True, the submitter lives on a tropical island in the Caribbean.:-)
Lucky you!
I should have said "mainstream choices for 64-bit OS on AMD64". And I did not mean to slight BSD, in my mind "Linux" maps nearly to "free Unix type OS".
Ah, but I didn't mention BSD, I mentioned VMS.:-)
Anyway, while I was composing a response everyone and their dog jumped all over the 64-bit OS bit with OS X comments.
In any case, for the near future if you want to run a 64 bit operating system you will either be using one of the free Linux versions or the free download of Windows XP-64 beta.
My, but does anyone else think the submitter live in a rather sheltered world?
I've been running a 64-bit operating system for the past five or six years, and it isn't one of those mentioned. It just happens to be OpenVMS running on Alpha.
I really don't like the idea that you can't continue to link to an article beyond a certain time limit, or that after that time limit anyone following your link will get a demand for a $3 payment.
That's why, although the article may be shorter, I prefer to use BBC News if I'm referring to a story.
Having said that, I certainly feel sorry for the NYT, and I do have my own valid registration. I just can't see how they can find a for-profit way to handle their archive.
send them a picture of somewhere on Earth that deserves to be spared from the Vogons
I will assume that Vogons will be doing the judging. (Given that the competition closes in about 24 hours, this is probably correct.) What appeals to Vogons? Administration. Bureaucratic red tape, sealing wax and paperwork. Ugly, drab functionality.
Therefore, I would send in a picture of an administration building on Earth that is the most ugly, greyest, most drab utilitarian administration building in existence, and that also generates great quantities of bureaucratic paper work for no good reason.
I see. Then I better get myself off to Brussels and photograph the European Commission buildings. After all they're in Belgium!
You report it to spamcop then you go to the spammer's unsubscribe page and enter the FCC complaints email address to get it "removed" from their database.
When you repeatedly hear stories of companies having problems installing ERP packages, why should it come as any surprise that an educational institution for which the package is not designed has problems with it?
Personally, I think the person(s) responsible for specifying off-the-shelf software with some customisations should be shot.
I've worked on ERP implementations, heck, I've worked on ERP software development. It's all about providing a sophisticated accounting system with cookie-cutter business modules around it. Everyone has customisations on it, how large those customisations are depend on how far away you are, or want to be, from the template the ERP provider offers. Education is well away from what those templates offer. Probably so far away that you cannot justify the cost of the migration and customisations. That leaves you wondering if someone recommended the migration because it would look good on their CV.
Judging from the vast majority of the comments people happy with their cellular service are few and far between. Everyone else is itching to bitch and moan about how dreadful it is.
Personally, I think the survey may have been a little off. They're looking for things that piss people off, but they seem to have restricted it to things you pay for.
If you get one that sucks hang up on the idiots and call right back. Keeping playing Russian Roulette till you hit someone that sounds like they have half a brain.
I like the idea of playing Russian Roulette with call center staff.
Load revolver with one round in a random place.
Call Customer service and wait for them to say hello.
Place gun next to receiver and pull trigger.
Sooner or later one of those call center staff is going to need clean underwear.
Having the article point out that the anti-counterfitting measure their software scans for is various circles reminded me of The Stainless Steel Rat. In one story he discovers that the "impossible to counterfeit" money they have relies on a series of creases in the notes, spacing based on square roots of prime numbers.
The actual impact of this effort on counterfeiting will be minimal anyway. People can always get hold of the version prior to counterfeit detection being introduced.
Well, it's about time Google started taking the fight to Microsoft. The signs that MS are about to try their embrace and extent tactics on the search marketplace are already apparent.
Or haven't you seen the adverts everywhere for the MSN searchbar?
Reminds me of an interesting question posed to me once. What if grass, the plain old green blades out on your lawn, could easily be made into something that could get you high?
Obviously you haven't seen Caddyshack...
You know I invented my own grass too and the amazing stuff about this is you can play 36 holes on it, then you can take some home and get stoned out of the bejesus with it.
It isn't about being "more competitive", it is, as an earlier poster pointed out, a race to the bottom.
You, as in an American at risk of having your job moved overseas, can't compete. You'd be somewhere around the poverty line if you were living on the salaries paid to, say, Indian programmers.
Those who shortsightedly argue that demand for IT people in India will drive up the salaries there and make employing in the US more attractive neglect the obvious. Once India becomes too expensive, the jobs will be moved to the next developing country with a reasonably well educated workforce. Rinse and repeat until half the world is complaining that country Foo stole their jobs.
It's a little low of the article author to suggest that the engineers responsible for the development of the current Internet technologies are responsible for the offshoring of jobs. Did they take the decision to do so? No. They made it possible. That's actually one of the major points of being an engineer, particularly a software engineer. You are either working to make someone else redundant, or to make yourself redundant.
What I'd see happening is Tivo figuring out what the end user might be doing, based upon what they're watching. Sci-fi -- reruns of B5, Star Trek, Stargate, etc. -- suggests you're a nerd, so you get adverts for the latest Intel processor, and other such things, for example. And so on.
Actually, it is up to the advertisers to do their homework and figure that out. It is utterly useless for the folks selling cleaning products, but if they want to do things like promote movies with longer trailers on-demand, that will work.
I utterly hate the analogy that FOSS is communistic. First of all, last time I checked, FOSS hadn't killed hundreds of millions of people as communism had. Second, it doesn't work on a philosophical level.
I'm amazed that something opening like this got any "Insightful" mods, let alone enough to get it to a score of 4.
Communism per-se hasn't killed anyone. Totalitarian regimes claiming to be communist have, on the other hand, killed lots of people.
Why not use an organ donor? Or one of those people who want to have their ashes put into space? I'd do it, if I were dead, that is... better than being wormfood.
Well, if they used a human body the only data they'd get would be when they got it back and cut it up. That would only let them see how much damage the radiation had done.
Their mannequin is stuffed full of sensors that will record the radiation levels a body would be exposed to. These circumstances can be reproduced repeatedly in the lab with real bodies or organs.
No problem with them limiting content to the UK (and turning it into a revenue service outside the UK, as they do with BBC North America) but WTF do they think they should be restricting content? We paid for it after all.
Presumably that means you are a UK citizen who might have seen the political games going on around the time of the initial announcement. The previous discussion was over the BBC article quoting the now ex-Director General, Greg Dyke.
I missed that discussion, but reading it now I found this comment
predicting Greg's departure.
I used to work in the development of software for subscriber management when mobile phones were just taking off in the UK. The concept of "golden numbers" was enshrined in the software.
I don't think there was much in the way of transferability, but all the companies using our software to sell service could sell you cute or memorable numbers for a fee.
A long time ago, Woz had a number that matched the Pan Am reservation number. People in Silicon Valley's 408 area code who failed to dial 800 would get him instead - one of those minor miracles arranged by Charles Dickens, or by God. You think you've got Pan Am - but instead you've got Woz, who explored many variants of the special, rare case of the prank phone call initiated by the recipient. In one prank, which has the cruel simplicity of a Zen koan, he would quickly tell the caller that as the millionth passenger on Pan Am, they had won a lifetime of free travel. In the middle of collecting the caller's personal information, he would hang up, leaving them to confusedly call back and attempt to get confirmation of their fabulous and elusive prize.
i got a free SIPphone software with my LindowsOS, you have to know someone who his also connected to the SIP network for this to work.. So its useless for me anyway..
As has been pointed out, there are pay services where you can connect to the POTS network and make calls. Obviously, these services include provision of a "POTS number" so anyone can dial you. The obvious one is Vonage.
Now, what a little digging into FWD will uncover are some free ways to link yourself into the POTS network. No, you can't make outbound calls to non-0800 numbers, but you can set yourself up to receive calls from non-VoIP callers. Firstly, there are lists of access numbers that people can call and then dial your FWD number. Secondly, there are at least a couple of places where you can get a POTS number that will reach your FWD number. One gives a number in Washington State, the other gives an 0345 UK number. If you're really interested in finding that, read the FWD mailing list archive, I don't think slashdotting those services would be wise.
Admittedly, this won't stop VoIP being useless to you if calling these numbers costs your friends the same or more than calling your land line or cell, but if you have friends overseas who you can convince to sign up then there's a point to it.
Eventually VoIP will reach a critical mass, the point you miss here is that the FCC have decided to keep out of it and thus make it reaching that critical mass more likely.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, while I was composing a response everyone and their dog jumped all over the 64-bit OS bit with OS X comments.
I'll see your Alpha workstation and raise you a DEC AlphaServer 2100.
:-)
Sledghammer-proof hardware.
This sucker is so large that you can tell people you keep a copy of the Internet on it, and they believe you.
I've been running a 64-bit operating system for the past five or six years, and it isn't one of those mentioned. It just happens to be OpenVMS running on Alpha.
I really don't like the idea that you can't continue to link to an article beyond a certain time limit, or that after that time limit anyone following your link will get a demand for a $3 payment.
That's why, although the article may be shorter, I prefer to use BBC News if I'm referring to a story.
Having said that, I certainly feel sorry for the NYT, and I do have my own valid registration. I just can't see how they can find a for-profit way to handle their archive.
MS? Aieeee!
What? Did I say a bad word?
You report it to spamcop then you go to the spammer's unsubscribe page and enter the FCC complaints email address to get it "removed" from their database.
When you repeatedly hear stories of companies having problems installing ERP packages, why should it come as any surprise that an educational institution for which the package is not designed has problems with it?
Personally, I think the person(s) responsible for specifying off-the-shelf software with some customisations should be shot.
I've worked on ERP implementations, heck, I've worked on ERP software development. It's all about providing a sophisticated accounting system with cookie-cutter business modules around it. Everyone has customisations on it, how large those customisations are depend on how far away you are, or want to be, from the template the ERP provider offers. Education is well away from what those templates offer. Probably so far away that you cannot justify the cost of the migration and customisations. That leaves you wondering if someone recommended the migration because it would look good on their CV.
Judging from the vast majority of the comments people happy with their cellular service are few and far between. Everyone else is itching to bitch and moan about how dreadful it is.
Personally, I think the survey may have been a little off. They're looking for things that piss people off, but they seem to have restricted it to things you pay for.
The BBC recently ran a short series called Brassed Off Britain. Apparently what pisses off Brits most is Junk Mail. Closely followed by Banks.
Load revolver with one round in a random place.
Call Customer service and wait for them to say hello.
Place gun next to receiver and pull trigger.
Sooner or later one of those call center staff is going to need clean underwear.
Having the article point out that the anti-counterfitting measure their software scans for is various circles reminded me of The Stainless Steel Rat. In one story he discovers that the "impossible to counterfeit" money they have relies on a series of creases in the notes, spacing based on square roots of prime numbers.
The actual impact of this effort on counterfeiting will be minimal anyway. People can always get hold of the version prior to counterfeit detection being introduced.
10,000+ books. Right, so I've got to read all of them before I can post a comment?
Oh wait, this is Slashdot.
It's good to see that at the bottom they've pointed people to a number of spyware/adware removal tools.
Most ISPs daren't point their users at these in case it breaks said user's precious Kazaa.
Well, it's about time Google started taking the fight to Microsoft. The signs that MS are about to try their embrace and extent tactics on the search marketplace are already apparent.
Or haven't you seen the adverts everywhere for the MSN searchbar?
From the various articles, there's mention of a virus on WinNY that shares user's confidential data.
You know I invented my own grass too and the amazing stuff about this is you can play 36 holes on it, then you can take some home and get stoned out of the bejesus with it.
It isn't about being "more competitive", it is, as an earlier poster pointed out, a race to the bottom.
You, as in an American at risk of having your job moved overseas, can't compete. You'd be somewhere around the poverty line if you were living on the salaries paid to, say, Indian programmers.
Those who shortsightedly argue that demand for IT people in India will drive up the salaries there and make employing in the US more attractive neglect the obvious. Once India becomes too expensive, the jobs will be moved to the next developing country with a reasonably well educated workforce. Rinse and repeat until half the world is complaining that country Foo stole their jobs.
It's a little low of the article author to suggest that the engineers responsible for the development of the current Internet technologies are responsible for the offshoring of jobs. Did they take the decision to do so? No. They made it possible. That's actually one of the major points of being an engineer, particularly a software engineer. You are either working to make someone else redundant, or to make yourself redundant.
Communism per-se hasn't killed anyone. Totalitarian regimes claiming to be communist have, on the other hand, killed lots of people.
Their mannequin is stuffed full of sensors that will record the radiation levels a body would be exposed to. These circumstances can be reproduced repeatedly in the lab with real bodies or organs.
I missed that discussion, but reading it now I found this comment predicting Greg's departure.
Politics, eh?
I used to work in the development of software for subscriber management when mobile phones were just taking off in the UK. The concept of "golden numbers" was enshrined in the software.
I don't think there was much in the way of transferability, but all the companies using our software to sell service could sell you cute or memorable numbers for a fee.
A fun read...
Now, what a little digging into FWD will uncover are some free ways to link yourself into the POTS network. No, you can't make outbound calls to non-0800 numbers, but you can set yourself up to receive calls from non-VoIP callers. Firstly, there are lists of access numbers that people can call and then dial your FWD number. Secondly, there are at least a couple of places where you can get a POTS number that will reach your FWD number. One gives a number in Washington State, the other gives an 0345 UK number. If you're really interested in finding that, read the FWD mailing list archive, I don't think slashdotting those services would be wise.
Admittedly, this won't stop VoIP being useless to you if calling these numbers costs your friends the same or more than calling your land line or cell, but if you have friends overseas who you can convince to sign up then there's a point to it.
Eventually VoIP will reach a critical mass, the point you miss here is that the FCC have decided to keep out of it and thus make it reaching that critical mass more likely.
Nice quoting.
Nicked from a previous discussion
Even then, half of that had been nicked from someone's article. Privacy: Who Needs It?
Betcha didn't think you'd get caught?