According to the Logan report, which was written by an independent security contractor, "the number of system-generated false positives was excessive, and as a result, the operator's workload is taxing and strenuous, requiring constant undivided attention and periodic relief, which amounts to a staffing minimum of two persons for one workstation."
Unfortunately, this does not tell the whole story. There are very few shares available to short, which is one reason why there is a very low short interest.
You really ought to compare fatalities per million passenger-minutes. Its a more reasonable measure in this game of how to lie with statistics.
If you do that, the quick back of the envelope calculation has cars at about 100, urban transit at about 45, school bus at about 10, and shuttle at about 2.
However, it only makes sense to use shuttle passenger-minutes (or passenger-miles on the orbital track) if you consider it a pleasure craft with the goal being to circle the earth.
If you consider that it has an actual orbital destination that is about 200 miles from where it started (400 miles round trip), then you should compare fatalities per million passenger-miles based on a 400 mile round trip for the shuttle. This works out to about 44, worse than a school bus, but better than a car or urban transit.
Elections should be eliminated, replaced by a random draft system. If you get drafted, you can take the job, or pass. If you pass, then another person is drafted.
I gave up on inkjets last February. I had already switched to doing my photo printing using dotphoto.com for about.15-.19 per photo.
I bought a Minolta 2300 DL network color laser on sale from OfficeMax for $600. The network interface is included in the base price, which makes this printer the best bargain I've seen in a color laser printer. An optional duplexer adds about $330 to the price. The protocol used by this printer is Zenographics ZjStream (JBIG based). I wrote an open source driver for it, called
foo2zjs.
The printer with my driver is good enough for business graphics and casual photo printing. The resolution of this printer is 2400x600 with one bit (1 dot size) per CMYK color plane. The printer is not good enough for photo printing, but I prefer dotphoto.com for that anyway. For the price, I would buy htis printer again.
I've also got an unreleased driver for the HP LaserJet 1500 color laser printer. This printer uses Oak Technologies OAKT protocol, also JBIG based. This printer has two bits (3 dot sizes) per CMYK plane. The driver currently produces output that can be parsed and turned back into the original page images, but has never been tested on a real LJ 1500. I shelved further work on the OAKT driver due to HP's lack of interest in loaning me a LaserJet 1500 for final testing.
A Mathematician and an Engineer are in a room with a naked woman. They are told that with each step they take, they can travel 1/2 of the way to the naked woman.
The Mathematician says "Sigh, We'll never get there".
The Engineer says "But we'll get close enough!"
Try to think realistically here. At this point in time, there are only 3 or 4 desktop platforms that are important enough that you might want to make sure the installation experience is painless. You can afford to compile and ship 3 curl binaries with your package in order to improve the installation experience for that large set of people. Statically link the binaries.
The rest are off in left field and are probably used to having to stand on their head in order to install software for their platform. If you can help them, great. If not, move on.
Well then, use the libcurl bindings for Java, rather than the curl command line tool. You can still suck down any needed libraries for them. You might have to whip up dialogs to ask them for password(s) during the install.
Its all doable in a no-surf, fully automatic way if you work at it. With the possible exception of a web site that requires registration and the registration must be confirmed by email response.
a 5 line shell script will take care of getting any libraries they need from the web. There is no reason your users should have to surf to get the libs. Get them for them.
Suppose that 1000 USA geeks were living in a geek-hive apartment building and most wanted to order super high speed service for $21.
The phone/cable companies would be jumping up and down to offer the super high speed service for a lower price because they make it up in lower costs and higher penetration.
But there would be no way for them to offer it because the government, led by left-wing whiners, would demand that everybody in the city be offered the same deal at the same price. Regardless how expensive it might be to wire up individual houses. In addition, the government would require you to pay an extra $5/month to subsidize libraries, schools, and the poor so that they could get the cheap high speed for free.
Sheesh, the article author doesn't understand the RIAA rules. Here they are in an easy to read format...
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.ht ml
His idea of tiny, one-song webcasters won't fly. However, the idea could be modified to 100-song webcasters and you might make it work, for an end user cost of about 10 cents for the 100 songs.
I guess I don't get it. If you can open an ssh connection to the remote machine, why wouldn't you just tunnel PPP over the connection and have full VPN networking between the local box and the remote box?
This is poor man's VPN. Just as effective as the expensive kind,
but costs less. And you can set it up in minutes. All it requires
is the ability to ssh into the remote machine. Then it tunnels
PPP over the ssh connection to provide full network connectivity.
Two sample scripts are provided:
frostyppp
ipcroeppp
You are expected to understand routing and the concept of tunneling
and to create your own version of one of these scripts. If you don't
understand routing, then use Windoze and the expensive VPN box or
software that your IT guys probably want you to use (because they
don't understand routing and tunnelling, either).
They asked me first, but decided not to use my words, which were:
Scientists will achieve human immortality by 2100. Do you want the government (you) to pay for *me* to live forever? Think about *that* before voting for government insurance programs. I could be around a long time.
It just so happens that last weekend I setup a MythTV box. I used a $20 AverTV stereo tuner card that I got from CompUSA (the sale is still on). The video card is a $50 nVidia GeForce 440MX clone. The rest of the computer is a 2.4Ghz P4, 60 GB disk, and 512MB RAM. My 9 year old put that computer together from the parts for $400.
I had never setup a MythTV box before. I just used "apt-get" to get the RPMS for Redhat 9. They installed painlessly. The MythTV setup was going within an hour. I had only two simple problems during the install, covered by the FAQ. One was that I needed to run the KDE desktop, and the other was that I needed to set the audio mixer properly (otherwise, I would hear the live audio, rather than the delayed audio).
I'm recording using MPEG-4 compression with it. I set it for max quality and a 30 minute TV show is taking up 750-1000 MB's.
It seems like a great setup, and I'm looking forward to blasting the MPEG-4's onto a DVD drive for archival storage. I need to save "The Simpsons" shows until my kids are old enough that my wife will let us watch those shows.:-)
I do not know the names of the people in your company to whom this
note should be addressed, but I can describe them.
* There are 1 or 2 first class, original UNIX programmers who created
all the products you actually make money on.
* They no longer are in the mainstream of the company. Perhaps they
left. Perhaps they are now consultants. Certainly they can be
described as UNIX bigots.
* They are completely pissed off, arrogant, and upset about the current
move to the "Source Integrity" product. They feel your current
customer base will be disappointed by the Windows orientation, the
terrible documentation presented in the "test drive", and the
overall poor quality of the product.
* They feel that you should have remained compatible with the GNU
"cvs" product, offering a simple, fully functional, easy to use
command line interface.
Now I will describe the people who realize they are just foolish
UNIX programmers who do not understand the movement to fully complaint
MicroSoft technology.
* They are slick, fast talking gentlemen, who have never worked for a
small prosperous company.
* They have never produced a product that made money, development, startup
and market costs included.
* They do not understand your current products, or the customers who
buy them They feel you are serving an odd niche, one soon to
disappear in the overwhelming rush of total Microsoft dominance in
the market.
* They have identified another, larger, more significant market of
Microsoft programmers who will want to buy their products. They
perceive these programmers care primarily that the look and feel of
these products match Visual C++, and suit a more professional data
processing image than the renagade programmer of the past.
* They do not understand the real requirements of the product. They
are assisted by a few slightly-better-than-mediocre Microsoft
programmers who want to bear Bill Gates children.
* They are proud of their shiny new offering. They don't fully understand
why anyone would want it, but they think the term "sandbox" is one of
its best features.
* They wear nice clothes, they are charming, and they always go home by
6 pm. They work out in the gym. They use Microsoft email.
Here is my message to the good guys (first category)
I really need cvs for my project. I really do. I talked with your
blithering salesperson on the phone, and he told me to try out the
test drive. I was enthusiastic. I tried it. Within 15 minutes,
I was so mad I could spit. It ruined my entire evening.
I really need that product. I was depending on you guys to have it.
And now I am screwed.
My cats use the sandbox. I don't. It smells bad.
Your company survives on its image. Your image is being destroyed.
Your RCS product is destroyed.
These fools destoy your entire company if you let them.
They will claim you are in a declining market. They will cut back
promoting the stuff that continues to sell, claiming it must finance
new products. The new products will be ill conceived. Because they
do not understand the customer, and they do not have your support,
they will attempt to discredit you. They will bring in Microsoft
lovers they claim are experts.
Together, they and their experts, like the blind leading the blind
will lead your company to the abyss. When their products fail, they
will claim it was insufficient development funds or promotion funds
that killed it, even though they spent far more money on this trash
than you ever spent on the products that succeeded. They will cut
back your products even further to finance the madness.
In the end, when it is clear to them that the company is faltering,
they will leave, shiny resumes in hand, claiming success for the products
they tried to kill. They will never accept blame for the ill-conceived
products they tried to create.
They see only image. They cannot create value for it is not within
them. They are made of hype, and hype is all they can create.
And when your company is gone, they will move on to destroy another
company. They will never accept responsiblity. They will never accept
consequences. They will polish resumes instead. They will have lunch.
I have been there. I have watched these idiots destroy my company,
as they are destroying yours. If you still have the power to fire them,
fire them. If you can't, its too late to fix the problem. Quit and
never look back. Your company was destoryed by terrorists. Be grateful
you survived. Tomorrow is another day.
Passport is completely insecure.
If you know a persons email address
and their mothers maiden name, you
will likely be able to change their
password and take over their account.
This is easy information to come by.
Microsoft doesn't even send an email
to the email address to let you know
that the password has been changed.
Not to mention that once you've created
a passport account, you can never delete
it.
Honestly, I think these ads are the lesser of the various evils. I'd much prefer to go to a site with these ads than with a site with popups/popunders, or worse, a site like ign.com where you get an entire page of ads before you can click thru to your destination page.
Ads are here to stay. I'll take these over the others. Any idea when the United Virtualities IPO takes place?
Slashdot Mirror
"100-mule train Borax". You may be too young to remember the commercials.
Taken from the ACLU web site:
According to the Logan report, which was written by an independent security contractor, "the number of system-generated false positives was excessive, and as a result, the operator's workload is taxing and strenuous, requiring constant undivided attention and periodic relief, which amounts to a staffing minimum of two persons for one workstation."
SCOX: Short: 459.0K (6.46%), Float: 7.10M, AveVol: 268.0K (as of 8-Aug-2003)
Unfortunately, this does not tell the whole story. There are very few shares available to short, which is one reason why there is a very low short interest.
-Rick, author of LinuxTrade: A Curses-based Stock Streamer for Linux
You really ought to compare fatalities per million passenger-minutes. Its a more reasonable measure in this game of how to lie with statistics.
If you do that, the quick back of the envelope calculation has cars at about 100, urban transit at about 45, school bus at about 10, and shuttle at about 2.
However, it only makes sense to use shuttle passenger-minutes (or passenger-miles on the orbital track) if you consider it a pleasure craft with the goal being to circle the earth.
If you consider that it has an actual orbital destination that is about 200 miles from where it started (400 miles round trip), then you should compare fatalities per million passenger-miles based on a 400 mile round trip for the shuttle. This works out to about 44, worse than a school bus, but better than a car or urban transit.
-Rick
When I questioned the way a new "technology levy" was going to be spent, I got this gem in an email reply from the superintendent...
"I have never believed that Apple products were appropriate purchases, but many
school districts continue to purchase them."
-- Dr. Dennis Peterson, Superintendent of Minnetonka Schools
Elections should be eliminated, replaced by a random draft system. If you get drafted, you can take the job, or pass. If you pass, then another person is drafted.
My foo2zjs driver support the Minolta 2200 DL, 2300 DL, and PageWorks/Pro L color laser printers under Linux.
I gave up on inkjets last February. I had already switched to doing my photo printing using dotphoto.com for about .15-.19 per photo.
I bought a Minolta 2300 DL network color laser on sale from OfficeMax for $600. The network interface is included in the base price, which makes this printer the best bargain I've seen in a color laser printer. An optional duplexer adds about $330 to the price. The protocol used by this printer is Zenographics ZjStream (JBIG based). I wrote an open source driver for it, called foo2zjs.
The printer with my driver is good enough for business graphics and casual photo printing. The resolution of this printer is 2400x600 with one bit (1 dot size) per CMYK color plane. The printer is not good enough for photo printing, but I prefer dotphoto.com for that anyway. For the price, I would buy htis printer again.
I've also got an unreleased driver for the HP LaserJet 1500 color laser printer. This printer uses Oak Technologies OAKT protocol, also JBIG based. This printer has two bits (3 dot sizes) per CMYK plane. The driver currently produces output that can be parsed and turned back into the original page images, but has never been tested on a real LJ 1500. I shelved further work on the OAKT driver due to HP's lack of interest in loaning me a LaserJet 1500 for final testing.
Your attitude reminds me of the old joke:
A Mathematician and an Engineer are in a room with a naked woman. They are told that with each step they take, they can travel 1/2 of the way to the naked woman.
The Mathematician says "Sigh, We'll never get there".
The Engineer says "But we'll get close enough!"
Try to think realistically here. At this point in time, there are only 3 or 4 desktop platforms that are important enough that you might want to make sure the installation experience is painless. You can afford to compile and ship 3 curl binaries with your package in order to improve the installation experience for that large set of people. Statically link the binaries.
The rest are off in left field and are probably used to having to stand on their head in order to install software for their platform. If you can help them, great. If not, move on.
Pick your battles.
Well then, use the libcurl bindings for Java, rather than the curl command line tool. You can still suck down any needed libraries for them. You might have to whip up dialogs to ask them for password(s) during the install.
Example: test.java
Its all doable in a no-surf, fully automatic way if you work at it. With the possible exception of a web site that requires registration and the registration must be confirmed by email response.
-Rick
a 5 line shell script will take care of getting any libraries they need from the web. There is no reason your users should have to surf to get the libs. Get them for them.
Suppose that 1000 USA geeks were living in a geek-hive apartment building and most wanted to order super high speed service for $21.
The phone/cable companies would be jumping up and down to offer the super high speed service for a lower price because they make it up in lower costs and higher penetration.
But there would be no way for them to offer it because the government, led by left-wing whiners, would demand that everybody in the city be offered the same deal at the same price. Regardless how expensive it might be to wire up individual houses. In addition, the government would require you to pay an extra $5/month to subsidize libraries, schools, and the poor so that they could get the cheap high speed for free.
x86 based unices have had multiple virtual consoles, and therefore fast user switching, since the 1980's.
In fact, here is a 1989 SCO announcement which includes their flavor of virtual consoles...
SCO XENIX Release 2.3 on 80286-based machines
Sheesh, the article author doesn't understand the RIAA rules. Here they are in an easy to read format...
t ml
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.h
His idea of tiny, one-song webcasters won't fly. However, the idea could be modified to 100-song webcasters and you might make it work, for an end user cost of about 10 cents for the 100 songs.
Does anybody know where the slides for this talk are?
Roddenberry's timeline would have been 100% accurate except that a generation of engineers wasted 10 years watching a TV show instead of living it.
I guess I don't get it. If you can open an ssh connection to the remote machine, why wouldn't you just tunnel PPP over the connection and have full VPN networking between the local box and the remote box?
I've been doing this for years.
http://home.mn.rr.com/richardsons/sw/pppssh.tar.gz
From the README:
This is poor man's VPN. Just as effective as the expensive kind, but costs less. And you can set it up in minutes. All it requires is the ability to ssh into the remote machine. Then it tunnels PPP over the ssh connection to provide full network connectivity.
Two sample scripts are provided: frostyppp ipcroeppp
You are expected to understand routing and the concept of tunneling and to create your own version of one of these scripts. If you don't understand routing, then use Windoze and the expensive VPN box or software that your IT guys probably want you to use (because they don't understand routing and tunnelling, either).
They asked me first, but decided not to use my words, which were:
Scientists will achieve human immortality by 2100. Do you want the
government (you) to pay for *me* to live forever? Think about *that* before
voting for government insurance programs. I could be around a long time.
It just so happens that last weekend I setup a MythTV box. I used a $20 AverTV stereo tuner card that I got from CompUSA (the sale is still on). The video card is a $50 nVidia GeForce 440MX clone. The rest of the computer is a 2.4Ghz P4, 60 GB disk, and 512MB RAM. My 9 year old put that computer together from the parts for $400.
:-)
I had never setup a MythTV box before. I just used "apt-get" to get the RPMS for Redhat 9. They installed painlessly. The MythTV setup was going within an hour. I had only two simple problems during the install, covered by the FAQ. One was that I needed to run the KDE desktop, and the other was that I needed to set the audio mixer properly (otherwise, I would hear the live audio, rather than the delayed audio).
I'm recording using MPEG-4 compression with it. I set it for max quality and a 30 minute TV show is taking up 750-1000 MB's.
It seems like a great setup, and I'm looking forward to blasting the MPEG-4's onto a DVD drive for archival storage. I need to save "The Simpsons" shows until my kids are old enough that my wife will let us watch those shows.
-Rick
Has anybody found a link for the protocol specifications? I looked around on the Onkyo site and didn't find them.
Ethernet is great, but not if I have to reverse engineer the protocol in order to serve music to the receiver.
Just thought I'd mention that due to a generous money donation by a private sponsor, the LinuxTrade software was converted to the GPL on 08/30/02.
This is a great trend, IMHO.
Here's a message a friend of mine wrote a few years back, which I saved. Enjoy.
-Rick
From anonymous Wed Apr 26 00:27:55 1995
Subject: MKS
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 1995 00:36:08 -0500 (CDT)
Postmaster@mks.com,
I do not know the names of the people in your company to whom this note should be addressed, but I can describe them.
* There are 1 or 2 first class, original UNIX programmers who created all the products you actually make money on.
* They no longer are in the mainstream of the company. Perhaps they left. Perhaps they are now consultants. Certainly they can be described as UNIX bigots.
* They are completely pissed off, arrogant, and upset about the current move to the "Source Integrity" product. They feel your current customer base will be disappointed by the Windows orientation, the terrible documentation presented in the "test drive", and the overall poor quality of the product.
* They feel that you should have remained compatible with the GNU "cvs" product, offering a simple, fully functional, easy to use command line interface.
Now I will describe the people who realize they are just foolish UNIX programmers who do not understand the movement to fully complaint MicroSoft technology.
* They are slick, fast talking gentlemen, who have never worked for a small prosperous company.
* They have never produced a product that made money, development, startup and market costs included.
* They do not understand your current products, or the customers who buy them They feel you are serving an odd niche, one soon to disappear in the overwhelming rush of total Microsoft dominance in the market.
* They have identified another, larger, more significant market of Microsoft programmers who will want to buy their products. They perceive these programmers care primarily that the look and feel of these products match Visual C++, and suit a more professional data processing image than the renagade programmer of the past.
* They do not understand the real requirements of the product. They are assisted by a few slightly-better-than-mediocre Microsoft programmers who want to bear Bill Gates children.
* They are proud of their shiny new offering. They don't fully understand why anyone would want it, but they think the term "sandbox" is one of its best features.
* They wear nice clothes, they are charming, and they always go home by 6 pm. They work out in the gym. They use Microsoft email.
Here is my message to the good guys (first category)
I really need cvs for my project. I really do. I talked with your blithering salesperson on the phone, and he told me to try out the test drive. I was enthusiastic. I tried it. Within 15 minutes, I was so mad I could spit. It ruined my entire evening.
I really need that product. I was depending on you guys to have it. And now I am screwed.
My cats use the sandbox. I don't. It smells bad.
Your company survives on its image. Your image is being destroyed.
Your RCS product is destroyed.
These fools destoy your entire company if you let them.
They will claim you are in a declining market. They will cut back promoting the stuff that continues to sell, claiming it must finance new products. The new products will be ill conceived. Because they do not understand the customer, and they do not have your support, they will attempt to discredit you. They will bring in Microsoft lovers they claim are experts.
Together, they and their experts, like the blind leading the blind will lead your company to the abyss. When their products fail, they will claim it was insufficient development funds or promotion funds that killed it, even though they spent far more money on this trash than you ever spent on the products that succeeded. They will cut back your products even further to finance the madness.
In the end, when it is clear to them that the company is faltering, they will leave, shiny resumes in hand, claiming success for the products they tried to kill. They will never accept blame for the ill-conceived products they tried to create.
They see only image. They cannot create value for it is not within them. They are made of hype, and hype is all they can create.
And when your company is gone, they will move on to destroy another company. They will never accept responsiblity. They will never accept consequences. They will polish resumes instead. They will have lunch.
I have been there. I have watched these idiots destroy my company, as they are destroying yours. If you still have the power to fire them, fire them. If you can't, its too late to fix the problem. Quit and never look back. Your company was destoryed by terrorists. Be grateful you survived. Tomorrow is another day.
I can't decide whether I'd rather watch TV shows with commercials or read the articles with "Comments" on Slashdot.
Mindless drivel vs. um, mindless drivel.
I think I'll stick with TV and commercials. At least with TV, I'm not tempted to waste even more time responding to the mindless drivel.
-Rick
Passport is completely insecure.
If you know a persons email address
and their mothers maiden name, you
will likely be able to change their
password and take over their account.
This is easy information to come by.
Microsoft doesn't even send an email
to the email address to let you know
that the password has been changed.
Not to mention that once you've created
a passport account, you can never delete
it.
Try these things if you don't believe me.
-Rick
Honestly, I think these ads are the lesser of the various evils. I'd much prefer to go to a site with these ads than with a site with popups/popunders, or worse, a site like ign.com where you get an entire page of ads before you can click thru to your destination page.
Ads are here to stay. I'll take these over the others. Any idea when the United Virtualities IPO takes place?
-Rick