ive heard the same said about public transportation a few times
I don't know about most areas, but in Southeastern Pennsylvania, SEPTA can never make as much money in fares as it needs to spend. Even with generous government subsidies, it has massive budget shortfalls year after year after year.
Say what you will about the benefits of a public transportation system, I realize there is an argument that can be made on both sides. But realize that it is a public welfare system. No different than a public WiFi network.
Just don't delete your old mail, and drop all your spare papers in a separate box instead of a waste basket.
How nice for you that you don't work at a company that has an email retention policy that is automatically enforced. Many large companies do today. If I leave an email in any folder for more than 60 days, it's automatically deleted. Oh, and my deleted bin in Outlook is cleaned out every night automatically. Oh, and corporate has disabled the use of PST files. Of course, all these things can be bypassed by a very technical user, but the point is, many corporations have spent a lot of time and energy on automatically not keeping things.
In cases like this, they must then temporarily reverse all those decisions and create actual projects to undo the work.
Imagine you work at one of these 32 companies and you're dilligently working on a project that's going fantastically. Suddenly because of some lawsuit that you have nothing to do with and the company only tangentially has any relationship with one of the two parties, you have to stop working on your project so that you can immediately begin a document preservation project.
I'm not saying AMD isn't within their rights, I'm just making the observation that it's getting so difficult to do business anymore. Bad enough companies have to dodge copyright, trademark and patent infringement cases all day for things they actually do. Add to that cases that they had little or nothing to do with, but they might have some document that some other company sent to them.
A few times in the last 10 years, I wrote a few lines of code toward a new operating system. Each time, after thinking about Microsoft's monopoly and how they conspired so that people like me couldn't compete, I gave up.
I'll send them a bill and follow it up with a lawsuit if they don't pay it.
The biggest stumbling block to Linux on the desktop is that it is not pre-loaded by computer manufacturers such as Dell.
The average user would do just as well with Linux pre-loaded as they do with Windows pre-loaded. Add to that the lack of viruses and spyware and any productivity lost due to being in unfamiliar territory would possibly be more than made up for by the less-attacked environment.
With the spirit of common brotherhood that has been displayed in Washington lately (especially in the Senate), the confirmation of O'connor's replacement should go very smoothly.
If the RIAA didn't give the artists any royalties due, they would be breaching their contract with the artists, but not committing piracy.
What you say sure looks like legalese until you realize that copyright infringement has nothing to do with piracy whatsoever. That is true whether it's a kid in his bedroom, a person selling copied DVDs on the street or the RIAA.
I hate how copying a song has been equated to murdering, raping and pillaging marauders at sea. It's been an effective PR campaign but it's plain nonsense.
I could just as easily claim that if you don't pay me $100, you're guilty of murdering my chances of buying a bigger house. You murderer!
WordPerfect author says: Microsoft Word is crap.
Lotus 1-2-3 author says: Microsoft Excel is crap.
Mozilla author says: Microsoft Internet Explorer is crap.
I hope this one turns out better for you (for all of our sake)!
This has resulted in new offerings like Google News and social networking site Orkut. At Yahoo, there are posters promoting the "Idea Factory", where employees are invited to well, submit ideas (read boring)."
Is this a flashback to 1999 or what? A sky-high IPO from a company that "thinks outside the box" when it comes to employees. Do they have pinball and video games for their employees to use whenever they want too?
The only difference is that Google actually has a business plan and makes some money. Do they make enough money to support an $80B market cap though? Only time will tell that one.
Don't forget the super-duper-high-security last three digits on the back of the card!
I'm sure it's no problem at all that many online vendors ask for those last three digits and then store them alongside your credit card number and expiration date. Security problem solved. Done, and done.
Just thought I'd add that your father's credit might be better than he thinks. You don't appear to be in the U.S., but the big credit reporting agencies in the U.S. don't even have a record of "a few days late". Typically, one must be 30+ days, 60+ days, 90+ days or 120+ days late on a payment for it to fall into one of the negative slots that affect one's credit.
Of course, that doesn't stop the credit card company from penalizing you for being a few days late with late charges, increasing your interest rate, etc. That's becoming more and more common.
What you're missing is the whole "economies of scale" concept. If someone is "acquiring" a botnet of 10,000 computers that is quite a lot of bandwidth even if all of them are providing a "wimpy 48 K/bps of DDoS power."
Good point, and one that I didn't miss. My point was, if you can scan any IP block range you want to, wouldn't you start (and likely finish) with Comcast Cable's instead of AOL's? All of them are obviously of value, but the Comcast ones give far more value and are far faster to scan.
"That's three or four times as many attacks per million subscribers," Weinstein argued. "The numbers show that AOL members are significantly less likely to have been compromised by a zombie. This is actually good news for our users."
Picture that you're a script-kiddie botnet owner looking for more zombie systems. You have a program that someone provided to you that scans netblocks for systems vulnerable to hundreds of various buffer overflow attacks. You get to pick what netblocks the scanner runs on.
Which would you pick:
1. AOL dialup netblocks, where the user's average 48 K/bps connection takes an average of 1 minute to scan and provides you with a wimpy 48 K/bps of DDoS power
2. Comcast Cable Modem netblocks, where the user's average 384 K/bps upstream bandwidth takes an average of 6 seconds to scan and provides you with a beefy 4,000 K/bps downstream DDoS power.
The numbers quoted above should be accurate enough to get the point. AOL hosts take far longer to compromise and provide far less "bang for the buck". No wonder they're compromised a smaller percentage of time.
I've said this many times before, but my idea is to stage virus drills. Every week or so, the IT department should send fake viruses to a random population of the corporate environment. It will have an attachment that will only report to the IT department who opened it. Once a user opens the fake virus attachment, they must watch a 2-hour video on their own time on the subject of "safe email habits".
Pretty soon, they'll be too paranoid to open any attachment.
Most viruses are spread by stupid people that open the "Britney Spears Nude" attachment and then it goes through their address book and sends a copy of itself to everyone in it. If you're not receiving such emails, it either means that you have no friends that have added you to their address book or that your friends aren't falling for virused emails.
Me? I have a lot of stupid friends.
Re:Only going to work if it became standard
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
My history of typing (all on QWERTY):
First learned to type on my Commodore 64 when I was 10.
My first year of typing class in high school, I typed 70 WPM while my typing teacher typed 65 WPM.
My second year of typing class, I was up to about 90 WPM.
My third year of typing class, I was up to about 110 WPM.
I'm a 33-year old professional programmer with 15 years professional experience and now type over 130 WPM. I've never had a single problem with wrist or hand pain until about 3 months ago. I started having all kinds of numbness in my hand and pain in my wrist. Needless to say, I freaked out. The problem went from nothing to seriously impeding me in a matter of days.
Considering I never believed that carpal tunnel syndrome or other wrist problems existed previously, I was quite surprised. After a few weeks with fiddling with various things (using wrist straps at night, using Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard, taking B vitamins, etc.) I'm now symptom free. Pretty much the only thing I do now is use the MS Natural keyboard both at work and home and that seems to keep any problems at bay.
The bottom line is, just because you don't have any symptoms now doesn't mean that you won't sometime soon. Trust me, you'll be quite surprised if it happens.
Re:General Motors: 19.48 billion adjusted for debt
on
Another Dot-com Boom?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Long term anything in the stock market is a fools game.
Let me make a modification for you:
Long term any single thing in the stock market is a fool's game.
A balanced portfolio of domestic small-cap, mid-cap and large-cap stocks along with a smattering of international funds and bond funds is the only sure bet long-term. Anything else and you might as well put it all on black at the casino.
Never mind. I forgot - you're better at picking stocks than everyone else in the world, and your winning streak will never end. Good luck with that.
Through that time, they had decades of profitability. They also had many years of losing money, as they do now.
By your "snapshot in time" evaluation procedure, you should buy a stock when it's hot and sell it when it's cold. Buy high, sell low? That's precisely the human-herd mentality that causes so many people to lose money in the market.
Google is a great company, but at this stock price, your only chance is the "greater fool theory". Maybe someone dumber than you will come along and buy Google stock for $350 per share.
Don't be surprised if no online vendor takes you up on your tempting offer to disclose their trade secrets in exchange for satisfying the curiosity of "ylikone" on Slashdot.
I know the Slashdot crowd has a reputation of living in their parents' basement, but come on. Have any of you expressing surprise and outrage ever shopped in a grocery store? Let's see...
Almost every item is listed as a "regular price" and a "club price". If I possess one of their club cards (i.e. approximation of a frequent shopper), I pay the club price. If I don't possess such a card, I pay far more.
Oh, and then there's the whole coupon thing. Based on my shopping habits, sometimes a coupon prints out, making me further pay less than another consumer for the same item in the same store. Sometimes they even mail me a coupon to encourage me to buy a particular thing!
You can express your opinion on the fairness of this, but expressing surprise or doubt that this occurs only shows you haven't been paying attention in the online OR the offline world.
Slashdot Mirror
ive heard the same said about public transportation a few times
I don't know about most areas, but in Southeastern Pennsylvania, SEPTA can never make as much money in fares as it needs to spend. Even with generous government subsidies, it has massive budget shortfalls year after year after year.
Now the governor of Pennsylvania, in an amazingly audacious or clever move (depending on your viewpoint) is figuring out a way to redirect federal highway dollars to the public transportation system.
Say what you will about the benefits of a public transportation system, I realize there is an argument that can be made on both sides. But realize that it is a public welfare system. No different than a public WiFi network.
Just don't delete your old mail, and drop all your spare papers in a separate box instead of a waste basket.
How nice for you that you don't work at a company that has an email retention policy that is automatically enforced. Many large companies do today. If I leave an email in any folder for more than 60 days, it's automatically deleted. Oh, and my deleted bin in Outlook is cleaned out every night automatically. Oh, and corporate has disabled the use of PST files. Of course, all these things can be bypassed by a very technical user, but the point is, many corporations have spent a lot of time and energy on automatically not keeping things.
In cases like this, they must then temporarily reverse all those decisions and create actual projects to undo the work.
Imagine you work at one of these 32 companies and you're dilligently working on a project that's going fantastically. Suddenly because of some lawsuit that you have nothing to do with and the company only tangentially has any relationship with one of the two parties, you have to stop working on your project so that you can immediately begin a document preservation project.
I'm not saying AMD isn't within their rights, I'm just making the observation that it's getting so difficult to do business anymore. Bad enough companies have to dodge copyright, trademark and patent infringement cases all day for things they actually do. Add to that cases that they had little or nothing to do with, but they might have some document that some other company sent to them.
A few times in the last 10 years, I wrote a few lines of code toward a new operating system. Each time, after thinking about Microsoft's monopoly and how they conspired so that people like me couldn't compete, I gave up.
I'll send them a bill and follow it up with a lawsuit if they don't pay it.
The biggest stumbling block to Linux on the desktop is that it is not pre-loaded by computer manufacturers such as Dell.
The average user would do just as well with Linux pre-loaded as they do with Windows pre-loaded. Add to that the lack of viruses and spyware and any productivity lost due to being in unfamiliar territory would possibly be more than made up for by the less-attacked environment.
With the spirit of common brotherhood that has been displayed in Washington lately (especially in the Senate), the confirmation of O'connor's replacement should go very smoothly.
If the RIAA didn't give the artists any royalties due, they would be breaching their contract with the artists, but not committing piracy.
What you say sure looks like legalese until you realize that copyright infringement has nothing to do with piracy whatsoever. That is true whether it's a kid in his bedroom, a person selling copied DVDs on the street or the RIAA.
I hate how copying a song has been equated to murdering, raping and pillaging marauders at sea. It's been an effective PR campaign but it's plain nonsense.
I could just as easily claim that if you don't pay me $100, you're guilty of murdering my chances of buying a bigger house. You murderer!
WordPerfect author says: Microsoft Word is crap.
Lotus 1-2-3 author says: Microsoft Excel is crap.
Mozilla author says: Microsoft Internet Explorer is crap.
I hope this one turns out better for you (for all of our sake)!
Why do you care?
This has resulted in new offerings like Google News and social networking site Orkut. At Yahoo, there are posters promoting the "Idea Factory", where employees are invited to well, submit ideas (read boring)."
Is this a flashback to 1999 or what? A sky-high IPO from a company that "thinks outside the box" when it comes to employees. Do they have pinball and video games for their employees to use whenever they want too?
The only difference is that Google actually has a business plan and makes some money. Do they make enough money to support an $80B market cap though? Only time will tell that one.
Don't forget the super-duper-high-security last three digits on the back of the card!
I'm sure it's no problem at all that many online vendors ask for those last three digits and then store them alongside your credit card number and expiration date. Security problem solved. Done, and done.
I agree with your common sense post.
Just thought I'd add that your father's credit might be better than he thinks. You don't appear to be in the U.S., but the big credit reporting agencies in the U.S. don't even have a record of "a few days late". Typically, one must be 30+ days, 60+ days, 90+ days or 120+ days late on a payment for it to fall into one of the negative slots that affect one's credit.
Of course, that doesn't stop the credit card company from penalizing you for being a few days late with late charges, increasing your interest rate, etc. That's becoming more and more common.
Credit, like electricity, is provided to people to use as a tool. One can use that tool responsibly. For instance:
1. Don't buy things you can't afford
2. Don't stick your finger in a light socket
Or one can use such tools irresponsibly and think that consequences don't apply to them.
I wonder which type of person you are?
What you're missing is the whole "economies of scale" concept. If someone is "acquiring" a botnet of 10,000 computers that is quite a lot of bandwidth even if all of them are providing a "wimpy 48 K/bps of DDoS power."
Good point, and one that I didn't miss. My point was, if you can scan any IP block range you want to, wouldn't you start (and likely finish) with Comcast Cable's instead of AOL's? All of them are obviously of value, but the Comcast ones give far more value and are far faster to scan.
"That's three or four times as many attacks per million subscribers," Weinstein argued. "The numbers show that AOL members are significantly less likely to have been compromised by a zombie. This is actually good news for our users."
Picture that you're a script-kiddie botnet owner looking for more zombie systems. You have a program that someone provided to you that scans netblocks for systems vulnerable to hundreds of various buffer overflow attacks. You get to pick what netblocks the scanner runs on.
Which would you pick:
1. AOL dialup netblocks, where the user's average 48 K/bps connection takes an average of 1 minute to scan and provides you with a wimpy 48 K/bps of DDoS power
2. Comcast Cable Modem netblocks, where the user's average 384 K/bps upstream bandwidth takes an average of 6 seconds to scan and provides you with a beefy 4,000 K/bps downstream DDoS power.
The numbers quoted above should be accurate enough to get the point. AOL hosts take far longer to compromise and provide far less "bang for the buck". No wonder they're compromised a smaller percentage of time.
"Hmm.. That's weird. Every time I move my mouse, I get disconnected from my 802.11g network."
I've said this many times before, but my idea is to stage virus drills. Every week or so, the IT department should send fake viruses to a random population of the corporate environment. It will have an attachment that will only report to the IT department who opened it. Once a user opens the fake virus attachment, they must watch a 2-hour video on their own time on the subject of "safe email habits".
Pretty soon, they'll be too paranoid to open any attachment.
Most viruses are spread by stupid people that open the "Britney Spears Nude" attachment and then it goes through their address book and sends a copy of itself to everyone in it. If you're not receiving such emails, it either means that you have no friends that have added you to their address book or that your friends aren't falling for virused emails.
Me? I have a lot of stupid friends.
My history of typing (all on QWERTY):
First learned to type on my Commodore 64 when I was 10.
My first year of typing class in high school, I typed 70 WPM while my typing teacher typed 65 WPM.
My second year of typing class, I was up to about 90 WPM.
My third year of typing class, I was up to about 110 WPM.
I'm a 33-year old professional programmer with 15 years professional experience and now type over 130 WPM. I've never had a single problem with wrist or hand pain until about 3 months ago. I started having all kinds of numbness in my hand and pain in my wrist. Needless to say, I freaked out. The problem went from nothing to seriously impeding me in a matter of days.
Considering I never believed that carpal tunnel syndrome or other wrist problems existed previously, I was quite surprised. After a few weeks with fiddling with various things (using wrist straps at night, using Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard, taking B vitamins, etc.) I'm now symptom free. Pretty much the only thing I do now is use the MS Natural keyboard both at work and home and that seems to keep any problems at bay.
The bottom line is, just because you don't have any symptoms now doesn't mean that you won't sometime soon. Trust me, you'll be quite surprised if it happens.
Long term anything in the stock market is a fools game.
Let me make a modification for you:
Long term any single thing in the stock market is a fool's game.
A balanced portfolio of domestic small-cap, mid-cap and large-cap stocks along with a smattering of international funds and bond funds is the only sure bet long-term. Anything else and you might as well put it all on black at the casino.
Never mind. I forgot - you're better at picking stocks than everyone else in the world, and your winning streak will never end. Good luck with that.
GM has been in business since 1897.
Through that time, they had decades of profitability. They also had many years of losing money, as they do now.
By your "snapshot in time" evaluation procedure, you should buy a stock when it's hot and sell it when it's cold. Buy high, sell low? That's precisely the human-herd mentality that causes so many people to lose money in the market.
Google is a great company, but at this stock price, your only chance is the "greater fool theory". Maybe someone dumber than you will come along and buy Google stock for $350 per share.
Blasphemy! How dare you suggest that Google might not be worth nearly EIGHTY BILLION DOLLARS. That's its current market capitalization.
How does that compare to other companies?
Oracle: 64.78 billion
3M: 58.56 billion
American Express: 68.43 billion
Disney: 57.82 billion
General Motors: 19.48 billion
Red Hat: 2.2 billion
Anyone that suggests that a brand new company like Google shouldn't be worth 4x more than General Motors just isn't thinking correctly.
As a start to saving their soul, Disney would have stop trying to extend copyrights every time Mickey Mouse is about to go into the public domain.
Their unconstitutional extension of copyrights in perpetuity has made them about as evil of a corporation as I can think of today.
Don't be surprised if no online vendor takes you up on your tempting offer to disclose their trade secrets in exchange for satisfying the curiosity of "ylikone" on Slashdot.
I know the Slashdot crowd has a reputation of living in their parents' basement, but come on. Have any of you expressing surprise and outrage ever shopped in a grocery store? Let's see...
Almost every item is listed as a "regular price" and a "club price". If I possess one of their club cards (i.e. approximation of a frequent shopper), I pay the club price. If I don't possess such a card, I pay far more.
Oh, and then there's the whole coupon thing. Based on my shopping habits, sometimes a coupon prints out, making me further pay less than another consumer for the same item in the same store. Sometimes they even mail me a coupon to encourage me to buy a particular thing!
You can express your opinion on the fairness of this, but expressing surprise or doubt that this occurs only shows you haven't been paying attention in the online OR the offline world.