Okay, so the DS3 is a Very Bad Thing for a tonne of reasons.
BUT... The linked.doc says that
The scope of uncontrolled "Quantico Circuit" access allowed the third party to obtain significant information about any mobile phone subscribers, including -- listening in and recording all conversations en-mass; {... ]
Note the focus on 'phone' and 'conversations'. Aside from demonstrating ignorance on the difference between 'mass' and masse', this statement *directly contradicts* the linked.pdf, which states that the exposed 'Data network' transports all mobile data service traffic and related business app traffic but *not* the raw traffic of the 'Cell network', which was not examined in the audit.
Anyone else read this similarly?
Which is it? This, plus the lack of detail around the location of the 'network vcrs', which presumably are traffic copy mechanisms, the location of which will determine exactly what data is exposed by this mechanism, gives me less of a warm-and-fuzzy feeling with respect to the allegation's supporting documentation.
I am in no way supporting the existence of this no-ACL, no-logging circuit into what is allegedly a major carrier's mobile support network. The devil is in the details in this dialogue, however, and there is no excuse for direct contradictions and lack of important detail.
Now that Blackboard has acquired WebCT, it's getting worse, inconceivable as that might seem. The licensing was getting out of hand even pre-acquisition, and my Spidey-Sense tells me we're just about to take it on the chops from Blackboard. This patent, which stakes out the ground for role-based rights as a Blackboard invention, will kill all innovation as well as open source implementations such as Moodle and Sakai, etc. Everyone is going to be afraid for the future of these alternative LMS's, and will be driven to consolidating on a Blackboard platform, which turns out to be rewarding Blackboard for being monopolistic pricks!.
When Murray Goldberg was hacking Perl scripts at UBC (or whoever he got to do it for him, if) in the early days of what became WebCT, it was motivated out of a genuine desire to extend the reach of education by someone who I believe had a longtime love for teaching. To look at it now, the product would seem quite silly, I'm sure, but it represented the Golden Age of Learning Management Systems.
I don't know the development internals of WebCT, but it always seemed to me to be a Good Little Idea, but a Bad Bigger Idea. It just didn't scale. It was like there was no architecture, no coherency.
Near Dawson City in the Yukon Territory, Canada, there is a four story mining dredge that has been designated a historic site. These dredges were incredible Rube Goldberg machines; they were built ad-hoc, with shit hanging all over the place and the next thought-of feature literally bolted on the side of them. They worked, I guess, but they sure weren't pretty.
WebCT always reminded me of those dredges, a weird world where the next idea is welded on the side of the implementation in the first way someone thought of how to do it. It ends up being this ugly-but-nearly-functional Frankenstein. Maybe I'm being unfair to mining dredges and Frankensteins.
The biggest barrier to change is, in my experience, faculty who are trained up and comfortable using Blackboard, and who already have their curriculum good to go in Blackboard.
Students - unite!. Tell your prof that Blackboard sucks, and give them specific reasons why you believe this to be the case. Pressure profs to get whatever the Teaching and Technology/Learning Committee (or whatever it is called at your University) to get a pilot of an alternative LMS underway. Get that prof to pilot some of their courses on the alternative.
Let's break this monopoly and keep a competitive and innovative LMS landscape, or we'll all be stuck with something that is, emphatically, worse that WebCT. And fsck the USPTO for enabling this horse-shit, even if they are overworked and underpaid. If you don't have the answer, don't pretend you do. Go and find someone to help with evaluation. And, no, someone who is affiliated with the company behind the application doesn't count.
Then when you take all forms of democracy out of the picture and watch Stalin's death machine, look to Vietnam and the subsequent killing fields there
Point of clarification - the 'killing fields' of popular culture nomenclature, at least in North America (as represented by the movie, I suppose) were in Cambodia. I've never heard the term used in reference to Vietnam. Which could of course just indicate that I don't know jack.
But they should be made publicly available if the university benefits from public funds
Not trolling, but definitely playing Devil's Advocate here: so what if a university benefits from public funds? Don't many privately held corporations benefit from public funds (from infrastructure - roads - to services, to selling product that is paid for in 'public funds')?
My point is that the idea of 'benefiting from public funds' is a slippery one, and that segmenting patent applicability by some measure of the use of public funds in developing a patent is a complex issue.
And I'm not expressing support for the current state of the USPTO here, nor the general state of the patent system in the U.S. at this time - just questioning a particular idea expressed above.
It's a bit more complicated than that, as Netscape really was Mosaic in a way.
I do appreciate the overlap between the development teams, and that Netscape was originally named 'Mosaic Communications Corporation'. But NCSA Mosaic the browser still existed in spite of Clark/Anderson's attempt to appropriate the name. As far as I can tell, there was no overlap in the software, just in the name. Netscape the browser was in no way Mosaic the browser.
jwz claims outright that the browser they were developing was spoken of as 'crushing NCSA Mosaic', which is when he says he came up with 'Mozilla' http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html (search on Mozilla in the page).
In other words, you're happy that Mosaic killed Mosaic because they wanted to kill Mosaic.
Now that's a damned funny line. While I knew that Mosaic had beget Spyglass, I had *no* idea that Spyglass beget IE. I plead circular ignorance. Thanks for the laugh.
I wasn't there, but I've always understood 'Mozilla' to be a funky portmanteau of 'Mosaic Killer', stemming from Marc Anderson's dream of Netscape reigning supreme over Mosaic, the ground-breaking NCSA-developed graphical browser. Anyone out there who was close to the action?
As a result, I never shed a tear for Netscape when IE wiped the floor with them, as it seemed to me that Netscape got exactly what they had set out to do to Mosaic.
I remember quite vividly the first time I saw Mosaic fired up, watching the 'world' icon spin. I was so focused on the software - 'fucking cool!' - that I don't even remember what page we were loading.
... in response to controversy regarding camera systems on post-secondary education campuses...
I helped get this established on our campus. Why did we do it? It has nothing to do with "tracking everyone" and everything to do with crime. We have cameras on the parking lots because we kept having "neighbors" from the black-dominated slums nearby breaking into cars and carjacking people, and so they now have someone watching to dispatch a cop to a problem spot 24/7. We have cameras on buildings leading to classrooms, and even a few IN classrooms, because of people committing rapes and getting into fights.
I am empathetic to the issues you're presenting here. On the grounds of the university I work at, crime is very much an issue - usually, as far as I can tell, perpetrated by individuals not enrolled at the university. I hear you, and I don't think you're trolling.
But - what makes the camera response difficult for me is that such institutions, in my experience (which makes this just another fscking opinion), are *incapable* of setting and sticking to terms of reference for such a facility. Once the cameras are in place, people just can't help themselves in using them beyond a scope of a video record to be used to identify thieves in response to car break-ins, for example.
The transition to surveillance devices is fast, not matter how big a stack of bibles were used in swearing that they would never be used that way. Once the facility is in place, there is *always* what sounds to be a reasonable context for going beyond the original terms of reference.
I believe that, in a free society, an individual has a reasonable expectation of proceeding through their day without being subject to arbitrary surveillance. If you remove that expectation, you take a significant step towards a functioning police state.
Arbitrary surveillance is like crack for enforcement agencies of all ilk. Once they've tried it, they can't get it off it - it just works too damn well. And major precepts of privacy and freedom go out the window without a genuine debate about it every having taken place.
I'm not trolling either - I just feel strongly on this issue.
Dame Lynne Brindley DBE, Chief Executive of the British Library, said of the report findings: "Libraries have to accept that the future is now. At the British Library we have adopted the digital mindset... Turning the Pages 2.0 and the mass digitisation project to digitise 25 million of pages of 19th century English literature are only two examples of the pioneering work we are doing.
In other news, the CEO of the British Library was found drifting in a tear in the time/space continuum, disoriented and incapable of understanding that digitising shit in 2008 does not make one a pioneer.
Seriously, who writes this stuff? From the headline (Pioneering research shows 'Google Generation' is a myth) to the sponsor's announcement of the study (adopted the digital mindset), the study is so wrapped in hyperbole that I just can't take it seriously.
And reading it is bad enough - I'd rather poke my eye out with a sharpened stick than click on the audio link to the 'Launch Event'.
Every generation complains about the work ethic of succeeding generations. Oh, yeah, and the music they listen too is just noise and too damn loud.
I'm not trolling. If you have a good hiring process - one which explores the expectations of both the employee and the employer - then you'll bring in people who have an understanding of what is expected of them.
I'm no big-time manager of people. I've got 27 people reporting up to my position. The twenty-somethings are no different than anyone else; they want to learn, have some interesting project work to go along with the more mundane aspects of operations and they want to be treated with respect.
If you treat people otherwise, they won't respond well, no matter their age.
And yes, I understand that some people are just assholes, and it'll never work out with them. But that's your responsibility, as a hiring manager, to figure out in advance.
Frankly, if nobody pays to see movies, no movies will get made - or at least, only cheap movies where the person making them can afford to eat the cost.
What's a cheap movie - seriously, what are we talking here? 'Waking Ned Devine' ('Waking Ned' in U.K.) cost $3 million, according to http://www.iomguide.com/wakingned.php. No particular reason to pick this movie, except it was the first thing that popped into my mind when I thought about funny, well-made, non-Hollywood type movies.
I rent movies mainly, and hit the theatre ever once in a while to see movies that seem worthy of the big screen, like Lord of the Rings (as you mention). The 50 or so videos I own are music-related (Hard Day's Night, Steve Ray Live at the El-mocambo, etc.) So if Hollyood wants to pay Sylvester Stallone $20 million for Rocky Balboa, they can knock themselves out doing it, because it doesn't matter to me if that movie gets made.
Buying a DVD is as far as I'll go WRT DRM. And I have no problem ripping it so it's on my home network. So if the movie industry can't make Lord of the Rings on the revenue coming in from theatres and selling DVD's, then they better get their costs down, or look for another line of work. I think Peter Jackson's trilogy income of $20 million against a 20 percent take of the box-office rentals (according to Wikipedia) has some slack in it.
These sort of numbers blow big holes in the 'Big Movies Subsidizing Art Movies' story, at least for me. Movies will continue to get made - some of them good, too - for less; there is no natural law or objective truth mandating their dying business model.
These greedy bastards are abusing their customers beyond belief, and whining about hard times because their incredible gravy train is under stress. And they're trying to impose legislation worldwide via WIPO to boot. Fuck 'em. Piracy was never on my plate, but I don't even feel bad about that any more - my own or others.
And I'm not qualitatively equivocating Mr. Jackson w/ Stallone, or singling out LOTR for any reason other than that LOTR comes as close to something I admire coming out of Hollywood.
Houston police contacted KPRC from the test site, claiming the entire airspace was restricted by the Federal Aviation Administration. Police even threatened action from the FAA if the Local 2 helicopter remained in the area. However, KPRC reported it had already checked with the FAA on numerous occasions and found no flight restrictions around the site, a point conceded by Montalvo. When police department officials lie in an attempt to bully media out of covering simple testing of a technology, why (and how) do they expect that citizens will have *any* faith whatsoever with regard to their claimed motivations for a so-called service or, in the event of a rollout, of adherence to any privacy-related constraints/governance?
It's not even off the ground yet (!) and the bullshitting has already started.
The wind blew, the crap flew, and for days the vision was bad.
In the '70's Miller had a trademark on 'Lite' which came into its possession via Miller's acquisition of Meister Brau. When Miller Lite and its fantastically popular ex-jock/'Tastes Great!/'Less Filling' ad campaign rocketed Miller to the Number Two industry position (behind Anheuser-Busch) in only a couple of years, other companies started creating 'Light' bears. Miller started suing, citing its trademark on the term 'Lite'. My recollection (I can't find a link to substantiate) is that they while other companies were restricted from using the term 'Lite', 'Light' was deemed un-trademarkable (sorry!) since it was a simple english word.
As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders. Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders.
As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are millionaire sports franchise owners selling craptastic trash and trinkets to people willing to shill for their team for free. That's right, millionaire sports franchise owners selling craptastic trash are nothing more than soulless, blood-sucking gunsel shysters.
So Mark Cuban has *another* opinion [and is clueless about contractions]. Who gives a shit?
So last year we heard that mysterious 'German Officials' were
claiming they had technology for intercepting and decrypting Skype phone calls from no less of a source than the New York Times (via Skype forums): http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=54163
Bingo! You have granted them a non-exclusive license to use any part or all of your content for any purpose they are so inclined to fulfill. And even though the license expires
automatically upon removal of your content, you 'acknowledge' (and I'm not really sure what that means in a legal sense... does it agree or grant permission?) that the Company may retain your content as 'archived copies' (whatever the hell that means).
The best part of this is that the Terms of Use may change at any time and the user is obliged to discover this via their own review process:
It is your responsibility to regularly check the Site to determine if there have been changes to these Terms of Use and to review such changes.
Continued use of the service after changes to the ToS constitutes your acceptance. Why do people continue to accept these bullshit terms?
Have at it if you dig the service, folks. But these laments about features or process added to the Facebook experience are getting old and tired - you signed it all away, why are you surprised?
IANAL, but a common assertion on/. is that just because a ToS or EULA asserts something doesn't mean that it is enforceable or binding. Any lawyers out there to confirm/deny this?
Folks, Dvorak admits it in the clip link below - he writes to get reaction. I don't think he cares if he is correct or not - it's all an exercise in pot-stirring. And maybe he's got an advertising revenue side-effect to go with it... but he's been doing it so long that I don't think he's strictly in it for the money.
I have to say I am sad to see so many negative reactions to djb and his software.
Agreed. DJB is, in my experience of reading his USENET postings and documentation, certainly assertive in his writing, but the man is damn thorough and quite thoughtful. He's also prepared to argue his position at length and with plenty of vigour (to say the least) and this can piss people off.
I won't speak for anyone's experience with qmail other than my own; I converted a number of sendmail and mmdf (the MTA delivered with the SCO TCP/IP component about 12+ years ago, and an ancestor of pmdf) installations to qmail and I didn't find the setup particularly onerous or the documentation problematic, and there are lots of admins smarter and better than me out there. I will say that djb's docs have their own style and require a bit of getting used to, but this is the same reaction I've seen in many people the first time they've encountered a man page.
It's been a long time since I've admin'd an MTA, so I can't speak to setting up contemporary postfix or similar, but I can tell you that qmail was a blessing for me at the time, and I grabbed it and ran away from sendmail as quickly as I could. Even if you didn't like djb's security model, you couldn't deny that he had one, and that he applied it rigourously in the development of software. This was not my experience with sendmail.
Complaints about the number of required patches to qmail do resonate for me; my own feeling is that qmail suffered from a lack of author attention once the main development cycle(s) ended. This, combined with license restrictions, made it hard for qmail to evolve.
I've never read anything from djb that didn't make me stop and think. I admire him and his contributions; he doesn't just talk - he's a helluva walker as well.
Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? Linux teaches students about computers Windows teaches students how to use Windows.
I tried to deconstruct this sentence, and can't really get anywhere with it.
Operating systems are just that; systems software that facilitates the use and configuration of the hardware it is running on. I don't think that there is an inherent element within any OS which 'teaches' anything.
Obviously individuals develop preferences, and one's experience may even lead to a greater understanding of systems' architecture (or similar) using a particular OS. Certainly my experience was that using *nix of various flavours encouraged me to dig into elements of hardware and design more than using classic Mac OS did at the time. I don't think I would have ever started trying to write device drivers for NICs, or SLP drivers, if I had only been using a MAC (pre-OS X).
Before I get hammered by the Mac crowd for this comment, let me say that I don't think this was as a result of any shortcoming; rather, I believe that by *intention* using a Macintosh focused me as a user on the functional outcome I was trying to achieve, isolating me *by intention* from the internals below. That's fine - it's just one approach to structuring the user experience.
By contrast, the experience of obtaining and installing Slackware at the time made me very aware of the underlying system elements for interfacing with and using the hardware, and I suppose this is what the original poster may have been driving (sorry!) at - that using Linux leads to one being more informed about the systems architecture and interaction.
There's nothing sacred about this though - some people will argue that the point of using computers is to focus on the functional outcome desired, not learn how the underlying system is structured or works. I suspect that most folks on/. are interested in all these elements, but we're not typical users.
As for the ease of transition for Win98-->Vista vs. say SysV-->Ubuntu w/ gnome, I dunno if I buy this. Hell, trying to move people between kde and gnome has been known to start a war.
As for what all this has do do with why schools don't all use OSS, I'd say 'not much'. In the institution I work at, the main factors keeping OSS installation 'pocketed' rather than ubiquitous are custom software required to support faculty's curriculum on the academic side, and resistance to anything that doesn't say MS Office on the admin side.
I suspect that almost all software baked into curriculum (at least at the undergraduate level) has a reasonable OSS equivalent, but some (enough) faculty are strident in their resistant to change, and there is zero that the IT function can do about it.
Ironically, file portability/sharability led to the standardisation on MS Office in this institution; a potpourri of word processors but primarily WP were previously in use, but as MS marketing succeeded in selling Office, the critical mass of Word documents flowing in and out of the place ended up in a decree of Word only. Now the suggestion of using anything else leads to howls of outrage, and naturally MS continues to work to maintain complications of selling a switch via the Office Open XML specification.
It's not a money issue - the MS Campus agreement in use here keeps the annual cost of license upgrades for OS and Office plus other misc apps low enough that there isn't a big enough dollar saving available to make a compelling business case for the switch, particularly in light of the knee-jerk opposition to any such change.
All that being said, OSS gets big time play in the institution's back-end services, and there are pockets of energized evangelists. The biggest push on the desktop I see within the institution is not related to OSS, but rather to OS X. Fifty percent of student notebooks coming through the door are running OS X, and there is a growing faculty contingent running OS X as well.
I think the change is more likely to be from Windows to OS X, if anything. Small mercies, I suppose - at least it is Unix. But the licensing is just a switch from one big corp to another.
What about the *children* of the cockroaches, goddammit?
I was hoping I could get an 'you insensitive clod, you' in here, but it didn't play out.
More seriously, I think we're going to be hard-pressed to get even PETA whipped up on the cause of the cockroaches, but at 5000 feet, it is pretty fscking sick to expose any living creature to radiation sickness and death just so people can be entertained by a TV program while they chow down on their crappy Swanson Salisbury Steak & Instant Mashed Potatoes.
I read an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail about seven years back about this guy who runs a site - Slide Rule Universe - for getting slide rules of all ilk. He damn near makes a living off it. Who knew?
They're way too far into slide rules there. Gotta love 'em for it. I am not affiliated - just jealous.
I call B.S. on this one. Anyone dumb enough not to figure out where "cut and paste" came from doesn't deserve a job (must less a promotion to second grade).
Well, I can't speak to 20-something google employees, but when I acquired a 1930's Underwood typewriter a couple of years ago, the 12 year old son of a friend looked at it and asked what it was. I asked him what it looked like, and he replied that it looked something like a keyboard. He didn't know what a typewriter was.
Admittedly the kid is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I suspect that he's reasonably representative of his peer group.
Now that I think about it, the second graders might do better than a 12 year old. They're not heading into that teen recalcitrant thing and their imagination hasn't been spiked yet.
Umm.. Sounds to me like the bank needs to review the employment of their IT director.
Well, like North American banks and Caribbean branches that have a *tonne* of legacy code running on AS/400's, business apps are still out there running in SCO environments, apps that are critical to the business, but which scare the shit out of the organisation in terms of even thinking about unwinding them out of their businesses.
SCO had a solid biz app developer network out there one upon a time, with a lot of re-seller support, a holdover from when they were *the* PC-based UNIX, long before daryl and his prick henchmen decided to pursue a new 'business model' [cough]pump-and-dump scheme[cough].
But I guess they're fsck'd now, and looking at a whole different risk - they'll *have* to start working on it.
And no, I'm not painting a tech-equivalence between a modern AS/400 installation and intel hardware running openserver 6. But the business process analogue is solid, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so the DS3 is a Very Bad Thing for a tonne of reasons.
BUT ... The linked .doc says that
The scope of uncontrolled "Quantico Circuit" access allowed the third party to obtain significant information about any mobile phone subscribers, including -- listening in and recording all conversations en-mass; {Note the focus on 'phone' and 'conversations'. Aside from demonstrating ignorance on the difference between 'mass' and masse', this statement *directly contradicts* the linked .pdf, which states that the exposed 'Data network' transports all mobile data service traffic and related business app traffic but *not* the raw traffic of the 'Cell network', which was not examined in the audit.
Anyone else read this similarly?
Which is it? This, plus the lack of detail around the location of the 'network vcrs', which presumably are traffic copy mechanisms, the location of which will determine exactly what data is exposed by this mechanism, gives me less of a warm-and-fuzzy feeling with respect to the allegation's supporting documentation.
I am in no way supporting the existence of this no-ACL, no-logging circuit into what is allegedly a major carrier's mobile support network. The devil is in the details in this dialogue, however, and there is no excuse for direct contradictions and lack of important detail.
Oh yeah, they found it alright.
Now that Blackboard has acquired WebCT, it's getting worse, inconceivable as that might seem. The licensing was getting out of hand even pre-acquisition, and my Spidey-Sense tells me we're just about to take it on the chops from Blackboard. This patent, which stakes out the ground for role-based rights as a Blackboard invention, will kill all innovation as well as open source implementations such as Moodle and Sakai, etc. Everyone is going to be afraid for the future of these alternative LMS's, and will be driven to consolidating on a Blackboard platform, which turns out to be rewarding Blackboard for being monopolistic pricks!.
When Murray Goldberg was hacking Perl scripts at UBC (or whoever he got to do it for him, if) in the early days of what became WebCT, it was motivated out of a genuine desire to extend the reach of education by someone who I believe had a longtime love for teaching. To look at it now, the product would seem quite silly, I'm sure, but it represented the Golden Age of Learning Management Systems.
I don't know the development internals of WebCT, but it always seemed to me to be a Good Little Idea, but a Bad Bigger Idea. It just didn't scale. It was like there was no architecture, no coherency.
Near Dawson City in the Yukon Territory, Canada, there is a four story mining dredge that has been designated a historic site. These dredges were incredible Rube Goldberg machines; they were built ad-hoc, with shit hanging all over the place and the next thought-of feature literally bolted on the side of them. They worked, I guess, but they sure weren't pretty.
WebCT always reminded me of those dredges, a weird world where the next idea is welded on the side of the implementation in the first way someone thought of how to do it. It ends up being this ugly-but-nearly-functional Frankenstein. Maybe I'm being unfair to mining dredges and Frankensteins.
The biggest barrier to change is, in my experience, faculty who are trained up and comfortable using Blackboard, and who already have their curriculum good to go in Blackboard.
Students - unite!. Tell your prof that Blackboard sucks, and give them specific reasons why you believe this to be the case. Pressure profs to get whatever the Teaching and Technology/Learning Committee (or whatever it is called at your University) to get a pilot of an alternative LMS underway. Get that prof to pilot some of their courses on the alternative.
Let's break this monopoly and keep a competitive and innovative LMS landscape, or we'll all be stuck with something that is, emphatically, worse that WebCT. And fsck the USPTO for enabling this horse-shit, even if they are overworked and underpaid. If you don't have the answer, don't pretend you do. Go and find someone to help with evaluation. And, no, someone who is affiliated with the company behind the application doesn't count.
Incredible Mining Dredges - they really are cool, and a lot more fun that WebCT/Blackboard: http://www.pc.gc.ca/apprendre-learn/prof/itm2-crp-trc/htm/ndn4_e.asp .Point of clarification - the 'killing fields' of popular culture nomenclature, at least in North America (as represented by the movie, I suppose) were in Cambodia. I've never heard the term used in reference to Vietnam. Which could of course just indicate that I don't know jack.
Not trolling, but definitely playing Devil's Advocate here: so what if a university benefits from public funds? Don't many privately held corporations benefit from public funds (from infrastructure - roads - to services, to selling product that is paid for in 'public funds')?
My point is that the idea of 'benefiting from public funds' is a slippery one, and that segmenting patent applicability by some measure of the use of public funds in developing a patent is a complex issue.
And I'm not expressing support for the current state of the USPTO here, nor the general state of the patent system in the U.S. at this time - just questioning a particular idea expressed above.
I do appreciate the overlap between the development teams, and that Netscape was originally named 'Mosaic Communications Corporation'. But NCSA Mosaic the browser still existed in spite of Clark/Anderson's attempt to appropriate the name. As far as I can tell, there was no overlap in the software, just in the name. Netscape the browser was in no way Mosaic the browser.
jwz claims outright that the browser they were developing was spoken of as 'crushing NCSA Mosaic', which is when he says he came up with 'Mozilla' http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html (search on Mozilla in the page).
In other words, you're happy that Mosaic killed Mosaic because they wanted to kill Mosaic.Now that's a damned funny line. While I knew that Mosaic had beget Spyglass, I had *no* idea that Spyglass beget IE. I plead circular ignorance. Thanks for the laugh.
I wasn't there, but I've always understood 'Mozilla' to be a funky portmanteau of 'Mosaic Killer', stemming from Marc Anderson's dream of Netscape reigning supreme over Mosaic, the ground-breaking NCSA-developed graphical browser. Anyone out there who was close to the action?
As a result, I never shed a tear for Netscape when IE wiped the floor with them, as it seemed to me that Netscape got exactly what they had set out to do to Mosaic.
I remember quite vividly the first time I saw Mosaic fired up, watching the 'world' icon spin. I was so focused on the software - 'fucking cool!' - that I don't even remember what page we were loading.
... in response to controversy regarding camera systems on post-secondary education campuses ...
I helped get this established on our campus. Why did we do it? It has nothing to do with "tracking everyone" and everything to do with crime. We have cameras on the parking lots because we kept having "neighbors" from the black-dominated slums nearby breaking into cars and carjacking people, and so they now have someone watching to dispatch a cop to a problem spot 24/7. We have cameras on buildings leading to classrooms, and even a few IN classrooms, because of people committing rapes and getting into fights.I am empathetic to the issues you're presenting here. On the grounds of the university I work at, crime is very much an issue - usually, as far as I can tell, perpetrated by individuals not enrolled at the university. I hear you, and I don't think you're trolling.
But - what makes the camera response difficult for me is that such institutions, in my experience (which makes this just another fscking opinion), are *incapable* of setting and sticking to terms of reference for such a facility. Once the cameras are in place, people just can't help themselves in using them beyond a scope of a video record to be used to identify thieves in response to car break-ins, for example.
The transition to surveillance devices is fast, not matter how big a stack of bibles were used in swearing that they would never be used that way. Once the facility is in place, there is *always* what sounds to be a reasonable context for going beyond the original terms of reference.
I believe that, in a free society, an individual has a reasonable expectation of proceeding through their day without being subject to arbitrary surveillance. If you remove that expectation, you take a significant step towards a functioning police state.
Arbitrary surveillance is like crack for enforcement agencies of all ilk. Once they've tried it, they can't get it off it - it just works too damn well. And major precepts of privacy and freedom go out the window without a genuine debate about it every having taken place.
I'm not trolling either - I just feel strongly on this issue.
In other news, the CEO of the British Library was found drifting in a tear in the time/space continuum, disoriented and incapable of understanding that digitising shit in 2008 does not make one a pioneer.
Seriously, who writes this stuff? From the headline (Pioneering research shows 'Google Generation' is a myth) to the sponsor's announcement of the study (adopted the digital mindset), the study is so wrapped in hyperbole that I just can't take it seriously.
And reading it is bad enough - I'd rather poke my eye out with a sharpened stick than click on the audio link to the 'Launch Event'.
Every generation complains about the work ethic of succeeding generations. Oh, yeah, and the music they listen too is just noise and too damn loud.
I'm not trolling. If you have a good hiring process - one which explores the expectations of both the employee and the employer - then you'll bring in people who have an understanding of what is expected of them.
I'm no big-time manager of people. I've got 27 people reporting up to my position. The twenty-somethings are no different than anyone else; they want to learn, have some interesting project work to go along with the more mundane aspects of operations and they want to be treated with respect.
If you treat people otherwise, they won't respond well, no matter their age.
And yes, I understand that some people are just assholes, and it'll never work out with them. But that's your responsibility, as a hiring manager, to figure out in advance.
What's a cheap movie - seriously, what are we talking here? 'Waking Ned Devine' ('Waking Ned' in U.K.) cost $3 million, according to http://www.iomguide.com/wakingned.php. No particular reason to pick this movie, except it was the first thing that popped into my mind when I thought about funny, well-made, non-Hollywood type movies.
I rent movies mainly, and hit the theatre ever once in a while to see movies that seem worthy of the big screen, like Lord of the Rings (as you mention). The 50 or so videos I own are music-related (Hard Day's Night, Steve Ray Live at the El-mocambo, etc.) So if Hollyood wants to pay Sylvester Stallone $20 million for Rocky Balboa, they can knock themselves out doing it, because it doesn't matter to me if that movie gets made.
Buying a DVD is as far as I'll go WRT DRM. And I have no problem ripping it so it's on my home network. So if the movie industry can't make Lord of the Rings on the revenue coming in from theatres and selling DVD's, then they better get their costs down, or look for another line of work. I think Peter Jackson's trilogy income of $20 million against a 20 percent take of the box-office rentals (according to Wikipedia) has some slack in it.
These sort of numbers blow big holes in the 'Big Movies Subsidizing Art Movies' story, at least for me. Movies will continue to get made - some of them good, too - for less; there is no natural law or objective truth mandating their dying business model.
These greedy bastards are abusing their customers beyond belief, and whining about hard times because their incredible gravy train is under stress. And they're trying to impose legislation worldwide via WIPO to boot. Fuck 'em. Piracy was never on my plate, but I don't even feel bad about that any more - my own or others.
And I'm not qualitatively equivocating Mr. Jackson w/ Stallone, or singling out LOTR for any reason other than that LOTR comes as close to something I admire coming out of Hollywood.
"Nietzsche is dead" - God, 1900
"He's dead, Jim" - Dr. McCoy
From TFA:
Houston police contacted KPRC from the test site, claiming the entire airspace was restricted by the Federal Aviation Administration. Police even threatened action from the FAA if the Local 2 helicopter remained in the area. However, KPRC reported it had already checked with the FAA on numerous occasions and found no flight restrictions around the site, a point conceded by Montalvo. When police department officials lie in an attempt to bully media out of covering simple testing of a technology, why (and how) do they expect that citizens will have *any* faith whatsoever with regard to their claimed motivations for a so-called service or, in the event of a rollout, of adherence to any privacy-related constraints/governance?It's not even off the ground yet (!) and the bullshitting has already started.
The wind blew, the crap flew, and for days the vision was bad.
I dunno.
In the '70's Miller had a trademark on 'Lite' which came into its possession via Miller's acquisition of Meister Brau. When Miller Lite and its fantastically popular ex-jock/'Tastes Great!/'Less Filling' ad campaign rocketed Miller to the Number Two industry position (behind Anheuser-Busch) in only a couple of years, other companies started creating 'Light' bears. Miller started suing, citing its trademark on the term 'Lite'. My recollection (I can't find a link to substantiate) is that they while other companies were restricted from using the term 'Lite', 'Light' was deemed un-trademarkable (sorry!) since it was a simple english word.
Here's a Google Book link with a bit of background in item 14: http://books.google.com/books?id=B9xkMCPgL-kC&pg=RA1-PA817&lpg=RA1-PA817&dq=miller+lite+copyright+sued&source=web&ots=LTr2T5zPFK&sig=QDoCy6X_T0H1Jep7SVwo_iyt5N8
IANAL, so I don't understand why one would be okay (Office) while another wouldn't (Light).
As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are millionaire sports franchise owners selling craptastic trash and trinkets to people willing to shill for their team for free. That's right, millionaire sports franchise owners selling craptastic trash are nothing more than soulless, blood-sucking gunsel shysters.
So Mark Cuban has *another* opinion [and is clueless about contractions]. Who gives a shit?
So last year we heard that mysterious 'German Officials' were
claiming they had technology for intercepting and decrypting Skype phone calls from no less of a source than the New York Times (via Skype forums): http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=54163So, who pwns who?
Bingo! You have granted them a non-exclusive license to use any part or all of your content for any purpose they are so inclined to fulfill. And even though the license expires
automatically upon removal of your content, you 'acknowledge' (and I'm not really sure what that means in a legal sense ... does it agree or grant permission?) that the Company may retain your content as 'archived copies' (whatever the hell that means).
The best part of this is that the Terms of Use may change at any time and the user is obliged to discover this via their own review process:
It is your responsibility to regularly check the Site to determine if there have been changes to these Terms of Use and to review such changes.Continued use of the service after changes to the ToS constitutes your acceptance. Why do people continue to accept these bullshit terms?
Have at it if you dig the service, folks. But these laments about features or process added to the Facebook experience are getting old and tired - you signed it all away, why are you surprised?
IANAL, but a common assertion on /. is that just because a ToS or EULA asserts something doesn't mean that it is enforceable or binding. Any lawyers out there to confirm/deny this?
Folks, Dvorak admits it in the clip link below - he writes to get reaction. I don't think he cares if he is correct or not - it's all an exercise in pot-stirring. And maybe he's got an advertising revenue side-effect to go with it ... but he's been doing it so long that I don't think he's strictly in it for the money.
He just digs driving people crazy and the public profile that comes with it. He's not even afraid to say so out loud:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ
Agreed. DJB is, in my experience of reading his USENET postings and documentation, certainly assertive in his writing, but the man is damn thorough and quite thoughtful. He's also prepared to argue his position at length and with plenty of vigour (to say the least) and this can piss people off.
I won't speak for anyone's experience with qmail other than my own; I converted a number of sendmail and mmdf (the MTA delivered with the SCO TCP/IP component about 12+ years ago, and an ancestor of pmdf) installations to qmail and I didn't find the setup particularly onerous or the documentation problematic, and there are lots of admins smarter and better than me out there. I will say that djb's docs have their own style and require a bit of getting used to, but this is the same reaction I've seen in many people the first time they've encountered a man page.
It's been a long time since I've admin'd an MTA, so I can't speak to setting up contemporary postfix or similar, but I can tell you that qmail was a blessing for me at the time, and I grabbed it and ran away from sendmail as quickly as I could. Even if you didn't like djb's security model, you couldn't deny that he had one, and that he applied it rigourously in the development of software. This was not my experience with sendmail.
Complaints about the number of required patches to qmail do resonate for me; my own feeling is that qmail suffered from a lack of author attention once the main development cycle(s) ended. This, combined with license restrictions, made it hard for qmail to evolve.
I've never read anything from djb that didn't make me stop and think. I admire him and his contributions; he doesn't just talk - he's a helluva walker as well.
I tried to deconstruct this sentence, and can't really get anywhere with it.
Operating systems are just that; systems software that facilitates the use and configuration of the hardware it is running on. I don't think that there is an inherent element within any OS which 'teaches' anything.
Obviously individuals develop preferences, and one's experience may even lead to a greater understanding of systems' architecture (or similar) using a particular OS. Certainly my experience was that using *nix of various flavours encouraged me to dig into elements of hardware and design more than using classic Mac OS did at the time. I don't think I would have ever started trying to write device drivers for NICs, or SLP drivers, if I had only been using a MAC (pre-OS X).
Before I get hammered by the Mac crowd for this comment, let me say that I don't think this was as a result of any shortcoming; rather, I believe that by *intention* using a Macintosh focused me as a user on the functional outcome I was trying to achieve, isolating me *by intention* from the internals below. That's fine - it's just one approach to structuring the user experience.
By contrast, the experience of obtaining and installing Slackware at the time made me very aware of the underlying system elements for interfacing with and using the hardware, and I suppose this is what the original poster may have been driving (sorry!) at - that using Linux leads to one being more informed about the systems architecture and interaction.
There's nothing sacred about this though - some people will argue that the point of using computers is to focus on the functional outcome desired, not learn how the underlying system is structured or works. I suspect that most folks on /. are interested in all these elements, but we're not typical users.
As for the ease of transition for Win98-->Vista vs. say SysV-->Ubuntu w/ gnome, I dunno if I buy this. Hell, trying to move people between kde and gnome has been known to start a war.
As for what all this has do do with why schools don't all use OSS, I'd say 'not much'. In the institution I work at, the main factors keeping OSS installation 'pocketed' rather than ubiquitous are custom software required to support faculty's curriculum on the academic side, and resistance to anything that doesn't say MS Office on the admin side.
I suspect that almost all software baked into curriculum (at least at the undergraduate level) has a reasonable OSS equivalent, but some (enough) faculty are strident in their resistant to change, and there is zero that the IT function can do about it.
Ironically, file portability/sharability led to the standardisation on MS Office in this institution; a potpourri of word processors but primarily WP were previously in use, but as MS marketing succeeded in selling Office, the critical mass of Word documents flowing in and out of the place ended up in a decree of Word only. Now the suggestion of using anything else leads to howls of outrage, and naturally MS continues to work to maintain complications of selling a switch via the Office Open XML specification.
It's not a money issue - the MS Campus agreement in use here keeps the annual cost of license upgrades for OS and Office plus other misc apps low enough that there isn't a big enough dollar saving available to make a compelling business case for the switch, particularly in light of the knee-jerk opposition to any such change.
All that being said, OSS gets big time play in the institution's back-end services, and there are pockets of energized evangelists. The biggest push on the desktop I see within the institution is not related to OSS, but rather to OS X. Fifty percent of student notebooks coming through the door are running OS X, and there is a growing faculty contingent running OS X as well.
I think the change is more likely to be from Windows to OS X, if anything. Small mercies, I suppose - at least it is Unix. But the licensing is just a switch from one big corp to another.
telent console.storm.net ... sheesh.
What about the *children* of the cockroaches, goddammit?
I was hoping I could get an 'you insensitive clod, you' in here, but it didn't play out.
More seriously, I think we're going to be hard-pressed to get even PETA whipped up on the cause of the cockroaches, but at 5000 feet, it is pretty fscking sick to expose any living creature to radiation sickness and death just so people can be entertained by a TV program while they chow down on their crappy Swanson Salisbury Steak & Instant Mashed Potatoes.
How 'bout date of first post on USENET? And if you don't know what USENET is, or never posted on it, then you're not in the running to start with. :)
I read an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail about seven years back about this guy who runs a site - Slide Rule Universe - for getting slide rules of all ilk. He damn near makes a living off it. Who knew?
They're way too far into slide rules there. Gotta love 'em for it. I am not affiliated - just jealous.
http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/sruniverse.htmlWell, I can't speak to 20-something google employees, but when I acquired a 1930's Underwood typewriter a couple of years ago, the 12 year old son of a friend looked at it and asked what it was. I asked him what it looked like, and he replied that it looked something like a keyboard. He didn't know what a typewriter was.
Admittedly the kid is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I suspect that he's reasonably representative of his peer group.
Now that I think about it, the second graders might do better than a 12 year old. They're not heading into that teen recalcitrant thing and their imagination hasn't been spiked yet.
Well, like North American banks and Caribbean branches that have a *tonne* of legacy code running on AS/400's, business apps are still out there running in SCO environments, apps that are critical to the business, but which scare the shit out of the organisation in terms of even thinking about unwinding them out of their businesses.
SCO had a solid biz app developer network out there one upon a time, with a lot of re-seller support, a holdover from when they were *the* PC-based UNIX, long before daryl and his prick henchmen decided to pursue a new 'business model' [cough]pump-and-dump scheme[cough].
But I guess they're fsck'd now, and looking at a whole different risk - they'll *have* to start working on it.
And no, I'm not painting a tech-equivalence between a modern AS/400 installation and intel hardware running openserver 6. But the business process analogue is solid, I think.