Despite what you are made to believe, America is not a true democracy. You are given few choices by media, by powerful conglomerates and whatever you can think of and you vote for the lesser of evil. Which one of the candidates your hear fell 100% in-line I'd like to ask you. I voted McCain but hate his "Call it a banana" speech on illegal immigration. But the alternate candidate, i.e., NObama, was much worse in my opinion. Yes I know I could write my vote in but how many of us really do this ? There is no point. And Cynthia McKinney, the screaming black idiot woman from Atlanta for president ??? C'mon, you've got to be kidding me.
After getting this off my chest, I voted in Northern Mexico for intents and purposes. My voting place had 2 electronic voting machines erect in the middle of the voting room. As any geek at heart, I asked the guy who were trying to hand me the forms what these computers are for. HE said, they are for electronic voting but it takes too long of a time to vote on these. I kinda suggested that I want to do that regardless and he said they are already broken. I dunno if he spoke the truth or just to convey me to mark my vote on paper and not to deal with me if the machine somehow crashes or something but as I waitied in the line for about 10 minutes and as long as it took me to fill in my vote, I have not seen anyone voting electronically.
Somebody long before me, made a comment that India nailed this electronic voting with big success years ago. I have one comment about that: When 90% of the population is barely literate to understand what they are voting for, I don't think they have as much worry that the votes may be tampered with. In US, we all know what a joke Diebold machines are and no serious investment in making voting software open source so that the regular Joe the programmer can understand about it and inform justness of it to the masses. Idon;t think this e-voting will happen in my life time and I am just in my forties, not planning to die anytime soon.
this is more of a valuable one-liner than anything else but whomever saw me typing this to a terminal window, wants me to email them the command, so that they can keep it in their arsenal
The inherent reason to allow lotus notes on the i-evil-phone is to penetrate into the corporate IT infrastructure to replace the crackberry. As most of the readers here know, IBM's Lotus Notes still hold a chunky size of enterprise messaging market, to the dismay of Redmond. By allowing Lotus notes, they are making the inroads.
Also whoever thinks Lotus notes has a better UI than any mail app, is insane in my opinion. People use Lotus notes because they have to by corporate policy. When they add it to their i-phones, it is not going to replace the use of mailapp by no means, with the exception of 3 masochistic i-phone owners. Whereas the addition of a better functioning maill front end, might force Apple to revisit theor own mail app, which means money out of Steve the conman's pocket. It is intolerable...
Let's seeeee... what kind of business Sony-Ericson was in ? Hmmm... I think they are in cell phone manufacturing. So, if this demise of wi-fi, despite how unlikely, happens to take place, are they going to be benefiting from the windfall ? I'm not an economist but I think so. Who is releasing this article again ? Sony Ericsson ? Yeah, rrright.
I love these self serving news makers. Go fish, you, less than smart, cry-babies...
Why am I asking this you wonder ? Well, if you have seen it, you most probably read the predictions of the so-called innovative corporation CEOs' views of the 2037 or whatever year far ahead. Every person, is seeing the future as his or her company rulung the electronics world. According to almighty Gates, the surface computer will rule the world, according to CEO of iRobot corp. (forgot his name), there will be a proliferation of home robots; etc. etc. The point I am trying to make is, PC magazine has become the automatic mouth of the advertisers. If you need unbiased reviews of items, it is one of the last places you should look. The issue has a long rhetoric about why they are changing from 22 issuer per year to 12 issues per year. The real reason, people are so much fed up with their kakameme advertising ridden articles, nobody really wants to read it. In the past, I used to look forward to the day that thing dropped in my mailbox in almost a book thickness every other week. Now, it is just a bathroom reading, as I do not like to carry my laptop into the commode. Most of the time, it does not even take a full 10 minutes to go from one end of the magazine to the other.
Walmart PC? Heck, if you expect the world from a $200 pc regardless what OS you run on it, you are sure to be disappointed. I still have an almost 10 years old HP Omnibook laptop. I gave it to my mom for reading her news over the internet and I never hear her complaining how slow the dang thing is, even though it only has a 233 Mhz P-2 processor with 96MB RAM. I don;t understand why this, comparably ultramodern PC for $200 was such a big disappointment.
Seriously considering canceling my subscription to PC Mag and getting a prorated refund.
You wouldn't make it to your second week in my organization. By enforcing "no web mail" policy, you are pushing the users to use the company email system to send and receive personal messages. And god forbid, your infrastructure is MS Exchange, you are more vulnerable than the webmail systems that you are afraid of, let alone opening up your company to be liable to what people say in their personal email messages.
The DRM free content available to download legitimately, usually is not even worth the time you sift thru them to find the one piece that you can barely tolerate among 100s of trash metal bands (I am speaking of music only here but it can be stretched to cover any art form) who thinks louder they play better it is, or some talentless hack, who thinks whatever he/she plays is instant classic.
On the other hand, we have the metallicas for heavy metal and Beatles for classic pieces, yet they are crippled by DRM and I really do not want to waste my time or my money to be able to listen to them on two different platforms, i.e., on my iPod and on my non-itunes ready computer.
Am I asking too much after paying $1 to a single song ? In what justification can the IP owner can ask me to pay for the same thing twice ?
Yes it is a thorny issue. H1B has its upsides and down as any other matter. I, for one, was the holder of those highly coveted 65,000 H1B visas at one time in the past. If I do not have single dime in the dot com boom time in the silicon valley to my name right now, I owe it to that H1B> I came here from Canada, without knowing much, or heck, nothing, about what H1B entails. I was placed in Atlanta GA, at the time where all those people in Silicon Valley, who were making obscene amounts of money on IPOs, were farming their low level, day-to-day operations to where I worked. I was stuck with this company, Syntel, one of the biggest abusers of H1B visa, because the owner/CEO (they are publicly traded) was indian and had a large pool of available candidates. I met with some of these people. Some were sharp and US should be happy to have them in the workforce here but some others I have met were really the bottom of barrel.
US does not have a good system to justify these people. Most "engineers" these H1B abusing companies bring in, are/were brought in to, first learn than contribute to the projects they were supposed to be assisting from the get go. And nobody was saying anything. Mainly because, they needed to fill the desks with warm bodies. In my opinion, lots of these highly coveted H1B positions did not do any good to US economy but was a boon to the abusers of these visa holders, such as Syntel, Tata etc. They were able to fill up their coffers without much effort.
H1B to permanent residency was a good promise as long as it floated. But in my case, less than 3 months before my, so-called, labor certification got approved by the dept. of labor, I got canned by the second company who held my visa and I found myself, facing deportation. Fortunately, I had a girlfriend at the time, wife now, who is a US citizen and we had to take our marriage plans way in advance. So, if these people are really useful and contributing in the positions they hold, I think US should do something to speed up this process and should not hold them tied to the employers. Otherwise, DOL, should have a possibility to can the visas of some and send them back. And before the approval of H1B visas, I think something as substantial as a degree from an accredited foreign college should be a requirement to prevent the abuser companies, bringing in the riff-raff as experts.
Well, as much as I hate M$, I do not understand why a US citizen wants to help a country, who is one of the biggest enemies of the US. If they are using M$ windows, let them use it and let them pay US in licensing costs and what not. Why liberate them them from another US stronghold. Oh I know why: Because Stallman does not care what happens to US. Given the chance, I am sure he had no problem helping the terrorist countries like Libya, Iran and Syria.
In my opinion, one has to choose his/her battles more appropriately and think twice before committing to such a stupid cause.
Considering you can travel from one end of the country to another in less than 2 hours, as well as pretty much flat landscape, broadcasting difficulties is not something of a concern for the Netherlands IMHO.
It is not any more than days, countable by one hand's fingers that we hear another horror story about some institution losing their members'/customers' sensitive information, putting them in the risk of their identity beong stolen, I am not sure which gennius at Amazon though of this idea and thought it would fly. Also, even if you do it, at least do it in privacy of your company, so that the casual script kiddie will not be after the contents of database. But applying for a patent to run the "Big Brother" database, you publicly announce that "I have something of a great interest to those, who are after illicit financial gains". C'mon, let's be real. If this is not just a psychological honey-pot to invite hackers to test their security system, it is the most idiotic idae I have heard in a long time.
Enough is enough. First Leo Laporte takes over the techtv like storm, with his degree in chinese linguistics or some other obscure discipline, along with his wine spectator turned pundit Dvorak. Now the likes of this Jamais Cascio guy, whom I never heard of before today. One look at the two klinked pages, he is nothing but a glorified blogger. Glorified only by likes of/.
Day is 24 hours and I only have few minutes to be spared for functions like eating and sleeping. I can do without reading Jamais and his cohorts./. is getting more and more to my nerves. No wonder digg is gainig up ground (and don't get me started with Kevin Rose. Puhlease)
They must have seen me driving or trying to drive while dialing a number on my new UT Starcom 6700 device's soft phone. Honest to god, I know I am driving worse than a drunk guy, trying to fit my fat fingers into the soft keypad buttons on the touch screen to dial a conference call number while driving.
Okay, I am paying an exorbitant $40 per month for my cable modem, and even though I have not read the TOS, I am sure somewhere in it, it says it is for my private use only and I can not share it with people outside my household or something very similar to that. FON on the other hand, with the financial push from google and skype, is telling people to share their bandwidth for profit, so that more people can use googles and skypes of the cyberspace, without having to pay the ma bell or ma cable. How does it going ot sit with them while the same google and skype are crying foul when net neutrality is shot down in senate/house ?
Google and skype has their own best interest in sight when they are investing in FON, not net access for everyone, socialistic idea. Even though I am a proponent of the net neutrality, I can not justify this FON push. It is noice to be able to access the net everywhere with one single bill I am pying at home but we all live in the real world and know that it ain;t gonna happen. At least not with the current status quo.
As far as microsoft is concerned, they are buying an appliance to provide a dedicated service. As any profit minded company, they should not care what it runs behind the scenes as long as TCO is low on the long run. And linux is known to be a robust OS in the embedded OS arena. So most probably it will run without any problems, meaning less out of pocket costs for m$. What do they care ? Also, they do not have any expertise in networking hardware arena, so it is not against their motto of not to use a product from the competition. I am not sure what's newsworthy about this story ? Slow Friday may be ?
Craig made a good argument when he mentioned the dark fiber but if that fiber does not reach into your home, like it does not to mine (because SBC or AT&T has no incentive to lay fiber into a latino dominant neighborhood) it is a useless fiber for me because I will access that fiber at a crawling DSL or a little better cable modem speeds.
So, if what AT&T spokes-whore says true, when they bust-up the bandwidth charges of M$, Google, Vonage etc, my broadband access fee is going to go dow. Right ? If it is right, I am all for it but knowing that, the hell will freeze over before we see a price drop in the communication charges of any kind, I am not holding out for that. So, it will only serve the telecom providers' coffers. Does it ring an analogy with the raising oil prices and raisin oil company profits thing to anyone ?
As with any other concept which took a nose dive from good to bad, this one also will need a nose dive before it can be fixed for good. Right now, Internet is only a couple of decades old, last few years of which, it has experienced a boom in the number of users.
Most of the internet users are far away off from the slashdot crown when it comes to education and thinking. They are just ignorant cliskers, who buy things, chat with friends and nowadays, use VOIP to cut down their phone bills. They do not know net neutrality from Adam. But when AT&T, Verizon and their cousins start to throttle VOIP bandwidth, their call quality will suffer; or their IM's will get slower, google searches will take forever to load, take your pick. Which is when they will realize something is not up-n-up and start making noise. And after this point, some idiotic government officials, who has a brain cell left behind, working, who want to get re-elected, will listen to the PEOPLE, not google or vonage or anyone else.
Right now, all that net neutrality stakeholders can do is to open up their corporate coffers and pony up some donations to this year's election campaign to some targeted house representatives to block AT&T pact.
If you leave it to him, US don't need no IT personnel. Anything and everything can be managed from India. At the end everything is electrical signals and travel time of signals between india and US is negligibly small. So, everythign managed from india must be honky-dory. Right ?
Well, we, all the REAL people of the IT world know that, it ain't so. How does the goon in india know that the factory workers are doing a impromptu clean up on their steel mill and the temperature went up a few notches unexpectedly before shutting the whole facility down due to what looks like a hazard from the distance of two continents ?
I hate the wise-ass indial executives of the H1-B exploit farms, making every IT operation so easy that even a monkey can do the same function. I am sorry but, until today, I have worked back to back with many indian IT people, here in the states, and witnessed that, they are the best book followers but when it comes to creativity for solutions, nada ! Lights are on but nobody home.
The #%^^@$! spammer jerk has thousands of computers in his bot network and leashed them on BlueSecurity. So far so good. These zombies are mostly on broadband connections, served by a cable or DSL provider.
Isn't it in the TOS of the ISPs to require the end user to keep his/her computer safe from viruses and malware, crippling the provider's network ? If so, why the ISPs shut those zombie machines' network connectivity down ? Yeah, there will be few bystanders who may get nabbed but most of these bystanders will be the geeks who are pushing their broadband connections to the limit and they will contact the ISP and get their connections re-instated. The clueless users, whoch have been own3d by the hacker will have to find someone to clean up their pc's caoghing up some dough which will make them a little more carefull about listening to people when they were told not to open attachments to see the cute dog pictures or accept free product offers from inscrupulous websites.
If you do not hold the ignorant users' feet to the fire, this zombie issue will not come to an end. Yes, we al know that, Redmond's finest operating system is no more than a joke when it comes to security, but if one is buying this crap, they should be ready to keep it safe and secure or find some other platform, let it be mac or linux or what have you.
I for one, am sick and tired of seeing the spammers to go unnoticed while the solution, regardless how brutal it is to the end user, goes unnoticed. Enough is enough !
What credentials are they going to use to verify ?
on
PayPal Goes Mobile
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· Score: 1
I meant to verify that you are actually you, not someone who stole your phone/callerID/ESN etc ? I did not see it anywhere I looked so far. As we all know know, caller ID and ESN are just jokes in the hands of real hackers and can be duplicated without much effort if you have the right hardware. What will prevent this kind of activity of syphooning money out of your account with hacked cell phones or what kind of guarantee are they going to provide to the victims of such activity ??
Well, most hand picked google mail beta participants being the geeks at heart to some degree, I do not think this service will be of much need but having a 100 MB web page at your disposal for quick scratches, is really nice from a free service.
This device was being sold on retail outlets like compussr and such for the past year or so and the reviews are dime a dozen. I am not sure how this article got past the scrutiny of slasdot editors while they slash stories of much better content left and right. He/she must be a good friend to one of the editors here I am thinking {grin}...
Don't you have enough worries in the real world, like running the crown of geekdom, a.k.a., slashdot, so that you are WASTING (with caps) time on a stupid game ? Moreover, you are wasting time crying over something stupid like moderation ? Do you see/read/hear people getting their articles rejected at/. even though most of them have more substance than the open source blabber some pundit spills out daily ?
To WoW, you are a customer. If you do not like how they run their system, you have the power to quit. If not, play by their rules. Not in many places, guests have much to say how the house gets run, as we, the peons, have not much to say what you publish here and what you reject.
There is gutenberg project which is slowly converting Public domain text into the digital platform but doing it w/o violating the copyrights. Google, being the 800 pound gorilla of the digital space, wants to say, "I do whatever I want and you can not do anything about it" which, in my opinion is not right.
Some people before my post said, pc's are not getting any slower and scanners any weaker and this is supposed to happen sooner or later. Well, I beg to differ. One person scanning his own, paid, copyrighted book/document and putting it on P2P is not right to start with, but after all, looking at the percentile of the internet users sucking up everything in their sight are not the people to worry about. Think about the mega-downloaders of the pirated music and movies and books. How many of those have really sat down and watch/listen/read all they downloaded. Not even close to anything comparable to what may happen if google start to offer them. There is not enough hours in a day to both be on the computer and suck up all the media content.
Whereas, if google wanted to offer whatever is in libraries, quite hefty portion of which is still protected by the copyright monstrous laws (which is a subject of aniother discussion but regardless how bad they are, they stand on a legal ground). And do you think if people can look up in google what they are looking for and get their daily fix of reference/literature using the free resources, they still are going to walk to the Borders or B&N and buy the print media. I sure would not, for nothing else than eliminating clutter in my home.
Google, the darling of internet, doing it now, does not make it right. I am against any mega conglomerate like RIAA/MPAA and alikes but this is not the way to deal with those morons. Two wrongs still does not make one right in my books {pun intented}
Slashdot Mirror
Despite what you are made to believe, America is not a true democracy. You are given few choices by media, by powerful conglomerates and whatever you can think of and you vote for the lesser of evil. Which one of the candidates your hear fell 100% in-line I'd like to ask you. I voted McCain but hate his "Call it a banana" speech on illegal immigration. But the alternate candidate, i.e., NObama, was much worse in my opinion. Yes I know I could write my vote in but how many of us really do this ? There is no point. And Cynthia McKinney, the screaming black idiot woman from Atlanta for president ??? C'mon, you've got to be kidding me.
After getting this off my chest, I voted in Northern Mexico for intents and purposes. My voting place had 2 electronic voting machines erect in the middle of the voting room. As any geek at heart, I asked the guy who were trying to hand me the forms what these computers are for. HE said, they are for electronic voting but it takes too long of a time to vote on these. I kinda suggested that I want to do that regardless and he said they are already broken. I dunno if he spoke the truth or just to convey me to mark my vote on paper and not to deal with me if the machine somehow crashes or something but as I waitied in the line for about 10 minutes and as long as it took me to fill in my vote, I have not seen anyone voting electronically.
Somebody long before me, made a comment that India nailed this electronic voting with big success years ago. I have one comment about that: When 90% of the population is barely literate to understand what they are voting for, I don't think they have as much worry that the votes may be tampered with. In US, we all know what a joke Diebold machines are and no serious investment in making voting software open source so that the regular Joe the programmer can understand about it and inform justness of it to the masses. Idon;t think this e-voting will happen in my life time and I am just in my forties, not planning to die anytime soon.
this is more of a valuable one-liner than anything else but whomever saw me typing this to a terminal window, wants me to email them the command, so that they can keep it in their arsenal
# ps -ef | grep <username> | awk {'print $2'} | xargs kill (-9 optionally)
Thank God.
should have been 3 words and read more like :
<b>Help us god !</b>
and I am not religious by any means. But only god can prevent this a$$hole from dipping into my wallet now that he is elected.
The inherent reason to allow lotus notes on the i-evil-phone is to penetrate into the corporate IT infrastructure to replace the crackberry. As most of the readers here know, IBM's Lotus Notes still hold a chunky size of enterprise messaging market, to the dismay of Redmond. By allowing Lotus notes, they are making the inroads.
Also whoever thinks Lotus notes has a better UI than any mail app, is insane in my opinion. People use Lotus notes because they have to by corporate policy. When they add it to their i-phones, it is not going to replace the use of mailapp by no means, with the exception of 3 masochistic i-phone owners. Whereas the addition of a better functioning maill front end, might force Apple to revisit theor own mail app, which means money out of Steve the conman's pocket. It is intolerable...
Let's seeeee... what kind of business Sony-Ericson was in ? Hmmm... I think they are in cell phone manufacturing. So, if this demise of wi-fi, despite how unlikely, happens to take place, are they going to be benefiting from the windfall ? I'm not an economist but I think so. Who is releasing this article again ? Sony Ericsson ? Yeah, rrright.
I love these self serving news makers. Go fish, you, less than smart, cry-babies...
Why am I asking this you wonder ? Well, if you have seen it, you most probably read the predictions of the so-called innovative corporation CEOs' views of the 2037 or whatever year far ahead. Every person, is seeing the future as his or her company rulung the electronics world. According to almighty Gates, the surface computer will rule the world, according to CEO of iRobot corp. (forgot his name), there will be a proliferation of home robots; etc. etc. The point I am trying to make is, PC magazine has become the automatic mouth of the advertisers. If you need unbiased reviews of items, it is one of the last places you should look. The issue has a long rhetoric about why they are changing from 22 issuer per year to 12 issues per year. The real reason, people are so much fed up with their kakameme advertising ridden articles, nobody really wants to read it. In the past, I used to look forward to the day that thing dropped in my mailbox in almost a book thickness every other week. Now, it is just a bathroom reading, as I do not like to carry my laptop into the commode. Most of the time, it does not even take a full 10 minutes to go from one end of the magazine to the other.
Walmart PC? Heck, if you expect the world from a $200 pc regardless what OS you run on it, you are sure to be disappointed. I still have an almost 10 years old HP Omnibook laptop. I gave it to my mom for reading her news over the internet and I never hear her complaining how slow the dang thing is, even though it only has a 233 Mhz P-2 processor with 96MB RAM. I don;t understand why this, comparably ultramodern PC for $200 was such a big disappointment.
Seriously considering canceling my subscription to PC Mag and getting a prorated refund.
You wouldn't make it to your second week in my organization. By enforcing "no web mail" policy, you are pushing the users to use the company email system to send and receive personal messages. And god forbid, your infrastructure is MS Exchange, you are more vulnerable than the webmail systems that you are afraid of, let alone opening up your company to be liable to what people say in their personal email messages.
Time to reevaluate the policies in my opinion.
The DRM free content available to download legitimately, usually is not even worth the time you sift thru them to find the one piece that you can barely tolerate among 100s of trash metal bands (I am speaking of music only here but it can be stretched to cover any art form) who thinks louder they play better it is, or some talentless hack, who thinks whatever he/she plays is instant classic.
On the other hand, we have the metallicas for heavy metal and Beatles for classic pieces, yet they are crippled by DRM and I really do not want to waste my time or my money to be able to listen to them on two different platforms, i.e., on my iPod and on my non-itunes ready computer.
Am I asking too much after paying $1 to a single song ? In what justification can the IP owner can ask me to pay for the same thing twice ?
Yes it is a thorny issue. H1B has its upsides and down as any other matter. I, for one, was the holder of those highly coveted 65,000 H1B visas at one time in the past. If I do not have single dime in the dot com boom time in the silicon valley to my name right now, I owe it to that H1B> I came here from Canada, without knowing much, or heck, nothing, about what H1B entails. I was placed in Atlanta GA, at the time where all those people in Silicon Valley, who were making obscene amounts of money on IPOs, were farming their low level, day-to-day operations to where I worked. I was stuck with this company, Syntel, one of the biggest abusers of H1B visa, because the owner/CEO (they are publicly traded) was indian and had a large pool of available candidates. I met with some of these people. Some were sharp and US should be happy to have them in the workforce here but some others I have met were really the bottom of barrel.
US does not have a good system to justify these people. Most "engineers" these H1B abusing companies bring in, are/were brought in to, first learn than contribute to the projects they were supposed to be assisting from the get go. And nobody was saying anything. Mainly because, they needed to fill the desks with warm bodies. In my opinion, lots of these highly coveted H1B positions did not do any good to US economy but was a boon to the abusers of these visa holders, such as Syntel, Tata etc. They were able to fill up their coffers without much effort.
H1B to permanent residency was a good promise as long as it floated. But in my case, less than 3 months before my, so-called, labor certification got approved by the dept. of labor, I got canned by the second company who held my visa and I found myself, facing deportation. Fortunately, I had a girlfriend at the time, wife now, who is a US citizen and we had to take our marriage plans way in advance. So, if these people are really useful and contributing in the positions they hold, I think US should do something to speed up this process and should not hold them tied to the employers. Otherwise, DOL, should have a possibility to can the visas of some and send them back. And before the approval of H1B visas, I think something as substantial as a degree from an accredited foreign college should be a requirement to prevent the abuser companies, bringing in the riff-raff as experts.
Well, as much as I hate M$, I do not understand why a US citizen wants to help a country, who is one of the biggest enemies of the US. If they are using M$ windows, let them use it and let them pay US in licensing costs and what not. Why liberate them them from another US stronghold. Oh I know why: Because Stallman does not care what happens to US. Given the chance, I am sure he had no problem helping the terrorist countries like Libya, Iran and Syria.
In my opinion, one has to choose his/her battles more appropriately and think twice before committing to such a stupid cause.
Down with Cuba and Cuban communist regime.
Considering you can travel from one end of the country to another in less than 2 hours, as well as pretty much flat landscape, broadcasting difficulties is not something of a concern for the Netherlands IMHO.
It is not any more than days, countable by one hand's fingers that we hear another horror story about some institution losing their members'/customers' sensitive information, putting them in the risk of their identity beong stolen, I am not sure which gennius at Amazon though of this idea and thought it would fly. Also, even if you do it, at least do it in privacy of your company, so that the casual script kiddie will not be after the contents of database. But applying for a patent to run the "Big Brother" database, you publicly announce that "I have something of a great interest to those, who are after illicit financial gains". C'mon, let's be real. If this is not just a psychological honey-pot to invite hackers to test their security system, it is the most idiotic idae I have heard in a long time.
Enough is enough. First Leo Laporte takes over the techtv like storm, with his degree in chinese linguistics or some other obscure discipline, along with his wine spectator turned pundit Dvorak. Now the likes of this Jamais Cascio guy, whom I never heard of before today. One look at the two klinked pages, he is nothing but a glorified blogger. Glorified only by likes of /.
/. is getting more and more to my nerves. No wonder digg is gainig up ground (and don't get me started with Kevin Rose. Puhlease)
Day is 24 hours and I only have few minutes to be spared for functions like eating and sleeping. I can do without reading Jamais and his cohorts.
They must have seen me driving or trying to drive while dialing a number on my new UT Starcom 6700 device's soft phone. Honest to god, I know I am driving worse than a drunk guy, trying to fit my fat fingers into the soft keypad buttons on the touch screen to dial a conference call number while driving.
Okay, I am paying an exorbitant $40 per month for my cable modem, and even though I have not read the TOS, I am sure somewhere in it, it says it is for my private use only and I can not share it with people outside my household or something very similar to that. FON on the other hand, with the financial push from google and skype, is telling people to share their bandwidth for profit, so that more people can use googles and skypes of the cyberspace, without having to pay the ma bell or ma cable. How does it going ot sit with them while the same google and skype are crying foul when net neutrality is shot down in senate/house ?
Google and skype has their own best interest in sight when they are investing in FON, not net access for everyone, socialistic idea. Even though I am a proponent of the net neutrality, I can not justify this FON push. It is noice to be able to access the net everywhere with one single bill I am pying at home but we all live in the real world and know that it ain;t gonna happen. At least not with the current status quo.
As far as microsoft is concerned, they are buying an appliance to provide a dedicated service. As any profit minded company, they should not care what it runs behind the scenes as long as TCO is low on the long run. And linux is known to be a robust OS in the embedded OS arena. So most probably it will run without any problems, meaning less out of pocket costs for m$. What do they care ? Also, they do not have any expertise in networking hardware arena, so it is not against their motto of not to use a product from the competition. I am not sure what's newsworthy about this story ? Slow Friday may be ?
Craig made a good argument when he mentioned the dark fiber but if that fiber does not reach into your home, like it does not to mine (because SBC or AT&T has no incentive to lay fiber into a latino dominant neighborhood) it is a useless fiber for me because I will access that fiber at a crawling DSL or a little better cable modem speeds.
So, if what AT&T spokes-whore says true, when they bust-up the bandwidth charges of M$, Google, Vonage etc, my broadband access fee is going to go dow. Right ? If it is right, I am all for it but knowing that, the hell will freeze over before we see a price drop in the communication charges of any kind, I am not holding out for that. So, it will only serve the telecom providers' coffers. Does it ring an analogy with the raising oil prices and raisin oil company profits thing to anyone ?
As with any other concept which took a nose dive from good to bad, this one also will need a nose dive before it can be fixed for good. Right now, Internet is only a couple of decades old, last few years of which, it has experienced a boom in the number of users.
:)
Most of the internet users are far away off from the slashdot crown when it comes to education and thinking. They are just ignorant cliskers, who buy things, chat with friends and nowadays, use VOIP to cut down their phone bills. They do not know net neutrality from Adam. But when AT&T, Verizon and their cousins start to throttle VOIP bandwidth, their call quality will suffer; or their IM's will get slower, google searches will take forever to load, take your pick. Which is when they will realize something is not up-n-up and start making noise. And after this point, some idiotic government officials, who has a brain cell left behind, working, who want to get re-elected, will listen to the PEOPLE, not google or vonage or anyone else.
Right now, all that net neutrality stakeholders can do is to open up their corporate coffers and pony up some donations to this year's election campaign to some targeted house representatives to block AT&T pact.
Long live the network - as long as you can
If you leave it to him, US don't need no IT personnel. Anything and everything can be managed from India. At the end everything is electrical signals and travel time of signals between india and US is negligibly small. So, everythign managed from india must be honky-dory. Right ?
Well, we, all the REAL people of the IT world know that, it ain't so. How does the goon in india know that the factory workers are doing a impromptu clean up on their steel mill and the temperature went up a few notches unexpectedly before shutting the whole facility down due to what looks like a hazard from the distance of two continents ?
I hate the wise-ass indial executives of the H1-B exploit farms, making every IT operation so easy that even a monkey can do the same function. I am sorry but, until today, I have worked back to back with many indian IT people, here in the states, and witnessed that, they are the best book followers but when it comes to creativity for solutions, nada ! Lights are on but nobody home.
The #%^^@$! spammer jerk has thousands of computers in his bot network and leashed them on BlueSecurity. So far so good. These zombies are mostly on broadband connections, served by a cable or DSL provider.
Isn't it in the TOS of the ISPs to require the end user to keep his/her computer safe from viruses and malware, crippling the provider's network ? If so, why the ISPs shut those zombie machines' network connectivity down ? Yeah, there will be few bystanders who may get nabbed but most of these bystanders will be the geeks who are pushing their broadband connections to the limit and they will contact the ISP and get their connections re-instated. The clueless users, whoch have been own3d by the hacker will have to find someone to clean up their pc's caoghing up some dough which will make them a little more carefull about listening to people when they were told not to open attachments to see the cute dog pictures or accept free product offers from inscrupulous websites.
If you do not hold the ignorant users' feet to the fire, this zombie issue will not come to an end. Yes, we al know that, Redmond's finest operating system is no more than a joke when it comes to security, but if one is buying this crap, they should be ready to keep it safe and secure or find some other platform, let it be mac or linux or what have you.
I for one, am sick and tired of seeing the spammers to go unnoticed while the solution, regardless how brutal it is to the end user, goes unnoticed. Enough is enough !
I meant to verify that you are actually you, not someone who stole your phone/callerID/ESN etc ? I did not see it anywhere I looked so far. As we all know know, caller ID and ESN are just jokes in the hands of real hackers and can be duplicated without much effort if you have the right hardware. What will prevent this kind of activity of syphooning money out of your account with hacked cell phones or what kind of guarantee are they going to provide to the victims of such activity ??
Well, most hand picked google mail beta participants being the geeks at heart to some degree, I do not think this service will be of much need but having a 100 MB web page at your disposal for quick scratches, is really nice from a free service.
This device was being sold on retail outlets like compussr and such for the past year or so and the reviews are dime a dozen. I am not sure how this article got past the scrutiny of slasdot editors while they slash stories of much better content left and right. He/she must be a good friend to one of the editors here I am thinking {grin}...
Don't you have enough worries in the real world, like running the crown of geekdom, a.k.a., slashdot, so that you are WASTING (with caps) time on a stupid game ? Moreover, you are wasting time crying over something stupid like moderation ? Do you see/read/hear people getting their articles rejected at /. even though most of them have more substance than the open source blabber some pundit spills out daily ?
To WoW, you are a customer. If you do not like how they run their system, you have the power to quit. If not, play by their rules. Not in many places, guests have much to say how the house gets run, as we, the peons, have not much to say what you publish here and what you reject.
As many people said, Grow Up !
There is gutenberg project which is slowly converting Public domain text into the digital platform but doing it w/o violating the copyrights. Google, being the 800 pound gorilla of the digital space, wants to say, "I do whatever I want and you can not do anything about it" which, in my opinion is not right.
Some people before my post said, pc's are not getting any slower and scanners any weaker and this is supposed to happen sooner or later. Well, I beg to differ. One person scanning his own, paid, copyrighted book/document and putting it on P2P is not right to start with, but after all, looking at the percentile of the internet users sucking up everything in their sight are not the people to worry about. Think about the mega-downloaders of the pirated music and movies and books. How many of those have really sat down and watch/listen/read all they downloaded. Not even close to anything comparable to what may happen if google start to offer them. There is not enough hours in a day to both be on the computer and suck up all the media content.
Whereas, if google wanted to offer whatever is in libraries, quite hefty portion of which is still protected by the copyright monstrous laws (which is a subject of aniother discussion but regardless how bad they are, they stand on a legal ground). And do you think if people can look up in google what they are looking for and get their daily fix of reference/literature using the free resources, they still are going to walk to the Borders or B&N and buy the print media. I sure would not, for nothing else than eliminating clutter in my home.
Google, the darling of internet, doing it now, does not make it right. I am against any mega conglomerate like RIAA/MPAA and alikes but this is not the way to deal with those morons. Two wrongs still does not make one right in my books {pun intented}