What does it take to get people/organizations to produce quality work?
Simple: An economic imparative to do so.
Business does what's best for business. I hate to sound like Katz but, this is "corpratism"... concepts like right and wrong, good and bad, and even legality are equated to dollars and decimal points. The only things that matter are stock valuations, revenues, and profits. I'm reminded of the "Splode" spoof-commercial from The Truth.
Take the automotive industry for an example; automakers forego a $6 safety device infavor of paying the legal fees in the "statistically infrequent" cases where it would have saved lives. By extention, your life is worth six US dollars. [there are hundreds of examples like this.]
Well, I can look at the source code for most (if not all) of the "Linux software" to see what it's doing... in the MS world, you have to go out of your way to track what the damned installer is blindly overwriting.
800 numbers aren't the only ones to get your number... my former employer once got an order from Bellsouth to tell our Lucent phone switch to honor the "don't display my number" bit. The switch was feed via PRI, so both DNIS and ANI information was always available and delivered to the handset! (New FCC regulations allowed us to turn it back on several years ago.)
The address is also on that report, usually. (Yes, I've had to inspect the 800 billing report for the ISP I used to work for -- we used it to know where we need to put a POP for a certain customer.)
Well, you could always resort to the sort of sledge hammer approach a friend of mine does... he's got a procmail filter rule that trashes everything that doesn't contain a vaild (expected) "To:" field. Of course, you need access to filter your mail at the server side. Any sendmail based system should be able to provide this with ease -- there's even an m4 macro for procmail local mail delivery. (I used to hate that, but I now live by it.)
The only thing that will deter this is a "national" database of spammers for ISPs to consult when creating an account. In most cases, there's very little, if anything, preventing someone from creating a new account seconds after having one canceled. I don't know of any ISPs who keep a list of people they've canceled. And the few that do don't have it tied to the automated account sign-up system.
Maybe a clearing house of Names, addresses, and CC#'s of the deadbeat SOBs sending out the spam would make a dent? (Yes, I'm including the bill to information as well. Go ahead, send your SPAM... people need CC#'s for p0rn!)
It does stipulate designated pager numbers. However, I don't think TCPA will apply as there was no phone call -- it was e-mailed to your phone. [Damn those loopholes!]
Ya' know, that's always bothered me... DVD-Video uses a very destructive method of compressing the video to get super-human compression, but the audio is 100% uncompressed "CD quality" audio (and often, there's more than one stream of it) most of the time. If that doesn't make the "stupid" light flash double time, I don't know what will.
[There are the "hacks" out there to blend MPEG4 video with MP3 audio, but no hardware supports it. (DivX)]
Actually, it doesn't take "a long time". I measure "long time" in days. RAID reconstruction doesn't take more than a few hours -- usually less than 4hrs even on 70G drives.
As for multiple disk failures... a normal RAID 5 array will have parity information for a single drive failure. You can setup more than one parity segment. [There is a distinction most vendors ignore: RAID 5 doesn't have a "parity drive"; the parity information is distributed throughout the array to avoid the write penalty of a single drive.]
You are correct: RAID is not a substitute for backups. RAID only limits your exposure to downtime due to drive failures. There are many other things that can, and do, fail.
It's more complicated than that. I live in NC. When I'm in DC for the weekend or CA on business, I pay DC or CA sales tax. They don't ask me where I'm from; they tax it locally and they're done.
Online sales are more complicated. Depending on individual tax codes (every spec of dirt in this country has it's own laws it seems), taxes may apply to the seller, the buyer, the point of origin (which may be neither), or any combination of these. In NC, I'm supposed to pay taxes on all purchases even if the seller doesn't account for it. (This was recently a hot item. I'll be surprised to see how many people actually pay their "internet" sales tax.)
As someone else mentioned, the online retailer would have to keep up with tax laws for every government in the country. "Offline" retailers don't have to do that so why should online retailers be forced to keep up with it all? To be fair, online stores should only have to perform the same as conventional stores. Then you have the problem of defining "point of origin" -- is that the warehouse(s), the company office(s), the physical location of the web server(s)...
Dude, it's a lot easier to do than all that... ever heard of a "hard link". NTFS supports hard links -- even to files that are open (what bloody idiot designed "sharing".)
Additionally, the player will place it's cached file in %TEMP%... just change %TEMP% to somewhere else -- presumably where there aren't such f***ing stupid sharing restrictions or another machine where the "file sharing" can be disconnected.
The ISP I used to work for had a "T3" (45Mbit link) to MAE-East. It was carried via various people to BTI's fiber entering the building. That OC-3 fiber ran into a Magnum fiber mux which spat out a pair of coax plugs for the DS3 which we pulled (poked, stuffed, and bleed into) 185ft from the telco room to the equipment rack. BTI called it a "low speed OC-3", which was acurate [the card in the Magnum was set to the lowest speed -- they really shouldn't leave those manuals laying around *whistle*]
Bull! I've plugged CSU to CSU hundreds of times. I don't have the lab space _or_ budget for a DMS100 (or a switch simulator.)
And, a T1 is an _analog_ circuit; it merely _carries_ digital data. It's digital on the V.35 side and analog on the RJ45 side.
Re:Some Line Lore (slightly OT)
on
Homebrew S/ADSL
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· Score: 1
A number of companies are starting to install neighborhood boxes that do the copper to fiber conversion out on a pole or in a manhole somewhere near you.
That device is a SLC ("slic") -- Service Line Concentrator. It's actually a very common thing in high density areas like apartment complexes and housing communities. The telco pulls a 50pair trunk in carrying T1s and then splits out 24 channels for each of the T1s -- 24 * 25 == 600 phones. That's much cheaper than dropping 600 pairs.
The real problem is the telco multiplexing beyond 24channels. Bell South has been known to do this in a few places -- I don't think they get away with it anymore:-) Having worked for an ISP, I know Bell South loves to do analog multiplexing; of course, it's physically 24 analog lines at the switch:-( [best speed was 21.6k]
Re:Finally a Solution for Rural Areas
on
Homebrew S/ADSL
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· Score: 1
No no no! You use ARCnet with bailing wire and/or jumper cables:-)
(Note: yes, I've run ARCnet over coat hangers before. And even once ran ethernet over cable TV cable sans terminators:-))
[Disclaimer: I'm the wrong kind of evil to be a lawyer, but I have been known to argue with a few of them.]
"He is transporting individuals electronically to locations in order to facilitate the illegal copying of DVDs. His behavior is analogous to driving someone to a home so that they may burglarize the home."
Not true. This is more closely analogous to telling someone the address of a home to which they then burglarize. URLs are very much like road-side billboards. Pointing someone to a web site containing materials they could use to break the law is no more illegal than selling someone a gun -- unless it can be proven that you are aware of their intent to break the law. It is far easier to suggest (and later prove) the links are a form of protest. AND, 2600 isn't wisking you away to someone else's web site -- you have to click the link.
According to the MPAA, the pirating of DVDs poses a "serious threat" and costs the organization $2.5 billion per year.
I really want to see the supporting logic and finacial analysis in support of such claims. DeCSS is nothing. How much does a DVD-R drive cost? a DVD-R blank? How long does it take to burn a 3.9G DVD-R? Even given the increasing consumer internet access speeds to which a surprisingly few people have access, moving a 4GB movie around is difficult. And there's no economical means to store the digital copy. (Ok, a 4GB DDS-2 [4mm] tape is under 10$) One would assume the professional crook would be a much more serious threat -- they don't care what you put on the disk; they make a near-molecular copy.
When digital VCRs become a common thing, then there will be a problem. HDTV will force this issue. (It'd also be nice to be able to direct record from a DSS system. DishPlayer is a nice start.)
McNelis said without this additional injunction the first one would be "worthless."
I'd have to say first injuction was also worthless, but go right ahead and file away. 2600 has obeyed the first injuction -- they are not hosting, distributing, or publishing the DeCSS source code. They are, however, hosting a page where people can add links to their own content (one pressumes it to be DeCSS, but 2600 hasn't indicated any verification of any kind; I could, for example, add a link to CmdrTaco's resume *grin*) Again, 2600 is only breaking the law if they are distributing DeCSS (this would be in violation of the prior restraining order.) They would be an accessory to a crime if they they had foreknowledge of one's illegal use of DeCSS downloaded by following the link(s) on 2600. But then, so would the site from which the DeCSS program was actually downloaded.
"We are hopeful that consistent with the court's earlier ruling, the activities of the defendant constitute trafficking and the illegal act and the court will stop him from doing it," said Litvack.
That certainly is a liberal definition of "trafficking"... Last time I checked, we still had the right to peaceful protest.
It's illegal to manufacture cocaine. It's illegal to sell cocaine. It's illegal to posses cocaine. But it's perfectly legal for me to tell you where you can go (and/or who to see) to buy some cocaine. The police may harass you, but you cannot be arested and jailed for merely knowing where to obtain cocaine.
Actually, that's not the original linuxchiq image. The waste band is doctored in that image -- "joe boxer" is what's in the original. (not that it matters.)
For various grossly inaccurate definitions of "legitimate", perhaps. AOL has millions upon millions of subscribers. Most of those subscribers fall into the "Complete Moron" bin -- you know, those people who would be better served not having a computer at all (also defined as those who are confused by the "0" and "1" on the power switch.)
ISPs certainly can (and have on several occasions) block e-mail from AOL. I can atest to the amount of calls those ISPs would get from customers.
ORBS is certainly a knock on the door, but an open relay is a small blip on the SPAM horizen --.01% of AOL SPAM due to relays vs. the number of their own SPAM generating subscribers (generally too uneducated to know any better. [I don't want to say stupid as they honestly don't know any better])
Besides, with 95% of all internet SPAM destined for <insert lame "screen name" here>@aol.com, who cares if all their mail servers are open relays. *grin*
Disclaimer: all statistics quoted here are based on nothing but assumed correct.
It has been my experience that postgres is just hideously slow. After removing "time travel" from the database engine, things improved greatly but postgres is still one of the (if not the) slowest SQL engines available. However, postgres is one of the most complete SQL implementations you can find (free and in source form.) It's not a speed demon, nor was it designed to be -- make it work, then make it fast.
MySQL is certainly fast as heck, but it's still missing alot of functionality one takes for granted these days. (Transactions being one of them.) Alot of people (myself included) use MySQL for business class stuff.
As the original question was one of "it cannot fail, EVER"... you're going to have to buy that level of security. There are several commercial databases for Linux that will do what you need -- they are not free (save Sybase.) But I suspect, you aren't concerned about "free". (security, speed of bug resolution, etc.)
What Netpliance is doing is credit card fraud. They have charged for services that where not ordered -- his receipt said $99 + s/h. Second, they are charging for services prior to providing them -- they haven't shipped the i-Opener yet, but they are already charging for ISP service. (They quote 7-10 days for shipping time, so they should know better than to start billing ISP services two days after taking the order.)
Call your credit card company. And then call your local BBB if the credit card company isn't going to do it (or do it anyway.) Your receipt clearly shows what you are to be charged.
Moral of the story: Be careful to whom you give your credit card information.
Slashdot Mirror
- What does it take to get people/organizations to produce quality work?
Simple: An economic imparative to do so.Business does what's best for business. I hate to sound like Katz but, this is "corpratism"... concepts like right and wrong, good and bad, and even legality are equated to dollars and decimal points. The only things that matter are stock valuations, revenues, and profits. I'm reminded of the "Splode" spoof-commercial from The Truth.
Take the automotive industry for an example; automakers forego a $6 safety device infavor of paying the legal fees in the "statistically infrequent" cases where it would have saved lives. By extention, your life is worth six US dollars.
[there are hundreds of examples like this.]
Well, I can look at the source code for most (if not all) of the "Linux software" to see what it's doing... in the MS world, you have to go out of your way to track what the damned installer is blindly overwriting.
800 numbers aren't the only ones to get your number... my former employer once got an order from Bellsouth to tell our Lucent phone switch to honor the "don't display my number" bit. The switch was feed via PRI, so both DNIS and ANI information was always available and delivered to the handset! (New FCC regulations allowed us to turn it back on several years ago.)
The address is also on that report, usually. (Yes, I've had to inspect the 800 billing report for the ISP I used to work for -- we used it to know where we need to put a POP for a certain customer.)
Well, you could always resort to the sort of sledge hammer approach a friend of mine does... he's got a procmail filter rule that trashes everything that doesn't contain a vaild (expected) "To:" field. Of course, you need access to filter your mail at the server side. Any sendmail based system should be able to provide this with ease -- there's even an m4 macro for procmail local mail delivery. (I used to hate that, but I now live by it.)
The only thing that will deter this is a "national" database of spammers for ISPs to consult when creating an account. In most cases, there's very little, if anything, preventing someone from creating a new account seconds after having one canceled. I don't know of any ISPs who keep a list of people they've canceled. And the few that do don't have it tied to the automated account sign-up system.
Maybe a clearing house of Names, addresses, and CC#'s of the deadbeat SOBs sending out the spam would make a dent? (Yes, I'm including the bill to information as well. Go ahead, send your SPAM... people need CC#'s for p0rn!)
It does stipulate designated pager numbers. However, I don't think TCPA will apply as there was no phone call -- it was e-mailed to your phone. [Damn those loopholes!]
Ya' know, that's always bothered me... DVD-Video uses a very destructive method of compressing the video to get super-human compression, but the audio is 100% uncompressed "CD quality" audio (and often, there's more than one stream of it) most of the time. If that doesn't make the "stupid" light flash double time, I don't know what will.
[There are the "hacks" out there to blend MPEG4 video with MP3 audio, but no hardware supports it. (DivX)]
Actually, it doesn't take "a long time". I measure "long time" in days. RAID reconstruction doesn't take more than a few hours -- usually less than 4hrs even on 70G drives.
As for multiple disk failures... a normal RAID 5 array will have parity information for a single drive failure. You can setup more than one parity segment. [There is a distinction most vendors ignore: RAID 5 doesn't have a "parity drive"; the parity information is distributed throughout the array to avoid the write penalty of a single drive.]
You are correct: RAID is not a substitute for backups. RAID only limits your exposure to downtime due to drive failures. There are many other things that can, and do, fail.
Maybe I'm a perfectionist, but that was the first thing I noticed. One would thing SciAm would have enough of a clue to spot that.
It's more complicated than that. I live in NC. When I'm in DC for the weekend or CA on business, I pay DC or CA sales tax. They don't ask me where I'm from; they tax it locally and they're done.
Online sales are more complicated. Depending on individual tax codes (every spec of dirt in this country has it's own laws it seems), taxes may apply to the seller, the buyer, the point of origin (which may be neither), or any combination of these. In NC, I'm supposed to pay taxes on all purchases even if the seller doesn't account for it. (This was recently a hot item. I'll be surprised to see how many people actually pay their "internet" sales tax.)
As someone else mentioned, the online retailer would have to keep up with tax laws for every government in the country. "Offline" retailers don't have to do that so why should online retailers be forced to keep up with it all? To be fair, online stores should only have to perform the same as conventional stores. Then you have the problem of defining "point of origin" -- is that the warehouse(s), the company office(s), the physical location of the web server(s)...
Dude, it's a lot easier to do than all that... ever heard of a "hard link". NTFS supports hard links -- even to files that are open (what bloody idiot designed "sharing".)
Additionally, the player will place it's cached file in %TEMP%... just change %TEMP% to somewhere else -- presumably where there aren't such f***ing stupid sharing restrictions or another machine where the "file sharing" can be disconnected.
Time invested: 15seconds.
Well, for long distance yeah.
The ISP I used to work for had a "T3" (45Mbit link) to MAE-East. It was carried via various people to BTI's fiber entering the building. That OC-3 fiber ran into a Magnum fiber mux which spat out a pair of coax plugs for the DS3 which we pulled (poked, stuffed, and bleed into) 185ft from the telco room to the equipment rack. BTI called it a "low speed OC-3", which was acurate [the card in the Magnum was set to the lowest speed -- they really shouldn't leave those manuals laying around *whistle*]
Bull! I've plugged CSU to CSU hundreds of times. I don't have the lab space _or_ budget for a DMS100 (or a switch simulator.)
And, a T1 is an _analog_ circuit; it merely _carries_ digital data. It's digital on the V.35 side and analog on the RJ45 side.
- A number of companies are starting to install neighborhood boxes that do the copper to fiber conversion out on a pole or in a manhole somewhere near you.
That device is a SLC ("slic") -- Service Line Concentrator. It's actually a very common thing in high density areas like apartment complexes and housing communities. The telco pulls a 50pair trunk in carrying T1s and then splits out 24 channels for each of the T1s -- 24 * 25 == 600 phones. That's much cheaper than dropping 600 pairs.The real problem is the telco multiplexing beyond 24channels. Bell South has been known to do this in a few places -- I don't think they get away with it anymore
No no no! You use ARCnet with bailing wire and/or jumper cables :-)
:-))
(Note: yes, I've run ARCnet over coat hangers before. And even once ran ethernet over cable TV cable sans terminators
- "He is transporting individuals electronically to locations in order to facilitate the illegal copying of DVDs. His behavior is analogous to driving someone to a home so that they may burglarize the home."
Not true. This is more closely analogous to telling someone the address of a home to which they then burglarize. URLs are very much like road-side billboards. Pointing someone to a web site containing materials they could use to break the law is no more illegal than selling someone a gun -- unless it can be proven that you are aware of their intent to break the law. It is far easier to suggest (and later prove) the links are a form of protest. AND, 2600 isn't wisking you away to someone else's web site -- you have to click the link.- According to the MPAA, the pirating of DVDs poses a "serious threat" and costs the organization $2.5 billion per year.
I really want to see the supporting logic and finacial analysis in support of such claims. DeCSS is nothing. How much does a DVD-R drive cost? a DVD-R blank? How long does it take to burn a 3.9G DVD-R? Even given the increasing consumer internet access speeds to which a surprisingly few people have access, moving a 4GB movie around is difficult. And there's no economical means to store the digital copy. (Ok, a 4GB DDS-2 [4mm] tape is under 10$) One would assume the professional crook would be a much more serious threat -- they don't care what you put on the disk; they make a near-molecular copy.When digital VCRs become a common thing, then there will be a problem. HDTV will force this issue. (It'd also be nice to be able to direct record from a DSS system. DishPlayer is a nice start.)
- McNelis said without this additional injunction the first one would be "worthless."
I'd have to say first injuction was also worthless, but go right ahead and file away. 2600 has obeyed the first injuction -- they are not hosting, distributing, or publishing the DeCSS source code. They are, however, hosting a page where people can add links to their own content (one pressumes it to be DeCSS, but 2600 hasn't indicated any verification of any kind; I could, for example, add a link to CmdrTaco's resume *grin*) Again, 2600 is only breaking the law if they are distributing DeCSS (this would be in violation of the prior restraining order.) They would be an accessory to a crime if they they had foreknowledge of one's illegal use of DeCSS downloaded by following the link(s) on 2600. But then, so would the site from which the DeCSS program was actually downloaded.- "We are hopeful that consistent with the court's earlier ruling, the activities of the defendant constitute trafficking and the illegal act and the court will stop him from doing it," said Litvack.
That certainly is a liberal definition of "trafficking"... Last time I checked, we still had the right to peaceful protest.It's illegal to manufacture cocaine. It's illegal to sell cocaine. It's illegal to posses cocaine. But it's perfectly legal for me to tell you where you can go (and/or who to see) to buy some cocaine. The police may harass you, but you cannot be arested and jailed for merely knowing where to obtain cocaine.
Actually, that's not the original linuxchiq image. The waste band is doctored in that image -- "joe boxer" is what's in the original. (not that it matters.)
Nah. She does look familiar tho'. (I suppose it's a few cross-wired neurons.)
:-)
Who's Tux been sleepin' with
For various grossly inaccurate definitions of "legitimate", perhaps. AOL has millions upon millions of subscribers. Most of those subscribers fall into the "Complete Moron" bin -- you know, those people who would be better served not having a computer at all (also defined as those who are confused by the "0" and "1" on the power switch.)
.01% of AOL SPAM due to relays vs. the number of their own SPAM generating subscribers (generally too uneducated to know any better. [I don't want to say stupid as they honestly don't know any better])
ISPs certainly can (and have on several occasions) block e-mail from AOL. I can atest to the amount of calls those ISPs would get from customers.
ORBS is certainly a knock on the door, but an open relay is a small blip on the SPAM horizen --
Besides, with 95% of all internet SPAM destined for <insert lame "screen name" here>@aol.com, who cares if all their mail servers are open relays. *grin*
Disclaimer: all statistics quoted here are based on nothing but assumed correct.
May be, but the linuxchiq is cuter than the bsdgirl :-)
(both jpegs are easy enough to find.)
It has been my experience that postgres is just hideously slow. After removing "time travel" from the database engine, things improved greatly but postgres is still one of the (if not the) slowest SQL engines available. However, postgres is one of the most complete SQL implementations you can find (free and in source form.) It's not a speed demon, nor was it designed to be -- make it work, then make it fast.
MySQL is certainly fast as heck, but it's still missing alot of functionality one takes for granted these days. (Transactions being one of them.) Alot of people (myself included) use MySQL for business class stuff.
As the original question was one of "it cannot fail, EVER"... you're going to have to buy that level of security. There are several commercial databases for Linux that will do what you need -- they are not free (save Sybase.) But I suspect, you aren't concerned about "free". (security, speed of bug resolution, etc.)
What Netpliance is doing is credit card fraud. They have charged for services that where not ordered -- his receipt said $99 + s/h. Second, they are charging for services prior to providing them -- they haven't shipped the i-Opener yet, but they are already charging for ISP service. (They quote 7-10 days for shipping time, so they should know better than to start billing ISP services two days after taking the order.)
Call your credit card company. And then call your local BBB if the credit card company isn't going to do it (or do it anyway.) Your receipt clearly shows what you are to be charged.
Moral of the story: Be careful to whom you give your credit card information.
Yeah... the death penalty for drunk driving. But even that won't stop people.