AMD Athlon XP does appear to be consistently faster than Pentium 4 at various math-intensive tasks like Photoshop filters but slower than Pentium 4 on OpenGL and Direct3D (most games). It is deceptive when looking to buy a new system and you see a choice "Athlon 2200Mhz" or "Pentium 2800Mhz" for around $100 more and one assumes the extra $100 will get you a faster system... depends on if you're playing games or doing video editing.
I think you're being sarcastic since Intel is one of the undisputed kings of marketing brand monikers (486, OverDrive, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium MMX, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, Xeon, Pentium 4, Itanium). Intel has already anticipated your suggestion, that's why their 64bit offering is called "Itanium" but I wonder if internally it is labelled as a "x786". Itanium sells for around $1800 (for Intel-type motherboards, each $9000 for HP-RX variety) and Itanium rackmount servers can be bought for around $3500, all you need is a 64-bit OS.
What I want to know is in this case who initiated discovered this download incident and initiated the complaint? Was it some 3rd party P2P watchdog hired by MGM who then complains directly to ISPs then the ISP accuses the customer? Or does Comcast police all downloads without waiting for incident complaints from companies like MGM? If that's the case then unfortunately Comacst cutomers agreed to it on sign-up, as from Comcast's Terms of Service: "Monitoring of Postings and Transmissions: Comcast shall have no obligation to monitor postings or transmissions made in connection with the Service. However, you acknowledge and agree that Comcast and its agents shall have the right to monitor any such postings and transmissions, including without limitation e-mail, newsgroups, chat, IP audio and video, and web space content, from time to time and to use and disclose them in accordance with Sections 4 and 5 of this Agreement, and as otherwise required by law or government request. "... and from their privacy policy page "Comcast uses personally identifiable information collected on the Service as necessary to render the Service and to... determine whether there are violations of any applicable policies and terms of service; " I guess that's standard for all ISPs Terms of Service, and we all agreed to it. Don't like it, use the other broadband carrier in your area, oh, they have the same terms, oh well.
Mircrosoft execs are obsessed with the fact that Linux is (mostly) free (as in beer) and they assume the spreading adoption of Linux is only for that reason. They have this picture in their head that small - medium size companies are just too cheap to buy Windows and that's what's causing the migrations to Linux. They find it hard to understand that in many situations it is the IT departments of many companies advocating Linux not because of price, but because Linux is just easier for most network admins to install, configure, manage, and maintain.
The rule is "Faster, Cheaper, Better" always wins. Cheaper by itself is not the whole answer.
So this patent covers launching different applications based on the duration of a button press, note that this is not same as typing different characters on a keypad or repeating characters when a cat in sitting on keyboard.
From the patent text:
... the Palm-size PC contains a plurality of buttons (called application buttons) that are used to launch the more common applications installed on a Palm-size PC. For example, if the application is a notes application, a short button press displays a list of summary information for the stored notes. If the same application button is pressed for a long period of time, e.g., at least one second, an alternative application function is launched.
I admit that is a clever approach for making the most of a few buttons, but is that so unique? Haven't any console video games used similar logic to do functionally the same thing? And what if there is a device that launches the same application each time the button is pressed but the application is in a different mode... I don't see a mention that situation in the patent text.
TT: None under Linux. There's no licensed player under Linux.
JV: But you're trying to set your own standards.
I am dissappointed to learn that we are no longer allowed to set our own standards. All this time we have been foolishly publishing RFCs and agreeing on ways to communicate data between different devices, not knowing that all this standardizing is not MPAA-approved. What were we thinking?! Well that's it, we'll just we'll have to turn off the Internet, no more SMTP, no more TCP, no more UDP, no more HTTP, no more HTML... turn it off... no wait! Wait until the MPAA gang gets its head out of its collective ass and finds huge profits in Internet media delivery, then we sadly inform them that Internet is one big open standard and therefore must be turned off, sorry guys, your rules.
Another dimension I hope projects like this expand into is capturing a much higher dynamic range of the color information stored on the film. If you scan a negative (or positive) at 128-bit color depth instead of 32-bit color depth or the more standard 24-bit color depth, capture very subtle diferrences of light and shadow which are not visible to the naked eye, but with careful image processing you can enhance and amplify those subtle color shifts and nearly normalize an under/overexposed picture, pulling details from the light/shadow/color which no one has ever seen before. Some might argue that the director did not intend for the audience to see Brando's face in full light in "The Godfather" and that the heavy shadows were intentional, but in most cases any director would agree that some of the detail they wanted in some shots was obscured by poor lighting/exposure and they would like to tweak that.
On the consumer side, putting a wide screen high-res video track on a DVD is one thing, but making that video (plus audio and subtracks) fit within 4.7GB (if you want to keep it all one disc)*and* having it play back reasonably well on the average consumer-level DVD player (which can only handle around 7Mbs bitrate) means you have to compress the hell out of each track which means reducing the quality of the picture with compression artifacts. So it seems to fully appreciate a high-res film-to-DVD transfer you'll have to have a nearly uncompressed DVD transfer (very little MPEG2 compression applied, probably spanning 6 discs or more) and a high-bandwidth DVD player that can handle a very high bitrate.
So what makes an application "trusted" is that it has been blessed by Microsoft, ie. any software publisher with the funds to pony up the fee to Microsoft to get the trusted seal of apporval I suppose. So that's supposed to make computing more secure... and what is a "secure" computing environment anyway? Most of us define a secure computing environment as a desktop we can work at where our data is secure, private, stable, and uninterupted by rogue applications that pop up in your face unexpectedly refuse to be ignored... this is where "trusted" vendors are trying our patience. It has become more common for every Windoze desktop application sold today to hag nag screens popping up for any number of reasons: "Do you want to check for updates?"... "Do you want to register now or be reminded to register in the next 15 minutes?"... "Would you like to see some exciting new offers? I'll just go ahead and add them to your bookmarks menu anyway..."... and all this happening when the offending application is not even running! Desktop software is becoming increasingly intrusive and interupting the workflow process.
So I ask you, what's worse: having a malicous virus annoy you and interupt your workday or having an application you paid for essentially behave even worse? At least virus authors don't nag you to register.
So my point is "secure" and "trusted" computing is obviously a joke when the companies driving this initiative are more intrusive and disruptive to the average work day than most virus authors.
Anyone trashing Infinium here has not bothered to try out Infiniums offerings themselves. If you lazy asses would go to their web site you'd see that they have produced many great things already, including a really cool logo, an Acrobat PDF file with cool graphics embedded in it, and a kick-ass schweeet streaming video file that has techno beats, flashy words and graphics flying all over the screen, I was was like "Whoa! That logo is cool!" I want to upgrade my connection to T3 so I can download the bigger versions of the promotional versions, and here them in Dolby Surround!
The problem with most lame-ass gamers these days is everyone expects to go to the store and buy a plastic box and you bring it home and plug it in and "play with it", as if pushing buttons and controllling things on the screen really matters. Well that's old thinking. Now days we don't have to hold a gaming system in our hands to appreciate it. We can just download a promotional video clips (that are all free by the way, why pay for games when promotional videos are free?) and it shows you what the system would look like, that is if you wanted a plastic box taking space in your home, but we don't have to actually hold it and play it, do we? No!
Infinium is taking the next bold step into "non-interactive promotional gaming" and all of you are just screwing around wasting money on your Pac-Man ancient history non-promotional I-have-to-hold-it-in-my-hands gaming systems. Losers! All of you! I'm never reading Slashdot again, at least not until I come back to work on Monday, I swear, all weekend no Slashdot!
I get the impression that NASA develops a lot of software for image processing. I'm picturing some really powerful GIMP plug-ins... "Make Mars Red", "Color Galaxy", "Add UFO"....
At this office we have several machines with
Norton AV pre-installed, what a pain in the ass! I wonder if just letting virii run amock through the office would be less annoying than dealing with Norton's constant nagging for attention.
Every-frickin-day at least several times a day
a Norton dialog pops up out of nowhere on your
screen while you are trying work, simply to remind you of the number of days left in your Norton subscription and do you want to
renew now?... and of course the only two buttons you can click to make the dialog go away are a classic Hobson's choice: "yes, I have my credit ready so please take take more money from me now" or "remind me later, like say in an hour or two when I get even busier"... then later an complete full-cavity virus scan starts up unannounced no matter how busy your machine is... and of course the constant demand for you to ineract with Norton
while virus updates are being downloaded and then after updates are downloaded it of course will say "click OK now to reboot" not even giving you the option to reboot later.
Now of course if I'd bother to RTFM and spend my time reconfiguring Norton I suppose I could figure out how to make it less annoying, and then take up more of my time doing the same to every machine in the office... but I was just wondering if the people working for Norton might consider making their products less godamn annoying then the virii they aspire to prevent.
I think you're right, part of what's going on here is a cultural divide that exists in many companies between the managers in suits and the admins in the back cubes watching the network. In some offices these two types hardly ever speak to each other: no kinship, no trust, no loyalty. Both parties bear the responsibility to walk across the office and speak directly to each other once in a while.
My years in sys admin middle management taught me that some admins just don't want to speak the managers in suits. They automatically distrust the management, they resent that anyone who knows less about networking is being paid more and is manager of many departments. They view anyone who meets with management and eats lunch with management as a kiss-ass or someone not to be trusted. This to me is exactly the kind of attitude that holds people back from getting promotions, being recognized, and makes one more vulnerable to becoming a victim of downsizing. If management has no idea who you are and what you do all day then you are effectively nobody to them, you are just another labor expense on the accounting books.
The easiest way to let management know that you have value is find a problem, and don't just whine about, do a little homework and propose a practical solution along with some numbers as to how much it will cost/save the company. If your department manager is the type of prick who would try to steal credit for your brilliant ideas then walk around his desk and talk directly to his boss about your brilliant ideas... if you have enough of those conversations with that boss you may even find yourself being promoted to replace the prick who stole credit for all of your ideas. Don't be someone who complains all the time, try to be someone who has solutions rather than complaints. Leaders have answers, followers have complaints. Managers value people they can go to for answers.
So in summary if you make no attempt to talk to management then don't be surprised if they become more comfortable dealing with some out-sourced vendor then they are dealing with you... don't be surprised if someday the managers you hardly ever spoke to tell you to pack up your desk.
Absolutely agree. I do a little web site consulting on the side and I usually tell my clients three bits of advice for better exposure:
1. Think about putting some kind of unique, useful, and/or entertaining content on your web site that people will want to visit, link to from their own web site, and even email to their friends. Good content builds traffic.
2. Take basic steps to make your pages search engine friendly. Descriptive titles, simple honest meta-tags, useful text in every page, descriptive links to other pages, etc.
3. Don't be obsessed with your Google ranking. Don't give money to anyone who claims they can boost your Google ranking. If you want to spend money for traffic than buy Google Ad Words or sponsor links, at least that way you pay per actual click-through rather than paying into a bidding war for an uncertain better ranking.
Re:Digital Rebel is not 35 mm SLR
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...and I think this is an important distinction to make because the difference in image sensor area of anything less than true 35mm changes the effective focal length of the 35mm-size lenses you use. For example you want to use a 28mm lens for wide-angle shots but the Canon Digital Rebel has an effective focal length conversion factor of 1.6, so a 28mm lens is effectively a 28mm x 1.6 = 44mm lens, so not as much wide angle as would a true 35mm image sensor. This issue alone is what has been keeping me on the digital SLR sidelines for the time-being.
Everyone has their own favorite story about an interaction with a real live spammer, this is my personal favorite from the archives of Hot Wired's defunct Packet column, called "My Spammer Dream Date"
Re:SCO is not targetting Linux with a lawsuit
on
SCO Volleys to Red Hat
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Exactly. If SCO execs were to tell the world that everyone using Windows needs to buy a $700 kernel license from SCO then you could fully expect Microsoft would unleash a battalion of lawyers in that direction. In that case it wouldn't matter that SCO was aiming a lawsuit directly at Microsoft or not, what matters is the direct trademark/copyright/ownership/right-to-sell attack on the product and its customers.
I agree. It's not like there aren't already sniffers out there that already do version detection. This is useful to me as an admin because I want to know everything about how my ports appear to the outside world.
But version detection doesn't seem to matter to the average skr1pt kiddie. After looking at many system logs and firewall logs it seems that many hax0r-type kids don't bother running a version detector and hand-picking an exploit based on server version but rather they use battering-ram style try-all-known-exploits scripts regardless of what the target system is. Just look at your own httpd logs and you'll occasionally find a single IP address attempting to call up a whole series of URLs for known CGI, Frontpage, and IIS exploits... version be damned they'll try all exploits anyway and see what happens, and my guess is these kids get into more systems than the version detecting cat burglar types.
You bring up a good point about simply switching variable names and function would throw off the comparator and I'm assumming ESR thaught of that already. In that if it's not already a feature the obvious first feature to add would be for comparator to have the option of ignoring variable names, function names, and comments.
But here's the point most readers here are missing: There are enough companies out there who are dumb enough (or have enough money to throw around without a care) to pay the invoice and that's all SCO is hoping for, a little more revenue plus a little more legitimacy in the eyes of the industry punditocracy as SCO will start reporting how much revenue they've gotten from "Linux licenses".
It's sad and funny to see a publically traded company resort to an ages-old scam in order to get revenue. Anyone who gets an invoice should contact the National Fraud Information Center.
Oh no! Now the government can link my cell phone number with my hotmail email address! Shit! They got me! Pretty soon they'll have my SS#, my employment history, my tax returns, my speeding tickets... oh wait... they already do.
Seriously though, I sort of agree with your hesitation here. I tend not to volunteer myself into a database. My hesitation with this one is what happens if this do-not-call list somehow gets involved in lawsuit or some sort of government re-org and as a result turns into a call-me-anytime-all-the-time list? What happens if Congress decides that it's OK for the government and political orgs to use the list to conduct surveys and broadcast political messages... then Congress decides to get a little extra revenue by selling the list to political interest groups... then telemarketers sue saying their message also deserves to broadcast on the list and some court agrees with them... or unscrupulous telemarketers somehow get access to the list then take it overseas and dial the shit out of it from an offshore spamming operation run by Dr. Evil... and I'm not suggesting this is all a big spammer conspiracy but I'd hate to see this turn into a Bad Thing.
Before I sign up I'd like to wait and see and hear some feedback from those who are on the list... are you getting more or less calls now?
No worse it could get worse, what about a talentless performer with fake boobs lip-syncing to a pre-recorded vocal track of some other equally talentless signer that is then fed through an Autotuner... oh wait, that was already done 10 years ago.
OK, how about a robot lip-syncing to a pre-recorded synthesized voice track... no wait, that describes half of Disneyworld.
OK, how about a robot-drawn anime film musically scored by a random click track from a cheap Casio keyboard... no wait, that could be any RPG video game made in last 10 years.
It's like Courtney Love's philisophical refrain "I fake it so real I'm beyond fake."
I agree, unfortunately SCO has a few factors leaning to its advanatage:
1. FUD is fast, courts are slow. Already the self-proclaimed industry analysts are advising IT managers to "take it slow" with Linux and Open Source until the "IP issues are clarified" and other such nonsense. If this case ever makes it to court in April 2005 (baring any delays) then expect a ruling in 2006 at the soonest... that's plenty of time for SCO to continue to stoke the FUD flames and grab market share from paranoid (and gullible) PHBs.
2. The technology press is proprietary-biased. The common industry misconception is "no one ever got fired for buying proprietary software". Some have pointed out that open source licenses often do not include indemntiy clauses to cover the customer's liability in case of IP disputes... only a few quiet pundits have pointed out that even proprietary licenses have limited indemnity clauses. Overall the technology press wants to prove that Linux/Open Source is some kind of "free lunch" and us "freeloaders" need to be taught a lesson that software must be paid for by someone or else the world just wouldn't make sense... the levels of ignorance are profound.
Personally I love it when pundits scoff at Linux/Open Source when their own web servers and email servers are running Linux and other GNU-type software and they're not even aware of it. "My email doesn't rely on open source software because I'm using Outlook!" *sigh*
3. Some companies have the money to pay SCO to leave them alone, and they will. Before this case comes to any sort of conslusion, in the meantime regardless of how blatantly wrong SCO's claims are, some companies will pay SCO just to have that piece of mind that they won't get tangled in the IP crossfire. Unfortunately they will bolster SCO's claims and give SCO more funding to continue harassing everyone. One would hope that anyone who buys a SCO license now will sue SCO for 5 times the amount later when this case get's settled heavily against SCO.
4. SCO investors and management only need to buy themselves enough time and enough publicity to cash out. Have you noticed how many press releases SCO pumps out every day lately? It seems they have devoted half of their staff for looking for matching lines of code (not knowing where it all came from) and the other half writing press releases.
Enron and others have demonstrated that you can scuttle a company and stay out of jail as long as you saved enough money to hire an army of laywers.
According to Red Hat's press release " Red Hat has established the Open Source Now Fund. The purpose of the fund will be to cover legal expenses associated with infringement claims brought against companies developing software under the GPL license and non-profit organizations supporting the efforts of companies developing software under a GPL license."
....so does that fund also cover plain ol' end users who get caught up in this mess?
(links gleaned from Google News) I'd submit these into the story submission but my submissions have 99% rejection rate.
SCO's proof bogus, Linux advocate says The creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, said he was not surprised by Perens analysis.
"It sure as hell looks like its BSD-licensed and has been around forever," Linus said. "This was what we claimed was the likely source of any common code in the first place: BSD code and various vendor stuff."...
...and, hold onto your seat because...
SCO Preparing Legal Action Against Customer Talking to ComputerWire, McBride added SCO is identifying Linux users for possible litigation. He said SCO had for the last month gathered information on Linux users, and identified about 10% of the total Linux servers sold last year. McBride added that he expected that figure to rise to 40% over the coming weeks before SCO would take action....
For this to work in a free market, the system has to prevent unscrupulous corporate entities from swooping in and sucking up all the (supposedly free of cost) excess power made available to the community then selling it back at ridiculously high prices in times of need. I'm guessing an auction system would be attached to it so each cell could sell their excess power to the highest bidder in times of excess, then in times of need buy power from the lowest sellers... I hope I not describing Enron's business plan (their public business plan that is, not their off-the-balance-sheet business plan).
Slashdot Mirror
AMD Athlon XP does appear to be consistently faster than Pentium 4 at various math-intensive tasks like Photoshop filters but slower than Pentium 4 on OpenGL and Direct3D (most games). It is deceptive when looking to buy a new system and you see a choice "Athlon 2200Mhz" or "Pentium 2800Mhz" for around $100 more and one assumes the extra $100 will get you a faster system... depends on if you're playing games or doing video editing.
I think you're being sarcastic since Intel is one of the undisputed kings of marketing brand monikers (486, OverDrive, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium MMX, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, Xeon, Pentium 4, Itanium). Intel has already anticipated your suggestion, that's why their 64bit offering is called "Itanium" but I wonder if internally it is labelled as a "x786". Itanium sells for around $1800 (for Intel-type motherboards, each $9000 for HP-RX variety) and Itanium rackmount servers can be bought for around $3500, all you need is a 64-bit OS.
What I want to know is in this case who initiated discovered this download incident and initiated the complaint? Was it some 3rd party P2P watchdog hired by MGM who then complains directly to ISPs then the ISP accuses the customer? Or does Comcast police all downloads without waiting for incident complaints from companies like MGM? If that's the case then unfortunately Comacst cutomers agreed to it on sign-up, as from Comcast's Terms of Service: "Monitoring of Postings and Transmissions: Comcast shall have no obligation to monitor postings or transmissions made in connection with the Service. However, you acknowledge and agree that Comcast and its agents shall have the right to monitor any such postings and transmissions, including without limitation e-mail, newsgroups, chat, IP audio and video, and web space content, from time to time and to use and disclose them in accordance with Sections 4 and 5 of this Agreement, and as otherwise required by law or government request. " ... and from their privacy policy page "Comcast uses personally identifiable information collected on the Service as necessary to render the Service and to ... determine whether there are violations of any applicable policies and terms of service; " I guess that's standard for all ISPs Terms of Service, and we all agreed to it. Don't like it, use the other broadband carrier in your area, oh, they have the same terms, oh well.
Mircrosoft execs are obsessed with the fact that Linux is (mostly) free (as in beer) and they assume the spreading adoption of Linux is only for that reason. They have this picture in their head that small - medium size companies are just too cheap to buy Windows and that's what's causing the migrations to Linux. They find it hard to understand that in many situations it is the IT departments of many companies advocating Linux not because of price, but because Linux is just easier for most network admins to install, configure, manage, and maintain.
The rule is "Faster, Cheaper, Better" always wins. Cheaper by itself is not the whole answer.
So this patent covers launching different applications based on the duration of a button press, note that this is not same as typing different characters on a keypad or repeating characters when a cat in sitting on keyboard. From the patent text:
... the Palm-size PC contains a plurality of buttons (called application buttons) that are used to launch the more common applications installed on a Palm-size PC. For example, if the application is a notes application, a short button press displays a list of summary information for the stored notes. If the same application button is pressed for a long period of time, e.g., at least one second, an alternative application function is launched.
I admit that is a clever approach for making the most of a few buttons, but is that so unique? Haven't any console video games used similar logic to do functionally the same thing? And what if there is a device that launches the same application each time the button is pressed but the application is in a different mode... I don't see a mention that situation in the patent text.
TT: None under Linux. There's no licensed player under Linux.
JV: But you're trying to set your own standards.
I am dissappointed to learn that we are no longer allowed to set our own standards. All this time we have been foolishly publishing RFCs and agreeing on ways to communicate data between different devices, not knowing that all this standardizing is not MPAA-approved. What were we thinking?! Well that's it, we'll just we'll have to turn off the Internet, no more SMTP, no more TCP, no more UDP, no more HTTP, no more HTML... turn it off... no wait! Wait until the MPAA gang gets its head out of its collective ass and finds huge profits in Internet media delivery, then we sadly inform them that Internet is one big open standard and therefore must be turned off, sorry guys, your rules.
Another dimension I hope projects like this expand into is capturing a much higher dynamic range of the color information stored on the film. If you scan a negative (or positive) at 128-bit color depth instead of 32-bit color depth or the more standard 24-bit color depth, capture very subtle diferrences of light and shadow which are not visible to the naked eye, but with careful image processing you can enhance and amplify those subtle color shifts and nearly normalize an under/overexposed picture, pulling details from the light/shadow/color which no one has ever seen before. Some might argue that the director did not intend for the audience to see Brando's face in full light in "The Godfather" and that the heavy shadows were intentional, but in most cases any director would agree that some of the detail they wanted in some shots was obscured by poor lighting/exposure and they would like to tweak that.
On the consumer side, putting a wide screen high-res video track on a DVD is one thing, but making that video (plus audio and subtracks) fit within 4.7GB (if you want to keep it all one disc)*and* having it play back reasonably well on the average consumer-level DVD player (which can only handle around 7Mbs bitrate) means you have to compress the hell out of each track which means reducing the quality of the picture with compression artifacts. So it seems to fully appreciate a high-res film-to-DVD transfer you'll have to have a nearly uncompressed DVD transfer (very little MPEG2 compression applied, probably spanning 6 discs or more) and a high-bandwidth DVD player that can handle a very high bitrate.
So what makes an application "trusted" is that it has been blessed by Microsoft, ie. any software publisher with the funds to pony up the fee to Microsoft to get the trusted seal of apporval I suppose. So that's supposed to make computing more secure... and what is a "secure" computing environment anyway? Most of us define a secure computing environment as a desktop we can work at where our data is secure, private, stable, and uninterupted by rogue applications that pop up in your face unexpectedly refuse to be ignored... this is where "trusted" vendors are trying our patience. It has become more common for every Windoze desktop application sold today to hag nag screens popping up for any number of reasons: "Do you want to check for updates?" ... "Do you want to register now or be reminded to register in the next 15 minutes?" ... "Would you like to see some exciting new offers? I'll just go ahead and add them to your bookmarks menu anyway..." ... and all this happening when the offending application is not even running! Desktop software is becoming increasingly intrusive and interupting the workflow process.
So I ask you, what's worse: having a malicous virus annoy you and interupt your workday or having an application you paid for essentially behave even worse? At least virus authors don't nag you to register.
So my point is "secure" and "trusted" computing is obviously a joke when the companies driving this initiative are more intrusive and disruptive to the average work day than most virus authors.
Anyone trashing Infinium here has not bothered to try out Infiniums offerings themselves. If you lazy asses would go to their web site you'd see that they have produced many great things already, including a really cool logo, an Acrobat PDF file with cool graphics embedded in it, and a kick-ass schweeet streaming video file that has techno beats, flashy words and graphics flying all over the screen, I was was like "Whoa! That logo is cool!" I want to upgrade my connection to T3 so I can download the bigger versions of the promotional versions, and here them in Dolby Surround!
The problem with most lame-ass gamers these days is everyone expects to go to the store and buy a plastic box and you bring it home and plug it in and "play with it", as if pushing buttons and controllling things on the screen really matters. Well that's old thinking. Now days we don't have to hold a gaming system in our hands to appreciate it. We can just download a promotional video clips (that are all free by the way, why pay for games when promotional videos are free?) and it shows you what the system would look like, that is if you wanted a plastic box taking space in your home, but we don't have to actually hold it and play it, do we? No!
Infinium is taking the next bold step into "non-interactive promotional gaming" and all of you are just screwing around wasting money on your Pac-Man ancient history non-promotional I-have-to-hold-it-in-my-hands gaming systems. Losers! All of you! I'm never reading Slashdot again, at least not until I come back to work on Monday, I swear, all weekend no Slashdot!
I get the impression that NASA develops a lot of software for image processing. I'm picturing some really powerful GIMP plug-ins... "Make Mars Red", "Color Galaxy", "Add UFO"....
At this office we have several machines with Norton AV pre-installed, what a pain in the ass! I wonder if just letting virii run amock through the office would be less annoying than dealing with Norton's constant nagging for attention. Every-frickin-day at least several times a day a Norton dialog pops up out of nowhere on your screen while you are trying work, simply to remind you of the number of days left in your Norton subscription and do you want to renew now? ... and of course the only two buttons you can click to make the dialog go away are a classic Hobson's choice: "yes, I have my credit ready so please take take more money from me now" or "remind me later, like say in an hour or two when I get even busier" ... then later an complete full-cavity virus scan starts up unannounced no matter how busy your machine is ... and of course the constant demand for you to ineract with Norton
while virus updates are being downloaded and then after updates are downloaded it of course will say "click OK now to reboot" not even giving you the option to reboot later.
Now of course if I'd bother to RTFM and spend my time reconfiguring Norton I suppose I could figure out how to make it less annoying, and then take up more of my time doing the same to every machine in the office... but I was just wondering if the people working for Norton might consider making their products less godamn annoying then the virii they aspire to prevent.
I think you're right, part of what's going on here is a cultural divide that exists in many companies between the managers in suits and the admins in the back cubes watching the network. In some offices these two types hardly ever speak to each other: no kinship, no trust, no loyalty. Both parties bear the responsibility to walk across the office and speak directly to each other once in a while.
My years in sys admin middle management taught me that some admins just don't want to speak the managers in suits. They automatically distrust the management, they resent that anyone who knows less about networking is being paid more and is manager of many departments. They view anyone who meets with management and eats lunch with management as a kiss-ass or someone not to be trusted. This to me is exactly the kind of attitude that holds people back from getting promotions, being recognized, and makes one more vulnerable to becoming a victim of downsizing. If management has no idea who you are and what you do all day then you are effectively nobody to them, you are just another labor expense on the accounting books.
The easiest way to let management know that you have value is find a problem, and don't just whine about, do a little homework and propose a practical solution along with some numbers as to how much it will cost/save the company. If your department manager is the type of prick who would try to steal credit for your brilliant ideas then walk around his desk and talk directly to his boss about your brilliant ideas... if you have enough of those conversations with that boss you may even find yourself being promoted to replace the prick who stole credit for all of your ideas. Don't be someone who complains all the time, try to be someone who has solutions rather than complaints. Leaders have answers, followers have complaints. Managers value people they can go to for answers.
So in summary if you make no attempt to talk to management then don't be surprised if they become more comfortable dealing with some out-sourced vendor then they are dealing with you... don't be surprised if someday the managers you hardly ever spoke to tell you to pack up your desk.
Absolutely agree. I do a little web site consulting on the side and I usually tell my clients three bits of advice for better exposure:
1. Think about putting some kind of unique, useful, and/or entertaining content on your web site that people will want to visit, link to from their own web site, and even email to their friends. Good content builds traffic.
2. Take basic steps to make your pages search engine friendly. Descriptive titles, simple honest meta-tags, useful text in every page, descriptive links to other pages, etc.
3. Don't be obsessed with your Google ranking. Don't give money to anyone who claims they can boost your Google ranking. If you want to spend money for traffic than buy Google Ad Words or sponsor links, at least that way you pay per actual click-through rather than paying into a bidding war for an uncertain better ranking.
...and I think this is an important distinction to make because the difference in image sensor area of anything less than true 35mm changes the effective focal length of the 35mm-size lenses you use. For example you want to use a 28mm lens for wide-angle shots but the Canon Digital Rebel has an effective focal length conversion factor of 1.6, so a 28mm lens is effectively a 28mm x 1.6 = 44mm lens, so not as much wide angle as would a true 35mm image sensor. This issue alone is what has been keeping me on the digital SLR sidelines for the time-being.
Everyone has their own favorite story about an interaction with a real live spammer, this is my personal favorite from the archives of Hot Wired's defunct Packet column, called "My Spammer Dream Date"
Exactly. If SCO execs were to tell the world that everyone using Windows needs to buy a $700 kernel license from SCO then you could fully expect Microsoft would unleash a battalion of lawyers in that direction. In that case it wouldn't matter that SCO was aiming a lawsuit directly at Microsoft or not, what matters is the direct trademark/copyright/ownership/right-to-sell attack on the product and its customers.
I agree. It's not like there aren't already sniffers out there that already do version detection. This is useful to me as an admin because I want to know everything about how my ports appear to the outside world.
... version be damned they'll try all exploits anyway and see what happens, and my guess is these kids get into more systems than the version detecting cat burglar types.
But version detection doesn't seem to matter to the average skr1pt kiddie. After looking at many system logs and firewall logs it seems that many hax0r-type kids don't bother running a version detector and hand-picking an exploit based on server version but rather they use battering-ram style try-all-known-exploits scripts regardless of what the target system is. Just look at your own httpd logs and you'll occasionally find a single IP address attempting to call up a whole series of URLs for known CGI, Frontpage, and IIS exploits
You bring up a good point about simply switching variable names and function would throw off the comparator and I'm assumming ESR thaught of that already. In that if it's not already a feature the obvious first feature to add would be for comparator to have the option of ignoring variable names, function names, and comments.
It's sad and funny to see a publically traded company resort to an ages-old scam in order to get revenue. Anyone who gets an invoice should contact the National Fraud Information Center.
Oh no! Now the government can link my cell phone number with my hotmail email address! Shit! They got me! Pretty soon they'll have my SS#, my employment history, my tax returns, my speeding tickets... oh wait... they already do.
Seriously though, I sort of agree with your hesitation here. I tend not to volunteer myself into a database. My hesitation with this one is what happens if this do-not-call list somehow gets involved in lawsuit or some sort of government re-org and as a result turns into a call-me-anytime-all-the-time list? What happens if Congress decides that it's OK for the government and political orgs to use the list to conduct surveys and broadcast political messages... then Congress decides to get a little extra revenue by selling the list to political interest groups... then telemarketers sue saying their message also deserves to broadcast on the list and some court agrees with them... or unscrupulous telemarketers somehow get access to the list then take it overseas and dial the shit out of it from an offshore spamming operation run by Dr. Evil... and I'm not suggesting this is all a big spammer conspiracy but I'd hate to see this turn into a Bad Thing.
Before I sign up I'd like to wait and see and hear some feedback from those who are on the list... are you getting more or less calls now?
No worse it could get worse, what about a talentless performer with fake boobs lip-syncing to a pre-recorded vocal track of some other equally talentless signer that is then fed through an Autotuner... oh wait, that was already done 10 years ago.
OK, how about a robot lip-syncing to a pre-recorded synthesized voice track... no wait, that describes half of Disneyworld.
OK, how about a robot-drawn anime film musically scored by a random click track from a cheap Casio keyboard... no wait, that could be any RPG video game made in last 10 years.
It's like Courtney Love's philisophical refrain "I fake it so real I'm beyond fake."
I agree, unfortunately SCO has a few factors leaning to its advanatage:
1. FUD is fast, courts are slow. Already the self-proclaimed industry analysts are advising IT managers to "take it slow" with Linux and Open Source until the "IP issues are clarified" and other such nonsense. If this case ever makes it to court in April 2005 (baring any delays) then expect a ruling in 2006 at the soonest... that's plenty of time for SCO to continue to stoke the FUD flames and grab market share from paranoid (and gullible) PHBs.
2. The technology press is proprietary-biased. The common industry misconception is "no one ever got fired for buying proprietary software". Some have pointed out that open source licenses often do not include indemntiy clauses to cover the customer's liability in case of IP disputes... only a few quiet pundits have pointed out that even proprietary licenses have limited indemnity clauses. Overall the technology press wants to prove that Linux/Open Source is some kind of "free lunch" and us "freeloaders" need to be taught a lesson that software must be paid for by someone or else the world just wouldn't make sense... the levels of ignorance are profound.
Personally I love it when pundits scoff at Linux/Open Source when their own web servers and email servers are running Linux and other GNU-type software and they're not even aware of it. "My email doesn't rely on open source software because I'm using Outlook!" *sigh*
3. Some companies have the money to pay SCO to leave them alone, and they will. Before this case comes to any sort of conslusion, in the meantime regardless of how blatantly wrong SCO's claims are, some companies will pay SCO just to have that piece of mind that they won't get tangled in the IP crossfire. Unfortunately they will bolster SCO's claims and give SCO more funding to continue harassing everyone. One would hope that anyone who buys a SCO license now will sue SCO for 5 times the amount later when this case get's settled heavily against SCO.
4. SCO investors and management only need to buy themselves enough time and enough publicity to cash out. Have you noticed how many press releases SCO pumps out every day lately? It seems they have devoted half of their staff for looking for matching lines of code (not knowing where it all came from) and the other half writing press releases.
Enron and others have demonstrated that you can scuttle a company and stay out of jail as long as you saved enough money to hire an army of laywers.
According to Red Hat's press release " Red Hat has established the Open Source Now Fund. The purpose of the fund will be to cover legal expenses associated with infringement claims brought against companies developing software under the GPL license and non-profit organizations supporting the efforts of companies developing software under a GPL license."
....so does that fund also cover plain ol' end users who get caught up in this mess?
(links gleaned from Google News) I'd submit these into the story submission but my submissions have 99% rejection rate.
...
...and, hold onto your seat because...
...
SCO's proof bogus, Linux advocate says The creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, said he was not surprised by Perens analysis. "It sure as hell looks like its BSD-licensed and has been around forever," Linus said. "This was what we claimed was the likely source of any common code in the first place: BSD code and various vendor stuff."
SCO Preparing Legal Action Against Customer Talking to ComputerWire, McBride added SCO is identifying Linux users for possible litigation. He said SCO had for the last month gathered information on Linux users, and identified about 10% of the total Linux servers sold last year. McBride added that he expected that figure to rise to 40% over the coming weeks before SCO would take action.
For this to work in a free market, the system has to prevent unscrupulous corporate entities from swooping in and sucking up all the (supposedly free of cost) excess power made available to the community then selling it back at ridiculously high prices in times of need. I'm guessing an auction system would be attached to it so each cell could sell their excess power to the highest bidder in times of excess, then in times of need buy power from the lowest sellers... I hope I not describing Enron's business plan (their public business plan that is, not their off-the-balance-sheet business plan).