Has anybody else ever though of this whole *sucks thing as a different kind of Better Business Bureau?
At least with one of these sites you can go and look at what people don't like about the company, all the BBB will tell you is that x number of people have filed complaints. Whenever I go look at something like wallmartsucks.com I don't find myself especially impressed with what most of these people have to say.
I mean seriously, I spent some time working for a retail computer outlet a few years ago and the one thing I took away from it is that you can't make everybody happy. I don't doubt that some people have very legitimate gripes with the company they complain about but most of it is just silly whining. I would think that a company would be somewhat aloof to this, there's nothing at wallmartsucks.com that would stop me from shopping there. (I have my own reasons for avoiding that place)
Is this just a case of a company sending their pet lawyers out to do whatever they feel is necessary or do they really think that their potential consumers are unable to evaluate this guy's gripes and dismiss them? Sounds to me like a better deal than the BBB saying 17 people have filed complaints but we won't tell you the details so you can make up your own mind.
Ok, I did a fresh install of windows on a computer at work. Windows 98 first edition. I popped in the cd, the install ran, and in 30 minutes the computer booted and I went to the Windows Update site. Four downloads and two reboots later, I have a reasonably secure system with no known exploits. Full install, all fixes applied - less than an hour and a half.
This is a pretty useless argument. Atfer spending this amount of time with an install of Windows 98, adding the updates and rebooting a couple of times you have an OS installed. If I spent the same amount of time with a Red Hat 7 install and updates I have everything I need to get my work done. I have Emacs and and gcc andPERL and Apache and MySQL and OpenSSH and Abiword and Gnumeric and Netscape and Mutt, etc.
You have Windows, IE, Outlook Express and WordPad. Joy, just what the hell are you going to do with that?
You're comment about Windows being secure is true. On the other hand its' not like it does anything either. As soon as you install an FTP server, a web server, an RDBMS and a remote acces program you have the potential to get just as "owned" as any other OS.
What people are trying to say here is that making my email program execute code because I've got something showing in the preview pane is pretty damn dangerous. Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I recived an email that makes use of these fancy scripting features. Its' a piece of spam (which I signed up for) from the Ministry of sound with a link to their new TV ad and a little flash animation. Its' pretty cool but I'll live without it if that's the cost of not getting email that causes some trojan to be executed.
If you go check out the Salon article, you'll find some more info on how this works.
I actually think this is kind of funny. The proposed schemes mostly work by expoiting differences int the redbook(cd audio) and yellowbook(cd-rom) standards, making it impossible to play these CDs in most cd-rom drives.
Well guess what you twits, I buy quite a few cds but I hardly ever use them in a stero style cd player. Basically what they're going to do is make it so I can't play them in my desktop, I can't play them in my laptop, I can't rip them and play them in my rio and they may not work in the high end player I've been thinking about buying. Even some car cd players may have problems.
So I'm supposed to pay 20 bucks for a cd I can only play in my $200 bookshelf system that sounds terrible and my 5 year old discman (which I can't find). Oh goody, I'm gonna go buy lots of these things.
Parents cannot hang over their children 24 hours a day, so we fall to the "tribe" mentality of watching our kids: The tribe puts signals stating the level of violence/nudity/profanity/etc
This statement is really pointing out the core of the issue. I agree with you, the V-Chip is an excelent tool for parents. Here's my problem, these raiting are being set by some ratings board somewhere. We have deemed these people to be our tribal elders so to speak.
These people are so out to lunch it makes me sick. Here's an example, I watched a story on The Power Rangers a little while ago, (I think it was on Newsworld) they had a couple of 8 year old boys sit down and watch an episode of the show. Almost instantly they were praticing the super cool kicks they had learned, aiming roughly at eachother's teeth. Now boys will do this, I did it enough when I was a kid but I also got hurt a few times. I think this is a bad thing.
The example you give above of the overweight naked women illustrates my point. I would be a whole lot happier with kids watching that than I would Power Rangers or WWF. You can be damn sure I can't configure my V-Chip to lock out stuff that I think is inapropriate, I am delegating this resposibilty to people that I personally think are twits. That scares me.
I'll second this one. I know 2 people that bought PSXs just so they could play this game.
Its' a toss up between Tony Hawk and Metal Gear Solid for best playstation gave ever. Based on the number of people I know that love this game I'd proably say Tony Hawk is the winner.
I doubt this. Intel is not aiming for Sun's market. Anybody who buys Sun hardware does so becuase it's insanely reliable, very scalable, and usually better suited to specific tasks (serving, crunching, etc). x86 simply does not match the benefits of using Sun hardware. Moving the PC space into a 64-bit architecture is the next fundamental step forward in faster home/business computing. Support? Was Intel targetting Sun when they released the first 32-bit PC space processors? No. The market wanted faster computers that could handle more memory as demand from applications increased. We're simply doing this again.
This market is exactly what the Itanium is aimed at. If it wasn't do you really think that HP would be working with the Itanium rather than the PA/RISC? HP's PA/RISC stuff is in exactly the same market as Sun's SPARC offerings.
I can't believe nobody (at least no media types) has ever asked MS what the scripting features in Outlook are for.
I used to get a bit of a chuckle from all of the MS Office macro viri running around. I always found it funny that no questions were ever raised (outside of/. et al) about whether or not its' really a good idea having a word processor able to execute random code contained in the document. On the other hand, I've also seen people do pretty cool stuff with VBA, so I think its' a pretty good feature to have.
Outlook scripting on the other hand I have never actually seen. I have never heard of anyone using it and I don't fully understand exactly what its' for. A rather handy feature that unfortunately exposes you to potential security risks I understand but an utterly useless feature that nobody uses? WTF?
Has anybody ever seen anything at all that actually uses scripting in Outlook?
Most video rental stores did have a seperate room or at least section for pr0n and "Faces of Death" type stuff. At least they did when I was a kid, most rental places now are part of a chain like Blockbuster or Rogers and they don't even cary stuff like that. If you want to get pr0n movies you usually have to go to stores that only cary adult movies, indepenantly owned video places have prety much vanished.
This sounds like it's going a little farther though, I would love to hear the screams if Blockbuster had to have a seperate room for R rated movies.
I was kind of surprised when I saw this on the news tonight. I never really thought of Canada, and especially BC as a place where this was likely to happen first. We don't really seem to have quite the same tendency to get into the whole "Save the Children" hysteria as you hear comming out of the States every so often.
I don't really disagree with a ratings system but I really don't see the need to legislate to this level of graularity. If I had a 8 year old child, I would not be pleased to see them playing Quake or Resident Evil, or watching violent movies. However I would probably consider this my resposibility rather than the government's.
I don't have a whole lot of faith in the way these systems make their decisions either. I have always found it rather silly that you can watch Die Hard on TV at 3pm on Saturday with all the swearing changed or muted and very little else changed. I would much rather have a small child hear someone say "shit" or see a naked boobie than have them watch 30 terrorists get shot every five minutes.
Re:Not that Theoretical - Mitnick did just this
on
Security Hole In TCP
·
· Score: 2
If you check out the book that Shimomura wrote with John Markoff, Takedown (ISBN: 0786862106) he talks a little bit about the attack and the work he did to figure the whole thing out. He also mentions that he gave a lecture on the attack method at some conference shortly before they actually captured Mitnick.
I really don't see cracking being a big thing for criminals to generate revenue.
Why do you think the "Russian mafia crackers" tried to extort money from the companies the stole the information from? Why didn't they just go buy a bunch of stuff and sell it? That would be really hard to do, you can't go into a retail store and buy something with a card number. You'd have to order a bunch of stuff from web sites or over the phone and have it shipped somewhere. How the hell are you going to make a bunch of money from that? Seems to me like it would be a major PITA, not to mention dangerous.
Your other example of the Taleban trashing a home loans database is almost laughable. First, just what the hell is Fannie Mae doing with a database containing information like this that is accessable from an outside connection. This should never happen. If this were ever to actually happen common sense woudl dictate that the database server should be wiped, restored from backup and secured (as in not connecting it to the internet in any way). Another PITA but hardly a disaster.
The evil master hacker stealing millions of dollars in just a few minutes is a myth. Try watching less of The lone Gunmen.
I think I have a pretty good idea how fair use works with music recordings. I have most of my CDs encoded into MP3s so I can listen to them easily while I'm working or crusing around with my laptop. This is fair, I paid for the music and I'm listening to it the way I want to.
However I also have a few books that hve been scanned with some sort of OCR system and saved as text files which I got from various web sites. For about 90% of these I also own copies of the books. It's actually really nice to pop open a text file on my laptop during a plane flight or something and not have to carry around a bunch of books. I also tried my Pilot using PlamDoc but that was just painfull to read.
I understand where Ellison is comming from, the same way I understand where Lars Ulrich is comming from but I just don't see the big threat. I just checked my HD and I've found the only "book" I don't own a copy of is 1984, that's actually one out of about 20.
I am an avid reader and tend to be an early adopter of most new networking technologies (like Napster), if anyone was going to cost these guys money it would be me but I don't. I spend money on new books every week. I find when I want a copy of a book it can take quite a while to find it.
I just don't see the threat to print publishers as clearly as something like Napster is to music publishers. (maybe, sort of)
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on that one.
This is a very serious matter, representative democracy cannot function like this. If I feel strongly about an issue I should bring it to the attention of my MP. It is the function of said MP to act on the concerns of the people he represents.
If you hold a national vote every time 3% of the electorate decides something is important then what is the function of parliment?
E-mail is proably the best way to spread stuff like this I can think of.
A few months ago in Canada we had a really good example. During our last election, Stockwell Day (leader of the Canadian Alliance Party) said that if his party formed the government they would enact legislation wich would put any petition wich was signed by 3% of the electorate (about 350,000 people) to a referendum.
The nice people at This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a TV show on CBC that does political satire, put a petition on the web. It stated "We demand that the government of Canada force Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris."
By 9:30 the next morning I had at least 5 e-mails from friends asking me to go and sign the petition, mnay of which had been forwarded 4 or 5 times. I know that I also sent this on to at least 10 people my self. If I rember correctly the petition was at well over 350,000 names by that afternoon, and well over a million in 4 days. It was really funny, his party didn't win, thank god, but it would have been great to see him run away from that promise.
I don't think the people behind this idea will have any problems getting to word out, its' so easy to forward a message like this to a ton of people. I understand they only need 8000 to actually do it, and I hope they pull it off. Man that would be sweet.
How often do you find that your servers are stuck at 100% CPU usage but you don't also have other problems like 100% RAM usage or a flooded disk sub system?
If you do find yourself in this situation exactly how much are you going to get from increasing the clock speed. Lets say you get 10% better performance out of the CPU, I frankly would be just as worried with a 90% usage on the CPUs. Just a little bit more load and you're still hosed.
What you should try is getting SMP servers with extra CPU slots or cluster the boxes.
Actually I used both. The javascript was mostly there to sniff the user's OS because Netscpae 4.6 on Mac OS handles tables differently than Netscpae 4.6 on UNIX / Win32. I couldn't get the OS info from the user agent info (using CGI.pm).
I've written javascript like this before but it was more along the lines of:
If it's netscape 4 on Win32 or Unix do X
If it's netscpae 4 on mac do this
If it's netscape 6/ Gecko do this
If it's IE do this
etc
This was a real pain in the ass to write but it needed to be done some some funky tables our designer came up with looked right. Turned out to be a really cool looking site. I can't imagine turning to my PHB and saying, "This person is using Netscape 4, we're not going to sell them anything". I would have been fired sooo fast.
Re:These are customer service types
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 1
I think you kind of lost my point. Things get confusing when you start throwing around media buzzwords.
As I and I'm sure others, understood things the term "knowledge worker" refered to people with specific technical skills that were driving the technical ends of these companies.
What I see in media reports of this kind is blaring headlines like "437 high tech workers laid off from Amazon" and the such. This is misleading, just because someone fills a position at a dot com company doesn't mean they are a high tech worker. The people in this article were all service and logistical people. I didn't see a single coder or admin mentioned.
These people don't contribute less to the company, they are not dumber. The thing that bugd me is that the media outlets are miss representing things. If L.L. Bean outsourced their call center nobody would be talking about "high tech" or "knowledge workers" being miss treated or laid off.
I know this isn't a really a big deal, it pretty standard reporting style for this day and age but is does bug me.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise.
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 4
What good will a union do for these people?
The statement in the article concerning unsafe environments in Amazon's warehouses baffle me. I can't speak about the US but in Canada if I found myself in conditions where people are "fainting and vomiting from the heat" I know damn well that one call to my province's Ocupation Health and Safety office would get the company in big trouble.
I can't imagine this being any different in the US, in fact I'm 95% percent sure that if such things were to take place in a union shop, the first thing the union would do is place a call to the government types anyways.
The simple fact is that a lot of the abuses you use as an example from the industrial revolution have now been deemed unlawful and there are angencies to deal with this stuff. A union doesn't change that.
I do however, understand layoffs, I very recently got let go myself. I'll pick myself up and get something else, there's lots of companies that need my skills right now. When it gets to the point that I can't find another job then I guess I'm screwed. Probably should have gone to university when I was 18 rather than starting a corespondence degree at 25. I fail to see how a union will change that. I also fail to see how a union would have saved my last employer from sliding into a revenue shortfall, I'd still be out of a job, I would just have taken home less money the past 6 months because I was paying union dues.
These are customer service types
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 1
Have you ever noticed that articles that talk about this new union movement are almost always people filling semi skilled jobs?
The Republic article refers to people in Amazon's customer service center as "high tech" workers. I am not trying to put these people down, I know that that is a really tough job, but I don't understand how they become "knowledge workers".
I personally always looked at the "knowledge worker" thing as being someone in an internal development or infrastructure group with all them super leet coding skillz and stuff. While I agree that a customer service department that is well staffed and effective is crucial to a company's success, I don't get how these particular people are more "high tech" than the same people that fill this function for Sears' catalog division.
I will agree with your statements about Sony being evil. Sony Playstation is where all this region crap came from in the first place.
However I must doubt the whole "that's why they don't put CD-R drives in thier PCs" thing. I;m sure the guy said that but its' crap.
If Sony didn't want people to be able to make CDs I wouldn't have a Sony CD-RW in my machine. Nor would I have a box of Sony blank CDs on my desk.
I have had a number of problems with various CDRs not playing in my Car Stero (kenwood), DVD player (samsung), my playstation and my old HP laptop.
1. The blue tinted cdr media (the cheaper ones) don't seem to work as well with everything. I have had a lot of luck with Gold tinted Maxells and TDKs, I'm not sure if you can get the Maxells any more, try Costco. Samsung 80 min silver ones also are pretty good.
2. Avoid Pacific Digital CDRs like the plague. They are dirt cheap but they seem to have a rather high failure rate, they don't usually work in my DVD player or PS1.
3. Get some good software. This may not be a factor in getting your CDRs to work but I have had much less trouble since I switched to Nero (www.ahead.de) from Adaptec's Easy Cd Creator. CDRWin, just sucks. cdecord on Linux is pretty good as well.
A couple years ago I found out that my company (a largish VAR) would pay be more if I had an MSCE so I trucked down to Costco and got myself some books. No, it wasn't very hard.
Well they did pay me more, and my friends made fun of me, but I also ended up with a free one year Technet subscription. Technet is basically MS's knowledge base, patches and beta software sent to you every month (10 - 25 cds).
I now have a foot and a half high stack of useless crap, even more offensive than AOL cds. Anyone have any ideas what I should do with them?
I am looking for funny stuff and no I don't think I could fit them up my ass.
if you can give me one good reason to have functional sound drivers on a server running HP-UX, I will let you do me nasty in the but.
HP builds more than servers.
One good reason for functional sound drivers on a HP/UX box:
HP boxen are commonly used in SCADA systems. Chances are if I have a big industrial control system I would want said system to relay me as much information as possible. Using various signal tones and pitches would allow me to do this in a way that would be sure to catch my attention while I am busy surfing pr0n sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anybody else ever though of this whole *sucks thing as a different kind of Better Business Bureau?
At least with one of these sites you can go and look at what people don't like about the company, all the BBB will tell you is that x number of people have filed complaints. Whenever I go look at something like wallmartsucks.com I don't find myself especially impressed with what most of these people have to say.
I mean seriously, I spent some time working for a retail computer outlet a few years ago and the one thing I took away from it is that you can't make everybody happy. I don't doubt that some people have very legitimate gripes with the company they complain about but most of it is just silly whining. I would think that a company would be somewhat aloof to this, there's nothing at wallmartsucks.com that would stop me from shopping there. (I have my own reasons for avoiding that place)
Is this just a case of a company sending their pet lawyers out to do whatever they feel is necessary or do they really think that their potential consumers are unable to evaluate this guy's gripes and dismiss them? Sounds to me like a better deal than the BBB saying 17 people have filed complaints but we won't tell you the details so you can make up your own mind.
Ok, I did a fresh install of windows on a computer at work. Windows 98 first edition. I popped in the cd, the install ran, and in 30 minutes the computer booted and I went to the Windows Update site. Four downloads and two reboots later, I have a reasonably secure system with no known exploits. Full install, all fixes applied - less than an hour and a half.
This is a pretty useless argument. Atfer spending this amount of time with an install of Windows 98, adding the updates and rebooting a couple of times you have an OS installed. If I spent the same amount of time with a Red Hat 7 install and updates I have everything I need to get my work done. I have Emacs and and gcc andPERL and Apache and MySQL and OpenSSH and Abiword and Gnumeric and Netscape and Mutt, etc.
You have Windows, IE, Outlook Express and WordPad. Joy, just what the hell are you going to do with that?
You're comment about Windows being secure is true. On the other hand its' not like it does anything either. As soon as you install an FTP server, a web server, an RDBMS and a remote acces program you have the potential to get just as "owned" as any other OS.
What people are trying to say here is that making my email program execute code because I've got something showing in the preview pane is pretty damn dangerous. Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I recived an email that makes use of these fancy scripting features. Its' a piece of spam (which I signed up for) from the Ministry of sound with a link to their new TV ad and a little flash animation. Its' pretty cool but I'll live without it if that's the cost of not getting email that causes some trojan to be executed.
Yeah, I worded that poorly, meant to say read the article for more info, its' also on salon.
Preview is my friend, Preview is my friend, Preview is my friend
If you go check out the Salon article, you'll find some more info on how this works.
I actually think this is kind of funny. The proposed schemes mostly work by expoiting differences int the redbook(cd audio) and yellowbook(cd-rom) standards, making it impossible to play these CDs in most cd-rom drives.
Well guess what you twits, I buy quite a few cds but I hardly ever use them in a stero style cd player. Basically what they're going to do is make it so I can't play them in my desktop, I can't play them in my laptop, I can't rip them and play them in my rio and they may not work in the high end player I've been thinking about buying. Even some car cd players may have problems.
So I'm supposed to pay 20 bucks for a cd I can only play in my $200 bookshelf system that sounds terrible and my 5 year old discman (which I can't find). Oh goody, I'm gonna go buy lots of these things.
idiots
Parents cannot hang over their children 24 hours a day, so we fall to the "tribe" mentality of watching our kids: The tribe puts signals stating the level of violence/nudity/profanity/etc
This statement is really pointing out the core of the issue. I agree with you, the V-Chip is an excelent tool for parents. Here's my problem, these raiting are being set by some ratings board somewhere. We have deemed these people to be our tribal elders so to speak.
These people are so out to lunch it makes me sick. Here's an example, I watched a story on The Power Rangers a little while ago, (I think it was on Newsworld) they had a couple of 8 year old boys sit down and watch an episode of the show. Almost instantly they were praticing the super cool kicks they had learned, aiming roughly at eachother's teeth. Now boys will do this, I did it enough when I was a kid but I also got hurt a few times. I think this is a bad thing.
The example you give above of the overweight naked women illustrates my point. I would be a whole lot happier with kids watching that than I would Power Rangers or WWF. You can be damn sure I can't configure my V-Chip to lock out stuff that I think is inapropriate, I am delegating this resposibilty to people that I personally think are twits. That scares me.
I'll second this one. I know 2 people that bought PSXs just so they could play this game.
Its' a toss up between Tony Hawk and Metal Gear Solid for best playstation gave ever. Based on the number of people I know that love this game I'd proably say Tony Hawk is the winner.
I doubt this. Intel is not aiming for Sun's market. Anybody who buys Sun hardware does so becuase it's insanely reliable, very scalable, and usually better suited to specific tasks (serving, crunching, etc). x86 simply does not match the benefits of using Sun hardware. Moving the PC space into a 64-bit architecture is the next fundamental step forward in faster home/business computing. Support? Was Intel targetting Sun when they released the first 32-bit PC space processors? No. The market wanted faster computers that could handle more memory as demand from applications increased. We're simply doing this again.
This market is exactly what the Itanium is aimed at. If it wasn't do you really think that HP would be working with the Itanium rather than the PA/RISC? HP's PA/RISC stuff is in exactly the same market as Sun's SPARC offerings.
I can't believe nobody (at least no media types) has ever asked MS what the scripting features in Outlook are for.
/. et al) about whether or not its' really a good idea having a word processor able to execute random code contained in the document. On the other hand, I've also seen people do pretty cool stuff with VBA, so I think its' a pretty good feature to have.
I used to get a bit of a chuckle from all of the MS Office macro viri running around. I always found it funny that no questions were ever raised (outside of
Outlook scripting on the other hand I have never actually seen. I have never heard of anyone using it and I don't fully understand exactly what its' for. A rather handy feature that unfortunately exposes you to potential security risks I understand but an utterly useless feature that nobody uses? WTF?
Has anybody ever seen anything at all that actually uses scripting in Outlook?
Sort of.
Most video rental stores did have a seperate room or at least section for pr0n and "Faces of Death" type stuff. At least they did when I was a kid, most rental places now are part of a chain like Blockbuster or Rogers and they don't even cary stuff like that. If you want to get pr0n movies you usually have to go to stores that only cary adult movies, indepenantly owned video places have prety much vanished.
This sounds like it's going a little farther though, I would love to hear the screams if Blockbuster had to have a seperate room for R rated movies.
I was kind of surprised when I saw this on the news tonight. I never really thought of Canada, and especially BC as a place where this was likely to happen first. We don't really seem to have quite the same tendency to get into the whole "Save the Children" hysteria as you hear comming out of the States every so often.
I don't really disagree with a ratings system but I really don't see the need to legislate to this level of graularity. If I had a 8 year old child, I would not be pleased to see them playing Quake or Resident Evil, or watching violent movies. However I would probably consider this my resposibility rather than the government's.
I don't have a whole lot of faith in the way these systems make their decisions either. I have always found it rather silly that you can watch Die Hard on TV at 3pm on Saturday with all the swearing changed or muted and very little else changed. I would much rather have a small child hear someone say "shit" or see a naked boobie than have them watch 30 terrorists get shot every five minutes.
If you check out the book that Shimomura wrote with John Markoff, Takedown (ISBN: 0786862106) he talks a little bit about the attack and the work he did to figure the whole thing out. He also mentions that he gave a lecture on the attack method at some conference shortly before they actually captured Mitnick.
And yeah, that was a few years ago.
I really don't see cracking being a big thing for criminals to generate revenue.
Why do you think the "Russian mafia crackers" tried to extort money from the companies the stole the information from? Why didn't they just go buy a bunch of stuff and sell it? That would be really hard to do, you can't go into a retail store and buy something with a card number. You'd have to order a bunch of stuff from web sites or over the phone and have it shipped somewhere. How the hell are you going to make a bunch of money from that? Seems to me like it would be a major PITA, not to mention dangerous.
Your other example of the Taleban trashing a home loans database is almost laughable. First, just what the hell is Fannie Mae doing with a database containing information like this that is accessable from an outside connection. This should never happen. If this were ever to actually happen common sense woudl dictate that the database server should be wiped, restored from backup and secured (as in not connecting it to the internet in any way). Another PITA but hardly a disaster.
The evil master hacker stealing millions of dollars in just a few minutes is a myth. Try watching less of The lone Gunmen.
I think I have a pretty good idea how fair use works with music recordings. I have most of my CDs encoded into MP3s so I can listen to them easily while I'm working or crusing around with my laptop. This is fair, I paid for the music and I'm listening to it the way I want to.
However I also have a few books that hve been scanned with some sort of OCR system and saved as text files which I got from various web sites. For about 90% of these I also own copies of the books. It's actually really nice to pop open a text file on my laptop during a plane flight or something and not have to carry around a bunch of books. I also tried my Pilot using PlamDoc but that was just painfull to read.
I understand where Ellison is comming from, the same way I understand where Lars Ulrich is comming from but I just don't see the big threat. I just checked my HD and I've found the only "book" I don't own a copy of is 1984, that's actually one out of about 20.
I am an avid reader and tend to be an early adopter of most new networking technologies (like Napster), if anyone was going to cost these guys money it would be me but I don't. I spend money on new books every week. I find when I want a copy of a book it can take quite a while to find it.
I just don't see the threat to print publishers as clearly as something like Napster is to music publishers. (maybe, sort of)
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on that one.
This is a very serious matter, representative democracy cannot function like this. If I feel strongly about an issue I should bring it to the attention of my MP. It is the function of said MP to act on the concerns of the people he represents.
If you hold a national vote every time 3% of the electorate decides something is important then what is the function of parliment?
E-mail is proably the best way to spread stuff like this I can think of.
A few months ago in Canada we had a really good example. During our last election, Stockwell Day (leader of the Canadian Alliance Party) said that if his party formed the government they would enact legislation wich would put any petition wich was signed by 3% of the electorate (about 350,000 people) to a referendum.
The nice people at This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a TV show on CBC that does political satire, put a petition on the web. It stated "We demand that the government of Canada force Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris."
By 9:30 the next morning I had at least 5 e-mails from friends asking me to go and sign the petition, mnay of which had been forwarded 4 or 5 times. I know that I also sent this on to at least 10 people my self. If I rember correctly the petition was at well over 350,000 names by that afternoon, and well over a million in 4 days. It was really funny, his party didn't win, thank god, but it would have been great to see him run away from that promise.
I don't think the people behind this idea will have any problems getting to word out, its' so easy to forward a message like this to a ton of people. I understand they only need 8000 to actually do it, and I hope they pull it off. Man that would be sweet.
How often do you find that your servers are stuck at 100% CPU usage but you don't also have other problems like 100% RAM usage or a flooded disk sub system?
If you do find yourself in this situation exactly how much are you going to get from increasing the clock speed. Lets say you get 10% better performance out of the CPU, I frankly would be just as worried with a 90% usage on the CPUs. Just a little bit more load and you're still hosed.
What you should try is getting SMP servers with extra CPU slots or cluster the boxes.
Actually I used both. The javascript was mostly there to sniff the user's OS because Netscpae 4.6 on Mac OS handles tables differently than Netscpae 4.6 on UNIX / Win32. I couldn't get the OS info from the user agent info (using CGI.pm).
That's true. I got around it somehow, I just don't remember exactly what I did.
I've written javascript like this before but it was more along the lines of:
If it's netscape 4 on Win32 or Unix do X
If it's netscpae 4 on mac do this
If it's netscape 6/ Gecko do this
If it's IE do this
etc
This was a real pain in the ass to write but it needed to be done some some funky tables our designer came up with looked right. Turned out to be a really cool looking site. I can't imagine turning to my PHB and saying, "This person is using Netscape 4, we're not going to sell them anything". I would have been fired sooo fast.
I think you kind of lost my point. Things get confusing when you start throwing around media buzzwords.
As I and I'm sure others, understood things the term "knowledge worker" refered to people with specific technical skills that were driving the technical ends of these companies.
What I see in media reports of this kind is blaring headlines like "437 high tech workers laid off from Amazon" and the such. This is misleading, just because someone fills a position at a dot com company doesn't mean they are a high tech worker. The people in this article were all service and logistical people. I didn't see a single coder or admin mentioned.
These people don't contribute less to the company, they are not dumber. The thing that bugd me is that the media outlets are miss representing things. If L.L. Bean outsourced their call center nobody would be talking about "high tech" or "knowledge workers" being miss treated or laid off.
I know this isn't a really a big deal, it pretty standard reporting style for this day and age but is does bug me.
What good will a union do for these people?
The statement in the article concerning unsafe environments in Amazon's warehouses baffle me. I can't speak about the US but in Canada if I found myself in conditions where people are "fainting and vomiting from the heat" I know damn well that one call to my province's Ocupation Health and Safety office would get the company in big trouble.
I can't imagine this being any different in the US, in fact I'm 95% percent sure that if such things were to take place in a union shop, the first thing the union would do is place a call to the government types anyways.
The simple fact is that a lot of the abuses you use as an example from the industrial revolution have now been deemed unlawful and there are angencies to deal with this stuff. A union doesn't change that.
I do however, understand layoffs, I very recently got let go myself. I'll pick myself up and get something else, there's lots of companies that need my skills right now. When it gets to the point that I can't find another job then I guess I'm screwed. Probably should have gone to university when I was 18 rather than starting a corespondence degree at 25. I fail to see how a union will change that. I also fail to see how a union would have saved my last employer from sliding into a revenue shortfall, I'd still be out of a job, I would just have taken home less money the past 6 months because I was paying union dues.
Have you ever noticed that articles that talk about this new union movement are almost always people filling semi skilled jobs?
The Republic article refers to people in Amazon's customer service center as "high tech" workers. I am not trying to put these people down, I know that that is a really tough job, but I don't understand how they become "knowledge workers".
I personally always looked at the "knowledge worker" thing as being someone in an internal development or infrastructure group with all them super leet coding skillz and stuff. While I agree that a customer service department that is well staffed and effective is crucial to a company's success, I don't get how these particular people are more "high tech" than the same people that fill this function for Sears' catalog division.
Am I missing something here or what?
I will agree with your statements about Sony being evil. Sony Playstation is where all this region crap came from in the first place.
However I must doubt the whole "that's why they don't put CD-R drives in thier PCs" thing. I;m sure the guy said that but its' crap.
If Sony didn't want people to be able to make CDs I wouldn't have a Sony CD-RW in my machine. Nor would I have a box of Sony blank CDs on my desk.
I have had a number of problems with various CDRs not playing in my Car Stero (kenwood), DVD player (samsung), my playstation and my old HP laptop.
1. The blue tinted cdr media (the cheaper ones) don't seem to work as well with everything. I have had a lot of luck with Gold tinted Maxells and TDKs, I'm not sure if you can get the Maxells any more, try Costco. Samsung 80 min silver ones also are pretty good.
2. Avoid Pacific Digital CDRs like the plague. They are dirt cheap but they seem to have a rather high failure rate, they don't usually work in my DVD player or PS1.
3. Get some good software. This may not be a factor in getting your CDRs to work but I have had much less trouble since I switched to Nero (www.ahead.de) from Adaptec's Easy Cd Creator. CDRWin, just sucks. cdecord on Linux is pretty good as well.
Hang on there buddy,
Just because Americans can't make beer that doesn't taste like mouldy water doesn't mean that Canadians are equally challenged.
Next time you're up in the great white north try and get your hands on something made by Big Rock breweries of Calgary. That's good beer.
I will agree that anything they put 'ICE' on the label of isn't fit for dogs.
A couple years ago I found out that my company (a largish VAR) would pay be more if I had an MSCE so I trucked down to Costco and got myself some books. No, it wasn't very hard.
Well they did pay me more, and my friends made fun of me, but I also ended up with a free one year Technet subscription. Technet is basically MS's knowledge base, patches and beta software sent to you every month (10 - 25 cds).
I now have a foot and a half high stack of useless crap, even more offensive than AOL cds. Anyone have any ideas what I should do with them?
I am looking for funny stuff and no I don't think I could fit them up my ass.
HP builds more than servers.
One good reason for functional sound drivers on a HP/UX box:
HP boxen are commonly used in SCADA systems. Chances are if I have a big industrial control system I would want said system to relay me as much information as possible. Using various signal tones and pitches would allow me to do this in a way that would be sure to catch my attention while I am busy surfing pr0n sites.
I humbly decline your offer.