right nor a need to know.
Look at it this way: I have a wife and two young children. Placing valid whois information on the Internet potentially puts them in danger. I will not provide valid whois information to the pubic even if that becomes a federal crime. Nor will I relinquish my domain. I will use a service such as Domains by Proxy, I will get an overseas friend to register it with my friend's business address, or I will just plain lie. But I will not put that information in whois.
I keep an unlisted phone number for the same reason: no one to whom I do not personally choose to provide my address or phone number has either a right or need to know that, and freely providing that information puts you at greater risk of identify theft or worse. If the government has a need to know, they can find out without using whois. Or if they can't, all they have to do is email me and ask me. After verifying that it really is a representative of the government and finding out why they want to know, I will be happy to provide that information.
To further illustrate just how shallow - and what a red herring - your argument is, surely you must know that a registered domain is not necessary to either distribute or receive illegally copied music, movies, or games. You do realize, don't you, that P2P has nothing to do with having a domain name? All you need to do P2P file exchange is Internet access and some software. Heck, you can even run a warez FTP site without a domain name; all you need is an IP address on a zombie somewhere.
Your claim, that we do not have a right to privacy is just plain wrong, and none of your arguments support it, not even tangentially. All you have done is to throw out a bogus claim (maybe you were even just trolling, in which case I apologize to everyone for feeding a troll) with no support whatsoever.
We do have a right to privacy. A law banning unlisted phone numbers would probably be easily overturned. Whois information is no different, and a law forbidding it to be private is equally likely to be overturned. And even if it is not, enforcing a law that millions of people refuse to obey is pretty much impossible. The copyright infringement you cite is a good case in point; copyright infringement is against the law and has been for centuries, and despite the passage of even stricter laws against it, enforcement has never been more difficult because of the tens of millions of people who are violating those laws. If every holder of a vanity domain tells them to take their accurate whois info and shove it, well, they can't arrest us all.
Actually, in the 19th century they did first come up with a data network. It was called the telegraph and used Morse code. It was only later that they figured out how to put voice over the wires.
And after you find a suitably attractive title in IMDB, be sure to name your OSS project after it. Let them have the fun of sorting the sheep from the goats when there are 500 OSS projects named after movies :-)
Somebody actually used the word "synergy" in my company once. This was especially disturbing in light of the facts that this is actually a pretty good and generally rather enlightened place to work. Also, we're one of the top companies in our field (which happens to be corporate spam filtering and email archiving for compliance with ).
It was used as the reason why I couldn't work from home most of the time, despite the fact that I can actually get more work done on those rare occasions when I do work from home. Something about the "synergy" of people all coming together in a work place. This despite the fact that the team I lead is all in another country and we communicate exclusively by instant messaging and email, except for a conference call team meeting once a week (they're in another native English-speaking country and they are all native English speakers, or this would be really difficult).
It wasn't my boss who said this, of course. My boss would never say something like that and probably wouldn't care if the only time I ever came to the office was for the weekly conference call (b/c I don't have that kind of phone system at home). It was somebody higher up. My boss had actually taken the idea of having me work from home to the higher-ups. My position was that it's a win-win: I like it, I'm more productive because it's comfortable and quiet, it saves me commuting time and money and wear and tear on my car, it saves the company money because I will supply all of my own connectivity and necessary computer equipment and will bring my notebook on days when I work in the office, and finally - I would probably work forever for a company that let me work from home 3 or 4 days a week.
All those benefits for both sides, and instead of a view of tree-covered hills out my living room window as a I work, I have a view of the gray walls of a cubicle, and if I turn a round, I can see some skyscrapers in the distance out a window by some other cubicles. All in the name of synergy.
Ah, well. This is still a pretty good place to work, I have a bunch of cheap stock options that will likely pay off, and we're doing well against our competition. I still like working here, despite the view. There are lots of people who can't say that.
Dang, yesterday I had mod points but used them all up on post of relatively little value compared to yours. I majored in linguistics myself, but then went back into IT a few years after graduating (I'd been working in IT for some years before going go college, and majored in linguistics because I loved it; however, it just didn't pay very well and competition was fierce, so I'm back in IT).
The parent hits the nail on the head with his/her summary: these kids didn't make variations on an existing language, they developed a pidgin, which was creolized by the younger kids coming in, and soon developed into a full-blown language of its own.
Things like this are attested in the literature, of course. I recall reading an account of a pair of (hearing) twins who developed a language of their own. I'm not talking about the secret words from some things that we all have as children and typically share with our siblings of near age, but a full-blown language. They could speak it all day long and no one else in the world understood it.
No, it's not just you. As an ex-mainframer, like my father before me, I remember those days well. IBM's power over vendors and use of FUD against anyone they heard was even thinking about buying from a competitor was captured in the following two passages, well known among mainframers:
"I BM, you BM, we all BM for IBM"
"Nobody ever get fired for buying IBM."
Boca Raton was an early center of telemarketing boiler rooms, that seems to be what attracted the spammers. I suspect that at least some of them are the same people. At the very least, they share the same (lack of) moral character.
---
From the article:
But daily results posted by MessageLabs, Earthlink (ELNK), and Symantec (SYMC) showed little correlation.
And neither has anyone else. It was only a single institution that claimed their weekly spam traffic was down 100 million messages
---
That single institution was Postini, a more important source than the ones listed above. I work for another major filtering company, and Postini is one of our direct competitors. We do well over 100 million inbound messages per day, and I can also attest that there was a significant drop-off in spam (I'm not at liberty to give you a number, but it was millions of messages per day) over that hurricane weekend and the days immediately following it.
We and Postini have it right, the others don't. We, like Postini, focus our business on Enterprise clients. From this and our shared take on that major drop in spam, one could reasonably conclude that Florida spammers are more focused on the Enterprise as well, but from the other side.
Consider the ones who showed little (not "no") correlation: Earthlink is mostly used by home users, not Enterprise users. It's possible (I don't know) that ML and Symantec have a more mixed customer base than we do.
Also, note that while the article weakly claims that hurricanes weren't the cause, it advances no alternate theory.
Finally, an anecdotal piece of evidence: over that weekend, I tried to access a couple of mirror sites that were in Florida, and they were down. I'm sure a lot of spammers' servers also were, no matter what may be claimed publicly.
The article blew it. Really. The Florida spammers had to have been in evacuation shelters and/or without power for several days and couldn't spam effectively. It shows up very clearly in the stats. They are pretty much back to normal now.
HTF can something be redundant when no one else posted anything like it?! Oh, wait, this is Slashdot, where being on crack guarantees you mod points. Except for me. I'm not on crack and still get mod points all the time, and I use them to reward the intelligent and punish the foolish. M2 is also a very good weapon for that (note that these are not defined in terms of "agrees with me" and "doesn't agree with me." I have often modded up people with whom I vehemently disagreed b/c they presented a cogent and well-formed argument, even if I did not share their opinion and/or conclusions).
All crack-crazed mods, be forewarned that I M2 daily and have been doing so for years. I mark ALL Redundant mods unfair as a matter of policy. If you care what happens to your moderations in M2, *do not* mod anything Redundant. I will get you. You may, however, mod this as a troll, although I'm not trolling you. I'm completely serious.
This isn't really about the moderation, it's about the fact that some people are clearly too stupid to have mod points and yet get them anyway. OK, you can mod that flamebait if you like.
P.S. I know I'll get modded down for this, but...
I have one mod point left, and if you were not already at +5, you would have it, good sir.
:-)
As the leader of the email security team on a 100 million+ message per day network (that is, someone who spends all his time doing battle with spammers and phishers), this made me laugh my ass off. Thanks!