From the comment in TFA "technicians pulled up the affected cable", and the blog entry linked to from the article:
Once the fibre arrives they need to blow it into the 3600 feet long duct before the splicing can start. It is 60 fibres that need to be spliced.
It would appear to me that the cable in question was buried.
Now, I am sure there is probably an access point to the duct that you could open and stick the muzzle of a gun down. Depending on the material, it might ricochet down the length. However, I believe most of these rural runs are made of some sort of plastic, which would mean it was more likely that someone was walking along and pointing a gun down at the dirt. But it would need to be a shallow conduit, and the person would need the gear to determine where it was buried to cause that much trouble for that much distance.
"Has it broken any new ground with any new operating paradigms? (Thats a genuine question , I don't know).
I do wonder why thety bother and don't just try and integrate any new ways of thinking they've come up with into pre-existing systems such as Linux or BSD."
Slowly, ideas from Plan 9 are being adopted by other systems. Plan 9 was the first operating system with complete support for the UTF-8 Unicode character set encoding. The dump file system has been mimicked in Athena's OldFiles directories or Network Appliance's.snapshot directories. The flexible rfork(2) system call, the basis of lightweight threads, was adopted as is by the various BSD derivatives and reincarnated on Linux as clone(2). The simple file protocol 9P has been implemented on early versions of FreeBSD and current versions of Linux.
On the "Data Improvement" front, I implemented something like this maybe 5 or 6 years ago. The company had a workforce of "lower" cost data entry staff, and when volumes of data came in over the web, we validated what we could programmitically, then routed questional records to human staff for cleanup and use in building a dictionary of sorts that made our automated process better. It was more cost effective to go this hybrid computing route than to throw lots of "expensive" programming at it.
Sign up for the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA), "Mail Preference Service" (MPS), it will reduce the amount of unwanted mail coming to you, including credit card offers, and it really works. Use option 2, and print and mail your form, it only costs the price of a stamp. Don't pay to do so online, it takes time to process anyhow.
However, a few notes on the service:
1) It can easily take 6 months for a mailing list to be updated removing your address from it. This has to do with the frequency that marketers update and certify their lists for the USPS.
2) Some of those catalogs that you have been getting for no apparent reason that you like getting, they may stop. If you are an existing customer of a company, or have specifically requested to get a certain mailing, then you may still get that mailing.
3) If there are multiple last names in your household, you may need to submit the form multiple times with those combinations (there are some stupid list maintainers out there).
Am I the only one who thought of "New Speak" from 1984 when reading this?
From the Wikipedia article:
Newspeak is closely based on English but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. This suited the totalitarian regime of the Party, whose aim was to make any alternative thinking ("thoughtcrime") or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but MPE users are using this platform for the IMAGE database. They have invested lots of time and money into software and development around the IMAGE database and the underlying (and quite limiting) MPE file system.
Remember, this technology is 20+ years old, and there wasn't much competition in the mid-range database market back in the day. There are lots of companies who have done the same around IBM big iron, luckily enough have done so that IBM still provides them with an upgrade path. Unfortunately that is no longer the case for the 3000 users, and for about a decade now, HP has been trying to pursuade them to move to the 9000. And by pursuade, I mean sales tricks like has been described. To some extent, they can justify the premium that people continue to pay to run a 3000, due to the limited demand for the 3000.
This is not too unlike a MS SQL Server + Windows Server + Windows Desktop scenario, but MS has far more marketshare than the 3000 ever did. Regardless, you are right, an all HP system, with no competition is what has done the 3000 users in.
If I were to do something about my office situation, I would probably get/make a sit-stand desk.
An article from the other day about geek health problems brings up the issue of low back pain, an ergonomic sit-stand desk might be a great choice for long hours of computer work. If you don't want to shell out for the high-cost adjustable desks, you can sometimes make do with a workbench type desk that you can stand at and type, and a tall chair to go with it for the times you want to sit.
The USPS has a concept called "work sharing", where you share the work to deliver the mail piece, and they will charge you less.
$0.39 is what you pay for First-Class Mail®. Most bulk mail you receive is Standard Mail®. Basic presorted Standard Mail costs $0.282 per piece, down to as little as $0.033 with the DDU discount. That weekly advertisement mailer you get, probably cost less than 4 cents to mail. However, it does cost plenty of money to produce and print and package. The reason it costs so little to mail, is that the mailer did lots and lots of work sharing to get the cost down. They've made it easy on the postal carrier to get that mailing to your mailbox.
I wouldn't say I'm on an anti-Apple crusade, I have plenty of respect for the company, and have owned several of their systems, starting with a 1979 Apple II, and more recently an iMac and a couple iPods.
What I was commenting on was that when given taxable product only, people need to come up with the cash to pay the taxes. Like when Oprah gave all those cars away. Many people had to sell their car to get the cash to pay taxes.
At least on Jeopardy, they give you cash.
What Apple could have done, and what I've seen other companies do when they give goods away, is they could also give a percentage of the value more in cash to the recipient so they have cash on hand to pay to the tax man.
My point, if anything, was that sometimes these gifts of products aren't always well thought out.
I applaud his effort, but I am slightly concerned with what happens with the waste product from this thing. If they just dump it back into the water hole, I would think they would start to see diminishing returns on output water quality.
The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water - even raw sewage -- and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine's waste heat.
This will either fall into the barter rules or sweepstake winnings, either way, the value of the goodies and travel is probably taxable to the developer.
Perhaps the way MA and other states could squash some of the arguments against ODF would be to create a web service to convert the documents to and from ODF. The web service would take as input either a URL to a document on their web site or a posted document, in addition to the format the document should be converted too (using existing OpenOffice filter code), and present the user with that document. Then, a user (some state constituent) won't need to install OpenOffice if they already have MS Office installed. They could have little icons on the web site that offered the documents in different formats (ODF, PDF, DOC, etc.), and the web service would take the ODF master and convert to the other formats as needed.
Can someone help me out here? Isn't BSD supposed to be secure by default?
There are multiple distributions that claim BSD heritage, each has different intentions in creating it's distribution. The only large BSD based distribution that strives for high security is OpenBSD. You probably would have a hard time getting this exploit to work on an OpenBSD distribution without intentionally screwing up your default configuration. That MAY be less true of a FreeBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, SunOS4, NeXTStep, etc. systems that is based on BSD as well.
Reminds me of the time I ripped the door off a Convex C1 supercomputer, as well as some of the internal frame rails, and turned it into a computer desk. It was my supercomputer computer desk.
There is the environmental cost of the manufacturing process. However, unless some really toxic methods or materials are used to build and maintain these cars, they are probably still better off than the alternative.
This might not be true with a hydrogen powered car that gets it's hydrogen extracted from a water source by a 50% efficient coal powered generation plant.
The problem with this proposal is that it would cost the big corporations money to implement.
More importantly, the problem with this proposal is that it would cost SMALL organizations money and time to implement.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons why companies big and small transmit data.
For example, your church wants to send a mailing to all its members. It sends its mailing list to a print shop to address all the mail pieces. The print shop sends the addresses to a National Change of Address vendor to make sure they have the most recent address for you since your last move. Should all the churches across America who have little to none software experience be forced to implement extra levels of notification when you gave them the information to begin with?
As for credit card info, if you have ever read the document that passes for a privacy policy for most credit cards, they generally state that they can share information with 3rd party marketing agencies. If they give you the option to opt out, it usually isn't until after you have an account with them, and they have already extracted your information and sold it. But again, you gave it to them in the first place.
The rules probably vary from state to state, but in general, you pay taxes to the state where the SOURCE of your income comes from, assuming your employer doesn't have another location in the state you live in.
A number of posts discuss allocating revenue by % of the year you are a resident. This typically would apply if you had a Job in State A, then moved to a Job in State B. Residency should only apply for investment income and the like.
Road warriors who work for themselves, or a company in the same state where they claim legal residence, pay in the state of their residence.
Workers who live in a state with income tax, but work in a different state that doesn't have income tax, pay in the state of their residence. The same applys for those who work in Washington DC (which is a District, not a state), which is apportioned it's operating budget by congress.
If you work in DC, live 50% of the year in Virginia, and 50% of the year in Maryland - guess what - you pay to both states for the duration of your residency.
Some states have reciprocity agreements with each other to simplify this. But in general, you don't get double taxed.
IANAL - find someone qualified for your situation.
Re:Everybody loves lemonade...
on
Plants for Cubicles?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you are in a Northern climate, and don't have a sunny Southern facing window, I would avoid the lemon tree. They can be hard to keep alive during the Winter months when you live in someplace like Minnesota for example.
Yes, but as posted earlier, there is a limited life to the parts in the printer. Little plastic gears do wear and break.
This is true in a car too, but the aftermarket parts supply is much more prevelant. I can think of at least 3 auto-parts stores within about a mile of my house, this doesn't count dealerships.
And speaking of dealerships, I can go into my dealership, walk to the parts counter, and tell them I have a model year X car, and I need a new widget, and they will pull up the scematic on their computer screen and ask -- "This widget?", and often I can collect the part on the spot.
Try asking your sales droid at Best Buy for a tractor drive assembly for your HP Color Laser 4xxx, and watch the blank stare on their face.
Depending on the printer model, it is often cheaper to dispose of the thing and buy new.
I am not a tax lawyer... However, I think you could write it off as unexpensed business expense -- like auto milage.
But the kicker is that you would need to have enough of these types of expenses to pass the 2% minimum in orger to receive the deduction. Meaning, the sum of all of these types of expenses needs to be greater than 2% of your taxable income.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I am sure there is probably an access point to the duct that you could open and stick the muzzle of a gun down. Depending on the material, it might ricochet down the length. However, I believe most of these rural runs are made of some sort of plastic, which would mean it was more likely that someone was walking along and pointing a gun down at the dirt. But it would need to be a shallow conduit, and the person would need the gear to determine where it was buried to cause that much trouble for that much distance.
"Has it broken any new ground with any new operating paradigms? (Thats a genuine question , I don't know). I do wonder why thety bother and don't just try and integrate any new ways of thinking they've come up with into pre-existing systems such as Linux or BSD."
Well, yes. Read the overview
Mod parent up
On the "Data Improvement" front, I implemented something like this maybe 5 or 6 years ago. The company had a workforce of "lower" cost data entry staff, and when volumes of data came in over the web, we validated what we could programmitically, then routed questional records to human staff for cleanup and use in building a dictionary of sorts that made our automated process better. It was more cost effective to go this hybrid computing route than to throw lots of "expensive" programming at it.
Information Security
If you don't care about physical security, then...
Sign up for the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA), "Mail Preference Service" (MPS), it will reduce the amount of unwanted mail coming to you, including credit card offers, and it really works. Use option 2, and print and mail your form, it only costs the price of a stamp. Don't pay to do so online, it takes time to process anyhow.
However, a few notes on the service:
1) It can easily take 6 months for a mailing list to be updated removing your address from it. This has to do with the frequency that marketers update and certify their lists for the USPS.
2) Some of those catalogs that you have been getting for no apparent reason that you like getting, they may stop. If you are an existing customer of a company, or have specifically requested to get a certain mailing, then you may still get that mailing.
3) If there are multiple last names in your household, you may need to submit the form multiple times with those combinations (there are some stupid list maintainers out there).
From the Wikipedia article:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but MPE users are using this platform for the IMAGE database. They have invested lots of time and money into software and development around the IMAGE database and the underlying (and quite limiting) MPE file system.
Remember, this technology is 20+ years old, and there wasn't much competition in the mid-range database market back in the day. There are lots of companies who have done the same around IBM big iron, luckily enough have done so that IBM still provides them with an upgrade path. Unfortunately that is no longer the case for the 3000 users, and for about a decade now, HP has been trying to pursuade them to move to the 9000. And by pursuade, I mean sales tricks like has been described. To some extent, they can justify the premium that people continue to pay to run a 3000, due to the limited demand for the 3000.
This is not too unlike a MS SQL Server + Windows Server + Windows Desktop scenario, but MS has far more marketshare than the 3000 ever did. Regardless, you are right, an all HP system, with no competition is what has done the 3000 users in.
If I were to do something about my office situation, I would probably get/make a sit-stand desk.
An article from the other day about geek health problems brings up the issue of low back pain, an ergonomic sit-stand desk might be a great choice for long hours of computer work. If you don't want to shell out for the high-cost adjustable desks, you can sometimes make do with a workbench type desk that you can stand at and type, and a tall chair to go with it for the times you want to sit.
The USPS has a concept called "work sharing", where you share the work to deliver the mail piece, and they will charge you less.
$0.39 is what you pay for First-Class Mail®. Most bulk mail you receive is Standard Mail®.
Basic presorted Standard Mail costs $0.282 per piece, down to as little as $0.033 with the DDU discount. That weekly advertisement mailer you get, probably cost less than 4 cents to mail. However, it does cost plenty of money to produce and print and package. The reason it costs so little to mail, is that the mailer did lots and lots of work sharing to get the cost down. They've made it easy on the postal carrier to get that mailing to your mailbox.
I'll bite on the troll.
I wouldn't say I'm on an anti-Apple crusade, I have plenty of respect for the company, and have owned several of their systems, starting with a 1979 Apple II, and more recently an iMac and a couple iPods.
What I was commenting on was that when given taxable product only, people need to come up with the cash to pay the taxes. Like when Oprah gave all those cars away. Many people had to sell their car to get the cash to pay taxes.
At least on Jeopardy, they give you cash.
What Apple could have done, and what I've seen other companies do when they give goods away, is they could also give a percentage of the value more in cash to the recipient so they have cash on hand to pay to the tax man.
My point, if anything, was that sometimes these gifts of products aren't always well thought out.
I applaud his effort, but I am slightly concerned with what happens with the waste product from this thing. If they just dump it back into the water hole, I would think they would start to see diminishing returns on output water quality.
The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water - even raw sewage -- and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine's waste heat.
Part of me wonders how the IRS will view this.
This will either fall into the barter rules or sweepstake winnings, either way, the value of the goodies and travel is probably taxable to the developer.
Thanks Apple.
Perhaps the way MA and other states could squash some of the arguments against ODF would be to create a web service to convert the documents to and from ODF. The web service would take as input either a URL to a document on their web site or a posted document, in addition to the format the document should be converted too (using existing OpenOffice filter code), and present the user with that document. Then, a user (some state constituent) won't need to install OpenOffice if they already have MS Office installed. They could have little icons on the web site that offered the documents in different formats (ODF, PDF, DOC, etc.), and the web service would take the ODF master and convert to the other formats as needed.
Can someone help me out here? Isn't BSD supposed to be secure by default?
There are multiple distributions that claim BSD heritage, each has different intentions in creating it's distribution. The only large BSD based distribution that strives for high security is OpenBSD. You probably would have a hard time getting this exploit to work on an OpenBSD distribution without intentionally screwing up your default configuration. That MAY be less true of a FreeBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, SunOS4, NeXTStep, etc. systems that is based on BSD as well.
Reminds me of the time I ripped the door off a Convex C1 supercomputer, as well as some of the internal frame rails, and turned it into a computer desk. It was my supercomputer computer desk.
There is the environmental cost of the manufacturing process. However, unless some really toxic methods or materials are used to build and maintain these cars, they are probably still better off than the alternative.
This might not be true with a hydrogen powered car that gets it's hydrogen extracted from a water source by a 50% efficient coal powered generation plant.
Hello, Enron?!?
Wasn't this one of Enron's money grubbing ploys?
The problem with this proposal is that it would cost the big corporations money to implement.
More importantly, the problem with this proposal is that it would cost SMALL organizations money and time to implement.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons why companies big and small transmit data.
For example, your church wants to send a mailing to all its members. It sends its mailing list to a print shop to address all the mail pieces. The print shop sends the addresses to a National Change of Address vendor to make sure they have the most recent address for you since your last move. Should all the churches across America who have little to none software experience be forced to implement extra levels of notification when you gave them the information to begin with?
As for credit card info, if you have ever read the document that passes for a privacy policy for most credit cards, they generally state that they can share information with 3rd party marketing agencies. If they give you the option to opt out, it usually isn't until after you have an account with them, and they have already extracted your information and sold it. But again, you gave it to them in the first place.
The rules probably vary from state to state, but in general, you pay taxes to the state where the SOURCE of your income comes from, assuming your employer doesn't have another location in the state you live in.
A number of posts discuss allocating revenue by % of the year you are a resident. This typically would apply if you had a Job in State A, then moved to a Job in State B. Residency should only apply for investment income and the like.
Road warriors who work for themselves, or a company in the same state where they claim legal residence, pay in the state of their residence.
Workers who live in a state with income tax, but work in a different state that doesn't have income tax, pay in the state of their residence.
The same applys for those who work in Washington DC (which is a District, not a state), which is apportioned it's operating budget by congress.
If you work in DC, live 50% of the year in Virginia, and 50% of the year in Maryland - guess what - you pay to both states for the duration of your residency.
Some states have reciprocity agreements with each other to simplify this. But in general, you don't get double taxed.
IANAL - find someone qualified for your situation.
If you are in a Northern climate, and don't have a sunny Southern facing window, I would avoid the lemon tree. They can be hard to keep alive during the Winter months when you live in someplace like Minnesota for example.
Yes, but as posted earlier, there is a limited life to the parts in the printer. Little plastic gears do wear and break.
This is true in a car too, but the aftermarket parts supply is much more prevelant. I can think of at least 3 auto-parts stores within about a mile of my house, this doesn't count dealerships.
And speaking of dealerships, I can go into my dealership, walk to the parts counter, and tell them I have a model year X car, and I need a new widget, and they will pull up the scematic on their computer screen and ask -- "This widget?", and often I can collect the part on the spot.
Try asking your sales droid at Best Buy for a tractor drive assembly for your HP Color Laser 4xxx, and watch the blank stare on their face.
Depending on the printer model, it is often cheaper to dispose of the thing and buy new.
I am not a tax lawyer...
However, I think you could write it off as unexpensed business expense -- like auto milage.
But the kicker is that you would need to have enough of these types of expenses to pass the 2% minimum in orger to receive the deduction. Meaning, the sum of all of these types of expenses needs to be greater than 2% of your taxable income.
Is that something like:
Windows 2000, built on NT Technology.
Where the T in NT stands for "Technology"
What is Minnesota running out of money just like the EU? So they try to hit up the cash cow...
Well, MN is running out of money, but that isn't what this is about.
MN was one of the original states in the anti-trust lawsuit. When the other states settled, we didn't.
It just took this long to pan out.
Urm... That is a beaker. As in a Lab environment.