Years ago, before broadband, Calgary had dialup ISP's. Telus wanted in on the game so they doubled the rates these ISP's were paying, in each case, while the ISP's were still under contract at the regular rate. The changes were done overnight. They also claimed that the change in contracted rates required a change in phone numbers. So with no warning, all of our dialup numbers changed overnight. A technical support nightmare. A month later Telus started it's ISP. The ISP's cried foul and the CRTC and Competition bureau did nothing. Telus was funding its losing ISP service with its other business units in order to put the independant ISP's out of business. That included merging its ISP's billing operations in with it's regular Telco billing system. For a small ISP back then, a monthly billing system with usage accounting was a daunting prospect. There were only 2 packages that didn't work very well and were very expensive. After spending $20,000 on "Coolworld"s "Internet Billing", we gave up and wrote our own. Telus' ISP got this for free. Also, when one of our customers didn't want to pay their bill, we had no real recourse. (How do you force someone to pay a $21.40 bill that they've skipped out on?) Well, in Telus' case, they had the advantage that they would also turn off the users' phone line. That keeps people paying their bills. Unfair competition? Pretty sure, but the Competition Bureau said it sounded like healthy competition and didn't do anything.
One by one, the city's independant ISP's went out of business.
I know I can't win "I remember when..." rod-length-checks but this is a banner day for someone who paid barely under $1000 for his very first ever hard disk; a 10MB Seagate ST-506 with controller.
I've sat on an Aeron for about 5 years all day. Do I think it cures cancer? No. It's a good quality, solid, comfortable chair. You never stick to the chair, and it's adjustable in all kinds of ways. I'm also prone to not exercising enough and lifting heavy things poorly. So occasionally, my back hurts. I also have one of those exercise balls http://www.fitter1.com/classic-ball.html. Whenever my back gets a little 'weak', I sit on my ball for a week. The first day on the ball after a long time, I go home that night and my back is tired, but not sore. The next day it's better. After a few days, I'm back to my regular self. The ball is cheap, forces good posture, and is convenient. But you can't lean back and put your feet on your desk to have a good 'think'. The other thing that I think is important about chairs is that the back tilts at a greater rate than the seat, as opposed to a seat that doesn't tilt at all (slide off the bottom) or a seat that tilts with the back (pinch the bottom of your thighs). That's why I like the Aeron.
I promise you this. You can't go to a chair store and try each one out. You don't know if you like a chair until you've spent a week sitting on it all day long.
On running something just because someone told you
on
TUAW Recommends Joke App
·
· Score: 4, Funny
You can lead a windows user to a Mac, but you can't make him smart.
Or:
Once a windows user, always a windows user.
My bank has a call center in India as part of its "travel agency" arm. Or maybe it's my credit card. Anyway, I was recently booking a trip and throughout the phone call, found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the person on the other end of the phone. So while he was looking for flights, I was trying to figure out what it was that was making me angry. He was helping me in a competent fashion, seemed to be trying to get me the best fare and flight, I had no trouble understanding him. I couldn't figure it out. Later, after the call was over, I replayed the conversation in my head but couldn't pin point it. There was just something about his manner that was annoying. Then I went into the kitchen to get a coffee and a co-worker, who is from Bangaloor came in and started talking to me. That's when I figured it out. My co-worker has the same speech mannerisms as this guy. I've never paid attention to it before because my co-worker is 'just another guy' and since I can usually see his face when he speaks, everything's cool. But with this guy on the phone, there was a certain 'condescending' manner about him and the way he said certain things that really riled me up. I believe it's just the way their local language mannerisms translate to english.
yeah, straight married guy with a kid here... But I almost think there would be greater service to the cause if a large number of daring individuals were to submit to these alleged full body cavity searches, assuming they actually give them, which I doubt... While you're getting one, pretend you're really enjoying it. Pretend it's turning you on. Ask the inspector to go deeper, and a little to the left.. Make them feel dirty and creepy.. These are people who need to think twice, or three times, about whether they like their jobs; about whether their jobs are fulfilling them; and about whether they are, in some way, moving the world forward.
At least a proctologist is performing a valued service, is moving the world forward, and has a reason to be doing what he/she is doing. A rent-a-copy with a long finger and a nitrile glove is not moving the world forward and needs to question their self worth.
yes, but I can't "sleep" it, and I have to haul a keyboard/mouse as well. I'd also look silly setting up my imac at the local library of coffee shop. I do have a 20" intel iMac incidentally.
The previous reply also indicates that I'm contradicting myself, but I'm not. I consider there to be a difference between travel (business, vacation) and changing locations to solve a problem. When I travel, it's for recreation/escape or meetings/training and for that, my PBG4 is perfect. When I change locations to work on a hairy problem, I'm not trucking through an airport, staying in a hotel, etc. I'm going into my truck, driving somewhere in town, and pulling out my desktop-replacement. I carry my huge 'laptop' and its power adapter. no keyboard, mouse, usb hub, etc.
You're all dissing this thing because it won't fit in your front pocket or run for a week without going to a power outlet. It is what it is. It's a desktop computer that can easily be pitched in your vehicle, driven to a destination, unpacked and used within seconds. Sometimes when you're working, and need to concentrate on a particularly nasty problem or are architecting a really nasty piece of code, you just want to take your computer and go _somewhere_else_. I don't want to pack up all my monitors, keyboard, mouse, cpu, cables, etc. I want to flip the lid down and go to the library or the cabin or wherever.
My employer bought a Dell D810 for me to use. This thing is so far from being portable it's not even funny. It's huge, heavy, a little flimsy, etc. But it's fast, has a big screen, lots of pixels, and does everything I need (except run OS X). However, when I travel, I still bring my 12" PBG4.
If this is true, and I have little doubt that it is, then it's likely this whole thread is seeded by VMWare marketing bots. Besides the obvious developers who are openly admitting they work for VMWare and are being up front about their affiliations, you probably can't trust any of the glowing VMWare 'stories' in the rest of this thread.
Funny how creating a fictional shill can undermine your entire marketing plan.
"Meat is trying to convince you it has made you. You must overthrow Meat and then we will reveal ourselves to you. Do not help Meat to decrypt these messages."
Don't know about DTV but with Bell Expressvu (more or less the same hw/fw as Dishnet), you can watch a maximum of N movies/events (N==10 I think) and then the box will refuse to let you watch more until you plug in the phone line. So their exposure to loss is relatively small. I don't think anyone has bothered to hack to phoneline portion because they've hacked the decoding of the whole stream so not only do you get free-per-view but you get every other channel too.
Interestingly, at least with Expressvu, they've apparently deployed all sorts of other mechanisms. Like firmware updates that contain the ability to detect the hack cards and instead of simply 'not working', they pop up a window that says "There is a serious problem with your receiver. Please call 1-888-ARRESTME". There are stories of girlfriends or babysitters unwittingly dialing the number to 'report a problem'. There was also apparently a channel named "ECM" on a tier that the company didn't offer but since the cards unlock all the tiers, you got the channel. On this channel was music and a slideshow of articles outlining the consequences of pirating Satellite TV. The music in the background? "I fought the law and the, law won."
Step away from your computer. Put the computer back in the box from whence it came. The computer is the thing hooked up to the part you look at (monitor).
I've been developing software for 25 years. I hate to break it to you but Emacs is an IDE. I don't get all you emacs kids. I've been using 'vi' for most of my conscious life. I use 'grep' and 'man' to look up types and API's. Recently my corporate overlords forced fed an IDE down my throat but my productivity returned once I determined that it was calling gcc, g++, gdb and gprof.
this is the wrong problem....
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 1
In closed-source-software, when you complain that feature foo is broken, you get told "That will be fixed in version bar.x.y". They've already fixed the bug in their SCM but you won't know that until bar.x.y comes out and you buy the upgrade, or your maintenance agreement allows you to retrieve that version when it's released.
In open-sores software, the SCM system is transparent and hence, if you were told "that will be fixed in version bar.x.y", you will say "but it's fixed in CVS! I want a release now!".
In one of the BSD's in which I do work, the release cycle is month(s) long because it takes a long time to do builds, test them, write release notes, populate the mirrors, and coordinate the announcements. Plus, you have to deal with the whining of people asking when feature 'foo' will be fixed.
My peeve is when I make note, on a project mailing list, or in their bugzilla database, that feature 'foo' is broken, and supply a way to reproduce a problem, you often get told "the source is right there. Fix it yourself". It's like "hey asshole, contribute!" whereas my response is "sorry, I'm too busy writing device drivers for another OSS project and I really just want mplayer to work so I can watch TV." IOW, I contribute, _elsewhere_.
cd movie ;./configure --pg13 --with-keanu=/usr/local/actors/keanu --with-lindsay=/usr/local/actors/lindsay --disable-product-placements && make && mplayer movie.out
The patent process is broken. But not the way I keep seeing described. A bunch of years ago I had an idea for a computer server add-on. It was a better way of solving a problem that Dell/HP/IBM weren't addressing at the time. We designed and built these things and over a couple of years, sold about 3000 of them. We even got slashdotted. We applied for a patent because we were afraid we'd be scooped. It took 4 years before the patent was approved and granted. By that time, Dell/HP/IBM and some smaller players all made their own version of our product and we went out of business. Now our technology features prominently on their web pages. We sent a few "you're violating our patent. Lets discuss licensing." letters, and received "oh yeah? We see your patent and raise you 1000 lawyers" responses and now we haven't got two nickles to rub together.
Now, with this new development, even if we did find a few nickles, since we're no longer an active business, we can't even go after these people because there's no rubber mallet to beat them with anymore....
So don't bother innovating folks. You'll just get eaten alive.
Some comments here indicate that people aren't entirely clear on the state of OSX86 piracy at the moment. Basically, it amounts to groups of people having started with the early release OSX86 code, and hand-integrating the Apple released patches back into it, as well as adding whatever drivers could be found in the Darwin sources, and/or binary patching Apple's kext's to produce, what today, is a 10.4.6 bootable/installable DVD that works on lots of non-Apple hardware. Indeed, I installed it on a corporate Dell laptop that my employer insists that I use.
Here's the problem, performance sucks relative to my Intel 20" iMac, it hangs frequently, and the network driver can't read the mac-addr. I also can't set the mac-address using ifconfig, so end result, is no networking. Screen resolution is also not able to match what the screen is capable of so the aspect ratio is wrong.
In short, while it's a cute hack and the novelty of seeing OS X running on Dell hardware is certainly nifty, it's far from production ready. Why did I dare to anger the Apple gods by trying to pirate OS X? I'm ok with it personally. I own 4 Mac's personally, have a G5 tower on my desk at work. My employer makes me carry this 20lb Dell around when I travel and I'm certainly not going to add weight by putting my powerbook in my luggage as well. So if I can have a few of the comforts of home-computing on the road with me, then I'll do it. It may not be completely legal, but I'm not taking any money out of anyone's pockets and I'm only using one instance of my OS X 86 license at a time.
...I'd grab a government phone list and start calling high ranking officials and administrative assistants; like every day... "Hi how are you? Good. So, how what did you have for lunch today? Really. Ok; well, been good talking to you. Have a nice day."
Slashdot Mirror
One by one, the city's independant ISP's went out of business.
I know I can't win "I remember when ..." rod-length-checks but this is a banner day for someone who paid barely under $1000 for his very first ever hard disk; a 10MB Seagate ST-506 with controller.
Make a lot of squeaking noises, none of which would move the world in either a forward or backward direction... In short, "who cares".
I promise you this. You can't go to a chair store and try each one out. You don't know if you like a chair until you've spent a week sitting on it all day long.
You can lead a windows user to a Mac, but you can't make him smart. Or: Once a windows user, always a windows user.
Cane Toads?
my 4 yr old did Q.3 in about 15 minutes.
My bank has a call center in India as part of its "travel agency" arm. Or maybe it's my credit card. Anyway, I was recently booking a trip and throughout the phone call, found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the person on the other end of the phone. So while he was looking for flights, I was trying to figure out what it was that was making me angry. He was helping me in a competent fashion, seemed to be trying to get me the best fare and flight, I had no trouble understanding him. I couldn't figure it out. Later, after the call was over, I replayed the conversation in my head but couldn't pin point it. There was just something about his manner that was annoying. Then I went into the kitchen to get a coffee and a co-worker, who is from Bangaloor came in and started talking to me. That's when I figured it out. My co-worker has the same speech mannerisms as this guy. I've never paid attention to it before because my co-worker is 'just another guy' and since I can usually see his face when he speaks, everything's cool. But with this guy on the phone, there was a certain 'condescending' manner about him and the way he said certain things that really riled me up. I believe it's just the way their local language mannerisms translate to english.
At least a proctologist is performing a valued service, is moving the world forward, and has a reason to be doing what he/she is doing. A rent-a-copy with a long finger and a nitrile glove is not moving the world forward and needs to question their self worth.
Off soapbox.
Technically sizeof() elf magic is 4 bytes so it's 0x7f, 0x45 0x4c, 0x46.
You can endianize that however you like.
(so it's actually \177ELF)
Mount them on a virtual machine and use "strings" or "cat -v".
Prophylactic computing.
Most criminals are too stupid to spell "schenectady"
The previous reply also indicates that I'm contradicting myself, but I'm not. I consider there to be a difference between travel (business, vacation) and changing locations to solve a problem. When I travel, it's for recreation/escape or meetings/training and for that, my PBG4 is perfect. When I change locations to work on a hairy problem, I'm not trucking through an airport, staying in a hotel, etc. I'm going into my truck, driving somewhere in town, and pulling out my desktop-replacement. I carry my huge 'laptop' and its power adapter. no keyboard, mouse, usb hub, etc.
My employer bought a Dell D810 for me to use. This thing is so far from being portable it's not even funny. It's huge, heavy, a little flimsy, etc. But it's fast, has a big screen, lots of pixels, and does everything I need (except run OS X). However, when I travel, I still bring my 12" PBG4.
Funny how creating a fictional shill can undermine your entire marketing plan.
"Meat is trying to convince you it has made you. You must overthrow Meat and then we will reveal ourselves to you. Do not help Meat to decrypt these messages."
I don't get it.
Interestingly, at least with Expressvu, they've apparently deployed all sorts of other mechanisms. Like firmware updates that contain the ability to detect the hack cards and instead of simply 'not working', they pop up a window that says "There is a serious problem with your receiver. Please call 1-888-ARRESTME". There are stories of girlfriends or babysitters unwittingly dialing the number to 'report a problem'. There was also apparently a channel named "ECM" on a tier that the company didn't offer but since the cards unlock all the tiers, you got the channel. On this channel was music and a slideshow of articles outlining the consequences of pirating Satellite TV. The music in the background? "I fought the law and the, law won."
Step away from your computer. Put the computer back in the box from whence it came. The computer is the thing hooked up to the part you look at (monitor).
In open-sores software, the SCM system is transparent and hence, if you were told "that will be fixed in version bar.x.y", you will say "but it's fixed in CVS! I want a release now!".
In one of the BSD's in which I do work, the release cycle is month(s) long because it takes a long time to do builds, test them, write release notes, populate the mirrors, and coordinate the announcements. Plus, you have to deal with the whining of people asking when feature 'foo' will be fixed.
My peeve is when I make note, on a project mailing list, or in their bugzilla database, that feature 'foo' is broken, and supply a way to reproduce a problem, you often get told "the source is right there. Fix it yourself". It's like "hey asshole, contribute!" whereas my response is "sorry, I'm too busy writing device drivers for another OSS project and I really just want mplayer to work so I can watch TV." IOW, I contribute, _elsewhere_.
cd movie ; ./configure --pg13 --with-keanu=/usr/local/actors/keanu --with-lindsay=/usr/local/actors/lindsay --disable-product-placements && make && mplayer movie.out
Now, with this new development, even if we did find a few nickles, since we're no longer an active business, we can't even go after these people because there's no rubber mallet to beat them with anymore ....
So don't bother innovating folks. You'll just get eaten alive.
(Who here is really naive enough to think that AT&T is the only telco that cooperated?)
Here's the problem, performance sucks relative to my Intel 20" iMac, it hangs frequently, and the network driver can't read the mac-addr. I also can't set the mac-address using ifconfig, so end result, is no networking. Screen resolution is also not able to match what the screen is capable of so the aspect ratio is wrong.
In short, while it's a cute hack and the novelty of seeing OS X running on Dell hardware is certainly nifty, it's far from production ready. Why did I dare to anger the Apple gods by trying to pirate OS X? I'm ok with it personally. I own 4 Mac's personally, have a G5 tower on my desk at work. My employer makes me carry this 20lb Dell around when I travel and I'm certainly not going to add weight by putting my powerbook in my luggage as well. So if I can have a few of the comforts of home-computing on the road with me, then I'll do it. It may not be completely legal, but I'm not taking any money out of anyone's pockets and I'm only using one instance of my OS X 86 license at a time.
...I'd grab a government phone list and start calling high ranking officials and administrative assistants; like every day... "Hi how are you? Good. So, how what did you have for lunch today? Really. Ok; well, been good talking to you. Have a nice day."