It's pretty amazing that a company that is making so much money seems to be playing catch up a lot, or perhaps it's that they want in when something catches fire (after at first dismissing it).
While I understand why they would need to do it, this would be disappointing.
I also suspect that it will not bring in quite enough money to support their current collection of content. Perhaps what they might consider first scaling back their content production as a way to cut costs...
IANAL, but I don't think PC Mag or "CW33" read the law. Per Section 4a1 and 4b, it only applies if you're specifically snooping in the data on the computer. It says nothing about normal repair. Not that someone disgruntled couldn't try to make a case out of it...
Agree w/ vanyel.
If you read the original quoted article, you'll see that the original author only wondered out aloud if this would apply to PC repair folks.
From the post:
"It seems obvious that in order to provide a full range of litigation support services, including forensic examination, then you will have to become licensed. But will all vendors, even those who do not perform such examinations, need a license as well?"
This congressional inquiry dovetails nicely with the documentary that features Al Gore, An Incovenient Truth. I recently saw the movie, and while I was aware of the problem of Global Warming, I'm now truly worried that my later years (I'm currently 35) are going to be more about surviving in an even increasingly difficult environment instead of just living. Watching graphs with exponential progressions coupled with comparitive photographs taken over the last 50 years is turly sobering.
There is another angle that you can take in looking at this question: what does your job require you to know? Or perhaps, what do you need to know in order to qualify for a particular position?
I've been in the IT industry for a long time, including as a consultant and I've seen companies of various sizes. I'll never forget one huge financial services firm, which of course had a correspondingly huge IT department (on the order of 1,000 people), had a guy who was in charge of DNS. That's it. This guy probably got paid 6 figures just to manage their DNS. I'm not saying DNS isn't important, but I can't believe it took up 40 hours of work a week. Anyway, that was just an example of one extreme. On the other hand, you could work for a small company that has lots of IT demands like I do, and they need me to know stuff ranging from managing the computers/network/security to the PBX and phone lines.
So if you're not currently employed in IT, do a little research. Find out what kind of company you'd like to work for, and what they want in an IT guy.
PS> If you're in England or at least get Channel 4, check out the IT crowd. It's a pretty funny sitcom on life in IT. If not, you can find episodes on the show's website or on YouTube.
I'm sure folks have noticed that Cisco IP Phones also get placed into quite a few shows that have a high-tech slant to them bordering on sci-fi (think Alias). Sure, it's not something that a typical consumer is going to run out and buy, but I can imagine those people working in large corporations that can afford Cisco IP telephony products wondering how they can cool phones like that.
Ok, about the ISP fees you are right, that is bullshit as google does not get anything of those, but about ads you are completely wrong, Google is an advertising company and they make all their money from advertising. That is their cash cow.
I was just making the point that you don't pay for Gmail, not even via ads. You don't take money out of your pocket and pay it to Google in any way so that you can use Gmail or many of their other applications. Agreed that advertising is Google's cash cow.
All the other cute applications that they make are concieved to attract users (which for them are EYES) to their advertisments. It is like in TV, TV is free ok, but you have the right of getting some quality in the programs.
A Right? You're joking, right? What right do we have to demand quality in TV or Gmail or any other freely provided service. Sure, we can ask. We can plead. But we have no right. We can with PBS, b/c some of our tax dollars go to pay for that, but that's it.
While I totally agree with these comments, there is another point that we need to keep in mind: Gmail is *free*. Remember the phrase 'you get what you pay for'? Well, I believe that in this case you get a whole lot for paying nothing; in fact, you get a pretty kickass application. Sure, a security hole may pop up now and again, but how many major software apps have no security holes? As long as they fix them in due time, it's ok with me.
To the naysayers that argue that you 'pay' for it in ads and ISP fees, those are weak arguments. If you really believe Google is doing such a bad job with Gmail, stop using it.
Hasn't this subject been beaten to death already? Stories about the Internet and gaming being addictive have been written ad nauseum ever since those things became popular. What makes an Internet 'addiction' so different from say, an 'addiction' to Dungeons & Dragons or collecting model cars or modding your car or... Well, you get the point. To me, this is just the media wanting to find something to write about other than hard news.
As long as people continue to exist, they will find and invent new things to obsess about. Personally, I have quite a few things that I spend hours and hours doing (including surfing the Net), but I hardly label them addictions, but instead see them as things I love, things that I'm passionate about. Nothing wrong with that. Call it an addiction, an obsession, whatever. It's not about to cause me to lose my job.
I know... this is off-topic, but I can't help myself. Every time I hear or read "Nintendo", I always think of O'Neill in Stargate SG-1 hilariously substituting "neutrinos" for "nintendos".
FRAISER: Colonel, I can only guess at the effect this type of radiation may have on the human body. I recommend limited exposure, ten, fifteen minutes at most.
DANIEL: Wait a minute, that's not enough time. I mean there has to be some sort of radiation suit or.
O'NEILL: Hey! If you'd been listening you know that nintendos pass through everything.
Agreed. At this point, it's hard to see how Google can be surpassed, but just think about it: are all of your search results exactly or even close to what you thought you would find? Nope. That's why there are at least a half dozen search engine upstarts that are working on the next generation of search technologies. Google has now attained a position like Yahoo where search is hardly their means of survival, but search is still a killer (and necessary) web application and someone else will come along and clean Google's clock.
I can't help thinking that the average person is still pretty clueless about RFID tags and will still be even when there are 25x as many! Will understanding of RFID tags be similar to that of browser cookies? Will the security implications be blown out of proportion in a similar way? Don't get me wrong, I'm all about computer security, but cookies hardly scare me, and so far, RFID tags don't scare me too much. The counter solution should be pretty simple - get an RFID scanner so you know if there are any 'hidden' ones about.
Systemic differences and improvements are what drive the typical gamer's series purchases. Video games, for the most part, try to deliver a REVOLUTION on each upgrade. About the only revolution you could get with a series like Madden is having the guy come up with something original to say (hasn't happened yet), improving the UI, and making the players look more realistic. But there is a time when this effort stalls, because the game of football itself doesn't change enough to keep fans as interested in purchasing an upgrade to a game that they already own.
I agree. I don't really have much desire to spend $40/$50 on a game that really only updates the stats that it draws upon. However, I may be interested in buying a game that had updates that cost say around $10 per year. That way, I cut down on my expenses, get to play a game that has up to date stats and not have to re-learn a new game.
Yep, agreed. I know of folks who had the last book Fedex'ed to them Saturday morning (it was released Fri night at midnight), and then proceeded to spend the *entire* weekend reading the book. Why? Just in case anyone talked about it on Monday morning at work. *sigh*
It was months before I read the book; I didn't find out a thing before I read it either. Yeah, yeah, I read Harry Potter.;-)
Here's a link to the essay that D.J. Bernstein wrote on the 'IPv6 Mess'. He makes some good points that I think are really significant. The fact that IPv6 has not been widely deployed yet is a silent acceptance of the migration nightmare that it would cause.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
Hear! Hear! Thx Rasmus. I still remember one of my co-workers first encouraging me to use PHP for CGI scripting about 5 years ago, and me saying "Nah, Perl works a-ok for me." Well I also used the Bourne Shell for CGI scripting once upon a time too and moved along.
PHP really is the right tool for the job of building websites. It was designed with that in mind, so that's not a slam against Perl in any way.
To be fair, I should really check out Python and Ruby soon... The great thing about PHP now is that it has reached that critical mass where the numbers in users, libraries and tools are large enough to help you with almost anything. So there is that inertia keeping me, and I'm sure many others, from moving onto, or even trying some other language.
Boy, even when you think you have an original idea for a post, someone beats you to it on Slashdot. C'mon people: stop hitting Refresh waiting for new stories to appear! *sigh*
This trend is definitely true in smaller companies. Why spend thousands of dollars on proprietary software when you can get an open source project for free that you can modify to your heart's content? Granted, you're going to spend time and money to make those modifications, but it can be worth it when you get exactly what you want/need.
Compared to 5 to 10 years ago, the number of open source software apps available now is mind-blowing. So much so that whenever we are researching and deploying a new application, we immediately go looking for the open source one. The proprietary version is a last resort.
While this would be quite an accomplishment should it come to reality, and could set the establishment on its ear, I can't help but thinking from browsing through their site that it's still 'vaporware'. Just take a look at the Sponsors page. They're requesting 6 quality 3D Unix machines and a 10-system rendering cluster, among other things.
My users are constantly travelling and plugging into God knows whose networks, and then calling me up and telling me they that our mail server is dead b/c they can't send e-mail. Why they always blame the local IT group first is beyond me... But anyway, it was invariably b/c port 25 was blocked.
Our solution was to create a recipe that they could follow to tunnel their SMTP connection over SSH to our SMTP server. Even your pointy-haired boss can follow it. Include screenshots and make sure to include copious amounts of blame on the hotel network and spammers.
If you're using Windows, you can use PuTTY and set up the forwarding tunnel beforehand too.
Being a geek that loves a story that takes place in a completely new 'world' (ex: Babylon 5, Dune, Star Trek, X-Files, etc.), I'm all about the details, how everything ties together. I loved how it came to be told that Luke and Leia were siblings and that Vader was Luke's father.
So it bugs me a little bit that there were so many inconsistencies between the 1st trilogy (I, II, III) and the 2nd (IV, V, VI). But only a little. I have most of a great story, for which I can make up fixes in my head. I also got to see a stunning visual counterpart to a story (that has more details in the book version, BTW). Plus, we all got some more details that were never hinted at in the original trilogy or the follow-on books/comics.
So think back on the movie and enjoy the main story arcs and try to ignore the little things. Hell, I plan to go see EP III again after finishing the book version!
For those of you looking for an Open Source CMS system, you may also want to consider Xaraya (which sprang out of the PostNuke project). Xaraya is currently closing in on its 1.0 release, and we've been running a site successfully since the 0.9.9 version. Extensibility in the form of modules and hooks feature prominently in Xaraya as well. And if you're still confused about which CMS system to pick (or want to be confused!), take a look at cmsmatrix.org.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty amazing that a company that is making so much money seems to be playing catch up a lot, or perhaps it's that they want in when something catches fire (after at first dismissing it).
While I understand why they would need to do it, this would be disappointing.
I also suspect that it will not bring in quite enough money to support their current collection of content. Perhaps what they might consider first scaling back their content production as a way to cut costs...
IANAL, but I don't think PC Mag or "CW33" read the law. Per Section 4a1 and 4b, it only applies if you're specifically snooping in the data on the computer. It says nothing about normal repair. Not that someone disgruntled couldn't try to make a case out of it...
Agree w/ vanyel. If you read the original quoted article, you'll see that the original author only wondered out aloud if this would apply to PC repair folks. From the post:
Wright also had an essay in Wired magazine in April explaining why he felt they were important and help to spur our imagination.
That same site has some articles describing the Sling stuff. Here's one on the features of the Slingbox.
This congressional inquiry dovetails nicely with the documentary that features Al Gore, An Incovenient Truth. I recently saw the movie, and while I was aware of the problem of Global Warming, I'm now truly worried that my later years (I'm currently 35) are going to be more about surviving in an even increasingly difficult environment instead of just living. Watching graphs with exponential progressions coupled with comparitive photographs taken over the last 50 years is turly sobering.
There is another angle that you can take in looking at this question: what does your job require you to know? Or perhaps, what do you need to know in order to qualify for a particular position?
I've been in the IT industry for a long time, including as a consultant and I've seen companies of various sizes. I'll never forget one huge financial services firm, which of course had a correspondingly huge IT department (on the order of 1,000 people), had a guy who was in charge of DNS. That's it. This guy probably got paid 6 figures just to manage their DNS. I'm not saying DNS isn't important, but I can't believe it took up 40 hours of work a week. Anyway, that was just an example of one extreme. On the other hand, you could work for a small company that has lots of IT demands like I do, and they need me to know stuff ranging from managing the computers/network/security to the PBX and phone lines.
So if you're not currently employed in IT, do a little research. Find out what kind of company you'd like to work for, and what they want in an IT guy.
PS> If you're in England or at least get Channel 4, check out the IT crowd. It's a pretty funny sitcom on life in IT. If not, you can find episodes on the show's website or on YouTube.
I'm sure folks have noticed that Cisco IP Phones also get placed into quite a few shows that have a high-tech slant to them bordering on sci-fi (think Alias). Sure, it's not something that a typical consumer is going to run out and buy, but I can imagine those people working in large corporations that can afford Cisco IP telephony products wondering how they can cool phones like that.
I was just making the point that you don't pay for Gmail, not even via ads. You don't take money out of your pocket and pay it to Google in any way so that you can use Gmail or many of their other applications. Agreed that advertising is Google's cash cow.
All the other cute applications that they make are concieved to attract users (which for them are EYES) to their advertisments. It is like in TV, TV is free ok, but you have the right of getting some quality in the programs.A Right? You're joking, right? What right do we have to demand quality in TV or Gmail or any other freely provided service. Sure, we can ask. We can plead. But we have no right. We can with PBS, b/c some of our tax dollars go to pay for that, but that's it.
While I totally agree with these comments, there is another point that we need to keep in mind: Gmail is *free*. Remember the phrase 'you get what you pay for'? Well, I believe that in this case you get a whole lot for paying nothing; in fact, you get a pretty kickass application. Sure, a security hole may pop up now and again, but how many major software apps have no security holes? As long as they fix them in due time, it's ok with me.
To the naysayers that argue that you 'pay' for it in ads and ISP fees, those are weak arguments. If you really believe Google is doing such a bad job with Gmail, stop using it.
Hasn't this subject been beaten to death already? Stories about the Internet and gaming being addictive have been written ad nauseum ever since those things became popular. What makes an Internet 'addiction' so different from say, an 'addiction' to Dungeons & Dragons or collecting model cars or modding your car or... Well, you get the point. To me, this is just the media wanting to find something to write about other than hard news.
As long as people continue to exist, they will find and invent new things to obsess about. Personally, I have quite a few things that I spend hours and hours doing (including surfing the Net), but I hardly label them addictions, but instead see them as things I love, things that I'm passionate about. Nothing wrong with that. Call it an addiction, an obsession, whatever. It's not about to cause me to lose my job.
I know ... this is off-topic, but I can't help myself. Every time I hear or read "Nintendo", I always think of O'Neill in Stargate SG-1 hilariously substituting "neutrinos" for "nintendos".
Full episode transcipt here.Agreed. At this point, it's hard to see how Google can be surpassed, but just think about it: are all of your search results exactly or even close to what you thought you would find? Nope. That's why there are at least a half dozen search engine upstarts that are working on the next generation of search technologies. Google has now attained a position like Yahoo where search is hardly their means of survival, but search is still a killer (and necessary) web application and someone else will come along and clean Google's clock.
_KJH
I can't help thinking that the average person is still pretty clueless about RFID tags and will still be even when there are 25x as many! Will understanding of RFID tags be similar to that of browser cookies? Will the security implications be blown out of proportion in a similar way? Don't get me wrong, I'm all about computer security, but cookies hardly scare me, and so far, RFID tags don't scare me too much. The counter solution should be pretty simple - get an RFID scanner so you know if there are any 'hidden' ones about.
Systemic differences and improvements are what drive the typical gamer's series purchases. Video games, for the most part, try to deliver a REVOLUTION on each upgrade. About the only revolution you could get with a series like Madden is having the guy come up with something original to say (hasn't happened yet), improving the UI, and making the players look more realistic. But there is a time when this effort stalls, because the game of football itself doesn't change enough to keep fans as interested in purchasing an upgrade to a game that they already own.
I agree. I don't really have much desire to spend $40/$50 on a game that really only updates the stats that it draws upon. However, I may be interested in buying a game that had updates that cost say around $10 per year. That way, I cut down on my expenses, get to play a game that has up to date stats and not have to re-learn a new game.
Yep, agreed. I know of folks who had the last book Fedex'ed to them Saturday morning (it was released Fri night at midnight), and then proceeded to spend the *entire* weekend reading the book. Why? Just in case anyone talked about it on Monday morning at work. *sigh*
It was months before I read the book; I didn't find out a thing before I read it either. Yeah, yeah, I read Harry Potter. ;-)
How sad, considering you can already get this free utility for Win 2k/XP:
i trite/
http://home.insightbb.com/~ryanvm/tinyutilities/v
Here's a link to the essay that D.J. Bernstein wrote on the 'IPv6 Mess'. He makes some good points that I think are really significant. The fact that IPv6 has not been widely deployed yet is a silent acceptance of the migration nightmare that it would cause.
Hear! Hear! Thx Rasmus. I still remember one of my co-workers first encouraging me to use PHP for CGI scripting about 5 years ago, and me saying "Nah, Perl works a-ok for me." Well I also used the Bourne Shell for CGI scripting once upon a time too and moved along.
PHP really is the right tool for the job of building websites. It was designed with that in mind, so that's not a slam against Perl in any way.
To be fair, I should really check out Python and Ruby soon... The great thing about PHP now is that it has reached that critical mass where the numbers in users, libraries and tools are large enough to help you with almost anything. So there is that inertia keeping me, and I'm sure many others, from moving onto, or even trying some other language.
Here's hoping for another 10 years...
Boy, even when you think you have an original idea for a post, someone beats you to it on Slashdot. C'mon people: stop hitting Refresh waiting for new stories to appear! *sigh*
Anyway, for those geeks among us who have missed out on the great Sci-Fi show that is Stargate SG-1, and don't know what the Replicators are, check out this link: http://www.gateworld.net/omnipedia/races/links/rep licators.shtml.
This trend is definitely true in smaller companies. Why spend thousands of dollars on proprietary software when you can get an open source project for free that you can modify to your heart's content? Granted, you're going to spend time and money to make those modifications, but it can be worth it when you get exactly what you want/need.
Compared to 5 to 10 years ago, the number of open source software apps available now is mind-blowing. So much so that whenever we are researching and deploying a new application, we immediately go looking for the open source one. The proprietary version is a last resort.
While this would be quite an accomplishment should it come to reality, and could set the establishment on its ear, I can't help but thinking from browsing through their site that it's still 'vaporware'. Just take a look at the Sponsors page. They're requesting 6 quality 3D Unix machines and a 10-system rendering cluster, among other things.
I wish them the best of luck in their endeavor.
My users are constantly travelling and plugging into God knows whose networks, and then calling me up and telling me they that our mail server is dead b/c they can't send e-mail. Why they always blame the local IT group first is beyond me... But anyway, it was invariably b/c port 25 was blocked.
Our solution was to create a recipe that they could follow to tunnel their SMTP connection over SSH to our SMTP server. Even your pointy-haired boss can follow it. Include screenshots and make sure to include copious amounts of blame on the hotel network and spammers.
If you're using Windows, you can use PuTTY and set up the forwarding tunnel beforehand too.
Being a geek that loves a story that takes place in a completely new 'world' (ex: Babylon 5, Dune, Star Trek, X-Files, etc.), I'm all about the details, how everything ties together. I loved how it came to be told that Luke and Leia were siblings and that Vader was Luke's father.
So it bugs me a little bit that there were so many inconsistencies between the 1st trilogy (I, II, III) and the 2nd (IV, V, VI). But only a little. I have most of a great story, for which I can make up fixes in my head. I also got to see a stunning visual counterpart to a story (that has more details in the book version, BTW). Plus, we all got some more details that were never hinted at in the original trilogy or the follow-on books/comics.
So think back on the movie and enjoy the main story arcs and try to ignore the little things. Hell, I plan to go see EP III again after finishing the book version!
My blood pressure is fine. How's yours? ;-)
For those of you looking for an Open Source CMS system, you may also want to consider Xaraya (which sprang out of the PostNuke project). Xaraya is currently closing in on its 1.0 release, and we've been running a site successfully since the 0.9.9 version. Extensibility in the form of modules and hooks feature prominently in Xaraya as well. And if you're still confused about which CMS system to pick (or want to be confused!), take a look at cmsmatrix.org.