Vinyl had a problem with static - dust and crap would get attracted to the disk, then stick to the needle. CD's had no issue remotely like that. What they did, however, have was a surface that needed to be clean to the point that the reflective properties of human fingerprints could be an issue, as could any scratch made by a passing strand of lint. They probably re-packaged every "anti-static album wipe" as a "lint-free CD cleaning cloth". Now see how many times you can rub your fingers across the surface of a CD and wipe it off with your shirt before it doesn't sound as good as your friend's what with the laser hitting random parts of the CD and the player getting so confused about it's time index and current audio track that it won't let you advance or rewind. You know, subtle audiophile stuff.
One of them can speak both code and legalese at the same time, and one of them can spot that the other described a pre-increment but designed the loop like he meant to describe a post-increment. Mock them if you will, AC, but I'd love it if they brought these two on where I work.
It also really matters on a device that doesn't have Flash. Flash is bad enough when it's up and running and serving you obnoxious ads and opening security holes on your system. The worst is that with its near monopoly, when you take it away, then someone says "Will you publish my app?", often times they're asking "Will you permit my content to be seen on the Internet when using your platform?" You can see Fiore's cartoons on Salon.com on your desktop/notebook/netbook. If Salon.com wanted to serve you their Flash content in general on an iWhatever, they'd need to publish an app. And apply to the store. And answer for the fact that Fiore is the least of the ridicule of public figures that they engage in. The devices that a lot of people will adopt as a primary means of "accessing the Internet" will display content that web site operators can publish any damn way they want using text, photos, and Quicktime media formats, and content that Apple's willing to have its name associated with using anything else.
Novell, who had Microsoft sell their distro on the premise that Microsoft owned hunks of Linux is one of the last bastions of Open Source? Google gives lots of code away and sponsors events to get student developers to cut their teeth writing for Open Source projects, and it's scary that they're big bad proprietary guys getting their "commercial hooks deeper into" their own invention? And somehow the article title is the name of a Rod Stewart song about people judging the town tramp?!?!?!?!?!? Jeesh. Things are murky enough without this guy trying to make it worse in hopes you keep coming back for the part where he sorts it all out for you.
the way it persists itself in autostart is really nasty,
Which simply shows that the lack of Linux malware isn't because Linux is somehow magically superior, but simply because nobody has taken the time to write any...
Um, no. It doesn't show shit. Not unless he explains that "the way it persists itself in autostart" is something harder to rectify than the readily-editable plain text files he listed. I've known IT professionals who couldn't come up with a way to salvage a machine hit by a "ransom note" trojan. Hell, at least once Sophos has decided it was easier to crack the password than provide cleaning instructions. Windows has lots and lots of places to hide files that start when you boot and log in, built in features for disabling everything you might do to fix a problem (so that your office peons don't do anything "dangerous"), and no way to get at the system without loading everything that's configured to load - well, almost no way. You can edit the Windows registry from a Linux CD. I'm sure that's totally easier than vi/etc/crontab
OP, yes, it's unethical to release what you have. No one's going to thank you for choosing a worthy cause to donate their hijacked bandwidth and CPU cycles to. And unless you're the guy behind this, you didn't get there first and that thing you threw together in a week won't be giving qualified "security people" any revelations. If Linux wants to lay claim to Unix's heritage, those guys were decades behind the first people to exploit stupid security blunders. Stop having a chip on your shoulder about people who didn't put two and two together when they saw "Hardening Linux" on the shelf at the bookstore. Those aren't sysadmins who are going to be saved from their ignorance when "security people" - desperate for a way to tangibly illustrate that the worst-configured systems can be pwned - get your toolkit like manna from heaven.
It's not necessarily that 60C is a panic value in and of itself. Say you want to shoot for 50 on average, so you start slowing things down a little at 55. Throttle down a conservative 5% and watch for it to level off. If it had just spontaneously hit 56C, you'd be happy to throttle it back by 10% - 90% of max speed - except you just throttled it back and it went up a degree, so throttle it back by 15%. 57C - ok, you've throttled by a "heightened alert" percentage AND the temperature delta is still positive. By the time you're at 59C, throttling is starting to look like a complete failure - either you've been pegging the CPU forever, you're operating at an out of spec environmental temperature/ventilation condition, or the cooling situation isn't what it should be.
This is a really well thought-out scenario, but I think choosing nuclear war as an example hurt your argument in places. I know, I know, that was what the system was designed for. But you have to admit, it would still interest the people who didn't personally have to hide in their fridges.
Cursive writing will persist as a specialty skill for those of a historical or artistic bent. My mother did the most beautiful calligraphy when I was growing up, and it was already fading fast with increasingly cheap typewriters. Some people are still learning it, to show off at the Renn Faire. People shoot bows and arrows, but not because it's a way to survive like it used to be.
...what pisses most people off is that the offshore phone monkeys are completely unintelligible.
That's not quite all there is to it. The phone monkeys are also working off a script. And probably haven't been working at that job long enough to learn anything else about what you'd like somebody to figure out. They might even be fielding calls as an "outsource support vendor" to too many companies at the same time to learn anything more. Your odds of talking to a subject matter expert are approximately zero. Their job is not to be good, their job is to cost less than somebody good. Speaking a mashed up creole version of the language in which they have titular fluency is just adding insult to injury a lot of the time.
Um. If you are on the helpdesk - unjamming printers and unfreezing outlook is your job. Your work isn't being interrupted every five minutes, but rather you are being called on to do your job every five minutes.
There are as many different sets of roles for helpdesk employee as there are helpdesks. I work at a helpdesk and it is very much an interruption to my job if someone comes to me with any of the more mundane issues the desk as a whole handles. Analyzing trouble tickets for trend analysis, developing workarounds to new defects, trying to automate those workarounds so that we don't have 800 sites all calling us about the same thing, updating the knowledge base, evaluating new hardware and software releases (yes, it's some other department's job to do that first, but they like to bury things in 50-page release notes where people have to call the helpdesk to accomplish something basic, forgetting that that's the short definition of "defect"), writing database front-ends so that we don't have to have the frontline poking around in places we'd rather they wouldn't, and I can't even begin to describe the variety of conference calls I manage to get roped into. Even in the frontline of a generic helpdesk at a non-technology outfit he could easily have one set of responsibilities that involves someone running up to him and telling him to drop everything, and another that involves having something engaging, stimulating, and remotely resembling why he got into technology in the first place that he's being asked to drop. Oh, and RTF summary again - do you really think that web developers, dba's, and database architects get asked literally every five minutes to handle something stupid and boring without ever getting a few hours to sink their teeth into a task?
IT is a support function
Um, no. The people who design and implement the things that later get supported are also working in IT.
If you have an issue that could create serious problems if you were given the wrong drugs, etc., you should get a medic-alert bracelet or similar with the information.
Do you have a blood type other than AB positive, and if so, do you have this information on a medic-alert bracelet? There's information that you expect to have in advance (you're right, it doesn't amount to much), information you gather and have to make note of (I give him drug X, so don't give him drug Y, it won't mix, and by the way, he says he's diabetic), information that has to get to and from other parts of the hospital (uh yeah, his potassium was high when he came in, you might want to take him off that banana bag). We don't know what was happening in that ER, what challenges they worked their way through for a day, how many people they turned away exactly between 1 A.M. and 3 A.M., or how badly they needed to be seen (I've had two ambulance rides and zero life-threatening medical emergencies myself). The same guy who blogged that this was "more about billing than patient care" without backing up that assertion in any way links to his own earlier post where he talks about what "an obvious slam dunk" Electronic Health Records are, because it will result in "tens of thousands of lives saved annually in the US alone". My point is that people (I don't mean people like yourself who make sensible points, swillden) who don't know the story - and you still don't when you RTFA - shouldn't be going "OMG! You turn amboolance away 2 catch up on teh paperwork? Me know wuld hav dun that!" should remember the old adage "Nothing's impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself."
How convenient that ESET, the author of the report, offers a product to protect against that.
Yes, fortunate indeed. I would have thought that if you were going to go to the trouble of stealing account credentials, you'd engage in item theft or swindling money from a person's contacts like earlier posters mentioned. Fortunately, we had someone with a vested financial interest in setting them straight. The most valuable asset you accumulate in a MMORPG is the credibility with which you can display a hyperlink. I mean it's not like people will click on suspicious links from strangers.
Games have frequently been crap for the first release for a decade or more.
More, much more. Over twenty years ago, the first release of Pools of Radiance crashed if you entered any of several dungeons. Pretty ballsy when you had to call a telephone number to have someone snail mail you a stack of floppy disks.
I used to try and use that spare time towards improving our existing systems. My boss is very quick to put a stop to that kind of non-sense, but then has me wait for weeks on end before giving me a project he deems worth my time.
So why not just ignore him and get on with the job? If he complains then ask what else to do.
Yes, you tell your boss what for. You tell him you know what you need to do and he can like it or leave it. When you get fired, tell me where you used to work. I'd try to hook you up with the job I've got now, but every time someone leaves, they say "Hurray! The budget shrank. Oh by the way, we're bringing three new clients on board."
Apparently,they made more money off this than the download sales of all their other albums combined. And, even after giving it away for free, the CD release was one of their best selling albums.
They got a lot of publicity from the decision to use this model. I've heard about exactly one Radiohead album on NPR - care to guess which one? That article also talks about getting a lot of positive reviews and the album "having a more accessible sound and personal style of lyrics". <oldman>In my day, alternative bands released alternative music! And when they wrote a so-called "accessible" album and sold it with a marketing gimmick, we called them sell-outs!</oldman> But seriously, this example doesn't really prove anything either way. If this business model were a whole section of amazon.com or the iTunes music store, we might have some real data points.
I'd suggest two proxies. Squid for the caching, and Privoxy inline before it to filter out the adverts and other junk. It will make most junk laden pages better to read too.
Probably what I'd do in his situation. But if setting up Squid sounds like too much work for simple web surfing, Privoxy could be a tremendous help by itself. By default, it blocks a lot of the pop-up, drive-by advertising-related bandwidth robbers, and since the original poster already has a convenient status bar showing him who's grabbing his bandwidth and giving nothing in return, it's going to be trivial to build up a blacklist to just kill. The syntax of the configuration files may seem a little daunting at first if you're not use to something similar, but they're well-commented, and have a lot of examples. There's a straight-forward well-documented way to deanimate gifs (load only one frame, at substantial bandwidth savings), and if you delve into it, you might be able to minimize unnecessary reloads by tweaking http headers and javascript. It's cross-platform, easy to install and use if it's your only proxy (only slightly less so if you need to forward to another proxy) and it "Just Works".
The Firefox thing, do a reinstall and turn off the feedback agent, see if that helps.
Trust me when I say you can come up with new curses faster than you can code them into an automatic censorship proram...
Pondering this make me feel a whole lot better about the whole enterprise. I'm all in favor of protecting budding young minds from the use of profanity as a substitute for creative expression... by teaching them that profanity is the inspiration for expressing yourself creatively. Also I like the thought of someone going to their manager and saying, "I need a ruling on 'defecating masonry'. Can we let that go?"
I can't believe anyone can find a job with those requirements. Perhaps the mass of positions advertised these days are just a ploy to allow more H1Bs and outsourcing.
It's worse than that. It's managers who don't know how to tell someone who can learn on the job from someone who can't, and can't run a solid team that can teach the new guy the ropes. There's a pretty good article about how this happens at some companies. In my own job, I came on board a year ago with a solid team of upper tier people ready to take me under their wing, I taught myself more about SQL than anyone else there had ever bothered to learn (there's plenty more to worry about than the database stuff), and I moved up pretty quickly. There's a whole slew of resume bullet points where I went from never touched to proficient in one year. Then the technical leads largely left, the frontline people they weeded out (almost) all the worst of them, but they doubled or even tripled the workload on everyone with any idea what they were doing.
I couldn't come on board today and learn what I learned. Hell, fresh-faced kid who's as smart as me just started and I don't have time to teach him, word's gotten out through the whole company that I'm one of two people in the department you want to talk to and I'm being worked to death.
Why am I still there? The one thing they've got going for them is they've got a wicked smart über geek who knows his own doing the technical interviews. Until I can find another place doing the same thing where I can say, "I came in to find everyone frantic and the phones ringing off the hook. I tweaked a query I had written some months back to not join the two tables we didn't need, just return the column in question, added a date/time function, plugged it into my batch file to run it at 300 remote locations, had the data to resubmit within 20 minutes of when I walked in the door, and for the first time in four hours, everything was OK." I'm just some guy who's "only done SQL one year".
The law does not allow or require spy cameras.
The law requires that the on-line schools validate that the student is the one actually doing the work. The law does not specify any means of doing so.
The person who wrote the article should be fired for using an outrageous misleading headline and first paragraph to make a mountain out of a mole hill.
This is so dishonest that it doesn't qualify as journalism.
Well-said, but permit me a little nitpicking. On careful reading, you see that what they say is "a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras". The rest of the article is about how institutions are researching different ways of complying with student ID verification requirements, "spy" cameras most definitely included. The real problem is that they don't tell us anything about the bill besides what they say the gist of it is. I really wanted to either raise an objection with my representatives if the language of the bill was specific enough to require the kinds of measures that they were speculating about, or make my feelings clear to my school if they had enough wiggle room to decide how this went down. I mean, if I have to choose between my future and paying $150 for the privilege of having my fingerprint, name, and picture broadcast by I. fuckin' E. I want to know who to scream at. But no, all they want to tell me is that it's before Congress and it's a shoo-in to pass, no need to worry about the bill number, what house it's in, when a vote's scheduled if it is. I tried, but the last bill I could find is S.3180 which extended the HEA to the end of July 2008. Thanks, fuckwads. Next time you write about pending legislation in scary, ominous terms keep in mind that some of us will have a reaction other than to bend over and spread 'em.
So, Submitter says that the right-wing Chicagoboyz blog says that Congressman Culberson says that Congrassman Brady says that Congressman Capuano says that Majority Leader Pelosi says she wants to stifle free spech?
Yes, and the blog post links to the document itself, which says that they're talking about ways to disseminate the exact same information that they publish now using outside hosting services, that everybody's behind the idea, they have some common-sense guidelines for hosting the content, and there's at least one site they can give the green light to right now. They're looking to make sure that when you look at official content of the House of Representatives, you know you are, when you're not anymore, you know you're not anymore. Now, the one possible sticking point:
To the maximum extent possible, the official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House's content guidelines.
In light of the context of the letter, that's basically saying if you couldn't put it on the House website, you can't have it hosted next to content that you couldn't post on the House website. You can't have it looking like the House of Representatives is trying to sell you (crap - I've had like three web ads in four years escape my filters, what do they try to sell you these day? car wax, let's say car wax) car wax or wants you to click on a link to Food Not Bombs or your local "militia" after you listen to what they have to say. Even if this is the most draconian fascist nightmare you can imagine (if it is, go to your library, ask where the history section is, and grab three books at random) nobody's "scheming to impose rules". From the letter:
As you are aware, current CHA regulations have been interpreted to prohibit Members from posting official content outside of the House.gov domain.
Maybe Robert Brady was aware, but somebody needs to tell zenpundit and selil, and if John Culberson actually wasn't that fucking stupid, he should be ticked off at the words that have been put in his mouth. What they're out to do is go shopping for places where Representatives can post the media they want to, and give them a handy list of places they can post away without having to worry about their disk quota. I don't see how trying to find a content-neutral platform for offsite hosting of exactly the content disseminated now is "censorship", "nakedly partisan", or a move to "reimpose the 'Fairness Doctrine'".
Seriously, if I want to be roped into reading an article with a bunch of total fucking bullshit hype that any fifth grader can see through once they sit down and read the damn thing, I'll go to the checkout line at the drug store. Nice one, Timothy.
EVERYBODY PANIC!
Yes, everybody panic. We were all sadly mistaken when we thought we'd seen the worst out of the editors here.
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Vinyl had a problem with static - dust and crap would get attracted to the disk, then stick to the needle. CD's had no issue remotely like that. What they did, however, have was a surface that needed to be clean to the point that the reflective properties of human fingerprints could be an issue, as could any scratch made by a passing strand of lint. They probably re-packaged every "anti-static album wipe" as a "lint-free CD cleaning cloth". Now see how many times you can rub your fingers across the surface of a CD and wipe it off with your shirt before it doesn't sound as good as your friend's what with the laser hitting random parts of the CD and the player getting so confused about it's time index and current audio track that it won't let you advance or rewind. You know, subtle audiophile stuff.
One of them can speak both code and legalese at the same time, and one of them can spot that the other described a pre-increment but designed the loop like he meant to describe a post-increment. Mock them if you will, AC, but I'd love it if they brought these two on where I work.
It also really matters on a device that doesn't have Flash. Flash is bad enough when it's up and running and serving you obnoxious ads and opening security holes on your system. The worst is that with its near monopoly, when you take it away, then someone says "Will you publish my app?", often times they're asking "Will you permit my content to be seen on the Internet when using your platform?" You can see Fiore's cartoons on Salon.com on your desktop/notebook/netbook. If Salon.com wanted to serve you their Flash content in general on an iWhatever, they'd need to publish an app. And apply to the store. And answer for the fact that Fiore is the least of the ridicule of public figures that they engage in. The devices that a lot of people will adopt as a primary means of "accessing the Internet" will display content that web site operators can publish any damn way they want using text, photos, and Quicktime media formats, and content that Apple's willing to have its name associated with using anything else.
Confederate cash is rare and a century and a half old. It's worth a fortune.
Novell, who had Microsoft sell their distro on the premise that Microsoft owned hunks of Linux is one of the last bastions of Open Source? Google gives lots of code away and sponsors events to get student developers to cut their teeth writing for Open Source projects, and it's scary that they're big bad proprietary guys getting their "commercial hooks deeper into" their own invention? And somehow the article title is the name of a Rod Stewart song about people judging the town tramp?!?!?!?!?!? Jeesh. Things are murky enough without this guy trying to make it worse in hopes you keep coming back for the part where he sorts it all out for you.
Um, no. It doesn't show shit. Not unless he explains that "the way it persists itself in autostart" is something harder to rectify than the readily-editable plain text files he listed. I've known IT professionals who couldn't come up with a way to salvage a machine hit by a "ransom note" trojan. Hell, at least once Sophos has decided it was easier to crack the password than provide cleaning instructions. Windows has lots and lots of places to hide files that start when you boot and log in, built in features for disabling everything you might do to fix a problem (so that your office peons don't do anything "dangerous"), and no way to get at the system without loading everything that's configured to load - well, almost no way. You can edit the Windows registry from a Linux CD. I'm sure that's totally easier than vi /etc/crontab
OP, yes, it's unethical to release what you have. No one's going to thank you for choosing a worthy cause to donate their hijacked bandwidth and CPU cycles to. And unless you're the guy behind this, you didn't get there first and that thing you threw together in a week won't be giving qualified "security people" any revelations. If Linux wants to lay claim to Unix's heritage, those guys were decades behind the first people to exploit stupid security blunders. Stop having a chip on your shoulder about people who didn't put two and two together when they saw "Hardening Linux" on the shelf at the bookstore. Those aren't sysadmins who are going to be saved from their ignorance when "security people" - desperate for a way to tangibly illustrate that the worst-configured systems can be pwned - get your toolkit like manna from heaven.
It's not necessarily that 60C is a panic value in and of itself. Say you want to shoot for 50 on average, so you start slowing things down a little at 55. Throttle down a conservative 5% and watch for it to level off. If it had just spontaneously hit 56C, you'd be happy to throttle it back by 10% - 90% of max speed - except you just throttled it back and it went up a degree, so throttle it back by 15%. 57C - ok, you've throttled by a "heightened alert" percentage AND the temperature delta is still positive. By the time you're at 59C, throttling is starting to look like a complete failure - either you've been pegging the CPU forever, you're operating at an out of spec environmental temperature/ventilation condition, or the cooling situation isn't what it should be.
This is a really well thought-out scenario, but I think choosing nuclear war as an example hurt your argument in places. I know, I know, that was what the system was designed for. But you have to admit, it would still interest the people who didn't personally have to hide in their fridges.
Cursive writing will persist as a specialty skill for those of a historical or artistic bent. My mother did the most beautiful calligraphy when I was growing up, and it was already fading fast with increasingly cheap typewriters. Some people are still learning it, to show off at the Renn Faire. People shoot bows and arrows, but not because it's a way to survive like it used to be.
That's not quite all there is to it. The phone monkeys are also working off a script. And probably haven't been working at that job long enough to learn anything else about what you'd like somebody to figure out. They might even be fielding calls as an "outsource support vendor" to too many companies at the same time to learn anything more. Your odds of talking to a subject matter expert are approximately zero. Their job is not to be good, their job is to cost less than somebody good. Speaking a mashed up creole version of the language in which they have titular fluency is just adding insult to injury a lot of the time.
There are as many different sets of roles for helpdesk employee as there are helpdesks. I work at a helpdesk and it is very much an interruption to my job if someone comes to me with any of the more mundane issues the desk as a whole handles. Analyzing trouble tickets for trend analysis, developing workarounds to new defects, trying to automate those workarounds so that we don't have 800 sites all calling us about the same thing, updating the knowledge base, evaluating new hardware and software releases (yes, it's some other department's job to do that first, but they like to bury things in 50-page release notes where people have to call the helpdesk to accomplish something basic, forgetting that that's the short definition of "defect"), writing database front-ends so that we don't have to have the frontline poking around in places we'd rather they wouldn't, and I can't even begin to describe the variety of conference calls I manage to get roped into. Even in the frontline of a generic helpdesk at a non-technology outfit he could easily have one set of responsibilities that involves someone running up to him and telling him to drop everything, and another that involves having something engaging, stimulating, and remotely resembling why he got into technology in the first place that he's being asked to drop. Oh, and RTF summary again - do you really think that web developers, dba's, and database architects get asked literally every five minutes to handle something stupid and boring without ever getting a few hours to sink their teeth into a task?
Um, no. The people who design and implement the things that later get supported are also working in IT.
Yeah cause they killed all kinds of people before 1990 when all they had was paper.
Yes, and they still do. And that's not despite a sweeping adoption of IT, it's partly due to a lack of one.
If you have an issue that could create serious problems if you were given the wrong drugs, etc., you should get a medic-alert bracelet or similar with the information.
Do you have a blood type other than AB positive, and if so, do you have this information on a medic-alert bracelet? There's information that you expect to have in advance (you're right, it doesn't amount to much), information you gather and have to make note of (I give him drug X, so don't give him drug Y, it won't mix, and by the way, he says he's diabetic), information that has to get to and from other parts of the hospital (uh yeah, his potassium was high when he came in, you might want to take him off that banana bag). We don't know what was happening in that ER, what challenges they worked their way through for a day, how many people they turned away exactly between 1 A.M. and 3 A.M., or how badly they needed to be seen (I've had two ambulance rides and zero life-threatening medical emergencies myself). The same guy who blogged that this was "more about billing than patient care" without backing up that assertion in any way links to his own earlier post where he talks about what "an obvious slam dunk" Electronic Health Records are, because it will result in "tens of thousands of lives saved annually in the US alone". My point is that people (I don't mean people like yourself who make sensible points, swillden) who don't know the story - and you still don't when you RTFA - shouldn't be going "OMG! You turn amboolance away 2 catch up on teh paperwork? Me know wuld hav dun that!" should remember the old adage "Nothing's impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself."
In an ER, "paperwork" includes information on whether they'll kill you if they give you a certain drug or transfusion. Stuff like that.
That poor fuck. That's like asking IT to show you how to use the toilet because it's got one of those fancy high-tech motion sensor thingies on it.
Yes, fortunate indeed. I would have thought that if you were going to go to the trouble of stealing account credentials, you'd engage in item theft or swindling money from a person's contacts like earlier posters mentioned. Fortunately, we had someone with a vested financial interest in setting them straight. The most valuable asset you accumulate in a MMORPG is the credibility with which you can display a hyperlink. I mean it's not like people will click on suspicious links from strangers.
More, much more. Over twenty years ago, the first release of Pools of Radiance crashed if you entered any of several dungeons. Pretty ballsy when you had to call a telephone number to have someone snail mail you a stack of floppy disks.
Yes, you tell your boss what for. You tell him you know what you need to do and he can like it or leave it. When you get fired, tell me where you used to work. I'd try to hook you up with the job I've got now, but every time someone leaves, they say "Hurray! The budget shrank. Oh by the way, we're bringing three new clients on board."
They got a lot of publicity from the decision to use this model. I've heard about exactly one Radiohead album on NPR - care to guess which one? That article also talks about getting a lot of positive reviews and the album "having a more accessible sound and personal style of lyrics". <oldman>In my day, alternative bands released alternative music! And when they wrote a so-called "accessible" album and sold it with a marketing gimmick, we called them sell-outs!</oldman> But seriously, this example doesn't really prove anything either way. If this business model were a whole section of amazon.com or the iTunes music store, we might have some real data points.
Probably what I'd do in his situation. But if setting up Squid sounds like too much work for simple web surfing, Privoxy could be a tremendous help by itself. By default, it blocks a lot of the pop-up, drive-by advertising-related bandwidth robbers, and since the original poster already has a convenient status bar showing him who's grabbing his bandwidth and giving nothing in return, it's going to be trivial to build up a blacklist to just kill. The syntax of the configuration files may seem a little daunting at first if you're not use to something similar, but they're well-commented, and have a lot of examples. There's a straight-forward well-documented way to deanimate gifs (load only one frame, at substantial bandwidth savings), and if you delve into it, you might be able to minimize unnecessary reloads by tweaking http headers and javascript. It's cross-platform, easy to install and use if it's your only proxy (only slightly less so if you need to forward to another proxy) and it "Just Works".
The Firefox thing, do a reinstall and turn off the feedback agent, see if that helps.
No, no, no. "Microsoft Sues Baby Eaters for Copyright Infringement". Pay attention.
Pondering this make me feel a whole lot better about the whole enterprise. I'm all in favor of protecting budding young minds from the use of profanity as a substitute for creative expression... by teaching them that profanity is the inspiration for expressing yourself creatively. Also I like the thought of someone going to their manager and saying, "I need a ruling on 'defecating masonry'. Can we let that go?"
It's worse than that. It's managers who don't know how to tell someone who can learn on the job from someone who can't, and can't run a solid team that can teach the new guy the ropes. There's a pretty good article about how this happens at some companies. In my own job, I came on board a year ago with a solid team of upper tier people ready to take me under their wing, I taught myself more about SQL than anyone else there had ever bothered to learn (there's plenty more to worry about than the database stuff), and I moved up pretty quickly. There's a whole slew of resume bullet points where I went from never touched to proficient in one year. Then the technical leads largely left, the frontline people they weeded out (almost) all the worst of them, but they doubled or even tripled the workload on everyone with any idea what they were doing.
I couldn't come on board today and learn what I learned. Hell, fresh-faced kid who's as smart as me just started and I don't have time to teach him, word's gotten out through the whole company that I'm one of two people in the department you want to talk to and I'm being worked to death.
Why am I still there? The one thing they've got going for them is they've got a wicked smart über geek who knows his own doing the technical interviews. Until I can find another place doing the same thing where I can say, "I came in to find everyone frantic and the phones ringing off the hook. I tweaked a query I had written some months back to not join the two tables we didn't need, just return the column in question, added a date/time function, plugged it into my batch file to run it at 300 remote locations, had the data to resubmit within 20 minutes of when I walked in the door, and for the first time in four hours, everything was OK." I'm just some guy who's "only done SQL one year".
Well-said, but permit me a little nitpicking. On careful reading, you see that what they say is "a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras". The rest of the article is about how institutions are researching different ways of complying with student ID verification requirements, "spy" cameras most definitely included. The real problem is that they don't tell us anything about the bill besides what they say the gist of it is. I really wanted to either raise an objection with my representatives if the language of the bill was specific enough to require the kinds of measures that they were speculating about, or make my feelings clear to my school if they had enough wiggle room to decide how this went down. I mean, if I have to choose between my future and paying $150 for the privilege of having my fingerprint, name, and picture broadcast by I. fuckin' E. I want to know who to scream at. But no, all they want to tell me is that it's before Congress and it's a shoo-in to pass, no need to worry about the bill number, what house it's in, when a vote's scheduled if it is. I tried, but the last bill I could find is S.3180 which extended the HEA to the end of July 2008. Thanks, fuckwads. Next time you write about pending legislation in scary, ominous terms keep in mind that some of us will have a reaction other than to bend over and spread 'em.
Yes, and the blog post links to the document itself, which says that they're talking about ways to disseminate the exact same information that they publish now using outside hosting services, that everybody's behind the idea, they have some common-sense guidelines for hosting the content, and there's at least one site they can give the green light to right now. They're looking to make sure that when you look at official content of the House of Representatives, you know you are, when you're not anymore, you know you're not anymore. Now, the one possible sticking point:
In light of the context of the letter, that's basically saying if you couldn't put it on the House website, you can't have it hosted next to content that you couldn't post on the House website. You can't have it looking like the House of Representatives is trying to sell you (crap - I've had like three web ads in four years escape my filters, what do they try to sell you these day? car wax, let's say car wax) car wax or wants you to click on a link to Food Not Bombs or your local "militia" after you listen to what they have to say. Even if this is the most draconian fascist nightmare you can imagine (if it is, go to your library, ask where the history section is, and grab three books at random) nobody's "scheming to impose rules". From the letter:
Maybe Robert Brady was aware, but somebody needs to tell zenpundit and selil, and if John Culberson actually wasn't that fucking stupid, he should be ticked off at the words that have been put in his mouth. What they're out to do is go shopping for places where Representatives can post the media they want to, and give them a handy list of places they can post away without having to worry about their disk quota. I don't see how trying to find a content-neutral platform for offsite hosting of exactly the content disseminated now is "censorship", "nakedly partisan", or a move to "reimpose the 'Fairness Doctrine'".
Seriously, if I want to be roped into reading an article with a bunch of total fucking bullshit hype that any fifth grader can see through once they sit down and read the damn thing, I'll go to the checkout line at the drug store. Nice one, Timothy.
Yes, everybody panic. We were all sadly mistaken when we thought we'd seen the worst out of the editors here.