Windows Update is the friendly auto-patcher. AFAIK you can't download patches from there for later use. But the patches are available seperately; I used Firefox to download one of the patches I was missing. (The rest I FTP'd from a coworker who downloaded most of the patches.)
Here is the place to download the MS04-11 patches to prevent the Sasser worm, although for the moment that URL seems hosed. Google cache here.
I love to bash Microsoft, but if you'll look carefully there's usually a way around the candy-coated-user-friendly-tools-that-break-when-t hings-go-bad. They even have some handy downloads for detection, treatment and patching.
A. Non-IT employee who fancies himself a PC guy brings his PC in to work on the night shift B. Unplugs his work PC connection C. Plugs in his home PC to download something from the fast company net connection D. Infects lan from inside E. Takes PC home and no one but him knew it was there.
I wonder where these other people work where employees important enough to have laptops can be PC-Nazi'ed around. Where I work the people with laptops tell me how things are. And the guys who bring PCs in for movies and LAN games are buddies with everyone including security so I almost never find out.
All that said, I had one infection on a laptop in 100 PCs under me, and 4 that were rebooting but didn't actually have the virus running or on the HDD because the virus scanner prevented it from saving to disk. The laptop guy was off the network before Sasser released and was hit before his scanner auto-updated. And he's the head honcho.
I forgot to mention my LAN is part of a worldwide WAN and we're getting attacks from other parts of the intranet. So I don't know if the local head honcho caught Sasser at work or at home over the weekend.
See also the LEAF Bering firewall/router mini Linux distro. With some tweaking the uLibc version can even do a bridging firewall with traffic control.
With some carefully crafted traffic control/shaping I can now run multiple P2P apps (legitimate ones, FWIW) on multiple machines and still surf the web, download http & ftp, ssh and serve web pages with low latency and high bandwidth while the p2p traffic fills in the gaps. Traffic control is to bandwidth what nice is to CPU utilization.
LEAF Project LARTC, good info on traffic control. Ignore the crap about giving ACKs priority, though. I quickly found out most p2p traffic packets have ACKs and choke the connection if you give them priority.
The point here is that the extra information wasn't really relevant, and merely appeared to be inserted to boost the submitter's ego.
What do you think this site is about, anwyay? You think this is a social network of online friends? I see it as a geek fest of mostly guys trying to be clever. The once-removed remark like this is generally highly favored, and both submitter and reader feel smarter when they get the connection.
I can safely say this because I do the same thing.
More seriously, you hope someone else witnessed the whole thing; you shouldn't be craning your neck to see who hit you.
Even more seriously, I was hit-and-run from behind in my van on the freeway a few years back. I saw him coming and was able to prepare and maintain control. (I was going 55; he must've been going 80 or more.) He kept control, passed me and took off. I had the presence of mind to write down the plate number, car model and description and driver description--we looked at each other as he passed. I called the police; I was rattled and gave them the wrong highway, so they had to call back and ask me where I was, and it was the next city over--a diferent department. So I had to wait about 45min to an hour because of my gaff, but the point is that after getting all that info the investigator wrote me back a month later saying the license plate was expired and nobody was at the address given for that plate. Case closed.
Yep, them license plates really help catch those criminals.
(By the way, this was a 3-lane freeway that was empty except for me in the middle lane and a truck I was passing on the right; that's when I saw him coming really fast from behind; he made half a move to the left lane but looked as if he wasn't going to make it there before hitting me. My options were to speed up (dangerous because I was more likely to lose control if he hit me; besides I was a loaded van and couldn't accellerate quickly), slow down (bad idea because that closes the distance faster) or try to change lanes, but the truck was blocking my escape right and the vehicle behind was straddling the middle and left lanes and had made a half-assed effort to get in the left shortly before hitting me. It was a bright sunny day.)
If you are thinking of buying SCO stock, do it to short it.
I wouldn't even do that. The stock is way too volatile. The Baystar interviews were apparetly viewed as positive by investors because the stock jumped back up 20% again. We think SCO is dead, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to get the stock back up to $20 this year. I think it will be near zero within 5 years, but it's going to be a rough ride along the way. I wouldn't want an $8 or $10 short to be flying upwards of $20.
Pay attention: most geeks think SCO is a stock scam. Well, even if it is, they are good at it! How did the price go up over $8 after threats of pulling all their cash? I wish my company could handle that kind of bad news so well.
I can't figure out if Baystar is wanting to pull their money back or if they are pulling puppet strings to get their agenda implemented at SCO. (I'm not necessarily talking MS conspiracy here, just a nonmanaging investor effectively enforcing its own policy via financial pressure.)
It is still odd to me that SCO first released the redemption claim. I sometimes wonder if that was to spite Baystar in a behind-the-scenes battle for power; my theory being that Baystar didn't want to be have their investment discussions thrust into the public but are now interviewing for PR damage control. In other words: Baystar pressures SCO, SCO resists, Baystar issues redemption claim to persuade, SCO gets pissed and publicizes the claim to hurt Baystar's reputation as a VC company, Baystar spins that they are unhappy with how SCO management has proceeded with the original plan and hints and has unnamed confirmations that Baystar wants changes in SCO upper management. Next move?
In a post after the redemption claim was released but before the Baystar interviews I predicted that the stock would be spun back up for a while before it crashed comletely in two weeks to a few months. It did go up, but I'm no longer sure it will crash completely so soon. It might, or SCO may have an upper-management transplant and contniue some or all of the legal battles for a year or more.
I just realized something: Baystar and RBC don't have to have SCO win to make money. They just need their converted shares to be worth more at some point in the future and then sell them, yes? So Baystar may well be happy with an unwinnable case as long as the stock price can be painted and spun and speculated up to a point where they can dump profitably. This whole Baystar redemption thing may just be an internal power struggle turned public by the weaker party.
I have an Associate's degree and worked my way through, but I was working part time.
I'm not as gung-ho about education as some of your other respondents, but I'm wary of working full time during college. First, you'll quickly learn that your dream job has lots of problems; it always happens that way. Second, you're moving out of state. That and the fact that you have no degree tends to trap you into that company. Also it's very easy to "put off" or "take a break from" college for a semester or two, and before you know it you've been out of college for 10 years and wonder if your credits are still valid. The degree (even an Associates) is forever, but stray credits don't help much.
It seems fairly easy for me to move around and up within a company that allows equivalent work experience to substitute for college, but I suspect it will be harder to switch to another company.
I occasionally wonder if I should get a 4-year degree. I don't think I will since I have my financial house in order and believe I have enough contacts and options to get me through want I want in life. But my sister, who is 6 years younger, got her 4-year degree in 4 or 5 years and is now making at least 150% of what I'm making, so she's more than 6 years ahead of me salary-wise. There's a little more to the story than that, but the degree helps. (Conversely, her ex-husband got his 4-year degree in the same timespan and is teaching elementary school in rural Texas for much less than I make.)
Another consideration: Check into tuition in both states. I was shocked at the difference in tuition in Texas versus Indiana. Apparently Texas subsidises higher education much more than many other states. Also consider taxes; If the state you move to has higher taxes (income plus sales plus property) you don't get to keep as much of your salary.
Something that REALLY helps is to think: what is the worst that can happen to me?
To which of course the answer is "I could get fired." That outcome is easily softened: the solution is to not rack up debt, pay off existing debt and start saving. For many salaries this requires being more frugal than the average American, but the financial security is well worth it.
Wow! The first IT job post in a long time that I could relate to.
People respect my work, amongst other things, as they know that my estimates are realistic and my performance is consistently better than what they're used to from others
Ditto. It's amazing how less stressful work is when you earn people's respect. There have been a few people I've worked with/for that everyone else hated, but I managed to get along with them just fine because I never BS'ed them.
Doctors, lawyers and engineers have had the foresight and backbone to thoroughly educate themselves, and (forearmed) stand up for what they know truly works well. Until this becomes common practice in IT, ours will remain a fledgling profession, full of unnecessary stress.
Very well put.I hadn't thought of it that way. So far I've just given in to the idiocy of my industry and rolled my eyes a lot. Then again, while I am personally respected I'm not in a position in my company where the policymakers listen to me...yet. (This may change within a month or two; I may become a policymaker of a major project.)
Couldn't you have done the work with a FOSS database and then import to Access for presentation? Or use ODBC to use Access as a front end to a FOSS database? Would anyone have noticed?
These days my attitude is "get the job done, and if they want to fire me for it, fine."
I'm not sure why nobody picked up on simple ISAM systems like Berkeley DB
Very good point. It was only recently when I was figuring out the backend to OpenLDAP that I realized the potential and suitability of what I called "hashing databases" for web content and much simple content. Heck, even MySQL realizes it because they simply put a SQL engine on top of a BDB database.
In retrospect, Perl hackers love hashes and I think they use them in a similar way to BDB.
My guess is that for most computer newbie types database was synonymous with SQL, and we wanted to work with the cool stuff.
what is it exactly that MySQL is good at that Postgresql isn't at least equal or better at?
The only things I can think of are the familiarity aspect, for people who are already very knowledgable about MySQL not wanting to switch
My first thought was a company that had one or more people with MySQL experience, or perhaps an existing MySQL server. It's not necessarily the want/preference, but the existing people who will use or support the product.
Also, many packaged products are built for MySQL. I'm a PostgreSQL fan with PostgreSQL installed and running, but for small home project a while back I installed MySQL because the application I downloaded was MySQL-only and I decided it was easier to install MySQL than reconfigure the application for PostgreSQL.
All that said,I still don't get why MySQL is the bee's knees. I don't see how it's easier. Perhaps it's the marketing or the shiny pretty documentation?
Let's see, they are independent coders who know the ins and outs of popular business software that's making money. If you're a company making money off of Linux/OSS and you need help debugging or customizing your implementation, who are you gonna hire?
Probably because Baystar wants their $20mil back, RBC is expected to follow this week wanting their $30mil back, both with 20% penalties against SCO, nobody else will loan SCO money after major investors wanting their money back and SCO doesn't have enough to pay them back, much less continue the lawsuits afterward. Oh, and they don't seem to have many actual revenue-generating customers anymore.
Speculation considers that most of SCO's assets could be frozen pending settlement with Baystar/RBC assuming SCO fights the redemption claim.
But I wouldn't be surprised to see SCO spin an up story for a week or two and have the stock jump again before everything crumbles in two weeks to a few months.
Insert the word only before the word see. Now, do you still hold that position? Then what are you praying to?
I haven't analyzed it that closely; ultimately I don't know what/who God is. It's beyond me. I just generally accept there's more in existence than I will ever comprehend. I see no point in deciding whether God is a being, concept or whatnot. I have yet to meet another person who I trust or believe in enough to tell me that.
I don't know who I'm praying to. Well, God, but who's God? Maybe my praying is just wishful thinking, maybe it's mental masturbation, maybe it's a meditation. I don't spend much time worrying about it now; I figure I'll eventually find out or cease existing, so it works out either way.
If you are praying to the trees you either believe the trees can hear you, in which case you're a nutjob.
So if I believe I can pray to trees that listen to me I'm a nutjob, but I'm not a nutjob if I pray to a being I can't see or hear who created everything because of some intangible part of me that will live on after my biological death? I'm not arguing with you either way, I just find these kind of arguments funny, and most religious discussions are like this to me. Actually, my being a nutjob would explain a lot, like why I pray without really understanding who/what I'm praying to or whether it makes a difference.
If you are an agnostic and then become a christian, I doubt you were ever agnostic.
You are much heavier into defining Christian and agnostic than I. I generally don't discuss religion because everyone has such strong opinions (I live in the Bible Belt). Whether I describe myself as Christian or agnostic really depends on who I'm talking to and what I think it means to them. If I cared, I'd probably tell a fundamentalist Christian that I'm agnostic to avoid finer points of debate; I'd probably tell an atheist I'm a Christian not to inspire debate but to separate myself from his strong declaration that there is no God.
I guess I could be called a spiritual waffler, but really I just don't usually care much to discuss--and certainly not to evangelize--my spirituality and am more or less comfortable with it. I responded to you because I enjoyed the irony of my fitting both and neither of your descriptions for agnostic and Christian.
I find it hilarious how so many christians can interpret the agnostic postition as one that just needs a little more coaxing.
I don't. Organized religion from my point of view is a search for personal validation. It's easier to feel validated by God if all the people around you share the same ideas about God. It only makes sense that they would shun those who adamantly oppose their views but try to assimilate those whose views fall between them and their opponents.
Note the irony in the above paragraph that people search for validation from God through rallying with like-minded human mortals. Go figure. It reminds me of the joke about Unitarians: They believe that if you know enough you'll go to heaven.
This is the problem I have with church and religion as I see it implemented: It's all about humans telling other humans what to think and do. It's the same as any other power structure or clique. I resent that in general (but not on the basis of divine sanction, which goes back to the original argument, in which if you'll notice I'm not participating).
If you claim to see god in the trees and the beauty of the world, you are making the agnostic argument and you are a nonbeliever. If you pray, you are a believer.
I do both. What does that make me?
God I can handle. Churches and religion I find too pushy, hypocritical and self-righteous.
There is no chance of them ever competing with XM, because their traffic and weather is so much better, and without commercials, since I got mine, I haven't even once turned on my car radio since.
I'm happy for you that XM works for you, but I'm a bit surprised you got modded +5 Informative/Interesting for that.
Are you (and the mods) saying that XM's traffic and weather being better is a sustainable differentiator? If that's really a big reason, it's not like XM has some secret inside info to weather and traffic that another competitor couldn't get.
And XM currently doesn't have commercials, but it costs money and requires special equipment. Cable didn't have commercials at first, either.
I'm not really countering Audguy here but the mods who thought that comment was so interesting and informative. If XM is better, fine, but these two advantages aren't likely permanent or even long lived.
am I losing my mind or didn't I read back in 1993 that we'd all be using solid state hard drives by now?
We are all using solid state hard drives. I have a USB pen, some CF cards and a SmartMedia card or two. Several of my embedded devices (router, modem, probably appliances) have DOC's. Some BIOSes are DOC's now I think. I imagine we're all using solid state HDD's today.
Forking over $48M to the voice talent may be a high percentage but FOX is still making a killing on it.
I'm all for the workers in any case getting a fair share, but one point I haven't seen in this thread yet (reading at +4, admittedtly) is that Fox has lots of other shows on air and lots more that never made it. Lots of money in entertainment is thrown away on losers or underperformers, so the hits have to carry all the failures with them or the company goes under and the hits never get made.
I'm not picking a side here, just throwing in a factor not mentioned when all the Simpsons' revenue is mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows Update is the friendly auto-patcher. AFAIK you can't download patches from there for later use. But the patches are available seperately; I used Firefox to download one of the patches I was missing. (The rest I FTP'd from a coworker who downloaded most of the patches.)
t hings-go-bad. They even have some handy downloads for detection, treatment and patching.
Here is the place to download the MS04-11 patches to prevent the Sasser worm, although for the moment that URL seems hosed. Google cache here.
Sasser detection and treatment info from Microsoft.
http://www.microsoft.com/security/MS security home.
I love to bash Microsoft, but if you'll look carefully there's usually a way around the candy-coated-user-friendly-tools-that-break-when-
A. Non-IT employee who fancies himself a PC guy brings his PC in to work on the night shift
B. Unplugs his work PC connection
C. Plugs in his home PC to download something from the fast company net connection
D. Infects lan from inside
E. Takes PC home and no one but him knew it was there.
I wonder where these other people work where employees important enough to have laptops can be PC-Nazi'ed around. Where I work the people with laptops tell me how things are. And the guys who bring PCs in for movies and LAN games are buddies with everyone including security so I almost never find out.
All that said, I had one infection on a laptop in 100 PCs under me, and 4 that were rebooting but didn't actually have the virus running or on the HDD because the virus scanner prevented it from saving to disk. The laptop guy was off the network before Sasser released and was hit before his scanner auto-updated. And he's the head honcho.
I forgot to mention my LAN is part of a worldwide WAN and we're getting attacks from other parts of the intranet. So I don't know if the local head honcho caught Sasser at work or at home over the weekend.
See also the LEAF Bering firewall/router mini Linux distro. With some tweaking the uLibc version can even do a bridging firewall with traffic control.
With some carefully crafted traffic control/shaping I can now run multiple P2P apps (legitimate ones, FWIW) on multiple machines and still surf the web, download http & ftp, ssh and serve web pages with low latency and high bandwidth while the p2p traffic fills in the gaps. Traffic control is to bandwidth what nice is to CPU utilization.
LEAF Project
LARTC, good info on traffic control. Ignore the crap about giving ACKs priority, though. I quickly found out most p2p traffic packets have ACKs and choke the connection if you give them priority.
The point here is that the extra information wasn't really relevant, and merely appeared to be inserted to boost the submitter's ego.
What do you think this site is about, anwyay? You think this is a social network of online friends? I see it as a geek fest of mostly guys trying to be clever. The once-removed remark like this is generally highly favored, and both submitter and reader feel smarter when they get the connection.
I can safely say this because I do the same thing.
What do you do when the car hit and runs you?
Writhe in pain. That's what I usually do.
More seriously, you hope someone else witnessed the whole thing; you shouldn't be craning your neck to see who hit you.
Even more seriously, I was hit-and-run from behind in my van on the freeway a few years back. I saw him coming and was able to prepare and maintain control. (I was going 55; he must've been going 80 or more.) He kept control, passed me and took off. I had the presence of mind to write down the plate number, car model and description and driver description--we looked at each other as he passed. I called the police; I was rattled and gave them the wrong highway, so they had to call back and ask me where I was, and it was the next city over--a diferent department. So I had to wait about 45min to an hour because of my gaff, but the point is that after getting all that info the investigator wrote me back a month later saying the license plate was expired and nobody was at the address given for that plate. Case closed.
Yep, them license plates really help catch those criminals.
(By the way, this was a 3-lane freeway that was empty except for me in the middle lane and a truck I was passing on the right; that's when I saw him coming really fast from behind; he made half a move to the left lane but looked as if he wasn't going to make it there before hitting me. My options were to speed up (dangerous because I was more likely to lose control if he hit me; besides I was a loaded van and couldn't accellerate quickly), slow down (bad idea because that closes the distance faster) or try to change lanes, but the truck was blocking my escape right and the vehicle behind was straddling the middle and left lanes and had made a half-assed effort to get in the left shortly before hitting me. It was a bright sunny day.)
If you are thinking of buying SCO stock, do it to short it.
I wouldn't even do that. The stock is way too volatile. The Baystar interviews were apparetly viewed as positive by investors because the stock jumped back up 20% again. We think SCO is dead, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to get the stock back up to $20 this year. I think it will be near zero within 5 years, but it's going to be a rough ride along the way. I wouldn't want an $8 or $10 short to be flying upwards of $20.
Pay attention: most geeks think SCO is a stock scam. Well, even if it is, they are good at it! How did the price go up over $8 after threats of pulling all their cash? I wish my company could handle that kind of bad news so well.
I can't figure out if Baystar is wanting to pull their money back or if they are pulling puppet strings to get their agenda implemented at SCO. (I'm not necessarily talking MS conspiracy here, just a nonmanaging investor effectively enforcing its own policy via financial pressure.)
It is still odd to me that SCO first released the redemption claim. I sometimes wonder if that was to spite Baystar in a behind-the-scenes battle for power; my theory being that Baystar didn't want to be have their investment discussions thrust into the public but are now interviewing for PR damage control. In other words: Baystar pressures SCO, SCO resists, Baystar issues redemption claim to persuade, SCO gets pissed and publicizes the claim to hurt Baystar's reputation as a VC company, Baystar spins that they are unhappy with how SCO management has proceeded with the original plan and hints and has unnamed confirmations that Baystar wants changes in SCO upper management. Next move?
In a post after the redemption claim was released but before the Baystar interviews I predicted that the stock would be spun back up for a while before it crashed comletely in two weeks to a few months. It did go up, but I'm no longer sure it will crash completely so soon. It might, or SCO may have an upper-management transplant and contniue some or all of the legal battles for a year or more.
I just realized something: Baystar and RBC don't have to have SCO win to make money. They just need their converted shares to be worth more at some point in the future and then sell them, yes? So Baystar may well be happy with an unwinnable case as long as the stock price can be painted and spun and speculated up to a point where they can dump profitably. This whole Baystar redemption thing may just be an internal power struggle turned public by the weaker party.
I have an Associate's degree and worked my way through, but I was working part time.
I'm not as gung-ho about education as some of your other respondents, but I'm wary of working full time during college. First, you'll quickly learn that your dream job has lots of problems; it always happens that way. Second, you're moving out of state. That and the fact that you have no degree tends to trap you into that company. Also it's very easy to "put off" or "take a break from" college for a semester or two, and before you know it you've been out of college for 10 years and wonder if your credits are still valid. The degree (even an Associates) is forever, but stray credits don't help much.
It seems fairly easy for me to move around and up within a company that allows equivalent work experience to substitute for college, but I suspect it will be harder to switch to another company.
I occasionally wonder if I should get a 4-year degree. I don't think I will since I have my financial house in order and believe I have enough contacts and options to get me through want I want in life. But my sister, who is 6 years younger, got her 4-year degree in 4 or 5 years and is now making at least 150% of what I'm making, so she's more than 6 years ahead of me salary-wise. There's a little more to the story than that, but the degree helps. (Conversely, her ex-husband got his 4-year degree in the same timespan and is teaching elementary school in rural Texas for much less than I make.)
Another consideration: Check into tuition in both states. I was shocked at the difference in tuition in Texas versus Indiana. Apparently Texas subsidises higher education much more than many other states. Also consider taxes; If the state you move to has higher taxes (income plus sales plus property) you don't get to keep as much of your salary.
Hey, give him a break: his editor was out of the office.
Something that REALLY helps is to think: what is the worst that can happen to me?
To which of course the answer is "I could get fired." That outcome is easily softened: the solution is to not rack up debt, pay off existing debt and start saving. For many salaries this requires being more frugal than the average American, but the financial security is well worth it.
Wow! The first IT job post in a long time that I could relate to.
People respect my work, amongst other things, as they know that my estimates are realistic and my performance is consistently better than what they're used to from others
Ditto. It's amazing how less stressful work is when you earn people's respect. There have been a few people I've worked with/for that everyone else hated, but I managed to get along with them just fine because I never BS'ed them.
Doctors, lawyers and engineers have had the foresight and backbone to thoroughly educate themselves, and (forearmed) stand up for what they know truly works well. Until this becomes common practice in IT, ours will remain a fledgling profession, full of unnecessary stress.
Very well put.I hadn't thought of it that way. So far I've just given in to the idiocy of my industry and rolled my eyes a lot. Then again, while I am personally respected I'm not in a position in my company where the policymakers listen to me...yet. (This may change within a month or two; I may become a policymaker of a major project.)
Jjjjerrrjjjaaayyyyooonnnneeeeoooohhhtooooo!!!!
I hope you're happy now.
Nope, you got modded funny. I think for it to have been like Khan's scream you would have to do it so well as to get modded as flamebait.
Couldn't you have done the work with a FOSS database and then import to Access for presentation? Or use ODBC to use Access as a front end to a FOSS database? Would anyone have noticed?
These days my attitude is "get the job done, and if they want to fire me for it, fine."
I'm not sure why nobody picked up on simple ISAM systems like Berkeley DB
Very good point. It was only recently when I was figuring out the backend to OpenLDAP that I realized the potential and suitability of what I called "hashing databases" for web content and much simple content. Heck, even MySQL realizes it because they simply put a SQL engine on top of a BDB database.
In retrospect, Perl hackers love hashes and I think they use them in a similar way to BDB.
My guess is that for most computer newbie types database was synonymous with SQL, and we wanted to work with the cool stuff.
what is it exactly that MySQL is good at that Postgresql isn't at least equal or better at?
The only things I can think of are the familiarity aspect, for people who are already very knowledgable about MySQL not wanting to switch
My first thought was a company that had one or more people with MySQL experience, or perhaps an existing MySQL server. It's not necessarily the want/preference, but the existing people who will use or support the product.
Also, many packaged products are built for MySQL. I'm a PostgreSQL fan with PostgreSQL installed and running, but for small home project a while back I installed MySQL because the application I downloaded was MySQL-only and I decided it was easier to install MySQL than reconfigure the application for PostgreSQL.
All that said,I still don't get why MySQL is the bee's knees. I don't see how it's easier. Perhaps it's the marketing or the shiny pretty documentation?
We were embargoed by DHS to not release the information until tomorrow.
And if anybody could determine the identity of an Anonymous Coward, it certainly wouldn't be an inside group of hardened NOC geeks.
Oh wait...
Good info, though. Thanks.
It's been a long year. . .
You think Linux and OSS coders feel like schmoes?
Let's see, they are independent coders who know the ins and outs of popular business software that's making money. If you're a company making money off of Linux/OSS and you need help debugging or customizing your implementation, who are you gonna hire?
I would, but I couldn't find "Bitchy". (Would that be a +1 or -1?)
Probably because Baystar wants their $20mil back, RBC is expected to follow this week wanting their $30mil back, both with 20% penalties against SCO, nobody else will loan SCO money after major investors wanting their money back and SCO doesn't have enough to pay them back, much less continue the lawsuits afterward. Oh, and they don't seem to have many actual revenue-generating customers anymore.
Speculation considers that most of SCO's assets could be frozen pending settlement with Baystar/RBC assuming SCO fights the redemption claim.
But I wouldn't be surprised to see SCO spin an up story for a week or two and have the stock jump again before everything crumbles in two weeks to a few months.
Insert the word only before the word see. Now, do you still hold that position? Then what are you praying to?
I haven't analyzed it that closely; ultimately I don't know what/who God is. It's beyond me. I just generally accept there's more in existence than I will ever comprehend. I see no point in deciding whether God is a being, concept or whatnot. I have yet to meet another person who I trust or believe in enough to tell me that.
I don't know who I'm praying to. Well, God, but who's God? Maybe my praying is just wishful thinking, maybe it's mental masturbation, maybe it's a meditation. I don't spend much time worrying about it now; I figure I'll eventually find out or cease existing, so it works out either way.
If you are praying to the trees you either believe the trees can hear you, in which case you're a nutjob.
So if I believe I can pray to trees that listen to me I'm a nutjob, but I'm not a nutjob if I pray to a being I can't see or hear who created everything because of some intangible part of me that will live on after my biological death? I'm not arguing with you either way, I just find these kind of arguments funny, and most religious discussions are like this to me. Actually, my being a nutjob would explain a lot, like why I pray without really understanding who/what I'm praying to or whether it makes a difference.
If you are an agnostic and then become a christian, I doubt you were ever agnostic.
You are much heavier into defining Christian and agnostic than I. I generally don't discuss religion because everyone has such strong opinions (I live in the Bible Belt). Whether I describe myself as Christian or agnostic really depends on who I'm talking to and what I think it means to them. If I cared, I'd probably tell a fundamentalist Christian that I'm agnostic to avoid finer points of debate; I'd probably tell an atheist I'm a Christian not to inspire debate but to separate myself from his strong declaration that there is no God.
I guess I could be called a spiritual waffler, but really I just don't usually care much to discuss--and certainly not to evangelize--my spirituality and am more or less comfortable with it. I responded to you because I enjoyed the irony of my fitting both and neither of your descriptions for agnostic and Christian.
I find it hilarious how so many christians can interpret the agnostic postition as one that just needs a little more coaxing.
I don't. Organized religion from my point of view is a search for personal validation. It's easier to feel validated by God if all the people around you share the same ideas about God. It only makes sense that they would shun those who adamantly oppose their views but try to assimilate those whose views fall between them and their opponents.
Note the irony in the above paragraph that people search for validation from God through rallying with like-minded human mortals. Go figure. It reminds me of the joke about Unitarians: They believe that if you know enough you'll go to heaven.
This is the problem I have with church and religion as I see it implemented: It's all about humans telling other humans what to think and do. It's the same as any other power structure or clique. I resent that in general (but not on the basis of divine sanction, which goes back to the original argument, in which if you'll notice I'm not participating).
If you claim to see god in the trees and the beauty of the world, you are making the agnostic argument and you are a nonbeliever. If you pray, you are a believer.
I do both. What does that make me?
God I can handle. Churches and religion I find too pushy, hypocritical and self-righteous.
There is no chance of them ever competing with XM, because their traffic and weather is so much better, and without commercials, since I got mine, I haven't even once turned on my car radio since.
I'm happy for you that XM works for you, but I'm a bit surprised you got modded +5 Informative/Interesting for that.
Are you (and the mods) saying that XM's traffic and weather being better is a sustainable differentiator? If that's really a big reason, it's not like XM has some secret inside info to weather and traffic that another competitor couldn't get.
And XM currently doesn't have commercials, but it costs money and requires special equipment. Cable didn't have commercials at first, either.
I'm not really countering Audguy here but the mods who thought that comment was so interesting and informative. If XM is better, fine, but these two advantages aren't likely permanent or even long lived.
am I losing my mind or didn't I read back in 1993 that we'd all be using solid state hard drives by now?
We are all using solid state hard drives. I have a USB pen, some CF cards and a SmartMedia card or two. Several of my embedded devices (router, modem, probably appliances) have DOC's. Some BIOSes are DOC's now I think. I imagine we're all using solid state HDD's today.
Forking over $48M to the voice talent may be a high percentage but FOX is still making a killing on it.
I'm all for the workers in any case getting a fair share, but one point I haven't seen in this thread yet (reading at +4, admittedtly) is that Fox has lots of other shows on air and lots more that never made it. Lots of money in entertainment is thrown away on losers or underperformers, so the hits have to carry all the failures with them or the company goes under and the hits never get made.
I'm not picking a side here, just throwing in a factor not mentioned when all the Simpsons' revenue is mentioned.