I swear this place is becoming more and more like Digg everyday. I'm no longer renewing my Slashdot subscription while I can get this same quality news for free elsewhere. Where do I start?
1.The screenshots clearly show WinXP, not Vista. In fact, this guy's ultra-leet "port sniffing software and networking tools" is PeerGuardian 2. Straight from the product's home page: Note: PeerGuardian 2 does not support Windows Vista at the moment. This is a top priority, and we hope to have a Vista download soon.
2. Lame screen shots from some Windows app isn't enough to validate a conspiracy theory. Where's the complete traffic dump? And not from some random guy and his "fanboy" friend; how about a creditable network security organization? Hell, I'd even settle for an intern with his CCNA.
3. Hard to tell because all we have are screen shots, but it looks like nothing more than port scans.::yawn::
(Guess is this is what I get for spending a beautiful Sunday afternoon indoors, on my computer).
Actually, only a caller ID number can be spoofed. The number -> name correlation is a database lookup done at the phone company; customers have no control of that on a call-by-call basis.
Here in Oakland County, Michigan, they took a different approach. Our nascent, county-wide wifi network was almost entirely privately funded. The county agreed to provide the space to mount the antennas (on land already owned by the county) and to promote it. The actual design and implementation was bid out to the private sector. The winner agreed to pick up the infrastructure tab and to provide free wireless to everyone in the service area. In exchange, they are permitted to offer plans with more bandwidth and traffic prioritization to those willing to pay for it. It's a win-win: It didn't cost the taxpayers anything and we all get free access, and the private company gets to keep any profits that they make from the premium service.
Because men are scared-to-death, repulsed, deeply saddened (or some combination of the three) to contimplate the thought of their wives walking around sans breast. I'm not a psychologist, but I would think that the reason that breasts are so objectified sexually is that they are linked to a basic, nurturing comfort deep within our psyche very early in our lives. A woman unable to offer fullfill that role has somehow lost a significant porition of her humanity. Of course, when rationally considered that's utter BS. But not all husbands can fully let go of that fear.
Instead of printing the actual picture to analog film, what about encoding the digital stream into a high-density barcode and printing it to microfilm? I have no idea how much media this would take but it could be completely lossless on an analog medium.
I recently decided to move to Postgres from MySQL. There are some pretty cool things about Postgres; flexible authentication options and sequences being my current favorite. I've found that it's docs are actually pretty good (I don't know what they were like before). However, since the topic here are stored procedures, I have to really complain bitterly about Postgres's implementation of stored procedures. Creating a sproc that returns a dataset rather than just a outpur parameter is a convoluted dance. You have to exactly define the output using a "TYPE" and then iterate over the dataset using a cursor-like syntax.
Consider this simple example that I'm currently working on. It's for an internal peer review application where coworkers give one positive and one negative comment about each other:
DROP TYPE answers_type CASCADE; CREATE TYPE answers_type AS ( positive text ,negative text);
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION answers_get( _review_id int ) RETURNS setof answers_type AS $$ DECLARE rec answers_type; BEGIN
FOR rec IN SELECT positive ,negative FROM answers WHERE review = _review_id ORDER BY id DESC LOOP RETURN NEXT rec; END LOOP; RETURN; END; $$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
This ends up being very unwieldy for larger and more complex stored procedures. I recently compared simple output -parameter only stored procedures between Postgres, MySQL, and MS SQL on my blog. Fortunately it's a lot more straightforward when using that method. I'll stick with Postgres for now and just hope that this is eventually improved.
Sorry man, but this just sounds like a lot of whining. You were modded up as "Interesting" because your story isn't something that a lot of Slashdotters have heard, i.e. it's the exception. You might be exaggerating, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that your story is 100% accurate. If that's the case, your friends to grow a pair and find a new job. I despise it when people incessantly bitch around the water cooler but never forcefully speak up to management or put the effort into finding a new job.
And don't give me the lame excuse that *every* job in your area has been outsourced and there aren't any jobs available. Yes, gone are the days that you could be a break/fix screwdriver operator or a help desk "tech" and make $60k/yr. But there are plently of organizations out there that desperately need experienced and competent IT folk. If your friends have evolved their skill sets with the changing technology, then they're golden. If not, then they ought to seriously consider a career change. But I don't have much pity for people who bitch about what amounts to indentured servitude when they're voluntarily employed.
Wow. Someone equating patent infringment to the struggles of civil rights movement--only on Slashdot. Jury nullification is only applicable in criminal cases. Vonage was not charged with a crime; ergo there was nothing to nullify. You might want to read up on the term before using it again.
Yes, Ruby is the current web development flavor of the month, however, don't get caught up in the hype. There are good number of MVC web development frameworks in other languages, including even Lisp and Smalltalk, but most notably Python. In my opinion it makes more sense to learn a Python framework for a number of reasons. Mainly because Python is used in considerably more non-web applications than Ruby, which makes your skills more portable (and you more employable). Ruby on Rails is also very monolythic, while two of the the three most popular Python frameworks, TurboGears and Pylons are very modular (especially Pylons since it's built around the WSGI spec). Finally, Python compiles to bytecode whereas Ruby does not. Hence Python outperforms Ruby in almost every shootout.
::Wince:: A WordPress blog making the frontpage of Slashdot (my blog nonetheless). FYI, I'm using the WP-Cache Wordpress plugin to help keep the thing online. If it stays up, it's almost certainly because of that functionality. The software itself is running on a pretty much idle, dedicated Xeon box in a datacenter.
Bah... there's always a way to build a better mousetrap. In fact, I personally am working on one that I feel is quite good. And there are experts in natural language processing and statistics that I'm sure could innovate circles around me in this area. In a few years I'm sure web search will be a whole new ballgame (again).
"nofollow" only exists because Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a (at the time) brillant idea of ranking webpages according to how many sites linked back to it... and now that method of determining relevance is broken. Prior to this innovation, most search engines relied upon META tags... which also eventually broke. Google is where it is today because they recognized that the web had evolved past META tags (and other techniques of self-describing content).
My point is that the Internet as a whole souldn't be tripping over ourselves because Google's invention too is now obsolete. The "nofollow" attribute is just an ugly hack created to accommodate the frequently-gamed PageRank algorithm. We should instead find new ways to determine relevance. Hey, if your idea is good enough, you might even find yourself a billionaire someday too. Who knows, maybe the next wave will also wash away all those god-forsaken AdSense landing pages and domain squatters (oh please, oh please, oh please...).
There are a zillion apps out there that accomplish the same thing. This is just one company riding a meme for publicity sakes. God how I hate marketers...
I had to read your comment four times before I understood it was sarcastic. I don't know how things work in Kansas, but my mother is a third-grade teacher in a less-affluent part of Toledo. In a class of more than 20 students, it's very rare that more than four or five parents bother attending parent-teacher conferences. Heck, it's pretty common for students to show up at the beginning of the year without so much as a pencil to their name. Parents have learned to abdicate way, way too much of their responsibilities in providing a future for their children.
Re:I joke a lot on Slashdot, but serious question
on
The Math Behind PageRank
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As pointed out, the Times site isn't fooled, but there are a good many out there that are fooled. Sometimes if you ever do a Google search, one of the results will contain a keyword or two. However, when you click on the link, you'll find yourself redirected to a subscription page. Useragent spoofing can frequently show you the same page that Google indexed.
If you're a FF user, grab the Useragent Switcher extension and add in a UA of "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)". You'll then be two clicks away from seeing what was previously registration-only.
You make some excellent points, which illustrate why this service shouldn't really be compared to YouTube. It's a lot like comparing email to SMS. Both are very similiar on the surface, but both are also very successful because they serve slightly different purposes. As you pointed out, it's lack of streaming is the reason why it can't directly compete with YouTube. But because YouTube chooses to stream, they can't offer the same high-quality video as Zudeo. I think it's way to soon call this idea dead in the water. I mean, the iPod was just another MP3 player when it came to market. We'll have to see how well the idea is executed first.
Bah... it doesn't have to be that expensive. I've plugged them before here and I'll plug them again because I think that the company is amazing: Stardock. They're a tiny, independent developer/publisher about 30 minutes from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their most notable game is Galactic Civilizations 2, which includes 3D modeling, professional music score and sound effects, an insane amount of detail, excellent replayability, challenging AI, and very balanced gameplay. When I think "independent game developer", lame little Flash-based games are what come to mind. However GalCiv2 *fully* competes with anything EA has ever put out. Stardock also has a very "pro-customer" stance on copy protection too.
Personally, I think every product should have a sort of magic pull-string... Just untape the string and pull it, and the otherwise-invulnerable packaging neatly falls away in two or three tidy chunks to reveal its contents...
I just hope it's more effective than the paper tab that sticks out of a Hershey's Kiss. That stupid thing is one of the most poorly engineered packages of the past 100 years.
1. Take an existing technology
2. Adapt it for use in health care.
3. Profit!
Seriously, though... any would-be inventors would be wise to keep that in mind. If you think the Pentagon overpays for a toliet seat, wait to you see what a hospital spends on one.
1/5? It's actually twice as worse as you think. 40% of Americans "flatly reject" evolution. Of 35 surveyed countries, only Turkey has a less enlightened populace.
But if you believe in the Bible, why do you need to seek scientific credibility, and why are Creationists so reluctant to put their theories to peer review, I ask?
"I would give the same answer as [prominent atheist, Richard] Dawkins. He believes there is no God and nothing you could say would convince him otherwise. You are dealing with an origins issue. If you don't have the information, you cannot be sure. Nothing contradicts the Bible's account of the origins."
Why do theists continually shift the burden of proof back to athiests? If I were to insist that a teapot orbited the Sun (an analogy used by Dawkins), I would have to *prove* this to other people before they'd believe me. Why does religion get a free pass when telling me there's an invisiable man in the sky?
Hmmm? There's nothing in the article to indicate that the balance is being picked up by taxpayers. I think a more likely scenario is that they're still working on finding another $3M in donations.
The real question is, if Jesus were to drop on by, would he approve of $25M being spent on religious idolism? Or would he have prefered that money spent maybe saving the lives of a few thousand people in a third-world country? But consistency has never been one of organizaed religion's strong points.
Comparing CallerID to SMTP is a pretty good analogy. However I don't agree that either of them are "broken". Neither of the two were designed with authentication in mind, nor were they ever advertised as a means of security. Before CID, you had to actually answer the phone to see who was on the other end. CID was introduced as a conveniance feature, not a security feature. It's people's expectations that are broken, not the technologies.
How is this +4 Insightful? You're arguing that items need to be unique in order to be desirable or profitable. Rolex, Mercedes Benz, heck, even McDonalds has "a sustainable, proven business model" of selling identical wares over and over again. Artisians enjoy making unique contributions to the world. Some of them make a very good living, but that's rare. Businesses, on the other hand, strive to make money the in most efficent manner possible. Despite being uncool, both have their place in the world. How much do you think your computer would cost if each one had to be hand-crafted?
Slashdot Mirror
I swear this place is becoming more and more like Digg everyday. I'm no longer renewing my Slashdot subscription while I can get this same quality news for free elsewhere. Where do I start?
::yawn::
1.The screenshots clearly show WinXP, not Vista. In fact, this guy's ultra-leet "port sniffing software and networking tools" is PeerGuardian 2. Straight from the product's home page: Note: PeerGuardian 2 does not support Windows Vista at the moment. This is a top priority, and we hope to have a Vista download soon.
2. Lame screen shots from some Windows app isn't enough to validate a conspiracy theory. Where's the complete traffic dump? And not from some random guy and his "fanboy" friend; how about a creditable network security organization? Hell, I'd even settle for an intern with his CCNA.
3. Hard to tell because all we have are screen shots, but it looks like nothing more than port scans.
(Guess is this is what I get for spending a beautiful Sunday afternoon indoors, on my computer).
Actually, only a caller ID number can be spoofed. The number -> name correlation is a database lookup done at the phone company; customers have no control of that on a call-by-call basis.
Here in Oakland County, Michigan, they took a different approach. Our nascent, county-wide wifi network was almost entirely privately funded. The county agreed to provide the space to mount the antennas (on land already owned by the county) and to promote it. The actual design and implementation was bid out to the private sector. The winner agreed to pick up the infrastructure tab and to provide free wireless to everyone in the service area. In exchange, they are permitted to offer plans with more bandwidth and traffic prioritization to those willing to pay for it. It's a win-win: It didn't cost the taxpayers anything and we all get free access, and the private company gets to keep any profits that they make from the premium service.
Because men are scared-to-death, repulsed, deeply saddened (or some combination of the three) to contimplate the thought of their wives walking around sans breast. I'm not a psychologist, but I would think that the reason that breasts are so objectified sexually is that they are linked to a basic, nurturing comfort deep within our psyche very early in our lives. A woman unable to offer fullfill that role has somehow lost a significant porition of her humanity. Of course, when rationally considered that's utter BS. But not all husbands can fully let go of that fear.
Instead of printing the actual picture to analog film, what about encoding the digital stream into a high-density barcode and printing it to microfilm? I have no idea how much media this would take but it could be completely lossless on an analog medium.
I recently decided to move to Postgres from MySQL. There are some pretty cool things about Postgres; flexible authentication options and sequences being my current favorite. I've found that it's docs are actually pretty good (I don't know what they were like before). However, since the topic here are stored procedures, I have to really complain bitterly about Postgres's implementation of stored procedures. Creating a sproc that returns a dataset rather than just a outpur parameter is a convoluted dance. You have to exactly define the output using a "TYPE" and then iterate over the dataset using a cursor-like syntax.
Consider this simple example that I'm currently working on. It's for an internal peer review application where coworkers give one positive and one negative comment about each other:
This ends up being very unwieldy for larger and more complex stored procedures. I recently compared simple output -parameter only stored procedures between Postgres, MySQL, and MS SQL on my blog. Fortunately it's a lot more straightforward when using that method. I'll stick with Postgres for now and just hope that this is eventually improved.
Sorry man, but this just sounds like a lot of whining. You were modded up as "Interesting" because your story isn't something that a lot of Slashdotters have heard, i.e. it's the exception. You might be exaggerating, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that your story is 100% accurate. If that's the case, your friends to grow a pair and find a new job. I despise it when people incessantly bitch around the water cooler but never forcefully speak up to management or put the effort into finding a new job.
And don't give me the lame excuse that *every* job in your area has been outsourced and there aren't any jobs available. Yes, gone are the days that you could be a break/fix screwdriver operator or a help desk "tech" and make $60k/yr. But there are plently of organizations out there that desperately need experienced and competent IT folk. If your friends have evolved their skill sets with the changing technology, then they're golden. If not, then they ought to seriously consider a career change. But I don't have much pity for people who bitch about what amounts to indentured servitude when they're voluntarily employed.Wow. Someone equating patent infringment to the struggles of civil rights movement--only on Slashdot. Jury nullification is only applicable in criminal cases. Vonage was not charged with a crime; ergo there was nothing to nullify. You might want to read up on the term before using it again.
Yes, Ruby is the current web development flavor of the month, however, don't get caught up in the hype. There are good number of MVC web development frameworks in other languages, including even Lisp and Smalltalk, but most notably Python. In my opinion it makes more sense to learn a Python framework for a number of reasons. Mainly because Python is used in considerably more non-web applications than Ruby, which makes your skills more portable (and you more employable). Ruby on Rails is also very monolythic, while two of the the three most popular Python frameworks, TurboGears and Pylons are very modular (especially Pylons since it's built around the WSGI spec). Finally, Python compiles to bytecode whereas Ruby does not. Hence Python outperforms Ruby in almost every shootout.
Further reading:
Of snakes and rubies; Or why I chose Python over Ruby
TurboGears and Pylons (a technical comparison)
From PHP to Python (my blog)
::Wince:: A WordPress blog making the frontpage of Slashdot (my blog nonetheless). FYI, I'm using the WP-Cache Wordpress plugin to help keep the thing online. If it stays up, it's almost certainly because of that functionality. The software itself is running on a pretty much idle, dedicated Xeon box in a datacenter.
Bah... there's always a way to build a better mousetrap. In fact, I personally am working on one that I feel is quite good. And there are experts in natural language processing and statistics that I'm sure could innovate circles around me in this area. In a few years I'm sure web search will be a whole new ballgame (again).
"nofollow" only exists because Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a (at the time) brillant idea of ranking webpages according to how many sites linked back to it... and now that method of determining relevance is broken. Prior to this innovation, most search engines relied upon META tags... which also eventually broke. Google is where it is today because they recognized that the web had evolved past META tags (and other techniques of self-describing content).
My point is that the Internet as a whole souldn't be tripping over ourselves because Google's invention too is now obsolete. The "nofollow" attribute is just an ugly hack created to accommodate the frequently-gamed PageRank algorithm. We should instead find new ways to determine relevance. Hey, if your idea is good enough, you might even find yourself a billionaire someday too. Who knows, maybe the next wave will also wash away all those god-forsaken AdSense landing pages and domain squatters (oh please, oh please, oh please...).
There are a zillion apps out there that accomplish the same thing. This is just one company riding a meme for publicity sakes. God how I hate marketers...
I had to read your comment four times before I understood it was sarcastic. I don't know how things work in Kansas, but my mother is a third-grade teacher in a less-affluent part of Toledo. In a class of more than 20 students, it's very rare that more than four or five parents bother attending parent-teacher conferences. Heck, it's pretty common for students to show up at the beginning of the year without so much as a pencil to their name. Parents have learned to abdicate way, way too much of their responsibilities in providing a future for their children.
As pointed out, the Times site isn't fooled, but there are a good many out there that are fooled. Sometimes if you ever do a Google search, one of the results will contain a keyword or two. However, when you click on the link, you'll find yourself redirected to a subscription page. Useragent spoofing can frequently show you the same page that Google indexed.
If you're a FF user, grab the Useragent Switcher extension and add in a UA of "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)". You'll then be two clicks away from seeing what was previously registration-only.
You make some excellent points, which illustrate why this service shouldn't really be compared to YouTube. It's a lot like comparing email to SMS. Both are very similiar on the surface, but both are also very successful because they serve slightly different purposes. As you pointed out, it's lack of streaming is the reason why it can't directly compete with YouTube. But because YouTube chooses to stream, they can't offer the same high-quality video as Zudeo. I think it's way to soon call this idea dead in the water. I mean, the iPod was just another MP3 player when it came to market. We'll have to see how well the idea is executed first.
Bah... it doesn't have to be that expensive. I've plugged them before here and I'll plug them again because I think that the company is amazing: Stardock. They're a tiny, independent developer/publisher about 30 minutes from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their most notable game is Galactic Civilizations 2, which includes 3D modeling, professional music score and sound effects, an insane amount of detail, excellent replayability, challenging AI, and very balanced gameplay. When I think "independent game developer", lame little Flash-based games are what come to mind. However GalCiv2 *fully* competes with anything EA has ever put out. Stardock also has a very "pro-customer" stance on copy protection too.
2. Adapt it for use in health care.
3. Profit!
Seriously, though... any would-be inventors would be wise to keep that in mind. If you think the Pentagon overpays for a toliet seat, wait to you see what a hospital spends on one.
1/5? It's actually twice as worse as you think. 40% of Americans "flatly reject" evolution. Of 35 surveyed countries, only Turkey has a less enlightened populace.
The Computer History Museum has been on my list of places to see before I die for awhile. It's that "other" geek haven in Mountain View, CA.
Hmmm? There's nothing in the article to indicate that the balance is being picked up by taxpayers. I think a more likely scenario is that they're still working on finding another $3M in donations.
The real question is, if Jesus were to drop on by, would he approve of $25M being spent on religious idolism? Or would he have prefered that money spent maybe saving the lives of a few thousand people in a third-world country? But consistency has never been one of organizaed religion's strong points.
Comparing CallerID to SMTP is a pretty good analogy. However I don't agree that either of them are "broken". Neither of the two were designed with authentication in mind, nor were they ever advertised as a means of security. Before CID, you had to actually answer the phone to see who was on the other end. CID was introduced as a conveniance feature, not a security feature. It's people's expectations that are broken, not the technologies.
How is this +4 Insightful? You're arguing that items need to be unique in order to be desirable or profitable. Rolex, Mercedes Benz, heck, even McDonalds has "a sustainable, proven business model" of selling identical wares over and over again. Artisians enjoy making unique contributions to the world. Some of them make a very good living, but that's rare. Businesses, on the other hand, strive to make money the in most efficent manner possible. Despite being uncool, both have their place in the world. How much do you think your computer would cost if each one had to be hand-crafted?