I am in this situation right now. My domain at NetSol is expiring early August, so I decided to transfer it to register.com. After I paid $35 transfer fee, I received an e-mail from NetSol asking me to authorize the transfer. I did authorize it, but just a few days ago register.com sent me an e-mail that NetSol denied my transfer request.
I sent an e-mail to Customer Service at NetSol, but they haven't responded to it. Neither was I successful at trying to contact them by the phone.
When I read this, I thought I must have written it... This is verbatim the problem I've been experiencing for the last week or so. The most annoying thing I've seen is in their emails where they instruct you to send responses to another email address instead of using the reply-to field...
They list a price tag of $39.99 for the "Consumer" package, and $59.99 for the "Professional" package. Both are available for the Palm IIIx/IIIxe and Palm Vx.
(Seems to me that this is a severely limited subset of all the Palm platforms that are out there...)
The Consumer pacakge comes with your standard apps, ToDo, Expense, etc, and the Professional package adds their SDK.
Of course, they have no screen shots or other means to evaluate how well the apps replace those available with PalmOS, and no details on how to install. I'd want those details before I'd commit $60, even if I did get a free t-shirt from their amazingly annoying blinking ad.
Code reviews exist and don't exist primarily as a function of the company you're at or the group you're in. And if they do exist, there's a whole range of quality to them.
I've worked at a large government contracting comapny, and they had code reviews as part of the ISO process. Which meant that they occured regularly. And I've also worked at a small company, where everyone said "We should do reviews" but then never did. I take that back... they tried one, no one prepared for it, so it flopped, and a follow up was never scheduled.
Now I'm not saying that preparation is absolutely necessary. If everyone is familiar with the code, they can do a good impromptu review. But if you have no clue what the code does, you probably won't be able to comment on anything but the style , unless the code is pretty rudimentary. Also, giving people a chance to read through it at leisure lets you have a relatively quick meeting as people run down their red-lines rather than sitting and reading code in a conference room.
And when you actually review, review the code, not the coder! Some people tend to turn code reviews into an ego driven contest. They may not release any code until no one will be able to find a single bug when it comes up for review. Others may pore over code, desperate to find any bugs they can, in order to bash the reviewee. Once you get into this kind of situation, no one is productive since they're way to concerned with the reviews to actually do anything else.
But I've also seen very good reviews where constructive criticism came up, suggestions were given to improve architecture or code flow, and people on both sides learned something. And that's what you have to keep striving for, because it may not come very easily.
The thing I don't get is how long it's taken them to start any lawsuits. Why now? There have been anti-barney jihads around the internet for at least 6-7 years now.
Heck, I had a tshirt that said "Kill Barney" and it's been long enough ago that that tshirt got holes, became a rag, and even outlived its usefulness as a rag.
It looks like alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die is still around. How about "Night of the Barney"? and all of its sequels that floated around usenet for forever? Surely that is a little more defaming that a site that displays ways of killing purple dinosaurs. Can you still find Barney WAD files for Doom? By this point, there would be thousands of people to sue...
Problem is, Spamcop redacts the sender's address when forwarding reports. Makes it rather hard to resolve the complaint, when I have no idea what address to get removed from the mailing list.
I agree that this is the wrong thing to do when it's a legit mailing list, especially when it's an opt-in list. And the SpamCop instructions explicitly ask users to try unsubscribing first.
The problem is when I get 52 copies of "Buy Viagra Now!" emails where the sender/reply-to/remove addresses are completely unrelated to each other or the URL for purchasing. And if I did reply to the remove request address, I bet I'd only get an undeliverable error because some poor schmuck has been bombarded with 50,000 unsubscribe requests for a product he's never heard of and has overflowed the mail limit set by his ISP.
That's what SpamCop is designed for, and where it should be used. You can't guarantee a tool will be used properly every time, but that shouldn't prohibit you from making the tool available.
Spam is free speech, people! When you prevent someone from telling people about their issue or product, what ever it might be, in the United States, you are restriting their Constitutionally-guarenteed rights to free speech.
I agree that preventing someone from speaking is wrong, however, this is not quite that cut and dried... In the case of product based spam, it is restricting them from speaking anonymously. They are still free to send their message without using an open-relay. If they truly are trying to sell a worthwhile product they believe in, why are they often hiding their identity?
I had exactly the same experience with a Denver based ISP!
First you feel silly spelling a cryptic password out for some clueless tech person over the phone, and then you find out you can't change it without calling them back and spelling out that one.
This ISP just couldn't figure out why I didn't want them to know my password... They most likely had root access anyway, making knowing my password a moot point! And if this person on the phone didn't have root, I don't want them having my password either!
It wouldn't bother me so much, if I could change it the first time I logged in, but having no secure way to change it really bothered me.
The difficult part comes when the storm strikes while you're out of town, or even at work.
I had a near strike with lightning, the surge protectors all worked, I just had to reset my alarm clock, microwave, etc. But I had this weird phone problem for days...
It seemed like sometime during the night, my phone line would go off-hook, and nothing would reset it until I went around and unplugged all the phones. Finally, I tracked it back to the plug my modem was running off of. Except my modem worked fine...
A little more experimentation, and it turned out that something in my modem got fried by the lightning, and it could no longer hang up completely. The connection got dropped, but the next time you picked up the phone, you got a dead line. Unplug the modem from the wall and all is well again, until you dial the modem.
The lessons I learned? Always have a surge protector on any phone line running into an expensive device. And keep all your warrenty information handy - I got the manufacturer to install a new modem for free.
Actually, I did see Patriot Games. And I giggled through the whole satellite imagery scene. Just like I giggled through the scenes of files being deleted as they were being read...
Not yet. If you look at commercial satellite imagery companies, most satellites have a 1 meter or larger resolution. We're talking about maybe being able to distinguish between cars and trucks, not look at the 1/4 inch you are extending over your property line.
Nope. If you look around at commercial satellite imagery companies, they seem to be struggling to get a 24 hour turn around time on still images, let alone video.
You're right... perhaps I should have spoken more clearly.
I *meant* to say that the threads failed to clean *themselves* up. They had no timers or other means of detecting that they had stalled, therefore couldn't releasing any held resources, or cause themselves to exit, etc, etc.
First off, I have to agree with many of the above comments. The benchmarks are suspicious. But then you have to take it all with a grain of salt because the source is SysAdmin magazine.
My own complimentary subscription for presenting at LISA '99 just ran out, but as anyone who's read this journal before can tell you, this article was just written by Joe Admin, and was about on par for the magazine. Even if you haven't read the journal before, you could click on the big "Write For Us" link at the top of the page, and see that "all of our articles are written by readers."
Now, I'm not slamming the magazine! It's a decent piece of work, and actually has some good articles about tricks and tools that help sys admins get their day to day jobs done. But at the same time, it's also subject to some one-sided reviews and some articles take a lot of flak for their controversial positions. Just look at who wrote the article (the original developer of the mail engine) and take it with a grain of salt.
And if you really disagree write them a counter piece, or at least a letter to the editor pointing out the flaws.
And how to clean up their threads... I ran into a server program (that I had to write an EAI connector for) that in one case bloated up to 2000+ threads because it just kept launching them without cleaning any up.
It made sense to have multiple threads of execution inside it, as it had to handle many client processes simultaneously, but apparently when the thread execution stopped, they just went off into oblivion. That's something that will bring a system to its knees...
My previous company took the stance that as long as the GPL code stays in its own jar, that's equivalent to using a shared library - not a derivative work.
I believe the key here is that the linking is dynamic, not when the linking occurs.
Exactly. Taking options instead of salary and banking on that to make you rich is just foolhardy. I've got options now, but that's in addition to a 10% raise over my previous employer.
And especially in the current market situation (trust me... my last company just folded up their US office because of the market conditions) you don't want to count your options before they hatch.
I haven't been a huge Napster user in the past, but I just got a portable mp3 player, and wanted to grab some tracks so I didn't have to spend the weekend ripping CDs. Also, it helps when you only want one track off the CD and you can't track anyone down who will let you borrow it...
Anyway, I still found all the tracks I searched for on the official Napster server, with practically no name mangling. Perhaps I'm lucky and was looking for stuff that hasn't hit the filter lists yet, (or my tastes in music just won't make the lists at all), but I didn't seem to see a big degredation in music available. I guess we'll see how things compare in a week or so.
On one hand, I know several people here in the Denver-metro area that would love to move (back) to the SLC area. Of course, their religious preferences probably influence that, but that's a quality of life decisions they have made. Add that to the decision that they don't want to put up with the explosive growth, housing costs, and traffic congestion that Colorado is seeing, and you can understand where they are coming from.
On the other hand, I would never live in SLC, or in Texas, simply because the quality of life isn't the same as what I want. I want to be near the Rocky Mountains, have snow without ice-storms, and warm summers without 100+ degrees of heat.
And companies even are concerned about quality of life... For example, the company I'm at now has a headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, and picked Boulder, Colorado for the US office, simply because the quality of life was similar to that in Brisbane. For years the company didn't even have a major client in the same city, but the Boulder atmosphere was what the company wanted, and what they believed would be attractive to employees.
Everybody is concerned with quality of life, but how you define quality of life will likely be completely different from how other people define it.
IMHO, if companies don't like the atmosphere of the SLC area, why are they remaining there? If you can't make employees come to where you are, maybe you should move to where employeers are.
I made a number of repairs to the optical mouse I had with my Amiga 4000 years ago; here's what I've found:
As one other poster recommended, a soldering pencil will work better than a gun. I ended up replacing switches under the mouse buttons when I wore them out playing Populous II, and a pencil fit into tight spots on the board with more precision.
Pay careful attention to any specs you can find on the LED; trial by error isn't something to rely on. I couldn't find any specs for my mouse, and used trial and error to work my way through a couple LED's from Radio Shack... I couldn't find any that would light brightly enough for the mouse to work. And it was a shame to pack it away after all the other mods I made...
Good luck with your mods, and I hope you can find good specs.
Lately, I've had a few bad experiences as well. It seems they use patience as a litmus test to decide if you should really get your rebate.
For example, I picked up a intel hub at CompUSA because of their "half-price hubs" rebate. Just a little 4-porter, but the price break made it much cheaper than its competitors. I got back a postcard that said they couldn't fulfill my rebate because I didn't provide my street address - I receive mail at a post office box. Ridiculous. They're mailing me the rebate, not hand delivering it. Unless they really want profiling info and sending the rebate as a second priority.
This postcard had a URL, and an 800 number. I called the number, and got to a message that essentially said "If you mailed your rebate less than 8 weeks ago, it isn't in the system. If you mailed it over 8 weeks ago, please hold for 2 hours..."
The URL was little better. It only had a form, where you had to even supplwhich rebate this was for, fill out a text box, and someone would get in touch with you. I actually got 2 emails that said that my rebate was being processed, and I should receive it shortly.
Of course, I still haven't seen it since then, and that was about 2-3 weeks ago...
And to look at this from another point of view, my brother just got his MCSE certifications, and was interviewing for a couple of jobs. In one tech support position, his supervisor would have been an older, more experienced, but snarly and un-user-friendly tech whose MCSE wasn't up to date.
The HR people doing the hiring, pretty much told my brother that because his boss had essentially the same qualifications but was older and had more work experience, there'd be little room for advancement, even though my brother had a better "bed-side manner" for giving tech support. Plus, the HR people hinted that his boss would probably resent him for being younger and having similar credentials (other than the experience).
I don't know if the HR people had some ulterior motive for presenting the situation this way, but perhaps they are trying to combat age-centric problems before they arise.
Re:Used a pdp-8? I built one!
on
PDP-10 Revival
·
· Score: 1
Wow...
I used a LD-14 as well. And wrote my PDP-8 simulator in software. (This was at the University of Wyoming during '94-'96 or so)
The classes were in undergraduate computer architectures, where the PDP-8 had a special place in one lecturer's heart as the epitome of the Von Neumann computer, with a reasonable (yet small) instruction set. I knew PDP-8 assembly very well, for the first round, and in the advanced class with the LD-14, I got to know the binary op codes pretty well too.
I hated the PDP-8 at the time... but once I took a class that used x86 assembly, I pined for that sweet PDP-8!
Slashdot Mirror
I am in this situation right now. My domain at NetSol is expiring early August, so I decided to transfer it to register.com. After I paid $35 transfer fee, I received an e-mail from NetSol asking me to authorize the transfer. I did authorize it, but just a few days ago register.com sent me an e-mail that NetSol denied my transfer request.
I sent an e-mail to Customer Service at NetSol, but they haven't responded to it. Neither was I successful at trying to contact them by the phone.
When I read this, I thought I must have written it... This is verbatim the problem I've been experiencing for the last week or so. The most annoying thing I've seen is in their emails where they instruct you to send responses to another email address instead of using the reply-to field...
Anyone know about compatibility with the various Handspring models?
They list a price tag of $39.99 for the "Consumer" package, and $59.99 for the "Professional" package. Both are available for the Palm IIIx/IIIxe and Palm Vx.
(Seems to me that this is a severely limited subset of all the Palm platforms that are out there...)
The Consumer pacakge comes with your standard apps, ToDo, Expense, etc, and the Professional package adds their SDK.
Of course, they have no screen shots or other means to evaluate how well the apps replace those available with PalmOS, and no details on how to install. I'd want those details before I'd commit $60, even if I did get a free t-shirt from their amazingly annoying blinking ad.
Code reviews exist and don't exist primarily as a function of the company you're at or the group you're in. And if they do exist, there's a whole range of quality to them.
I've worked at a large government contracting comapny, and they had code reviews as part of the ISO process. Which meant that they occured regularly. And I've also worked at a small company, where everyone said "We should do reviews" but then never did. I take that back... they tried one, no one prepared for it, so it flopped, and a follow up was never scheduled.
Now I'm not saying that preparation is absolutely necessary. If everyone is familiar with the code, they can do a good impromptu review. But if you have no clue what the code does, you probably won't be able to comment on anything but the style , unless the code is pretty rudimentary. Also, giving people a chance to read through it at leisure lets you have a relatively quick meeting as people run down their red-lines rather than sitting and reading code in a conference room.
And when you actually review, review the code, not the coder! Some people tend to turn code reviews into an ego driven contest. They may not release any code until no one will be able to find a single bug when it comes up for review. Others may pore over code, desperate to find any bugs they can, in order to bash the reviewee. Once you get into this kind of situation, no one is productive since they're way to concerned with the reviews to actually do anything else.
But I've also seen very good reviews where constructive criticism came up, suggestions were given to improve architecture or code flow, and people on both sides learned something. And that's what you have to keep striving for, because it may not come very easily.
The thing I don't get is how long it's taken them to start any lawsuits. Why now? There have been anti-barney jihads around the internet for at least 6-7 years now.
Heck, I had a tshirt that said "Kill Barney" and it's been long enough ago that that tshirt got holes, became a rag, and even outlived its usefulness as a rag.
It looks like alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die is still around. How about "Night of the Barney"? and all of its sequels that floated around usenet for forever? Surely that is a little more defaming that a site that displays ways of killing purple dinosaurs. Can you still find Barney WAD files for Doom? By this point, there would be thousands of people to sue...
Problem is, Spamcop redacts the sender's address when forwarding reports. Makes it rather hard to resolve the complaint, when I have no idea what address to get removed from the mailing list.
I agree that this is the wrong thing to do when it's a legit mailing list, especially when it's an opt-in list. And the SpamCop instructions explicitly ask users to try unsubscribing first.
The problem is when I get 52 copies of "Buy Viagra Now!" emails where the sender/reply-to/remove addresses are completely unrelated to each other or the URL for purchasing. And if I did reply to the remove request address, I bet I'd only get an undeliverable error because some poor schmuck has been bombarded with 50,000 unsubscribe requests for a product he's never heard of and has overflowed the mail limit set by his ISP.
That's what SpamCop is designed for, and where it should be used. You can't guarantee a tool will be used properly every time, but that shouldn't prohibit you from making the tool available.
Spam is free speech, people! When you prevent someone from telling people about their issue or product, what ever it might be, in the United States, you are restriting their Constitutionally-guarenteed rights to free speech.
I agree that preventing someone from speaking is wrong, however, this is not quite that cut and dried... In the case of product based spam, it is restricting them from speaking anonymously. They are still free to send their message without using an open-relay. If they truly are trying to sell a worthwhile product they believe in, why are they often hiding their identity?
And you can even simplify the process of fighting back by using SpamCop to help identify all the appropriate places to report the abuse.
I had exactly the same experience with a Denver based ISP!
First you feel silly spelling a cryptic password out for some clueless tech person over the phone, and then you find out you can't change it without calling them back and spelling out that one.
This ISP just couldn't figure out why I didn't want them to know my password... They most likely had root access anyway, making knowing my password a moot point! And if this person on the phone didn't have root, I don't want them having my password either!
It wouldn't bother me so much, if I could change it the first time I logged in, but having no secure way to change it really bothered me.
The difficult part comes when the storm strikes while you're out of town, or even at work.
I had a near strike with lightning, the surge protectors all worked, I just had to reset my alarm clock, microwave, etc. But I had this weird phone problem for days...
It seemed like sometime during the night, my phone line would go off-hook, and nothing would reset it until I went around and unplugged all the phones. Finally, I tracked it back to the plug my modem was running off of. Except my modem worked fine...
A little more experimentation, and it turned out that something in my modem got fried by the lightning, and it could no longer hang up completely. The connection got dropped, but the next time you picked up the phone, you got a dead line. Unplug the modem from the wall and all is well again, until you dial the modem.
The lessons I learned? Always have a surge protector on any phone line running into an expensive device. And keep all your warrenty information handy - I got the manufacturer to install a new modem for free.
Actually, I did see Patriot Games. And I giggled through the whole satellite imagery scene. Just like I giggled through the scenes of files being deleted as they were being read...
Just because it's a movie, doesn't make it real.
Not yet. If you look at commercial satellite imagery companies, most satellites have a 1 meter or larger resolution. We're talking about maybe being able to distinguish between cars and trucks, not look at the 1/4 inch you are extending over your property line.
Nope. If you look around at commercial satellite imagery companies, they seem to be struggling to get a 24 hour turn around time on still images, let alone video.
You're right... perhaps I should have spoken more clearly.
I *meant* to say that the threads failed to clean *themselves* up. They had no timers or other means of detecting that they had stalled, therefore couldn't releasing any held resources, or cause themselves to exit, etc, etc.
My own complimentary subscription for presenting at LISA '99 just ran out, but as anyone who's read this journal before can tell you, this article was just written by Joe Admin, and was about on par for the magazine. Even if you haven't read the journal before, you could click on the big "Write For Us" link at the top of the page, and see that "all of our articles are written by readers."
Now, I'm not slamming the magazine! It's a decent piece of work, and actually has some good articles about tricks and tools that help sys admins get their day to day jobs done. But at the same time, it's also subject to some one-sided reviews and some articles take a lot of flak for their controversial positions. Just look at who wrote the article (the original developer of the mail engine) and take it with a grain of salt.
And if you really disagree write them a counter piece, or at least a letter to the editor pointing out the flaws.
And how to clean up their threads... I ran into a server program (that I had to write an EAI connector for) that in one case bloated up to 2000+ threads because it just kept launching them without cleaning any up.
It made sense to have multiple threads of execution inside it, as it had to handle many client processes simultaneously, but apparently when the thread execution stopped, they just went off into oblivion. That's something that will bring a system to its knees...
My previous company took the stance that as long as the GPL code stays in its own jar, that's equivalent to using a shared library - not a derivative work.
I believe the key here is that the linking is dynamic, not when the linking occurs.
And especially in the current market situation (trust me... my last company just folded up their US office because of the market conditions) you don't want to count your options before they hatch.
I haven't been a huge Napster user in the past, but I just got a portable mp3 player, and wanted to grab some tracks so I didn't have to spend the weekend ripping CDs. Also, it helps when you only want one track off the CD and you can't track anyone down who will let you borrow it...
Anyway, I still found all the tracks I searched for on the official Napster server, with practically no name mangling. Perhaps I'm lucky and was looking for stuff that hasn't hit the filter lists yet, (or my tastes in music just won't make the lists at all), but I didn't seem to see a big degredation in music available. I guess we'll see how things compare in a week or so.
On one hand, I know several people here in the Denver-metro area that would love to move (back) to the SLC area. Of course, their religious preferences probably influence that, but that's a quality of life decisions they have made. Add that to the decision that they don't want to put up with the explosive growth, housing costs, and traffic congestion that Colorado is seeing, and you can understand where they are coming from.
On the other hand, I would never live in SLC, or in Texas, simply because the quality of life isn't the same as what I want. I want to be near the Rocky Mountains, have snow without ice-storms, and warm summers without 100+ degrees of heat.
And companies even are concerned about quality of life... For example, the company I'm at now has a headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, and picked Boulder, Colorado for the US office, simply because the quality of life was similar to that in Brisbane. For years the company didn't even have a major client in the same city, but the Boulder atmosphere was what the company wanted, and what they believed would be attractive to employees.
Everybody is concerned with quality of life, but how you define quality of life will likely be completely different from how other people define it.
IMHO, if companies don't like the atmosphere of the SLC area, why are they remaining there? If you can't make employees come to where you are, maybe you should move to where employeers are.
That would be an Amiga 4000 I had years ago... After all, I'll only be 3902 years old in March.
I made a number of repairs to the optical mouse I had with my Amiga 4000 years ago; here's what I've found:
As one other poster recommended, a soldering pencil will work better than a gun. I ended up replacing switches under the mouse buttons when I wore them out playing Populous II, and a pencil fit into tight spots on the board with more precision.
Pay careful attention to any specs you can find on the LED; trial by error isn't something to rely on. I couldn't find any specs for my mouse, and used trial and error to work my way through a couple LED's from Radio Shack... I couldn't find any that would light brightly enough for the mouse to work. And it was a shame to pack it away after all the other mods I made...
Good luck with your mods, and I hope you can find good specs.
Lately, I've had a few bad experiences as well. It seems they use patience as a litmus test to decide if you should really get your rebate.
For example, I picked up a intel hub at CompUSA because of their "half-price hubs" rebate. Just a little 4-porter, but the price break made it much cheaper than its competitors. I got back a postcard that said they couldn't fulfill my rebate because I didn't provide my street address - I receive mail at a post office box. Ridiculous. They're mailing me the rebate, not hand delivering it. Unless they really want profiling info and sending the rebate as a second priority.
This postcard had a URL, and an 800 number. I called the number, and got to a message that essentially said "If you mailed your rebate less than 8 weeks ago, it isn't in the system. If you mailed it over 8 weeks ago, please hold for 2 hours..."
The URL was little better. It only had a form, where you had to even supplwhich rebate this was for, fill out a text box, and someone would get in touch with you. I actually got 2 emails that said that my rebate was being processed, and I should receive it shortly.
Of course, I still haven't seen it since then, and that was about 2-3 weeks ago...
And to look at this from another point of view, my brother just got his MCSE certifications, and was interviewing for a couple of jobs. In one tech support position, his supervisor would have been an older, more experienced, but snarly and un-user-friendly tech whose MCSE wasn't up to date.
The HR people doing the hiring, pretty much told my brother that because his boss had essentially the same qualifications but was older and had more work experience, there'd be little room for advancement, even though my brother had a better "bed-side manner" for giving tech support. Plus, the HR people hinted that his boss would probably resent him for being younger and having similar credentials (other than the experience).
I don't know if the HR people had some ulterior motive for presenting the situation this way, but perhaps they are trying to combat age-centric problems before they arise.
Wow...
I used a LD-14 as well. And wrote my PDP-8 simulator in software. (This was at the University of Wyoming during '94-'96 or so)
The classes were in undergraduate computer architectures, where the PDP-8 had a special place in one lecturer's heart as the epitome of the Von Neumann computer, with a reasonable (yet small) instruction set. I knew PDP-8 assembly very well, for the first round, and in the advanced class with the LD-14, I got to know the binary op codes pretty well too.
I hated the PDP-8 at the time... but once I took a class that used x86 assembly, I pined for that sweet PDP-8!