Offtopic is actually correct in this case. If it was a Troll, it would be attempting to incite people to disagree with vitriol. That's clearly not the case. Just as clearly, it has nothing whatsoever to do with call center jobs (at least I hope it doesn't). Thus, offtopic.
It turns out that DirecTV doesn't check your bona fides such as your address - they only run a credit check on the name and SSN you provide, without verifying that you belong to either that name or SSN!
Seems reasonable to me - how many people are ordering new DirecTV because they're moving? I'd guess a signficant majority. How many would be happy giving them their old address ("Why do you need to know that?")?
Surely a sledghammer, whilst local, is not a privilege escalation?
Depends. Some guy holds a sledgehammer over my jewels and wants me to call him "Sir," I'll probably oblige, at least while he's got energy of position over me. And I'm not even military!
Not really. The OS provides virtual memory space to each program running underneath it - this helps prevent the happy fun times you may have had as a child (or younger adult) using PEEK and POKE on early micros. Any reference to memory ultimately has to be run through the OS tables to figure out what the correct memory location is, so that the contents can be served to the application. I (having in glorious/. fashion not bothered to read the article) am not sure why memory reference zero would be shared at all.
NOTE: All applications may request shared memory space through which to talk to each other. It would be highly reasonable to deny any request for shared memory with an address of 0... And in any case, this shouldn't affect anyone else either with a reasonable memory subsystem. Otherwise, if your userland program knew my userland program's address space you could read my state, which is obviously not possible.
Then again, maybe due to the fact that this has the kernel executing said code, its not a userland issue after all. The real problem (apart from the NULL==0 thing) is that a userland app managed to put code at position 0 of the kernel space in the first place. Anything running with kernel privs can do whatever it wishes already, of course.
Hell, I still miss "Carrier Command." Haven't found a reasonable replacement for it since. Not to mention most anything by Psygnosis (nigh impossible, but they sure were purty).
Sigh.
And the kids today. Always on my lawn... grumble... mutter...
The only real difference is that the optical scan ballot is hard to read with the naked eye. Having something similar, but with OCR (dead easy using standard clean predetermined fonts), would perhaps give a bit more confidence to people that they'd voted as they intended to vote. Also, you'd get all of the benefits of the assistance technology can provide to those who need it. But yes, its all about making it easy to generate an un-misreadable paper ballot, with no smudges, hanging chads, crossouts, write-ins-and-checks, or other issues.
Also, those with stable family, housing, and employment situations are much less likely to re-offend than others.
Unfortunately, most municipalities interpretation of the sex-offender list pretty much precludes this. In some major cities, the "off limits" sections are so widespread that you basically can't live there legally. Mass murderer released after 25 years? Come on down! On the list? Not in this town, buddy...
Although ironically, having someone known to go around beating women into submission to brutally murder them being restricted from social networking sites has not even been proposed.
And when your boss says, "By the way, if you vote for Dan, you get to keep your job - and I want to see your voting receipt to prove it, or out you go!"? That's one of the main reasons that we have private polling in the first place.
How about going back to the old ways - electronically generating, at the polling place, an anonymous, very clear, human-readable piece of paper describing your vote. Use machines to create as many as you want, one at a time, on special pieces of paper that are handed out either as you walk in the door and get IDd or upon the insertion of your previous one into a shredder. Once you're happy with it, it goes into the voting box which a) saves it, and b) scans it and records the data, unofficially (ie: the piece of paper wins in a recount).
Dead simple, totally private, and fully auditable. Plus, with an open standard, there could be different types of paper-generating-machines for people with different needs, no problem. No hanging chads, no huge expense, quick access to unofficial results and about as easy a recount procedure as you could ask for.
Finally, at the end of the day, do it the CA way and have the boxes opened up and tallied by hand for the major issue and a random selection of minor ones at each station. Anyone can watch, and any discrepancy over.1% of the total is assumed to be computer-tampering and triggers a full manual count for all issues at that station, and a more thorough audit to determine the source of the discrepancy.
Those were always fun to click on, too. They'd often just dump you out at an Amazon storefront, costing the ad purchaser a few cents in the meantime. Maybe that's why they went away?
In cases of slow traffic this is 100% true. In cases where traffic is moving at significant speed, waiting until the last moment to exit a lane (whether its ending, or peeling off, whatever) can cause substantial delays if the person merging has failed to line themselves up with a gap and has to hold up exiting traffic or causes a situation in which the other lane of traffic has to drastically adjust their speed to accommodate the merger.
Germany (indeed, most/all of Europe) get around this situation by requiring that people pass a driving test before allowing them to drive. In my homeland (the UK) its long, arduous, and if you don't get it right, you don't pass (and you can be failed for things like "lack of confidence"). In the US, you have to be able to navigate a few residential blocks, and you're allowed to drive if you don't miss more than 30% of the requirements; nevertheless, a not insignificant minority of the population requires multiple tries to pass.
Pre would have been well within their rights to create a player that sync'd to your iTunes library - there are well defined touchpoints for doing so. Apple wasn't too happy with a third-party device that, through pretense, passed itself off as an iPod to their iPod-syncing-software (within the iTunes UI at least), thus restricting their ability to change the interfaces that iTunes and the iPod family use to communicate with each other. After all, its not like this change broke any legitimate devices.
Use a public API, and Apple should (and historically has) maintain compatibility. Sneak through an open backdoor, and Apple historically has (and arguably should) slammed it in their faces.
Case in point - Palm did something sneaky, Apple made a legitimate change that didn't affect any of the documented behavior of their application, and now Apple is being handed shovels of crap for it in public. Anyone else see the conflict here?
Microsoft technically had no obligation to keep the undocumented hooks deep into their structure either - they were all undocumented (remember Petzold's Undocumented Windows?) - but still got trashed in the marketplace when they released a new version that, quite legitimately, didn't maintain those crappy, bug-leaden interface touchpoints. That's become a real lesson to anyone who watched them (and Wine, et al) suffer from the aftermath of that decision.
The example about breaking windows doesn't apply at all. Its more along the lines of stopping your neighbor playing baseball on the spot you might someday build a pool now, rather than waiting for him to have told everyone in the city to use it and then getting publicly booed when you decide to build a pool in the middle of their baseball field (which is still actually your back yard).
Actually, yes. When Windows kept a bunch of unsupported hooks lying around for too long, they were stuck supporting them. Whenever they tried to fix the OS by removing old cruft that was never intended to be there in the first place, they broke things (often Lotus). Because the apps had worked for years, Windows got the blame. Keeping some of those hacks around rather than just supporting the official APIs was very difficult - ironically, that's exactly the same difficulty that Wine, et al, face - implementing the official APIs is far easier than being bug-for-bug compatible with Windows.
Apple would rather not find themselves in the same boat, and this is one of many situations that could start that chain of events.
So, at the high-volume rate, the afore-mentioned 20mbps line would cost approximately $48/month wholesale. Selling that for $60/month retail, including last-mile costs, support, and all sorts of other inclusions, is completely, utterly unrealistic. Shaving that down to a 10:1 ratio (with an expense per line of $4.80/month) is still pretty high as far as wholesale parts costs are figured.
Because part of the reason Windows existed is for people to come along and write 1-2-3 for it. Its an OS (kinda), designed and advertised as being open and permissive for 3rd party software and hardware to integrate to it.
iTunes, on the other hand, was sold (for free, but a download can be a "sale" in the market adoption sense) because it "just works". If they had allowed the Palm to continue to do its thing, and then a year from now they released a minor update and the Palm stopped working because it was doing something incorrectly, or even correctly but in a way unanticipated by Apple, would Palm step up and say, "Oh, our bad, don't blame iTunes..."?
Doubt it. Apple has no interest in de facto agreeing to support an unknown list of uncertified devices made by competitors with their iTunes product. They have a huge interest in supporting those devices and any accompanying drivers, programs, &c, with their OS product, OSX, through the clearly defined hardware and software interfaces. See the difference?
Let's use another example. Let's say that you write a website that hosts a lot of content. I write a screen-scraper that harvests that content and presents it to my users, "because its useful and, hey, its on the internets, and your content is getting more eyeballs so you should be happy, right?" Naturally I show my ads and not yours. You then change the HTML generated by your server, and my screen-scraper brakes. Should that be my problem or yours?
What if you didn't even know about my product. What if you did. Does that change the situation in any way?
A 10mbps line pushes over 100 gigabytes in a 24 hour period. That's an awful lot of content to be moving around every single day, even by today's standards, for a residential line. iTunes video content seems to run about 750 MB / hr, so you'd need to be downloading approximately 133 hours of content per day to hit that - even with 5 people, that's 26 hours of video per day, per person...
And, if you were at that ISP today, offering 10mbps connections to people, and had, oh, 100 of your subscribers flooding their local connections, you'd be filling a GigE pipe with nothing but their crap. Could you really stay in business by just "ordering a new" connection when that happened? Would a large number of those connections even be realistically available, regardless of price?
What you're expecting is available - its just not cheap. Current pricing for guaranteed bandwidth is approximately $300-400/mo for 1.5mbps bidirectional. 10mpbs (what my office does) will run you approximately $1,000/mo.
If you want to pay $50-60/mo for 20mbps, you're going to get oversubscribing. Period. Think about the number of customers a cable provider has. Multiply that by, oh, 10. Then figure out how they're expected to get redundant 'net pipes that add up to that bandwidth, for any money. Hard, innit?
Slashdot Mirror
At the risk of losing karma...
Offtopic is actually correct in this case. If it was a Troll, it would be attempting to incite people to disagree with vitriol. That's clearly not the case. Just as clearly, it has nothing whatsoever to do with call center jobs (at least I hope it doesn't). Thus, offtopic.
That was my slogan for a while, too. Pity my liver couldn't take the strain.
Seems reasonable to me - how many people are ordering new DirecTV because they're moving? I'd guess a signficant majority. How many would be happy giving them their old address ("Why do you need to know that?")?
Depends. Some guy holds a sledgehammer over my jewels and wants me to call him "Sir," I'll probably oblige, at least while he's got energy of position over me. And I'm not even military!
Probably don't need to install the patch then. Or keep the machine powered on, for that matter...
Not really. The OS provides virtual memory space to each program running underneath it - this helps prevent the happy fun times you may have had as a child (or younger adult) using PEEK and POKE on early micros. Any reference to memory ultimately has to be run through the OS tables to figure out what the correct memory location is, so that the contents can be served to the application. I (having in glorious /. fashion not bothered to read the article) am not sure why memory reference zero would be shared at all.
NOTE: All applications may request shared memory space through which to talk to each other. It would be highly reasonable to deny any request for shared memory with an address of 0... And in any case, this shouldn't affect anyone else either with a reasonable memory subsystem. Otherwise, if your userland program knew my userland program's address space you could read my state, which is obviously not possible.
Then again, maybe due to the fact that this has the kernel executing said code, its not a userland issue after all. The real problem (apart from the NULL==0 thing) is that a userland app managed to put code at position 0 of the kernel space in the first place. Anything running with kernel privs can do whatever it wishes already, of course.
Hell, I still miss "Carrier Command." Haven't found a reasonable replacement for it since. Not to mention most anything by Psygnosis (nigh impossible, but they sure were purty).
Sigh.
And the kids today. Always on my lawn... grumble... mutter...
The only real difference is that the optical scan ballot is hard to read with the naked eye. Having something similar, but with OCR (dead easy using standard clean predetermined fonts), would perhaps give a bit more confidence to people that they'd voted as they intended to vote. Also, you'd get all of the benefits of the assistance technology can provide to those who need it. But yes, its all about making it easy to generate an un-misreadable paper ballot, with no smudges, hanging chads, crossouts, write-ins-and-checks, or other issues.
Unfortunately, most municipalities interpretation of the sex-offender list pretty much precludes this. In some major cities, the "off limits" sections are so widespread that you basically can't live there legally. Mass murderer released after 25 years? Come on down! On the list? Not in this town, buddy...
Although ironically, having someone known to go around beating women into submission to brutally murder them being restricted from social networking sites has not even been proposed.
How reasonable is this again?
And when your boss says, "By the way, if you vote for Dan, you get to keep your job - and I want to see your voting receipt to prove it, or out you go!"? That's one of the main reasons that we have private polling in the first place.
How about going back to the old ways - electronically generating, at the polling place, an anonymous, very clear, human-readable piece of paper describing your vote. Use machines to create as many as you want, one at a time, on special pieces of paper that are handed out either as you walk in the door and get IDd or upon the insertion of your previous one into a shredder. Once you're happy with it, it goes into the voting box which a) saves it, and b) scans it and records the data, unofficially (ie: the piece of paper wins in a recount).
Dead simple, totally private, and fully auditable. Plus, with an open standard, there could be different types of paper-generating-machines for people with different needs, no problem. No hanging chads, no huge expense, quick access to unofficial results and about as easy a recount procedure as you could ask for.
Finally, at the end of the day, do it the CA way and have the boxes opened up and tallied by hand for the major issue and a random selection of minor ones at each station. Anyone can watch, and any discrepancy over .1% of the total is assumed to be computer-tampering and triggers a full manual count for all issues at that station, and a more thorough audit to determine the source of the discrepancy.
Those were always fun to click on, too. They'd often just dump you out at an Amazon storefront, costing the ad purchaser a few cents in the meantime. Maybe that's why they went away?
In cases of slow traffic this is 100% true. In cases where traffic is moving at significant speed, waiting until the last moment to exit a lane (whether its ending, or peeling off, whatever) can cause substantial delays if the person merging has failed to line themselves up with a gap and has to hold up exiting traffic or causes a situation in which the other lane of traffic has to drastically adjust their speed to accommodate the merger.
Germany (indeed, most/all of Europe) get around this situation by requiring that people pass a driving test before allowing them to drive. In my homeland (the UK) its long, arduous, and if you don't get it right, you don't pass (and you can be failed for things like "lack of confidence"). In the US, you have to be able to navigate a few residential blocks, and you're allowed to drive if you don't miss more than 30% of the requirements; nevertheless, a not insignificant minority of the population requires multiple tries to pass.
Pre would have been well within their rights to create a player that sync'd to your iTunes library - there are well defined touchpoints for doing so. Apple wasn't too happy with a third-party device that, through pretense, passed itself off as an iPod to their iPod-syncing-software (within the iTunes UI at least), thus restricting their ability to change the interfaces that iTunes and the iPod family use to communicate with each other. After all, its not like this change broke any legitimate devices.
Use a public API, and Apple should (and historically has) maintain compatibility. Sneak through an open backdoor, and Apple historically has (and arguably should) slammed it in their faces.
Case in point - Palm did something sneaky, Apple made a legitimate change that didn't affect any of the documented behavior of their application, and now Apple is being handed shovels of crap for it in public. Anyone else see the conflict here?
Microsoft technically had no obligation to keep the undocumented hooks deep into their structure either - they were all undocumented (remember Petzold's Undocumented Windows?) - but still got trashed in the marketplace when they released a new version that, quite legitimately, didn't maintain those crappy, bug-leaden interface touchpoints. That's become a real lesson to anyone who watched them (and Wine, et al) suffer from the aftermath of that decision.
The example about breaking windows doesn't apply at all. Its more along the lines of stopping your neighbor playing baseball on the spot you might someday build a pool now, rather than waiting for him to have told everyone in the city to use it and then getting publicly booed when you decide to build a pool in the middle of their baseball field (which is still actually your back yard).
Actually, yes. When Windows kept a bunch of unsupported hooks lying around for too long, they were stuck supporting them. Whenever they tried to fix the OS by removing old cruft that was never intended to be there in the first place, they broke things (often Lotus). Because the apps had worked for years, Windows got the blame. Keeping some of those hacks around rather than just supporting the official APIs was very difficult - ironically, that's exactly the same difficulty that Wine, et al, face - implementing the official APIs is far easier than being bug-for-bug compatible with Windows.
Apple would rather not find themselves in the same boat, and this is one of many situations that could start that chain of events.
So, at the high-volume rate, the afore-mentioned 20mbps line would cost approximately $48/month wholesale. Selling that for $60/month retail, including last-mile costs, support, and all sorts of other inclusions, is completely, utterly unrealistic. Shaving that down to a 10:1 ratio (with an expense per line of $4.80/month) is still pretty high as far as wholesale parts costs are figured.
Because part of the reason Windows existed is for people to come along and write 1-2-3 for it. Its an OS (kinda), designed and advertised as being open and permissive for 3rd party software and hardware to integrate to it.
iTunes, on the other hand, was sold (for free, but a download can be a "sale" in the market adoption sense) because it "just works". If they had allowed the Palm to continue to do its thing, and then a year from now they released a minor update and the Palm stopped working because it was doing something incorrectly, or even correctly but in a way unanticipated by Apple, would Palm step up and say, "Oh, our bad, don't blame iTunes..."?
Doubt it. Apple has no interest in de facto agreeing to support an unknown list of uncertified devices made by competitors with their iTunes product. They have a huge interest in supporting those devices and any accompanying drivers, programs, &c, with their OS product, OSX, through the clearly defined hardware and software interfaces. See the difference?
Let's use another example. Let's say that you write a website that hosts a lot of content. I write a screen-scraper that harvests that content and presents it to my users, "because its useful and, hey, its on the internets, and your content is getting more eyeballs so you should be happy, right?" Naturally I show my ads and not yours. You then change the HTML generated by your server, and my screen-scraper brakes. Should that be my problem or yours?
What if you didn't even know about my product. What if you did. Does that change the situation in any way?
Additionally, since when is being "more informative and instructive than a Google search" considered to be good enough to justify a book purchase?
A 10mbps line pushes over 100 gigabytes in a 24 hour period. That's an awful lot of content to be moving around every single day, even by today's standards, for a residential line. iTunes video content seems to run about 750 MB / hr, so you'd need to be downloading approximately 133 hours of content per day to hit that - even with 5 people, that's 26 hours of video per day, per person...
And, if you were at that ISP today, offering 10mbps connections to people, and had, oh, 100 of your subscribers flooding their local connections, you'd be filling a GigE pipe with nothing but their crap. Could you really stay in business by just "ordering a new" connection when that happened? Would a large number of those connections even be realistically available, regardless of price?
What you're expecting is available - its just not cheap. Current pricing for guaranteed bandwidth is approximately $300-400/mo for 1.5mbps bidirectional. 10mpbs (what my office does) will run you approximately $1,000/mo.
If you want to pay $50-60/mo for 20mbps, you're going to get oversubscribing. Period. Think about the number of customers a cable provider has. Multiply that by, oh, 10. Then figure out how they're expected to get redundant 'net pipes that add up to that bandwidth, for any money. Hard, innit?
Personally, I'm more impressed with the 13 foot monitor. I'm assuming its some sort of front projection device. Wonder what the resolution is? :)
We did, and I think it would have worked too, but we added it on as a patch to Informix 6. Big mistake.