Surprise? At least in lower NY, I have it from a first-hand source that there are entire areas- some in expensive neighborhoods- that have 40-50 year old copper and are both underserved for their population density and receiving poor POTS service because the ILEC, Verizon, refuses to upgrade the infrastructure. My friend has said that there is often four times the unconnected copper side by side with stuff that should be ripped out but they have been ordered not to use it. Since maintainence of existing lines isn't covered by the arrangement, they are waiting the CLECs out and splicing and resplicing old lines while they lobby the FCC. As soon as a single pair is used on a new bundle, they have to share.
The reasoning is that the ILEC considers itself:
a) short-changed for the real costs of maintaining the infrastructure. There is some truth to this argument but only if you completely ignore the enormous value of the monopoly they enjoy, the length of time they've held it, the subsidies they've received and the opportunities it presents them (whether they take them or not).
b) don't want to share, no way no how. This I truly believe.
It's generated a fair amount of interest among residents even though there isn't a decent place to sit within range. It happens to cover the local public school (CSD6M287) but from the logs I'm not seeing any regular use and no one has contacted me from the school.
It would, in my estimate, be a great thing for the co-ops to get together and set up cheap co-operative internet perhaps with wireless access as a public service possibly gain enough groundswell to start a community freenet and even a freebox program. When I have a bit more time (I already volunteer) I might bring it up again but I don't see it getting beyond us hobbyists I don't see anyone stepping forward to take on this second (and third) full-time job as neighborhood ISP and technical mentor.
Remember that? I'm not the only one who forked over $14 to Tim Wisseman for that game just to play on a BBS. It was one of the best I've ever played, addictive as all heck.
Just about every turn-based, galactic conquest game has been a pale shadow of that one. I had a brief email discussion with the author when he decided to do the Windows version (I was among those who wanted a new DOS version or a port to *Nix) and found him to be a really cool guy.
VGA Planets Home
Maybe I should dig out that floppy disk and load up freedos.
I wrote this a couple of years ago while working in a small shop (350 users, complex environment)... Editorial: The Egoless Admin.</shameless-self-promotion>
I still agree with it. Your job is that of architect, carpenter, plumber, electrician, handyman and, finally, janitor.
Now, in a much larger shop (tens of thousands of users, hugely complex environment), I'm learning and relearning the lessons and seeing again that the more thought you put into the first four jobs the less you put into the last two. That, and that very few- including most other techs- really understand good system design. You better be opinionated and you better be right most of the time or everything will end up a mess.
The IMF plans I've read about generally do make good sense on the surface. The problem is that they seem to be conceived in a vacuum, not taking into account anything beyond the short-term fiscal problem. You can't hope to tackle monetary policy without addressing the fundamental social and political problems including a working and respected legal system, safe housing, pure food and water, employment and worker protection laws, preventing involvement of the military in civic affairs and- forget about imposing a republican or democratic government- deterring tribalism, cronyism, organized crime or bold-faced exploitation by oligarchs. It's putting the cart before the horse and that is why is rarely works.
2) near indestructability of prions (1100F for hours, etc.)
3) ability of TSE's to cross species (scrapie in sheep, BSE in cattle, CJD in people, TME in mink, PSE in pigs, etc.) and it's all the same group of diseases. They differ in the speed that they cause damage, but that's about it.
I would really like to see something supporting the idea that a protein can survive 1100 degrees F for any amount of time. For comparison- picked up from various web searches- Aluminum melts around 1220F and Zinc at 787F while fiberglass roofing ignites without exposure to flame at around 900F and rigid PVC pipe does so at 850F. The extreme end of thermophilic bacteria is around 113C (235F) so infectious agents surviving intact for extended periods at 1100F more than highly unlikely.
There were studies that found that prions survived 30 minutes at 134C (273F) in an autoclave but later studies found that 138C (280F) with or without a strong alkaline bath disinfected them. It's now part of nursing curriculum:
Decontaminating the Indestructible Prion
The U.S. Senate is obliging and gives out the addresses in a convenient form: U.S. Senate. The U.S. House of Representatives is less so, but others have done the work: CongressMergeContacting the Congress.
Both manage the symlinks for you and, for those who don't build their own, it is trivially easy to convert existing packages or tarballs to their system.
- technik
They aren't totally OS-unfriendly but they also aren't inexpensive. FWIW, they do make use of Red Hat in their Smartguard appliance and their field guys are Linux saavy.
Umm, no. I work for a company that has our own symbol on/., one with a funky dropped 'e' in it. You might be able to figure out who we are.
Dang, now what could that company be?
Better check here.
This is why when someone brings a law suit against someone else and looses[sic], they should not only compensate that person/company, but should do so 100X the costs it took to defend themselves. Then the RIAA would have to reconsider next time it was to use terrorism and its bought Senators to push researchers around.
This is a truly awful idea and I'm ashamed that it got modded up to '5'. Who benefits most from a situation where a failed lawsuit can rebound and cost the plaintiff 100x the cost of defense? Big companies, the same big companies you rail against. Little guys with solid cases against big businesses will be pressed to the wall to justify a lawsuit when they tally up the $250-$500/hour that a lawyer costs and multiply by 100.
Does anyone believe that a scheme like this would be anything but a lever used by well-funded entities to cow the aggrieved into settling and pervert the legal process? Right. It will stop frivolous lawsuits by guaranteeing that they are not brought by any group that can't pony up an escrow of a few million dollars per month as the suit drags on.
Well, so the old story goes, if they really are decent *n*x talent, one warm body will go a lot further than it would in a Windows shop.
I can address that: I single-handedly managed for nine months 38 Sun servers ranging from SS4 to E4500's running Solaris with everything from Apache to DNS to Netscape Enterprise to Sybase to a host of proprietary products. I was also the contact for much of farmed-out production and the reference for the 75-odd developers while all 350 at the organization used the services at some time or another. One busy SA and, yes, I'm not inexpensive.
On the other side of the aisle there were seven people managing six NetWare servers doing authentication, file & print, and groupware and twelve NT servers running everything from 3270 gateway to CRM to IIS to remote access (Citrix) to MSSQL and the desktop issues of 350 clients.
I rarely needed overtime while they regularly used overtime. Which team cost the organization more?
I'll apologize for what follows. I'm not a mathematician and have no formal training in it since high school (and it shows), someone with a better head for this should probably take it up.
The article reminds me of a discussion I had a few months ago with a manager that led me to partially develop the following (humorous) idea during my commute home:
The idiocy of a group is not constant. Representing the number of members as N, the collective idiocy of the group G can be calculated thus I(G sub N) = N^(N-1) where N>=1. Compare this to the number of paths in a complete graph of nodes N, f(N) = N(N-1) / 2. The latter is frequently used to demonstrate that it is not possible for all individuals in an organization to have perfect communication with all the others when N increases since, despite it being provable that an information path exists from any node to any other, the communication is not itself perfect. (It should also be noted that there are potentially an infinite number of ineffective path within an organization and this, too should be explored) This imperfection of communication, I argue, is the idiocy (or impedance) of the organization. Indeed, even in a group consisting of a single member communication is not possible because idiocy is not zero. This is stated in the first rule, In any group there is always a non-zero amount of idiocy (or colloquially: in any group there is always one idiot, this being doubly true when there is a group of one). It has also been observed that this idiocy is not evenly distributed across an organization, that is that each path has its own, non-zero amount of idiocy, equal or less than the organizational total.
ust be careful of what you do. The first job you take is generally what you will be doing for the rest of your career.
Entirely untrue. If you let yourself be defined by the title assigned by your employer then, I suppose, this can happen. A job is a job and titles mean next to nothing except during the minute and a half that someone skims your resume. What can you do? Can you prove it? That is important.
Take a few jobs. Work on different things. Work on things that interest you and some that don't. Stay somewhere long enough to learn what it's like to be an insider. Jump around when you need so you know what it's like to be on the outside. Build a large set of skills. Accept lower pay when changing areas if the field interests you. If the company is large enough, transfer internally to other areas. Work hard. Develop a good reputation. Admit when you screw up and then fix it. Stay in touch with colleagues.
Raising a fuss now just because a market leader wants to sell both new *and* used books side-by-side is likely to fall on deaf ears.
And where do the used books come from? Why new books, of course! It's the squeezing out of the publisher's profits that is at issue. And before anyone cries,"they've got to eat too" think about the relative value six months after the first printing of the novel of the week by LeCarre/Bradford/Koontz/King that populate the bestseller lists and the sorts of texts that people hold on to in areas such as Mathematics, Philosophy, History, or Computer Science. Curmudgeon that I am, I think it's good that the used book market can take the wind out of the sails for best sellers. The latter hold their value better (which is why college book stores can get away with the prices they charge) but these standbys don't turn the fast buck and a glut of once-read novels would (we can hope) be an end to this chase and hopefully put the remaining publishers back in the book business.
People will pay for entertainment, but not for information. Businesses will pay for the minimum set of things they have to, but if given a less expensive option, they will take it.
As I see it, the issue with these newspapers is that they are expiring articles out faster to get them into the archive where they can make money off them than would any large library.
People and businesses will pay for aggregated and processed information. The requirements are simple: the information aggregation must be large, the location mechanism must be easy to user, the cost must be lower than the value of the time to do the research by other means. Ask anyone who has used Lexis-Nexis for legal research. This sort of charging is similar to following up an Eric search and buying a copy of the article or using any of the dozens of stock analysis sites.
The answer (see above) is to aggregate as much of this as possible in one place- including the AP and Reuters news wires- make it easy to use, and sell it cheap. Arrange the licensing in advance for a flat rate or establish as staggered fee structure for the more desireable collections.
- technik
Now Alice wants on Bob's machine so he (Bob) opens up the firewall to allow Alice to access his server (don't forget; SSH isn't about encrypting and decrypting email, its a real time connection. And hey; if you need security and therefor use SSH but no firewall I think you're missing the point). Their keys get intercepted by Charlie. Charlie tries to access Bobs machine but is rejected by his firewall. Now what?
I'm guessing and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong... Now Charlie starts flooding Alice with FINs and ICMP RESETs to kill any communication. Alice may think there is a problem but Charlie only needs a few seconds, a few minutes if he's tweaking routes. If he wants to impersonate her, he sets his IP and MAC address to Alice's and begins ARPing like mad to notify any upstream routers & switches that he is really Alice. If he wants to divert traffic, he starts throwing out bogus RIP, OSPF, or BGP packets to try and route everything intended for Alice through him. Charlie stops flooding Alice and acts as a gateway for her or he masquerades as Alice using, variously, her MAC, IP, and/or Key and in any event Bob doesn't suspect a thing.
This is looks harder in practice on the real Internet than it seems in print.
The guy goes to a Perl group and talks to them about the wonders of ML, and is amazed that people get defensive about Perl. What was he *thinking* would happen?
He would probably expect a little thinking to happen. Perhaps some of the audience would reflect and possibly reconsider some of the ideas to which they've grown attached.
That's the source of real growth in many areas, not just programming. Using a metaphor, rubbing up against new ideas (even if the ideas themselves old) doesn't wear you down, it polishes you even if you reject the ideas. You have been exposed to them and had the opportunity to evaluate them.
Sounds useful to me.
- technik
Slashdot Mirror
Surprise? At least in lower NY, I have it from a first-hand source that there are entire areas- some in expensive neighborhoods- that have 40-50 year old copper and are both underserved for their population density and receiving poor POTS service because the ILEC, Verizon, refuses to upgrade the infrastructure. My friend has said that there is often four times the unconnected copper side by side with stuff that should be ripped out but they have been ordered not to use it. Since maintainence of existing lines isn't covered by the arrangement, they are waiting the CLECs out and splicing and resplicing old lines while they lobby the FCC. As soon as a single pair is used on a new bundle, they have to share.
The reasoning is that the ILEC considers itself:
a) short-changed for the real costs of maintaining the infrastructure. There is some truth to this argument but only if you completely ignore the enormous value of the monopoly they enjoy, the length of time they've held it, the subsidies they've received and the opportunities it presents them (whether they take them or not).
b) don't want to share, no way no how. This I truly believe.
Looks like the plan worked.
There is, at least when you're within the few block, line-of-sight range:
Hudson Heights.
It's generated a fair amount of interest among residents even though there isn't a decent place to sit within range. It happens to cover the local public school (CSD6M287) but from the logs I'm not seeing any regular use and no one has contacted me from the school.
It would, in my estimate, be a great thing for the co-ops to get together and set up cheap co-operative internet perhaps with wireless access as a public service possibly gain enough groundswell to start a community freenet and even a freebox program. When I have a bit more time (I already volunteer) I might bring it up again but I don't see it getting beyond us hobbyists I don't see anyone stepping forward to take on this second (and third) full-time job as neighborhood ISP and technical mentor.
Remember that? I'm not the only one who forked over $14 to Tim Wisseman for that game just to play on a BBS. It was one of the best I've ever played, addictive as all heck.
Just about every turn-based, galactic conquest game has been a pale shadow of that one. I had a brief email discussion with the author when he decided to do the Windows version (I was among those who wanted a new DOS version or a port to *Nix) and found him to be a really cool guy.
VGA Planets Home
Maybe I should dig out that floppy disk and load up freedos.
- technik
Sounds like you've read (or absorbed) The Cluetrain Manifesto: 95 Theses. A rereading might be in order for the boardroom.
I wrote this a couple of years ago while working in a small shop (350 users, complex environment)... Editorial: The Egoless Admin.</shameless-self-promotion>
I still agree with it. Your job is that of architect, carpenter, plumber, electrician, handyman and, finally, janitor.
Now, in a much larger shop (tens of thousands of users, hugely complex environment), I'm learning and relearning the lessons and seeing again that the more thought you put into the first four jobs the less you put into the last two. That, and that very few- including most other techs- really understand good system design. You better be opinionated and you better be right most of the time or everything will end up a mess.
The IMF plans I've read about generally do make good sense on the surface. The problem is that they seem to be conceived in a vacuum, not taking into account anything beyond the short-term fiscal problem. You can't hope to tackle monetary policy without addressing the fundamental social and political problems including a working and respected legal system, safe housing, pure food and water, employment and worker protection laws, preventing involvement of the military in civic affairs and- forget about imposing a republican or democratic government- deterring tribalism, cronyism, organized crime or bold-faced exploitation by oligarchs. It's putting the cart before the horse and that is why is rarely works.
- Technik~
2) near indestructability of prions (1100F for hours, etc.)
3) ability of TSE's to cross species (scrapie in sheep, BSE in cattle, CJD in people, TME in mink, PSE in pigs, etc.) and it's all the same group of diseases. They differ in the speed that they cause damage, but that's about it.
I would really like to see something supporting the idea that a protein can survive 1100 degrees F for any amount of time. For comparison- picked up from various web searches- Aluminum melts around 1220F and Zinc at 787F while fiberglass roofing ignites without exposure to flame at around 900F and rigid PVC pipe does so at 850F. The extreme end of thermophilic bacteria is around 113C (235F) so infectious agents surviving intact for extended periods at 1100F more than highly unlikely.
There were studies that found that prions survived 30 minutes at 134C (273F) in an autoclave but later studies found that 138C (280F) with or without a strong alkaline bath disinfected them. It's now part of nursing curriculum: Decontaminating the Indestructible Prion
Anyone interested in the diseases and cross-species aspects might want to read Paul Ewald's Evolution of Infectious Diseases and Plague Time.
- technik
The U.S. Senate is obliging and gives out the addresses in a convenient form: U.S. Senate. The U.S. House of Representatives is less so, but others have done the work: CongressMerge Contacting the Congress.
It wouldn't be difficult to comb The U.S. House of Representatives Locate Representatives' Web Sites Listed by Name for addresses.
Do you have a link for that attribution? It's not in google Usenet archive.
Both manage the symlinks for you and, for those who don't build their own, it is trivially easy to convert existing packages or tarballs to their system.
- technik
They aren't totally OS-unfriendly but they also aren't inexpensive. FWIW, they do make use of Red Hat in their Smartguard appliance and their field guys are Linux saavy.
- technik
Umm, no. I work for a company that has our own symbol on /., one with a funky dropped 'e' in it. You might be able to figure out who we are.
Dang, now what could that company be? Better check here.
This is why when someone brings a law suit against someone else and looses[sic], they should not only compensate that person/company, but should do so 100X the costs it took to defend themselves. Then the RIAA would have to reconsider next time it was to use terrorism and its bought Senators to push researchers around.
This is a truly awful idea and I'm ashamed that it got modded up to '5'. Who benefits most from a situation where a failed lawsuit can rebound and cost the plaintiff 100x the cost of defense? Big companies, the same big companies you rail against. Little guys with solid cases against big businesses will be pressed to the wall to justify a lawsuit when they tally up the $250-$500/hour that a lawyer costs and multiply by 100.
Does anyone believe that a scheme like this would be anything but a lever used by well-funded entities to cow the aggrieved into settling and pervert the legal process? Right. It will stop frivolous lawsuits by guaranteeing that they are not brought by any group that can't pony up an escrow of a few million dollars per month as the suit drags on.
Saw the stencils spraypainted on the sidewalk at the 14Th Street N/R.
Merlyn's /. account was hacked. He received the message 'your email has been changed' and is unable to access the #9918 account.
Do not believe the rantings originating from #9918.
This is an unbelievable insult heaped upon the injury of losing.
I irc-ed with Randal today. This is NOT from him. Someone has taken over his /. account to defame him.
- technik
Well, so the old story goes, if they really are decent *n*x talent, one warm body will go a lot further than it would in a Windows shop.
I can address that: I single-handedly managed for nine months 38 Sun servers ranging from SS4 to E4500's running Solaris with everything from Apache to DNS to Netscape Enterprise to Sybase to a host of proprietary products. I was also the contact for much of farmed-out production and the reference for the 75-odd developers while all 350 at the organization used the services at some time or another. One busy SA and, yes, I'm not inexpensive.
On the other side of the aisle there were seven people managing six NetWare servers doing authentication, file & print, and groupware and twelve NT servers running everything from 3270 gateway to CRM to IIS to remote access (Citrix) to MSSQL and the desktop issues of 350 clients.
I rarely needed overtime while they regularly used overtime. Which team cost the organization more?
I'll apologize for what follows. I'm not a mathematician and have no formal training in it since high school (and it shows), someone with a better head for this should probably take it up.
The article reminds me of a discussion I had a few months ago with a manager that led me to partially develop the following (humorous) idea during my commute home:
The idiocy of a group is not constant. Representing the number of members as N, the collective idiocy of the group G can be calculated thus I(G sub N) = N^(N-1) where N>=1. Compare this to the number of paths in a complete graph of nodes N, f(N) = N(N-1) / 2. The latter is frequently used to demonstrate that it is not possible for all individuals in an organization to have perfect communication with all the others when N increases since, despite it being provable that an information path exists from any node to any other, the communication is not itself perfect. (It should also be noted that there are potentially an infinite number of ineffective path within an organization and this, too should be explored) This imperfection of communication, I argue, is the idiocy (or impedance) of the organization. Indeed, even in a group consisting of a single member communication is not possible because idiocy is not zero. This is stated in the first rule, In any group there is always a non-zero amount of idiocy (or colloquially: in any group there is always one idiot, this being doubly true when there is a group of one). It has also been observed that this idiocy is not evenly distributed across an organization, that is that each path has its own, non-zero amount of idiocy, equal or less than the organizational total.
Okay. Anyone want to finish?
for a list of ways in which technology has failed to improve our daily life, press 3 now
-- seen in a Usenet tagline
ust be careful of what you do. The first job you take is generally what you will be doing for the rest of your career.
Entirely untrue. If you let yourself be defined by the title assigned by your employer then, I suppose, this can happen. A job is a job and titles mean next to nothing except during the minute and a half that someone skims your resume. What can you do? Can you prove it? That is important.
Take a few jobs. Work on different things. Work on things that interest you and some that don't. Stay somewhere long enough to learn what it's like to be an insider. Jump around when you need so you know what it's like to be on the outside. Build a large set of skills. Accept lower pay when changing areas if the field interests you. If the company is large enough, transfer internally to other areas. Work hard. Develop a good reputation. Admit when you screw up and then fix it. Stay in touch with colleagues.
That's about all the advice I can give.
- technik
Raising a fuss now just because a market leader wants to sell both new *and* used books side-by-side is likely to fall on deaf ears.
And where do the used books come from? Why new books, of course! It's the squeezing out of the publisher's profits that is at issue. And before anyone cries,"they've got to eat too" think about the relative value six months after the first printing of the novel of the week by LeCarre/Bradford/Koontz/King that populate the bestseller lists and the sorts of texts that people hold on to in areas such as Mathematics, Philosophy, History, or Computer Science. Curmudgeon that I am, I think it's good that the used book market can take the wind out of the sails for best sellers. The latter hold their value better (which is why college book stores can get away with the prices they charge) but these standbys don't turn the fast buck and a glut of once-read novels would (we can hope) be an end to this chase and hopefully put the remaining publishers back in the book business.
feh
-technik
People will pay for entertainment, but not for information. Businesses will pay for the minimum set of things they have to, but if given a less expensive option, they will take it.
As I see it, the issue with these newspapers is that they are expiring articles out faster to get them into the archive where they can make money off them than would any large library.
People and businesses will pay for aggregated and processed information. The requirements are simple: the information aggregation must be large, the location mechanism must be easy to user, the cost must be lower than the value of the time to do the research by other means. Ask anyone who has used Lexis-Nexis for legal research. This sort of charging is similar to following up an Eric search and buying a copy of the article or using any of the dozens of stock analysis sites.
The answer (see above) is to aggregate as much of this as possible in one place- including the AP and Reuters news wires- make it easy to use, and sell it cheap. Arrange the licensing in advance for a flat rate or establish as staggered fee structure for the more desireable collections.
- technik
Now Alice wants on Bob's machine so he (Bob) opens up the firewall to allow Alice to access his server (don't forget; SSH isn't about encrypting and decrypting email, its a real time connection. And hey; if you need security and therefor use SSH but no firewall I think you're missing the point). Their keys get intercepted by Charlie. Charlie tries to access Bobs machine but is rejected by his firewall. Now what?
I'm guessing and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong... Now Charlie starts flooding Alice with FINs and ICMP RESETs to kill any communication. Alice may think there is a problem but Charlie only needs a few seconds, a few minutes if he's tweaking routes. If he wants to impersonate her, he sets his IP and MAC address to Alice's and begins ARPing like mad to notify any upstream routers & switches that he is really Alice. If he wants to divert traffic, he starts throwing out bogus RIP, OSPF, or BGP packets to try and route everything intended for Alice through him. Charlie stops flooding Alice and acts as a gateway for her or he masquerades as Alice using, variously, her MAC, IP, and/or Key and in any event Bob doesn't suspect a thing.
This is looks harder in practice on the real Internet than it seems in print.
Anyone?
- technik
The guy goes to a Perl group and talks to them about the wonders of ML, and is amazed that people get defensive about Perl. What was he *thinking* would happen?
He would probably expect a little thinking to happen. Perhaps some of the audience would reflect and possibly reconsider some of the ideas to which they've grown attached.
That's the source of real growth in many areas, not just programming. Using a metaphor, rubbing up against new ideas (even if the ideas themselves old) doesn't wear you down, it polishes you even if you reject the ideas. You have been exposed to them and had the opportunity to evaluate them.
Sounds useful to me.
- technik
I'm glad that idiocy and ineptitude are not limited to the U.S. patent office. Seems that the EU is equally lacking.
Now, can anyone comment on what international treaties might force the imposition of these here and/or our gaffs there?
- technik