Many webmasters host urchin.js locally to speed up page load times. Google does not recommend this practice, but they also do not forbid it. I don't particularly feel like trawling through urchin.js, but a quick skim doesn't seem to have that file submitting to google-analytics.com. It seems to go, instead, to analytics.corp.google.com.
At any rate, I think that you'll find that the google analytics hostname is www.google-analytics.com (with a hyphen). I also think that the NoScript firefox plugin will protect you well against googal-analytics as well as a host of other tracking mechanisms.
If I buy services from a company and they fail to deliver, I have choices. Like suing them (example: breach of contract) and recovering damages. Awesome.
So riddle me this, batman. Users buy Urchin and also purchase a contract for support and upgrades. Urchin gets bought by Google, who breaches that contract by not releasing an upgrade, and failing to deliver support. Reminder: CUSTOMERS PAID FOR BOTH OF THEM!
Now, how come these customers aren't able to get any relief from the courts? How come their only recourse is to bitch about the problem on Slashdot?
I think that you'll find that in the Real World, if you pay for software/services in order to have someone to sue, you are definitely not getting your money's worth.
What you don't realize is that, from Google's perspective, you're not the customer Well, these Urchin users paid for support contracts and for upgrades. I think I'm willing to grant them "customer" status.
The problem is, these customers did not get what they paid for, and that is why they are upset. I can't say that I blame them.
Wouldn't you be mad if you paid for something and didn't get it, or if the company half-assed their commitments?
Even easier would be to just paste someone else's face over the face you are trying to obscure. After that, you can apply your favorite distortion technique.
Result: the distorted part of the image will still look like a distorted face. But if someone manages to reverse your whiz-bang distorting technique, all they'll see is that you pasted some other face over the real face.
Some people don't like having that many applications open at once. Why should I need to have an email client, a news reader, an RSS reader, and a calendar open at once? Why can't I just have that all in one application?
Of course, don't let the fact that the overwhelming majority of the business world finds combining email with a calendar to be useful change your mind.
I'm glad you're not an idiot, but even smart people do idiotic things from time to time. As for me, I'm an idiot who every once in a while does something clever. We all have to live with our limitations.
At any rate, I'm going to have to stick with my original advice. It's great and altruistic and all that you want to create a whiz-bang open source POS solution. Your heart is in the right place, but your head is not.
Wait until you see a lot of black ink on your financial statements. Wait until your business requires only 40 hours per week from you.
Starting a business takes everything you've got. I know so many people who tried to start this or that type of business and just get bogged down in some irrelevant project. I know one guy who was so convinced not to hire an accountant that he got stuck researching the optimal type of corporate entity to use, then he got stuck learning basic bookkeeping, then he got stuck learning tax accounting. Meanwhile, he never made a single sale. Ever.
I know a lady who started a jewelry business and she had two lines. Her first was wildly successful, but she decided to pour everything into a second line while neglecting the first. Oh, sure, the company is still in business. But it is bleeding red ink everywhere. It's only afloat because her husband is a partner in a law firm. I can't believe he hasn't pulled the plug on this yet. It's easily a 6 figure loss for them.
I could go on forever. The point is, concentrate on what makes you money! This POS idea is going to take you thousands of miles outside of your comfort zone, and just as many miles off your business plan. It is going to cost many, many thousands of dollars. You will not be able to hire a few Indians to hammer this out over a weekend--cheap coders need perfect requirements and specs, which you will never have. Anyway, you do not want your business running on software that was hammered out by a few Indians over a weekend with ambiguous specs.
Lastly and most importantly, I wish you the best of luck with your business. And since it sounds like your mind is made up to get mired in this POS POS (ha ha get it?), I'll wish you the best of luck with that as well. Just promise yourself you'll gauge its progress with ruthless objectivity and pull the plug on it quickly.;)
Don't be an idiot. You're trying to start a business, yet you are creating a monstrosity of a barrier to entry for yourself. When you're in business, you do what you're good at (what makes you money) and you buy what you are not good at. You said yourself, that you have no idea how to run a software development project.
If you do "roll your own", you have no idea how long it will take to build this thing, what the quality will be, whether or not it will interface with your accounting software, what the response time will be for breakage, what it will ultimately cost, and probably about 100 other things that neither you nor I are thinking of right now. In the meantime, you are losing money.
On the other hand, you could buy a package and be up and running tomorrow.
Buy a QuickBooks POS for $800 and get on with your business plan. In five years you'll be able to start a charity open source project.
As someone who started two successful businesses, I can't believe you even asked this question.
Did the $120 include diagnosing the problem, as well? If so, $120 is ultracheap for the home service call, diagnosis, and repair of a really weird problem including parts and labor.
What are these "journalists" going to say when they find out that when they call the appliance repairman because their pilot light won't stay lit, he's installing a $3.50 thermometer coupler and charging them $75?
Note to journalists: Experts' time is expensive. Deal with it. You don't like it? Become an expert in everything.
The guy who immediately thought it was a bad HD was awfully crazy, though. I don't think a bad HD is a crazy initial thought. Indeed, my mother in law called me about 6 months ago and said that her laptop would not boot. My response, "pull out the hard drive and put it back in nice and firmly, and try powering on again."
Brace yourself now, because what I'm about to tell you will shock you. It turns out that was the problem. I know, now you think I'm crazy... that's just something we're both going to have to live with.
All kidding aside, how often have you seen "blown" RAM? I admit, I am not a PC tech, so I don't really have any field experience in this matter. But in your experience, in machines that have been in service for a while, how many RAM failures do you encounter vs. hard disk failures? I've seen plenty of DOA RAM, and plenty of crashed HDs, but I've never hard a once-good RAM module just completely bite the dust on me before.
Intuition would support this theory. If you had to guess a PC part most likely to fail, would you guess a solid-state component? Or would you guess a component with moving parts that is particularly sensitive to heat exposure?
I'm surprised your biggest complaint about The Gimp is lack of 16-bit support. Who gives a shit about 8 vs. 16 bit when The Gimp's color management is so awful?
Even if The Gimp supported 16 bit, it would still be worthless because the colors will still be wonky. Incorrect 16 bit color is hardly an improvement over incorrect 8 bit color in my book.
It's clear that people are not significantly incentivized to use the carpool lanes. Not true at all in the DC area. There are several rideshare organizations and slug lots to accommodate those who want to use the carpool lanes.
Moreover, conflicting schedules (particularly after work) and the impossibility of spontaneity provide heavy disincentives toward their use. That's why you ave slug lots. People line up in those lots and motorists pick people up from the lines. It doesn't matter if your schedule conflicts with your carpool buddies, because your buddies will be different on the way home.
People who live in Arlington or Falls Church, especially, could have to go miles out of the way to get to work, despite having a major traffic artery in their back yards. Jumpin' Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick. Please don't tell me you consider I-66 to be a "major traffic artery". Because of Arlington's pigheadedness, Route 50 has more travel lanes through Arlington than Interstate 66.
And anyway, Falls Churchians and Arlingtonians have plenty of roads other than 66 to choose from. Hell, you can't even get onto 66 going Eastbound from half of Arlington, anyhow.
more efficiently spent toward carbon offsets I've never understood this whole carbon offsets thing. Is there any actual legal framework with teeth in place to force emitters to purchase "carbon credits"?
Even if there was such a thing, I would be against it for this purpose. Why should we prefer to spend our "carbon emition" resources on ParkingLot-66 as opposed to actual production of useful goods? To me, that seems wasteful.
Or make the Metro train free to ride; it's already heavily subsidized anyway, and everyone would benefit from increased use. DC Metro is already at capacity. You seem to be familiar with Northern VA, so you've probably heard the term "Orange Crush". The Blue line is at capacity as well.
There really isn't much more that Metro can do to increase capacity. They're already running many 8 car trains. What metro really needs to do, that they will never do, is add more tracks. Currently, if there is one "sick passenger" on one train in one direction, the entire metro system gets brought to its knees. This is because that line will have to single-track (trains going in both directions on one track), and the resulting slowdown gums up the other lines as well.
At any rate, I disagree with your assertion that HOV won't change behavior. I know plenty of people who HOV when they otherwise would not. Slug lines further support this position.
What I think may screw the whole thing up is these HOT lanes. I mean, really. People in NoVA have way more money than time. Why should I bother to pick up slugs if I can just pay $5 or whatever and not even have to slow down?
Ok, I'm for creative solutions as much as the next guy, but seriously, WTF?
First, what will you do for the trip home? Were you planning on bringing her into work with you and soaking her in the gym's hot tub?
Secondly, you would need two real dolls. The lanes in question are HOV-3.
Lastly, how much do those real dolls cost? $1000 or so, IIRC? (I'm at work, so I can't very well check). And you'd have to buy two of them. Much cheaper to just pay the toll, I'd say.
If you've been arrested over your key, no-one can trust that it is not compromised. Quite true. Perhaps it was me that misunderstood your suggestion, then?
If you were merely trying to protect others from believing that your signed messages actually came from you, then your "autorevoke" would work.
On the other hand, if you were trying to prevent the authorities from using your private key to decrypt your encrypted documents, the revocation technique would not hinder that decryption.
At any rate, this law concerns itself with decrypting suspects' files, not with impersonating suspects. I'm not aware of any UK law that allows the police to compel someone to reveal your private keys for the purpose of impersonating him or her.
The fact that you refuse to obey to a law is not proof that you are breaking other laws Not proof, but it is evidence. Only a jury can decide if that evidence constitutes proof beyond reasonable doubt.
Have an off-shore cron job to revoke your keys if you don't touch them often enough. Either I have seriously misunderstood your suggestion, or you seriously misunderstand the mechanics of key revocation. I'm guessing that the latter is this case.
In PKI, the function of revoking keys is not to render your private key inoperable. The purpose of key revocation is to declare publicly that your private key has been compromised, and thus, any signatures made with that revoked private key should not be trusted.
In any case, your private key can still be used to decrypt any cyphertext that was encrypted with your public key. Revoking your public key does not change that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the NSA used to do that as well. They have their own exit off of the Baltimore-Washington parkway. It used to be unmarked and heavily-fortified.
Gee whiz, wonder what that is there.
Many webmasters host urchin.js locally to speed up page load times. Google does not recommend this practice, but they also do not forbid it. I don't particularly feel like trawling through urchin.js, but a quick skim doesn't seem to have that file submitting to google-analytics.com. It seems to go, instead, to analytics.corp.google.com.
At any rate, I think that you'll find that the google analytics hostname is www.google-analytics.com (with a hyphen). I also think that the NoScript firefox plugin will protect you well against googal-analytics as well as a host of other tracking mechanisms.
Cheers!
So riddle me this, batman. Users buy Urchin and also purchase a contract for support and upgrades. Urchin gets bought by Google, who breaches that contract by not releasing an upgrade, and failing to deliver support. Reminder: CUSTOMERS PAID FOR BOTH OF THEM!
Now, how come these customers aren't able to get any relief from the courts? How come their only recourse is to bitch about the problem on Slashdot?
I think that you'll find that in the Real World, if you pay for software/services in order to have someone to sue, you are definitely not getting your money's worth.
The problem is, these customers did not get what they paid for, and that is why they are upset. I can't say that I blame them.
Wouldn't you be mad if you paid for something and didn't get it, or if the company half-assed their commitments?
Even easier would be to just paste someone else's face over the face you are trying to obscure. After that, you can apply your favorite distortion technique.
Result: the distorted part of the image will still look like a distorted face. But if someone manages to reverse your whiz-bang distorting technique, all they'll see is that you pasted some other face over the real face.
Some people don't like having that many applications open at once. Why should I need to have an email client, a news reader, an RSS reader, and a calendar open at once? Why can't I just have that all in one application?
Of course, don't let the fact that the overwhelming majority of the business world finds combining email with a calendar to be useful change your mind.
I'm glad you're not an idiot, but even smart people do idiotic things from time to time. As for me, I'm an idiot who every once in a while does something clever. We all have to live with our limitations.
;)
At any rate, I'm going to have to stick with my original advice. It's great and altruistic and all that you want to create a whiz-bang open source POS solution. Your heart is in the right place, but your head is not.
Wait until you see a lot of black ink on your financial statements. Wait until your business requires only 40 hours per week from you.
Starting a business takes everything you've got. I know so many people who tried to start this or that type of business and just get bogged down in some irrelevant project. I know one guy who was so convinced not to hire an accountant that he got stuck researching the optimal type of corporate entity to use, then he got stuck learning basic bookkeeping, then he got stuck learning tax accounting. Meanwhile, he never made a single sale. Ever.
I know a lady who started a jewelry business and she had two lines. Her first was wildly successful, but she decided to pour everything into a second line while neglecting the first. Oh, sure, the company is still in business. But it is bleeding red ink everywhere. It's only afloat because her husband is a partner in a law firm. I can't believe he hasn't pulled the plug on this yet. It's easily a 6 figure loss for them.
I could go on forever. The point is, concentrate on what makes you money! This POS idea is going to take you thousands of miles outside of your comfort zone, and just as many miles off your business plan. It is going to cost many, many thousands of dollars. You will not be able to hire a few Indians to hammer this out over a weekend--cheap coders need perfect requirements and specs, which you will never have. Anyway, you do not want your business running on software that was hammered out by a few Indians over a weekend with ambiguous specs.
Lastly and most importantly, I wish you the best of luck with your business. And since it sounds like your mind is made up to get mired in this POS POS (ha ha get it?), I'll wish you the best of luck with that as well. Just promise yourself you'll gauge its progress with ruthless objectivity and pull the plug on it quickly.
Don't be an idiot. You're trying to start a business, yet you are creating a monstrosity of a barrier to entry for yourself. When you're in business, you do what you're good at (what makes you money) and you buy what you are not good at. You said yourself, that you have no idea how to run a software development project.
If you do "roll your own", you have no idea how long it will take to build this thing, what the quality will be, whether or not it will interface with your accounting software, what the response time will be for breakage, what it will ultimately cost, and probably about 100 other things that neither you nor I are thinking of right now. In the meantime, you are losing money.
On the other hand, you could buy a package and be up and running tomorrow.
Buy a QuickBooks POS for $800 and get on with your business plan. In five years you'll be able to start a charity open source project.
As someone who started two successful businesses, I can't believe you even asked this question.
The jury's hands were probably tied.
If you just had a RAM failure, would you want to replace it with the cheapest junk you could find from disreputable online sources? Riiiight.
And maybe someone who just experienced a RAM failure doesn't want to replace his RAM with the cheapest junk parts he can find?
viola [vee-oh-luh]
-noun
1. a four-stringed musical instrument of the violin family, slightly larger than the violin; a tenor or alto violin.
Did the $120 include diagnosing the problem, as well? If so, $120 is ultracheap for the home service call, diagnosis, and repair of a really weird problem including parts and labor.
What are these "journalists" going to say when they find out that when they call the appliance repairman because their pilot light won't stay lit, he's installing a $3.50 thermometer coupler and charging them $75?
Note to journalists: Experts' time is expensive. Deal with it. You don't like it? Become an expert in everything.
Brace yourself now, because what I'm about to tell you will shock you. It turns out that was the problem. I know, now you think I'm crazy... that's just something we're both going to have to live with.
All kidding aside, how often have you seen "blown" RAM? I admit, I am not a PC tech, so I don't really have any field experience in this matter. But in your experience, in machines that have been in service for a while, how many RAM failures do you encounter vs. hard disk failures? I've seen plenty of DOA RAM, and plenty of crashed HDs, but I've never hard a once-good RAM module just completely bite the dust on me before.
Intuition would support this theory. If you had to guess a PC part most likely to fail, would you guess a solid-state component? Or would you guess a component with moving parts that is particularly sensitive to heat exposure?
Why do you care about color depth when The Gimp's color management is so bad?
Personally, I don't consider incorrect 16 bit color to be a serious improvement over incorrect 8 bit color.
I'm surprised your biggest complaint about The Gimp is lack of 16-bit support. Who gives a shit about 8 vs. 16 bit when The Gimp's color management is so awful?
Even if The Gimp supported 16 bit, it would still be worthless because the colors will still be wonky. Incorrect 16 bit color is hardly an improvement over incorrect 8 bit color in my book.
And anyway, Falls Churchians and Arlingtonians have plenty of roads other than 66 to choose from. Hell, you can't even get onto 66 going Eastbound from half of Arlington, anyhow. more efficiently spent toward carbon offsets I've never understood this whole carbon offsets thing. Is there any actual legal framework with teeth in place to force emitters to purchase "carbon credits"?
Even if there was such a thing, I would be against it for this purpose. Why should we prefer to spend our "carbon emition" resources on ParkingLot-66 as opposed to actual production of useful goods? To me, that seems wasteful. Or make the Metro train free to ride; it's already heavily subsidized anyway, and everyone would benefit from increased use. DC Metro is already at capacity. You seem to be familiar with Northern VA, so you've probably heard the term "Orange Crush". The Blue line is at capacity as well.
There really isn't much more that Metro can do to increase capacity. They're already running many 8 car trains. What metro really needs to do, that they will never do, is add more tracks. Currently, if there is one "sick passenger" on one train in one direction, the entire metro system gets brought to its knees. This is because that line will have to single-track (trains going in both directions on one track), and the resulting slowdown gums up the other lines as well.
At any rate, I disagree with your assertion that HOV won't change behavior. I know plenty of people who HOV when they otherwise would not. Slug lines further support this position.
What I think may screw the whole thing up is these HOT lanes. I mean, really. People in NoVA have way more money than time. Why should I bother to pick up slugs if I can just pay $5 or whatever and not even have to slow down?
Ok, I'm for creative solutions as much as the next guy, but seriously, WTF?
First, what will you do for the trip home? Were you planning on bringing her into work with you and soaking her in the gym's hot tub?
Secondly, you would need two real dolls. The lanes in question are HOV-3.
Lastly, how much do those real dolls cost? $1000 or so, IIRC? (I'm at work, so I can't very well check). And you'd have to buy two of them. Much cheaper to just pay the toll, I'd say.
I have seen the less-informed use non-word "virii" for as long as I can remember. How long does it take to drill this into people thick skulls?
;)
On the other hand, I've gotta jet. I think a hacker just hijacked a few of my boxen.
If you were merely trying to protect others from believing that your signed messages actually came from you, then your "autorevoke" would work.
On the other hand, if you were trying to prevent the authorities from using your private key to decrypt your encrypted documents, the revocation technique would not hinder that decryption.
At any rate, this law concerns itself with decrypting suspects' files, not with impersonating suspects. I'm not aware of any UK law that allows the police to compel someone to reveal your private keys for the purpose of impersonating him or her.
In PKI, the function of revoking keys is not to render your private key inoperable. The purpose of key revocation is to declare publicly that your private key has been compromised, and thus, any signatures made with that revoked private key should not be trusted.
In any case, your private key can still be used to decrypt any cyphertext that was encrypted with your public key. Revoking your public key does not change that.