It's interesting that one business the goverment never gets involved in is food distribution, because while everyone can have an opinion about a bailout, hungry citizens tend to concentrate minds. It's a very hard problem getting the right amount of food to the rigth places with minimum wastage, and frankly the government is not capable of doing it. With a few exceptions due to massive demographic change or natural disaster, starvation has rarely figured as an issue within America. Why is that?
We can carry on propping up the system as it stands, or we can swallow the fact that a lot of people are going to have their lives turned inside out, and swallow the medicine now before it gets worse (public sector off-balance sheet liabilities, anyone?).
No it basically turns your graphics card into a general purpose floating point number cruncher, which is potentially useful for all sorts of things (although I predict Moore's Law will in a few years render it as obsolete as the maths co-processor).
I'm with Internet Central, who charge £20+VAT for a maxed out ADSL connection. I'm not a heavy torrenter, but I do use iPlayer and download distros and stuff and have never noticed being throttled or capped. Their tech support is excellent, as in you speak to Slashdot readers who know what you're talking about when you tell them that traceroute dies within their network, and you don't pay premium rate. Oh, and they have no truck with Phorm or the IWF or anyone else AFAICT. Now if only they offered TV and phone service too...
I just find it funny that an article on how to deal with slashdotting is on slashdot. Sadly, it has failed to fall over, creating what would have been a fine piece of irony.
Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious that the/. crew have lost control of the site except on editorial matters. This post ought to convince you, if nothing else will. Note in particular the time interval in which those employees posted.
Exactly. What I don't understand is why there are no Hollywood studios like Apple. There's one guy at the top, and if he thinks it sucks, then it doesn't go. Is it really that hard to find one person with good taste and a bit of business sense? I mean, seriously, Quantum of Solace sucked hard and it was pretty obvious that chucking every damned effect and action scene they could think of at it was not what the movie needed. Why can nobody tell them this?
The trouble was any kind of central point became a massive juicy target for them, and it would be just the same for an open source project. Bluefrog IIRC ended up just drowning in a tide of DDOSing. Kinda ironic, really:)
As far as I can see the only real solution to spam is intelligent filtering, which Google leads the way on: it's got to the point where if a spam mail gets through, I open it it up and have a good look at it to see how the heck it got through.
I've had a similar experience. I moved to gmail for the legendary spam handling when I crossed the 2000/month barrier; I peaked at 3500 and now I'm under 500 per month. Someone is doing something right. Interestingly, I has actually gone up over the last few weeks, not down.
BT owns and runs the copper phone line network. Virgin runs the cable network. Yes, the core of BT's network is up to date, but that last mile stinks. Virgin is fine as far as their technical capability goes, but as a company they stink.
This is a reasonable point. Good old-fashioned supply and demand economics have to come into play here. If a customer is happy with the price and quality of what he's got, then why should anyone invest money speeding him up? It's also worth noting that Britain has an ancient and decaying copper network so frequently getting anything useful out of broadband is a trial in itself.
Although I agree with the justice of going after them for misleading statements, I reckon all-in-all these people are better off, having got a PC with XP rather than being forced to wrestle the leviathan.
It's also worth noting that kids these days (sheesh...can't believe I just wrote that) grow up with very different mental approaches than we do now. I see 18 year olds running half a dozen IM windows, surfing, answering phone calls and writing essays simultaneously. I couldn't ever have done that because I didn't grow up thinking that way. So comparing these people's work patterns may be a bit misleading.
Try blanking all your cookies, then spend a few weeks surfing with them set to prompt. It is genuinely scary how many organisations are tracking your behaviour.
I don't get the point of this service. When I use Google, I don't hang around to admire my search results, I'm just glad I managed to craft a query that landed what I wanted on the first page. I am certainly not going to sit around to review my search results on their behalf.
Yes, but in practice that's ridiculously unworkable. Try working in an accounts receivables department for a large consumer utility company. You deal with hundreds of incoming payments a day, frequently without any helpful identification from the sender. People will do things like pay the previous months bill instead of this months, pay their call charges but not their service charges, leave off a charge they disagree with, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. You need to be able to access pretty much everyone's info in order to track down what the payment is and where it came from. Asking the person doing that to get authorisation every time he needs to look at a new piece of information is plain silly (and how does it help, since his line manager must have unfettered access?).
I'm past understanding how they screw some of this stuff up so badly. I went to see Quantum of Solace last weekend, expecting all the negativity I'd been hearing to be nonsense from people who didn't have a clue what decent cinema was, and instead...it was like a CD that had been mastered hot enough to make your ears bleed. Non-stop action with the camera in Daniel Craig's face does not equal exciting viewing, people, it just doesn't. How they could have thought it was good, exciting, tight film making is just beyond me. Gah, lawn, etc.
Bandying about technicalities here. If I claim that techno-vampire eats babies and enjoys it, and he sues me, then all I need to do in court is produce a video of him enthusiasticly cooking up toddlers and the case is over. The difference with America is that in Britain, if I don't turn up in court, I will automatically lose. In America, techno-vampire has to prove that he doesn't like the meat of innocent children (for example, by providing testimonies from reliable people that he is and has been for many years a committed vegetarian).
I was given a similar piece of paper on my first day at Uni. I refused point blank to sign it and after a great deal of humming and hawing I was told that they would get back to me. That was 9 years ago...still waiting.
Nope. Truth is an absolute defence in civil cases, which is all there is in Britain. However, there are privacy implications under case law; read up on Max Mosely if you're interested.
Slashdot Mirror
We can carry on propping up the system as it stands, or we can swallow the fact that a lot of people are going to have their lives turned inside out, and swallow the medicine now before it gets worse (public sector off-balance sheet liabilities, anyone?).
How are these people allowed near kids? It's rhetorical question, don't bother replying.
No it basically turns your graphics card into a general purpose floating point number cruncher, which is potentially useful for all sorts of things (although I predict Moore's Law will in a few years render it as obsolete as the maths co-processor).
I'm with Internet Central, who charge £20+VAT for a maxed out ADSL connection. I'm not a heavy torrenter, but I do use iPlayer and download distros and stuff and have never noticed being throttled or capped. Their tech support is excellent, as in you speak to Slashdot readers who know what you're talking about when you tell them that traceroute dies within their network, and you don't pay premium rate. Oh, and they have no truck with Phorm or the IWF or anyone else AFAICT. Now if only they offered TV and phone service too...
I just find it funny that an article on how to deal with slashdotting is on slashdot. Sadly, it has failed to fall over, creating what would have been a fine piece of irony.
Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious that the /. crew have lost control of the site except on editorial matters. This post ought to convince you, if nothing else will. Note in particular the time interval in which those employees posted.
A bit like SCO, it just makes it all the more satisfying when they do finally get that bitchslap they so richly deserve.
Exactly. What I don't understand is why there are no Hollywood studios like Apple. There's one guy at the top, and if he thinks it sucks, then it doesn't go. Is it really that hard to find one person with good taste and a bit of business sense? I mean, seriously, Quantum of Solace sucked hard and it was pretty obvious that chucking every damned effect and action scene they could think of at it was not what the movie needed. Why can nobody tell them this?
As far as I can see the only real solution to spam is intelligent filtering, which Google leads the way on: it's got to the point where if a spam mail gets through, I open it it up and have a good look at it to see how the heck it got through.
I've had a similar experience. I moved to gmail for the legendary spam handling when I crossed the 2000/month barrier; I peaked at 3500 and now I'm under 500 per month. Someone is doing something right. Interestingly, I has actually gone up over the last few weeks, not down.
BT owns and runs the copper phone line network. Virgin runs the cable network. Yes, the core of BT's network is up to date, but that last mile stinks. Virgin is fine as far as their technical capability goes, but as a company they stink.
This is a reasonable point. Good old-fashioned supply and demand economics have to come into play here. If a customer is happy with the price and quality of what he's got, then why should anyone invest money speeding him up? It's also worth noting that Britain has an ancient and decaying copper network so frequently getting anything useful out of broadband is a trial in itself.
Although I agree with the justice of going after them for misleading statements, I reckon all-in-all these people are better off, having got a PC with XP rather than being forced to wrestle the leviathan.
It's also worth noting that kids these days (sheesh...can't believe I just wrote that) grow up with very different mental approaches than we do now. I see 18 year olds running half a dozen IM windows, surfing, answering phone calls and writing essays simultaneously. I couldn't ever have done that because I didn't grow up thinking that way. So comparing these people's work patterns may be a bit misleading.
Hmm. Successful troll is successful.
I don't get the point of this service. When I use Google, I don't hang around to admire my search results, I'm just glad I managed to craft a query that landed what I wanted on the first page. I am certainly not going to sit around to review my search results on their behalf.
Mods, please bury this post by modding over-rated; I'm having browser problems. Google might help me
Did Hiroshima not convince you?
Yes, but in practice that's ridiculously unworkable. Try working in an accounts receivables department for a large consumer utility company. You deal with hundreds of incoming payments a day, frequently without any helpful identification from the sender. People will do things like pay the previous months bill instead of this months, pay their call charges but not their service charges, leave off a charge they disagree with, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. You need to be able to access pretty much everyone's info in order to track down what the payment is and where it came from. Asking the person doing that to get authorisation every time he needs to look at a new piece of information is plain silly (and how does it help, since his line manager must have unfettered access?).
Obvious shoop is obvious.
Antidisestablishmentarianist.
I'm past understanding how they screw some of this stuff up so badly. I went to see Quantum of Solace last weekend, expecting all the negativity I'd been hearing to be nonsense from people who didn't have a clue what decent cinema was, and instead...it was like a CD that had been mastered hot enough to make your ears bleed. Non-stop action with the camera in Daniel Craig's face does not equal exciting viewing, people, it just doesn't. How they could have thought it was good, exciting, tight film making is just beyond me. Gah, lawn, etc.
Bandying about technicalities here. If I claim that techno-vampire eats babies and enjoys it, and he sues me, then all I need to do in court is produce a video of him enthusiasticly cooking up toddlers and the case is over. The difference with America is that in Britain, if I don't turn up in court, I will automatically lose. In America, techno-vampire has to prove that he doesn't like the meat of innocent children (for example, by providing testimonies from reliable people that he is and has been for many years a committed vegetarian).
I was given a similar piece of paper on my first day at Uni. I refused point blank to sign it and after a great deal of humming and hawing I was told that they would get back to me. That was 9 years ago...still waiting.
Nope. Truth is an absolute defence in civil cases, which is all there is in Britain. However, there are privacy implications under case law; read up on Max Mosely if you're interested.