We're so used to the stupidity of it all that we don't ask obvious questions: How the hell did we end up with a system where the employer controls our access to health care? How can the employer find a plan that really suits all their employees needs? Conversely, what is the employee's motivation to keep their own health care costs down? I'd prefer a law that prohibited employers from dictating a health care plan.
If I change jobs it shouldn't affect my health care. People should be able to choose the services they need, buy them individually, and if an employer wants to reimburse them that's fine.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that someone has tried to attack the bug-tracking problem. But 100K records isn't even a decent test case for most big database projects. A database I use has a table with 70 million records and another with 20 million. Bugzilla will need to handle those kind of numbers if it is going to be used to track large software projects like Windows XP.;-)
Amen to that, brother. Some of you may say there's no need to "spy" on people, just ask them for feedback. It doesn't work. Most people won't tell you your site sucks when they couldn't find what they wanted. They just go away mad. And the feedback you do get is rarely clear and coherent enough to be useful.
Comparing desktop 1MHz P3 to 1MHz Athlon, the P3 uses half the power (25 vs. 49 watts). My current PC is an Intel for this very reason, I can make it nearly silent because it doesn't need heroic fan efforts. If convergence between consumer electronics and PCs ever happens, it won't happen with AMD. Thermal and acoustic considerations become more important than raw speed; would you want an Athlon with a screaming fan next to your TV?
Whoa! You're assuming a solution that wasn't specified by the original poster. He said:
I think asking for a refund is silly, but OTOH I think @home and other ISP's should be taking proactive measures to actively block the legions of fools who have no idea they've been rooted.
This could be done--and is done, I just talked to an @Home rep yesterday--by turning off service to customers that their logs indicate are probing other customer's port 80, which is BTW prohibited by the service agreement. They have to call in to get their service restored.
If web developers would be professional enough to embrace standards properly, we wouldn't need to have this discussion.
Dear diary, today I wrote many pages of standards-compliant HTML and ECMAScript. Yes, it won't work on the majority of browsers that people use. But I must hold true to standards, even if they're not deployed.
Web sites are content. Who has the right to choose how and when that content is presented to a user: the content creator, or the user? If you say "content creator" then yes, Smart Tags should be banned. Let's also say users don't have the right to use their own style sheets to alter the look of your page, and they can't use ad blockers either. IE will let users control this feature, it can be turned off, and it can be customized with add ins. So who's trying to limit user control, your site or Microsoft?
Smart Tags are a relatively benign way to add more dynamic content to a web page. All that happens is that the existing words get a special markup. It's not like you say "Save the whales" and they change it to "Kill baby seals."
Geez, if you want to bash Microsoft then you can use the old "they always steal their ideas" saw because this has already been done by programs like Flyswat for many months. Flyswat doesn't provide a way for content creators to turn it off!
You'll start to notice the disk drive noise. Some of the 5400RPM drives are quiet, but the 7200RPM ones emit a very irritating whine. It's even worse if you put two of them in because of the beat frequency effect.
What I did was drill out the drive mounting holes and put rubber grommets in. The drive mounting screws go through the grommets and prevent any vibration from being conducted in the case. (Add a separate frame grounding wire between the drive and the case to prevent static problems.) You will probably need to bend the drive cage out a bit to get the drive to fit after the grommets are installed.
I also added some 1/8-inch sound insulation material in the case near the drives. When it's new this stuff smells a bit of petroleum by-products, it's best to air it out a month or so before putting it in the system.
The result isn't a totally quiet system but it's pretty good.
I agree that mixing code and markup can be a mess. It's easier for web designers to mess up your code and harder for you to see the logic through all the HTML presentation.
Gee, have you guys looked at Microsoft.NET yet? It lets you separate the two very effectively. Even if you don't want to USE Microsoft products, it's okay to LEARN from them.
Man, it would be great if party tags could be used to tell the good guys from the bad. It ain't that simple. Take big weapons systems. Now-VP Cheney tried to kill the V22 Osprey when he was defense secretary. Now we find out the Marines are hell-bent on going into full production with a piece of technology that isn't ready and is killing troops at a steady clip. And they're being backed by the senators and congressmen--both Democrat and Republican--whose constituents have the most jobs and money to gain. "Who CARES if it works, as long as it brings money to my district? We'll just spend MORE money to MAKE it work!"
In the end it doesn't matter what they SAY they're going to do, only what they manage to get through. Remember the Clipper chip during the Clinton administration? We managed to stop that...
Thoughts on the Electoral College
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
OK, if you're ready for some analysis on why the electoral college is good, look at http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm.
Excerpts:
A general preference for one candidate over the other is like a house advantage in gambling. "If candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every vote," Natapoff says, "in 100,000 votes he's almost sure to win. And that's bad for the individual voter, whose vote then doesn't make any difference in the outcome. The leading candidate becomes the house."
Natapoff concedes that the Madisonian system does contain within it one small, unavoidable paradox. Every once in a while, if we use districting to jack up individual voting power, we'll have an electoral "anomaly"--a loser like Harrison will nudge out a slightly more popular Cleveland. He sees those anomalies, as well as the more frequent close calls, not as defects but as signs that the system is working. It is protecting individual voting power by preserving the threat that small numbers of votes in this or that district can turn the election. "We were blinded by its minor vices," he says. "All that happens is someone with fewer votes gets elected," temporarily. What doesn't happen may be far more important. In 1888, victorious Republicans didn't celebrate by jailing or killing Democrats, and Democrats didn't find Harrison so intolerable that they took up arms. Cleveland came back to win four years later, beating Harrison under the same rules as before. The republic survived.
ZDNet has a script they run that puts a stock symbol link after the first reference of large well-known companies. Slashdot is a piece of a piece of a not-as-well-known company, so I suspect the name-to-ticker mapping isn't in their script's database. It appears that VA Linux isn't in there either, because ZDNet stories don't create the VA Linux stock quote link, even when the story is about VA Linux!
As for the lack of a link to the site, even an AOL user will know to try adding.com, which works. Like we need more of the great unwashed around here...
Cringely columns usually get their info from unauthenticated emails, which makes them potentially as reliable as a an Emulex press release. However, the basic info on where MS runs Unix--mostly through companies they've acquired--has been discussed in a few places. What business-minded person really thinks it's a good idea to spend scarce technical resources to reimplement a complex system on Windows 2000 just to spite Unix?
Be careful on interpreting the Windows 2000 comment though; the product was announced over a year ago, and it certainly wasn't ready for prime time then. I currently manage three web servers and a MS SQL server that run Windows 2000 and I can tell you it's an improvement from NT.
When VCRs and tape rentals became popular in the early 80's the very same Jack Valenti testified before Congress that rentals would kill the motion picture industry and they must be stopped. This was when a single tape cost between $70 and $100 to buy!
Look what happened instead. The industry makes a tidy profit selling movies for $10-15 after just six months out of the theater, and the rental business helps to drive demand for their product.
The same is likely to happen with DVDs. Price the product reasonably, and rake in the money on volume.
: If a company holds a trademark and don't : pursue _every_ "alleged unlawful" use of : it, then they can't pursue _any_ of them
Then they've made their own job impossible with this policy. What's the chance they'll be able to trace down and eliminate the thousands of pages that currently mention Pez? If they simply pursued the naughty ones--say, sites trying to sell knock-off products with "Pez" hidden in their META tags--then it would be reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
We're so used to the stupidity of it all that we don't ask obvious questions: How the hell did we end up with a system where the employer controls our access to health care? How can the employer find a plan that really suits all their employees needs? Conversely, what is the employee's motivation to keep their own health care costs down? I'd prefer a law that prohibited employers from dictating a health care plan.
If I change jobs it shouldn't affect my health care. People should be able to choose the services they need, buy them individually, and if an employer wants to reimburse them that's fine.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that someone has tried to attack the bug-tracking problem. But 100K records isn't even a decent test case for most big database projects. A database I use has a table with 70 million records and another with 20 million. Bugzilla will need to handle those kind of numbers if it is going to be used to track large software projects like Windows XP. ;-)
Amen to that, brother. Some of you may say there's no need to "spy" on people, just ask them for feedback. It doesn't work. Most people won't tell you your site sucks when they couldn't find what they wanted. They just go away mad. And the feedback you do get is rarely clear and coherent enough to be useful.
Comparing desktop 1MHz P3 to 1MHz Athlon, the P3 uses half the power (25 vs. 49 watts). My current PC is an Intel for this very reason, I can make it nearly silent because it doesn't need heroic fan efforts. If convergence between consumer electronics and PCs ever happens, it won't happen with AMD. Thermal and acoustic considerations become more important than raw speed; would you want an Athlon with a screaming fan next to your TV?
This could be done--and is done, I just talked to an @Home rep yesterday--by turning off service to customers that their logs indicate are probing other customer's port 80, which is BTW prohibited by the service agreement. They have to call in to get their service restored.
Dear diary, today I wrote many pages of standards-compliant HTML and ECMAScript. Yes, it won't work on the majority of browsers that people use. But I must hold true to standards, even if they're not deployed.
Let's pass a law that says people have to support every platform, no matter how unprofitable.
Web sites are content. Who has the right to choose how and when that content is presented to a user: the content creator, or the user? If you say "content creator" then yes, Smart Tags should be banned. Let's also say users don't have the right to use their own style sheets to alter the look of your page, and they can't use ad blockers either. IE will let users control this feature, it can be turned off, and it can be customized with add ins. So who's trying to limit user control, your site or Microsoft?
Smart Tags are a relatively benign way to add more dynamic content to a web page. All that happens is that the existing words get a special markup. It's not like you say "Save the whales" and they change it to "Kill baby seals."
Geez, if you want to bash Microsoft then you can use the old "they always steal their ideas" saw because this has already been done by programs like Flyswat for many months. Flyswat doesn't provide a way for content creators to turn it off!
You'll start to notice the disk drive noise. Some of the 5400RPM drives are quiet, but the 7200RPM ones emit a very irritating whine. It's even worse if you put two of them in because of the beat frequency effect.
What I did was drill out the drive mounting holes and put rubber grommets in. The drive mounting screws go through the grommets and prevent any vibration from being conducted in the case. (Add a separate frame grounding wire between the drive and the case to prevent static problems.) You will probably need to bend the drive cage out a bit to get the drive to fit after the grommets are installed.
I also added some 1/8-inch sound insulation material in the case near the drives. When it's new this stuff smells a bit of petroleum by-products, it's best to air it out a month or so before putting it in the system.
The result isn't a totally quiet system but it's pretty good.
I agree that mixing code and markup can be a mess. It's easier for web designers to mess up your code and harder for you to see the logic through all the HTML presentation.
.NET yet? It lets you separate the two very effectively. Even if you don't want to USE Microsoft products, it's okay to LEARN from them.
Gee, have you guys looked at Microsoft
Man, it would be great if party tags could be used to tell the good guys from the bad. It ain't that simple. Take big weapons systems. Now-VP Cheney tried to kill the V22 Osprey when he was defense secretary. Now we find out the Marines are hell-bent on going into full production with a piece of technology that isn't ready and is killing troops at a steady clip. And they're being backed by the senators and congressmen--both Democrat and Republican--whose constituents have the most jobs and money to gain. "Who CARES if it works, as long as it brings money to my district? We'll just spend MORE money to MAKE it work!"
In the end it doesn't matter what they SAY they're going to do, only what they manage to get through. Remember the Clipper chip during the Clinton administration? We managed to stop that...
OK, if you're ready for some analysis on why the electoral college is good, look at http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm.
Excerpts:
A general preference for one candidate over the other is like a house advantage in gambling. "If candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every vote," Natapoff says, "in 100,000 votes he's almost sure to win. And that's bad for the individual voter, whose vote then doesn't make any difference in the outcome. The leading candidate becomes the house."
Natapoff concedes that the Madisonian system does contain within it one small, unavoidable paradox. Every once in a while, if we use districting to jack up individual voting power, we'll have an electoral "anomaly"--a loser like Harrison will nudge out a slightly more popular Cleveland. He sees those anomalies, as well as the more frequent close calls, not as defects but as signs that the system is working. It is protecting individual voting power by preserving the threat that small numbers of votes in this or that district can turn the election. "We were blinded by its minor vices," he says. "All that happens is someone with fewer votes gets elected," temporarily. What doesn't happen may be far more important. In 1888, victorious Republicans didn't celebrate by jailing or killing Democrats, and Democrats didn't find Harrison so intolerable that they took up arms. Cleveland came back to win four years later, beating Harrison under the same rules as before. The republic survived.
ZDNet has a script they run that puts a stock symbol link after the first reference of large well-known companies. Slashdot is a piece of a piece of a not-as-well-known company, so I suspect the name-to-ticker mapping isn't in their script's database. It appears that VA Linux isn't in there either, because ZDNet stories don't create the VA Linux stock quote link, even when the story is about VA Linux!
.com, which works. Like we need more of the great unwashed around here...
As for the lack of a link to the site, even an AOL user will know to try adding
Cringely columns usually get their info from unauthenticated emails, which makes them potentially as reliable as a an Emulex press release. However, the basic info on where MS runs Unix--mostly through companies they've acquired--has been discussed in a few places. What business-minded person really thinks it's a good idea to spend scarce technical resources to reimplement a complex system on Windows 2000 just to spite Unix?
Be careful on interpreting the Windows 2000 comment though; the product was announced over a year ago, and it certainly wasn't ready for prime time then. I currently manage three web servers and a MS SQL server that run Windows 2000 and I can tell you it's an improvement from NT.
When VCRs and tape rentals became popular in the early 80's the very same Jack Valenti testified before Congress that rentals would kill the motion picture industry and they must be stopped. This was when a single tape cost between $70 and $100 to buy!
Look what happened instead. The industry makes a tidy profit selling movies for $10-15 after just six months out of the theater, and the rental business helps to drive demand for their product.
The same is likely to happen with DVDs. Price the product reasonably, and rake in the money on volume.
: If a company holds a trademark and don't
: pursue _every_ "alleged unlawful" use of
: it, then they can't pursue _any_ of them
Then they've made their own job impossible with this policy. What's the chance they'll be able to trace down and eliminate the thousands of pages that currently mention Pez? If they simply pursued the naughty ones--say, sites trying to sell knock-off products with "Pez" hidden in their META tags--then it would be reasonable.