Bingo. While back coders took enormous pride in seeing to it that their apps would compile and run on as many *nix flavours as possible. Hell, thats what autoconf and imake were for! Now going form [other-*nix-variant] to linux is pretty easy, because the various maintainers have made damn sure that these compatibility tools work. You just try going the other way...
...Bash-isms...
yeah, but this isnt purely a linux annoyance - its a laziness problem. I've lost count of the number of times I've beaten trainee sysadmins over the head telling them that I dont care what their preferred shell is, write the critical scripts so/sbin/sh can run it and learn how to do without features that are not in there. If the system is crashing down about your ears, thats the only shell you can rely on being there and working close to the way you think it should. Its like folks who hate (and have forgotten) ed & vi and only use emacs shrieking in panic when they discover they need to edit a critical (and probably complex) config file to get their hosed box out of single user mode...
I have three rubber stamps in my passport that would be much easier to fake and mean exactly the same thing.
Only three? They processed yours in jigtime then:)
All joking aside, though, those rubber stamps are a joke. Hell, the visa itself used to be a rubber stamp before what was then the INS moved over to requiring the fancy sticker full of security-print features. I'm sure there were folks who wanted the entire system to use these stickers but I'd bet it got shot down by the cost of implementing on-demand printing of them at every port of entry and immigration office. Ultimately, no matter how careful a nation is in designing and implementing a "secure" system, anyone with good enough fake documentation can be passed through that system with nobody the wiser - even to the extent of giving the fake documents some legitimacy in the eyes of the target country by virtue of their being in the targets official database as valid. There have, in the past, been cases of legitimate travellers being detained at national borders for using false documentation because a fake with the same number/name/whatever was used first so when the real one turns up it gets flagged.
Border security is hard enough in an island nation like the UK, the USA will never achieve it to the level the current administration seems to want. The best anyone can ever do is know where most of the holes are.
This honestly doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. Consider that this changes very little... ... seems to eliminate a less sophisticated avenue of fraud...
This sort of matches my viewpoint too. I mean, as a Brit living in the USA I already have an ID card with multiple features to make it hard to fake and biometric data (photo and fingerprint) - its called a "green card" although only the lettering on the back is green anymore. Wouldnt surprise me in the slightest to discover that theres all sorts of data encoded on it in machine-readable form from my visa application through to the final interview when they authorised giving me the card in the first place. I havent looked into it in any detail because I dont give a rats ass. They have the data anyway and the rules that govern its use dont change just because they stick it on a card. The harder it is for some jerk with a semtex fetish to fake one of these and maybe pretend to be me the happier I'll be. Personally I'd rather not get a vacation in Cuba thanks to identity theft....
If my psion seriesV hadnt bitten the big one I'd still be using it. If it had only croaked a few months earlier I'd have been able to get it fixed and still be using it. The palmOS replacement was a letdown.
This book should be required reading for anyone about to comment on public issues such as this one. One classic piece of "crooked thinking" it highlights is when one side of a debate siezes on a side issue where they are assured of a strong argument and somehow infers that "winning" on the side issue strengthens their argument on the main one whilst not actually advancing any points to support their position on the main issue. Someone on the receiving end of this tactic gives it legitimacy by falling into the trap of debating the side issue rather than the main one. Of course in this discussion the most highly moderated comments are all about whether copyright infringement is theft or not. Oddly enough in this case the tactic is used by both sides.. as "It aint theft so you cant punish folks that do it" by one side and as "Of course we have to crack down on these digital thieves" by the other.
Arguing over whether copyright infringement is equivalent to theft is all very well and a valid philosophical debate but doesnt address whether this would be a good law or not. Whether copyright infringement is theft or not this would STILL be a bad law if it were ever passed. Authors and artists deserve protection of their works from improper exploitation and duplication. Copyright law provides this. The public deserves to have those creative people satisfy their side of the bargain that created copyright in the first place and release the monopoly on their works after a reasonable time. We can debate how long that time should be and how the supposedly equitable nature of this deal should be preserved as long as you like but it doesnt address the point at issue here. "Is this proposed law a suitable measure for enforcing existing copyright protections whilst preserving the balance between protection and fair use?" I think either side of the theft/not-theft debate will agree that the answer to that substantive question is "No" so why are we debating the "theft" issue so heavily?
Although statistics might have their place somewhere I've yet to find that place...
...100% of polls are misleading and only serve the purpose or ideology of the entities invloved...
The place you have yet to find is where proper data is gathered for the situation under investigation and no inferences are drawn from the statistics other than the strictly limited ones a given statistical method is designed to permit. Sadly, your statement about polls or other methods of gauging public opinion is correct since every effort is made under those circumstances to force the analysis into a path that supports a predetermined agenda. In this article, however, the author goes to some lengths to avoid these pitfalls.
He clearly describes his source data, being careful to show where its shortcomings are and to illustrate his reasons for choosing that particular set of input data. He is honest about the conclusions he draws too - There are only two valid conclusions for most analytical statistics applied to seeking a corellation between apparently distinct data series, you can either say "We are n% confident that a relationship exists" and then go on to analyse it further or you can say "We cannot show a relationship between X and Y." Unlike most bad analysis this author does not take that latter case and claim it proves there is no relationship. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this author should be applauded for not falling into this trap.
In short, it appears that an effort has been made here to apply statistics properly and under such circumstances the conclusions drawn are less likely to be BS. Just because a statistical calculation is involved doesnt make the answer wrong or the analyst dishonest.
...Better yet, to avoid arguments that it just brushed the plate, make it so that it is immediately clear wether it was hit or not. Perhaps by using three wooden sticks with a wooden crossbar at the top that will fall off if hit.
With the catcher out of the way, you can of course extend the playing field backwards too, behind the base. To avoid confusion, it would perhaps be better to remove the first and third base, though...
And of course, if you do this to baseball whilst doing something creative about the LBW rules in cricket - say get rid of LBW entirely and allow the batsman hit by the ball to walk one which would be scored as an extra - you might even get to a point where the two games were similar enough that they could reasonably play each other... wait a bit... NO!!! The english team dont need another national side that will visit the home of the sport and kick their arses - its embarrassing;)
It's why sararimen are called "exempt" employees. The employer is exempt from wage and hour restrictions on salaried employees, i.e. they 0wnz j00.
Not exactly - it depends on the employer. I'm an exempt employee and employed "at will" so I'm in trouble, right? Er... well... no. Fortunately the company I work for does see the whole exempt/at will business as two-sided. As far as they are concerned they pay me for results and dont really care how many or how few hours I work provided they get those results. Sometimes that means my life sucks because I'm busy as a one-armed paper-hanger but on the other hand they know that they get better results if they give me enough notice of whats in the wind and enough of the big picture to make intelligent scheduling decisions. I've actually been commended for going to my boss and saying "These n jobs are all high priority but I cant put in enough hours to do them all in this timeframe no matter how efficiently I work. Which one(s) should I let slip?" They know that if we cant resolve the scheduling issue ALL of the projects are going to slip and thats worse than picking one or two and rescheduling it in advance. On the other hand, if I waffle on it and they all slip anyway I can quite rightly expect to get bitched at. With a decent employer, be professional and they will treat you that way. If they dont they wont keep you - doesnt matter how bad the job market is, high staff turnover in costly folks still hits them in the balance sheet so they do have an incentive to keep their professional employees.
Re:Not absorption...less obstinance.
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Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
You are exactly right. I do tech support. Without question, the MOST annoying calls we get are from older tech who will start off the phone conversation with, "By the way, I've been programming for over 20 years, and I think..."
Having done many years on the helldesk, I agree with you. Having since then done more than that many years as a systems and network admin I can tell you the other kind of annoying call... When you say "Heres the symptoms of the problem, heres the steps to reproduce, heres what I've tried already to work around it, heres my estimate of the situation. Please can you confirm this or give me your opinion and do you know of any workaround that I havent tried yet?" and you know, from the response you get, that the guy on the other end is stumped and doesnt know how to proceed but they arent going to admit this fact and escalate to the next support tier until they have wasted a LOT of your time. Thats one of the other things about older geeks of every discipline - they have learned the hard way that "I dont know" != "I have failed" and manage to not be so insecure.
I've learned so much from folks both older and younger than myself that trying to guess at somebodies abilities or suitability for a particular post based on their age is self-evidently a waste of time. On the other hand, you make a great point about obstinacy.
They have the hardest time grasping that their way isn't the way something needs to be done in order for it to work in our software.
This tends to be, however, mainly a problem with changes happening during an employees tenure rather than at interview time. Many people, old and young, cant see past "the way they have always done it." Hardest thing with any implementation is swinging the clue-by-four to get folks to realize that working with the new system is not the same as forcing the new system to work in the same way as the old one...
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into writing a book, I have to ask where you get off telling me that there should be a hard cap on the limit of my copyright. Don't I have the right to profit for the rest of my life from my work? What about my children? What about my grandchildren?
Ok, assuming you're quite seriously asserting that there should be no limit, you have put much time and effort into a creative work. The law as it exists now therefore states that as an incentive to your releasing that work by publishing it you are guaranteed exclusive rights to distribute it for X years. The payoff for that protection is that after X years you lose that exclusivity. Nobody else ever gets to claim it as theirs, you (or your descendants, or whoever you assigned those rights to) just lose the monopoly. By eventually contributing the work into the public domain at the copyrights expiry, you are paying for the protection the work enjoyed up to that date.
If you want that exclusive control in perpetuity, dont release it outside your family.
I don't care how long Disney holds on to the mouse. Just because you place no value on your work doesn't mean that the rest of us don't place value on ours.
Your work, the product of thousands of hours of creative effort, is of considerable value. Thats why I'd encourage you to accept the "cost" of copyright protection - that the work will eventually pass into the public domain - and publish it.
Instead of technical arguments, go for the financial ones. The only technical part of your pitch is the required functionality. Then you present alternative strategies to achieve it. In dealing with senior management, particularly as I move from purely sysadmin stuff into more management work myself, I've learned that when they say "We dont want software without 24/7 global support" what they really mean is "We dont understand the implications so we're going to stick with the way we've always done things until someone convinces us different."
Personally, in your position, I'd build several possible scenarios...
No open source
Some open source
All open source
That would be a minimum, the important thing is that every one of them has to achieve what the company needs. The costs will differ, the risks will differ, the long-term implications of things like scalability will differ and these will all play into the management viewpoint. They dont care how "good" the software is or isnt. All you can do is the risk analysis and the cost/benefit presentation, making them aware of precisely the levels of risk each solution exposes the company to and precisely how much it will cost to avoid those risks. Every software package is a risk, whether open source or not. Every piece of hardware is a risk. Lose your main production data server and how much business do you lose per hour whilst its down? How long will it take to get it back in each of your scenarios? How likely is the outage in the first place? Since every solution you present meets the same needs, does it matter which one they choose?
Now, my personal opinion based on experience in the past is that when the analysis is complete the case for open source in at least some of the application areas of a unix environment will be a complete no-brainer. As you work up the results, however, you might be surprised at some of the places it doesnt give an appreciable benefit. Remember that the time you spend scripting and configuring stuff is part of the cost, as is employee learning time. Dont leave anything out. Be absolutely straight presenting the best comparable info you can and dont try and slant it either way. If they make the wrong choice and it bites the company in the butt it then wont be your fault, even if the wrong choice was your recommendation too.
...The use of it as a strongarm tactic is just a by-product of what was intended to be (and should be, basically) a just and good law...
Hmmm... I suspect that the intent behind the overbroad provisions of the DMCA was more in the minds of lobbyists and campaign committees than it was in the minds of the legislators that actually voted on it. You want an ass to follow your lead, dangle a carrot. If its a politician you want, the bait is a nice full war-chest for the next reelection campaign. Neither one thinks about the consequences of following the bait.
You probably won't be able to keep that client (or get their business). Example: our family business does all drawings on AutoCAD, and many of our clients also use it. One of our very best (and profitable) clients however, has switched all their engineers over to Pro-E (many thousands of dollars per seat) and will only send us files in that format. We have two options: tell the customer that we won't purchase Pro-E (they will take their business to our competitors; we lose much $$$), or we can bite the bullet and get some seat licenses for Pro-E (we keep their thousands/millions in business, but we buy software we don't want).
Most businesses don't see your not purchasing needed software as saving consumers money, they see you as a penny-pincher who doesn't understand the concept of overhead (you have to spend money to make money).
You make an excellent point, as does the poster you replied to. Given that a clients business has a certain arbitrary value, the optimal way to make this decision comes down to how much your client values your services. Unfortunately this is something difficult to predict in most situations.
If you are marketing a high-end service or product that the client cannot get more cost-effectively elsewhere, then you are likely to see clients prepared to conform to your standards for document submission, by virtue of being more willing to absorb any cost in doing so since even with that overhead your service still makes more economic sense than the alternatives. If the same product or service can be had elsewhere for the same price then you'd better be at least as flexible in the requirements you ask of your clients as your most-accessible competitor. The more you as a business can reduce the burden on your clients caused by confirming to your standards the easier it becomes to make those requirements without pricing yourself out of the market - not by your up-front costs but by your requirements.
Personally I'd be nervous about requiring any given document format from any client unless every package out there could both save and read it with no loss of data or I could provide them with a conversion tool for the ones that didnt at no extra cost. In your situation I'd be looking at ways to leverage a low number of seat licenses - possibly a batch conversion process. If I'm running some business where the offices are working entirely in oo on *nix and someone insists on sending me office 2003 files then my business needs a single windows machine, a single office 2003 license and an office assistant or a decent macro utility to do the conversions. I'm no CAD expert but I vaguely recall that most of the higher-end CAD packages are extensively scriptable - can a single Pro-E machine be set up to batch-process a set of files into AutoCAD format and back again? I remember helping a previous employer set up something similar with geographical information from varying sources - that way we didnt have to license lots of different packages for each seat AND we managed to keep using the one we liked. Considering that one of the reasons we liked it was that for a change the site license terms DIDNT verge on rape it worked out ok.
...a woman drunk antifreeze by mistake and got prescribed whisky when she went to the hospital...
Yep, makes perfect sense. The problem with methanol is that it gets into the same places in the body (specifically for some of the nastier toxic effects, in the liver and in nerve cells) that ethanol does - in nerve cells it tends to stick there rather than be released, in the liver it gets into the normal alcohol breakdown pathways and poisons 'em. Thats the same as ordinary alcohol poisoning, but it just takes a LOT less methanol for the same effect. The methanol is already in her system, only way to prevent the damage is to keep the ethanol levels high enough that the methanol cant get where it shouldnt. Get her completely drunk (as a pretty good measure of the ethanol content in her body) and keep her that way for long enough that the methanol has passed out of her system. Then you can let her sober up.
That's really my whole point in a nutshell. I disagree with it, but not for the reason stated by so many:)
Understood.. Interesting thing with this whole security-panic is that folks from all parts of the political spectrum are finding it steps a little too close to stuff they want to protect. You'd think that might tell the politicians something.
Not sure why the US doesn't allow dual citizenship. It's not as if you could run for president, even if you became a US citizen.
I think it had something to do with being the "new nation on the block" when things were originally set up couple of hundred years back. Doesnt really matter that you have a whole continent to play with, having the great imperial powers of the time breathing heavily down your necks tends to make newborn nations nervous - makes you want to be sure that anyone offering you allegiance isnt going to turn round later and claim that a previous one trumps it. As for running for any office, let alone that one, I prefer to keep my ethics the way they are - If I let them get flexible enough to be a politician of any sort I dont think I'd like what I saw in the mirror each morning.
Nice response. I have to say that I made my comment before I realized from some of your replies to other comments that you were focusing on foreigners living overseas. Whilst you have an excellent - indeed, unarguable - point if you are restricting your focus in this way I dont see how this proposal is similarly restricted. Therefore, whilst your point is sound it does not appear to be a defence of this proposal. This proposal is about US regulations governing US ISPs - the traffic they monitor will, in all probablility, have at least one end of its communications channel in the US, maybe even at the machine you're reading this on. Collecting similar information overseas is garden-variety espionage, the stuff that countries have been doing to each other since the idea of nations was first conceived. Personally, I dont see a British, Saudi or Chinese ISP handing over monitoring data just because the US has these regulations and a US government agency asks:) Furthermore, it is quite likely that the only person within the theoretical "reach" of the US government is going to be the one on the US end of the communication. (that is, of course, leaving aside any question of a practical reach of the government, which any country will extend as far as they think they can get away with)
This being the case, since these new regulations are neither required nor effective in monitoring persons overseas, their intended target must be persons in the US, whether they be foreign nationals like myself or US citizens like you. That takes the focus from spying to domestic intelligence-gathering - an essential tool for public safety and national security, but one that like a good rifle, must be equipped with an effective safety. Whats more, like a good rifleman, the US citizens shouldnt trust the safety alone but should watch something like this very carefully to make sure it isnt mishandled with a round chambered.
BTW, to answer your curiosity I am considering becoming a US citizen - I'm in two minds because on the one hand it is my home and I would value the opportunity to add my voice to the democratic process here. On the other hand, I am as proud of my nationality as any US citizen is of theirs - its not an easy thing for anyone to cut that last tie. On 4th July I hang the US and UK flags together outside my house - I just make sure that the US flag has the position of precedence according to proper flag ettiquette because of the day we're celebrating. Once the two countries fought, now they are allies and I'm proud of them both.
You had me up until you tipped your hand that you are not a US citizen. You have no rights in the US. Your free speech rights (or lack thereof) do not impinge my rights, nor my rights to choose leadership.
That having been said, I agree with your concerns and complaints. I just don't see where surveillance of foreigners is either here or there in this matter.
OK, lets look at this some - just for the sake of the argument lets take my situation. I'm not a US citizen but my wife and child are. We live in the US where I am a permanent resident. I work for a US company, pay US taxes on my income and property taxes on our home. My income is all that supports my family. Now assume that something I do on the net under this monitoring regime is misinterpreted as grounds for suspicion of me personally and it impacts my ability to work in the US. At this point one of three things has to happen.
My wife has to suddenly start bringing in our income, and she has a lower earning potential than I do.
The whole family has to uproot itself and move overseas
The family splits up with my wife and child remaining here and me leaving
Ignoring any impact to myself from these three scenarios lets just look at the consequences for two US citizens... In the first case their standard of living drops like a rock. Lose the house, lose most of the health coverage, savings for kids college and/or retirement are out of the question. In the second they are moving to an unfamiliar country, in the process wiping out any financial reserves (having done it once I can tell you international moving will leave all but the richest pretty broke) and causing significant emotional hardship. In the final case thats one more single-parent family to worry about with all the attendant problems that brings.
Ultimately, by impinging on my rights, the lives of US citizens are directly harmed. Its just one of the reasons why the highest law of this great nation, its constitution, requires things like equal protection under the law and rights of due process
Dont think so... heres the relevant snippet from the GPL
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest
your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to
exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or
collective works based on the Program.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program
with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of
a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under
the scope of this License.
Now, as currently released, with the tcp/ip implementation tightly bound to the rest of windows, the mere act of separating the tcp/ip code into dynamic libraries would not be sufficient to qualify as separate products under this license. However, you posed a "what if.." question and under the circumstances you set (paraphrasing as "tcp/ip code is GPL'd") then microsoft could have easily written a GPL'd implementation of tcp/ip for their target platforms and interface routines within windows that used it if it was present, ignored it if it wasnt. Nothing in the GPL would stop them copackaging the GPL'd code as a separate product on the distribution medium, even with an integrated installation method. The only requirement would be that windows would work just fine without it - which, as I seem to recall, it used to:)
In the article, the authors refer to TCPIP. I think this is an excellent example. If the TCP-IP protocol were released under GPL, then anyone writing an application that used TCPIP in any fashion would have to be GPL as well. That means : No commercial web browsers. No commercial email programs. No commercial ANYTHING that does updates via the web. No operating systems (Whens the last time an OS got released without TCPIP support?)
Really? just how much difference would have been made, do you think, if microsoft had been required to release the souce code for the dlls implementing tcp/ip? I'd guess it wouldn't do you much good without the rest of windows to wrap around it. Just because a library implementing a protocol is GPL'd doesnt mean that anything making function calls into that library also has to be. I suppose it's possible to argue the point if the app is statically linked but theres no way a particular version of a dynamic library imposes its own license on anything that calls it. Just because I use a few tweaked versions of system libraries derived from GPL'd code on this machine doesn't mean I can go to Sun and demand all the solaris source code. The fact that my tweaked versions supercede the originals and are called by OS processes doesnt change the license under which that OS is used.
...The insecurities in the operating systems are not the same, but neither one is bulletproof...
Quite correct. The only secure system is the one in your basement with no power cord.
...The biggest factor in security is how well the operating system in question has been configured...
Also correct. The biggest factor in "how secure" an OS may be comes from the ease with which it can be made as secure as possible given its architectural limitations and from the steps that can be taken in advance to limit the damage of a successful compromise. I've been running unix and linux machines for more years than I care to count, I have been a windows user since its earliest days and based on my experiences as my knowledge of each increased I turned more and more towards unix and its analogues for the critical stuff I have to keep secure and stable. Dont get me wrong, I'm not (for a change) advocating that everyone should dump windows. As a gaming platform, as a platform for basic office functionality or day to day workstation use its hard to argue against. Sure, intelligent choices need to be made regarding which tools you install - I wouldnt use outlook for email, for example - but its generally a pretty decent workstation OS. Unix workstations, on the other hand are best at specialist roles. Once you move into the server room, however, the situation reverses.
In my opinion - which is as biased as everybody elses, being based solely on my own experience - unix and its close cousins are easier to secure than windows but with a different professional background, whos to say I might not have a different opinion. YMMV.
oh, and by the way - "if you let the guest account rm -f *.* you're in a bit of trouble" - assuming I let anyone who wanted to remove any file with a dot in its name from the root dir of any of my servers I think they'd all keep working just fine;) Let them do it recursively and theres a couple of directories that would go away but I really wouldnt miss them. To really annoy me a cracker would have to step outside the 8.3 mindset and just get rid of *
Also, I've worked for companies where it's like pulling teeth to get the I.T. manager to allow you to do upgrades and patches. They're so afraid of service packs that break expensive/complex applications loaded on the servers, they refuse to patch things until months go by and they know for sure it's "safe".
True, and if there isnt active development going on for those in-house complex apps the company is going to be in a world of hurt sooner or later - when they face the choice between freezing all upgrades & fixes on the core servers or paying through the nose for the app to be reengineered to cope with changes in the IT landscape that naturally occur over the years.
Where I work, the in-house apps have a defined release cycle for regular updates - after all, patches aint just for the OS:) This means that when I have a patch for any OS component I put it on the integration test & QA setups first, if nothing breaks there it goes on development and then later into production concurrent with the first release of the app that was developed and run through an entire test & QA cycle running on the patched OS. Sure, theres some delays involved and I occasionally break this rule if theres a serious security hole to fix but these all get argued on their merits and I have not had a problem getting a management signoff for critical stuff. In general I find my systems are at least as current on their patches as most of my colleagues at other companies and often much better. The only thing that makes this difference is that the apps I must not break have developers working on them too and they are savvy enough that if an OS patch breaks it they dont care whether its their code or the patch that has the "bug", they just know they have to work around it before the next release.
Agreed absolutely. YES you can taste the difference between the "real" fats and their "healthier" substitutes. YES you can eat it in moderation without ill effects. I cook with and eat the same fats that were in my diet as a kid in the sixties - my pan-frying uses lard where appropriate, I use butter where the recipe calls for it. The only reason I dont use old-fashioned beef dripping for some things is that its almost impossible to find an old-fashioned butcher that can sell it to you. I also eat more (in terms of overall quantity and calorific value) than most folks I know. Whilst I dont eat too many burgers (because I dont like the taste of most commercial ones) the ones I make are huge - a 1lb burger is a meal, anything smaller is a snack. If the "healthy food" zealots were to be believed I should be one of the folks over 300lb and waddling through the supermarkets. I'm positively scrawny and my lipid profile is excellent. All this whilst working a relatively sedentary job. Of course I also study martial arts and work out hard on a daily basis (because it feels good, not because I'm trying to control my weight or anything.) Whats more, on a low fat diet I literally starve - I'm constantly hungry and my weight plummets like I was an anorexic teen... On the medical evidence I'd say my diet exactly fits my own physiology and lifestyle, and that is the important thing, not what components actually go into it.
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Bingo. While back coders took enormous pride in seeing to it that their apps would compile and run on as many *nix flavours as possible. Hell, thats what autoconf and imake were for! Now going form [other-*nix-variant] to linux is pretty easy, because the various maintainers have made damn sure that these compatibility tools work. You just try going the other way...
yeah, but this isnt purely a linux annoyance - its a laziness problem. I've lost count of the number of times I've beaten trainee sysadmins over the head telling them that I dont care what their preferred shell is, write the critical scripts so /sbin/sh can run it and learn how to do without features that are not in there. If the system is crashing down about your ears, thats the only shell you can rely on being there and working close to the way you think it should. Its like folks who hate (and have forgotten) ed & vi and only use emacs shrieking in panic when they discover they need to edit a critical (and probably complex) config file to get their hosed box out of single user mode...
I have three rubber stamps in my passport that would be much easier to fake and mean exactly the same thing.
Only three? They processed yours in jigtime then :)
All joking aside, though, those rubber stamps are a joke. Hell, the visa itself used to be a rubber stamp before what was then the INS moved over to requiring the fancy sticker full of security-print features. I'm sure there were folks who wanted the entire system to use these stickers but I'd bet it got shot down by the cost of implementing on-demand printing of them at every port of entry and immigration office. Ultimately, no matter how careful a nation is in designing and implementing a "secure" system, anyone with good enough fake documentation can be passed through that system with nobody the wiser - even to the extent of giving the fake documents some legitimacy in the eyes of the target country by virtue of their being in the targets official database as valid. There have, in the past, been cases of legitimate travellers being detained at national borders for using false documentation because a fake with the same number/name/whatever was used first so when the real one turns up it gets flagged.
Border security is hard enough in an island nation like the UK, the USA will never achieve it to the level the current administration seems to want. The best anyone can ever do is know where most of the holes are.
This honestly doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. Consider that this changes very little...
... seems to eliminate a less sophisticated avenue of fraud...
This sort of matches my viewpoint too. I mean, as a Brit living in the USA I already have an ID card with multiple features to make it hard to fake and biometric data (photo and fingerprint) - its called a "green card" although only the lettering on the back is green anymore. Wouldnt surprise me in the slightest to discover that theres all sorts of data encoded on it in machine-readable form from my visa application through to the final interview when they authorised giving me the card in the first place. I havent looked into it in any detail because I dont give a rats ass. They have the data anyway and the rules that govern its use dont change just because they stick it on a card. The harder it is for some jerk with a semtex fetish to fake one of these and maybe pretend to be me the happier I'll be. Personally I'd rather not get a vacation in Cuba thanks to identity theft....
Land of the Free!*
*Some restrictions apply. Void where prohibited.
If my psion seriesV hadnt bitten the big one I'd still be using it. If it had only croaked a few months earlier I'd have been able to get it fixed and still be using it. The palmOS replacement was a letdown.
This book should be required reading for anyone about to comment on public issues such as this one. One classic piece of "crooked thinking" it highlights is when one side of a debate siezes on a side issue where they are assured of a strong argument and somehow infers that "winning" on the side issue strengthens their argument on the main one whilst not actually advancing any points to support their position on the main issue. Someone on the receiving end of this tactic gives it legitimacy by falling into the trap of debating the side issue rather than the main one. Of course in this discussion the most highly moderated comments are all about whether copyright infringement is theft or not. Oddly enough in this case the tactic is used by both sides.. as "It aint theft so you cant punish folks that do it" by one side and as "Of course we have to crack down on these digital thieves" by the other.
Arguing over whether copyright infringement is equivalent to theft is all very well and a valid philosophical debate but doesnt address whether this would be a good law or not. Whether copyright infringement is theft or not this would STILL be a bad law if it were ever passed. Authors and artists deserve protection of their works from improper exploitation and duplication. Copyright law provides this. The public deserves to have those creative people satisfy their side of the bargain that created copyright in the first place and release the monopoly on their works after a reasonable time. We can debate how long that time should be and how the supposedly equitable nature of this deal should be preserved as long as you like but it doesnt address the point at issue here. "Is this proposed law a suitable measure for enforcing existing copyright protections whilst preserving the balance between protection and fair use?" I think either side of the theft/not-theft debate will agree that the answer to that substantive question is "No" so why are we debating the "theft" issue so heavily?
Although statistics might have their place somewhere I've yet to find that place...
...100% of polls are misleading and only serve the purpose or ideology of the entities invloved...
The place you have yet to find is where proper data is gathered for the situation under investigation and no inferences are drawn from the statistics other than the strictly limited ones a given statistical method is designed to permit. Sadly, your statement about polls or other methods of gauging public opinion is correct since every effort is made under those circumstances to force the analysis into a path that supports a predetermined agenda. In this article, however, the author goes to some lengths to avoid these pitfalls. He clearly describes his source data, being careful to show where its shortcomings are and to illustrate his reasons for choosing that particular set of input data. He is honest about the conclusions he draws too - There are only two valid conclusions for most analytical statistics applied to seeking a corellation between apparently distinct data series, you can either say "We are n% confident that a relationship exists" and then go on to analyse it further or you can say "We cannot show a relationship between X and Y." Unlike most bad analysis this author does not take that latter case and claim it proves there is no relationship. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this author should be applauded for not falling into this trap.
In short, it appears that an effort has been made here to apply statistics properly and under such circumstances the conclusions drawn are less likely to be BS. Just because a statistical calculation is involved doesnt make the answer wrong or the analyst dishonest.
You got egg on your face...
And of course, if you do this to baseball whilst doing something creative about the LBW rules in cricket - say get rid of LBW entirely and allow the batsman hit by the ball to walk one which would be scored as an extra - you might even get to a point where the two games were similar enough that they could reasonably play each other... wait a bit... NO!!! The english team dont need another national side that will visit the home of the sport and kick their arses - its embarrassing ;)
It's why sararimen are called "exempt" employees. The employer is exempt from wage and hour restrictions on salaried employees, i.e. they 0wnz j00.
Not exactly - it depends on the employer. I'm an exempt employee and employed "at will" so I'm in trouble, right? Er... well... no. Fortunately the company I work for does see the whole exempt/at will business as two-sided. As far as they are concerned they pay me for results and dont really care how many or how few hours I work provided they get those results. Sometimes that means my life sucks because I'm busy as a one-armed paper-hanger but on the other hand they know that they get better results if they give me enough notice of whats in the wind and enough of the big picture to make intelligent scheduling decisions. I've actually been commended for going to my boss and saying "These n jobs are all high priority but I cant put in enough hours to do them all in this timeframe no matter how efficiently I work. Which one(s) should I let slip?" They know that if we cant resolve the scheduling issue ALL of the projects are going to slip and thats worse than picking one or two and rescheduling it in advance. On the other hand, if I waffle on it and they all slip anyway I can quite rightly expect to get bitched at. With a decent employer, be professional and they will treat you that way. If they dont they wont keep you - doesnt matter how bad the job market is, high staff turnover in costly folks still hits them in the balance sheet so they do have an incentive to keep their professional employees.
You are exactly right. I do tech support. Without question, the MOST annoying calls we get are from older tech who will start off the phone conversation with, "By the way, I've been programming for over 20 years, and I think..."
Having done many years on the helldesk, I agree with you. Having since then done more than that many years as a systems and network admin I can tell you the other kind of annoying call... When you say "Heres the symptoms of the problem, heres the steps to reproduce, heres what I've tried already to work around it, heres my estimate of the situation. Please can you confirm this or give me your opinion and do you know of any workaround that I havent tried yet?" and you know, from the response you get, that the guy on the other end is stumped and doesnt know how to proceed but they arent going to admit this fact and escalate to the next support tier until they have wasted a LOT of your time. Thats one of the other things about older geeks of every discipline - they have learned the hard way that "I dont know" != "I have failed" and manage to not be so insecure.
I've learned so much from folks both older and younger than myself that trying to guess at somebodies abilities or suitability for a particular post based on their age is self-evidently a waste of time. On the other hand, you make a great point about obstinacy.
They have the hardest time grasping that their way isn't the way something needs to be done in order for it to work in our software.
This tends to be, however, mainly a problem with changes happening during an employees tenure rather than at interview time. Many people, old and young, cant see past "the way they have always done it." Hardest thing with any implementation is swinging the clue-by-four to get folks to realize that working with the new system is not the same as forcing the new system to work in the same way as the old one...
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into writing a book, I have to ask where you get off telling me that there should be a hard cap on the limit of my copyright. Don't I have the right to profit for the rest of my life from my work? What about my children? What about my grandchildren?
Ok, assuming you're quite seriously asserting that there should be no limit, you have put much time and effort into a creative work. The law as it exists now therefore states that as an incentive to your releasing that work by publishing it you are guaranteed exclusive rights to distribute it for X years. The payoff for that protection is that after X years you lose that exclusivity. Nobody else ever gets to claim it as theirs, you (or your descendants, or whoever you assigned those rights to) just lose the monopoly. By eventually contributing the work into the public domain at the copyrights expiry, you are paying for the protection the work enjoyed up to that date.
If you want that exclusive control in perpetuity, dont release it outside your family.
I don't care how long Disney holds on to the mouse. Just because you place no value on your work doesn't mean that the rest of us don't place value on ours.
Your work, the product of thousands of hours of creative effort, is of considerable value. Thats why I'd encourage you to accept the "cost" of copyright protection - that the work will eventually pass into the public domain - and publish it.
Personally, in your position, I'd build several possible scenarios...
That would be a minimum, the important thing is that every one of them has to achieve what the company needs. The costs will differ, the risks will differ, the long-term implications of things like scalability will differ and these will all play into the management viewpoint. They dont care how "good" the software is or isnt. All you can do is the risk analysis and the cost/benefit presentation, making them aware of precisely the levels of risk each solution exposes the company to and precisely how much it will cost to avoid those risks. Every software package is a risk, whether open source or not. Every piece of hardware is a risk. Lose your main production data server and how much business do you lose per hour whilst its down? How long will it take to get it back in each of your scenarios? How likely is the outage in the first place? Since every solution you present meets the same needs, does it matter which one they choose?
Now, my personal opinion based on experience in the past is that when the analysis is complete the case for open source in at least some of the application areas of a unix environment will be a complete no-brainer. As you work up the results, however, you might be surprised at some of the places it doesnt give an appreciable benefit. Remember that the time you spend scripting and configuring stuff is part of the cost, as is employee learning time. Dont leave anything out. Be absolutely straight presenting the best comparable info you can and dont try and slant it either way. If they make the wrong choice and it bites the company in the butt it then wont be your fault, even if the wrong choice was your recommendation too.
*Some restrictions apply. Void where prohibited
Hmmm... I suspect that the intent behind the overbroad provisions of the DMCA was more in the minds of lobbyists and campaign committees than it was in the minds of the legislators that actually voted on it. You want an ass to follow your lead, dangle a carrot. If its a politician you want, the bait is a nice full war-chest for the next reelection campaign. Neither one thinks about the consequences of following the bait.
You probably won't be able to keep that client (or get their business). Example: our family business does all drawings on AutoCAD, and many of our clients also use it. One of our very best (and profitable) clients however, has switched all their engineers over to Pro-E (many thousands of dollars per seat) and will only send us files in that format. We have two options: tell the customer that we won't purchase Pro-E (they will take their business to our competitors; we lose much $$$), or we can bite the bullet and get some seat licenses for Pro-E (we keep their thousands/millions in business, but we buy software we don't want).
Most businesses don't see your not purchasing needed software as saving consumers money, they see you as a penny-pincher who doesn't understand the concept of overhead (you have to spend money to make money).
You make an excellent point, as does the poster you replied to. Given that a clients business has a certain arbitrary value, the optimal way to make this decision comes down to how much your client values your services. Unfortunately this is something difficult to predict in most situations.
If you are marketing a high-end service or product that the client cannot get more cost-effectively elsewhere, then you are likely to see clients prepared to conform to your standards for document submission, by virtue of being more willing to absorb any cost in doing so since even with that overhead your service still makes more economic sense than the alternatives. If the same product or service can be had elsewhere for the same price then you'd better be at least as flexible in the requirements you ask of your clients as your most-accessible competitor. The more you as a business can reduce the burden on your clients caused by confirming to your standards the easier it becomes to make those requirements without pricing yourself out of the market - not by your up-front costs but by your requirements.
Personally I'd be nervous about requiring any given document format from any client unless every package out there could both save and read it with no loss of data or I could provide them with a conversion tool for the ones that didnt at no extra cost. In your situation I'd be looking at ways to leverage a low number of seat licenses - possibly a batch conversion process. If I'm running some business where the offices are working entirely in oo on *nix and someone insists on sending me office 2003 files then my business needs a single windows machine, a single office 2003 license and an office assistant or a decent macro utility to do the conversions. I'm no CAD expert but I vaguely recall that most of the higher-end CAD packages are extensively scriptable - can a single Pro-E machine be set up to batch-process a set of files into AutoCAD format and back again? I remember helping a previous employer set up something similar with geographical information from varying sources - that way we didnt have to license lots of different packages for each seat AND we managed to keep using the one we liked. Considering that one of the reasons we liked it was that for a change the site license terms DIDNT verge on rape it worked out ok.
Yep, makes perfect sense. The problem with methanol is that it gets into the same places in the body (specifically for some of the nastier toxic effects, in the liver and in nerve cells) that ethanol does - in nerve cells it tends to stick there rather than be released, in the liver it gets into the normal alcohol breakdown pathways and poisons 'em. Thats the same as ordinary alcohol poisoning, but it just takes a LOT less methanol for the same effect. The methanol is already in her system, only way to prevent the damage is to keep the ethanol levels high enough that the methanol cant get where it shouldnt. Get her completely drunk (as a pretty good measure of the ethanol content in her body) and keep her that way for long enough that the methanol has passed out of her system. Then you can let her sober up.
That's really my whole point in a nutshell. I disagree with it, but not for the reason stated by so many:)
Understood.. Interesting thing with this whole security-panic is that folks from all parts of the political spectrum are finding it steps a little too close to stuff they want to protect. You'd think that might tell the politicians something.
Not sure why the US doesn't allow dual citizenship. It's not as if you could run for president, even if you became a US citizen.
I think it had something to do with being the "new nation on the block" when things were originally set up couple of hundred years back. Doesnt really matter that you have a whole continent to play with, having the great imperial powers of the time breathing heavily down your necks tends to make newborn nations nervous - makes you want to be sure that anyone offering you allegiance isnt going to turn round later and claim that a previous one trumps it. As for running for any office, let alone that one, I prefer to keep my ethics the way they are - If I let them get flexible enough to be a politician of any sort I dont think I'd like what I saw in the mirror each morning.
Nice response. I have to say that I made my comment before I realized from some of your replies to other comments that you were focusing on foreigners living overseas. Whilst you have an excellent - indeed, unarguable - point if you are restricting your focus in this way I dont see how this proposal is similarly restricted. Therefore, whilst your point is sound it does not appear to be a defence of this proposal. This proposal is about US regulations governing US ISPs - the traffic they monitor will, in all probablility, have at least one end of its communications channel in the US, maybe even at the machine you're reading this on. Collecting similar information overseas is garden-variety espionage, the stuff that countries have been doing to each other since the idea of nations was first conceived. Personally, I dont see a British, Saudi or Chinese ISP handing over monitoring data just because the US has these regulations and a US government agency asks :) Furthermore, it is quite likely that the only person within the theoretical "reach" of the US government is going to be the one on the US end of the communication. (that is, of course, leaving aside any question of a practical reach of the government, which any country will extend as far as they think they can get away with)
This being the case, since these new regulations are neither required nor effective in monitoring persons overseas, their intended target must be persons in the US, whether they be foreign nationals like myself or US citizens like you. That takes the focus from spying to domestic intelligence-gathering - an essential tool for public safety and national security, but one that like a good rifle, must be equipped with an effective safety. Whats more, like a good rifleman, the US citizens shouldnt trust the safety alone but should watch something like this very carefully to make sure it isnt mishandled with a round chambered.
BTW, to answer your curiosity I am considering becoming a US citizen - I'm in two minds because on the one hand it is my home and I would value the opportunity to add my voice to the democratic process here. On the other hand, I am as proud of my nationality as any US citizen is of theirs - its not an easy thing for anyone to cut that last tie. On 4th July I hang the US and UK flags together outside my house - I just make sure that the US flag has the position of precedence according to proper flag ettiquette because of the day we're celebrating. Once the two countries fought, now they are allies and I'm proud of them both.
You had me up until you tipped your hand that you are not a US citizen. You have no rights in the US. Your free speech rights (or lack thereof) do not impinge my rights, nor my rights to choose leadership.
That having been said, I agree with your concerns and complaints. I just don't see where surveillance of foreigners is either here or there in this matter.
OK, lets look at this some - just for the sake of the argument lets take my situation. I'm not a US citizen but my wife and child are. We live in the US where I am a permanent resident. I work for a US company, pay US taxes on my income and property taxes on our home. My income is all that supports my family. Now assume that something I do on the net under this monitoring regime is misinterpreted as grounds for suspicion of me personally and it impacts my ability to work in the US. At this point one of three things has to happen.
Ignoring any impact to myself from these three scenarios lets just look at the consequences for two US citizens... In the first case their standard of living drops like a rock. Lose the house, lose most of the health coverage, savings for kids college and/or retirement are out of the question. In the second they are moving to an unfamiliar country, in the process wiping out any financial reserves (having done it once I can tell you international moving will leave all but the richest pretty broke) and causing significant emotional hardship. In the final case thats one more single-parent family to worry about with all the attendant problems that brings.
Ultimately, by impinging on my rights, the lives of US citizens are directly harmed. Its just one of the reasons why the highest law of this great nation, its constitution, requires things like equal protection under the law and rights of due process
Dont think so... heres the relevant snippet from the GPL
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
Now, as currently released, with the tcp/ip implementation tightly bound to the rest of windows, the mere act of separating the tcp/ip code into dynamic libraries would not be sufficient to qualify as separate products under this license. However, you posed a "what if.." question and under the circumstances you set (paraphrasing as "tcp/ip code is GPL'd") then microsoft could have easily written a GPL'd implementation of tcp/ip for their target platforms and interface routines within windows that used it if it was present, ignored it if it wasnt. Nothing in the GPL would stop them copackaging the GPL'd code as a separate product on the distribution medium, even with an integrated installation method. The only requirement would be that windows would work just fine without it - which, as I seem to recall, it used to :)
In the article, the authors refer to TCPIP. I think this is an excellent example. If the TCP-IP protocol were released under GPL, then anyone writing an application that used TCPIP in any fashion would have to be GPL as well. That means : No commercial web browsers. No commercial email programs. No commercial ANYTHING that does updates via the web. No operating systems (Whens the last time an OS got released without TCPIP support?)
Really? just how much difference would have been made, do you think, if microsoft had been required to release the souce code for the dlls implementing tcp/ip? I'd guess it wouldn't do you much good without the rest of windows to wrap around it. Just because a library implementing a protocol is GPL'd doesnt mean that anything making function calls into that library also has to be. I suppose it's possible to argue the point if the app is statically linked but theres no way a particular version of a dynamic library imposes its own license on anything that calls it. Just because I use a few tweaked versions of system libraries derived from GPL'd code on this machine doesn't mean I can go to Sun and demand all the solaris source code. The fact that my tweaked versions supercede the originals and are called by OS processes doesnt change the license under which that OS is used.
Quite correct. The only secure system is the one in your basement with no power cord.
Also correct. The biggest factor in "how secure" an OS may be comes from the ease with which it can be made as secure as possible given its architectural limitations and from the steps that can be taken in advance to limit the damage of a successful compromise. I've been running unix and linux machines for more years than I care to count, I have been a windows user since its earliest days and based on my experiences as my knowledge of each increased I turned more and more towards unix and its analogues for the critical stuff I have to keep secure and stable. Dont get me wrong, I'm not (for a change) advocating that everyone should dump windows. As a gaming platform, as a platform for basic office functionality or day to day workstation use its hard to argue against. Sure, intelligent choices need to be made regarding which tools you install - I wouldnt use outlook for email, for example - but its generally a pretty decent workstation OS. Unix workstations, on the other hand are best at specialist roles. Once you move into the server room, however, the situation reverses.
In my opinion - which is as biased as everybody elses, being based solely on my own experience - unix and its close cousins are easier to secure than windows but with a different professional background, whos to say I might not have a different opinion. YMMV.
oh, and by the way - "if you let the guest account rm -f *.* you're in a bit of trouble" - assuming I let anyone who wanted to remove any file with a dot in its name from the root dir of any of my servers I think they'd all keep working just fine ;) Let them do it recursively and theres a couple of directories that would go away but I really wouldnt miss them. To really annoy me a cracker would have to step outside the 8.3 mindset and just get rid of *
Also, I've worked for companies where it's like pulling teeth to get the I.T. manager to allow you to do upgrades and patches. They're so afraid of service packs that break expensive/complex applications loaded on the servers, they refuse to patch things until months go by and they know for sure it's "safe".
True, and if there isnt active development going on for those in-house complex apps the company is going to be in a world of hurt sooner or later - when they face the choice between freezing all upgrades & fixes on the core servers or paying through the nose for the app to be reengineered to cope with changes in the IT landscape that naturally occur over the years.
Where I work, the in-house apps have a defined release cycle for regular updates - after all, patches aint just for the OS :) This means that when I have a patch for any OS component I put it on the integration test & QA setups first, if nothing breaks there it goes on development and then later into production concurrent with the first release of the app that was developed and run through an entire test & QA cycle running on the patched OS. Sure, theres some delays involved and I occasionally break this rule if theres a serious security hole to fix but these all get argued on their merits and I have not had a problem getting a management signoff for critical stuff. In general I find my systems are at least as current on their patches as most of my colleagues at other companies and often much better. The only thing that makes this difference is that the apps I must not break have developers working on them too and they are savvy enough that if an OS patch breaks it they dont care whether its their code or the patch that has the "bug", they just know they have to work around it before the next release.
Agreed absolutely. YES you can taste the difference between the "real" fats and their "healthier" substitutes. YES you can eat it in moderation without ill effects. I cook with and eat the same fats that were in my diet as a kid in the sixties - my pan-frying uses lard where appropriate, I use butter where the recipe calls for it. The only reason I dont use old-fashioned beef dripping for some things is that its almost impossible to find an old-fashioned butcher that can sell it to you. I also eat more (in terms of overall quantity and calorific value) than most folks I know. Whilst I dont eat too many burgers (because I dont like the taste of most commercial ones) the ones I make are huge - a 1lb burger is a meal, anything smaller is a snack. If the "healthy food" zealots were to be believed I should be one of the folks over 300lb and waddling through the supermarkets. I'm positively scrawny and my lipid profile is excellent. All this whilst working a relatively sedentary job. Of course I also study martial arts and work out hard on a daily basis (because it feels good, not because I'm trying to control my weight or anything.) Whats more, on a low fat diet I literally starve - I'm constantly hungry and my weight plummets like I was an anorexic teen... On the medical evidence I'd say my diet exactly fits my own physiology and lifestyle, and that is the important thing, not what components actually go into it.