That sort of thing happens when the people using and driving for the taxi fleet are not the ones who incur the costs. In other words, the environmental costs are externalized. The solution is to build the cost of the environmental impact into the price of the service - i.e. internalize it - so that people will take that impact into account when making a purchase decision or comparing the prices of two options.
No, because this is the whole reason for regulating number of taxi medallions and fares. There are only ever the number of taxis on the road that the city wants to allow on the road
Which is why it can take 45 to 90 minutes for a taxi to show up - if they even show up at all.
Windows is going live with a 'new online local search and mapping service. [...] The final word on which service is better remains to be seen but this competition will certainly benefit the end-users.
I think this is the first time I have ever seen the words "Windows" and "competition" in the same story on Slashdot. *rubs eyes*
Google is simple. There arent millions of distrations. You dont have to SEARCH for the search bar. you dont have to wait for the eyeblasters to load so that they can in turn obstruct your searching. GEEEZ people. it looks good the first time but after the 9999999th time you login just to do a simple search, and have to wait forever for the main page to connect to billions of addservers to serve you graphic adds, you end up back at google.
BINGO. The Google home page loads instantaneously, almost faster than an HTML page from my local filesystem. It's always there, very transparent, and very fast. Ads are there too, but they're relevant, and don't get in the way or slow things down.
The idea of FM radio is a good one, but the execution is horrible. It drives me absolutely insane to hear the same 10 songs over and over again for weeks on end. On my local station which plays "hip-hop and today's R&B" I swear they play that "Gold Digger" song 346 times a day. Their commercial-to-song ratio is actually not that bad - I have no complaints with that. But there is only so long I can listen to the same songs repeatedly, before I get a headache.
What I would like is an FM hip-hop station that plays a wide variety of great tracks, not just the song of the month from the mumbling, candy-ass mainstream artists. Until that station comes along, I'll keep listening to SmoothBeats.com.
Instead of running one mega-honking-big, water-cooled mission critical mail system, consider breaking it down by division. Set up subdomains so that users have addresses such as "username@research.organization.com" or "username@london.organization.co.uk"
Then, each division can handle its own mail. Or, you can set up different mail clusters to handle each division. Still centrally managed, but easier if you break the load into smaller chunks.
Of course, none of this is possible if you're talking about, like, email for mobile phone customers, where all the addresses are in the format 3015551212@messaging.mobileprovider.com.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents. Don't spend it all in one place.
My wife is a HS english teacher, and even she says the system needs a complete redesign.
Yes, I know many teachers who say the same thing in private.
I personally am somewhat enamored by the Sudbury Valley model. At the very least, I believe some of its principles would be beneficial to mainstream education.
After two more rounds of mergers, we'll have two companies left in each area. Each with strict but unwritten agreements not to compete in each others' areas. It's the same way Comcast/Time Warner do business in the Cable TV industry right now, anyways.
The cable TV industry is the way it is because it's illegal for two companies to operate in the same geographic area. Each cable operator is granted a "franchise" by the local government, allowing it to be the sole cable provider in that area.
It is absolutely crucial to read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. That will turn anyone into a good manager. Best manager I had was an analytical type like us back at GE. He read lots of books and practiced what they preached. The Carnegie book is the most important!
The parent poster speaks the truth. Yes, the title is silly and yes, it's from the 1950's, but damn if it isn't one of the very best books I've ever read.
IMHO, you can gain more from reading this one book than from reading an entire shelf of books on the management fad du jour.
If you want to advocate SPF, publish a SPF record for your domain
I'd love to, but I use Register.com's DNS servers for most of the domains I manage, and their web interface doesn't allow the entry of TXT records. I suppose I should bug them about that.
Eh, I get at least 275 pieces of spam a day, plus another 700+ undeliverable bounce messages 'cause some spammer forged the From: address to be from one of my customer's domains. (I am postmaster for the domains. Fortunately I am able to sort those messages into a separate folder.)
Add on top of that all the spam that my customers get, the disk space it takes up until they pop their mail off the server, the CPU time SpamAssassin spends trying to stop it all and my administrative time fuxoring with SpamAssassin settings and it definitely has a significant financial impact. I can only imagine what the impact is on big networks like AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Earthlink, etc.
I do believe that the worse it gets, the greater the financial incentive will be for everyone to focus on finding solutions.
In the meantime, be very thankful you only get 20-25 pieces a day.
Well, it's not damning to you, but to the "Linux on the desktop will over take Mac within a year" people, it's a damning statistic. I believe the article was accepted as a general discrediting of that statistic
I've always scoffed at those who say that Linux desktop usage has surpassed or is about to surpass Mac desktop usage. I host/maintain several dozen sites with a wide variety of mainstream and not-so-mainstream audiences. I checked the browser stats recently - Linux had about 0.1 to 0.3% on all of them.
It seems to me that, even with a BSD-style license (or no license at all) there is still an incentive for creators of derivative works to submit their most important fixes back upstream.
Let's say your company ships an image server which depends heavily on a BSD-licensed image manipulation library. From time to time you release new versions of your software which incorporate not only your own new features, but new features from the latest version of the image library as well.
If in the process of building your app you find and fix a bug in the image library, wouldn't it make sense for you to send a patch upstream and be done with it forever? Otherwise, every time you upgraded you'd have to fix the same stupid bug again, taking time away from more fruitful work.
Perhaps someone can clarify for me a) whether I explained that OK and b) whether that is actually what happens in the real world with BSD projects?
It's built on OSS technologies, including Apache, Tomcat and Postgres, IIRC. I'm working with a Chamber of Commerce which is in the middle of migrating to it from an old IMIS system. They should be going live on it soon. Contact me if you want me to put you in touch with the end users for a reference / first hand account of how it works.
Been there, dealt with that
on
eFax Hell?
·
· Score: 1
Yep, I had that happen to me, too. I wrote a broadcast fax system for my local Chamber of Commerce. It uses Ghostscript to convert PDFs to PostScript, and then uses efax (the Linux command-line fax utility, not the efax.com service) to send the faxes out to their 800+ members and contacts.
One time, a PDF didn't convert properly, and the recipients started getting faxes with 300 pages of PostScript gibberish. Fortunately we managed to stop it before too many of the faxes went out.
So, here's what I did to prevent that from reoccurring:
1. Set it up to first try converting with pdf2ps, and to fall back on pdftops if that fails. Those utilities are from two separate packages. Neither one will convert 100% of PDFs, but one usually works whenever the other fails. We've not really had any problems with conversion since.
2. Set it up to send a test fax to the Chamber, so they can preview it before sending out the whole batch of them.
That was a couple years ago. They've been using it since then to send out several broadcasts a week, and have had no hiccups.
Slashdot Mirror
That sort of thing happens when the people using and driving for the taxi fleet are not the ones who incur the costs. In other words, the environmental costs are externalized. The solution is to build the cost of the environmental impact into the price of the service - i.e. internalize it - so that people will take that impact into account when making a purchase decision or comparing the prices of two options.
No, because this is the whole reason for regulating number of taxi medallions and fares. There are only ever the number of taxis on the road that the city wants to allow on the road
Which is why it can take 45 to 90 minutes for a taxi to show up - if they even show up at all.
Meet the new schmucks, same as the old schmucks.
Ah yes, the Republicrats and Demopublicans. Someone remind me again what the difference is between them?
your doc probably already mentioned these, but... here are things which helped me get over my insomnia:
#1 - quitting smoking
#2 - exercise
#3 - allowing several hours of chillaxation after work but before bed
#4 - cutting down on coffee (or at least not drinking it after 5:30 pm)
Windows is going live with a 'new online local search and mapping service. [...] The final word on which service is better remains to be seen but this competition will certainly benefit the end-users.
I think this is the first time I have ever seen the words "Windows" and "competition" in the same story on Slashdot. *rubs eyes*
Google is simple. There arent millions of distrations. You dont have to SEARCH for the search bar. you dont have to wait for the eyeblasters to load so that they can in turn obstruct your searching. GEEEZ people. it looks good the first time but after the 9999999th time you login just to do a simple search, and have to wait forever for the main page to connect to billions of addservers to serve you graphic adds, you end up back at google.
BINGO. The Google home page loads instantaneously, almost faster than an HTML page from my local filesystem. It's always there, very transparent, and very fast. Ads are there too, but they're relevant, and don't get in the way or slow things down.
The idea of FM radio is a good one, but the execution is horrible. It drives me absolutely insane to hear the same 10 songs over and over again for weeks on end. On my local station which plays "hip-hop and today's R&B" I swear they play that "Gold Digger" song 346 times a day. Their commercial-to-song ratio is actually not that bad - I have no complaints with that. But there is only so long I can listen to the same songs repeatedly, before I get a headache.
What I would like is an FM hip-hop station that plays a wide variety of great tracks, not just the song of the month from the mumbling, candy-ass mainstream artists. Until that station comes along, I'll keep listening to SmoothBeats.com.
I still say the Institute for Justice is way cooler than the ACLU...
I too will believe it when I see it.
Instead of running one mega-honking-big, water-cooled mission critical mail system, consider breaking it down by division. Set up subdomains so that users have addresses such as "username@research.organization.com" or "username@london.organization.co.uk"
Then, each division can handle its own mail. Or, you can set up different mail clusters to handle each division. Still centrally managed, but easier if you break the load into smaller chunks.
Of course, none of this is possible if you're talking about, like, email for mobile phone customers, where all the addresses are in the format 3015551212@messaging.mobileprovider.com.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents. Don't spend it all in one place.
My wife is a HS english teacher, and even she says the system needs a complete redesign.
Yes, I know many teachers who say the same thing in private.
I personally am somewhat enamored by the Sudbury Valley model. At the very least, I believe some of its principles would be beneficial to mainstream education.
It's too bad that the average taxpayer thinks germs from another planet just don't sound very interesting.
I personally would prefer that such missions be financed voluntarily by people who do find them interesting and valuable. Ditto for the arts.
Just my 2 cents.
After two more rounds of mergers, we'll have two companies left in each area. Each with strict but unwritten agreements not to compete in each others' areas. It's the same way Comcast/Time Warner do business in the Cable TV industry right now, anyways.
The cable TV industry is the way it is because it's illegal for two companies to operate in the same geographic area. Each cable operator is granted a "franchise" by the local government, allowing it to be the sole cable provider in that area.
Since it doesn't cost any more money to those who click on the link, I fail to see the damage.
Actually, despite the reassurances, it leaves some of us wondering whether you really meant what you said.
It is absolutely crucial to read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. That will turn anyone into a good manager. Best manager I had was an analytical type like us back at GE. He read lots of books and practiced what they preached. The Carnegie book is the most important!
The parent poster speaks the truth. Yes, the title is silly and yes, it's from the 1950's, but damn if it isn't one of the very best books I've ever read.
IMHO, you can gain more from reading this one book than from reading an entire shelf of books on the management fad du jour.
Hell, check out Oddpost
All the tracks will be available for download after November 9 at http://creativecommons.org/wired
Didn't Bush tell us to go to a community college and educate ourselves so we can get higher paying jobs?
Is it just in my town, or are community colleges a joke everywhere?
If you want to advocate SPF, publish a SPF record for your domain
I'd love to, but I use Register.com's DNS servers for most of the domains I manage, and their web interface doesn't allow the entry of TXT records. I suppose I should bug them about that.
Eh, I get at least 275 pieces of spam a day, plus another 700+ undeliverable bounce messages 'cause some spammer forged the From: address to be from one of my customer's domains. (I am postmaster for the domains. Fortunately I am able to sort those messages into a separate folder.)
Add on top of that all the spam that my customers get, the disk space it takes up until they pop their mail off the server, the CPU time SpamAssassin spends trying to stop it all and my administrative time fuxoring with SpamAssassin settings and it definitely has a significant financial impact. I can only imagine what the impact is on big networks like AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Earthlink, etc.
I do believe that the worse it gets, the greater the financial incentive will be for everyone to focus on finding solutions.
In the meantime, be very thankful you only get 20-25 pieces a day.
Well, it's not damning to you, but to the "Linux on the desktop will over take Mac within a year" people, it's a damning statistic. I believe the article was accepted as a general discrediting of that statistic
I've always scoffed at those who say that Linux desktop usage has surpassed or is about to surpass Mac desktop usage. I host/maintain several dozen sites with a wide variety of mainstream and not-so-mainstream audiences. I checked the browser stats recently - Linux had about 0.1 to 0.3% on all of them.
It seems to me that, even with a BSD-style license (or no license at all) there is still an incentive for creators of derivative works to submit their most important fixes back upstream.
Let's say your company ships an image server which depends heavily on a BSD-licensed image manipulation library. From time to time you release new versions of your software which incorporate not only your own new features, but new features from the latest version of the image library as well.
If in the process of building your app you find and fix a bug in the image library, wouldn't it make sense for you to send a patch upstream and be done with it forever? Otherwise, every time you upgraded you'd have to fix the same stupid bug again, taking time away from more fruitful work.
Perhaps someone can clarify for me a) whether I explained that OK and b) whether that is actually what happens in the real world with BSD projects?
Check out Saraf Solutions' Aviansus:
http://www.saraf.com/Aviansus_Home.html
It's built on OSS technologies, including Apache, Tomcat and Postgres, IIRC. I'm working with a Chamber of Commerce which is in the middle of migrating to it from an old IMIS system. They should be going live on it soon. Contact me if you want me to put you in touch with the end users for a reference / first hand account of how it works.
Yep, I had that happen to me, too. I wrote a broadcast fax system for my local Chamber of Commerce. It uses Ghostscript to convert PDFs to PostScript, and then uses efax (the Linux command-line fax utility, not the efax.com service) to send the faxes out to their 800+ members and contacts.
One time, a PDF didn't convert properly, and the recipients started getting faxes with 300 pages of PostScript gibberish. Fortunately we managed to stop it before too many of the faxes went out.
So, here's what I did to prevent that from reoccurring:
1. Set it up to first try converting with pdf2ps, and to fall back on pdftops if that fails. Those utilities are from two separate packages. Neither one will convert 100% of PDFs, but one usually works whenever the other fails. We've not really had any problems with conversion since.
2. Set it up to send a test fax to the Chamber, so they can preview it before sending out the whole batch of them.
That was a couple years ago. They've been using it since then to send out several broadcasts a week, and have had no hiccups.
Hope that helps.
I suggest Ultraviolence.
See http://www.teamuvr.com/teamuvr_mp3.htm