Since GA is based off of Urchin, I assume that they are using something close to it. Urchin works off of a server's access logs. Primarily, it tries to set a cookie that is then used for tracking. The standard practice is to modify the access logs to include that tracking token in the log entry. If no cookie can be set, then it approximates a session based on source IP, user-agent, referrer, time between requests, etc.
I would imagine that most people are being counted multiple times, thus inflating the number considerably.
Some companies get patents for defensive purposes to ensure no one else patents it and uses it against them. I had a serious knee-jerk reaction when my employer sent out an email advertising our patent program. The explanation I got was that we weren't going to be patenting stuff to keep others from doing those things, but to patent them before others do so that we can't be sued. Facebook could be doing just that.
In that same email, I was told that the company despises the state of IP and have active lobbying efforts to change things. I felt much better about my employer after hearing all of that.
As someone that works in support for a hosting provider, you're the type of customer that irritates me the most. While they shouldn't be rebooting your box to get root access without your consent, you should at least help them help you. Give them an account with limited sudo access to view your logs. If that won't do, then provide them with the necessary logs. If that's not good enough, don't expect support and move your stuff to some place that doesn't provide the level of support you're paying for.
It is not likely that enough recipients will take the effort to report the mail to spamcop.net There are ways to configure a mail server to automatically report messages that are identified as spam to other blacklists.
Is the spamcop blacklist widely used anyway? Yes. (I work for a large hosting provider and see it among the most commonly used after Spamhaus.)
At most, some individual Bayesian filters may become more sensitive to the name of the company and travel-related spam, although I'm not sure how hotmail/gmail/yahoo exactly deal with user-reported spam. Again, some client-side utilities can be configured to automatically report spam to blocklists and spam digesting providers (i.e. pyzor).
The submitter works for a travel agency. Plenty of competition; the chance that the potential customer comes to them is small anyway. But a lost sale is still a lost sale. If would really suck if one of those would have been a repeat business customer wanting to setup contracts.
I'm afraid that, however unethical this spamming would be, the risk of getting in trouble is rather small. Again, from someone that works at a large hosting provider, you're right. I think the biggest risk is the potential tarnishing of the business image.
It sounds like the boss is in the knee-jerk reaction. He needs to have a cool head to gently persuade him and show him the business case for not responding. You have to show him that it makes the whole business look unprofessional and the competitor has already done that to themselves. If these are known customers, it would be better to contact them directly via some other means (such as a phone call). You'll do better to work on your customer relationships than you would to respond in such an impersonal and annoying fashion.
I got burned by this same thing when I got my dad's Toshiba. I was good for everything but sound. You want to talk about frustration. At least everything worked out of the box with Debian.
I've really been trying to figure out how I was going to vote for in the primaries. Since I'm registered Democrat in Florida, I can only vote to Democrats in the primary. I like Kucinich, but know he is terribly unlikely to win the primaries let alone the general election. That left Obama and Clinton as reasonable choices for me since I'm not a fan of Edwards. I've been leaning toward Obama because Clinton just seems to be too populist, almost as if her stance on issues is determined by the changing winds of public opinion. Despite his lack of experience, I think I'm going to have to vote for Obama because this sort of thing goes directly against my belief that government should be getting up into this type of thing.
*emo sigh* I'm such a tortured mix of liberal and conservative. No one gets me.
I think it's very much in the Scotty style. Rather than doubling the expected time to delivery, drastically underestimate the life expectancy. I'm sure Scotty would approve.
Not worth the hassle. I tried the VM route and it was too much of a hassle for her. Since Crossover Office's support for Office 2k3 is spotty, I didn't want to create more problems for her. With both of us having our own systems, it works out much better because we don't have to share. There have been plenty of times when I needed to work and she needed to work on a paper. Without two systems, I would have been screwed because you know who would have been the one to get the computer.
The only thing my wife and I had a problem with at first was her difficulties using Linux for her school work. The program she is in has standardized on MS Word and wants everything turned in in that format. I don't care who you are or what you say, OO.o has some issues with formatting when saving in.doc format. Things just come out looking differently.
We finally came to the conclusion that she needed a system to herself running Windows. Since then, she is happy as can be with our setup. We value our privacy over what's on our computers, in our email, etc. We don't snoop because we trust each other and to snoop would violate that trust. We play on a do to you as I would have you do to me. She has no problems I keep my own website (doesn't even care) or have a myspace page or anything tech-wise.
I have two printers at the house. One is a laser and the other an inkjet AIO. My wife is a speech language pathology student and doing her practicum. Between papers for class, notes professors put online, patient and management reports for the clinic or anything else that doesn't have to be color, she uses the laser. For materials for her clients (mostly 3 to 8 year olds), color is important for stimulation, so she uses the AIO. She also scans a lot of stuff, so rather than buy separate inkjet and scanner, I got her an AIO. So what do I print? Bathroom reading material... because the laptop is too hot for my bare thighs.
Would you suggest I use the onboard Nvidia graphics and buy a Hauppage card for TV support?
Yes. If you get a PVR-150, PVR-250, etc, you get hardware level MPEG-2 encoding, which is nice. Definitely takes load off the system.
Otherwise, I've been running Ubuntu as my primary desktop for over a year now. For the few things I need Windows for (Visio, Word, non-linux games), I use either a Windows VM in VMWare or I reboot to a small Windows XP install. The vast majority of the time, I'm all Ubuntu. You'll want to look at Automatix for some additional best of the best apps.
It's Debian. If you have stable in your sources.conf, you'll get upgraded next time you run apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade (once it is released).
Federal agencies are typically slow to pick up on new versions of Office and Windows. Currently, the US Air Force has a moratorium on IE7 and has since it came out citing security issues. Neither Vista nor Office 2k7 are approved for use on Air Force networks...yet. They have to be certified to be safe and secure to use on unclassified and classified networks. This is normal. Eventually, and unfortunately in my opinion, the moratorium will be lifted and approval will be given. It's more of a question of when, rather than if.
How would you view someone with a military background, like myself? I've spent almost 6 years in and plan to get out at the end of the year. I've been a sys admin through those six years working in tactical and educational environments. I've had my verbal and written comm skills honed out of necessity and professional training. I've research, presented and implemented solutions that were adopted as standards. I've trained subordinates, peers, and superiors. I've been project leader for several high visibility projects. I will finish my associates degree in May. I'm working on certs. Oh, and I'm a partner in a small consulting business. How would you say an employer would look at me?
I know it sounds like I'm tooting my own horn, but I really am looking for an honest assessment.
And what average user is going to go dig in a wiki? They don't want to go find the answer for themselves. They want to and will call the helpdesk if it is available. Trust me, I know. Tried a similar approach.
On a side note, orientation isn't going to do anyone good unless it really grabs people's attention and a movie or flash is just going to put them to sleep. They don't care! I have to do all sorts of annual training for my job, from fire extinguishers to information assurance, all of which I click or fast forward through to get to the test at the end.
If it doesn't have anything to do with pay and/or benefits, either make it live and fun or skip it altogether. They can pick up standard operating procedures from their supervisor.
I'm not a programmer. I'm a sys admin. All of the web apps I've written for the government, regardless of whether I used my personal resources and time or not, belong to them as long as I have used their equipment. For Official Use Only and what that implies is something people outside of the government seem to have a really hard time understanding. If you use government resources for personal gain, it can be classified as fraud, waste, and abuse for which you can go to jail.
They were also delivering items to locals in country. DHL services far more people than Americans in places America doesn't really like. They're international!
Baghdad International Airport in late 2004 or early 2005. I was deployed to the airport when a DHL Airbus A300 was hit by a shoulder fired missile launched by a man on a donkey cart just outside the airport at the end of the runway. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing.
But when he is given resources and time to work on the project, which they commissioned, it is theirs. The fact that he took it home and worked on it off duty with his own resources does not make it automagically his. Additionally, most states and the federal government have policies stating that unofficial use of their resources is forbidden, to include activities of personal gain. Finally, according to the article, Iowa gave Wisconsin the original source for free under the agreement that it would not be sold. I don't know how well that agreement was written out, but that may blow the whole thing out of the water if it has a derivative works statement.
Well, considering jihad means effort or endeavors against man's own self and to work hard to do right things, then yes, it does warrant a jihad to correct your improper use of the term.
My wife was so pissed at me when I deleted all of the music/movies/shows we had on the network by accident when I typed "rm -rf/mnt/storage" instead of/mnt/storage/backup like I had meant to. There is just some music we'll never get back.
Now I have an external hard drive backing up EVERYTHING to make recovery from such a mishap possible.
Back to the topic, after I moved from Windows on the desktop to Linux (Gnome) full time, I've actually had less "Honey, make it work!" from my wife. She got a new scanner/printer, hooked it up, went to "Add a printer" and it worked. She asked how to scan stuff and I pointed her to xsane. Opened xsane, it found it. When she needed them in the Windows install we have running in VMWare, she had so much trouble. Not because she had to add the removable devices to the VM, but from the hassle of finding drivers, installing them, but being prompted along the way to install 10 extra programs, etc.
The "Honey, make it work!" tally:
Linux - 1
Windows - at least 5
I'm a former unstablist too and have gone to Ubuntu now which I consider to be somewhere between unstable and testing. Bugs aren't common, but when you do find them, they are generally consistent and there has already been a bug report made. Most importantly, they tend to be minor and sometimes fixable on the spot. Otherwise, they can be worked around.
SUSE recently, SLED and openSUSE, has had some bumps in the bug department lately. I don't know what it is, but the packages have just been sucking lately. I left SUSE after 9.2 to go back to Debian because of the tons of issues I was having. My brother, a long time SUSE fan, left them for a yet-to-be-determined distro having stuck through the mounting issues. We're both happier people now that we have distros that Just Work.
Slashdot Mirror
Macbooks don't have them or their bluetooth wireless keyboard. I find it quite annoying.
Since GA is based off of Urchin, I assume that they are using something close to it. Urchin works off of a server's access logs. Primarily, it tries to set a cookie that is then used for tracking. The standard practice is to modify the access logs to include that tracking token in the log entry. If no cookie can be set, then it approximates a session based on source IP, user-agent, referrer, time between requests, etc.
I would imagine that most people are being counted multiple times, thus inflating the number considerably.
Some companies get patents for defensive purposes to ensure no one else patents it and uses it against them. I had a serious knee-jerk reaction when my employer sent out an email advertising our patent program. The explanation I got was that we weren't going to be patenting stuff to keep others from doing those things, but to patent them before others do so that we can't be sued. Facebook could be doing just that. In that same email, I was told that the company despises the state of IP and have active lobbying efforts to change things. I felt much better about my employer after hearing all of that.
As someone that works in support for a hosting provider, you're the type of customer that irritates me the most. While they shouldn't be rebooting your box to get root access without your consent, you should at least help them help you. Give them an account with limited sudo access to view your logs. If that won't do, then provide them with the necessary logs. If that's not good enough, don't expect support and move your stuff to some place that doesn't provide the level of support you're paying for.
I got burned by this same thing when I got my dad's Toshiba. I was good for everything but sound. You want to talk about frustration. At least everything worked out of the box with Debian.
I've really been trying to figure out how I was going to vote for in the primaries. Since I'm registered Democrat in Florida, I can only vote to Democrats in the primary. I like Kucinich, but know he is terribly unlikely to win the primaries let alone the general election. That left Obama and Clinton as reasonable choices for me since I'm not a fan of Edwards. I've been leaning toward Obama because Clinton just seems to be too populist, almost as if her stance on issues is determined by the changing winds of public opinion. Despite his lack of experience, I think I'm going to have to vote for Obama because this sort of thing goes directly against my belief that government should be getting up into this type of thing.
*emo sigh* I'm such a tortured mix of liberal and conservative. No one gets me.
I think it's very much in the Scotty style. Rather than doubling the expected time to delivery, drastically underestimate the life expectancy. I'm sure Scotty would approve.
Not worth the hassle. I tried the VM route and it was too much of a hassle for her. Since Crossover Office's support for Office 2k3 is spotty, I didn't want to create more problems for her. With both of us having our own systems, it works out much better because we don't have to share. There have been plenty of times when I needed to work and she needed to work on a paper. Without two systems, I would have been screwed because you know who would have been the one to get the computer.
The only thing my wife and I had a problem with at first was her difficulties using Linux for her school work. The program she is in has standardized on MS Word and wants everything turned in in that format. I don't care who you are or what you say, OO.o has some issues with formatting when saving in .doc format. Things just come out looking differently.
We finally came to the conclusion that she needed a system to herself running Windows. Since then, she is happy as can be with our setup. We value our privacy over what's on our computers, in our email, etc. We don't snoop because we trust each other and to snoop would violate that trust. We play on a do to you as I would have you do to me. She has no problems I keep my own website (doesn't even care) or have a myspace page or anything tech-wise.
I have two printers at the house. One is a laser and the other an inkjet AIO. My wife is a speech language pathology student and doing her practicum. Between papers for class, notes professors put online, patient and management reports for the clinic or anything else that doesn't have to be color, she uses the laser. For materials for her clients (mostly 3 to 8 year olds), color is important for stimulation, so she uses the AIO. She also scans a lot of stuff, so rather than buy separate inkjet and scanner, I got her an AIO. So what do I print? Bathroom reading material... because the laptop is too hot for my bare thighs.
Otherwise, I've been running Ubuntu as my primary desktop for over a year now. For the few things I need Windows for (Visio, Word, non-linux games), I use either a Windows VM in VMWare or I reboot to a small Windows XP install. The vast majority of the time, I'm all Ubuntu. You'll want to look at Automatix for some additional best of the best apps.
It's Debian. If you have stable in your sources.conf, you'll get upgraded next time you run apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade (once it is released).
Federal agencies are typically slow to pick up on new versions of Office and Windows. Currently, the US Air Force has a moratorium on IE7 and has since it came out citing security issues. Neither Vista nor Office 2k7 are approved for use on Air Force networks...yet. They have to be certified to be safe and secure to use on unclassified and classified networks. This is normal. Eventually, and unfortunately in my opinion, the moratorium will be lifted and approval will be given. It's more of a question of when, rather than if.
How would you view someone with a military background, like myself? I've spent almost 6 years in and plan to get out at the end of the year. I've been a sys admin through those six years working in tactical and educational environments. I've had my verbal and written comm skills honed out of necessity and professional training. I've research, presented and implemented solutions that were adopted as standards. I've trained subordinates, peers, and superiors. I've been project leader for several high visibility projects. I will finish my associates degree in May. I'm working on certs. Oh, and I'm a partner in a small consulting business. How would you say an employer would look at me?
I know it sounds like I'm tooting my own horn, but I really am looking for an honest assessment.
You've never seen A Few Good Men, have you?
And what average user is going to go dig in a wiki? They don't want to go find the answer for themselves. They want to and will call the helpdesk if it is available. Trust me, I know. Tried a similar approach.
On a side note, orientation isn't going to do anyone good unless it really grabs people's attention and a movie or flash is just going to put them to sleep. They don't care! I have to do all sorts of annual training for my job, from fire extinguishers to information assurance, all of which I click or fast forward through to get to the test at the end.
If it doesn't have anything to do with pay and/or benefits, either make it live and fun or skip it altogether. They can pick up standard operating procedures from their supervisor.
I'm not a programmer. I'm a sys admin. All of the web apps I've written for the government, regardless of whether I used my personal resources and time or not, belong to them as long as I have used their equipment. For Official Use Only and what that implies is something people outside of the government seem to have a really hard time understanding. If you use government resources for personal gain, it can be classified as fraud, waste, and abuse for which you can go to jail.
They were also delivering items to locals in country. DHL services far more people than Americans in places America doesn't really like. They're international!
Baghdad International Airport in late 2004 or early 2005. I was deployed to the airport when a DHL Airbus A300 was hit by a shoulder fired missile launched by a man on a donkey cart just outside the airport at the end of the runway. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing.
Pictures here.
But when he is given resources and time to work on the project, which they commissioned, it is theirs. The fact that he took it home and worked on it off duty with his own resources does not make it automagically his. Additionally, most states and the federal government have policies stating that unofficial use of their resources is forbidden, to include activities of personal gain. Finally, according to the article, Iowa gave Wisconsin the original source for free under the agreement that it would not be sold. I don't know how well that agreement was written out, but that may blow the whole thing out of the water if it has a derivative works statement.
Here I go playing into a troll...
Well, considering jihad means effort or endeavors against man's own self and to work hard to do right things, then yes, it does warrant a jihad to correct your improper use of the term.
My wife was so pissed at me when I deleted all of the music/movies/shows we had on the network by accident when I typed "rm -rf /mnt/storage" instead of /mnt/storage/backup like I had meant to. There is just some music we'll never get back.
Now I have an external hard drive backing up EVERYTHING to make recovery from such a mishap possible.
Back to the topic, after I moved from Windows on the desktop to Linux (Gnome) full time, I've actually had less "Honey, make it work!" from my wife. She got a new scanner/printer, hooked it up, went to "Add a printer" and it worked. She asked how to scan stuff and I pointed her to xsane. Opened xsane, it found it. When she needed them in the Windows install we have running in VMWare, she had so much trouble. Not because she had to add the removable devices to the VM, but from the hassle of finding drivers, installing them, but being prompted along the way to install 10 extra programs, etc.
The "Honey, make it work!" tally:
Linux - 1
Windows - at least 5
I'm a former unstablist too and have gone to Ubuntu now which I consider to be somewhere between unstable and testing. Bugs aren't common, but when you do find them, they are generally consistent and there has already been a bug report made. Most importantly, they tend to be minor and sometimes fixable on the spot. Otherwise, they can be worked around. SUSE recently, SLED and openSUSE, has had some bumps in the bug department lately. I don't know what it is, but the packages have just been sucking lately. I left SUSE after 9.2 to go back to Debian because of the tons of issues I was having. My brother, a long time SUSE fan, left them for a yet-to-be-determined distro having stuck through the mounting issues. We're both happier people now that we have distros that Just Work.