....neither the author nor the publisher receives royalties from Amazon's used book sales.....
Bullshit. They got royalties the first time the book was sold. If they want to really hurt Amazon, all they have to do is write/publish books that are so good that people won't want to get rid of them.
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The school has adopted a policy that if turnitin.com catches plagerism you must prove your innocence. I realize its not the court of law but it just seems wrong to me.
Not to mention the level of idiocy that would come up with that policy and still be eligible for a teaching job. For those wondering, it is impossible for you to "prove your innocence", unless you can come up with a comprehensive list of every other term paper every written and show that your paper is different than all of them.
That's why the burden of proof is ultimately on the school to prove that you did cheat. If you did, in fact, copy your paper from someone else, it should be trivial for them to produce the paper that you copied as evidence that they are correct.
Don't be intimidated if they try to make you prove anything. Just go to the school board meeting and get it taken care of at the top level.
It doesn't take a genius to see that if they don't have money to pay employees for work that's already been completed, then they sure as hell don't have money to pay a lawyer to go after dubious legal claims.
Remember that in a bankruptcy situation (such as the one that this company is apparently headed toward), employees' pay is second in line only to taxes. Even if a lawyer takes this case on contingency and wins, he can't get any money from it until every last paycheck has been cut. He would never see the winnings from the suit.
No lawyer is going to touch that with a ten foot pole. There are plenty of paying customers to be found.
Ultimately, people within Microsoft must understand that they don't have the skills within their organization to run something this important all by themselves. Look at the last two years:
Didn't pay bill for Passport.com, service down for two days, they were mostly unaware of the problem and couldn't solve it on their own. If not for Slashdot, it's difficult to say how long it would have been down.
DNS down for two days. How does a company of that size have a problem like this?
MSN Messenger down for a week. Think about that. An entire week. Again, how does this happen?
The first two items would have disabled their whole service. The third just shows that they don't have the competence required to run such an important service. They need to not only have a network of repositories, they need to gracefully bow out of being part of that network.
the one I found most interesting is that the current EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) suit is an astonishing 24 years old
On the other hand, nobody has died or been injured in the last 24 years because of their suit. There's something to be said for that kind of reliability.
Another good reference is in Chapter 17 of "A History of PI" by Petr Beckman (ISBN 0-88029-418-3). Beckman goes so far as to include a reproduction of the bill.
The bill doesn't actually give any values for PI directly. Rather, it supposes to provide simple formulas for computing the value of PI based on enclosing squares. Here's part of section 1:
"It has been found that the cirular area is to the quadrant of the circumference, as the area of an equilateral rectable is to the square on one side."
And later in section 2:
"By taking the quadrant of the circle's circumference for the linear unit, we fulfill the requirements of both quadrature and rectification of the circle's circumference. Furthermore, it has revealed the ratio of the chord and arc of ninety degrees, which is as seven to eight, and also the ratio of the diagonal and one side of a square, which is as ten to seven, disclosing the fourth important fact, that the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four, and because of these facts and the further fact that the fule in present use fails to work both ways mathematically, it should be discarded as wholly wanting and misleading in practical applications."
Now, there are about three different "values" for PI in there. Dr. Edwin Goodman, who came up with this tripe, was a "circle-squarer", one who thought PI could be computed, well, easily.
It's scary that the guy was a doctor given his profound misunderstanding of simple geometry, and seeming inability to do the simple measurements which would prove his theories wrong.
But this bill is much bigger in folklore than in real life. Some facts regarding it:
1. It was never passed in to law. Ever. It passed unanimously in the House, and was tabled in the Senate, and never voted on there.
2. It doesn't say that PI=3, PI=3.14, or that PI is equal to any other simple number. Rather, it gives a number of methods (all of which are grossly incorrect) that could be used to very easily calculate PI.
3. It never made it into any textbooks that I know of. That was the goal of Dr. Goodman.
4. It did happen in Indiana, 1897, House Bill No. 246
5. Dr. Goodman, in section 3 of the bill, also claims to have previously trisected an angle. The guy was either a fruitcake or a charlatan.
f3
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>302 Found</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Found</H1>
The document has moved <A HREF="http://10.0.0.1/suspend.html?Computers/Artic les/
copyright.shtml">here</A>.<P>
</BODY></HTML>
Right, and when Digital Convergence does it, we call it a "click-wrap" license and shit all over them.
DC claimed that there was a license to use a piece of hardware, something which cannot be copyrighted. To make matters worse (for DC), they had sent these items to a large group of people unsolicited. The rest had been given away at Radio Shack.
There's a big difference between a simple piece of hardware and a copyrighted program.
I guess NASA is in the business of releasing press releases about the use of a new product that they've never even seen work. Fraud? You are a cynic, aren't you.
Not too cynical if you read their web site. I've been watching this company since 1997, and it is very suspicious. It should also be noted that NASA hasn't used it yet, rather they have bought one to test. Big difference, and definitely it shouldn't be seen as an endorsement.
Their web site is really short on technical details, long on hype. Just reading the technical specs that they provide is an interesting exercise. Let's take a quick look:
Memory: 288 MB SDRAM - 8 NS access time
36 chips, each 4 meg x 16 bits
7.2 GB/s throughput (200 MB/s per chip)
"8 NS access time" would normally be written as "133MHz", or PC133 memory. 7.2GB/sec? Give me a break. That number is BS.
FAI to Host: PCI 32 bit 33 MHz, which is 120 MB/s
It might be 120MB/s, but it's also behind the current $1K PC.
External: 50 pin back edge of cord
Mini SCSI female connector (physical only)
48 pins directly connected to FPGA, power, and ground
1 pin connected to clock bus
10 nanosecond pin cycle time
4800 Mb/s data rate
Note that now we're using bits instead of bytes to get an extravagantly large number. That's still 600MB/sec, presumably 160MHz SCSI at 32-bits. If so, that's fast.
Eurocard organized as:
Bus width: 8x36 pins direct connect to compute FPGAs (array)
2x36 pins direct connect to I/O controller FPGA
Bus speed: 10 nanosecond cycle time
Aggregate 36 Gb/s bandwidth
Yet another new unit for bandwidth, Gb/s. It's running at 100MHz, you can do the math. Ah, but wait:
Clock: On board 200 MHz
Let's see, 10ns cycle time, 200MHz clock. So the clock is divided by two, and it's really not relevant how fast it's running. Why not get a 1GHz crystal and divide by 10?
Operating system Windows 98 SE
Would someone seriously ship a research oriented computer with Win98? Even if you were sticking with MS products, NT/2K would be the logical choice.
The simple fact is that their web site is short on real facts, long on real hype. It's dumbed down, and includes a lot of numbers like the ones above which have been obfuscated to make them look better. Most of their hardware is standard stuff, I believe that the numbers that they've chosen to use in various descriptions (8 NS, 4800Mb/s, 3.6Gb/s, etc.) were purposely chosen to make it difficult for the average person to see that most of that hardware is the normal stuff that you would get with your $1500 computer.
I hope that they have something here, that it's as good as they say. But to convince technically-minded people like me, they'll have to post a page with no BS, just straight facts. I'm not holding my breath.
If Pride thinks his music will not show up on the internet, well he is crazy.
He knows it'll show up on the Internet. Actually, on his record company's web site. Look here: Tennessean Story
If you own the CD, you can get the MP3's from them. Seems bizarre to me.
There's really no other way to put it, but setting your business up for spamming is the rough equivalent of sewing a nice red A into the front of all your garments. While they may get a few customers from it, they will lose far more.
I have to wonder what they're going to do when all your possible ISP's refuse to provide service to you, which should take about a week. Note that you won't be able to get any broadband service ever again. Your company will be forced into using UUNet dialups to get internet access.
Stupid stupid stupid. Please let us know what your company is, then quit.
I'm still trying to figure out how some manager at Microsoft can make disparaging comments about Linux, and the press feels that it warrants a story. It doesn't make sense, and this is the second or third time so far this year that it's happened.
The irony of this story is that Microsoft is wanting to lobby the government to do "something" about open source software, hey, I want to do that, too. Only in my case, that "something" is further adoption of OSS, particularly for government projects.
Oh well, Microsoft is once again proving that they see Linux as a threat...
This is part of the reason that web browsers suck: because people demand that they render broken content "nicely".
Missing </td> and </tr> tags aren't broken, yet Netscape can't render the page. According to the specs, end tags aren't needed on table elements or list elements; it can easily be deduced that if you have a <tr> tag, the previous table row and any of its open columns have ended. If Netscape simply followed the specs I think we'd all be happier.
But the bigger problem is broken HTML. While it may be the author's problem, your browser should render it as best it can. One reason is simply that today's HTML may be considered broken in a few years, and vice versa. At any rate, it's the right thing to do. If IE was the browser that didn't render broken HTML, we'd see all kinds of comments about how stupid that is.
I had an interesting problem recently. I tried to view the article at aspalliance.com that was linked from a story last week, and I couldn't get the page to come up. A little sleuthing showed that a router at bbnplanet.net was blocking all traffic to that particular IP address, and sending back "packet filtered" icmp messages.
I'm on @Home, and bbnplanet just happened to be the link between my network and aspalliance.com. I called bbnplanet's customer help line at about 2:30 in the afternoon, and was told that they were aware of the problem and working on it. Around 10PM, still couldn't get in, so I called again and was asked to email them a traceroute. I emailed a traceroute from two completely different networks that both stopped at the same router.
Now, here's the funny part. The customer support person emailed me back that the problem was apparently that aspalliance.com had an outstanding bill at network solutions, and she showed me how to view that. What irony! I responded with a scathing letter explaining that since I had the IP address of aspalliance.com, network solutions, and dns, was irrelevant. I then called again, and she was pissed off.
She told me to wait a minute, then came back and explained that I would have to call aspalliance's ISP to find out why bbnplanet was blocking them. Ah, so we admit that we're blocking them? No, she couldn't tell me if they were blocking it, only that I would have to call this other company. I asked "So you know that you're blocking them?" Her response: "Sir, we know everything that we're blocking." My response: "Aren't you the one who just sent me an email claiming that this was over an unpaid network solutions bill?" She didn't have an answer for that, and finally hung up.
Concerned that aspalliance.com might be running an ORS known to spammers, I called the other ISP the next day to warn them. They had no idea why bbnplanet was blocking that host, of course.
Anyway, it's amazing how difficult it is to get in touch with people at these large companies. I had to call dbn.net over a bad router a few weeks ago that was keeping me from getting to my machine in the colo facility. The front-line guy wouldn't talk to me because I "wasn't their customer", yet they were one of three networks that I traversed to reach my destination. I was a customer of a customer of a customer. How in the hell am I going to get @Home to fix that, and how long would that take? It's messed up.
# ping 166.82.12.4
PING 166.82.12.4 (166.82.12.4) from 24.17.218.106 : 56(84) bytes of data.
From h0.ctcom.bbnplanet.net (4.24.66.82): Packet filtered
From h0.ctcom.bbnplanet.net (4.24.66.82): Packet filtered
A traceroute stops at a specific router, returning !X (which corresponds to the "Packet filtered" messages). A call to bbnplanet's support line reveals (after 3 calls) that they are blocking it "for a reason", but they can't tell me more. Allison got snappy and pissy with me.
Anyway, the gist of this is that folks on @Home (at least in my area) cannot see this page.
Inaccurate information must be corrected or deleted, assuming you can prove it's inaccurate and the CRA agrees it's inaccurate, but the CRA is not required to remove accurate data from your file unless it is outdated.
Last I looked, the burden of proof always fell on the company that reported the inaccurate data to the credit bureau. In other words, you dispute an item, and if the credit bureau hasn't received proof from the company in 30 days, it's wiped off your record. It's also wiped off during the intervening time, meaning that you might be able to run back in to the bank and get that loan.
That's how companies work that claim to be able to "fix your credit, no matter how bad." They dispute every single bad item on your credit report, and you have a few weeks to go out and get more credit.
A huge percentage of companies have an IT stategy as follows:
IT staff are expected to deal with the systems not suggest/develop
Management staff talk to all sorts of people and make a decision whenever they think they might be smart
In my experience, this is true far more often than it should be. Most larger companies that I've done work for have an IT department which I can describe only as "castrated", and they are basically forced to implement whatever the rest of the company wants. The opposite of that, which I've also seen, is the BOFH IT department which implements "solutions" without consulting the hapless users who will be forced to take it or leave it.
There has to be a middle ground where IT makes good choices based on user feedback and suggestions. There's a missing dialog.
MS may have a monstrous market share, but I do not believe for a moment it is loyal. If Sony relased a consumer product tomorrow running Linux with a windows alike UI (hack up a "complete" windows desktop) and one of the methods (working properly of course) to run win32 programs do you think anyone would be dismissing it because it didn't run MS Windows (or even how many people would pay an extra $100 on purchase to get said MS Windows)?
Windows adds $50-$75 to the purchase price of a new PC. To create an OS to compete with it, you're going to have to be able to match that price point. The idea that you'll be able to beat it by $100 is absurd (unless your company pays Dell to put your OS on their machines). The idea that you'll be able to match it after doing a ton of custom development is questionable. MS just has a hell of a head start, and a firmly entrenched distribution system, and the VAR price for their OS (98/ME) is (cough cough) reasonable.
I do believe that licensing issues are going to take on a stronger role in the purchase decisions, particularly with the "anti-piracy" "features" of Whistler. I also believe that'll invoke a lawsuit (might do it myself) which will ultimately force MS to quit licensing per-machine. The bottom line is, though, that corporate clients are already growing weary of MS's licensing tactics, and that's one area where Linux is kicking their ass (as well as the collective ass of proprietary Unix).
Sometimes I think that's what really has Ballmer awake at night.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. They got royalties the first time the book was sold. If they want to really hurt Amazon, all they have to do is write/publish books that are so good that people won't want to get rid of them.
Guess it's easier to bitch at Amazon....
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The school has adopted a policy that if turnitin.com catches plagerism you must prove your innocence. I realize its not the court of law but it just seems wrong to me.
Not to mention the level of idiocy that would come up with that policy and still be eligible for a teaching job. For those wondering, it is impossible for you to "prove your innocence", unless you can come up with a comprehensive list of every other term paper every written and show that your paper is different than all of them.
That's why the burden of proof is ultimately on the school to prove that you did cheat. If you did, in fact, copy your paper from someone else, it should be trivial for them to produce the paper that you copied as evidence that they are correct.
Don't be intimidated if they try to make you prove anything. Just go to the school board meeting and get it taken care of at the top level.
Michael
It's a serious question. I'll be able to add this "signature" as a spamassassin rule with a weight of 5 and catch all of these very easily.
Good for me and my customers.
It doesn't take a genius to see that if they don't have money to pay employees for work that's already been completed, then they sure as hell don't have money to pay a lawyer to go after dubious legal claims.
Remember that in a bankruptcy situation (such as the one that this company is apparently headed toward), employees' pay is second in line only to taxes. Even if a lawyer takes this case on contingency and wins, he can't get any money from it until every last paycheck has been cut. He would never see the winnings from the suit.
No lawyer is going to touch that with a ten foot pole. There are plenty of paying customers to be found.
Michael
Ultimately, people within Microsoft must understand that they don't have the skills within their organization to run something this important all by themselves. Look at the last two years:
The first two items would have disabled their whole service. The third just shows that they don't have the competence required to run such an important service. They need to not only have a network of repositories, they need to gracefully bow out of being part of that network.
Michael
the one I found most interesting is that the current EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) suit is an astonishing 24 years old
On the other hand, nobody has died or been injured in the last 24 years because of their suit. There's something to be said for that kind of reliability.
Another good reference is in Chapter 17 of "A History of PI" by Petr Beckman (ISBN 0-88029-418-3). Beckman goes so far as to include a reproduction of the bill.
The bill doesn't actually give any values for PI directly. Rather, it supposes to provide simple formulas for computing the value of PI based on enclosing squares. Here's part of section 1:
"It has been found that the cirular area is to the quadrant of the circumference, as the area of an equilateral rectable is to the square on one side."
And later in section 2:
"By taking the quadrant of the circle's circumference for the linear unit, we fulfill the requirements of both quadrature and rectification of the circle's circumference. Furthermore, it has revealed the ratio of the chord and arc of ninety degrees, which is as seven to eight, and also the ratio of the diagonal and one side of a square, which is as ten to seven, disclosing the fourth important fact, that the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four, and because of these facts and the further fact that the fule in present use fails to work both ways mathematically, it should be discarded as wholly wanting and misleading in practical applications."
Now, there are about three different "values" for PI in there. Dr. Edwin Goodman, who came up with this tripe, was a "circle-squarer", one who thought PI could be computed, well, easily.
It's scary that the guy was a doctor given his profound misunderstanding of simple geometry, and seeming inability to do the simple measurements which would prove his theories wrong.
But this bill is much bigger in folklore than in real life. Some facts regarding it:
1. It was never passed in to law. Ever. It passed unanimously in the House, and was tabled in the Senate, and never voted on there.
2. It doesn't say that PI=3, PI=3.14, or that PI is equal to any other simple number. Rather, it gives a number of methods (all of which are grossly incorrect) that could be used to very easily calculate PI.
3. It never made it into any textbooks that I know of. That was the goal of Dr. Goodman.
4. It did happen in Indiana, 1897, House Bill No. 246
5. Dr. Goodman, in section 3 of the bill, also claims to have previously trisected an angle. The guy was either a fruitcake or a charlatan.
Michael
In this case it looks like the owner of the domain has set up his name server to return 10.0.0.1 for the relevant host.
DNS can't be updated that quickly, normally. They're doing a nasty redirect from the web server:
% telnet www.warnertechnology.com 80 /Computers/Articles/copyright.shtml HTTP/1.1
o pyright.shtml
c les/
copyright.shtml">here</A>.<P>
Trying 207.198.70.137...
Connected to warnertechnology.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET
Host: www.warnertechnology.com
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 21:27:30 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 ApacheJServ/1.0b3
Location: http://10.0.0.1/suspend.html?Computers/Articles/c
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
f3
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>302 Found</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Found</H1>
The document has moved <A HREF="http://10.0.0.1/suspend.html?Computers/Arti
</BODY></HTML>
0
Right, and when Digital Convergence does it, we call it a "click-wrap" license and shit all over them.
DC claimed that there was a license to use a piece of hardware, something which cannot be copyrighted. To make matters worse (for DC), they had sent these items to a large group of people unsolicited. The rest had been given away at Radio Shack.
There's a big difference between a simple piece of hardware and a copyrighted program.
Michael
I don't think they have enough responses for the poll to be statistically valid, anyway. Is someone actually paying for this "report"?
Michael
I guess NASA is in the business of releasing press releases about the use of a new product that they've never even seen work. Fraud? You are a cynic, aren't you.
Not too cynical if you read their web site. I've been watching this company since 1997, and it is very suspicious. It should also be noted that NASA hasn't used it yet, rather they have bought one to test. Big difference, and definitely it shouldn't be seen as an endorsement.
Their web site is really short on technical details, long on hype. Just reading the technical specs that they provide is an interesting exercise. Let's take a quick look:
Memory: 288 MB SDRAM - 8 NS access time 36 chips, each 4 meg x 16 bits 7.2 GB/s throughput (200 MB/s per chip)
"8 NS access time" would normally be written as "133MHz", or PC133 memory. 7.2GB/sec? Give me a break. That number is BS.
FAI to Host: PCI 32 bit 33 MHz, which is 120 MB/s
It might be 120MB/s, but it's also behind the current $1K PC.
External: 50 pin back edge of cord Mini SCSI female connector (physical only) 48 pins directly connected to FPGA, power, and ground 1 pin connected to clock bus 10 nanosecond pin cycle time 4800 Mb/s data rate
Note that now we're using bits instead of bytes to get an extravagantly large number. That's still 600MB/sec, presumably 160MHz SCSI at 32-bits. If so, that's fast.
Eurocard organized as: Bus width: 8x36 pins direct connect to compute FPGAs (array) 2x36 pins direct connect to I/O controller FPGA Bus speed: 10 nanosecond cycle time Aggregate 36 Gb/s bandwidth
Yet another new unit for bandwidth, Gb/s. It's running at 100MHz, you can do the math. Ah, but wait:
Clock: On board 200 MHz
Let's see, 10ns cycle time, 200MHz clock. So the clock is divided by two, and it's really not relevant how fast it's running. Why not get a 1GHz crystal and divide by 10?
Operating system Windows 98 SE
Would someone seriously ship a research oriented computer with Win98? Even if you were sticking with MS products, NT/2K would be the logical choice.
The simple fact is that their web site is short on real facts, long on real hype. It's dumbed down, and includes a lot of numbers like the ones above which have been obfuscated to make them look better. Most of their hardware is standard stuff, I believe that the numbers that they've chosen to use in various descriptions (8 NS, 4800Mb/s, 3.6Gb/s, etc.) were purposely chosen to make it difficult for the average person to see that most of that hardware is the normal stuff that you would get with your $1500 computer.
I hope that they have something here, that it's as good as they say. But to convince technically-minded people like me, they'll have to post a page with no BS, just straight facts. I'm not holding my breath.
Michael
If Pride thinks his music will not show up on the internet, well he is crazy.
He knows it'll show up on the Internet. Actually, on his record company's web site. Look here:
Tennessean Story
If you own the CD, you can get the MP3's from them. Seems bizarre to me.
There's really no other way to put it, but setting your business up for spamming is the rough equivalent of sewing a nice red A into the front of all your garments. While they may get a few customers from it, they will lose far more.
I have to wonder what they're going to do when all your possible ISP's refuse to provide service to you, which should take about a week. Note that you won't be able to get any broadband service ever again. Your company will be forced into using UUNet dialups to get internet access.
Stupid stupid stupid. Please let us know what your company is, then quit.
Michael
I think Richard Stallman should consider using this as the motto of the Free Software Foundation. Heck, any open source endeavor!
Richard Stallman, open source? Someone's throwing rocks at the bee's nest...
If some non-profit organization or the government (as per PBS) were to pay for bandwidth for exceptional/popular sites, how much would it help?
Do I want the government deciding what is "exceptional" or "popular"?
Michael
It may well spell the end of having a quickie in the janitorial closet.
I'm still trying to figure out how some manager at Microsoft can make disparaging comments about Linux, and the press feels that it warrants a story. It doesn't make sense, and this is the second or third time so far this year that it's happened.
The irony of this story is that Microsoft is wanting to lobby the government to do "something" about open source software, hey, I want to do that, too. Only in my case, that "something" is further adoption of OSS, particularly for government projects.
Oh well, Microsoft is once again proving that they see Linux as a threat...
Michael
Which specs are those? Can you point to an official reference?
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#table
Is that "official" enough, moron?
Michael
This is part of the reason that web browsers suck: because people demand that they render broken content "nicely".
Missing </td> and </tr> tags aren't broken, yet Netscape can't render the page. According to the specs, end tags aren't needed on table elements or list elements; it can easily be deduced that if you have a <tr> tag, the previous table row and any of its open columns have ended. If Netscape simply followed the specs I think we'd all be happier.
But the bigger problem is broken HTML. While it may be the author's problem, your browser should render it as best it can. One reason is simply that today's HTML may be considered broken in a few years, and vice versa. At any rate, it's the right thing to do. If IE was the browser that didn't render broken HTML, we'd see all kinds of comments about how stupid that is.
Michael
Are you saying that M$ forgot to pay their $35 this year? And I thought I was cheap!
I think they learned:
(46) expire_date: 20100503|
That's May, 2010. They paid 10 years in advance.
Michael
I had an interesting problem recently. I tried to view the article at aspalliance.com that was linked from a story last week, and I couldn't get the page to come up. A little sleuthing showed that a router at bbnplanet.net was blocking all traffic to that particular IP address, and sending back "packet filtered" icmp messages.
I'm on @Home, and bbnplanet just happened to be the link between my network and aspalliance.com. I called bbnplanet's customer help line at about 2:30 in the afternoon, and was told that they were aware of the problem and working on it. Around 10PM, still couldn't get in, so I called again and was asked to email them a traceroute. I emailed a traceroute from two completely different networks that both stopped at the same router.
Now, here's the funny part. The customer support person emailed me back that the problem was apparently that aspalliance.com had an outstanding bill at network solutions, and she showed me how to view that. What irony! I responded with a scathing letter explaining that since I had the IP address of aspalliance.com, network solutions, and dns, was irrelevant. I then called again, and she was pissed off.
She told me to wait a minute, then came back and explained that I would have to call aspalliance's ISP to find out why bbnplanet was blocking them. Ah, so we admit that we're blocking them? No, she couldn't tell me if they were blocking it, only that I would have to call this other company. I asked "So you know that you're blocking them?" Her response: "Sir, we know everything that we're blocking." My response: "Aren't you the one who just sent me an email claiming that this was over an unpaid network solutions bill?" She didn't have an answer for that, and finally hung up.
Concerned that aspalliance.com might be running an ORS known to spammers, I called the other ISP the next day to warn them. They had no idea why bbnplanet was blocking that host, of course.
Anyway, it's amazing how difficult it is to get in touch with people at these large companies. I had to call dbn.net over a bad router a few weeks ago that was keeping me from getting to my machine in the colo facility. The front-line guy wouldn't talk to me because I "wasn't their customer", yet they were one of three networks that I traversed to reach my destination. I was a customer of a customer of a customer. How in the hell am I going to get @Home to fix that, and how long would that take? It's messed up.
Michael
# ping 166.82.12.4
PING 166.82.12.4 (166.82.12.4) from 24.17.218.106 : 56(84) bytes of data.
From h0.ctcom.bbnplanet.net (4.24.66.82): Packet filtered
From h0.ctcom.bbnplanet.net (4.24.66.82): Packet filtered
A traceroute stops at a specific router, returning !X (which corresponds to the "Packet filtered" messages). A call to bbnplanet's support line reveals (after 3 calls) that they are blocking it "for a reason", but they can't tell me more. Allison got snappy and pissy with me.
Anyway, the gist of this is that folks on @Home (at least in my area) cannot see this page.
Michael
Inaccurate information must be corrected or deleted, assuming you can prove it's inaccurate and the CRA agrees it's inaccurate, but the CRA is not required to remove accurate data from your file unless it is outdated.
Last I looked, the burden of proof always fell on the company that reported the inaccurate data to the credit bureau. In other words, you dispute an item, and if the credit bureau hasn't received proof from the company in 30 days, it's wiped off your record. It's also wiped off during the intervening time, meaning that you might be able to run back in to the bank and get that loan.
That's how companies work that claim to be able to "fix your credit, no matter how bad." They dispute every single bad item on your credit report, and you have a few weeks to go out and get more credit.
Michael
A huge percentage of companies have an IT stategy as follows:
In my experience, this is true far more often than it should be. Most larger companies that I've done work for have an IT department which I can describe only as "castrated", and they are basically forced to implement whatever the rest of the company wants. The opposite of that, which I've also seen, is the BOFH IT department which implements "solutions" without consulting the hapless users who will be forced to take it or leave it.
There has to be a middle ground where IT makes good choices based on user feedback and suggestions. There's a missing dialog.
MS may have a monstrous market share, but I do not believe for a moment it is loyal. If Sony relased a consumer product tomorrow running Linux with a windows alike UI (hack up a "complete" windows desktop) and one of the methods (working properly of course) to run win32 programs do you think anyone would be dismissing it because it didn't run MS Windows (or even how many people would pay an extra $100 on purchase to get said MS Windows)?
Windows adds $50-$75 to the purchase price of a new PC. To create an OS to compete with it, you're going to have to be able to match that price point. The idea that you'll be able to beat it by $100 is absurd (unless your company pays Dell to put your OS on their machines). The idea that you'll be able to match it after doing a ton of custom development is questionable. MS just has a hell of a head start, and a firmly entrenched distribution system, and the VAR price for their OS (98/ME) is (cough cough) reasonable.
I do believe that licensing issues are going to take on a stronger role in the purchase decisions, particularly with the "anti-piracy" "features" of Whistler. I also believe that'll invoke a lawsuit (might do it myself) which will ultimately force MS to quit licensing per-machine. The bottom line is, though, that corporate clients are already growing weary of MS's licensing tactics, and that's one area where Linux is kicking their ass (as well as the collective ass of proprietary Unix).
Sometimes I think that's what really has Ballmer awake at night.
Michael
I agree that some people working for MS are racist, it's a given out of 20,000 people. But Bill Gates is personally named in the lawsuit.
Michael