There is an RFC for some sort of protocol that returns the longitude and latitude of the server with a particular IP address.
Cant remember what it was, and comparatively few servers actually supported it.
Well, if I were running a network (used to, when I was young and innocent, before the darkness, before ERP...errr...), I'm not sure that, unless used internally only, I would want anyone to be able to query my servers in order to find out where they're physically located. I can't see much constructive use for this information, but I can see how it could be abused.
I'm reminded of a story I read a little while back relating to this very thing...
Supposedly, some server admin type guys encountered this; their server started playing music, and they ass-umed it was a virus. So, they ran all the latest virus scanners on there, did everything they knew to do, finally ended up first reinstalling the OS and then low level formatting the drives, and couldn't get it to go away...when someone wandered in and pointed out it was just the BIOS telling them the CPU was running a little too hot. Oops.:-)
What actual valuable information can you get from a ping and/or traceroute? If this company's target is indeed "providing demographic, geographic and psychographic information to others," what on Earth could they possibly pull out of a traceroute log that would be of any use to them? Or is this just a ``first wave'' type of thing, which will be followed up with stealthier, but more intrusive, probes?
As for the stealth part, though, I don't quite see how they'll ``fly stealthily beneath the radar of firewalls and intrusion detection systems'' unless they have some truly `1337 TCP/IP h4x0rs at their site.:-)
it's a good thing they did that, because we know that all 13 year olds are entirely too computer illiterate to lie about their age in an incredibly complex system such as ICQ.
I really don't think ICQ is expecting to keep 13 yr olds off of their system -- however, what they've done will keep their hands clean. If someone raises hell, they can now point to the policy and say, ``hey, we said he/she couldn't use it.''
...what really happens is that Jar-Jar will enter a rift in the space/time continuum and get transported back in time hundreds of years; ladies and gentlemen, Jar-Jar is... Yoda.
ERP Software is still in the era of vt100's and those green and white stripy A3 fanfold printouts.
I certainly hope that was an intended exaggeration. SAP R/3 4.6 has a rather nice, very (too) graphical GUI, interfaces happily with the web thru ITS, has support for running HTML as well as Java based GUIs, and other niceties.. when was the last time you looked at an ERP system?
The advantage might be that there would be more opportunity for the rest of us to take a look at these systems.
Unfortunately, it wouldn't do you much good. I've worked with ERP systems for a while, and just having your own, open sourced or not, wouldn't really do you much good. There's an enormous amount of configuration to do before even getting started; you muddle through that and end up with a system that really does you no good, as the tough part of being an ERP system developer is *not* the system itself (SAP for instance uses a rather simple langauge that doesn't take long to learn well), but rather how to achieve what you want to do -- the business logic part of it. The most '1337 4GL hax0rer in the world may not have a clue what to do if someone asks him to match up deliveries with schedule lines for current sales orders -- those things are what you *need* to learn, and I quite honestly doubt you're going to end up learning them unless you work in a real-world environment where things actually happen. I don't see ERP systems moving towards small businesses anytime soon; they're just not geared for smaller scale setups... so even if you made your own little fake-company setup on the system you'd never touch 10% of the stuff you'd be faced with at any company actually using one of these systems.
Sorry to sound so negative, but I think the only way to acquire the skills necessary to do ERP programming is to go work for a company with such a beast... and there are *plenty* of opportunities there, as long as you can prove that you're capable of learning.:-)
-pf
PS -- depending on the release of SAP you work with you may be faced with 10000-15000 database tables to pick from when you look for your data... just an idea of the enormousness of these systems.
SAP is more or less written entirely in an internal programming language called ABAP -- the only 'closed' part of the system is the actual lower level communication with the database and operating system. All the business logic, all the applications you run -- the source for those is wide open to anyone with developer access.
I'm not familiar with Baan, but it may be somewhat similar -- if not, I doubt they would allow for much customization and need to die anyway.
So, anyway, what's up with the 'Open Source' cry this time? Is it the generic reply to anything these days? 'Wow, Gadzoox lost business this quarter, they should Open Source their hardware to save their business!!!'
Oh, this reminds me of a hobby I used to have; when I got business cards from people I didn't like (annoying car salesmen for instance) I'd gather a little pile of cards and, if they had pager numbers, start paging them with each other's pager numbers a few times. It was enjoyable in some vaguely perverted way.:-)
Minor commentary: most (all?) countries in Europe use the comma and period in the opposite way the US does; IOW, while we write $3,000.24 here it'd be $3.000,24 there..:-)
uLPC, that is indeed correct. If I recall correctly, he was working on it when I left Lysator back in '95 or so.:-) Didn't he develop it from scratch to avoid the licensing/copyright hassles he'd have to face if he based it on the improved LPC interpreter he'd worked on? My memory's foggy.
What i used to really like about X-Files was that the show wasn't serial. You could watch any episode as a stand-alone mini-movie. Then two years ago they started turning it into a soap opera. Recent episodes have been better, but the stories seem to lack the same creative inspiration of the origional stories. For awhile I thought they were shifting more from space alien stuff to the supernatural. But recent episodes seem to be all over the place.
``All over the place'' would be a fairly good way of putting it. However, I do think they've come out with some fairly decent episodes more reminiscent of the earlier seasons; ``Chimera'' (with the wife of the cheating husband turning into some sort of monster), ``Brand X'' (the tobacco company one, almost had horror movie class nastiness in it, partially!), and the one with the genie in it were all quite cool and entertaining.:-) Before that, though, I almost got the feeling they were so sure this was the last season that they started to goof off wildly with the Cops episode and the ``First Person Shooter'' one. I enjoyed those, too, but I can see how a lot of people were mildly upset over them...
Really, I think that there's enough, uh, ``dimensional enhancements'' of the ``important details'' on Baywatch, that even with a 16x16 pixel resolution on your TV they'd show up clearly..;-)
Why does Katz always feel the need to use l instead of 1?
I think Katz is just, in his own way, protesting the whole `1337 h4x0r3r movement. Or, maybe he's an agent of the letters intending to recover lost territory from the evil digits.
"The best law, from a therapist's point of view, would be a sliding scale... five years for seventeen, four for sixteen, three for fifteen, two for fourteen and down... I've seen it go to one at twelve, with prosecution shifted to parents, but I'm not sure that's well thought out..." I don't think I'm understanding you. Are you saying that people who assault/younger/ victims should get/less/ time in jail??
I think that what he was saying is that for it to be considered statuatory rape, the difference in age would have to be five years for a 17 yr old, 4 for a 16 year old, etc etc...
Really, unless they attach your own personal information to the viewing data, who really gives a flip? Seems like some people have WAY too much time on their hands dreaming up conspiracy theories.
If you want something WORTHWHILE to spend your energy on, check out our current tax system, and hop over to this site to see what you can do. Or volunteer in a soup kitchen.
Whats next... free long distance with a commercial break every 2 minutes?
IIRC, some company in Sweden did something similar to this; had you listen to a 20-30 second advertisement before connecting you, then the call was free. Don't recall all the details, though.:-)
Well, there is no way in hell they'll ever get a handle on the 'net. If something makes its way onto the net (deCSS code for instance) it's there to stay, period. Not to mention the legal impact of the 'net being virtually country-less -- how can you regulate someone in a country without any copyright laws? How can you prevent them from distributing whatever they want?
What's interesting to me is, how will corporations continue to make money? When, some decades from now, music, movies et al are distributed as pure data streams (I think CDs and DVDs will stick around, or something similar to them, for some time as people are so used to having a physical media representing a certain piece of information), what will keep someone from buying one copy of it, and distributing it all over the place? Where will the revenue come from?
I think that a lot of companies are going to be forced to completely restructure their thinking, and adapt to suit the new market, rather than rely on the government and laws to protect them against change.
Death of the 'net as we know it? Maybe so, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Cant remember what it was, and comparatively few servers actually supported it.
Well, if I were running a network (used to, when I was young and innocent, before the darkness, before ERP...errr...), I'm not sure that, unless used internally only, I would want anyone to be able to query my servers in order to find out where they're physically located. I can't see much constructive use for this information, but I can see how it could be abused.
-pf
Supposedly, some server admin type guys encountered this; their server started playing music, and they ass-umed it was a virus. So, they ran all the latest virus scanners on there, did everything they knew to do, finally ended up first reinstalling the OS and then low level formatting the drives, and couldn't get it to go away...when someone wandered in and pointed out it was just the BIOS telling them the CPU was running a little too hot. Oops. :-)
True or not, it was still funny to read...
-pf
As for the stealth part, though, I don't quite see how they'll ``fly stealthily beneath the radar of firewalls and intrusion detection systems'' unless they have some truly `1337 TCP/IP h4x0rs at their site. :-)
-pf
-pf
-pf
I really don't think ICQ is expecting to keep 13 yr olds off of their system -- however, what they've done will keep their hands clean. If someone raises hell, they can now point to the policy and say, ``hey, we said he/she couldn't use it.''
-pf
Hey, they've both got accents. :-)
I certainly hope that was an intended exaggeration. SAP R/3 4.6 has a rather nice, very (too) graphical GUI, interfaces happily with the web thru ITS, has support for running HTML as well as Java based GUIs, and other niceties.. when was the last time you looked at an ERP system?
-pf
Unfortunately, it wouldn't do you much good. I've worked with ERP systems for a while, and just having your own, open sourced or not, wouldn't really do you much good. There's an enormous amount of configuration to do before even getting started; you muddle through that and end up with a system that really does you no good, as the tough part of being an ERP system developer is *not* the system itself (SAP for instance uses a rather simple langauge that doesn't take long to learn well), but rather how to achieve what you want to do -- the business logic part of it. The most '1337 4GL hax0rer in the world may not have a clue what to do if someone asks him to match up deliveries with schedule lines for current sales orders -- those things are what you *need* to learn, and I quite honestly doubt you're going to end up learning them unless you work in a real-world environment where things actually happen. I don't see ERP systems moving towards small businesses anytime soon; they're just not geared for smaller scale setups... so even if you made your own little fake-company setup on the system you'd never touch 10% of the stuff you'd be faced with at any company actually using one of these systems.
Sorry to sound so negative, but I think the only way to acquire the skills necessary to do ERP programming is to go work for a company with such a beast... and there are *plenty* of opportunities there, as long as you can prove that you're capable of learning. :-)
-pf
PS -- depending on the release of SAP you work with you may be faced with 10000-15000 database tables to pick from when you look for your data... just an idea of the enormousness of these systems.
SAP is more or less written entirely in an internal programming language called ABAP -- the only 'closed' part of the system is the actual lower level communication with the database and operating system. All the business logic, all the applications you run -- the source for those is wide open to anyone with developer access.
I'm not familiar with Baan, but it may be somewhat similar -- if not, I doubt they would allow for much customization and need to die anyway.
So, anyway, what's up with the 'Open Source' cry this time? Is it the generic reply to anything these days? 'Wow, Gadzoox lost business this quarter, they should Open Source their hardware to save their business!!!'
-pf
-pf
-pf
Minor commentary: most (all?) countries in Europe use the comma and period in the opposite way the US does; IOW, while we write $3,000.24 here it'd be $3.000,24 there.. :-)
-pf
Sure seems like there sure is some strange grammar there...
-pf
``All over the place'' would be a fairly good way of putting it. However, I do think they've come out with some fairly decent episodes more reminiscent of the earlier seasons; ``Chimera'' (with the wife of the cheating husband turning into some sort of monster), ``Brand X'' (the tobacco company one, almost had horror movie class nastiness in it, partially!), and the one with the genie in it were all quite cool and entertaining. :-) Before that, though, I almost got the feeling they were so sure this was the last season that they started to goof off wildly with the Cops episode and the ``First Person Shooter'' one. I enjoyed those, too, but I can see how a lot of people were mildly upset over them...
-pf
-pf
-pf
I think Katz is just, in his own way, protesting the whole `1337 h4x0r3r movement. Or, maybe he's an agent of the letters intending to recover lost territory from the evil digits.
-pf
I think that what he was saying is that for it to be considered statuatory rape, the difference in age would have to be five years for a 17 yr old, 4 for a 16 year old, etc etc...
-pf
Really, unless they attach your own personal information to the viewing data, who really gives a flip? Seems like some people have WAY too much time on their hands dreaming up conspiracy theories.
If you want something WORTHWHILE to spend your energy on, check out our current tax system, and hop over to this site to see what you can do. Or volunteer in a soup kitchen.
-pf
IIRC, some company in Sweden did something similar to this; had you listen to a 20-30 second advertisement before connecting you, then the call was free. Don't recall all the details, though. :-)
-pf
What's interesting to me is, how will corporations continue to make money? When, some decades from now, music, movies et al are distributed as pure data streams (I think CDs and DVDs will stick around, or something similar to them, for some time as people are so used to having a physical media representing a certain piece of information), what will keep someone from buying one copy of it, and distributing it all over the place? Where will the revenue come from?
I think that a lot of companies are going to be forced to completely restructure their thinking, and adapt to suit the new market, rather than rely on the government and laws to protect them against change.
Death of the 'net as we know it? Maybe so, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. :-)
-pf
This is "Stuff that Matters"?
-pf