Another reason would be that people working for the company through contracting firms do not count as "headcount" for purposes of EEOC reports.
So you need some people with specific skills and experience who happen to be in -no- "protected class" and you don't want your EEOC hiring stats and salary averages to look skewed, you bring them on board through a third party. The contracting firm may also be located in a different geographic location with different demographics - the criteria for proving discrimation is by looking at the composition of the local employment pool of the employer's location. The subcontractor is an employee of the contractor, not the client.
Even if the subcontractor gets sued at some point for employment discrimination, they don't have the "deep pockets" of a large corporation and act as a legal buffer.
A high traffic web site has a huge intrinsic value when/if the owner decides to sell it. Just because it is not used to generate current cash flow doesn't mean that there is no profit involved.
I struggle a bit with the idea that a 500 pound bag of concrete is "easy to transport". Okay, it may be easy to transport on a truck/plane, but getting that bag to its final resting place is another matter - do we need a forklift as well? Does it have handles so 20 people can carry it up a slope?
The article mentions that all they've built so far is a 1/8th scale model. A 1/8th scale model only has 1/512th the volume of the real thing... meaning their model probably weighed around 1 pound and is 1 foot x 1 foot... now that I believe IS easy to transport.
I started writing a spider way back when I first found out about the internet (1995ish) as a learning experience and have continued to tweak it over time, although it is not yet a commercial product.
The problem the spider has to deal with in trying to organize and rank the results is that there is an inherent problem with the way web servers handle default web pages for a domain or a directory:
http://www.xyz.com/ actually pulls up http://www.xyz.com/index.html (because apache or the web server has been told to use index.html if no page component is in the URI) - but there is no requirement to communicate the "index.html" page name to the client, and very few servers actually do that (if they do, you'll see the URL change in the browser)
Some of the incoming links point to just the doemain, other links point to the fully qualified URL. More than likely, your spider will eventually follow both and then receive web pages that are nearly identical.
At some point, xyz.com discovers php (yea!)... but they have traffic and page rank associated with index.html. They put up a 302 redirect to point index.html -> index.php
Or they symlink index.html to index.php and tell php to parse index.html even though the extension is.html...
So from google's perspective: http://xyz.com/ http://www.xyz.com/ http://xyz.com/index.html http://www.xyz.com/in dex.php http://www.xyz.com/index.html http://xyz.com/index.php
all return identical content and the web has links pointing to every one of those names (and those links almost never go away or are corrected once created). From the Search Engine's perspective, which is the "real" URL/URI for the page?
Google (and the visitor) generally would like the answer to be
http://www.xyz.com/
Using the BASE URL tag tells Google the actual page name and clears up any ambiguity, which is why using one partially fixes the problem in some cases.
Ecommerce web site is installed in subdirectory, but wants its main page to be the "default" page for the domain - referral tracking and cookie management depends on this - however the web pages rely on the package existing in a subdirectory of the document root:
Actual URI is http://www.xyz.com/ecommerce/index.php
How do you get to that page as the default without confusing the search engines or losing the referring URL? Possible answers:
1) Use a meta refresh - doing that loses tracking information, as the landing page becomes the referring page. Google will also not be happy as this looks like a doorway page, and the redirect page itself has no real "content" to index 2) Use a 301 redirect - Bzzzzt - wrong answer - if you do this, you'll telling the world that http://www.xyz.com/ no longer exists in all perpetuity. 3) Use a 302 redirect - clears up tha ambiguity, however confusing Page Ranking at least temporarily - since your incoming links mostly point at http://www.xyz.com/, not http://www.xyz.com/ecommerce/index.php 4) Use a Base Ref on/ecommerce/index.php identifying itself as the true identity of that page. If at some point, you change from php to to the next great scripting language, the change to the base href will pick that up. I would HOPE that the Google duplicate detection considers the BASE URI to be authoritative as long as it matches the domain, and drops all other identical pages. 5) Have the web server return a content-location: header. This is similar to the base URL, except it is done at the http level not within the HTTP. content-location: can either be relative to the request or absolute. It isn't authoritative, but could be helpful. In general, a cross-domain content-location header would have to be ignored, otherwise you would have the same exploit... you request
I have run a successful dialup ISP Directory since 1998, and I tend to agree with this understanding of ISP. It isn't 1995 any more.
1) Few ISPs any longer provide Usenet access - and usenet is in steep decline 2) Blogs are largely taking over the functions people used to do with personal web sites (Here is a picture of my cat, and what I had at Starbucks today) 3) Few ISPs run IRC servers any more 4) Modem pool management, DNS and network transport have been outsourced to companies like Level(3) and/or aggregators like GlobalPops, DialupUSA, Ikano, or YounNetPlus
What does that leave the ISP doing / responsible for?
1) Email 2) Finding customers 3) Billing 4) Setup support (since about 1997, DUN setup with XP is pretty simple - so this is much less important than when you had to talk people through setting up Trumpet Winsock)
Very few visitors these days are choosing an ISP on anything other than lowest monthly cost. All they are doing is buying "Internet Dial Tone".
Of course, Business Class customers have different needs - those local/regional ISPs that are still surviving are doing it because they have a diverse group of customers - but keeping a business customer happy requires a more highly skilled and responsive support staff.
Pigs will eat anything - which causes them to be used to consume human fecal matter in some societies without "modern" sanitation.
By creating a food cycle where humans and pigs consume from each other, it sets up the dynamics for diseases - worms being the most obvious.
In fairly recent times, scientists have figured out that influenza (flu) is a combination of human, duck, and pig DNA - because in Asia it is common for the three groups to live in close proximity and interact. The domesticated ducks carry the flu, and then spread it to migrating birds - then a year later, that new strain shows up around the world.
When dealing with XML, you need a DTD that defines the data contained in the XML expression in order to parse the string into meaningful data structures (right?)
When an "XML database" is changed, is the data prior to the change left in its old XML format pointing to the original DTD, or does it require conversion of all existing data? How can the data be accessed while that conversion is going on?
How would the method of implementing a schema change be communicated to other places which have already archived copies of an old XML data entity? DTD only defines current state information - it doesn't communicate "If XYZ = 1 in DTD.v1 then set XYZ2 to "A" and set new field ABC to "foo" for DTD.v2". Each iteration of change would become increasingly more complex unless the data is converted.
This is not to say that the same issues don't exist with SQL or relational databases - but just abstracting the organization of the data doesn't mean that your problems are solved.
Lately, I've been using mySQL - and the developers have some curious ideas about the "real world". Even the most trivial changes to the database schema require mySQL to copy and rebuild the entire table... like adding a new index or adding a new field at the end of the table. When tables start having millions of rows, that means this becomes a much less attractive product.
The rationale for doing things this way had two reasons - first, it was the easiest way to implement schema changes. Second, "People should never be changing data schemas in a production environment".
Oh, really? When did we regress to the idea that databases can go down overnight in order to back them up and to implement schema changes?
And it is the other members of the Senate's job to represent their constituants - by -not- spending the money unless it is a good idea on its own merit.
Last time I checked, Ms. Mikulski is a member of the minority party in the Senate, so for her opinion to prevail, she will need to convince some Republicans to her point of view.
She voted against S256 (Bankruptcy reform) this week - so if she wants to get her way, she might think about acting in a more bipartisan manner... or follow in the footsteps of Senator Sarbanes and announce her retirement.
I have found that if I load a PDF document and then use "Back" to back up to the page which had the link pointing to the pdf document that Firefox crashes. Eventually, the adobe reader process also crashes.
Don't know that this is the same issue, but it is pretty reproducable...
Using VoIP on your computer is not running a server.
When your computer boots, it establishes a connection to the VoIP servers. The Client then remains online waiting to either place a call or receive an incoming phone call over the existing connection. This is no different than IM software or GoToMYPC.
Should an internet provider be stupid enough to create a rule that a CUSTOMER's PC may not accept incoming connections, it is trivial to reverse the connection sequences to cause the client to initiate the initial connection. What's next? forcefully disconnect any IP connection over "x" seconds old?
Do you really think it is a successful business strategy to go to war against your customer's needs?
Wouldn't Indymedia be an example of what this decision is trying to stop?
Teresa Heinz Kerry -> Tides Foundation -> $365,000 -> Indymedia, and overnight an entire network of "independent" news web sites published by "journalists" open up worldwide that appear to have a coordinated opinion about the 2004 election.
Unfortunately, the above post is probably too late to get much attention - but the above article does mention that this *IS* the telco that Vonage was concerned about actively blocking VoIP.
Looks like the FCC has settled this issue and other Telcos should take note. Since the non-RBOC telcos were exempted from the 1996 Telecom Reform Act, perhaps this one thought they could get away with doing this.
Now onto more important issues like Howard Stern and regulation of Satellite Radio content.
Were a cable internet company to get that agressive, that would seal their fate in getting them labeled as common carrriers for internet traffic. This issue was very hot a few years ago with AOL leading the charge to get equal access to the cable networks - until they acquired Time Warner, that is.
After installing Ethereal on my PC, one of the first discoveries was that this is exactly what many of the streaming audio services do - they send an HTTP regest on port 80 to download an "image" file with an undefined size, which is actually the audio stream. Oddly, hours later that image still has not finished downloading:)
Of course, this only works in listen-only services - since VoIP is bidirectional, the outgoing traffic would be a bit more problematic.
I was commenting on the wisdom (or lack thereof) of using a 3rd party service - the one the article is acout - to generate the SSL for you as opposed to generating it yourself.
Why should I trust an unknown 3rd party to generate the certificate for me? At the end of the process, doesn't that leave them with the information to do bad things, since they chose and potentially recorded the private key?
Microsoft's Beta spyware looks pretty good to me - I installed it the day it was announced.
The only issue I have with the blocker is that if it believes a piece of software is not what -they- consider spyware, it will let that program modify "sensitive" areas of the registry (boot time startup programs) without giving you an option to say "No" - ie Real Networks realsched.exe, Quick Time qttask.exe.... things that want to automatically call home or preload part of their software during boot for faster startup.
And since the cable companies are now getting in the phone business, we need to probably add back in Adelphia, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and a few others. Adelphia is rumored to be about ready to be bought up from bankrupcty court, although the bond holders don't like the proposed offer. http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050213/1002 905.asp
At the first of being told "this is old news", the other day I stumbled on a company in the business of running "Listening posts" for digital watermarking of music and commercials. This is a service that sends daily reports back to ASCAP, BMI, MPAA, RIAA, advetisers, etc indicating every time that some watermarked media was detected (and royalties are due or confirming that purchased advertisements have really been run)
One of my favorite questions to wake up people's thinking about political affiliations, guns, and ethnic identity is to ask them "Who killed Fred Hampton, and why?".
Ever wonder how investigators were able to recover Oliver North's emails from backup tapes? There are few things / places that you would expect / hope where comminications and records would be more secure and protected with unbreakable encryption than the National Security Council.
(PROFS was the email system used at that time, which ran on large IBM mainframes)
Slashdot Mirror
Another reason would be that people working for the company through contracting firms do not count as "headcount" for purposes of EEOC reports.
So you need some people with specific skills and experience who happen to be in -no- "protected class" and you don't want your EEOC hiring stats and salary averages to look skewed, you bring them on board through a third party. The contracting firm may also be located in a different geographic location with different demographics - the criteria for proving discrimation is by looking at the composition of the local employment pool of the employer's location. The subcontractor is an employee of the contractor, not the client.
Even if the subcontractor gets sued at some point for employment discrimination, they don't have the "deep pockets" of a large corporation and act as a legal buffer.
IANAL-BIUTBAIC
A high traffic web site has a huge intrinsic value when/if the owner decides to sell it. Just because it is not used to generate current cash flow doesn't mean that there is no profit involved.
Just Ask Jeeves(tm)
Based on that definition, Zell Miller could make a pretty compelling case that the Democratic Party has become a cult - especially #5.
There goes the patent!
I struggle a bit with the idea that a 500 pound bag of concrete is "easy to transport". Okay, it may be easy to transport on a truck/plane, but getting that bag to its final resting place is another matter - do we need a forklift as well? Does it have handles so 20 people can carry it up a slope?
The article mentions that all they've built so far is a 1/8th scale model. A 1/8th scale model only has 1/512th the volume of the real thing... meaning their model probably weighed around 1 pound and is 1 foot x 1 foot... now that I believe IS easy to transport.
I started writing a spider way back when I first found out about the internet (1995ish) as a learning experience and have continued to tweak it over time, although it is not yet a commercial product.
.html...
.com/index.php
/ecommerce/index.php identifying itself as the true identity of that page. If at some point, you change from php to to the next great scripting language, the change to the base href will pick that up. I would HOPE that the Google duplicate detection considers the BASE URI to be authoritative as long as it matches the domain, and drops all other identical pages.
The problem the spider has to deal with in trying to organize and rank the results is that there is an inherent problem with the way web servers handle default web pages for a domain or a directory:
http://www.xyz.com/ actually pulls up http://www.xyz.com/index.html (because apache or the web server has been told to use index.html if no page component is in the URI) - but there is no requirement to communicate the "index.html" page name to the client, and very few servers actually do that (if they do, you'll see the URL change in the browser)
Some of the incoming links point to just the doemain, other links point to the fully qualified URL. More than likely, your spider will eventually follow both and then receive web pages that are nearly identical.
At some point, xyz.com discovers php (yea!)... but they have traffic and page rank associated with index.html. They put up a 302 redirect to point index.html -> index.php
Or they symlink index.html to index.php and tell php to parse index.html even though the extension is
So from google's perspective:
http://xyz.com/
http://www.xyz.com/
http://xyz.com/index.html
http://www.xyz.com/in dex.php
http://www.xyz.com/index.html
http://xyz
all return identical content and the web has links pointing to every one of those names (and those links almost never go away or are corrected once created). From the Search Engine's perspective, which is the "real" URL/URI for the page?
Google (and the visitor) generally would like the answer to be
http://www.xyz.com/
Using the BASE URL tag tells Google the actual page name and clears up any ambiguity, which is why using one partially fixes the problem in some cases.
<head>...<base href="http://www.xyz.com/index.php"></head>
Now, let's make it uglier:
Ecommerce web site is installed in subdirectory, but wants its main page to be the "default" page for the domain - referral tracking and cookie management depends on this - however the web pages rely on the package existing in a subdirectory of the document root:
Actual URI is http://www.xyz.com/ecommerce/index.php
How do you get to that page as the default without confusing the search engines or losing the referring URL? Possible answers:
1) Use a meta refresh - doing that loses tracking information, as the landing page becomes the referring page. Google will also not be happy as this looks like a doorway page, and the redirect page itself has no real "content" to index
2) Use a 301 redirect - Bzzzzt - wrong answer - if you do this, you'll telling the world that http://www.xyz.com/ no longer exists in all perpetuity.
3) Use a 302 redirect - clears up tha ambiguity, however confusing Page Ranking at least temporarily - since your incoming links mostly point at http://www.xyz.com/, not http://www.xyz.com/ecommerce/index.php
4) Use a Base Ref on
5) Have the web server return a content-location: header. This is similar to the base URL, except it is done at the http level not within the HTTP. content-location: can either be relative to the request or absolute. It isn't authoritative, but could be helpful. In general, a cross-domain content-location header would have to be ignored, otherwise you would have the same exploit... you request
I have run a successful dialup ISP Directory since 1998, and I tend to agree with this understanding of ISP. It isn't 1995 any more.
1) Few ISPs any longer provide Usenet access - and usenet is in steep decline
2) Blogs are largely taking over the functions people used to do with personal web sites (Here is a picture of my cat, and what I had at Starbucks today)
3) Few ISPs run IRC servers any more
4) Modem pool management, DNS and network transport have been outsourced to companies like Level(3) and/or aggregators like GlobalPops, DialupUSA, Ikano, or YounNetPlus
What does that leave the ISP doing / responsible for?
1) Email
2) Finding customers
3) Billing
4) Setup support (since about 1997, DUN setup with XP is pretty simple - so this is much less important than when you had to talk people through setting up Trumpet Winsock)
Very few visitors these days are choosing an ISP on anything other than lowest monthly cost. All they are doing is buying "Internet Dial Tone".
Of course, Business Class customers have different needs - those local/regional ISPs that are still surviving are doing it because they have a diverse group of customers - but keeping a business customer happy requires a more highly skilled and responsive support staff.
Pigs will eat anything - which causes them to be used to consume human fecal matter in some societies without "modern" sanitation.
By creating a food cycle where humans and pigs consume from each other, it sets up the dynamics for diseases - worms being the most obvious.
In fairly recent times, scientists have figured out that influenza (flu) is a combination of human, duck, and pig DNA - because in Asia it is common for the three groups to live in close proximity and interact. The domesticated ducks carry the flu, and then spread it to migrating birds - then a year later, that new strain shows up around the world.
When dealing with XML, you need a DTD that defines the data contained in the XML expression in order to parse the string into meaningful data structures (right?)
When an "XML database" is changed, is the data prior to the change left in its old XML format pointing to the original DTD, or does it require conversion of all existing data? How can the data be accessed while that conversion is going on?
How would the method of implementing a schema change be communicated to other places which have already archived copies of an old XML data entity? DTD only defines current state information - it doesn't communicate "If XYZ = 1 in DTD.v1 then set XYZ2 to "A" and set new field ABC to "foo" for DTD.v2". Each iteration of change would become increasingly more complex unless the data is converted.
This is not to say that the same issues don't exist with SQL or relational databases - but just abstracting the organization of the data doesn't mean that your problems are solved.
Lately, I've been using mySQL - and the developers have some curious ideas about the "real world". Even the most trivial changes to the database schema require mySQL to copy and rebuild the entire table... like adding a new index or adding a new field at the end of the table. When tables start having millions of rows, that means this becomes a much less attractive product.
The rationale for doing things this way had two reasons - first, it was the easiest way to implement schema changes. Second, "People should never be changing data schemas in a production environment".
Oh, really? When did we regress to the idea that databases can go down overnight in order to back them up and to implement schema changes?
And it is the other members of the Senate's job to represent their constituants - by -not- spending the money unless it is a good idea on its own merit.
Last time I checked, Ms. Mikulski is a member of the minority party in the Senate, so for her opinion to prevail, she will need to convince some Republicans to her point of view.
She voted against S256 (Bankruptcy reform) this week - so if she wants to get her way, she might think about acting in a more bipartisan manner... or follow in the footsteps of Senator Sarbanes and announce her retirement.
I have found that if I load a PDF document and then use "Back" to back up to the page which had the link pointing to the pdf document that Firefox crashes. Eventually, the adobe reader process also crashes.
Don't know that this is the same issue, but it is pretty reproducable...
Using VoIP on your computer is not running a server.
When your computer boots, it establishes a connection to the VoIP servers. The Client then remains online waiting to either place a call or receive an incoming phone call over the existing connection. This is no different than IM software or GoToMYPC.
Should an internet provider be stupid enough to create a rule that a CUSTOMER's PC may not accept incoming connections, it is trivial to reverse the connection sequences to cause the client to initiate the initial connection. What's next? forcefully disconnect any IP connection over "x" seconds old?
Do you really think it is a successful business strategy to go to war against your customer's needs?
Wouldn't Indymedia be an example of what this decision is trying to stop?
Teresa Heinz Kerry -> Tides Foundation -> $365,000 -> Indymedia, and overnight an entire network of "independent" news web sites published by "journalists" open up worldwide that appear to have a coordinated opinion about the 2004 election.
Unfortunately, the above post is probably too late to get much attention - but the above article does mention that this *IS* the telco that Vonage was concerned about actively blocking VoIP.
Looks like the FCC has settled this issue and other Telcos should take note. Since the non-RBOC telcos were exempted from the 1996 Telecom Reform Act, perhaps this one thought they could get away with doing this.
Now onto more important issues like Howard Stern and regulation of Satellite Radio content.
Were a cable internet company to get that agressive, that would seal their fate in getting them labeled as common carrriers for internet traffic. This issue was very hot a few years ago with AOL leading the charge to get equal access to the cable networks - until they acquired Time Warner, that is.
After installing Ethereal on my PC, one of the first discoveries was that this is exactly what many of the streaming audio services do - they send an HTTP regest on port 80 to download an "image" file with an undefined size, which is actually the audio stream. Oddly, hours later that image still has not finished downloading :)
Of course, this only works in listen-only services - since VoIP is bidirectional, the outgoing traffic would be a bit more problematic.
That I follow completely.
I was commenting on the wisdom (or lack thereof) of using a 3rd party service - the one the article is acout - to generate the SSL for you as opposed to generating it yourself.
Why should I trust an unknown 3rd party to generate the certificate for me? At the end of the process, doesn't that leave them with the information to do bad things, since they chose and potentially recorded the private key?
Microsoft's Beta spyware looks pretty good to me - I installed it the day it was announced.
The only issue I have with the blocker is that if it believes a piece of software is not what -they- consider spyware, it will let that program modify "sensitive" areas of the registry (boot time startup programs) without giving you an option to say "No" - ie Real Networks realsched.exe, Quick Time qttask.exe.... things that want to automatically call home or preload part of their software during boot for faster startup.
800x900 would be 720,000 square kilometers. Also, it says the *average* depth is believed to be 45 meters.
That's a lot of ice.
On the other hand, count the number of times the words "suggest", "may", "plausible", "suspected", "appears", "as if" occur in the article.
Is someone trying to build a case for research funding, perhaps?
All this time, I thought human life was part of nature. When a beaver cuts down a tree and dams a creek, that's part of nature.
Please get over your guilt at being a living organism.
It would be interesting to know if this color/shape to number connection is "hard wired" to a base 10 numbering system...
Could he just as easily express pi in hexidecimal? Or does that break outside his established thinking pattern?
Did he get this ability to recite pi by memorizing an existing precomputed string of numbers, or is he computing it on the fly in his head?
Can he do the same thing with e?
You left out one piece of the pie - BellSouth.
2 905.asp
And since the cable companies are now getting in the phone business, we need to probably add back in Adelphia, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and a few others. Adelphia is rumored to be about ready to be bought up from bankrupcty court, although the bond holders don't like the proposed offer.
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050213/100
At the first of being told "this is old news", the other day I stumbled on a company in the business of running "Listening posts" for digital watermarking of music and commercials. This is a service that sends daily reports back to ASCAP, BMI, MPAA, RIAA, advetisers, etc indicating every time that some watermarked media was detected (and royalties are due or confirming that purchased advertisements have really been run)
http://confirmedia.com/index.cfm
It sounds like what they are asking for (without necessarily understanding the technology) is to expand this concept to IP based traffic.
One of my favorite questions to wake up people's thinking about political affiliations, guns, and ethnic identity is to ask them "Who killed Fred Hampton, and why?".
This may sound like a political troll but...
Ever wonder how investigators were able to recover Oliver North's emails from backup tapes? There are few things / places that you would expect / hope where comminications and records would be more secure and protected with unbreakable encryption than the National Security Council.
(PROFS was the email system used at that time, which ran on large IBM mainframes)