I agree with the sentiments here that "You lost the bid, so just move on."
If you want to find out WHY you've lost the bid, a questionnaire is a good idea. Give them some meaningful but neutral questions, and give them a chance to respond in their own words. Assume that you will get no results, but if you DO get feedback, consider it carefully in future bids.
With regards to security, why did you find a competing product more valuable?
CompetitorCo's track record for security seemed stronger.
OurCo has not demonstrated suffient regard for security.
Cost outweighed security concerns.
With regards to interoperability, why did you find a competing product more valuable?
CompetitorCo's products have a higher degree of interoperability with your other systems.
OurCo's products have not demonstrated interoperability with established standards.
Cost outweighed interoperability concerns.
And so on. If your questionnaire smacks of propaganda, and not of honest "how can we serve you better" fact-finding, then it will land in the recycle bin.
The folks at Bell Labs have a sense of humor, anyway.
On their pre-generated samples page, the English sample is a computer-sung rendition of "Bicycle Built for Two." This is the song which the murderous HAL 9000 in Clark/Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey sang as he was being put to sleep.
Do we need to set up a site which compares Unix variants? A little 1 to 10 rating scale where people can decide if FreeBSD is a Unix, or if OSX is not a Unix?
At the time I tried them, I found no such language on the site. Yes, it may have "timed out" as you describe.
I didn't contact customer service because it wasn't that big a deal: they sent a coupon and I got a couple free prints. I didn't feel entitled to more free prints, but I did wonder why the promotion wasn't as they described it.
I did raise this on Slashdot. Last I checked, I could talk about it wherever I wanted. That goes for recommendations and reservations both. Timothy mentioned Shutterfly, I responded. Get off your high horse.
As for their quality, that wasn't the topic raised. Yep, they are a solid bureau. They spend lots on those cute vellum envelopes and extra 'thank you' inserts in each shipment, which are both impressive and overdone. They lived up to their contract: they said they'd charge for shipping and materials, and they gave me the finest shipping and materials my money could pay for.
The prints themselves are awesome. If you don't want to be bothered with printing it yourself, then Shutterfly is a great bureau to save you the effort. They take care of their inks and paper stocks, where the home hobbyist would not. However, I've found that my $150 HP Deskjet 932C printer and some high glossy photo inkjet paper can rival the results, with a turnaround of ten minutes instead of four days.
If I have a dozen prints I want to send to my computer-phobic mother cross-country, I'll load up the Shutterfly client software and use their service again.
Yep, I wanted to see what the print quality was, so I got two prints done by Shutterfly. They sent the two, and then erased the rest of my "free" prints.
Nowhere on the site could I find any language that suggested something like "up to 25 free prints in your first order." They also charged for the postage materials and service, so I know it wasn't an attempt to save themselves from 25 separate envelopes.
A newspaper in San Francisco last week (forget which one) had a front page teaser discussing the liberties taken with calling card rates. Sure, 100 free minutes for $2, but each time you dial it's a minimum of 25 minutes.
The more granularity they can force, the fewer transactions they really have to process. It's all a scam.
I'm not trying to sell you on either layout, but there's lots of misinformation out there on the QWERTY/DVORAK issue.
One, QWERTY was not designed to slow you down. It was designed to alternate between areas of the striker array, so that it wouldn't jam. A well-oiled qwerty Underwood would allow typing speeds to exceed 100wpm. Of course, electronic keyboards have no striker swing time, so they can allow higher speeds, but that doesn't prove the qwerty was designed to slow you down.
Two, it's an urban legend, unproven, whether the QWERTY layout intentionally put all the letters of the word 'typewriter' on the top row. The theory is that this was for untrained salesmen showing off the new device. This may just be a coincidence, same as the word 'stewardesses' can be typed using just the left hand.
Three, the DVORAK layout won't save you from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Two things affect it: the constriction of the carpal tunnel itself, through flexion of the wrists to unnatural angles, and the force applied to carpal tendons by your typing strength. Keep your wrists straight and off the work surface (not resting on those dumb wrist rests!), type at a natural sustainable rate, and take 30-second breaks now and then to exercise your eye muscles and rest your hand tendons. Few jobs require you to type every moment of the day.
Four, the DVORAK layout has no conclusive evidence of speed advantage. There are fast typists on either layout: whichever layout works for you is the one that's best for you. If you touch type less than 60wpm, you probably shouldn't look for a new layout to improve your accuracy.
If you're looking to improve your typing speed, this is the training technique that works for almost any mental-physical activity: find a way to exercise the skill without thinking about it. Your medulla oblongata is easier trained when the cerebrum doesn't get involved. Learn to catch by socializing with Dad, not by watching the ball. Learn to type by typing in MUDs or chat-rooms; the need for speed to do or say something in a timely fashion will force your hands to train themselves, in a way that conscious effort never will.
I would *love* to move to a rackmount system, but the cost of the rack itself has held me back.
Ideally, I'd like a half-high enclosed cabinet that's got some cooling and some space for UPSes. A house with kids is not a cleanroom, so fan filters would be nice but enclosures are a must. Clear door to monitor the blinky lights on the cablemodem and switch once in a while.
If I lived in Oakland or San Jose, I would just drop by one of the dot.bomb firesales and grab me something for pennies on the dollar, but everything I've seen is over US$800. Ouch.
I used the TTL example because regular lab oscilloscopes for first year electronics schools register 5ns. It's a common "get you thinking" exercise. TTL is the goldfish of digital electronics; it's hard to kill the chips. TTL is used by people who fuss with electronics as a hobby (TINI, BasicStamp, etc.), which is a wider audience than those who work with electronics professionally alone.
The speed of light 'c' is 299792458 m/s in a vacuum. A nanosecond is 10^-9 s, so that makes an easy 0.299792458 m/ns. While physics is usually not a good time to switch away from the metric system, that's about one foot per nanosecond (11.8028526772 in/ns).
One foot is roughly one light-nanosecond in a vacuum.
If you have played around with Transistor Transistor Logic (TTL) 5Vcc discrete logic chips in school, you probably learned that gates don't settle their state changes instantly. They take some time to drift from ~5V to ~0V output, or vice versa. The NAND gate is the root of all simple TTL gates, you can implement any simple gate with just NANDs.
One manufacturer's 74LS00 quad NAND package has a "time to pull low" worst-case of 15 ns, and a "time to pull high" worst-case of 22 ns. This is per input bit to be processed. Before that worst-case time has elapsed, you can't be sure you're getting the right answer out of the chip. Managing propagation delays is the biggest reason for providing a CLOCK which drives all the logic at nice clear intervals. The interval has to assume the worst case of any of the involved logic. No wonder the Apple ][ clock was rated at just over 1 MHz, giving ~1000ns between clock ticks.
We don't use TTL in today's computers of course, it's too slow and chips requiring 5V signals produce too much heat for small circuit paths in the chip.
This article is saying that a packet of information sent into the switch as a beam of light can be switched intelligently from its current course to some other course in the time it would take that packet to move just five feet(*).
(*) 'c' is the speed of light through a vacuum; a fiber isn't vacuum; I know that.
Yes, Visors have a different port; keyboards have to be made for Visor or Palm. The Visor software is also able to deal with USB (unlike any Palm I think), but I don't know if that affects the pinout needs.
I don't have a copy of the file, is it for Deutche (German) language pages? Do Germans need different style sheets? Or is this some sort of style-remover?
The SETI website used this copyrighted work with permission from the owners. Did you?
If you were funny on your own, you'd deserve a laugh, or a plus moderation. If you attributed this to its rightful source, you'd be considered witty for juxtaposing the article with the story. As it is, you're just plagiarizing.
If you're looking for these, including this word in your search will find a lot more. Many types of orrery have been made of brass for hundreds of years.
In an important case for privacy and free speech advocates, the
Supreme Court ruled recently that the First Amendment protects
anonymous political speech. In McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission,
decided April 19, 1995, the Court struck down an Ohio law that required
the disclosure of personal identity on political literature.
The case you link regards whether or not a handbill on a political issue must include a signature. The First Amendment says you can say (and not say) whatever you want. Thus, the handbill author can decide to omit his or her signature from what he says, and the law cannot compell that signature on that handbill.
If the handbills had been libelous, however, the identity of the author could have been legally vulnerable. Libel is not a protected speech, it is an infraction of the laws, and the perpetrator of libel cannot legally remain anonymous.
"``The First Amendment clearly applies to the Internet,'' Zilly said. ``The law says that a person has a right to speak anonymously.''
One, the First Amendment does NOT say that you have a right to speak anonymously.
Two, the right to privacy (and thus limited anonymity), comes from the FOURTH amendment, a security within their persons, houses, papers and effects; also the FIFTH amendment precludes your being compelled to supply information about yourself or your conduct, metaphorically this can be read as an extension of the fourth amendment into your thoughts: 'your brain cannot be seized and searched, you are secure within your mind.'
You are *always* to be held accountable for your actions; there is no right to being free from accountability. If there was a John Doe suspect, and a specific legal criminal charge, then the court could and would hear the case of whether or not the two were in fact related.
I've thought for the past year or so that someone should make a 'beatnux' or 'beatnix' distro, with lots of flower-power iconography. Lots of Baez and Beatles.
Peace, Love and Free Code.
The thing is, it's kinda scary that this generation's loudest beatnik "stick it to the man" sentiments come in the form of banishing copyrights and civil infringements. What happened to organizing those voices to the things that really matter? Where are the protests against unjustified warfare, civil rights abuses, racial intolerance in our police forces, environmental sabotage, sexual inequality, caste systems, and voter disenfranchisement?
Just a guess, but if each node in a tree was a decision (do I eat this?, is this compatible with my alignment?) and the left and right had strengths (60% sure I'd say yes), then you could tweak that bias as you monitored feedback from the actual outcomes.
It's a bit more crisp and reflective than a neural net, in that you know the specific purpose of each node. In a neural net, it's hard to reflect: "why exactly did you make that choice?"
(Wow, it's a rollercoaster. Down to 1:Flamebait and up to 5:Insightful and down to 1:Overrated and up to 5 again. Moderation Totals:Insightful=2, Interesting=2, Informative=2, Overrated=3, Total=9. Interestingly, it stopped listing a Flamebait moderation after the first few hours. A couple others of mine were hit with Overrated, so maybe someone's got a beef with me. [shrug])
It really only affect Active FTP sessions. Passive sessions really work without a problem with firewalls, because the connections and transfers are all done in band. If you want to save your self the trouble, just set all your FTP servers to passive only. No problem then at all.
Um, that's not how passive mode ftp works. You still have two sockets for the FTP, whether active or passive. What changes is who will initiate the connection for the data.
Without recently developed stateful firewall monitors, FTP is very difficult to arrange from host A behind firewall f(A) to host B behind firewall f(B). Active mode butts up against f(A), and passive mode butts up against f(B).
You miss my argument: if folks are stealing time from payphones, and payphones go away... then folks are stealing content from unprotected media like CDs... how long will it be before the only media out there is encrypted for pay-for-play?
It's inevitable that people will rip off stuff from naive unprotected services. If rip-offs are relatively small and difficult (a la Capncrunch's phreaking), no big deal. But when rip-offs grow to the scale of Napster, the naive companies wise up quickly-- and close the loopholes, taking legitimate use out of play as well.
As has been stated elsewhere, Java uses 64bit time on the same epoch, but counts milliseconds instead of seconds. Easy conversion, and we can only measure 292.27 million years.
I hate to see pay phones disappear and this sounds like a nice way to keep 'em alive a little longer. Heck, hacking pay phones is where it all started for the likes of Cap'n crunch.
Anyone else see a problem with this attitude?
Slashdot 2003: I'd hate to see CDs disappear and maybe there's a nice way to keep 'em alive a little longer. Heck, ripping CDs is where it all started for the likes of Sean Fanning.
Not many programs are gonna care how many digits are in a timestamp, but I bet some do try to format stuff assuming a less-than-one-billion-seconds-since-epoch time.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the sentiments here that "You lost the bid, so just move on."
If you want to find out WHY you've lost the bid, a questionnaire is a good idea. Give them some meaningful but neutral questions, and give them a chance to respond in their own words. Assume that you will get no results, but if you DO get feedback, consider it carefully in future bids.
- With regards to security, why did you find a competing product more valuable?
- CompetitorCo's track record for security seemed stronger.
- OurCo has not demonstrated suffient regard for security.
- Cost outweighed security concerns.
- CompetitorCo's products have a higher degree of interoperability with your other systems.
- OurCo's products have not demonstrated interoperability with established standards.
- Cost outweighed interoperability concerns.
And so on. If your questionnaire smacks of propaganda, and not of honest "how can we serve you better" fact-finding, then it will land in the recycle bin.With regards to interoperability, why did you find a competing product more valuable?
Are we going to need a sommelier for Slashdot?
Ports, Wine, Brandies, Whiskeys, ... oh.
Nevermind.
The folks at Bell Labs have a sense of humor, anyway.
On their pre-generated samples page, the English sample is a computer-sung rendition of "Bicycle Built for Two." This is the song which the murderous HAL 9000 in Clark/Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey sang as he was being put to sleep.
The first thing I thought of, when reading the story, was Terry Gilliam's movie, "Brazil."
When will we have Robert de Niro zip-lining into people's apartments to fix their networks without a 27B-6?
Do we need to set up a site which compares Unix variants? A little 1 to 10 rating scale where people can decide if FreeBSD is a Unix, or if OSX is not a Unix?
At the time I tried them, I found no such language on the site. Yes, it may have "timed out" as you describe.
I didn't contact customer service because it wasn't that big a deal: they sent a coupon and I got a couple free prints. I didn't feel entitled to more free prints, but I did wonder why the promotion wasn't as they described it.
I did raise this on Slashdot. Last I checked, I could talk about it wherever I wanted. That goes for recommendations and reservations both. Timothy mentioned Shutterfly, I responded. Get off your high horse.
As for their quality, that wasn't the topic raised. Yep, they are a solid bureau. They spend lots on those cute vellum envelopes and extra 'thank you' inserts in each shipment, which are both impressive and overdone. They lived up to their contract: they said they'd charge for shipping and materials, and they gave me the finest shipping and materials my money could pay for.
The prints themselves are awesome. If you don't want to be bothered with printing it yourself, then Shutterfly is a great bureau to save you the effort. They take care of their inks and paper stocks, where the home hobbyist would not. However, I've found that my $150 HP Deskjet 932C printer and some high glossy photo inkjet paper can rival the results, with a turnaround of ten minutes instead of four days.
If I have a dozen prints I want to send to my computer-phobic mother cross-country, I'll load up the Shutterfly client software and use their service again.
Yep, I wanted to see what the print quality was, so I got two prints done by Shutterfly. They sent the two, and then erased the rest of my "free" prints.
Nowhere on the site could I find any language that suggested something like "up to 25 free prints in your first order." They also charged for the postage materials and service, so I know it wasn't an attempt to save themselves from 25 separate envelopes.
A newspaper in San Francisco last week (forget which one) had a front page teaser discussing the liberties taken with calling card rates. Sure, 100 free minutes for $2, but each time you dial it's a minimum of 25 minutes.
The more granularity they can force, the fewer transactions they really have to process. It's all a scam.
I'm not trying to sell you on either layout, but there's lots of misinformation out there on the QWERTY/DVORAK issue.
One, QWERTY was not designed to slow you down. It was designed to alternate between areas of the striker array, so that it wouldn't jam. A well-oiled qwerty Underwood would allow typing speeds to exceed 100wpm. Of course, electronic keyboards have no striker swing time, so they can allow higher speeds, but that doesn't prove the qwerty was designed to slow you down.
Two, it's an urban legend, unproven, whether the QWERTY layout intentionally put all the letters of the word 'typewriter' on the top row. The theory is that this was for untrained salesmen showing off the new device. This may just be a coincidence, same as the word 'stewardesses' can be typed using just the left hand.
Three, the DVORAK layout won't save you from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Two things affect it: the constriction of the carpal tunnel itself, through flexion of the wrists to unnatural angles, and the force applied to carpal tendons by your typing strength. Keep your wrists straight and off the work surface (not resting on those dumb wrist rests!), type at a natural sustainable rate, and take 30-second breaks now and then to exercise your eye muscles and rest your hand tendons. Few jobs require you to type every moment of the day.
Four, the DVORAK layout has no conclusive evidence of speed advantage. There are fast typists on either layout: whichever layout works for you is the one that's best for you. If you touch type less than 60wpm, you probably shouldn't look for a new layout to improve your accuracy.
If you're looking to improve your typing speed, this is the training technique that works for almost any mental-physical activity: find a way to exercise the skill without thinking about it. Your medulla oblongata is easier trained when the cerebrum doesn't get involved. Learn to catch by socializing with Dad, not by watching the ball. Learn to type by typing in MUDs or chat-rooms; the need for speed to do or say something in a timely fashion will force your hands to train themselves, in a way that conscious effort never will.
I would *love* to move to a rackmount system, but the cost of the rack itself has held me back.
Ideally, I'd like a half-high enclosed cabinet that's got some cooling and some space for UPSes. A house with kids is not a cleanroom, so fan filters would be nice but enclosures are a must. Clear door to monitor the blinky lights on the cablemodem and switch once in a while.
If I lived in Oakland or San Jose, I would just drop by one of the dot.bomb firesales and grab me something for pennies on the dollar, but everything I've seen is over US$800. Ouch.
I used the TTL example because regular lab oscilloscopes for first year electronics schools register 5ns. It's a common "get you thinking" exercise. TTL is the goldfish of digital electronics; it's hard to kill the chips. TTL is used by people who fuss with electronics as a hobby (TINI, BasicStamp, etc.), which is a wider audience than those who work with electronics professionally alone.
Put "5 nanoseconds" into perspective.
The speed of light 'c' is 299792458 m/s in a vacuum. A nanosecond is 10^-9 s, so that makes an easy 0.299792458 m/ns. While physics is usually not a good time to switch away from the metric system, that's about one foot per nanosecond (11.8028526772 in/ns).
One foot is roughly one light-nanosecond in a vacuum.
If you have played around with Transistor Transistor Logic (TTL) 5Vcc discrete logic chips in school, you probably learned that gates don't settle their state changes instantly. They take some time to drift from ~5V to ~0V output, or vice versa. The NAND gate is the root of all simple TTL gates, you can implement any simple gate with just NANDs.
One manufacturer's 74LS00 quad NAND package has a "time to pull low" worst-case of 15 ns, and a "time to pull high" worst-case of 22 ns. This is per input bit to be processed. Before that worst-case time has elapsed, you can't be sure you're getting the right answer out of the chip. Managing propagation delays is the biggest reason for providing a CLOCK which drives all the logic at nice clear intervals. The interval has to assume the worst case of any of the involved logic. No wonder the Apple ][ clock was rated at just over 1 MHz, giving ~1000ns between clock ticks.
We don't use TTL in today's computers of course, it's too slow and chips requiring 5V signals produce too much heat for small circuit paths in the chip.
This article is saying that a packet of information sent into the switch as a beam of light can be switched intelligently from its current course to some other course in the time it would take that packet to move just five feet(*).
(*) 'c' is the speed of light through a vacuum; a fiber isn't vacuum; I know that.
Yes, Visors have a different port; keyboards have to be made for Visor or Palm. The Visor software is also able to deal with USB (unlike any Palm I think), but I don't know if that affects the pinout needs.
I don't have a copy of the file, is it for Deutche (German) language pages? Do Germans need different style sheets? Or is this some sort of style-remover?
i18n is a bad abbreviation
By Terry Bisson
From "Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories," Copyright © 1994, Tor Books
The SETI website used this copyrighted work with permission from the owners. Did you?
If you were funny on your own, you'd deserve a laugh, or a plus moderation. If you attributed this to its rightful source, you'd be considered witty for juxtaposing the article with the story. As it is, you're just plagiarizing.
A model of a solar or planetary system is called an orrery.
A Java Orrery Applet
Another Java Orrery Applet
If you're looking for these, including this word in your search will find a lot more. Many types of orrery have been made of brass for hundreds of years.
In an important case for privacy and free speech advocates, the Supreme Court ruled recently that the First Amendment protects anonymous political speech. In McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission, decided April 19, 1995, the Court struck down an Ohio law that required the disclosure of personal identity on political literature.
The case you link regards whether or not a handbill on a political issue must include a signature. The First Amendment says you can say (and not say) whatever you want. Thus, the handbill author can decide to omit his or her signature from what he says, and the law cannot compell that signature on that handbill.
If the handbills had been libelous, however, the identity of the author could have been legally vulnerable. Libel is not a protected speech, it is an infraction of the laws, and the perpetrator of libel cannot legally remain anonymous.
"``The First Amendment clearly applies to the Internet,'' Zilly said. ``The law says that a person has a right to speak anonymously.''
One, the First Amendment does NOT say that you have a right to speak anonymously.
Two, the right to privacy (and thus limited anonymity), comes from the FOURTH amendment, a security within their persons, houses, papers and effects; also the FIFTH amendment precludes your being compelled to supply information about yourself or your conduct, metaphorically this can be read as an extension of the fourth amendment into your thoughts: 'your brain cannot be seized and searched, you are secure within your mind.'
You are *always* to be held accountable for your actions; there is no right to being free from accountability. If there was a John Doe suspect, and a specific legal criminal charge, then the court could and would hear the case of whether or not the two were in fact related.
I've thought for the past year or so that someone should make a 'beatnux' or 'beatnix' distro, with lots of flower-power iconography. Lots of Baez and Beatles.
Peace, Love and Free Code.
The thing is, it's kinda scary that this generation's loudest beatnik "stick it to the man" sentiments come in the form of banishing copyrights and civil infringements. What happened to organizing those voices to the things that really matter? Where are the protests against unjustified warfare, civil rights abuses, racial intolerance in our police forces, environmental sabotage, sexual inequality, caste systems, and voter disenfranchisement?
Just a guess, but if each node in a tree was a decision (do I eat this?, is this compatible with my alignment?) and the left and right had strengths (60% sure I'd say yes), then you could tweak that bias as you monitored feedback from the actual outcomes.
It's a bit more crisp and reflective than a neural net, in that you know the specific purpose of each node. In a neural net, it's hard to reflect: "why exactly did you make that choice?"
(Wow, it's a rollercoaster. Down to 1:Flamebait and up to 5:Insightful and down to 1:Overrated and up to 5 again. Moderation Totals:Insightful=2, Interesting=2, Informative=2, Overrated=3, Total=9. Interestingly, it stopped listing a Flamebait moderation after the first few hours. A couple others of mine were hit with Overrated, so maybe someone's got a beef with me. [shrug])
It really only affect Active FTP sessions. Passive sessions really work without a problem with firewalls, because the connections and transfers are all done in band. If you want to save your self the trouble, just set all your FTP servers to passive only. No problem then at all.
Um, that's not how passive mode ftp works. You still have two sockets for the FTP, whether active or passive. What changes is who will initiate the connection for the data.
Without recently developed stateful firewall monitors, FTP is very difficult to arrange from host A behind firewall f(A) to host B behind firewall f(B). Active mode butts up against f(A), and passive mode butts up against f(B).
FTP is a broken protocol.
You miss my argument: if folks are stealing time from payphones, and payphones go away... then folks are stealing content from unprotected media like CDs... how long will it be before the only media out there is encrypted for pay-for-play?
It's inevitable that people will rip off stuff from naive unprotected services. If rip-offs are relatively small and difficult (a la Capncrunch's phreaking), no big deal. But when rip-offs grow to the scale of Napster, the naive companies wise up quickly-- and close the loopholes, taking legitimate use out of play as well.
As has been stated elsewhere, Java uses 64bit time on the same epoch, but counts milliseconds instead of seconds. Easy conversion, and we can only measure 292.27 million years.
I hate to see pay phones disappear and this sounds like a nice way to keep 'em alive a little longer. Heck, hacking pay phones is where it all started for the likes of Cap'n crunch.
Anyone else see a problem with this attitude?
Slashdot 2003: I'd hate to see CDs disappear and maybe there's a nice way to keep 'em alive a little longer. Heck, ripping CDs is where it all started for the likes of Sean Fanning.
Not many programs are gonna care how many digits are in a timestamp, but I bet some do try to format stuff assuming a less-than-one-billion-seconds-since-epoch time.
Review your code?