For anyone who hasn't yet read it, I highly recommend that you read Paul Graham's blog post entitled "The Submarine". It's a very interesting insight into how PR firms craft the fake news that you describe.
Right, but what's with all the hype about Java and the GPL? Server-size image maps don't need Javascript to work. Unless I'm totally missing something here (which is possible) I could cook together a PHP class that does this exact same thing in less than an hour.
I don't understand why this has made it's way onto Slashdot? It's an image map. With a PIN pad. Besides the fact it looks like a solution looking for a problem, I don't see the innovation. This could very easily be replicated in praticially any web scripting language of your choice.
Why would anyone have a need to write a simple spider nowadays? In 2006, there has to be a better way than just following links. For example, it would be interesting to see something that crawled the various social bookmarking sites and corelated the various terms. For example, User A on Delicious and User B on Stumble Upon both bookmark a link about Pink Floyd and another one about Led Zep. If I'm searching for something about Floyd, the system could recommend some cool info about Led Zep too. (Email me if you need to know where to send my royality checks).
Ugh... the blurb is woefully incorrect. The dolphins didn't sing, and they certaintly didn't sing the Batman themesong. They were trained to respond to the rhythm of one long beat, followed by one short beat. It's quite a stretch to equate this to the old "Batmaaaannn!" catchphrase, much less the song. Perhaps the dolphins are instead brushing up on Morse code in preparation for a DX contest?
I am so sick of people trotting out this tired meme. It's always said so smuggly, like the rest of us are idiots for calling the US a democracy. Here in Michigan, I just today directly voted on five state ballot inititives. During past days I've also directly voted on funding proposals for local schools, libraries, fire departments, and other public services. Many times, proposed local ordinances also go the voters. These things have a greater affect on my life than most of the federal bills that get shuffled around by elected officals in DC.
No one's hiding the fact that the United States is a republic ("the Republic, for which it stands..."). But it's also a democracy. And I would argue that the democracy part is more relevant than the republic aspects.
I remember years ago when NSI/Verisign was the only game in town and certs cost $300+. It was a *royal* PIA to buy one. It generally entailed several phone conversations with an account rep, faxing them reams of documentation verifying business identity.
When other CAs got into the game, the increased competition drove down the prices of the certs. Since Verisign wasn't making as much money on them, they couldn't afford the same level of verification and still expect to compete. Eventually the whole process became web-based and more streamlined (or less intensive, depending on how you look at it).
The reason this happened it because buyers' #1 concern (beyond is browser/server compatibility) is price. If Internet consumers would put more pressure on website owners to use certs from reputible CA's and demand a more through verification, both prices and levels of verification would increase again. Of course consumers don't demand this due to ignorance of 'net security. However, this is slowly changing as the technology matures and increased media exposure of identity theft, worms, etc.
This latest Verisign product is probably just a response to that upswing in market demand. However, IMHO, it's probably slightly ahead of its time to be a success. I doubt it's the conspiracy some/.er's are making it out to be though.
Companies need to know that we won't just bend over and let them fuck us with little "upgrades" like that, at least not without noticing.
Since you didn't mention otherwise, I'm going to assume that you still use iTunes? How exactly is that not "bending over?" If that feature was really that important to you, you would switched to using WinAmp and Shoutcast (or something similar). It's doubtful that Apple cares what you think is important to you. That doesn't affect your buying decision. They're more interested in what you actually care about.
As mentioned in the article, BitPass requires you to put a minimum of $3 into your account when you open it. Obviously this seems stupid if you only want to spend a nickel. I understand BitPass's plight--it probably costs them a minimum $0.30-0.40 in fees to process a credit card. However, If you remember the early days of Paypal, they burned through some serious VC funds by basically throwing millions at people to get them to signup. It worked and paid off in spades big time. If BitPass wants to ever be a contender, they're going to have accept the fact that they'll need to bleed money for a year or two.
Repeat after me: Coorelation does not equal causation.
What evidence do you have that supports the notion that Americans will get faster access if net neutrality is scuttled? This is equating "faster access" with killing net neutrality is the exact koolaid that the telcom industry has been trying to cram into the collective consciousness. Their real goal has nothing to do with fiber in your home. It's all about being able to wring more cash out of Google, YouTube, and especially Vonage (who directly undercuts them).
Wow, what a condescending piece of Jedi hand-waving that is. Translation: "Hey, this legislation is too complex to compress into a 30 second sound-bite. But trust us, we know what's best for you."
I don't care if it's a tech, pharmacutical, or national parks bill. If a group chose to communicate like that to me, I'd take enough offense to instinctively oppose their viewpoint.
Cisco phones obviously ship with SCCP firmware. However, Cisco has also created SIP firmware which you can choose to use instead. So you can use the original SCCP phone with Asterisk if you load the SCCP channel driver. Or, you can load the SIP firmware on the phone and use it with SIP on Asterisk. The later one is the preferable one because Asterisk's SCCP support is a bare minimum, while the Cisco SIP firmware is pretty good.
A lot of people pickup a Cisco handset off of Ebay and think they'll easily just start using it with their Asterisk server. To get access to the SIP firmware, you need a current Cisco support agreement (which is a PIA to get if you aren't a corporate customer). A support agreement for a single phone is pretty cheap (around $10 I think), but you also need to buy a license to use the SIP software, which is around $200-300 IIRC. Alternatively, you can find the firmware on several P2P networks, but it takes a lot of luck to do so. IMHO, it really isn't worth doing unless you're purely looking for a learning experience or already have a Cisco phone laying around. You're much better off picking up an Aastra 9220i hand set. It's SIP out of the box, has a great feture set, and is *much* cheaper than any Cisco phone. Plus it actually has a backlight! (Which is a feature that you don't really think about unless you don't have one). Honestly, even if they were the same price, I'd probably still buy Aastras for a small-office rollout.
If you want to email me: Sure. (It's a spamgourmet address).
You can install SIP firmware in Cisco phones. I currently have a 7960 on my desk that I use with Asterisk. It's not a fun (or cheap, since it requires a seperate license from Cisco), but it can be done en masse with a TFTP server.
Actually, *all* corporations pay taxes. Some may not income taxes, but they certainly pay other taxes (or their members do). In fact, corporate taxes account for around 7% of the US's GDP. While that's somewhat concerning because as late as the 1960's, corporate taxation accounted for 25% of the GPD, it certainly isn't "no taxes".
Also keep in mind that the vast majority of corporations are small businesses (can't find a citation ATM). That's important because small businesses employ 52% of the workers in the US and create 65% of the net new jobs. But even if you qualify your hating to "big corporations" (however you define that line), it doesn't really advance the argument. The computer you're now using wouldn't exist without corporations. Neither would many of the other benefits modern society offers that are taken advantage of daily by the same people who criticize capitalism.
I'm not saying much of corporate America doesn't suck. I'm a former refugee myself, who's since left to run his own company. But the mindless corporate bashing that is a regular mantra here at Slashdot is just plain mental laziness.
To the IT-inclined, yeah, hosting data vital your business on someone's server can make you cringe. However, to 99% of the small businesses out there, they think nothing of it. All you have to do is look to the success of Salesforce.com to see that. Or even more common: How many small businesses use IMAP (either through a client or a webmail interface)? If their webhost suddenly closed their doors, they could potentially lose years of critical correspondence.
As an IT guy myself, I stuggle to explain this sort of stuff to small business owners. But them again, these are the same people who balk at the cost of DAT or DLT drive yet wouldn't even consider canceling their business owner's insurance policy. Go figure.
Well, the paper could be preprinted (using a dye sub process or something) to look like some sort of official document with a blank space in the middle. Sure, there are cheaper ways to do it; but almost by definition, I think, promotional material has to be gimicky.
Rereading the article it looks like a special printer would also be required, so scratch the idea anyhow.;-)
An interesting application for this would be for printable coupons. You get a piece of this paper in the mail with some sort of promotion. The instructions tell you feed the paper into your printer and visit a certain URL to print a "special one day only" coupon.
Sure, expiration ("expiry" for the rest of the world) dates have been around forever. However, knowing that your coupon will literally disappear tomorrow would be an added psychological incentive to use it. (I've *got* to stop giving marketers new ideas...)
Slashdot doesn't define the page fonts. Change your browser's default sans-serif to whatever you choose and you're golden. I personally use Swis721 BT as my sans-serif font and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono as the monospaced font. They work nicely.
What you describe is actually *very* common for novice 'net users. In fact, I might say that more of them do it than don't. Check out AOL's recently released search data. Just randomly check out various users' search histories. It would be interesting to see how this correlates to the frequency of Google users doing the same thing.
Bonus geek points for using an HP graphing calculator and string instead of GPS. Though I'm not quite sure why the farmers would give permission for parts of their crop to be destroyed (even if he/she's an OSS advocate).
The busiest airports in the world handle 30-80 million passengers per year. With an 8% false positive rate, a 30M/year airport would flag almost 8,800 innocent people per day, per airport as a terrorist. How can this be considered even remotely feasible? Even if getting flagged just means that you have to undergo a more rigorous personal inspection it's going to piss off a lot of passengers. Plus the TSA people aren't going to put much creedance into something that dramatically increases their daily workload, but might catch one terrorist every decade. Just another misuse of expensive technology.
One of my network support customers is a tiny township of a few square miles, it's about the smallest form of government in modern-day America. Almost every single decision has to be approved by their board of trustees of about six-seven people. It takes absolutely *forever* to get anything done and is frustrating beyond belief. Yes, it's even worse than corporate America. I can't possibly imagine to run even a small company like that and still remain competitive.
Slashdot Mirror
For anyone who hasn't yet read it, I highly recommend that you read Paul Graham's blog post entitled "The Submarine". It's a very interesting insight into how PR firms craft the fake news that you describe.
Right, but what's with all the hype about Java and the GPL? Server-size image maps don't need Javascript to work. Unless I'm totally missing something here (which is possible) I could cook together a PHP class that does this exact same thing in less than an hour.
Here's their demo app.
I don't understand why this has made it's way onto Slashdot? It's an image map. With a PIN pad. Besides the fact it looks like a solution looking for a problem, I don't see the innovation. This could very easily be replicated in praticially any web scripting language of your choice.
Why would anyone have a need to write a simple spider nowadays? In 2006, there has to be a better way than just following links. For example, it would be interesting to see something that crawled the various social bookmarking sites and corelated the various terms. For example, User A on Delicious and User B on Stumble Upon both bookmark a link about Pink Floyd and another one about Led Zep. If I'm searching for something about Floyd, the system could recommend some cool info about Led Zep too. (Email me if you need to know where to send my royality checks).
Ugh... the blurb is woefully incorrect. The dolphins didn't sing, and they certaintly didn't sing the Batman themesong. They were trained to respond to the rhythm of one long beat, followed by one short beat. It's quite a stretch to equate this to the old "Batmaaaannn!" catchphrase, much less the song. Perhaps the dolphins are instead brushing up on Morse code in preparation for a DX contest?
I am so sick of people trotting out this tired meme. It's always said so smuggly, like the rest of us are idiots for calling the US a democracy. Here in Michigan, I just today directly voted on five state ballot inititives. During past days I've also directly voted on funding proposals for local schools, libraries, fire departments, and other public services. Many times, proposed local ordinances also go the voters. These things have a greater affect on my life than most of the federal bills that get shuffled around by elected officals in DC.
No one's hiding the fact that the United States is a republic ("the Republic, for which it stands..."). But it's also a democracy. And I would argue that the democracy part is more relevant than the republic aspects.
How do they prevent people from just pissing on the floors?
I remember years ago when NSI/Verisign was the only game in town and certs cost $300+. It was a *royal* PIA to buy one. It generally entailed several phone conversations with an account rep, faxing them reams of documentation verifying business identity.
When other CAs got into the game, the increased competition drove down the prices of the certs. Since Verisign wasn't making as much money on them, they couldn't afford the same level of verification and still expect to compete. Eventually the whole process became web-based and more streamlined (or less intensive, depending on how you look at it).
The reason this happened it because buyers' #1 concern (beyond is browser/server compatibility) is price. If Internet consumers would put more pressure on website owners to use certs from reputible CA's and demand a more through verification, both prices and levels of verification would increase again. Of course consumers don't demand this due to ignorance of 'net security. However, this is slowly changing as the technology matures and increased media exposure of identity theft, worms, etc.
This latest Verisign product is probably just a response to that upswing in market demand. However, IMHO, it's probably slightly ahead of its time to be a success. I doubt it's the conspiracy some /.er's are making it out to be though.
As mentioned in the article, BitPass requires you to put a minimum of $3 into your account when you open it. Obviously this seems stupid if you only want to spend a nickel. I understand BitPass's plight--it probably costs them a minimum $0.30-0.40 in fees to process a credit card. However, If you remember the early days of Paypal, they burned through some serious VC funds by basically throwing millions at people to get them to signup. It worked and paid off in spades big time. If BitPass wants to ever be a contender, they're going to have accept the fact that they'll need to bleed money for a year or two.
Repeat after me: Coorelation does not equal causation.
What evidence do you have that supports the notion that Americans will get faster access if net neutrality is scuttled? This is equating "faster access" with killing net neutrality is the exact koolaid that the telcom industry has been trying to cram into the collective consciousness. Their real goal has nothing to do with fiber in your home. It's all about being able to wring more cash out of Google, YouTube, and especially Vonage (who directly undercuts them).
Wow, what a condescending piece of Jedi hand-waving that is. Translation: "Hey, this legislation is too complex to compress into a 30 second sound-bite. But trust us, we know what's best for you."
I don't care if it's a tech, pharmacutical, or national parks bill. If a group chose to communicate like that to me, I'd take enough offense to instinctively oppose their viewpoint.
The line for all the "cunning linguist" jokes starts right -----> here.
Cisco phones obviously ship with SCCP firmware. However, Cisco has also created SIP firmware which you can choose to use instead. So you can use the original SCCP phone with Asterisk if you load the SCCP channel driver. Or, you can load the SIP firmware on the phone and use it with SIP on Asterisk. The later one is the preferable one because Asterisk's SCCP support is a bare minimum, while the Cisco SIP firmware is pretty good.
A lot of people pickup a Cisco handset off of Ebay and think they'll easily just start using it with their Asterisk server. To get access to the SIP firmware, you need a current Cisco support agreement (which is a PIA to get if you aren't a corporate customer). A support agreement for a single phone is pretty cheap (around $10 I think), but you also need to buy a license to use the SIP software, which is around $200-300 IIRC. Alternatively, you can find the firmware on several P2P networks, but it takes a lot of luck to do so. IMHO, it really isn't worth doing unless you're purely looking for a learning experience or already have a Cisco phone laying around. You're much better off picking up an Aastra 9220i hand set. It's SIP out of the box, has a great feture set, and is *much* cheaper than any Cisco phone. Plus it actually has a backlight! (Which is a feature that you don't really think about unless you don't have one). Honestly, even if they were the same price, I'd probably still buy Aastras for a small-office rollout.
If you want to email me: Sure. (It's a spamgourmet address).
You can install SIP firmware in Cisco phones. I currently have a 7960 on my desk that I use with Asterisk. It's not a fun (or cheap, since it requires a seperate license from Cisco), but it can be done en masse with a TFTP server.
Actually, *all* corporations pay taxes. Some may not income taxes, but they certainly pay other taxes (or their members do). In fact, corporate taxes account for around 7% of the US's GDP. While that's somewhat concerning because as late as the 1960's, corporate taxation accounted for 25% of the GPD, it certainly isn't "no taxes".
. htm e raccess.html
Also keep in mind that the vast majority of corporations are small businesses (can't find a citation ATM). That's important because small businesses employ 52% of the workers in the US and create 65% of the net new jobs. But even if you qualify your hating to "big corporations" (however you define that line), it doesn't really advance the argument. The computer you're now using wouldn't exist without corporations. Neither would many of the other benefits modern society offers that are taken advantage of daily by the same people who criticize capitalism.
I'm not saying much of corporate America doesn't suck. I'm a former refugee myself, who's since left to run his own company. But the mindless corporate bashing that is a regular mantra here at Slashdot is just plain mental laziness.
Sources:
http://www.cbpp.org/10-16-03tax.htm
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oecon/chap4
http://www.fedex.com/us/about/news/speeches/great
To the IT-inclined, yeah, hosting data vital your business on someone's server can make you cringe. However, to 99% of the small businesses out there, they think nothing of it. All you have to do is look to the success of Salesforce.com to see that. Or even more common: How many small businesses use IMAP (either through a client or a webmail interface)? If their webhost suddenly closed their doors, they could potentially lose years of critical correspondence.
As an IT guy myself, I stuggle to explain this sort of stuff to small business owners. But them again, these are the same people who balk at the cost of DAT or DLT drive yet wouldn't even consider canceling their business owner's insurance policy. Go figure.
Well, the paper could be preprinted (using a dye sub process or something) to look like some sort of official document with a blank space in the middle. Sure, there are cheaper ways to do it; but almost by definition, I think, promotional material has to be gimicky.
;-)
Rereading the article it looks like a special printer would also be required, so scratch the idea anyhow.
An interesting application for this would be for printable coupons. You get a piece of this paper in the mail with some sort of promotion. The instructions tell you feed the paper into your printer and visit a certain URL to print a "special one day only" coupon.
Sure, expiration ("expiry" for the rest of the world) dates have been around forever. However, knowing that your coupon will literally disappear tomorrow would be an added psychological incentive to use it. (I've *got* to stop giving marketers new ideas...)
Slashdot doesn't define the page fonts. Change your browser's default sans-serif to whatever you choose and you're golden. I personally use Swis721 BT as my sans-serif font and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono as the monospaced font. They work nicely.
Damnit. And that was at the top of my Netflix queue.
What you describe is actually *very* common for novice 'net users. In fact, I might say that more of them do it than don't. Check out AOL's recently released search data. Just randomly check out various users' search histories. It would be interesting to see how this correlates to the frequency of Google users doing the same thing.
Bonus geek points for using an HP graphing calculator and string instead of GPS. Though I'm not quite sure why the farmers would give permission for parts of their crop to be destroyed (even if he/she's an OSS advocate).
The busiest airports in the world handle 30-80 million passengers per year. With an 8% false positive rate, a 30M/year airport would flag almost 8,800 innocent people per day, per airport as a terrorist. How can this be considered even remotely feasible? Even if getting flagged just means that you have to undergo a more rigorous personal inspection it's going to piss off a lot of passengers. Plus the TSA people aren't going to put much creedance into something that dramatically increases their daily workload, but might catch one terrorist every decade. Just another misuse of expensive technology.
One of my network support customers is a tiny township of a few square miles, it's about the smallest form of government in modern-day America. Almost every single decision has to be approved by their board of trustees of about six-seven people. It takes absolutely *forever* to get anything done and is frustrating beyond belief. Yes, it's even worse than corporate America. I can't possibly imagine to run even a small company like that and still remain competitive.