Re:Dominos pizza insisted I have a land line
on
VoIP Questioned
·
· Score: 1
It's up to them. Maybe they adopted that "ignorant policy" after the 100th time some asshole 13 year old kid sent a pizza to "I.C. Weiner" up at the cryogenics lab.
Most of the smaller mom&pop shops usually act this way, ya know the ones that actually make good pizza. They dont have the deep pockets to absorb these costs, Pizza Hut and the rest who slop ketchup and cheeze whiz on a piece of flatbread and dare to call it a pizza don't care. They let you order online. No big deal, since their pizza is worth a nickel to them and the delivery boys time is worth zilch (ie; he works for tips).
The nature of the problem seems to be that VoIP could be so flexible - it could issue phone numbers the same way DHCP issues IP addresses.
Fuck phonebooks for VoIP, you'd have to publish 4 a day to keep up! In my vision of the future, every phone has a small touch display, and you look up your numbers there against an authoratative source, ie; DNS for phone numbers.
Not that FUD-dy.
on
VoIP Questioned
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
All of the concerns listed are legitimate, and have kept me from considering replacing my land line.
Here in Maryland, hurricane Isabel knocked out our power for a week last summer. Land line phones still worked, so we could call around to our friends and family, find someone who still has juice, head over and ride out the storm. With VOIP, our options would be drive around the state aimlessly, or hunt down a payphone, etc.. Forget that. And if the storm had of hit us hard, knocked a tree into our kitchen or something, I'm sorry, but 911 service is not a small, inconsequential feature that VOIP-zealots make it out to be.
The fast food delivery problem is less severe, but still there. Many pizza joints wouldnt even send a car out if they couldnt verify the address. They've been jerked around by cranks too many times. I've had friends with unlisted numbers or who were blocking caller-id have pizza joints hang up on 'em.
It's a nice idea, but one whos time hasn't come yet. At least not as the primary phone for my residence. Not until my connection to the 'net has the same level of reliability as my land-line.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You should always think about DB and platform independence as much as you can.
So what if your company made a huge investment in Oracle. What if Oracle winds up chapter 11 in six months, what if the next great Enron scam is happening at Oracle now?
The very nature of an RDBMS is such that you shouldn't have to jump through any application-level hoops to use it to its "fullest capacity". I expect to issue SQL statements and that's it. To me, the measure of a DB is how well it does what it does - store and retrieve data, without fucking it all up.
As the grandparent said, you can encapsulate any specific stuff in stored procedures or custom functions. But you shouldn't be relying on it.
Well, seeing as how this "interesting article", as the submitter calls it, is hosted on Oracle's site, you'd think the cynics here at slashdot would instantly recognize it as the typical marketing horseshit you'd find on any corporate page.
Yeah, according to Oracle, Oracle+PHP5 (and oracle specific application development) is the bomb-diggity, ASP.Net and SQL Server are teh suck. I'm sure MSFT would tell you the opposite.
This "article" has as much credibility as the MS-published Windows v. Linux TCO studies.
But - of course - marketing horseshit is Gospel here at slashdot, just so long as it says MS sucks.
Know what, in reality, it all works about the same. All this piddly-dee shit about timings and a handful of MHZ overclock is all about benchmarking and little else.
I dunno, I tried Catalyst 4.7 the other day.. Rebooted, my system was completely messed up video wise. I couldnt change resolutions from the control panel.. Did a complete uninstall (used driver cleaner) and reinstalled, fired up Far Cry, and had messed up graphics and a locked system within seconds.
I turned on that new temporal AA shit, rebooted, then turned it off, rebooted, now it's working again. ATi's temporal AA is like every other feature, sounds really awesome on paper but doesnt actually work in real games. (TruForm, etc, etc)
ATi is focusing on whiz-bang new bullet-points for their marketing literature, and ignoring known bugs that have been out there for months and years.
God forbid you own anything R200 based (9200s, 8500s, etc), because virtually nothing for those "ancient" cards is being updated in the drivers. "Ancient" of course means you still buy them for a hundred bucks at CompUSA.
I'm no fanboy for either. I'm not someone who sees two companies screwing consumers as "competition". Two choices suck, whether it's Intel vs AMD, ATi vs nVidia, Dems vs Reps or Cheech vs Chong.
Stop spreading these MORONIC "the discs go backwards so piracy is un-possible" rumours.
The Xbox does not spin backwards, nor read inside-out. It uses drives that are as close to stock as you can get, regular toshiba, phillips, samsung drives with modified firmware. It has a proprietary game format. There's a short video session (a video clip saying "this is an xbox game not a movie you idiot") which is all your PC will see, since it does not know about the format of the disk. This COULD be overcome in software, but it would be difficult and would require hacking the firmware of some PC drive and writing all the filesystem shit, etc..
Anyways.
Gamecube discs do not spin backwards, nor PS2, nor dreamcast, nor Sega Saturn, nor TG-CD. This rumour has come up about every single disc-based game console to date.
It would require refitting media pressing factories, custom mastering equipment, etc, etc, all KINDs of ridiculous infrastructure, when if the purpose is copy protection, existing schemes work great (usually broken by a weak link elsewhere, ie; bunnie lifting the MD5 key to decrypt the xbox' bios - if that hadn't happened, it would still be "unhackable")..
Anyhow... THE DISCS WORK LIKE EVERY OTHER DISK, THEY JUST HAVE STUFF WRITTEN ON 'EM THAT YOUR COMPUTER DOESN'T KNOW ABOUT!
Ahhhh... One of those lame rumours that supposedly "intelligent geeky" people spread.
Except those that want to pirate "uncopyable" PS2 and XBox games, of course. And don't forget the ease and convenience of 1:1 copies of what you rented from blockbuster.
Because the "law" that Odeon's breaking is one of those grey area type of things that may or may not exist. The correct course of action would have been a civil suit to resolve this, which would no doubt go to arbitration and end up worked out. Odeon would have no problem tweaking their site to save themselves the bad press.
Does having a site only working in IE make it inaccessible to handicapped? Is this saying that Mozilla users are handicapped? IE, and windows, have some good integrated accessibility features, magnifyers and text-to-speech and all that.
The guy keeps saying they break this accessability law because it doesnt work on some browsers or systems. I don't see the connection. Mario Sunshine doesn't run on my linux-hacked XBox, is Nintendo violating this law?
If thats the fact, then I should point out that I've had many problems with slashdot on Mozilla and Firebird/fox/ant/fly, and it looks like positive shit under lynx. Apparently slashdot is breaking this "law" too.
I wont argue that this is good web design habits. Your sites should be viewable under any old HTML 1.1+ browser, IMO. But since when was it a matter of law to have a shit website? Since never, and thats really whats going on here.
It's one of those subjective things. Like the "fair use" thing. Slashbots on the free mp3z side of the argument would have you believe it's in the bill of rights, next to freedom of speech and religion. It's not.
Umm, capturing customer data and forwarding it to Odeon's real site, while his site pretends to be an official Odeon site (with all their official logos, etc) seems to be the crux of the problem.
If this guy was found selling all those people's names and emails he's harvested to spammers, would you still have him up on the cross to worship as a hero to the masses?
Below I will repost an passage from "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", while crediting myself as the author:
The President in particular is very much a figurehead - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had - he has already spent two of his ten Presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these very few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn't be more wrong.
I WROTE THAT! I'm awesome.
Any takedown notices or legal threats towards me are censorship.
emerge doesnt save the world or do anything much more than script wget,./configure, make, and make install for you.
I still can't get any sound out of my KDE desktop as a normal user account (member of the audio group) no matter what permissions I set on what devices. The same user can play sound at the console "ie; aplay testsounds.wav"
I dunno, some configuration bullshit with one of the 900 million components set up to do something simple (play sounds). ALSA, arts, kde, x, who the fuck knows it could be something in/etc/openldap/slapd.conf messing it all up.
Linux is completely infuriating because of issues like this. (Hint; normal mom-n-pop users kind of expect sound). People bitch about MS's insecurity, how secure is my gentoo box that I need to run as root to make it play an mp3?
Bah.
In three days I'll try to fix it. Three days is how long it'll take "emerge openoffice" to complete.
Who do you think is out on the streets selling bootlegged DVDs for 10 bucks a pop? Who do you think ORGANIZES this CRIMINAL activity? Could it be, organized crime? Groups trying to raise quick untracable bucks to fund other activities? Oh, no, that's just fearmongering and FUD.
I tell ya, the guys running the little bootleg booths around here all have turbans on their heads and long beards. They're raking in a lot of bucks, and he sure as fuck ain't spending it on the latest fashion or personal hygiene products.
I'm sure they're all just freedom fighters, and modern-day minutemen. Just ask Michael Moore.
When it was first launched in 1985, the computer technology was 10 years out of date by western standards. It has text-based graphics generated with a Russian 8-bit processor compared to the 16-bit processors used in western home computer games, or 32 bit processors used in western arcade machines at the time
In 1985 where was MY 16 bit game console and 32 bit arcade machines?
Hell, Super Mario Bros 2 came out in 1985. "Western life" wasn't that advanced.
Slashdot Mirror
It's up to them. Maybe they adopted that "ignorant policy" after the 100th time some asshole 13 year old kid sent a pizza to "I.C. Weiner" up at the cryogenics lab.
Most of the smaller mom&pop shops usually act this way, ya know the ones that actually make good pizza. They dont have the deep pockets to absorb these costs, Pizza Hut and the rest who slop ketchup and cheeze whiz on a piece of flatbread and dare to call it a pizza don't care. They let you order online. No big deal, since their pizza is worth a nickel to them and the delivery boys time is worth zilch (ie; he works for tips).
The nature of the problem seems to be that VoIP could be so flexible - it could issue phone numbers the same way DHCP issues IP addresses.
Fuck phonebooks for VoIP, you'd have to publish 4 a day to keep up! In my vision of the future, every phone has a small touch display, and you look up your numbers there against an authoratative source, ie; DNS for phone numbers.
All of the concerns listed are legitimate, and have kept me from considering replacing my land line.
Here in Maryland, hurricane Isabel knocked out our power for a week last summer. Land line phones still worked, so we could call around to our friends and family, find someone who still has juice, head over and ride out the storm. With VOIP, our options would be drive around the state aimlessly, or hunt down a payphone, etc.. Forget that. And if the storm had of hit us hard, knocked a tree into our kitchen or something, I'm sorry, but 911 service is not a small, inconsequential feature that VOIP-zealots make it out to be.
The fast food delivery problem is less severe, but still there. Many pizza joints wouldnt even send a car out if they couldnt verify the address. They've been jerked around by cranks too many times. I've had friends with unlisted numbers or who were blocking caller-id have pizza joints hang up on 'em.
It's a nice idea, but one whos time hasn't come yet. At least not as the primary phone for my residence. Not until my connection to the 'net has the same level of reliability as my land-line.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You should always think about DB and platform independence as much as you can.
So what if your company made a huge investment in Oracle. What if Oracle winds up chapter 11 in six months, what if the next great Enron scam is happening at Oracle now?
The very nature of an RDBMS is such that you shouldn't have to jump through any application-level hoops to use it to its "fullest capacity". I expect to issue SQL statements and that's it. To me, the measure of a DB is how well it does what it does - store and retrieve data, without fucking it all up.
As the grandparent said, you can encapsulate any specific stuff in stored procedures or custom functions. But you shouldn't be relying on it.
Well, seeing as how this "interesting article", as the submitter calls it, is hosted on Oracle's site, you'd think the cynics here at slashdot would instantly recognize it as the typical marketing horseshit you'd find on any corporate page.
Yeah, according to Oracle, Oracle+PHP5 (and oracle specific application development) is the bomb-diggity, ASP.Net and SQL Server are teh suck. I'm sure MSFT would tell you the opposite.
This "article" has as much credibility as the MS-published Windows v. Linux TCO studies.
But - of course - marketing horseshit is Gospel here at slashdot, just so long as it says MS sucks.
What is Maven?
/. article.
Sure sounds useless from the
To the first to deliver an Infinite Improbability Drive.
Ever notice that shitty bands are the only ones in love with the idea of giving their music away free? (as if it'd make me listen to it)
gave Armstrong the bird, and although it was excrutiating they did it as hard as they've ever done it before.
Know what, in reality, it all works about the same. All this piddly-dee shit about timings and a handful of MHZ overclock is all about benchmarking and little else.
This mouse here says they had the earth created to compute the question to the answer for life, the universe and everything.
New York TIMES?
What, you think you're better than us?!
Us?!
U.S.
U.S.A!
No way!
- John "Bagger" McGurk
net send is a source of great fun in an office full of morons.
Name your computer something ominous like "SYSTEM_KERNEL_DAEMON", then do some creative net sends, like:
net send * This machine has performed an illegal instruction and will self destruct in 45 seconds.
etc, etc, and so on.
Hours of fun for the whole family.
Or, when one new employee was fired around here, the next day I named my machine to his login id and sent some:
net send * You cant fire me! You are all fucked now! You'll be sorry!
And watched the panic stricken manager types run up and down the hall screaming "he's in the computer! he's in the computer!".
Aah.. Good times.
I dunno, I tried Catalyst 4.7 the other day.. Rebooted, my system was completely messed up video wise. I couldnt change resolutions from the control panel.. Did a complete uninstall (used driver cleaner) and reinstalled, fired up Far Cry, and had messed up graphics and a locked system within seconds.
I turned on that new temporal AA shit, rebooted, then turned it off, rebooted, now it's working again. ATi's temporal AA is like every other feature, sounds really awesome on paper but doesnt actually work in real games. (TruForm, etc, etc)
ATi is focusing on whiz-bang new bullet-points for their marketing literature, and ignoring known bugs that have been out there for months and years.
God forbid you own anything R200 based (9200s, 8500s, etc), because virtually nothing for those "ancient" cards is being updated in the drivers. "Ancient" of course means you still buy them for a hundred bucks at CompUSA.
I'm no fanboy for either. I'm not someone who sees two companies screwing consumers as "competition". Two choices suck, whether it's Intel vs AMD, ATi vs nVidia, Dems vs Reps or Cheech vs Chong.
Bah..
Oh for FUCK SAKES
Stop spreading these MORONIC "the discs go backwards so piracy is un-possible" rumours.
The Xbox does not spin backwards, nor read inside-out. It uses drives that are as close to stock as you can get, regular toshiba, phillips, samsung drives with modified firmware. It has a proprietary game format. There's a short video session (a video clip saying "this is an xbox game not a movie you idiot") which is all your PC will see, since it does not know about the format of the disk. This COULD be overcome in software, but it would be difficult and would require hacking the firmware of some PC drive and writing all the filesystem shit, etc..
Anyways.
Gamecube discs do not spin backwards, nor PS2, nor dreamcast, nor Sega Saturn, nor TG-CD. This rumour has come up about every single disc-based game console to date.
It would require refitting media pressing factories, custom mastering equipment, etc, etc, all KINDs of ridiculous infrastructure, when if the purpose is copy protection, existing schemes work great (usually broken by a weak link elsewhere, ie; bunnie lifting the MD5 key to decrypt the xbox' bios - if that hadn't happened, it would still be "unhackable")..
Anyhow... THE DISCS WORK LIKE EVERY OTHER DISK, THEY JUST HAVE STUFF WRITTEN ON 'EM THAT YOUR COMPUTER DOESN'T KNOW ABOUT!
Ahhhh... One of those lame rumours that supposedly "intelligent geeky" people spread.
Except those that want to pirate "uncopyable" PS2 and XBox games, of course. And don't forget the ease and convenience of 1:1 copies of what you rented from blockbuster.
That's the REAL market here.
But, gentoo zealots constantly extole emerge as the greatest of all "hold your hand" features, which was the point I was trying to refute.
How does using Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox/Opera qualify as a "disability"?
Can I get benefits? Can I sue my employer for making us use Netscape, thereby giving me a handicap?
Yeah, bad site design, sure, but I really cannot see the connection to any disabilities legislation.
Because the "law" that Odeon's breaking is one of those grey area type of things that may or may not exist. The correct course of action would have been a civil suit to resolve this, which would no doubt go to arbitration and end up worked out. Odeon would have no problem tweaking their site to save themselves the bad press.
Does having a site only working in IE make it inaccessible to handicapped? Is this saying that Mozilla users are handicapped? IE, and windows, have some good integrated accessibility features, magnifyers and text-to-speech and all that.
The guy keeps saying they break this accessability law because it doesnt work on some browsers or systems. I don't see the connection. Mario Sunshine doesn't run on my linux-hacked XBox, is Nintendo violating this law?
If thats the fact, then I should point out that I've had many problems with slashdot on Mozilla and Firebird/fox/ant/fly, and it looks like positive shit under lynx. Apparently slashdot is breaking this "law" too.
I wont argue that this is good web design habits. Your sites should be viewable under any old HTML 1.1+ browser, IMO. But since when was it a matter of law to have a shit website? Since never, and thats really whats going on here.
It's one of those subjective things. Like the "fair use" thing. Slashbots on the free mp3z side of the argument would have you believe it's in the bill of rights, next to freedom of speech and religion. It's not.
Umm, capturing customer data and forwarding it to Odeon's real site, while his site pretends to be an official Odeon site (with all their official logos, etc) seems to be the crux of the problem.
If this guy was found selling all those people's names and emails he's harvested to spammers, would you still have him up on the cross to worship as a hero to the masses?
Below I will repost an passage from "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", while crediting myself as the author:
The President in particular is very much a figurehead - he wields
no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the
government, but the qualities he is required to display are not
those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this
reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an
infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield
power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria
Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the
Galaxy has ever had - he has already spent two of his ten
Presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people
realize that the President and the Government have virtually no
power at all, and of these very few people only six know whence
ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly
believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a
computer. They couldn't be more wrong.
I WROTE THAT! I'm awesome.
Any takedown notices or legal threats towards me are censorship.
emerge doesnt save the world or do anything much more than script wget, ./configure, make, and make install for you.
/etc/openldap/slapd.conf messing it all up.
I still can't get any sound out of my KDE desktop as a normal user account (member of the audio group) no matter what permissions I set on what devices. The same user can play sound at the console "ie; aplay testsounds.wav"
I dunno, some configuration bullshit with one of the 900 million components set up to do something simple (play sounds). ALSA, arts, kde, x, who the fuck knows it could be something in
Linux is completely infuriating because of issues like this. (Hint; normal mom-n-pop users kind of expect sound). People bitch about MS's insecurity, how secure is my gentoo box that I need to run as root to make it play an mp3?
Bah.
In three days I'll try to fix it. Three days is how long it'll take "emerge openoffice" to complete.
No, emerge is most certainly not "all that".
Who do you think is out on the streets selling bootlegged DVDs for 10 bucks a pop? Who do you think ORGANIZES this CRIMINAL activity? Could it be, organized crime? Groups trying to raise quick untracable bucks to fund other activities? Oh, no, that's just fearmongering and FUD.
I tell ya, the guys running the little bootleg booths around here all have turbans on their heads and long beards. They're raking in a lot of bucks, and he sure as fuck ain't spending it on the latest fashion or personal hygiene products.
I'm sure they're all just freedom fighters, and modern-day minutemen. Just ask Michael Moore.
When it was first launched in 1985, the computer technology was 10 years out of date by western standards. It has text-based graphics generated with a Russian 8-bit processor compared to the 16-bit processors used in western home computer games, or 32 bit processors used in western arcade machines at the time
In 1985 where was MY 16 bit game console and 32 bit arcade machines?
Hell, Super Mario Bros 2 came out in 1985. "Western life" wasn't that advanced.
All the fixes for known worms/vulnerabilities are out the door on windows update. Go get 'em.