Actually, this is kind of interesting. If they have not gone after cell phone manufacturers and telco's, that would mean their patent is null and void, right?
If I'm not mistaken, you cannot be selective about who you go after with patent issues - its an all or none type of thing.
I'm the same way. When I pull up a site that is Flash (as in no HTML), I walk away - very quickly. I cannot stand it and personally, I think bringing about another product to do the same thing won't really help adoption.
HA!... No, "you dumb". I seriously hope you were joking.
Think about your comment on the business side of things.
Would you attempt to correct a problem yourself if you had a $15k contract due within a few days or would you call your client, tell them you'll be a week late due to the RMA process because of bad motherboards? Or, option 3 - your option - ship the boxes, all bad, and claim ignorance then hope they believe it?
Any sane person would have attempted to solve this on their own or go out and buy new motherboards locally (and get the others RMA'd) than kill a contract like this. Doing something like you recomended is almost a sure fire way to start trouble for your business.
In the long run, I would rather write my own CMS than use someone elses. When I first learned PHP, I wrote my own system. Now that I'm older and less stupid, I realize how many security holes where in the application, but in the 3 years I used it, not one hiccup because it wasn't documented anywhere.
I messed around with Mambo (sorta, kinda, like Drupal) and really didn't like it. I hacked it a little to do what I wanted, but found it wasn't for me.
At the same time, I'm a little at a loss. I'm currently writting an OSS application and while I know there will be security flaws, I'm stuck on what I want to do with the data. Do I encrypt everything, have the option of a global storage DB (my DB, not the one people install the application on), etc... Too many choices and they could all, somehow, become a security issue.
I've purchased 3 CD's in the last 8 years. I have NEVER purchased an MP3 online and I have bought 1 ring tone for my wife (a prof. musician). The kicker is - I don't download music or grab shares from friends.
As soon as I was old enough to realize that the music industry is over charging for their CD's as well as screwing the artists, I got upset. I've also lost interest in a lot of artists because the industry has no problem putting tone deaf idiots on stage even though they doctor the tracks on their CD to make it sound perfect.
The only CD's my wife buys are movie tracks put together by her favorite composers.
I don't go to the youngest or oldest guy. I let the first idiot walk up to me thinking about how much money he can make on me, I let him talk me up and I slowley go from complete idiot to super geek. After about 10 minutes, they realize they're in a situation that they can't get out of and usually end up trying to assist someone else.
Usually after this,
I don't care if you'r young, old, black, white, gay, or whatever - if you don't know what you're talking about and you're about the money, you're not going to help me.
Well, I think its funny how all the people in the US complain that the rates are higher there than the rest of the world.
I'm a US Cit. living in Europe and I pay upwards of $70 between 2 companies for my 768(662 is the actual)/128 Kbps DSL. Here, you pay for the line to the telco and then you pay the ISP for the access to the internet.
For what you have, I would have to pay over $100/mo for...
Funny - just the opposite happened to me at an employer.
Picture working in a call center in the middle of Summer (90 deg F outside) and we had a wind-chill factor INSIDE... People where covered in blankets and wearing gloves. Management complained to the building owner that the cooling was way too much. They brought in an engineer that setup historical temp boxes. Showed the cooling was right on and couldn't figure out why we where all cold - called us crazy and walked away.
2 weeks later, space heaters and electric blankets started piling up inside. The building owner threatened to cut cords on anything they found plugged in but did agree to call in other engineers. They brought in a PhD from a local school. After 20 minutes of looking over the data from the last engineer, a look at the building plans and a quick walk around, he said he would tell them what the problem was, but he wanted to bring in classes to show them how things that look right are not.
Turns out, the air ducts where misplaced in all the wrong spots with too many intakes. This caused sweeping wind-chills from one end of the call center to the other.
You've really got it easy, as does everyone in the US. I've been complaining about our drivers system for years. Here in Europe, you don't drive until you're 18 and even then, you must take professional driving courses for a very long time - all at your cost. The average person that works full time, etc, will spend approx 2 years learning how to drive before they are allowed to drive on their own.
I support this system in the States. Hell, I supported it when I was a kid before I learned how to drive. Now, at the same time, I wish the US would adopt the same type of speeds that Germany has.
A place that I worked at, the sys admin would keep a hiking backpack in his office. When people would ask what it was for, he would say it was for when something went wrong at the office. Everyone always laughed about how he was just ready for the next big one or something.
This went on for awhile until the new manager decided that he wanted something off of backup instead of being careful. Right in front of the manager, he grabbed his hiking backpack and walked into our MDF with a "See you in 2 days!" He setup an entire camp in the MDF, complete with 1 man tent, sleeping back (ear protection), clothes line between the racks and everything. The only reason he came out was to eat or leak. The manager got the idea and has been more careful ever since. [note: this was a very OLD system that took forever to restore]
Mk, so the webservers run themselves with the 80 million plus hits a month? The DBs run themselves with scripts and the code updates to the site magically happen, right? Oh yea, the billing & advertising are scripts too, right? OH! and the personal replies to reporters/customers and getting high-up people to respond to comments are done by pixies, right?
Do you understand what it takes to run a website, let alone one with this much traffic or hardware? Now, if you can remotely answer "yes" to that, do you know how to keep up with the demands of advertisers, customers and any company that wants to talk to you with such a limited staff?
Oh, wait, you're talking about the volunteers that help out, right? Yea, they don't have other things to do that are more important.... They can read each post twice to make sure its something you're gonna like...
Ok, I'm normally not an ass, but this just twisted me the wrong way. A manager said something to me when I was young and stupid and it has stuck with me: "Ignorance is bliss."
WHy[sic] not change it so two edtiors need to approve a story instead of just one?
Ok, at this point, you're starting to get into the whole PHB type of situation. That would be like me requesting to a coworker to look at a posting to Slashdot to make sure someone agreed with the post. Not only does it take extra time that is not needed, but the site ops have much more to do than double check each other. The quality MAY go up, but the volume will go down. Don't know about you, but I hit the site several times a day looking for the next story.
Or, why not only have one external link / day for submitters?
I personally do not pay attention to the links people put up for their name on a story. To be honest, I never hovered over a link to check it - I always thought it was their user profile. Now that I see what it is, a quick scan of links on the main page shows nothing that interests me. It also shows that some people just don't care about the link and don't use it.
If I want to know about someone, I try to contact them and let them know. There is a developer in Oregon that I found through Slashdot - I liked his posts, saw some code on his personal website link and emailed him from there (although he thought I was crazy). I'm still in a situation where I would love to hire Eric (ha - I said his name!) but due to various issues I can't yet. To get back on topic, if I want to know about someone, I'll click their link, otherwise I don't care how often that link comes up in front of me. I don't have to follow it if I don't care.
This is pretty interesting - I too have to deal with AFN. Oddly enough, I'm watching TV while reading/. and AFN has interrupted the normal programming and forced me to watch the Pentegon channel for coverage of the President at the VFW conference or whatever the heck it is. I'm pretty damn annoyed as well.
With all of the above hardware running, I don't need to turn the heat on in that room and you can hear the hum from a block away. Now the new computer is coming and she's getting upset - nevermind the fact that I've chosen a lot of the components specifically due to how quiet they are. (Low noise HD's, case has rubber mounts for everything plus 2 fans that I can control the speed, no noise power supply, etc...)
I think the biggest problem comes from her not understanding a server OS. She sees these servers running 24/7 but never sees me hook a monitor up and play with it. She occasionally will see me with what she calls a DOS screen, but thats it. Although I have recently gotten sneeky and turned off the SAMBA shared drive she uses for playing music - she doesn't like that...
You'd really have a blast here in Germany then. The people here tend to ride right up on your butt to get you to move out of the way - and they don't break when you tap your breaks. If you slow down, they flash their lights, honk and get closer - its absolutely crazy.
If you want the sob story, I can lay it on nice'n'thick: 7 months of unemployment. Throwing away 90% of what I owned, selling 8% and packing myself, my dog & the last 2% in my car to make a frantic 3 day cross country drive then spending 7 days homeless living out of my car.
Now, I left out the phone calls to request info on rooms for rent that included one older gent calling me a druggie and a whole lot of other names when I said I didn't have the 3 months worth of upfront rent he wanted for a trashed out room. Oh yea, and the landlord that I rented from moving out in the middle of the night only to have all the utilities turned off 2 days later... Not a fun experience and all due to a company laying me off. That has been the most humbling experience of my life.
I'm STILL paying off debt from 3 years ago.
There's more, but I don't think I need to go there.
With more bandwidth, we get bigger video. While the OS can handle it, when you start maxing out the new 1Gbps NICs, the OS will probably have some issues - especially when someone is doing several things.
Don't know about you, but I've currently got half my resources tied up in various things I'm doing right now. Watching a halfway decent video would make my laptop crawl - and no, I don't mean a DVD.
Computers are going faster, we are starting to put more RAM in automatically. In the past few years, I've seen the average RAM in a "starter system" go from 128 to 256 and now I'm starting to see 512 on a few sites. Personally, I'm building a rig that will have 4G worth. But, in the long run, its how the OS handles the memory usage, etc.
Personally, I think it will be more of a hardware issue than a software issue. For instance, certain calculators these days are more powerful than the Lunar landers that NASA used.
I think he's making these types of comments because he was from a time when you really had to be creative when you developed software. Now days, its normal for some application to take up a quarter or half of your memory (depending on what type of system you have). Nasa would have a cow, a heard of kittens and maybe a few geese if they where required to run the space shuttles programs on just 20mb, which is more than the Lunar modules had.
I was 6 months away from buying a Hummer H1 and putting a very large downpayment on a house I was going to build. By the time I could cash in, used toilet paper was worth more than my options. ($150'ish vs $1.50'ish)
Anyway, while I'm a little upset at the company I used to work for, I can't get too upset because I wouldn't have met my wife, I wouldn't be living in Germany on a 3 year honeymoon, etc...
Unless your view of education is skewed to favor completely false information - they're not educating. They're specifically scaring the ignorant. If they put up a sign that says "Almost every website you visit has your IP address - by the way, here is yours:...." then I would call it educating.
The notice: The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners.
There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them.
YOUR IP ADDRESS IS 217.188.2xx.xxx AND HAS BEEN LOGGED. Don't think you can't get caught. You are not anonymous.
is specifically designed to scare someone. Those who are stupid & ignorant will probably dump their MP3's when they see this notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is kind of interesting. If they have not gone after cell phone manufacturers and telco's, that would mean their patent is null and void, right?
If I'm not mistaken, you cannot be selective about who you go after with patent issues - its an all or none type of thing.
I'm the same way. When I pull up a site that is Flash (as in no HTML), I walk away - very quickly. I cannot stand it and personally, I think bringing about another product to do the same thing won't really help adoption.
Don't worry, my eyes almost got burned out of my skull looking at this thing...
HA! ... No, "you dumb". I seriously hope you were joking.
Think about your comment on the business side of things.
Would you attempt to correct a problem yourself if you had a $15k contract due within a few days or would you call your client, tell them you'll be a week late due to the RMA process because of bad motherboards? Or, option 3 - your option - ship the boxes, all bad, and claim ignorance then hope they believe it?
Any sane person would have attempted to solve this on their own or go out and buy new motherboards locally (and get the others RMA'd) than kill a contract like this. Doing something like you recomended is almost a sure fire way to start trouble for your business.
Couldn't agree more.
In the long run, I would rather write my own CMS than use someone elses. When I first learned PHP, I wrote my own system. Now that I'm older and less stupid, I realize how many security holes where in the application, but in the 3 years I used it, not one hiccup because it wasn't documented anywhere.
I messed around with Mambo (sorta, kinda, like Drupal) and really didn't like it. I hacked it a little to do what I wanted, but found it wasn't for me.
At the same time, I'm a little at a loss. I'm currently writting an OSS application and while I know there will be security flaws, I'm stuck on what I want to do with the data. Do I encrypt everything, have the option of a global storage DB (my DB, not the one people install the application on), etc... Too many choices and they could all, somehow, become a security issue.
HA!
I've purchased 3 CD's in the last 8 years. I have NEVER purchased an MP3 online and I have bought 1 ring tone for my wife (a prof. musician). The kicker is - I don't download music or grab shares from friends.
As soon as I was old enough to realize that the music industry is over charging for their CD's as well as screwing the artists, I got upset. I've also lost interest in a lot of artists because the industry has no problem putting tone deaf idiots on stage even though they doctor the tracks on their CD to make it sound perfect.
The only CD's my wife buys are movie tracks put together by her favorite composers.
I don't go to the youngest or oldest guy. I let the first idiot walk up to me thinking about how much money he can make on me, I let him talk me up and I slowley go from complete idiot to super geek. After about 10 minutes, they realize they're in a situation that they can't get out of and usually end up trying to assist someone else.
Usually after this,
I don't care if you'r young, old, black, white, gay, or whatever - if you don't know what you're talking about and you're about the money, you're not going to help me.
Well, I think its funny how all the people in the US complain that the rates are higher there than the rest of the world.
I'm a US Cit. living in Europe and I pay upwards of $70 between 2 companies for my 768(662 is the actual)/128 Kbps DSL. Here, you pay for the line to the telco and then you pay the ISP for the access to the internet.
For what you have, I would have to pay over $100/mo for...
Building was owned by Tyco - that should explain it.
Funny - just the opposite happened to me at an employer.
Picture working in a call center in the middle of Summer (90 deg F outside) and we had a wind-chill factor INSIDE... People where covered in blankets and wearing gloves. Management complained to the building owner that the cooling was way too much. They brought in an engineer that setup historical temp boxes. Showed the cooling was right on and couldn't figure out why we where all cold - called us crazy and walked away.
2 weeks later, space heaters and electric blankets started piling up inside. The building owner threatened to cut cords on anything they found plugged in but did agree to call in other engineers. They brought in a PhD from a local school. After 20 minutes of looking over the data from the last engineer, a look at the building plans and a quick walk around, he said he would tell them what the problem was, but he wanted to bring in classes to show them how things that look right are not.
Turns out, the air ducts where misplaced in all the wrong spots with too many intakes. This caused sweeping wind-chills from one end of the call center to the other.
*Yes mods, I know I'm off topic*
You've really got it easy, as does everyone in the US. I've been complaining about our drivers system for years. Here in Europe, you don't drive until you're 18 and even then, you must take professional driving courses for a very long time - all at your cost. The average person that works full time, etc, will spend approx 2 years learning how to drive before they are allowed to drive on their own.
I support this system in the States. Hell, I supported it when I was a kid before I learned how to drive. Now, at the same time, I wish the US would adopt the same type of speeds that Germany has.
A place that I worked at, the sys admin would keep a hiking backpack in his office. When people would ask what it was for, he would say it was for when something went wrong at the office. Everyone always laughed about how he was just ready for the next big one or something.
This went on for awhile until the new manager decided that he wanted something off of backup instead of being careful. Right in front of the manager, he grabbed his hiking backpack and walked into our MDF with a "See you in 2 days!" He setup an entire camp in the MDF, complete with 1 man tent, sleeping back (ear protection), clothes line between the racks and everything. The only reason he came out was to eat or leak. The manager got the idea and has been more careful ever since. [note: this was a very OLD system that took forever to restore]
Mk, so the webservers run themselves with the 80 million plus hits a month? The DBs run themselves with scripts and the code updates to the site magically happen, right? Oh yea, the billing & advertising are scripts too, right? OH! and the personal replies to reporters/customers and getting high-up people to respond to comments are done by pixies, right?
Do you understand what it takes to run a website, let alone one with this much traffic or hardware? Now, if you can remotely answer "yes" to that, do you know how to keep up with the demands of advertisers, customers and any company that wants to talk to you with such a limited staff?
Oh, wait, you're talking about the volunteers that help out, right? Yea, they don't have other things to do that are more important.... They can read each post twice to make sure its something you're gonna like...
Ok, I'm normally not an ass, but this just twisted me the wrong way. A manager said something to me when I was young and stupid and it has stuck with me: "Ignorance is bliss."
WHy[sic] not change it so two edtiors need to approve a story instead of just one?
Ok, at this point, you're starting to get into the whole PHB type of situation. That would be like me requesting to a coworker to look at a posting to Slashdot to make sure someone agreed with the post. Not only does it take extra time that is not needed, but the site ops have much more to do than double check each other. The quality MAY go up, but the volume will go down. Don't know about you, but I hit the site several times a day looking for the next story.
Or, why not only have one external link / day for submitters?
I personally do not pay attention to the links people put up for their name on a story. To be honest, I never hovered over a link to check it - I always thought it was their user profile. Now that I see what it is, a quick scan of links on the main page shows nothing that interests me. It also shows that some people just don't care about the link and don't use it.
If I want to know about someone, I try to contact them and let them know. There is a developer in Oregon that I found through Slashdot - I liked his posts, saw some code on his personal website link and emailed him from there (although he thought I was crazy). I'm still in a situation where I would love to hire Eric (ha - I said his name!) but due to various issues I can't yet. To get back on topic, if I want to know about someone, I'll click their link, otherwise I don't care how often that link comes up in front of me. I don't have to follow it if I don't care.
This is pretty interesting - I too have to deal with AFN. Oddly enough, I'm watching TV while reading /. and AFN has interrupted the normal programming and forced me to watch the Pentegon channel for coverage of the President at the VFW conference or whatever the heck it is. I'm pretty damn annoyed as well.
She's upset because of the amount of hardware I have:
2 FreeBSD boxes
1 Win 2k Adv Server
1 Laptop
2 Cisco Routers (CCNA Study)
1 Cisco Switch (CCNA Study)
With all of the above hardware running, I don't need to turn the heat on in that room and you can hear the hum from a block away. Now the new computer is coming and she's getting upset - nevermind the fact that I've chosen a lot of the components specifically due to how quiet they are. (Low noise HD's, case has rubber mounts for everything plus 2 fans that I can control the speed, no noise power supply, etc...)
I think the biggest problem comes from her not understanding a server OS. She sees these servers running 24/7 but never sees me hook a monitor up and play with it. She occasionally will see me with what she calls a DOS screen, but thats it. Although I have recently gotten sneeky and turned off the SAMBA shared drive she uses for playing music - she doesn't like that...
You'd really have a blast here in Germany then. The people here tend to ride right up on your butt to get you to move out of the way - and they don't break when you tap your breaks. If you slow down, they flash their lights, honk and get closer - its absolutely crazy.
I knew I would be off (because I'm too lazy to look up the real figures), but that is pretty interesting.
Contract out. I was lazy back in the day - I have since learned...
"It's been 8 seconds since you hit 'reply'." BLAH! I can't help I can type fast!
It wasn't meant as a sob story...
If you want the sob story, I can lay it on nice'n'thick: 7 months of unemployment. Throwing away 90% of what I owned, selling 8% and packing myself, my dog & the last 2% in my car to make a frantic 3 day cross country drive then spending 7 days homeless living out of my car.
Now, I left out the phone calls to request info on rooms for rent that included one older gent calling me a druggie and a whole lot of other names when I said I didn't have the 3 months worth of upfront rent he wanted for a trashed out room. Oh yea, and the landlord that I rented from moving out in the middle of the night only to have all the utilities turned off 2 days later... Not a fun experience and all due to a company laying me off. That has been the most humbling experience of my life.
I'm STILL paying off debt from 3 years ago.
There's more, but I don't think I need to go there.
And I don't consider my car as my penis extension though.
That was good... Made me laugh pretty damn loud at work, had to hide from my boss - thanks!
While I know this was a Troll type comment, I'll go ahead and bite.
The Hummer and house examples where to give an approximate value on my stocks while, at the same time, showing what I would do with the funds.
Half my options where exercisable within 6 months and where valued at $225k.
Oh, and my "SUV" can drive through your river.
I'm going to both agree and disagree.
With more bandwidth, we get bigger video. While the OS can handle it, when you start maxing out the new 1Gbps NICs, the OS will probably have some issues - especially when someone is doing several things.
Don't know about you, but I've currently got half my resources tied up in various things I'm doing right now. Watching a halfway decent video would make my laptop crawl - and no, I don't mean a DVD.
Computers are going faster, we are starting to put more RAM in automatically. In the past few years, I've seen the average RAM in a "starter system" go from 128 to 256 and now I'm starting to see 512 on a few sites. Personally, I'm building a rig that will have 4G worth. But, in the long run, its how the OS handles the memory usage, etc.
Personally, I think it will be more of a hardware issue than a software issue. For instance, certain calculators these days are more powerful than the Lunar landers that NASA used.
I think he's making these types of comments because he was from a time when you really had to be creative when you developed software. Now days, its normal for some application to take up a quarter or half of your memory (depending on what type of system you have). Nasa would have a cow, a heard of kittens and maybe a few geese if they where required to run the space shuttles programs on just 20mb, which is more than the Lunar modules had.
I was 6 months away from buying a Hummer H1 and putting a very large downpayment on a house I was going to build. By the time I could cash in, used toilet paper was worth more than my options. ($150'ish vs $1.50'ish)
Anyway, while I'm a little upset at the company I used to work for, I can't get too upset because I wouldn't have met my wife, I wouldn't be living in Germany on a 3 year honeymoon, etc...
No, I wouldn't call it educating people.
...." then I would call it educating.
Unless your view of education is skewed to favor completely false information - they're not educating. They're specifically scaring the ignorant. If they put up a sign that says "Almost every website you visit has your IP address - by the way, here is yours:
The notice:
The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed
that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal.
Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files
using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is
prosecuted by copyright owners.
There are legal services for downloading music and movies.
This service is not one of them.
YOUR IP ADDRESS IS 217.188.2xx.xxx AND HAS BEEN LOGGED.
Don't think you can't get caught. You are not anonymous.
is specifically designed to scare someone. Those who are stupid & ignorant will probably dump their MP3's when they see this notice.