Not everyone registered with the FTC. Here in Indiana, the Attorney General announced our state law(s) is|are more strict and we should retain our state registration. Registering with the FTC might give them a lighter law to deal with.
Overall, I think Kentucky has one of the strongest laws.
Several weeks ago, I got an unsolicited call from Oracle. The person gave their first name but not their last but did tell me they were from Oracle Sales. As soon as I told them it was an unsolicited call, they hung up. I returned the call and it was answered with "Oracle...". The lady told me they had over 300 people so it could have been anyone. I filed it nevertheless (one of the questions was "do you have caller-id and did it capture the phone number of the calling party?" (jeez, like how long are you supposed to retain that? I pulled out my digital camera and sent that along with my complaint) and received followup snailmail to confirm my complaint.
I'm booted on an XP-Pro with built-in SP1 partition and one of the spy software packages has just warned me SimIndiana has overwritten critical Windows files (apparently I don't have the software package configured to warn me before rather than after).
Anyway, I'm in the process of diagnosing what may or may not be problems and how severe they may be.
There's no money in backdated books in the eyes of
[brick-and-mortar] book stores and publishers (speaking as a
former publishing employee). Most people don't realize how
cutthroat the computer book market is; particularly when
compared to "regular" publishing which has no time
barrier(s). "Day and Date" describes when a book is desired
to be on the shelf; i.e., a book is on the shelf the same
day the software is available for purchase. Many people
don't even worry about quality for day-and-date books - they
buy the first ones on the shelf. (these folks are not
descriminating users, but those who think they need to go
through a product step-by-step in order to learn it).
Big question: "Just how long should they keep older versions
and how many of each older version should they keep?"
- this is not a rhetorical question - I'm interested in
seeing what people think makes good sense from a business
sense. And "Well, by making old versions available they're
more likely to have my business for new books." That's
weak. Seriously: how many for each version and how long for each?
Like many industries, the Pareto Principle[1]
rules: "80% of your revenue comes from your top 20% of
sales". So the remaining 20% of your revenue comes from the
other (bottom) 80% of your sales. (this is providing you
haven't picked products so good you don't have this
type of problem.
Back to purchasing books and used books in particular.
First: note that half.com is a spam supporter. If you want
to test this yourself, create a spam trap. Create some
hotmail account and submit that with a purchase at
Half.com. Use that
account for nothing else and log on periodically to keep the
account active. Next: Bookstores. n.b. nearly every time
books are mentioned on/. people say "It's $x on Amazon!"
and|or "It's $y on BN!" These are the same jokers who will
pay $2.00us/gallon for gas because it's the nearest gas
station but driving two blocks further, it's available for
$1.75us/gallon (and when you point this out, they claim they
didn't look down the street and notice the other station.
(so much for being smart enough for programming or observing
details enough to find errors, eh?
Check your local brick-n-mortar stores. Borders piles
their outdated books for a song (even if you are tone deaf)
on a table - it's cheaper for a sale than dealing with
destroying or shipping them back.
Finally, if you are lucky enough to have a CompUSA (we've got one
here in Indianapolis), they've got several hundred titles on
some rotating racks which are 25%-75% off the cover price
for older versions of software.
Finally, go to BookPool:
Search and Compare among 40+ sites, 20,000 sellers,
millions of books!
summary: this is an online shopping 'bot which searches
40+ online bookstores.
If you supply information, it'll include custom shipping
and|or taxes. You can mention
coupons. It'll present information in a ascending order
(cheapest first) with everything
in a table, all broken down.
Where do Amazon or BN rank? Near the top, but frequently not the top.
You'll find other stores whose price + shipping is less than Amazon's gross
price sine shipping - remember, shipping isn't always free for Amazon. So
if a store has a book charge + shipping which is less than Amazon cover
without shipping, you're getting a good deal.
If people are willing to limit themselves to Amazon & BN, they can
email me with the information and I'll gladly order the books on a
cheaper site and keep the difference.
Okay, you've got lots of help and tools. If you can't find it with
anything listed here, well, you must be [xxxxxxxxxx redacted xxxxxxxxxx]
[1]Pareto Principle: this is the "80/20 Rule"
everyone uses but likely doesn't understand 1) there's
actually a formal name for it; and 2) it's eponymous (based
upon someone's name). You have to be careful about tossing
too many terms around [at once] but this is one of those
which is nice to inject into a meeting or presentation.
No, most ISPs don't block 25 because they don't want to deal with the time & effort necessary to educate all of their users strapped to Outhouse and Outhouse Express to switch to a different port.
There's been a lengthy discussion on SPAM-L about this.
My suggestion has been to create a virus which would do it. Turn it loose on Friday, then on Monday all should be switched over.
...to be if they don't make an effort to contain those who "abuse" resources, either by stealing or share them, it will look as though they don't care. And they don't truly understand how things really work. Remember Eisner's (Disney) education a few months ago? He thought "ripping" meant "ripping off". Unless|until these guys loosen their ties so oxygen can begin circulating back up to their brains, they're going to spend a lot of resources (time, money, people) trying to "protect" their assets - without realizing how the real world works.
But if you can hear|see it, you can crack it. And even if it's not a do-gooder trying to crack it as a mission of justice, someone will crack it just for the challenge.
______________________________
The talent-laden Lakers stand to be disbanded as at least three players are eligible for free agency, including Kobe Bryant. Upon hearing this, Cell Block D has made an offer of three cartons of cigarettes, two bars of soap, and an inmate to be named later.
Does SCO still consider lawsuits to be part of their ongoing product line?
After all, they've paid their lawyers, et alia in stock, implying they either believe their stock will go up (highly unlikely) or they'll be bought out to shut them down (more likely).
I've collected a paycheck, one way or another, in almost twenty-five languages (in almost as many years) - the ability to learn new things quickly comes in handy when it comes when someone's got obscure code which needs to be rewritten, fixed, or updated.
Big Tip: It's not the language. It's the coder. If you know several languages and can apply the best one for a particular language, it's that much easier. If a language is best-suited for libraries, use it for libraries, then use other languages which are better for GUIs to do that and call the libraries as needed. 95% of the people in the industry really don't belong in the industry and their code basically sucks when you get a good look at it. The problem is people like it and think they're good at it. Because there are so many requests and so few people who can fill the slots, no filtering is really needed compared to what should be done. It may appear things are better now than they were twenty years ago, but the bottom line isn't all that different.
The truly sad part is if you grabbed a large quantity of people who code for a living and put them in a room and said, "All of the good coders go to this side and all of the bad ones go to that side." Which side do you think all of them will go to?
"You don't have to be good, just good enough."(and that's not good enough)
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that Microsoft squashed NN through a number of maneuvers and sort of knocked it out of first place, right or wrong.
Second, when the web needed to grow wings and move beyond static HTML and client-side code started coming into play, you ended up with EMCAScript. Netscape owned the keys. Netscape and Microsoft weren't able to come to terms, so Microsoft reverse-engineered it (why can't we do that with their code?) and put it into play with their browsers. That kept them on par with NN. Next, they needed to find something a little less "C-like" for the non-programmers who were HTML-literate to jump to server-side scripted pages. Visual Basic is easy. Let's castrate it a bit and mold it into a scripted language. That stays in their VB-like world. Granted, they support server-side JScript (a better term than JavaScript as they aren't really running JavaScript), PERLScript (why do people not spell it like an acronym any more?), PHP, and practically anything else which has been ported to run under IIS.
Welcome to v1.0 of the new scripting language known as SpellCheck.
"difinitive" should be "definitive"
By the same vendor, welcome to a preliminary alpha field test of a semantic analyzyer of "bozo posts".
A definitive answer has nothing to do with an objective question. Perhaps you meant "an objective answer has nothing to do with a subjective question"?
In the future, please don't be in such a hurry to see your postings appear on the first screen; use the [preview] button or the free versions of either pieces of software.
...and some of the other comments in response to this one, it would appear some people are saying, "No blood, no foul."
What if was in the field of pharmaceuticals and the data would be falsified? What would you do if you, family, friend, etc. were subjected to a medication which was passed as a product because of falsified data and severe problems developed? (How early would you go to wait in line to be the first one to sue?)
Along the same lines, what if your "doctor" cheated on a critical test, boards, etc. and you (et al) were diagnosed and treated incorrectly (and painfully)? What if your "mechanic" managed to get a job (by whatever means) and something was either overlooked or he mistakenly broke something which he didn't mean to do because of incompetence?
It can't matter in some situations and not in others.
We had a friend in high school who lacked practically all common sense. He wasn't retarded, feeble, or whatever adjective(s) you want to use. Working the usual fast-food joints, problems would ensue. Drop a piece of meat on the flooor, "oops!", pick it up, and finish making the sandwich. Accidentally drop plastic-handled tongs in the french-fryer. "Jack, where are the tongs?" "oops!". The grease melted the plastic and the plastic ended up clogging some of the conduits. Time to bring in a repair crew, yank everything out & figure out what happened & repair it. Not a cheap process.
"Not that big a deal."
It doesn't matter in some fields and not in others
Be more thorough in your research - it's been known to happen, but fairly rare. Tesla's biographies state he could create ball lightning at will (in demonstrations to others). So far (he lived 1854-1943, so there's been sixty-one years since), no one else has repeated this ability. Considering the gov't confiscated all of his belongings when he died, you'd think that type of knowledge would have slipped out.
Tornados are not fun here in the Midwest (Indiana) but neither will the next earthquake - the New Madrid Fault. California can claim to have all of the earthquakes it wants, but the last time the New Madrid Fault let loose at full strength, the Mississippi River reversed direction for two days and the ground flowed in swells of four-to-five feet high. When California can match those things, we'll talk about whose earthquakes are bigger.
Total Assets
April 30, 2004 October 31,2003
$82,877..........$94,952
It doesn't mean squat when it comes to quarterly earnings, revenue, dividend values, or anything else. There are some exceptions regarding the structures of the figures, but for the most part, if you had numbers (personally) which look like this, you'd almost certainly be filing for bankruptcy!
Yeah, his salary is higher than Gates' salary. Not long ago, Gates' salary was something in the ball park of $650'000. It's the stock which makes them so wealthy. Balmer is probably worth $10B-$15B (and that's a conservative estimate)
Once again, 404. Check your #$#$ links in preview mode before you post your stories. Don't be in such a rush for your material to be made available to everyone else. If your thoughts are that profound, that will remain so in the extra minute or two you take to make your material correct.
Take a look at SpamBayes at SourceForge.net. I use Outhouse, but SpamBayes is a God-send: it's a neural net written in Python (which shouldn't precluding the code to any other platform/product if needed). It sets up two folders: "Junk E-mail" and "Junk Suspects". The Junk E-mail folder becomes more & more accurate over time so there aren't very many FPs as you use it. When you either rescue or delete messages from the suspects list, it adds the proper weighting. It doesn't take very long to be *very* accurate. MailWasher is ok, but once you've used SpamBayes, nothing else will compare.
I've got NT4 and NT4 Server running under MS Virtual PC 2004 (along with a bunch of other stuff - BeOS, Microsoft Bob, MS DOS, 3.1, FreeDOS, etc.) so they're up & running as needed. I get requests periodically from people having problems with a particular OS. Bob is there just for the h%ll of it. Besides, it's in memory of Melinda French, Product Manager; oh, did I forget to mention she's now Melinda Gates?
Slashdot Mirror
Not everyone registered with the FTC. Here in Indiana, the Attorney General announced our state law(s) is|are more strict and we should retain our state registration. Registering with the FTC might give them a lighter law to deal with. Overall, I think Kentucky has one of the strongest laws.
Several weeks ago, I got an unsolicited call from Oracle. The person gave their first name but not their last but did tell me they were from Oracle Sales. As soon as I told them it was an unsolicited call, they hung up. I returned the call and it was answered with "Oracle...". The lady told me they had over 300 people so it could have been anyone. I filed it nevertheless (one of the questions was "do you have caller-id and did it capture the phone number of the calling party?" (jeez, like how long are you supposed to retain that? I pulled out my digital camera and sent that along with my complaint) and received followup snailmail to confirm my complaint.
(nota bene, note well)
I'm booted on an XP-Pro with built-in SP1 partition and one of the spy software packages has just warned me SimIndiana has overwritten critical Windows files (apparently I don't have the software package configured to warn me before rather than after).
Anyway, I'm in the process of diagnosing what may or may not be problems and how severe they may be.
There's no money in backdated books in the eyes of [brick-and-mortar] book stores and publishers (speaking as a former publishing employee). Most people don't realize how cutthroat the computer book market is; particularly when compared to "regular" publishing which has no time barrier(s). "Day and Date" describes when a book is desired to be on the shelf; i.e., a book is on the shelf the same day the software is available for purchase. Many people don't even worry about quality for day-and-date books - they buy the first ones on the shelf. (these folks are not descriminating users, but those who think they need to go through a product step-by-step in order to learn it).
/. people say "It's $x on Amazon!"
and|or "It's $y on BN!" These are the same jokers who will
pay $2.00us/gallon for gas because it's the nearest gas
station but driving two blocks further, it's available for
$1.75us/gallon (and when you point this out, they claim they
didn't look down the street and notice the other station.
(so much for being smart enough for programming or observing
details enough to find errors, eh?
Big question: "Just how long should they keep older versions and how many of each older version should they keep?" - this is not a rhetorical question - I'm interested in seeing what people think makes good sense from a business sense. And "Well, by making old versions available they're more likely to have my business for new books." That's weak. Seriously: how many for each version and how long for each?
Like many industries, the Pareto Principle [1] rules: "80% of your revenue comes from your top 20% of sales". So the remaining 20% of your revenue comes from the other (bottom) 80% of your sales. (this is providing you haven't picked products so good you don't have this type of problem.
Back to purchasing books and used books in particular. First: note that half.com is a spam supporter. If you want to test this yourself, create a spam trap. Create some hotmail account and submit that with a purchase at Half.com. Use that account for nothing else and log on periodically to keep the account active. Next: Bookstores. n.b. nearly every time books are mentioned on
Check your local brick-n-mortar stores. Borders piles their outdated books for a song (even if you are tone deaf) on a table - it's cheaper for a sale than dealing with destroying or shipping them back.
Finally, if you are lucky enough to have a CompUSA (we've got one here in Indianapolis), they've got several hundred titles on some rotating racks which are 25%-75% off the cover price for older versions of software.
Finally, go to BookPool: Search and Compare among 40+ sites, 20,000 sellers, millions of books! summary: this is an online shopping 'bot which searches 40+ online bookstores. If you supply information, it'll include custom shipping and|or taxes. You can mention coupons. It'll present information in a ascending order (cheapest first) with everything in a table, all broken down. Where do Amazon or BN rank? Near the top, but frequently not the top. You'll find other stores whose price + shipping is less than Amazon's gross price sine shipping - remember, shipping isn't always free for Amazon. So if a store has a book charge + shipping which is less than Amazon cover without shipping, you're getting a good deal.
If people are willing to limit themselves to Amazon & BN, they can email me with the information and I'll gladly order the books on a cheaper site and keep the difference.
Okay, you've got lots of help and tools. If you can't find it with anything listed here, well, you must be [xxxxxxxxxx redacted xxxxxxxxxx]
[1]Pareto Principle: this is the "80/20 Rule" everyone uses but likely doesn't understand 1) there's actually a formal name for it; and 2) it's eponymous (based upon someone's name). You have to be careful about tossing too many terms around [at once] but this is one of those which is nice to inject into a meeting or presentation.
So what happens if he wins and is shown to be not guilty? Will Cell Block D still want him?
Peopleware is an excellent recommendation. Another is "The Gold Collar Worker" - it's old (1985), but if you can find it, it's excellent.
You paste muppets?
Or do you mean you're a pastor (church leader) of muppets?
For the uneducated, here's a little diddy:
30's hot
20's nice
10's cold
0's ice
No, most ISPs don't block 25 because they don't want to deal with the time & effort necessary to educate all of their users strapped to Outhouse and Outhouse Express to switch to a different port.
There's been a lengthy discussion on SPAM-L about this.
My suggestion has been to create a virus which would do it. Turn it loose on Friday, then on Monday all should be switched over.
...to be if they don't make an effort to contain those who "abuse" resources, either by stealing or share them, it will look as though they don't care. And they don't truly understand how things really work. Remember Eisner's (Disney) education a few months ago? He thought "ripping" meant "ripping off". Unless|until these guys loosen their ties so oxygen can begin circulating back up to their brains, they're going to spend a lot of resources (time, money, people) trying to "protect" their assets - without realizing how the real world works.
But if you can hear|see it, you can crack it. And even if it's not a do-gooder trying to crack it as a mission of justice, someone will crack it just for the challenge.
______________________________
The talent-laden Lakers stand to be disbanded as at least three players are eligible for free agency, including Kobe Bryant. Upon hearing this, Cell Block D has made an offer of three cartons of cigarettes, two bars of soap, and an inmate to be named later.
Does SCO still consider lawsuits to be part of their ongoing product line?
After all, they've paid their lawyers, et alia in stock, implying they either believe their stock will go up (highly unlikely) or they'll be bought out to shut them down (more likely).
I've collected a paycheck, one way or another, in almost twenty-five languages (in almost as many years) - the ability to learn new things quickly comes in handy when it comes when someone's got obscure code which needs to be rewritten, fixed, or updated.
Big Tip: It's not the language. It's the coder. If you know several languages and can apply the best one for a particular language, it's that much easier. If a language is best-suited for libraries, use it for libraries, then use other languages which are better for GUIs to do that and call the libraries as needed. 95% of the people in the industry really don't belong in the industry and their code basically sucks when you get a good look at it. The problem is people like it and think they're good at it. Because there are so many requests and so few people who can fill the slots, no filtering is really needed compared to what should be done. It may appear things are better now than they were twenty years ago, but the bottom line isn't all that different.
The truly sad part is if you grabbed a large quantity of people who code for a living and put them in a room and said, "All of the good coders go to this side and all of the bad ones go to that side." Which side do you think all of them will go to?
"You don't have to be good, just good enough." (and that's not good enough)
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that Microsoft squashed NN through a number of maneuvers and sort of knocked it out of first place, right or wrong.
Second, when the web needed to grow wings and move beyond static HTML and client-side code started coming into play, you ended up with EMCAScript. Netscape owned the keys. Netscape and Microsoft weren't able to come to terms, so Microsoft reverse-engineered it (why can't we do that with their code?) and put it into play with their browsers. That kept them on par with NN. Next, they needed to find something a little less "C-like" for the non-programmers who were HTML-literate to jump to server-side scripted pages. Visual Basic is easy. Let's castrate it a bit and mold it into a scripted language. That stays in their VB-like world. Granted, they support server-side JScript (a better term than JavaScript as they aren't really running JavaScript), PERLScript (why do people not spell it like an acronym any more?), PHP, and practically anything else which has been ported to run under IIS.
Hmmm.
Good Point.
We'll incorporate it into our next build.
Welcome to v1.0 of the new scripting language known as SpellCheck.
"difinitive" should be "definitive"
By the same vendor, welcome to a preliminary alpha field test of a semantic analyzyer of "bozo posts".
A definitive answer has nothing to do with an objective question.
Perhaps you meant "an objective answer has nothing to do with a subjective question"?
In the future, please don't be in such a hurry to see your postings appear on the first screen; use the [preview] button or the free versions of either pieces of software.
P.S.
Thank-you for playing and come back soon.
...and some of the other comments in response to this one, it would appear some people are saying, "No blood, no foul."
What if was in the field of pharmaceuticals and the data would be falsified? What would you do if you, family, friend, etc. were subjected to a medication which was passed as a product because of falsified data and severe problems developed? (How early would you go to wait in line to be the first one to sue?)
Along the same lines, what if your "doctor" cheated on a critical test, boards, etc. and you (et al) were diagnosed and treated incorrectly (and painfully)? What if your "mechanic" managed to get a job (by whatever means) and something was either overlooked or he mistakenly broke something which he didn't mean to do because of incompetence?
It can't matter in some situations and not in others.
We had a friend in high school who lacked practically all common sense. He wasn't retarded, feeble, or whatever adjective(s) you want to use. Working the usual fast-food joints, problems would ensue. Drop a piece of meat on the flooor, "oops!", pick it up, and finish making the sandwich. Accidentally drop plastic-handled tongs in the french-fryer. "Jack, where are the tongs?" "oops!". The grease melted the plastic and the plastic ended up clogging some of the conduits. Time to bring in a repair crew, yank everything out & figure out what happened & repair it. Not a cheap process.
"Not that big a deal."
It doesn't matter in some fields and not in others
Be more thorough in your research - it's been known to happen, but fairly rare. Tesla's biographies state he could create ball lightning at will (in demonstrations to others). So far (he lived 1854-1943, so there's been sixty-one years since), no one else has repeated this ability. Considering the gov't confiscated all of his belongings when he died, you'd think that type of knowledge would have slipped out.
Tornados are not fun here in the Midwest (Indiana) but neither will the next earthquake - the New Madrid Fault. California can claim to have all of the earthquakes it wants, but the last time the New Madrid Fault let loose at full strength, the Mississippi River reversed direction for two days and the ground flowed in swells of four-to-five feet high. When California can match those things, we'll talk about whose earthquakes are bigger.
"Two wrongs don't make a right but three lefts do."
-Gallagher
Total Assets
April 30, 2004 October 31,2003
$82,877..........$94,952
It doesn't mean squat when it comes to quarterly earnings, revenue, dividend values, or anything else. There are some exceptions regarding the structures of the figures, but for the most part, if you had numbers (personally) which look like this, you'd almost certainly be filing for bankruptcy!
...and I'll say it again:
"Someday, Microsoft will patent the alphabet. And when that happens, we'll find ourselves paying royalties every time we sit down at the keyboard."
Yeah, his salary is higher than Gates' salary. Not long ago, Gates' salary was something in the ball park of $650'000. It's the stock which makes them so wealthy. Balmer is probably worth $10B-$15B (and that's a conservative estimate)
Once again, 404. Check your #$#$ links in preview mode before you post your stories. Don't be in such a rush for your material to be made available to everyone else. If your thoughts are that profound, that will remain so in the extra minute or two you take to make your material correct.
404. (test your links in preview mode before submitting a story)
Take a look at SpamBayes at SourceForge.net. I use Outhouse, but SpamBayes is a God-send: it's a neural net written in Python (which shouldn't precluding the code to any other platform/product if needed). It sets up two folders: "Junk E-mail" and "Junk Suspects". The Junk E-mail folder becomes more & more accurate over time so there aren't very many FPs as you use it. When you either rescue or delete messages from the suspects list, it adds the proper weighting. It doesn't take very long to be *very* accurate. MailWasher is ok, but once you've used SpamBayes, nothing else will compare.
I've got NT4 and NT4 Server running under MS Virtual PC 2004 (along with a bunch of other stuff - BeOS, Microsoft Bob, MS DOS, 3.1, FreeDOS, etc.) so they're up & running as needed. I get requests periodically from people having problems with a particular OS. Bob is there just for the h%ll of it. Besides, it's in memory of Melinda French, Product Manager; oh, did I forget to mention she's now Melinda Gates?