PBS's Frontline did a very good piece called "Is WalMart Good for America?" If you're being earnest, then I highly recommend that you that the time to watch it online.
Because it distracts you from the things that trully matter--um, like reality. You're volunteering yourself for Plato's cave (or the Matrix). Can you really not see how that is bad?
From a more pragmatic point of view: Imagine that you're working really hard to build a business in Second Life. You've spent hours doing so, and it's finally taken off. Now the publisher discontinues the world, or decides that it'll automatically take a 50% cut of your profits, or that it'll transfer your business to another character, etc. Maybe Taco Bell paid off the publisher and now all of your virtual products have a Taco Bell logo on them. Or maybe your computer dies, or you forget your password... Get my point?
If people are that malcontent slaving away for someone else that they have to start their own virtual business to regain a sense of control over their life, then they need to grow some balls and start their own real-life business. Sorry, but I have no respect for these Soma-addicts who prefer to play out thier lives within a safe, little, virtual sandbox. Every hour spent in their virtual life is an hour wasted of their real life.
This says something pretty significant and deeply disturbing about society yet the article seems to have glazed over it. Second Life has no point, it's not just a game. It's a reality that simply exists, it's the participants that determine everything--just like real life. People are escaping their own lives, why? Because they feel trapped? Trapped by what? The mindless and meaningless jobs that they hold down working for a multinational corporation. The incessant reminder that they need more material goods to be happy. That they aren't as beautiful as the people on TV. Aldous Huxley seems to have been a visionary. Now corporations are looking to tap into this phenomemon? Holy shit! In my opinion, this trend is more scary than DRM ever could be.
I was getting ready to tell you it's a pair of logic gates when I noticed your name. heh. To be honest, I have no clue; it was probably 5 years ago. Knowing myself though, it was just some random thought. This is the only place I use the name though. If I could change it, I would.
This is old news. Just blogs? Bah! Color me unimpressed. I've already harnessed the power of the Internet to track the mood of the entire planet: http://www.howisyourday.com/
This message brought to you by Salesforce.com
This article reads like a press release from Salesforce.com, the biggest player in the "software as a service" marketspace. I tried Salesforce when I started my VoIP business; if they're the market leader, this industry is too immature to be taken seriously.
First off, it isn't cheap--Salesforce.com is $65 per month, per seat and it has to be paid 3 months in advance. This makes it quite a bit more expensive for small businesses than say Goldmine or ACT. Secondly, the reliability was horrible. CRM is the lifeblood of any organization. *Any* downtime results in all of your customer facing people (sales team, customer support staff, billing, etc) basically sitting around on their hands. Sales leads were lost and customers were pissed off. The worst part about it is that we couldn't do anything about it. I couldn't reboot a server, rebuild table indexes, sacrifice an intern... nothing. I wasn't told what the problem was when the system came back up, nor was I even notified *when* they came back online. And I wasn't given an apology or a service credit.
After several very public blackeyes Salesforce finally released a systems status page. In a pure act of corporate hubris they named it http://trust.salesforce.com/. You know know something's deeply wrong when a simple status screen is given that hard of a PR spin. Sorry, but they already blew my trust. I don't care what BusinessWeek says, I wholeheartly recommend that an organization keep their key systems in-house!
...rising popularity in the United States of 'intelligent design'
I'd say "formally rising" and now "waning". The ID people have been quietly nursing their wounds since U.S. District Judge Jones, really put them in their place last December. The opinion he wrote was extraordinary lucid and well-reasoned. If anyone here hasn't read it, I would highly recommend it. It is anything but a dry legal document.
Actually, this is kind of a cool idea. Does anyone know of a company that does this in 2006? A Netflix for books? I read a lot of books that I don't necessarily want to buy. I could go to the local library for free, but their selection of newer books is pretty limited.
::groan:: Please make this go away.
on
Hacker Boot Camp
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Is it just me, or does the very name "certified ethical hacker" seem like an utterly stupid, attention-whoring term? It reminds me of the kids who hang out on IRC asking "How do I hack someone's computer if I have their IP address?". People don't go to "certified ethicial arsonists" bootcamps, they study fire science at an accredited school.
It sounds like this bootcamp just teaches people a handful of tricks that can be used to impress hiring managers. (Mentioned in the article: The default MS SQL login is "sa" with no password. Well, that's tidbit is not going to do you much good if you're assesing any version of SQL Server released within the past six years.) Do they explain the difference between a frame, packet, and datagram? All specifics and no theory.
According to this physics website, "Coal has a relatively high energy density of approximately 24 MJ/kg". Joules can also be expressed as "watts per second". A Pentium M (mobile) consumes 27 watts at peak utilization, and 5 watts at idle. So the would burn through that eight pound piece of coal in 10 seconds at idle, or two seconds under max load; backing up the television program's claim--if we forgot to account for the "M" in MJ/kg. Sounds like someone put a decimal point in the wrong place. That chunk of coal would actually power a Pentium M chip at full power for 23 days. (I'm ignoring things like the power consumption of the LCD, waste heat, etc. While not insignificant, those factors aren't going to affect the scale.)
I humbly submit my website as the Cutest Evar! (Hey, at least it's mildly amusing in a totally random, non-April Fools way. It's recently been moved to a new server; I'm curious to see how it would hold up against a Slashdotting.).
Between Slashdot and Fark, I think I'll just spend tomorrow outdoors.:-\ BTW, if Hemos and crew actually want to make it an interesting April Fools for once, they ought to enable all color, formatting and image related HTML tags in the posts.;-)
I'm guessing that you're laughing to yourself about sticking it to The Man by putting down "I.P. Freely" on the card application? Have you ever, even once, used your club card in conjunction with a check or a credit card? Whoops. There goes your alter ego.
And in other news today: Apple smuggly announced that the iPod is greatly outselling 8-track tape players.
I'm Novell certified and have (had) been admining Netware boxes for over a decade. But I haven't touched one in more than three years. NDS is worlds better than Active Directory, especially in a true enterprise-sized installation. However, the supposed debate is moot in 2006. Netware got clobbered like Netscape Navigator did. Too many software vendors have stopped writing versions of their products for Netware, and too many hardware vendors don't write drivers. I commend Novell for trying to turn their ship around and not resigning themselves to annilation. Their committment to SuSE is a very wise move, IMHO. So enough with the marketdroid strutting already. This hasn't been news since the last century.
It's more than just phones that's going to prevent adoption. Sure, there's a good amount of tech savvy businesses out there who would be willing to use something like this. However, there are 100x times as many businesses who would be saving a ton on their phone services if they could spell VoIP. Small business phone service is ungodly expensive. In many cases, they're spending more on their telecom services per month than they do rent. I've been working with a subscriber with a small, six-person office, with five phone lines and who makes a decent chunk of long distance calls. Their phone bill is over $600/mo! And they dropped $4k the phone system hardware four years ago.
The only way 95% of small businesses out there will ever adopt VoIP is if they are handheld through the process. Even if they know they'll save a ton of dough, working phones are just too critical to companies for them to throw caution to the wind. At the risk of giving away trade secrets;-) that's the angle the VoIP company I work for is taking. We seek out partnerships with independant computer techies, VARs, and consultants who have small businesses as clients. These are the people that have the ear of business owners when it comes to making technology decisions. In return, we pay the partner a monthly stipend/retainer to support the subscriber. Businesses are *much* more likley to adopt something like this if they know they have a local expert that they contact in case of problems.
While Skype is cool and can save them ton a cash what's even more important to businesses is a level of trust. I don't know a business owner in their right mind who would put their phone service in eBay's (the owner of Skype) hands. Their level of customer service is worse than Verizon.
"Massive Porn Buyer Info Leak?" What the hell does that even mean? Hats off to Zonk for managing to use "porn", "leak", and "massive" all in the same headline and posting it to one of the most widely read sites on the net. That sound you hear is thousands of RSS feed subscribers all scratching their heads.
Just to clarify (nit-pick?), you can set your CID number, but not your CID name (well, you can set it, but it normally has zero effect). That info is set on the far end of the call.
When the callee's carrier receives the call, it does a database lookup to find the name associated with the caller's number. If the caller's and the callee's providers don't share their CID name databases with each other, then the name field is populated with "Unknown", "Out of State", "Michigan Call", etc.
As others have pointed out, it's not the bandwidth that matters, it's packet loss and latency. Do a continious ping to your VoIP providers gatewatey with a packet size of 1024 bytes (or the closest hop that doesn't drop ICMP packets). If you continually get responses >200 ms (high latency), then it's going to be difficult to converse with someone because you'll constantly be talking over each other. Really bad latency will make the call sound half-duplex walkie talkie, where only one of you can speak at a time.
Now, if your ping is dropping packets (e.g. the response times-out), then you're going to experience choppy calls. Ideally packet loss should be under 1%, but under 5% random packet loss is still ok. And I say "random packet loss", because if the packet loss is bursty instead, then it's going to be much more of a problem. Bursty means that the packets are loss in blocks, not just a packet here or there, therefore the choppiness effect is worsened.
FYI, SIP is only the signaling protocol. Voice traffic is carried via RTP and RTP ports are dynamically allocated. There is also already significant development underway to improve the security of both SIP and RTP. See SIPS (SIP Secure).
From what I understand from watching "Shark Week" on the Discovery channel, sharks are dumber than a box of rocks. Even if we could somehow read their thoughts, I don't know we'd get anything meaningful.
Slashdot Mirror
PBS's Frontline did a very good piece called "Is WalMart Good for America?" If you're being earnest, then I highly recommend that you that the time to watch it online.
Because it distracts you from the things that trully matter--um, like reality. You're volunteering yourself for Plato's cave (or the Matrix). Can you really not see how that is bad?
From a more pragmatic point of view: Imagine that you're working really hard to build a business in Second Life. You've spent hours doing so, and it's finally taken off. Now the publisher discontinues the world, or decides that it'll automatically take a 50% cut of your profits, or that it'll transfer your business to another character, etc. Maybe Taco Bell paid off the publisher and now all of your virtual products have a Taco Bell logo on them. Or maybe your computer dies, or you forget your password... Get my point?
If people are that malcontent slaving away for someone else that they have to start their own virtual business to regain a sense of control over their life, then they need to grow some balls and start their own real-life business. Sorry, but I have no respect for these Soma-addicts who prefer to play out thier lives within a safe, little, virtual sandbox. Every hour spent in their virtual life is an hour wasted of their real life.
This says something pretty significant and deeply disturbing about society yet the article seems to have glazed over it. Second Life has no point, it's not just a game. It's a reality that simply exists, it's the participants that determine everything--just like real life. People are escaping their own lives, why? Because they feel trapped? Trapped by what? The mindless and meaningless jobs that they hold down working for a multinational corporation. The incessant reminder that they need more material goods to be happy. That they aren't as beautiful as the people on TV. Aldous Huxley seems to have been a visionary. Now corporations are looking to tap into this phenomemon? Holy shit! In my opinion, this trend is more scary than DRM ever could be.
I live 30 minutes west of Detroit; off of Baseline (aka, 8 Mile) Rd. in fact. I'm allowed to poke fun at the city (and the Lions).
I was getting ready to tell you it's a pair of logic gates when I noticed your name. heh. To be honest, I have no clue; it was probably 5 years ago. Knowing myself though, it was just some random thought. This is the only place I use the name though. If I could change it, I would.
I used to work at an ISP in Detroit.
Yes, it was a half-hearted attempt at humor. Guess I need to work on my delivery.
This is old news. Just blogs? Bah! Color me unimpressed. I've already harnessed the power of the Internet to track the mood of the entire planet: http://www.howisyourday.com/
This message brought to you by Salesforce.com This article reads like a press release from Salesforce.com, the biggest player in the "software as a service" marketspace. I tried Salesforce when I started my VoIP business; if they're the market leader, this industry is too immature to be taken seriously.
First off, it isn't cheap--Salesforce.com is $65 per month, per seat and it has to be paid 3 months in advance. This makes it quite a bit more expensive for small businesses than say Goldmine or ACT. Secondly, the reliability was horrible. CRM is the lifeblood of any organization. *Any* downtime results in all of your customer facing people (sales team, customer support staff, billing, etc) basically sitting around on their hands. Sales leads were lost and customers were pissed off. The worst part about it is that we couldn't do anything about it. I couldn't reboot a server, rebuild table indexes, sacrifice an intern... nothing. I wasn't told what the problem was when the system came back up, nor was I even notified *when* they came back online. And I wasn't given an apology or a service credit.
After several very public blackeyes Salesforce finally released a systems status page. In a pure act of corporate hubris they named it http://trust.salesforce.com/. You know know something's deeply wrong when a simple status screen is given that hard of a PR spin. Sorry, but they already blew my trust. I don't care what BusinessWeek says, I wholeheartly recommend that an organization keep their key systems in-house!
Raise your hand if you've ever bought a PC game from WalMart.
Me neither.
The proof of concept would have been more interesting if redirected me to https://www.google.com/ rather than http://www.google.com./ Does it work with a SSL connection?
Even if it does, it only forwards a person once. If I were to click on a link, the address bar would immediately change to the real domain.
Actually, this is kind of a cool idea. Does anyone know of a company that does this in 2006? A Netflix for books? I read a lot of books that I don't necessarily want to buy. I could go to the local library for free, but their selection of newer books is pretty limited.
Is it just me, or does the very name "certified ethical hacker" seem like an utterly stupid, attention-whoring term? It reminds me of the kids who hang out on IRC asking "How do I hack someone's computer if I have their IP address?". People don't go to "certified ethicial arsonists" bootcamps, they study fire science at an accredited school.
It sounds like this bootcamp just teaches people a handful of tricks that can be used to impress hiring managers. (Mentioned in the article: The default MS SQL login is "sa" with no password. Well, that's tidbit is not going to do you much good if you're assesing any version of SQL Server released within the past six years.) Do they explain the difference between a frame, packet, and datagram? All specifics and no theory.
According to this physics website, "Coal has a relatively high energy density of approximately 24 MJ/kg". Joules can also be expressed as "watts per second". A Pentium M (mobile) consumes 27 watts at peak utilization, and 5 watts at idle. So the would burn through that eight pound piece of coal in 10 seconds at idle, or two seconds under max load; backing up the television program's claim--if we forgot to account for the "M" in MJ/kg. Sounds like someone put a decimal point in the wrong place. That chunk of coal would actually power a Pentium M chip at full power for 23 days. (I'm ignoring things like the power consumption of the LCD, waste heat, etc. While not insignificant, those factors aren't going to affect the scale.)
I humbly submit my website as the Cutest Evar! (Hey, at least it's mildly amusing in a totally random, non-April Fools way. It's recently been moved to a new server; I'm curious to see how it would hold up against a Slashdotting.).
:-\ BTW, if Hemos and crew actually want to make it an interesting April Fools for once, they ought to enable all color, formatting and image related HTML tags in the posts. ;-)
Between Slashdot and Fark, I think I'll just spend tomorrow outdoors.
I'm guessing that you're laughing to yourself about sticking it to The Man by putting down "I.P. Freely" on the card application? Have you ever, even once, used your club card in conjunction with a check or a credit card? Whoops. There goes your alter ego.
And in other news today: Apple smuggly announced that the iPod is greatly outselling 8-track tape players.
I'm Novell certified and have (had) been admining Netware boxes for over a decade. But I haven't touched one in more than three years. NDS is worlds better than Active Directory, especially in a true enterprise-sized installation. However, the supposed debate is moot in 2006. Netware got clobbered like Netscape Navigator did. Too many software vendors have stopped writing versions of their products for Netware, and too many hardware vendors don't write drivers. I commend Novell for trying to turn their ship around and not resigning themselves to annilation. Their committment to SuSE is a very wise move, IMHO. So enough with the marketdroid strutting already. This hasn't been news since the last century.
How do you account for popular sites that are completely devoid of content *and* are a bit lacking in the design department, e.g. http://www.howisyourday.com/ and http://www.hampsterdance.com./
It's more than just phones that's going to prevent adoption. Sure, there's a good amount of tech savvy businesses out there who would be willing to use something like this. However, there are 100x times as many businesses who would be saving a ton on their phone services if they could spell VoIP. Small business phone service is ungodly expensive. In many cases, they're spending more on their telecom services per month than they do rent. I've been working with a subscriber with a small, six-person office, with five phone lines and who makes a decent chunk of long distance calls. Their phone bill is over $600/mo! And they dropped $4k the phone system hardware four years ago.
The only way 95% of small businesses out there will ever adopt VoIP is if they are handheld through the process. Even if they know they'll save a ton of dough, working phones are just too critical to companies for them to throw caution to the wind. At the risk of giving away trade secrets ;-) that's the angle the VoIP company I work for is taking. We seek out partnerships with independant computer techies, VARs, and consultants who have small businesses as clients. These are the people that have the ear of business owners when it comes to making technology decisions. In return, we pay the partner a monthly stipend/retainer to support the subscriber. Businesses are *much* more likley to adopt something like this if they know they have a local expert that they contact in case of problems.
While Skype is cool and can save them ton a cash what's even more important to businesses is a level of trust. I don't know a business owner in their right mind who would put their phone service in eBay's (the owner of Skype) hands. Their level of customer service is worse than Verizon.
"Massive Porn Buyer Info Leak?" What the hell does that even mean? Hats off to Zonk for managing to use "porn", "leak", and "massive" all in the same headline and posting it to one of the most widely read sites on the net. That sound you hear is thousands of RSS feed subscribers all scratching their heads.
Just to clarify (nit-pick?), you can set your CID number, but not your CID name (well, you can set it, but it normally has zero effect). That info is set on the far end of the call.
When the callee's carrier receives the call, it does a database lookup to find the name associated with the caller's number. If the caller's and the callee's providers don't share their CID name databases with each other, then the name field is populated with "Unknown", "Out of State", "Michigan Call", etc.
As others have pointed out, it's not the bandwidth that matters, it's packet loss and latency. Do a continious ping to your VoIP providers gatewatey with a packet size of 1024 bytes (or the closest hop that doesn't drop ICMP packets). If you continually get responses >200 ms (high latency), then it's going to be difficult to converse with someone because you'll constantly be talking over each other. Really bad latency will make the call sound half-duplex walkie talkie, where only one of you can speak at a time.
Now, if your ping is dropping packets (e.g. the response times-out), then you're going to experience choppy calls. Ideally packet loss should be under 1%, but under 5% random packet loss is still ok. And I say "random packet loss", because if the packet loss is bursty instead, then it's going to be much more of a problem. Bursty means that the packets are loss in blocks, not just a packet here or there, therefore the choppiness effect is worsened.
FYI, SIP is only the signaling protocol. Voice traffic is carried via RTP and RTP ports are dynamically allocated. There is also already significant development underway to improve the security of both SIP and RTP. See SIPS (SIP Secure).
From what I understand from watching "Shark Week" on the Discovery channel, sharks are dumber than a box of rocks. Even if we could somehow read their thoughts, I don't know we'd get anything meaningful.