I have delayed reactions and I browse quickly. There have been an insignificant number of times where an ad strikes my fancy and that fact registers as I am clicking to go to a new page. I want to click on the ad, so I page back, and it's some other ad. The ad I want is gone and no way to find it again.
Every site that serves ads should have a single page with a list of all ads so someone who wants to go back and see an ad, even maybe a day or two later, can quickly find it and click through.
Real life recent example: I saw an ad on slashdot for some network camera that I later wanted to find out more info about. I haven't seen that damn ad since and I'm not going to keep hitting reload until it may pop up again.
Marketing people need a big 2x4 clue-stick fed-ex'ed to their forehead at times...
There is a U.S. cable net commercial where the guy is sitting at his computer and all of a sudden a dialog box comes up and says "You've reached the end of the Internet, there are no more pages left to see." and the guy says "Woah, honey, come here..."
Imagine this program screaming along calculating a few more trillion places when all of a sudden it stops. Pi is NOT infinite after all.
Imagine the hiliarity that would ensue (oops, wrong web site...)
I saw that one, but it said something like "You have an urgent message from Joe." For giggles I hit the banner (hey, I liked the web site I was on and hoped they would get a few cents at least), and the next page asked for my e-mail address to get the message. So I typed in something-rude@example.com
I've seen my sister-in-law click these. She also has, I kid you not, an entire box of AOL CDs. When I went over to fix their computer once, I asked for the original CDs that came with the computer, and she hauled out an large box, including several dozen AOL CDs. I almost died.
So, I'm positive those deceptive ads worked very well...
What you can do is build the sources, and use that to verify the signature on the binaries.
But that still requires that you trust the person who built the binaries in the first place, since they'd be the one who also signs the binary.
I also seem to remember just compiling a simple DOS exe using the same compile settings always produced a different binary, although that might just be some sort of exe preamble or something.
My paranoia may be well unjustified, but what's the big deal about me compiling and then using my own binary rev?
WTF? I can download the source code to audit, but I can't compile it for any other use than to verify it? This means I can't use the compiled source code in daily normal use?
Anyone else have a problem with this? OK, I download source code, verify it looks fine, but if I want to use the program, I need to buy/download the binary from them -- whose binaries may not necessarily be compiled from the source code I verified to my satisfaction.
(Thank god for GNU and gpg, no strings attached beyond that "nasty" "viral" (sarcasm) GPL)
p.s. I guess we won't be seeing THIS product as part of gentoo!:)
IIS is included with W2K Server....what are you thinking, you have it, and you paid for it.
And I don't have a single tech that knows anything about it, so I'm not just going to let it install without some sort of training and planning. Trust me, I know it's there. It keeps trying to select itself during a w2k server install! It takes a lot of effort to make sure you don't check a sub-feature that will auto-check IIS for you.
Also, from what I read about SUS, you have total control over what patches are deployed where, unlike Windows Update set on automatic pilot.
Thanks, we use qchain. I should have said every hotfix session. It seems we need to do this every week. To be fair, redhat comes out with fixes on average once a week too, but I just find that much easier to handle due to rhn.
For some reason too, desktop clients don't take kindly to losing their share when a server is rebooted. This is a real puzzlement to me since you'd think a client OS would fail a bit more gracefully when a server resource temporarily goes away. Most of our office users don't log out at night, and when we reboot servers out from under them, desktop backgrounds disappear, we get a few calls about write failed errors, etc, etc...
It's not like a lost hard nfs mount where the client will just wait (er, hang..:) until the server comes back up. And if we are forced to reboot a Windows profile server during the day, we get loads of corrupt roaming profiles for people who are logging out when the server dies. (It's a college, people are always logging out..:)
They do have a point about management products. When you start getting into hundreds of servers, I'm sure management becomes quite a nightmare.
At my shop, we up to around 20 Linux servers. Keeping up with patches can be a pain. But since we started paying for (imagine that) an enterprise subscription to redhat network, the difficulty of this task has all but evaporated (except for kernel upgrades, which are a bit of a bear on our EMC SANs).
With RHN, I just pull up one web page with all of my servers, click click click, submit, and the servers all update themselves next time they check in.
Now if I only could have something that easy with my dozen Windows servers. We looked into Microsoft's SUS (software update service I think), but it "requires" an IIS server, which we don't have, so I need to get one of them up just to maintain hot fixes sanely? Sigh... Plus every hotfix on Windows requires a reboot. On Linux updates, I only need to reboot when a kernel is upgraded.
Anyway, as a manager of a shop that runs about 50/50 Windows and Linux, I think this is all bullshit, at least with my site's size. Linux gives us far less grief and requires less care and feeding.
But I do think management products can play a greater role in reducing TCO than a lot of you think when you get into hundreds of servers in a big data center. I'd be curious to hear from others who run "real" data centers...
btw, I thought Unicenter and others already supported Linux. No?
I bought my first 128K Mac in April 1984 for $2,495 and became an instant Mac freak. Got the fat mac upgrade, then switched to Mac Plus, SE 30, IIcx, then Powerbook 160. Then something happened -- actually nothing happened. That was the problem. "Copeland" never arrived, but NT did.
Windows NT had true multitasking, none of that memory allocation to each app crap, and was overall more stable (despite what Mac freaks say). Apple's OS was still basically a modified Andy Hertzfeld Switcher program. Hook into GetNextEvent and steal control and pass it to another program. Polling -- yack.
But this past summer I bought an iMac. What a beaut. Unix underneath it all, stable, runs well, a joy to use. Now I still have ah, two XP machines, one 2000 server, one Linux router/firewall, a laptop with XP, and one Linux workstation in the house (between my wife and I), and the iMac is in the living room on the coffee table, but my next laptop purchase will be a Mac, that's for sure.
Anyway, the claim that all Mac users stuck with Apple through bad times isn't true in my case. If they don't make a better product, I won't buy it. Right now, except for the dead-end processor chip they are currently stuck with, it's just a better product... (and if they don't put a G4 in the iBook this January, I won't be buying a crippled G3 iBook nor an over-priced G4 Powerbook.)
Thankfully, a recent Supreme Court decision ruled against a case where a judge decides the death penalty. It has to be a jury. This has caused a big ripple effect in many cases. For example, in my home state, Delaware, a guy named Capano was convicted of murdering his mistress, and a jury "recommended" 11 to 1 for death penalty. But in Delaware, it was only a recommendation and the judge decided whether to actually sentence the person or not. So, even though one could say the jury did want the death penalty, due to that technicality, that case is now up for review to see if the court decision applies to it. Capano has a real good case now to appeal the sentencing apparently.
Good point. Also, the meaning of the "right thing" is subjective too, of course. The "right thing" in a democratic society is pretty much what the will of the populace is, so if the population wants to execute criminals and abort fetuses, then those of us against it need to accept that is the fact while trying to convince others to change their opinion and hence change the laws (and hopefully within the system and not through acts of terrorism, like blowing up family planning clinics, for example).
So, I guess what defines government must be cleared up. I don't trust government, and I guess for me that means the will of the populace AND the elected officials capacity to accurately carry out that will.* I will admit, however, that I think the U.S. does a far better job of it than others. Doesn't mean I don't believe it should do better.
As for taxes and such, there is no way I could agree with every tax and how it's spent, but that pales in comparison to a losing one's life by government decree.
* Note that lately it seems the government is worried more about doing what big corporations want over the will of the people, but then again, it's our own fault for letting them....
I believe it is a drain on the economy to hold someone in prison for life.
A common misconception. In order to allow for the mandatory appeals to minimize changes of executing an innocent person, the cost to prosecute is more than the cost to house a criminal for life (even though that cost, last I heard, was over $30K/year...). It's cheaper to keep them alive than to kill them off.
Here, have a search on Google for numerous references backing up above claim.
Sigh, he was already moderated as over-rated. Moderation shouldn't be about whether one agrees with the poster. If I had mod points, I would have voted him up, even though I disagree with his position. It was well thought out, articulate, learned, and on-topic for this discussion.
I respect your beliefs, but I am against capital punishment. A hard position to believe in, especially with the arrest of the two snipers. I *do* believe they deserve to die.
I just don't believe any government should have the right to execute its own people. It's not that I don't believe some people deserve to die, it's because I don't trust the government to decide who deserves to die.
Luckily, currently in the U.S., there are a lot of safeguards and conditions, but who is to say that will continue? Sprinkle in some national paranoia over terrorism, then all of a sudden you see rules changing, people held without a trial indefintely, for example, because they are labeled enemy combatants. If the current climate and paranoia in the U.S. isn't checked, how long before someone like me who dares speak out against the policies of my government is labeled a traitor and traitor is a capital-capable offense?
Bottom line, I don't trust the government to do the right thing, and don't believe I, as a citizen, should support the right for that government to decide what crimes deserves capital punishment. If executions are not allowed, then all grey areas are removed. Throw the bastards away for life. It's not being "soft on crime."
With all that is happening lately in the U.S. politically, can you honestly say you trust that the crimes that warrant capital punishment won't be expanded to include other "crimes" against the country? During colonial times, the colonists fled countries where stealing a loaf of bread was considered a crime against the King, a treasonable offense, and hence worthy of capital punishment.
Do you honestly trust your government to do the right thing? Or more accurately, can you trust the people who keep them all in office to not fall in step like sheep and not throw them out of office for suggesting we need to waive some rights to fight terrorism?
The U.S. is listed by Amnesty International as not meeting many requirements regarding human rights, such as banning capital punishment and lack of adequate health care for all her citizens.
Oh well...
p.s. Hacktivismo can release their software under any terms they want. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Verizon has come up with a 144Kbps wireless network but charges $99/month for unlimited access. Sprint has cheaper unlimited data access -- from the phone only. Using it to hook your computer up is prohibited by their terms of service. Other plans charge per kilobyte. Is $0.008 per kilobyte reasonable to anyone. Talk about paying for your own spam...
I think many many people dream of just using a laptop of PDA for true wireless internet access -- if the costs are reasonable.
Right now the wireless telcos are pricing themselves out of the market.
Good point. Part of the difficulty of prosecuting spammers under many of these state anti-spam laws is the difficulty in finding them. So, sure, post the stuff, force them to claim ownership in such a way that it proves that it's their work, then turn around and sue them for breaking your state law.
Cable companies own most of the fat pipes that will make this work and have a competing product, ppv on demand
Cable companies hate bandwidth hogs and want to cap usage. Rent 5 movies and half your bandwidth may be gone for the month.
My cable company's new on demand service is way cooler. I scroll through list of movies, click remote, it starts instantly, I can pause, rewind, restart and watch it as many times as I want, for 24 hours. Plus it doesn't use my soon-to-be-precious IP bandwidth or consume my hard disk space.
Most people's TV and computer's are in separate rooms. The TV room is meant for watching movies, the computer room is meant for watching porn in a dark room with the door locked and shades drawn.
It's all of our nature to criticize everything (especially nerds who don't have a life!), but I think this can be quite good. It can help speed up the speed perception of mozilla users if a web site is designed to use it since a lot of stuff will be pre-loaded. This will help Mozilla appear to be faster than IE.
So, any web site authors out there who want to see browser competition stay alive, I recommend you give this feature serious thought. Even if you love IE and hate Mozilla, a healty competitive environment will keep the pressure on Microsoft to keep improving IE. (You notice how, once they hit over 90% of the browser market, improvements in IE ground to an almost halt?)
This total information awareness crap means everytime you buy a box of kleenex, it's recorded.
But get this, the city I live near, Wilmington, wants all residents to register their guns. The "conservatives" are screaming against it.
So, I can buy a gun anonymously (between private individuals) in Delaware legally, not have to report it, and have the full support of the same congressional persons that voted for this homeland defense bill. But if I buy an issue of 2600 with my credit card, I'll be put on someone's list...
Now, let's not let this degenerate to a flame about 2nd ammendment crap. I'm pointing out hypocracy here, not making a stand for mandatory gun registration... I'm making a stand against mandatory kleenex registration.
When a new user first runs pine, it asks them if they would mind sending an anonymous message that would count their use.
I still use pine. It's very very fast. Like searching for some text in a folder with 2500 messages is almost instantaneous. It also helps me cut through crap, reply quickly, and move on. Plus I don't have to use a mouse. I do have my priorities and just load up with 800 mg of Ibuprofen first!
I am old, 43, and suffering from RSI in a muscle in my right shoulder blade from using the mouse too much... However, that doesn't stop me from playing some decent first person shooters with my mouse.
Which reminds me, I was recently quoted in the newspaper here on a story about abandoning the mouse. My quote was ""If you tried to use keyboard commands for an online shooting game, you'd be dead before you could load your weapon," said Ken Weaverling, computer services manager at Delaware Technical & Community College."
I actually said "first person shooter" but the reporter changed it to "online shooting game." Still it was kinda neat even though people where I worked were wondering if they should call Tom Ridge's boys after me...
Slashdot Mirror
Every site that serves ads should have a single page with a list of all ads so someone who wants to go back and see an ad, even maybe a day or two later, can quickly find it and click through.
Real life recent example: I saw an ad on slashdot for some network camera that I later wanted to find out more info about. I haven't seen that damn ad since and I'm not going to keep hitting reload until it may pop up again.
Marketing people need a big 2x4 clue-stick fed-ex'ed to their forehead at times...
You're right, it was DirectTV. OK, so I guess I'm a marketeers worse nightmare. I remembered the ad, but associated it with the competition.
Imagine this program screaming along calculating a few more trillion places when all of a sudden it stops. Pi is NOT infinite after all.
Imagine the hiliarity that would ensue (oops, wrong web site...)
I've seen my sister-in-law click these. She also has, I kid you not, an entire box of AOL CDs. When I went over to fix their computer once, I asked for the original CDs that came with the computer, and she hauled out an large box, including several dozen AOL CDs. I almost died.
So, I'm positive those deceptive ads worked very well...
But that still requires that you trust the person who built the binaries in the first place, since they'd be the one who also signs the binary.
I also seem to remember just compiling a simple DOS exe using the same compile settings always produced a different binary, although that might just be some sort of exe preamble or something.
My paranoia may be well unjustified, but what's the big deal about me compiling and then using my own binary rev?
Anyone else have a problem with this? OK, I download source code, verify it looks fine, but if I want to use the program, I need to buy/download the binary from them -- whose binaries may not necessarily be compiled from the source code I verified to my satisfaction.
(Thank god for GNU and gpg, no strings attached beyond that "nasty" "viral" (sarcasm) GPL)
p.s. I guess we won't be seeing THIS product as part of gentoo! :)
Now if other browsers start re-gaining some share, expect IE 7 in a hurry, with nifty new features like tabs!
And I don't have a single tech that knows anything about it, so I'm not just going to let it install without some sort of training and planning. Trust me, I know it's there. It keeps trying to select itself during a w2k server install! It takes a lot of effort to make sure you don't check a sub-feature that will auto-check IIS for you.
Also, from what I read about SUS, you have total control over what patches are deployed where, unlike Windows Update set on automatic pilot.
For some reason too, desktop clients don't take kindly to losing their share when a server is rebooted. This is a real puzzlement to me since you'd think a client OS would fail a bit more gracefully when a server resource temporarily goes away. Most of our office users don't log out at night, and when we reboot servers out from under them, desktop backgrounds disappear, we get a few calls about write failed errors, etc, etc...
It's not like a lost hard nfs mount where the client will just wait (er, hang.. :) until the server comes back up. And if we are forced to reboot a Windows profile server during the day, we get loads of corrupt roaming profiles for people who are logging out when the server dies. (It's a college, people are always logging out.. :)
At my shop, we up to around 20 Linux servers. Keeping up with patches can be a pain. But since we started paying for (imagine that) an enterprise subscription to redhat network, the difficulty of this task has all but evaporated (except for kernel upgrades, which are a bit of a bear on our EMC SANs).
With RHN, I just pull up one web page with all of my servers, click click click, submit, and the servers all update themselves next time they check in.
Now if I only could have something that easy with my dozen Windows servers. We looked into Microsoft's SUS (software update service I think), but it "requires" an IIS server, which we don't have, so I need to get one of them up just to maintain hot fixes sanely? Sigh... Plus every hotfix on Windows requires a reboot. On Linux updates, I only need to reboot when a kernel is upgraded.
Anyway, as a manager of a shop that runs about 50/50 Windows and Linux, I think this is all bullshit, at least with my site's size. Linux gives us far less grief and requires less care and feeding.
But I do think management products can play a greater role in reducing TCO than a lot of you think when you get into hundreds of servers in a big data center. I'd be curious to hear from others who run "real" data centers...
btw, I thought Unicenter and others already supported Linux. No?
Windows NT had true multitasking, none of that memory allocation to each app crap, and was overall more stable (despite what Mac freaks say). Apple's OS was still basically a modified Andy Hertzfeld Switcher program. Hook into GetNextEvent and steal control and pass it to another program. Polling -- yack.
But this past summer I bought an iMac. What a beaut. Unix underneath it all, stable, runs well, a joy to use. Now I still have ah, two XP machines, one 2000 server, one Linux router/firewall, a laptop with XP, and one Linux workstation in the house (between my wife and I), and the iMac is in the living room on the coffee table, but my next laptop purchase will be a Mac, that's for sure.
Anyway, the claim that all Mac users stuck with Apple through bad times isn't true in my case. If they don't make a better product, I won't buy it. Right now, except for the dead-end processor chip they are currently stuck with, it's just a better product... (and if they don't put a G4 in the iBook this January, I won't be buying a crippled G3 iBook nor an over-priced G4 Powerbook.)
Thankfully, a recent Supreme Court decision ruled against a case where a judge decides the death penalty. It has to be a jury. This has caused a big ripple effect in many cases. For example, in my home state, Delaware, a guy named Capano was convicted of murdering his mistress, and a jury "recommended" 11 to 1 for death penalty. But in Delaware, it was only a recommendation and the judge decided whether to actually sentence the person or not. So, even though one could say the jury did want the death penalty, due to that technicality, that case is now up for review to see if the court decision applies to it. Capano has a real good case now to appeal the sentencing apparently.
So, I guess what defines government must be cleared up. I don't trust government, and I guess for me that means the will of the populace AND the elected officials capacity to accurately carry out that will.* I will admit, however, that I think the U.S. does a far better job of it than others. Doesn't mean I don't believe it should do better.
As for taxes and such, there is no way I could agree with every tax and how it's spent, but that pales in comparison to a losing one's life by government decree.
* Note that lately it seems the government is worried more about doing what big corporations want over the will of the people, but then again, it's our own fault for letting them....
A common misconception. In order to allow for the mandatory appeals to minimize changes of executing an innocent person, the cost to prosecute is more than the cost to house a criminal for life (even though that cost, last I heard, was over $30K/year...). It's cheaper to keep them alive than to kill them off.
Here, have a search on Google for numerous references backing up above claim.
Sigh, he was already moderated as over-rated. Moderation shouldn't be about whether one agrees with the poster. If I had mod points, I would have voted him up, even though I disagree with his position. It was well thought out, articulate, learned, and on-topic for this discussion.
I just don't believe any government should have the right to execute its own people. It's not that I don't believe some people deserve to die, it's because I don't trust the government to decide who deserves to die.
Luckily, currently in the U.S., there are a lot of safeguards and conditions, but who is to say that will continue? Sprinkle in some national paranoia over terrorism, then all of a sudden you see rules changing, people held without a trial indefintely, for example, because they are labeled enemy combatants. If the current climate and paranoia in the U.S. isn't checked, how long before someone like me who dares speak out against the policies of my government is labeled a traitor and traitor is a capital-capable offense?
Bottom line, I don't trust the government to do the right thing, and don't believe I, as a citizen, should support the right for that government to decide what crimes deserves capital punishment. If executions are not allowed, then all grey areas are removed. Throw the bastards away for life. It's not being "soft on crime."
With all that is happening lately in the U.S. politically, can you honestly say you trust that the crimes that warrant capital punishment won't be expanded to include other "crimes" against the country? During colonial times, the colonists fled countries where stealing a loaf of bread was considered a crime against the King, a treasonable offense, and hence worthy of capital punishment.
Do you honestly trust your government to do the right thing? Or more accurately, can you trust the people who keep them all in office to not fall in step like sheep and not throw them out of office for suggesting we need to waive some rights to fight terrorism?
I don't.
Oh well...
p.s. Hacktivismo can release their software under any terms they want. If you don't like it, don't use it.
If Verizon offered unlimited 1XRTT for equiv of $50CDN, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat. They charge US$99/month which is ridiculous, IMO....
I think many many people dream of just using a laptop of PDA for true wireless internet access -- if the costs are reasonable.
Right now the wireless telcos are pricing themselves out of the market.
Good point. Part of the difficulty of prosecuting spammers under many of these state anti-spam laws is the difficulty in finding them. So, sure, post the stuff, force them to claim ownership in such a way that it proves that it's their work, then turn around and sue them for breaking your state law.
:-) But there's other maybe better town names right in the Phoenix metro area, like Surprise or El Mirage.
So, any web site authors out there who want to see browser competition stay alive, I recommend you give this feature serious thought. Even if you love IE and hate Mozilla, a healty competitive environment will keep the pressure on Microsoft to keep improving IE. (You notice how, once they hit over 90% of the browser market, improvements in IE ground to an almost halt?)
But get this, the city I live near, Wilmington, wants all residents to register their guns. The "conservatives" are screaming against it.
So, I can buy a gun anonymously (between private individuals) in Delaware legally, not have to report it, and have the full support of the same congressional persons that voted for this homeland defense bill. But if I buy an issue of 2600 with my credit card, I'll be put on someone's list...
Now, let's not let this degenerate to a flame about 2nd ammendment crap. I'm pointing out hypocracy here, not making a stand for mandatory gun registration... I'm making a stand against mandatory kleenex registration.
When a new user first runs pine, it asks them if they would mind sending an anonymous message that would count their use.
I still use pine. It's very very fast. Like searching for some text in a folder with 2500 messages is almost instantaneous. It also helps me cut through crap, reply quickly, and move on. Plus I don't have to use a mouse. I do have my priorities and just load up with 800 mg of Ibuprofen first!
I am old, 43, and suffering from RSI in a muscle in my right shoulder blade from using the mouse too much... However, that doesn't stop me from playing some decent first person shooters with my mouse.
Which reminds me, I was recently quoted in the newspaper here on a story about abandoning the mouse. My quote was ""If you tried to use keyboard commands for an online shooting game, you'd be dead before you could load your weapon," said Ken Weaverling, computer services manager at Delaware Technical & Community College."
I actually said "first person shooter" but the reporter changed it to "online shooting game." Still it was kinda neat even though people where I worked were wondering if they should call Tom Ridge's boys after me...