I totally agree. At first it seems nifty that you can get your product info to the high rollers, but you know that as soon as it gets more developed you'll be walking through the mall and every available surface will be nattering that John Anderton needs to buy Guinness and a Lexus.
He might be, but my experience with Nagios a few months back was very similar to his description. In a couple of hours over a week or so, I was hard pressed to get it to stay running, and was unable to get it to report any information at all to me. Part of the problem may be that it's built to support multinational corporations, and I wanted it to run in an 8 person office monitoring three machines.
I'm really hoping this thread gives me some other options to look at on Monday... it sure seems like it has already.:)
No kidding. I spent a few months working tech support for a _major_ ISP in the 'states. If I followed a precise path on the incident report software, I could schedule a truck to go out to your address. I had no way of contacting the depot from whence said truck would be dispatched other than a ~50 character line that the technician may or may not have read.
I think my supervisor had access to an online form that would send an email to technicians somewhere else, not guaranteed to be read for a few days.
For most large ISPs, the technician at the other end has the power to screw up your account, and (sometimes) the power to fix it. But if you think they have any ability to get _anything_ filtered up to "head office" et. al., you're sadly mistaken. If you were to call up saying the corporate HQ was on fire, it would be at least a month before anyone with a fire extinguisher got paged.
That's a great idea. I was stunned to find out while reading The Cyberiad that it was translated, as it seems impossible that the subtle wit, intricate prose and puns on astro/nuclear/quantum physics that pervede the book came from another language. He must be a highly talented man.
Well, this Canadian doesn't need to feel safer, and sure doesn't.
The slippery slope is a perfectly valid argument. Even if you don't personally believe in it, plenty of people do, which is going to seriously harm the trust and good will that Google has built up over a decade. Perhaps not enough that people learn Chinese and use Baidu, but lots.
It would be nice if banks and credit card companies actually did something to prevent and prosecute the crime that directly involves them.
Too often I read of someone getting their identity stolen or having their account run up, and the bank will reverse the transactions, issue a new card, and take no furthur action at all. Contacting the police also seems to result in no action, as they don't have the time, equipment, or mandate to follow up possibly tricky international schemes.
I'd bank with an institution that followed up and prosecuted such actions, but forcing them to do it is an option.
Let me add yet another recommendation - I really like Steffen Gerlach's (free) Scanner. It shows disk useage as a simple pie-graph, and lets you drill down to directories, delete stuff, open an explorer window, etc.
I'm quite impressed with it anyways, and it comes with source if you're into that.
Must history repeat itself? Everybody thinks an unmanned robotic fighter is cool, until it gets hijacked. Then you'll wish you hadn't cut the YF-19 and YF-21...
...revealing a surreal, dark landscape unlike any ever seen before on Mars...
Not counting stuff that didn't completely land, there have been three previous landers, Vikings 1 and 2, and the Sojourner/Pathfinder pair. Plus of course the Spirit rover, and Opportunity is seeing totally different things so, yes! It's unlike anything seen before on Mars.
This is a good thing. You can't tell me it wouldn't suck to go there and be all "Oh, these rocks again. Could these be anymore regular basaltic igneous and andesite rocks???"
I've always figured that engineers should have something similar to the ASRS. I'm absolutely certain that hundreds of near-fatal design "oops"'s have been discovered at the last minute, and yet nobody else in a position to make those same mistakes is aware of it.
As someone who hopes one day to get a private pilots licence, by reading the ASRS I've found out about loads of common mistakes, many of the "holy crap that was close!" variety.
The same thing would be harder to implement for the computing industry, but if done right could prevent Therac-25 or London Ambulance Service CADS style disasters.
I always felt sorry for the BBC, having only a few pounds for the Dr. Who. budget. (At least, I hope they only had a few pounds. If they had anything more then yeah, that's kinda sad.)
I always felt it was part of the whole Dr. Who. experience believing that a bunch of people wearing the same coloured rags constituted an alien race, under the evil control of, say, robots (people talking funny while wearing silver coloured cardboard-boxes and spandex).
I dunno what institution of higher learning you went to, but mine has a "Computing Ethics" course as a requirement for CS.
It covers various ethical dilemmas (as I imagine Engineers do), and as someone else mentioned, goes over some of the more disastrous software creations. If you're interested, such lists usually include the Therac 25 (rollover bug, improper software re-use), the London Ambulance Service (Their newly-ordered, lowest-bidder Computer Aided Dispatch system caused massive problems), and the Ariane 5 rocket (overflow/improper error handling).
OTOH, I agree with you that people should know the conseqences (and likelyhood) of failure, as they clearly don't. There are loads examples on RISKS of people having laser surgery, needing some computerized medical device, and seeing gross examples that those using them have literally no idea the devices are misconfigured, warning of possible malfuctions, etc.
See, how can the report of reaching orbit be a dupe post?/. has to have this posted now, so that it'll be a dupe in 2004.
Either that, or slashdot is trying to beat CNN, and muscle Miss Cleo out in the predictive news business the easy way.;-)
I don't see where it says "samba" anyplace. I do see that it's got "catalogue" spelt "catalouge" a half dozen times. The research seems ok, I vote for better writing!
You took the words right out of my textbox. And you're only listing the mostly-moral, legal methods.
If this happens, I figure it's only a matter of time before IIS stops working well with Google. Heck, why not make it reject all robots, and submit it's own meta-content straight to MS? They'd be saving web owners bandwidth, don't you see? Sure you can turn it off; just click 6 times over there, type in this code, then modify those 5 registry strings.
Self-censorship is when you want to, and can, say something, but don't. Why would you do this? How about this: CNN reports something the current administration doesn't like very much. CNN finds that their reporters don't get their questions answered as often anymore. CNN falls behind on domestic reporting. All because they ran something that only a few people had interest in watching anyways. Might as well turf it.
This phenomenon is/was hotly debated in the case of Hong Kong reverting to Chinese rule. It's claimed news was ditched to avoid attracting gov't attention that might impose more strict censorship, what I mentioned above, or other.
Any time you bite your tongue to curry favour, there it is. The difference is that disclosing information isn't your entire job. For others it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I totally agree. At first it seems nifty that you can get your product info to the high rollers, but you know that as soon as it gets more developed you'll be walking through the mall and every available surface will be nattering that John Anderton needs to buy Guinness and a Lexus.
So you can't play if you're off by a millimetre, but if they're off by 10m or so, that's ok. :-P
He might be, but my experience with Nagios a few months back was very similar to his description. In a couple of hours over a week or so, I was hard pressed to get it to stay running, and was unable to get it to report any information at all to me. Part of the problem may be that it's built to support multinational corporations, and I wanted it to run in an 8 person office monitoring three machines.
:)
I'm really hoping this thread gives me some other options to look at on Monday... it sure seems like it has already.
No kidding.
I spent a few months working tech support for a _major_ ISP in the 'states. If I followed a precise path on the incident report software, I could schedule a truck to go out to your address. I had no way of contacting the depot from whence said truck would be dispatched other than a ~50 character line that the technician may or may not have read.
I think my supervisor had access to an online form that would send an email to technicians somewhere else, not guaranteed to be read for a few days.
For most large ISPs, the technician at the other end has the power to screw up your account, and (sometimes) the power to fix it. But if you think they have any ability to get _anything_ filtered up to "head office" et. al., you're sadly mistaken. If you were to call up saying the corporate HQ was on fire, it would be at least a month before anyone with a fire extinguisher got paged.
That's a great idea. I was stunned to find out while reading The Cyberiad that it was translated, as it seems impossible that the subtle wit, intricate prose and puns on astro/nuclear/quantum physics that pervede the book came from another language.
He must be a highly talented man.
Well, this Canadian doesn't need to feel safer, and sure doesn't.
The slippery slope is a perfectly valid argument. Even if you don't personally believe in it, plenty of people do, which is going to seriously harm the trust and good will that Google has built up over a decade. Perhaps not enough that people learn Chinese and use Baidu, but lots.
Also, are you sure everything in there is anonymous? How about searches like alcoholics anonymous near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC, or nuclear power plants near wherever starwed lives? No way am I trusting the U.S. government with any of my data.
And finally, why should Google be imposed upon just because the U.S. Government is too lazy to do it's own research? Screw 'em!
It would be nice if banks and credit card companies actually did something to prevent and prosecute the crime that directly involves them.
Too often I read of someone getting their identity stolen or having their account run up, and the bank will reverse the transactions, issue a new card, and take no furthur action at all. Contacting the police also seems to result in no action, as they don't have the time, equipment, or mandate to follow up possibly tricky international schemes.
I'd bank with an institution that followed up and prosecuted such actions, but forcing them to do it is an option.
I hearby swear to purchase and install the full version of Windows Server 2003 on my 2k box should that actually happen.
Let me add yet another recommendation - I really like Steffen Gerlach's (free) Scanner. It shows disk useage as a simple pie-graph, and lets you drill down to directories, delete stuff, open an explorer window, etc.
I'm quite impressed with it anyways, and it comes with source if you're into that.
Our government has already weighed in on the matter. (Last paragraph)
Not many people know, but with a simple download from the internet, Microsoft Windows will display pornographic images in the background. It's true!
Yeah... I'm imagining those porn sites.........
The two relevent pages I can find at debian.org are this one listing companies that have donated hardware, bandwidth, etc., and this page saying that they recommend giving to Software in the Public Interest and the Free Software Foundation
10$ says it's flashing "1202" right about now...
Yeah - they have to turn off stylesheets when it gets too cloudy.
Must history repeat itself? Everybody thinks an unmanned robotic fighter is cool, until it gets hijacked. Then you'll wish you hadn't cut the YF-19 and YF-21...
Not counting stuff that didn't completely land, there have been three previous landers, Vikings 1 and 2, and the Sojourner/Pathfinder pair. Plus of course the Spirit rover, and Opportunity is seeing totally different things so, yes! It's unlike anything seen before on Mars.
This is a good thing. You can't tell me it wouldn't suck to go there and be all "Oh, these rocks again. Could these be anymore regular basaltic igneous and andesite rocks???"
As someone who hopes one day to get a private pilots licence, by reading the ASRS I've found out about loads of common mistakes, many of the "holy crap that was close!" variety. The same thing would be harder to implement for the computing industry, but if done right could prevent Therac-25 or London Ambulance Service CADS style disasters.
It looks like Belkin is hearing this, but if not, it might help to notify some of the people they quote their rave reviews from.
I always felt it was part of the whole Dr. Who. experience believing that a bunch of people wearing the same coloured rags constituted an alien race, under the evil control of, say, robots (people talking funny while wearing silver coloured cardboard-boxes and spandex).
It covers various ethical dilemmas (as I imagine Engineers do), and as someone else mentioned, goes over some of the more disastrous software creations. If you're interested, such lists usually include the Therac 25 (rollover bug, improper software re-use), the London Ambulance Service (Their newly-ordered, lowest-bidder Computer Aided Dispatch system caused massive problems), and the Ariane 5 rocket (overflow/improper error handling).
OTOH, I agree with you that people should know the conseqences (and likelyhood) of failure, as they clearly don't. There are loads examples on RISKS of people having laser surgery, needing some computerized medical device, and seeing gross examples that those using them have literally no idea the devices are misconfigured, warning of possible malfuctions, etc.
See, how can the report of reaching orbit be a dupe post? /. has to have this posted now, so that it'll be a dupe in 2004.
Either that, or slashdot is trying to beat CNN, and muscle Miss Cleo out in the predictive news business the easy way. ;-)
I don't see where it says "samba" anyplace. I do see that it's got "catalogue" spelt "catalouge" a half dozen times. The research seems ok, I vote for better writing!
If this happens, I figure it's only a matter of time before IIS stops working well with Google. Heck, why not make it reject all robots, and submit it's own meta-content straight to MS? They'd be saving web owners bandwidth, don't you see? Sure you can turn it off; just click 6 times over there, type in this code, then modify those 5 registry strings.
Self-censorship is when you want to, and can, say something, but don't. Why would you do this? How about this: CNN reports something the current administration doesn't like very much. CNN finds that their reporters don't get their questions answered as often anymore. CNN falls behind on domestic reporting. All because they ran something that only a few people had interest in watching anyways. Might as well turf it.
This phenomenon is/was hotly debated in the case of Hong Kong reverting to Chinese rule. It's claimed news was ditched to avoid attracting gov't attention that might impose more strict censorship, what I mentioned above, or other.
Any time you bite your tongue to curry favour, there it is. The difference is that disclosing information isn't your entire job. For others it is.