Ahh, the glorious days of slamming my head against a brick wall because it hurt less than talking to the people on the phone.
[rant class:semi-incoherant]
The average lifespan of a telephone customer service rep is 18 months... it's only about a year for technical support. Why you ask? Because 90% of the people on the other end of the line are not qualified to use a toaster let alone a PC. I have spoken to everyone from 90 year old grandmothers to US Senators - Network administrators to neophites who are still trying to take their first PC out of a box. All in all, if the person was willing to listen, follow directions and pay attention, I could solve the problem... the other 90% just left both of us frustated and pissed off.
Best call: Mother caught little Johnie surfing porn, so she cut the phone line & superglued the jack into the modem. Since she was paying for internet service it was my responsibility to get her back online.... that one made it to a manager.
Death threats? weekly. Verbal abuse? 80% of the calls - since it usually started before I finished the hello, no it wasn't my sparkling personality. People get on the phone and they have the same feeling of invulnerability and anonymity that they do in cars. Perhaps someone should do a study reguarding phone rage.
Why do people on the tech line read scripts? Because the people who knew what they were talking about have all left before they became suicidal or homicidal - and the people who are left are the McD's rejects being paid minimum wage to read those scripts. You CANNOT pay someone enough to take that kind of abuse for extended periods, not if they give any sort of damb about anything.
I have worked 2 call centers & spoken with people from many more - almost all are the same way - 95% of the people are either self medicating or on psych meds, the rest are either new or should be medicated. The people who come in bright and cheery expecting to help people are crushed out in about 3 months and the anti-social mysanthropes feel entirely vindicated in hating everything with the species name Homo - {homo-erectus, homo-sitius, homo-moronicus, homo-knucklesdragonfloorus, homo-STFUB4IKY... etc.]
My favorite line FTFA: Be nice - or else
I once gave a guy a nickle refund. I was authorized to just hand out $20 in the name of customer satisfaction. Guy pissed me off after I offered him $10 credit - he demanded to get what he was owed - so I walked him down the path & after he agreed to every element, I totaled up his actual refund & applied it to his account $ 0.05. Thank you and have a nice day. Please feel free to call back anytime 24 hours a day 365 days a year.[click]
I also like the Indian 35/10 rule - only just give me the damn 10 year old, I always had better luck.
[/rant]
I am sorry, the use of clowns to represent oneself in court has been patented by SCO and therefore cannot be used by SONY unless they choose to liscence it. However given that process's track record, it's not all that effective anyway so why bother?.
For the record I do believe the use of Jesters, Charlatens, and Psychics are still public domain.
To paraphrase a management book I read: You don't need to know what a project is trying to do in order to manage the people in the project.
OK, on some level that might be true, one herd of cat's is pretty much like another and the skills to get them moving in the same direction are the same - but let's be realistic, if you don't know the business or the finer points of the process, you can very easily herd your cats right over the edge of a cliff.
I have seen a bunch of people come in with MBA's who think that they know how to make things run smoothly, only to find out later that things were smoothly moving twords a head-on collision with reality.
Master Bullsh*t Artists have their place - they make great insulation between working teams and management that lives in a marketing world. However, unless they know what exactly the team is doing, they need to stay away from trying to micro-manage the team.
(iv) do not permit the redistribution, retransmission or other exporting of a phonorecord embodying all or part of a performance licensed under this section from the device by digital outputs or removable media
OK I read that as saying if your trasmition can be recorded on any form of removable media it's illegal to broadcast without DRM. You know if I read it that way, some **IAA fucktard is going to try to use it that way.
Remember the DCMA will never be used to sqash innovation or competative ventures, and the PATRIOT act would never be used except to fight terrorists. Our dedicated politicians told us so.
The civil rights movement is a good counter-example of a special interest working for rights that do not negatively impact the majority's rights.
[hyperbole = on]
BS, they trampled all over my right to lynch people and burn crosses in other peoples yards. Bunch of fringe loonies out to take away my God given right to terrorize people just because they are different.
[hyperbole = off]
Sad state of affairs is that no matter what 'Public' or 'Special' interest you are looking at, there is going to be someone opposed to you on the grounds it's going to infringe on them.
As far as the actual FA goes, if the law says that I have to use the 'most restrictive' form of DRM, do I have to change my broadcast stream every week when competing DRMs quote themselves as being better?
How do they plan on controling those servers outside the US? Since the law would only apply to copywriten pieces, you can't use packet filtering to just kill MP3 & OV streams, because you would need to know if the individual piece was covered.
Let's be honest here....
MythTV was written by geeks, for geeks, I don't think that there's a lot of debate on that issue.
If a company want's to make & sell a MythTV box and can turn a profit doing it - so much the better, but either way, the MythTV geeks will keep working on the project. [note that it would be nice if some of the profit was forwarded as a donation to the team.]
What they are turning a profit on is not the MythTV software or the hardware. People are going to be paying for the convienence of not having to put it together for themselves. Check out companies that are selling HylaFax fax-servers. There are companies selling Athalon 1800 PC's w/ 4 fax lines & charging $1500 for them. Thats about $400(assuming they arn't using salvaged parts or a high end 4 line modem cards) for the PC & $1100 for configuing it. Not bad money for a job that took me about 4 hours to do the first time(stupid ISA jumpered modems).
I was working tech support that day.
You would not believe the number of people calling to complain that they couldn't see what was going on down the street because of the smoke and/or dust and they couldn't watch the news because their cable TV and internet services were not working.
Geeee, there are whole blocks of your city missing, why do you THINK your Cable is down?
IIRC - the basement of one of the towers housed a major peering point as well as a network satilite feeds.
Does it bother anyone else that the US said: Mark Summers, representing the US government, said there was no precedent to suggest the US would breach its promises, and the court should take on "faith" the undertaking.
but I don't see anywhere where they 'promise' to try him in federal court - they have given him 'assurances' but no 'guarantee'. Sorry, as soon as somebody says "take my word for it but I won't write it down", you know damb well they have no intention of keeping their precious word.
Most of the fuel cells have a semipermiable membrane impregnated with just enough platinum catalist to make the membrane conductive - that is some seriously expencive shit.
[bad ascii]
[/bad ascii]
I am trying to remember where the anode & cathode go, but my poor caffene deprived brain is failing miserably. I do remember that the efficiency of the cell is related to the surface area of the catalist membrane and that there was discussion of using micro-embossing - the same thing they use for those hologram stickers & stick on screen brighteners - to increace the surface area.
I worked for a company that did (still does) security holograms. Some of these puppies layer up to 24 seperate security features onto a single repeat (about 1 - 2"^2). When the head of the hologram dept went to China for a seminar, they (the Chineese govt) basically insisted he tour the new hologram lab at one of the Beiging (sp?) universities. Sure enough they were proudly displaying one of the security holograms we had made along with their clone of it. 3 months later Customs was finding authentic looking security holograms on counterfit goods --- wonder where they came from?
LOL, Check UK court cases
IIRC Lord McDonald of McDonald owns the McDonald name and all derivatives of it in the UK. I believe that got settled when McD's went after some small time eatery & the Lord stepped in and told them to piss off.
Could be interesting seeing McDonald (member of EU) vs. McDonald (US company) in that name grab.
Check the RFC for SMTP.
all SMTP email is sent via 7bit text characters. That's how it is. If you send a picture, it's expanded by 1/8th as it's converted to base64 and then sent as text.
If you send a 50MB Quark file, it's now a 56.25 MB text file.
When geeks say it's not the best tool, it's because we usually know what's going on under the hood.
If you want to rewrite the SMTP spec and can get everyone to agree on the proper form of error checking - feel free. Until SMTP does proper BINARY data transfer, it's not the right tool to use to transfer BINARY data.
Now the fun: It's ok to send packages by US Mail, I hope. Or is that only designed for letters? Postcards? God no!!!
The postal service is built around the courier service. Since it's inception, it has been designed to transport packages - boxes as well as envelopes.
I wouldn't recommend trying to send a 400# box of rocks through the US Post though. It's ok to send data by telephone line, I hope. Oops, only designed for voice.
Analog Phone lines:
Binary data => Analog Signal => Binary data -- on your best day.
More likely you are going to do:
Binary data => Analog Signal => Digital Conversion & Amplification [=> Repeat] => Binary Data
After your second aplifier you have just lost anything above 48.8 if you ever had it.
Again, Can you send data over an analog phone line - of course, You impliment a hack a bunch of bright men developed and it works sort of as long as everything else is working.
You think it's a good idea - check the retransmition rate - 10 - 20 % retransmition of bad packets is not unusual on rural lines.
Digital lines: Binary->Binary->Binary - ohhh, it works It's ok to send email via cable, I hope. Oops, only designed for video programming.
Analog cable 2 way: all the same problems with using a phone line - just a bigger pipe.
Analog cabel 1 way: a huge clusterfuck of clusterfucks.
Digital Cable: Binary->Binary->Binary - ohh, it works too
Note what happens - you start with a hack to make it work, then someone comes along and rebuilds the system to fulfill the need.
Nobody has found a process people will agree to for using Binary attatchments - so what are you left with? A system that works for what it was designed for, and sort of works for what it has become.
Even if you create a format for transfering Binary Data as Binary Data, you still have the problem that the not everyone is going to be able to download at the same rate. You might be able to push that 50MB file up on the corperate OC3, but Bob is still going to have to recieve it on his DSL, or gods forbid, over his cellphone linked laptop. You place the file on a server and send just the link to it, you have short sweet TEXT messages going over E-Mail and you have large files waiting for proper downloads in a proper fasion when it's convienent for people to grab them.
It's all about the right tool for the right job. I can seat a new piston with a 10# sledge, but a ring compresser and the wooden handle of a 20oz hammer works better.
Stop doing stupid size and.EXE and.DOC restrictions for those of us stuck in Windowsland.
Um, email was never designed for this. Worse the hack that is MIME was never designed for this. Email was designed to send - wait for it - mail!. Mime was designed to send text files attatched to mail messages - and later expanded to binary data. Look at the protocol, there is very little in the way of error correction and/or data integrity.
You want to send the power point presentation, that's fine - use a protocol that's designed to send a huge binary file. Those size,.exe, etc. restrictions aren't just there to piss you off. They are there to ensure that the mail keeps flowing. I like the idea of stripping large files out of the messages and replacing them with links to ftp/http servers. To me that's about as painless as it gets, and it sure as hell beats trying to explain to some moron on the other end of a phone why he can't get any mail when a 2GB file is attatched to his first message
Check in/Check out was the Sony DRM of the day, not too bad unless you loose one of the disks then you have just lost 1 of your 3 copies, & no you can't just remove & reinstall SS, as far as I could tell, it saved the list either in the registry or in a hidden file somewhere.
And yes, saying the software killed the format is not at all inaccurate. Upgrading it was a nightmare - the 2 times I tried, it woudln't run until I ran through all 3 patches on the site - no cumulative patches available.
On the up side, I believe that Realplayer now has an interface for it. Without the checkin/out crap.
Sometimes that doesn't work so well.
I just put together a Hylafax fax server using 2 ISA jumpered modems, recycled HD's (4 & 6 GB),MoBo(533Mhz), etc.
Worked nice yesterday after finally finding & getting the 2 hardware modems in. Unfortunately I came in today to one of the HD's slamming the read arm against the stop trying to thermal calibrate... and making this horrid scratching sound every once in a while.
So, I love recycled hardware, but some days it doesn't pay to dig through the scrap bin....also might be a problem with the MB, having problems getting 2 different HD's to format.
Nice project, but I think I may have to start with newer hardware.
human resources
That says it all right there. They are resources not people. Resources don't need medical care, time off or anything else beyond proper scheduling. When the US moved from having Offices for Personel to Human Resources we started down a very bad path.
Why is it the responsibility of companies to provide healthcare to it's employees? Because those employees are what make the company work. If you are turning a billion dollar net profit every year, sure you can pass every penny on to the stockholders. In return you get happy stockholders, and a 30-60% turnover rate in your employees - who are all so pissed off they go out of their way to subtly sabatoge your business.
Oh, and contribute to 80% of your shrinkage.
Hmm, and sue you and win every year.
And contribute to a bad PR situation.
And drive up the number of workman's comp claims - valid or not.
Alternately they can treat the workers as humans instead of replaceable parts, keep all but the greediest of stockholders happy, keep their inventory, and spend a shitload less fighting off the negative NIMBY publicity. You think those lawyers that show up at all the town meetings all over the country every day come cheap?
I think that several people have stated it or parts of it, but here's my take:
Does the sandles-&-ponytail nature of OSS development effect it's saleability?
No
Does the lack of 3-Piece-Suit-Wearing face men for those OSS projects effect it's saleability?
Yes
The people who ultimately decide on which software is going to be used are the 3 piece suit MBAs. Do they care what the techie in the basement wore when they wrote it?
No
Do they care what the man in their boardroom is wearing when they try to sell it to them?
Yes
I've been a tech for 20 years now in 3 different industries (Bio,Chem,& now IT), I've had to deal with everybody from the schmo who resurfaces FTIR-TIR plates to President/Owners who want to know why they can't successfully run a water catalized coating on an unsealed unit in the middle of a weeklong thunderstorm. The cruel reality is that people divide the world into US and THEM a lot more than they will admit, and the most obvious way to see that someone is an US is how they dress.
Best advice I ever got for interviews? Find out how you are supposed to dress on the job everyday and show up to the interview 1 step higher.
Job is casual - dress business casual, the job is business casual - dress business, etc.
The other thing is dress for your audiance. You show up for a tour of the sewers in Armani, everyone is just going to think you are a pompus asshat & not give you any respect. You show up in cutoffs and a T-shirt for a board meeting, you are a bum who can't possibly provide them with anything usefull.
Of course there are times that people are just nucking futs about the dress-code. One company I worked for made us wear button-downs, dress-slacks, dress shoes, and ties - to work in a lab with liquid adhesives and rotary presses. Their reasoning? They had expanded the sales office space to surround the lab and we were now 'Office' people because customer's might see us.
Same company once called a company they had been doing business with for 15 years and told them to cancell all the orders and never send another salesman. The reason? The salesman had shown up with a well trimmed beard.(Everyone knows you can't trust people with beards.)
IM: I think that it would be difficult for a company to "insert" anything via IM. Don't all IM services encrypt their traffic? - Perhaps it's not end-to-end encryption (I'm sure that AOL and MSN want the capability to spy on your conversations), but it's likely encrypted between you and the IM service provider. So the advertiser would have to decrypt and re-encrypt messages in order to insert advertisements - but this would cause an uproar (and undoubtedly would violate the TOS of the IM service provider.) Alternatively, the advertiser could host an IM bot that spams you with ads - but its bots would very quickly get blacklisted.
You could do what several other companies have done, create a frame with the useful information and a small frame to display pushed adds in. Qualcom had a mail client like that I believe. To employ it, you intercept all IM traffic not sent by your IM client.
P2P would be a bigger issue, if you created a P2P client to do that with, you might be potentially at risk for suits from **AA for facilitating copyright infringment. Not entirely certain how they would do it, but I am sure they would try - ignoring the Torrent level of linux distro's, non copyright/artist approved music, etc - we all KNOW the ONLY possible [roll_eye style:exagerated] use of P2P is pirating corperate produced music.
Web servers report the IP address of all connections to any CGI aware script interface.
websites currently identify domains owning the IP address through an automated call to internic &/|| nslookup
The concept of targeted web advertising is based on knowing who is submitting the request.
The concept of providing 'free' advertising supported internet access has been used previously - (Juno,NetZero).
Website interception and modification is/has been done by many major free hosting sites - used to brand all of the sites as coming from them.
Non-Obvious -- FAIL
altering web advertising based on customer identity is the core model for Google.
CSS was developed to allow the skinning of websites without distorting the core of the pages.
Google currently pays content providers for using GoogleAdds.
Face it all Google is doing is defining 'customer' as the WiFi owner instead of the user and claiming it's a whole new patentable idea. It's neither new nor novel - a corperate paradigm shift perhaps - but one that a huge number of companies have already made.
I can't think of the third criteria off the top of my head but if you fail the first 2 does it matter?
No Child Left Behind?
Hmm, feel good legislation that was never funded?
It's easy to say we did something for the children when all's you have to do is say yeah or ney, but don't have to come up with money for it.
I took a class on fetish photography with/from Nitke.
The whole case is that if she produces a table book of fetish art - she has several - she and the publishing house can determine where the book is to be sold and thereby adhere to the local obsenity laws. If, however, she publishes that same book on the internet, she can be held criminally liable in areas where the material is deemed obscene.
Let's take this to the extreem. If a US protectorate, the fictional island of Stickupbuttus, declares images depicting the bare ankle of a woman to be obscene *, every US website owner who shows an image of a woman's ankle is vulnerable to criminal prosecution.
That's why the suit was brought in the first place, to try to get the courts to say that a community based standard cannot apply to a medium that is simultaniously available throughout the US without chilling the speach of everyone on that medium. Took a trip to Cancoon & have photo's from the topless beach? You can be charged with obscenity if you post them on your website. Take a picture of someone in a Dominatrix outfit at the bar on Haloween? Same thing. Thongs from Daytona Beach? Ditto. Do a nude model shoot for photography class? Keep it away from your website. Wrote the next great romance? Don't do an E-publish
As an artist and profesional photographer, Barbara's medium is graphical. What the current verdict by the apeals court and this rejection say is, if she puts 1 photo which offends the standards of any 1 community in the US Federal Jurisdiction, she can be held criminally liable for it. Put bluntly, half the great masterpieces of the Rennisance don't pass that standard. Also, I don't know about you, but I think I might just start puking if every image on the Internet that might offend even 1 community were suddenly replaced by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Geddes photos.
* You laugh, those floor length table covers in Victorian homes where there because 'the sight of the gracefully curved table legs may inflame the male passion'.
What they have said is that MS has unfairly used it's dominance in desktop OS sales to force Server sales. That's the core of what they are looking to remedy now.
The actual documentation as I understand it is the core protocols/APIs for connectivity between MS applications.
What they got was a limited copy of the connectivity source code with no explanation of the APIs referenced, and that's why it was deemed to be useless.
MS provides:
function set_connection(pointer preconfigured_array){ push (preconfigured_array, connect_to_who); go=make_connection(preconfigured_array); if (! go){ return rnd(0); }else{ return go; } }
MS agent says "What do you mean you need documentation? It's right there, everything you need to know about making a connection!"
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, the glorious days of slamming my head against a brick wall because it hurt less than talking to the people on the phone. ... it's only about a year for technical support. Why you ask? Because 90% of the people on the other end of the line are not qualified to use a toaster let alone a PC. I have spoken to everyone from 90 year old grandmothers to US Senators - Network administrators to neophites who are still trying to take their first PC out of a box. All in all, if the person was willing to listen, follow directions and pay attention, I could solve the problem... the other 90% just left both of us frustated and pissed off. .... that one made it to a manager. ... etc.]
[rant class:semi-incoherant]
The average lifespan of a telephone customer service rep is 18 months
Best call: Mother caught little Johnie surfing porn, so she cut the phone line & superglued the jack into the modem. Since she was paying for internet service it was my responsibility to get her back online
Death threats? weekly. Verbal abuse? 80% of the calls - since it usually started before I finished the hello, no it wasn't my sparkling personality. People get on the phone and they have the same feeling of invulnerability and anonymity that they do in cars. Perhaps someone should do a study reguarding phone rage.
Why do people on the tech line read scripts? Because the people who knew what they were talking about have all left before they became suicidal or homicidal - and the people who are left are the McD's rejects being paid minimum wage to read those scripts. You CANNOT pay someone enough to take that kind of abuse for extended periods, not if they give any sort of damb about anything.
I have worked 2 call centers & spoken with people from many more - almost all are the same way - 95% of the people are either self medicating or on psych meds, the rest are either new or should be medicated. The people who come in bright and cheery expecting to help people are crushed out in about 3 months and the anti-social mysanthropes feel entirely vindicated in hating everything with the species name Homo - {homo-erectus, homo-sitius, homo-moronicus, homo-knucklesdragonfloorus, homo-STFUB4IKY
My favorite line FTFA: Be nice - or else
I once gave a guy a nickle refund. I was authorized to just hand out $20 in the name of customer satisfaction. Guy pissed me off after I offered him $10 credit - he demanded to get what he was owed - so I walked him down the path & after he agreed to every element, I totaled up his actual refund & applied it to his account $ 0.05. Thank you and have a nice day. Please feel free to call back anytime 24 hours a day 365 days a year.[click]
I also like the Indian 35/10 rule - only just give me the damn 10 year old, I always had better luck.
[/rant]
I am sorry, the use of clowns to represent oneself in court has been patented by SCO and therefore cannot be used by SONY unless they choose to liscence it. However given that process's track record, it's not all that effective anyway so why bother?.
For the record I do believe the use of Jesters, Charlatens, and Psychics are still public domain.
To paraphrase a management book I read:
You don't need to know what a project is trying to do in order to manage the people in the project.
OK, on some level that might be true, one herd of cat's is pretty much like another and the skills to get them moving in the same direction are the same - but let's be realistic, if you don't know the business or the finer points of the process, you can very easily herd your cats right over the edge of a cliff.
I have seen a bunch of people come in with MBA's who think that they know how to make things run smoothly, only to find out later that things were smoothly moving twords a head-on collision with reality.
Master Bullsh*t Artists have their place - they make great insulation between working teams and management that lives in a marketing world. However, unless they know what exactly the team is doing, they need to stay away from trying to micro-manage the team.
(iv) do not permit the redistribution, retransmission or other exporting of a phonorecord embodying all or part of a performance licensed under this section from the device by digital outputs or removable media
OK I read that as saying if your trasmition can be recorded on any form of removable media it's illegal to broadcast without DRM. You know if I read it that way, some **IAA fucktard is going to try to use it that way.
Remember the DCMA will never be used to sqash innovation or competative ventures, and the PATRIOT act would never be used except to fight terrorists. Our dedicated politicians told us so.
The civil rights movement is a good counter-example of a special interest working for rights that do not negatively impact the majority's rights.
[hyperbole = on]
BS, they trampled all over my right to lynch people and burn crosses in other peoples yards. Bunch of fringe loonies out to take away my God given right to terrorize people just because they are different.
[hyperbole = off]
Sad state of affairs is that no matter what 'Public' or 'Special' interest you are looking at, there is going to be someone opposed to you on the grounds it's going to infringe on them.
As far as the actual FA goes, if the law says that I have to use the 'most restrictive' form of DRM, do I have to change my broadcast stream every week when competing DRMs quote themselves as being better?
How do they plan on controling those servers outside the US? Since the law would only apply to copywriten pieces, you can't use packet filtering to just kill MP3 & OV streams, because you would need to know if the individual piece was covered.
Let's be honest here....
MythTV was written by geeks, for geeks, I don't think that there's a lot of debate on that issue.
If a company want's to make & sell a MythTV box and can turn a profit doing it - so much the better, but either way, the MythTV geeks will keep working on the project. [note that it would be nice if some of the profit was forwarded as a donation to the team.]
What they are turning a profit on is not the MythTV software or the hardware. People are going to be paying for the convienence of not having to put it together for themselves. Check out companies that are selling HylaFax fax-servers. There are companies selling Athalon 1800 PC's w/ 4 fax lines & charging $1500 for them. Thats about $400(assuming they arn't using salvaged parts or a high end 4 line modem cards) for the PC & $1100 for configuing it. Not bad money for a job that took me about 4 hours to do the first time(stupid ISA jumpered modems).
I was working tech support that day.
You would not believe the number of people calling to complain that they couldn't see what was going on down the street because of the smoke and/or dust and they couldn't watch the news because their cable TV and internet services were not working.
Geeee, there are whole blocks of your city missing, why do you THINK your Cable is down?
IIRC - the basement of one of the towers housed a major peering point as well as a network satilite feeds.
Does it bother anyone else that the US said:
Mark Summers, representing the US government, said there was no precedent to suggest the US would breach its promises, and the court should take on "faith" the undertaking.
but I don't see anywhere where they 'promise' to try him in federal court - they have given him 'assurances' but no 'guarantee'. Sorry, as soon as somebody says "take my word for it but I won't write it down", you know damb well they have no intention of keeping their precious word.
[bad ascii]
[/bad ascii]
I am trying to remember where the anode & cathode go, but my poor caffene deprived brain is failing miserably. I do remember that the efficiency of the cell is related to the surface area of the catalist membrane and that there was discussion of using micro-embossing - the same thing they use for those hologram stickers & stick on screen brighteners - to increace the surface area.
I worked for a company that did (still does) security holograms. Some of these puppies layer up to 24 seperate security features onto a single repeat (about 1 - 2"^2). When the head of the hologram dept went to China for a seminar, they (the Chineese govt) basically insisted he tour the new hologram lab at one of the Beiging (sp?) universities. Sure enough they were proudly displaying one of the security holograms we had made along with their clone of it. 3 months later Customs was finding authentic looking security holograms on counterfit goods --- wonder where they came from?
LOL, Check UK court cases
IIRC Lord McDonald of McDonald owns the McDonald name and all derivatives of it in the UK. I believe that got settled when McD's went after some small time eatery & the Lord stepped in and told them to piss off.
Could be interesting seeing McDonald (member of EU) vs. McDonald (US company) in that name grab.
Check the RFC for SMTP.
all SMTP email is sent via 7bit text characters. That's how it is. If you send a picture, it's expanded by 1/8th as it's converted to base64 and then sent as text.
If you send a 50MB Quark file, it's now a 56.25 MB text file.
When geeks say it's not the best tool, it's because we usually know what's going on under the hood. If you want to rewrite the SMTP spec and can get everyone to agree on the proper form of error checking - feel free. Until SMTP does proper BINARY data transfer, it's not the right tool to use to transfer BINARY data.
Now the fun:
It's ok to send packages by US Mail, I hope. Or is that only designed for letters? Postcards? God no!!!
The postal service is built around the courier service. Since it's inception, it has been designed to transport packages - boxes as well as envelopes.
I wouldn't recommend trying to send a 400# box of rocks through the US Post though.
It's ok to send data by telephone line, I hope. Oops, only designed for voice.
Analog Phone lines:
Binary data => Analog Signal => Binary data -- on your best day.
More likely you are going to do:
Binary data => Analog Signal => Digital Conversion & Amplification [=> Repeat] => Binary Data
After your second aplifier you have just lost anything above 48.8 if you ever had it.
Again, Can you send data over an analog phone line - of course, You impliment a hack a bunch of bright men developed and it works sort of as long as everything else is working.
You think it's a good idea - check the retransmition rate - 10 - 20 % retransmition of bad packets is not unusual on rural lines.
Digital lines: Binary->Binary->Binary - ohhh, it works
It's ok to send email via cable, I hope. Oops, only designed for video programming.
Analog cable 2 way: all the same problems with using a phone line - just a bigger pipe.
Analog cabel 1 way: a huge clusterfuck of clusterfucks.
Digital Cable: Binary->Binary->Binary - ohh, it works too
Note what happens - you start with a hack to make it work, then someone comes along and rebuilds the system to fulfill the need.
Nobody has found a process people will agree to for using Binary attatchments - so what are you left with? A system that works for what it was designed for, and sort of works for what it has become.
Even if you create a format for transfering Binary Data as Binary Data, you still have the problem that the not everyone is going to be able to download at the same rate. You might be able to push that 50MB file up on the corperate OC3, but Bob is still going to have to recieve it on his DSL, or gods forbid, over his cellphone linked laptop. You place the file on a server and send just the link to it, you have short sweet TEXT messages going over E-Mail and you have large files waiting for proper downloads in a proper fasion when it's convienent for people to grab them.
It's all about the right tool for the right job. I can seat a new piston with a 10# sledge, but a ring compresser and the wooden handle of a 20oz hammer works better.
Stop doing stupid size and .EXE and .DOC restrictions for those of us stuck in Windowsland. .exe, etc. restrictions aren't just there to piss you off. They are there to ensure that the mail keeps flowing. I like the idea of stripping large files out of the messages and replacing them with links to ftp/http servers. To me that's about as painless as it gets, and it sure as hell beats trying to explain to some moron on the other end of a phone why he can't get any mail when a 2GB file is attatched to his first message
Um, email was never designed for this. Worse the hack that is MIME was never designed for this. Email was designed to send - wait for it - mail!. Mime was designed to send text files attatched to mail messages - and later expanded to binary data. Look at the protocol, there is very little in the way of error correction and/or data integrity.
You want to send the power point presentation, that's fine - use a protocol that's designed to send a huge binary file. Those size,
Check in/Check out was the Sony DRM of the day, not too bad unless you loose one of the disks then you have just lost 1 of your 3 copies, & no you can't just remove & reinstall SS, as far as I could tell, it saved the list either in the registry or in a hidden file somewhere.
And yes, saying the software killed the format is not at all inaccurate. Upgrading it was a nightmare - the 2 times I tried, it woudln't run until I ran through all 3 patches on the site - no cumulative patches available.
On the up side, I believe that Realplayer now has an interface for it. Without the checkin/out crap.
Sometimes that doesn't work so well. ... and making this horrid scratching sound every once in a while.
I just put together a Hylafax fax server using 2 ISA jumpered modems, recycled HD's (4 & 6 GB),MoBo(533Mhz), etc.
Worked nice yesterday after finally finding & getting the 2 hardware modems in. Unfortunately I came in today to one of the HD's slamming the read arm against the stop trying to thermal calibrate
So, I love recycled hardware, but some days it doesn't pay to dig through the scrap bin....also might be a problem with the MB, having problems getting 2 different HD's to format.
Nice project, but I think I may have to start with newer hardware.
Sigh, guess I'll wait
human resources
That says it all right there. They are resources not people. Resources don't need medical care, time off or anything else beyond proper scheduling. When the US moved from having Offices for Personel to Human Resources we started down a very bad path.
Why is it the responsibility of companies to provide healthcare to it's employees? Because those employees are what make the company work. If you are turning a billion dollar net profit every year, sure you can pass every penny on to the stockholders. In return you get happy stockholders, and a 30-60% turnover rate in your employees - who are all so pissed off they go out of their way to subtly sabatoge your business.
Oh, and contribute to 80% of your shrinkage.
Hmm, and sue you and win every year.
And contribute to a bad PR situation.
And drive up the number of workman's comp claims - valid or not.
Alternately they can treat the workers as humans instead of replaceable parts, keep all but the greediest of stockholders happy, keep their inventory, and spend a shitload less fighting off the negative NIMBY publicity. You think those lawyers that show up at all the town meetings all over the country every day come cheap?
I think that several people have stated it or parts of it, but here's my take:
Does the sandles-&-ponytail nature of OSS development effect it's saleability?
No
Does the lack of 3-Piece-Suit-Wearing face men for those OSS projects effect it's saleability?
Yes
The people who ultimately decide on which software is going to be used are the 3 piece suit MBAs.
Do they care what the techie in the basement wore when they wrote it?
No
Do they care what the man in their boardroom is wearing when they try to sell it to them?
Yes
I've been a tech for 20 years now in 3 different industries (Bio,Chem,& now IT), I've had to deal with everybody from the schmo who resurfaces FTIR-TIR plates to President/Owners who want to know why they can't successfully run a water catalized coating on an unsealed unit in the middle of a weeklong thunderstorm. The cruel reality is that people divide the world into US and THEM a lot more than they will admit, and the most obvious way to see that someone is an US is how they dress.
Best advice I ever got for interviews? Find out how you are supposed to dress on the job everyday and show up to the interview 1 step higher.
Job is casual - dress business casual, the job is business casual - dress business, etc.
The other thing is dress for your audiance. You show up for a tour of the sewers in Armani, everyone is just going to think you are a pompus asshat & not give you any respect. You show up in cutoffs and a T-shirt for a board meeting, you are a bum who can't possibly provide them with anything usefull.
Of course there are times that people are just nucking futs about the dress-code. One company I worked for made us wear button-downs, dress-slacks, dress shoes, and ties - to work in a lab with liquid adhesives and rotary presses. Their reasoning? They had expanded the sales office space to surround the lab and we were now 'Office' people because customer's might see us.
Same company once called a company they had been doing business with for 15 years and told them to cancell all the orders and never send another salesman. The reason? The salesman had shown up with a well trimmed beard.(Everyone knows you can't trust people with beards.)
IM: I think that it would be difficult for a company to "insert" anything via IM. Don't all IM services encrypt their traffic? - Perhaps it's not end-to-end encryption (I'm sure that AOL and MSN want the capability to spy on your conversations), but it's likely encrypted between you and the IM service provider. So the advertiser would have to decrypt and re-encrypt messages in order to insert advertisements - but this would cause an uproar (and undoubtedly would violate the TOS of the IM service provider.) Alternatively, the advertiser could host an IM bot that spams you with ads - but its bots would very quickly get blacklisted.
You could do what several other companies have done, create a frame with the useful information and a small frame to display pushed adds in. Qualcom had a mail client like that I believe. To employ it, you intercept all IM traffic not sent by your IM client.
P2P would be a bigger issue, if you created a P2P client to do that with, you might be potentially at risk for suits from **AA for facilitating copyright infringment. Not entirely certain how they would do it, but I am sure they would try - ignoring the Torrent level of linux distro's, non copyright/artist approved music, etc - we all KNOW the ONLY possible [roll_eye style:exagerated] use of P2P is pirating corperate produced music.
- Web servers report the IP address of all connections to any CGI aware script interface.
- websites currently identify domains owning the IP address through an automated call to internic &/|| nslookup
- The concept of targeted web advertising is based on knowing who is submitting the request.
- The concept of providing 'free' advertising supported internet access has been used previously - (Juno,NetZero).
- Website interception and modification is/has been done by many major free hosting sites - used to brand all of the sites as coming from them.
Non-Obvious -- FAIL- altering web advertising based on customer identity is the core model for Google.
- CSS was developed to allow the skinning of websites without distorting the core of the pages.
- Google currently pays content providers for using GoogleAdds.
Face it all Google is doing is defining 'customer' as the WiFi owner instead of the user and claiming it's a whole new patentable idea. It's neither new nor novel - a corperate paradigm shift perhaps - but one that a huge number of companies have already made. I can't think of the third criteria off the top of my head but if you fail the first 2 does it matter?Freed to Investigate Rewarding Employment Diversity
No Child Left Behind?
Hmm, feel good legislation that was never funded?
It's easy to say we did something for the children when all's you have to do is say yeah or ney, but don't have to come up with money for it.
I took a class on fetish photography with/from Nitke.
The whole case is that if she produces a table book of fetish art - she has several - she and the publishing house can determine where the book is to be sold and thereby adhere to the local obsenity laws. If, however, she publishes that same book on the internet, she can be held criminally liable in areas where the material is deemed obscene.
Let's take this to the extreem. If a US protectorate, the fictional island of Stickupbuttus, declares images depicting the bare ankle of a woman to be obscene *, every US website owner who shows an image of a woman's ankle is vulnerable to criminal prosecution.
That's why the suit was brought in the first place, to try to get the courts to say that a community based standard cannot apply to a medium that is simultaniously available throughout the US without chilling the speach of everyone on that medium. Took a trip to Cancoon & have photo's from the topless beach? You can be charged with obscenity if you post them on your website. Take a picture of someone in a Dominatrix outfit at the bar on Haloween? Same thing. Thongs from Daytona Beach? Ditto. Do a nude model shoot for photography class? Keep it away from your website. Wrote the next great romance? Don't do an E-publish
As an artist and profesional photographer, Barbara's medium is graphical. What the current verdict by the apeals court and this rejection say is, if she puts 1 photo which offends the standards of any 1 community in the US Federal Jurisdiction, she can be held criminally liable for it. Put bluntly, half the great masterpieces of the Rennisance don't pass that standard. Also, I don't know about you, but I think I might just start puking if every image on the Internet that might offend even 1 community were suddenly replaced by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Geddes photos.
* You laugh, those floor length table covers in Victorian homes where there because 'the sight of the gracefully curved table legs may inflame the male passion'.
The actual documentation as I understand it is the core protocols/APIs for connectivity between MS applications.
What they got was a limited copy of the connectivity source code with no explanation of the APIs referenced, and that's why it was deemed to be useless.
MS provides:
MS agent says "What do you mean you need documentation? It's right there, everything you need to know about making a connection!"
Let's see 2K email accounts ....
Ahhh, I have a 700mhz linux box collecting dust under my desk...
$400 for scsi raid
$300 for tape backup
OK for $1.8mil I can cover NY.