Every single work written by arguably the greatest author in the English language (Shakespeare), just like every single work written by the arguably greatest author in the French language (Molière) heavily incorporated elements from previous authors well beyond the standard that we would call "copyright infringement" today. All modern scientific progress is built on the works of others. True human genius is cumulative.
Now, I understand the logic behind copyright and patent laws in modern society: we wish to give an incentive to creators to create by giving them unfettered rights to what they create. I also agree that we need to have a system in place to encourage creation.
However, it seems to me that we are reifying the practice: something that we as a society have constructed and continue to construct is being treated as a right in and of itself. I think that JK Rowling and all of the people associated with the "Harry Potter" machine have made enough that the objective of our copyright laws is being fulfilled. It is time for them to let it go.
But they won't. And that is what is scary: our culture is being taken from us and given to corporations. There is no legitimate reason that Mickey Mouse, which is part of our culture and should be free for us all, should still be covered under copyright. Walt Disney is dead. His children are rich (sort of).
The process is hardly conducive to the creation of more culture. Look at the music industry, where this process has advanced the most: has any really good music been published on a wide scale lately? No? Then lets get rid of the institution that no longer fulfill its purpose.
I have a right to my culture. You have a right to your fan fiction, to your culture.
That's OK. The vast majority of people are not "knowledgeable individuals", neither do they have the patience, and as such, will not bother with figuring out how to save these comics. It's the same principle that keeps movie people encrypting DVDs long after DVD Shrink became available: most people will by a new copy of a DVD rather than figure out how to make a backup before they destroy it.
All you need is a minimum of security through obscurity on your product and most people will either pay for it or do without.
Damn, dude, where did you work? It sounds like your institution had an almost criminal lack of control over their systems... or their grade database was done in MS Access.
Where I once worked we had a couple of student workers change their own grades
When I was in college (University of San Francisco), I worked in the registrar's office. We had an ncurses based system to interface with the database (which itself was of early 1980s vintage and basically unchanged since then according to the IT guy), in which you could switch between "screens" to manipulate different tables. My user, of course, only had access to the parts of the system that a student worker would need to do his job, which means that I pretty much only had write access to change the "addresses" table, and all the others were read only... and some tables I could not even read, such as financial information. The student workers in the financial aid department, in turn, could not even read the grade tables that I could look at. Sometimes, during class registration, I would get special access to the "registration" table, meaning that I could add and drop classes from a student's records, but as soon as the registration period was over, that access was changed to read-only again. In fact, the ability to change grades was limited to a half dozen people on campus: the registrar and his assistant and the heads of each of the colleges (and they only had access to the students in their respective college, IIRC). They shared this ability with nobody.
I though that was pretty sweet at the time, but I have since done my fair share of SQL database work, including a couple that I designed and built from scratch, and I have since learned that implementing this kind of compartmentalized permission system is pretty trivial... almost automatic since every db system I have ever used requires you to actively assign permissions to new users.
So, uh, where did you work? I think I might shoot a resume their way.
>the problem is people are taught Word, and Excel. They aren't taught word processing or spreadsheets. Every time MSFT releases the OS the layout is slightly different. new training is required for those were taught to memorize the interface.
Bingo, and as my company's IT guy, I am not going to tell my employer to spend his resources training people who will only be with the company for a few years how to "word process" and "spreadsheet" when he can just hire people off the street who know Word and Excel. An MS Office license costs my company about 400 euro per machine. I have to renew that 400 euro every five years or so to upgrade.
Teaching people stuff, however, is very expensive. When we migrated from Access to MySQL recently, I spent 3 business days teaching the company's three data entry people how to use the OpenOffice Base front-end. Assuming that we average 12 euros an hour take-home (to which you have to add about 8 euro an hour in taxes that my company pays), we spent 1920 Euro on training alone, plus the amount that my boss had to pay me to spend a few weeks redesigning, migrating, and testing the new database. I still have to teach the two bosses how to use it, and their time is very expensive. Every time we get a new data-entry employee (about once a year), I or one of the data-entry girls will spend three days or so teaching that person to use the database (so, about 500 euro a year maintenance costs). So, over the first five years, the move will have cost us just under 4000 euro as a low-ball estimate. For each fiver years after that, it will cost around 2500 euro. Compare that to Access: training took one business day because access works just like all the other MS programs and people pick it up quickly, plus the 3 licenses comes out to 1800 every five years.
Now, I can justify this cost because Access wasn't doing what we needed, and MySQL is truly a better solution that will allow us to save time and money on other tasks, but what about office? With MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint we can:
Expect even the interns to know how to use it to make professional looking documents/presentations
Expect people that we send documents to to be able to open them, including formatting and macros
Expect to be able to open documents people send us, including formatting and macros
Have working internationalization-- but now I am getting into gripes
Those four factors right there cost us a lot less money than the few thousand euro every few years we need for the licenses. Now, I know that somebody is going to read this and think "well, you should be exporting documents to something like pdf if you want it to look the same, not using a silly word processor". I agree. However, in the real world, people use Word.
The problem is indeed education, but it doesn't make business sense for this company to try to change the world.
I have mod moints, and I will not mod him up. Here's why:
Miguel interviewed for a job at MS
I've heard that, but without, oh I dunno... a reference, it isn't that informative.
However, they could finance him to subvert linux
Just one piece of evidence? Possibly an insightful statement... but conspiracy theories without evidence are little more than that.
This is all documented information
WHERE???
He's the kind of guy they like -- not a US citizen and willing to work cheap
That sounds like unfounded xenophobia to me. You have to have a reference for a statement like that. How much did he want? Was it less than an American doing his job would earn?
The assertions are plausible, but without just one reference, one piece of evidence, it doesn't really advance the conversation any more than "LOL M$ suxors!!!111!"
I bought a VW Golf TDI in 2002. Since that time, it has had electrical problems forcing it into the shop about every three months on average: It needs a new glow plug about once a year; there was a short in the computer that was causing the transmission to slip badly (that one took over a year for the mechanics to find); the motors that roll the windows up and down burned out, one after the other, about two months apart (this is a separate issue from the brackets that hold the window that broke, but that part has been recalled); the panel electronics just stopped working one day (bad soldering under the dashboard);...
I don't know much about cars, but I know that linux is way more reliable than a Golf.
I see this more as an indication of wide-spread management failure in the industry than of money per se.
Ironically, (unreasonably) high wage demands typically have more to do with the non-tangible compensation that a job offers than the actual amount of money employees make. That is, when people are happy with their job, when they enjoy the social contacts, when they get to work in a nice environment and, above all, when they have a sense of purpose, then they make reasonable wage demands. When the job sucks, they spend 8 hours a day thinking "I don't get paid enough for this shit." In that case, no wage will be high enough.
One of those things that management should be doing is ensuring that their employees have the intangibles to keep them happy and productive. That is something that our much derided PHBs learn to do in their MBA programs. However, I think that the IT industry is having issues in this arena because the skill set required to perform the job is so specialized that programmers who get promoted to managers never bother to acquire "managerial" skill sets (or they just don't put any value in managerial skill sets) and people who do have managerial skill sets are so wildly incompetent in IT that you would not dream of hiring them to manage coders or SAs.
Meanwhile, while I sit in Europe trying to irk my way through grad school living off of dollars I saved while I was in the army(and a part-time job doing IT stuff for a small business), I watch their value and my immediate standard of living drop.
For everybody on a fixed income, including retirees and people like me, this sucks. Seriously, parity with the CAD? No, this is not a good thing.
As for the idea that discouraging foreign workers is a good thing, might I ask in what universe you live in? Do you actually want to pay 25 bucks for a meal in a cheapish restaurant? That is what will happen if the immigrant labor leaves.
Some are complaining that they can't get to the server, so here is the text:
In his second dispatch from the Idea Festival in Louisville, Evgeny Morozov watches a podium-full of robots buzz around like bees, ask each other questions, find an orange, leave the room, form an orchestra, and prepare one day to save your life...
Special to INTELLIGENT DAILY LIFE
Surrounded by buzzing robots that end the session by performing in an orchestra, James McLurkin, a PhD student at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, talks about distributed robotics and swarm behavior to a packed house. His work has its roots in "swarm intelligence"--the study of collective behavior in decentralised, self-organised systems. Think of ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, fish schooling, and many other examples in nature.
During the last few hundred million years, nature has perfected such interactions. Now, scientists such as McLurkin want to get a better understanding of how these biological processes work and apply this knowledge to programming robots for doing complex tasks in groups. Perhaps, this is the ultimate interpretation of the Wisdom of Crowds thesis: individuals don't have to be smart to produce very smart group outcomes. Did somebody mention Wikipedia?
Early on, McLurkin pulls up a slide of Isaac Asimov's famed three laws of robotics, intended to forestall a robot revolt against humanity. "Well, robots don't know how to read, so those laws are not particularly useful", he smiles. Robots are not even smart enough to travel from the stage to the audience: they would get trapped in wires or collapse to the floor. For all the talk about robotics, today an average squirrel can still do more than any robot, he says.
He points to a number of philosophical, not just engineering problems, in his field. Problem number one is that we don't know what intelligence is, nor how to define it. Should we subject the robots to some upgraded version of the Turing test (which says that if a judge can't tell whether he is talking to a machine or a person, the machine passes the intelligence test)?
Can intelligence emerge from interactions of unintelligent components? That is a second philosophical question. As we are all built from molecules, continues McLurkin, either intelligence is something that results from interactions, or molecules are intelligent.
The third and final question is whether an intellect needs a body. Can a brain in a vat understand and experience the world without anything to relate to? Can we build such an intellect?
That slide with the three philosophical questions is subtitled "things that make you go "hmmm", and one can hear half of the audience "hmming".
Having finished with the philosophy, McLurkin gives a brief overview of earlier efforts to mass-build robots, presenting quite a few models, from iRobot Roomba to Honda Asimo to iRobot Packbot, all of them having different looks and different functionality. And, of course, NASA's successful launch of two robots on to Mars.
Quite naturally, he makes a transition to his own work. He has 112 robots in his arsenal and he is trying hard to make them work together. In his view, robots are best at jobs that are dangerous, dirty, or dull: "What if we sent 20 robots to work in hot spots around the world? What if we sent 200 robots to look for surivors after an earthquake? What if sent 2,000 robots to explore Mars?".
It's this last question he wants to address with his on-stage demonstration. McLurkin turns to a few dozen robots that he has on stage (he controls them with a remote). As a starter, he asks the robots to form a line; surely enough, they do. Next, he orders the robots to spread out. They do this too. The demonstration proceeds quite smoothly.
One thing that the robots don't know yet is how to define boundaries of the network, so they often spread out from the center and then get disconnected. The robots can communicate via one another (they know the neighbors, but don't know about everybody else) but
No, implementing good security practices saves time, every time.
It requires an upfront investment of time to implement and maintain the system, but it beats the hell out of spending your week re-ghosting all of the computers in the accounting department because some ex-employee decided it would be funny to install a back door, and now you have to lock down every system he had access to and also try to figure out what he could have leaked so you can notify your soon to be ex-customers of what you lost. Feel free to repeat every month or so, depending on the size of your organization.
Or, you could give users a limited access account (which is easy to do even in windows), implement a sane permission system on your servers, implement something like a kerberos server, and make your employees read and sign a "good security practices" memo once a year so that they understand your policy and why it is important.
Whats funny is that microsoft releasing this "NOW WITH SHINIER GRAPHICS!" version of Office is actually causing people in my org. to use OO.
That is exactly the experience that I am having. My boss recently bought a couple machines which had vista installed OEM (we are too small to be bulk ordering machines built to spec), one of which was destined for his desk. After a couple of days of messing with the Vista UI, he actually asked me to install Debian instead. I could not fucking believe my ears.
I would really like to do this (it would make my life as the company IT guy so much easier), but I can't find a drop-in replacement for MS Access. dammit.
Of course, if anybody knows a good data management program similar to MS Access that I can use to interface with a mysql server over an ssh tunnel, that would help us a lot.
I'm 28, athletic, and my first +5 post (or at least, the first one I remember) was in defense of windows security, which indicates that at least 4 other people agreed that windows is OK as an OS. I don't wear glasses and I am married to a woman who is pretty high on the physical attractiveness scale (and yes, I have had sex with her).
I think I am probably also pretty indicative Slashdotters. I think that the slashdot comment system is a pretty good way to hold authors accountable for what they write, and anonymity is no shield since the moderation system is pretty good at filtering bullshitters out (although not perfect).
It sounds to me like this author is your typical tech journalist who graduated with a C average from some no-name school, has brought the same mediocre performance to his job, and has been called for it on slashdot. Now, he's bitter.
I hear you. I work for a small business, and we have our email handled by our ISP. They won't cut off other users who are spamming, and so their mail server is now starting to show up on spam blacklists. It is really embarrassing to have to call our partners and customers and tell them to check their spam box for our email, and then we are lucky if it is even there. We will be changing ISPs soon... I hope.
It is delivered as a Trojan. People don't discuss removal techniques because the answer is so painfully obvious that most here don't think it is worth mentioning. Norton, AVG, clamAV, any anti-virus on the market or available for free will detect storms various incarnations, and most of them will disable it. Problem is, there are just millions and millions of (windows) users who don't bother with the most basic security.
I don't see this as a particular setback. It's just a good business decision: stable and tested over flashy and new. If they were going to go with Linux, they would probably choose etch over lenny.
The house in that article has a lot of windows. This is how it says they were made:
To meet the requirements of the Passivhaus standard, windows are manufactured with exceptionally high R-values (low U-values, typically 0.85 to 0.70 W/(m.K) for the entire window including the frame). These normally combine triple-pane insulated glazing (with a good solar heat-gain coefficient, low-emissivity coatings, argon or krypton gas fill, and 'warm edge' insulating glass spacers) with air-seals and specially developed thermally-broken window frames.
That is a lot of effort and resource consumption. I wonder, do the energy savings that these windows provide over their lifetimes actually compensate for all the energy and resources that go into their manufacture?
They obviously have the money to pay. But the point (or one of the points) of these lawsuits is to make people's lives hell, to make examples, to discourage copyright infringement by others. Here, they are trying to make show that even if you fight and win, you still lose.
And just to clarify, viral marketing deserves the term because it invades pre-existing social networks with self-perpetuating processes, such as kewl videos or catch phrases. (yes I ripped that off from wikipedia), whereas the GPL only "infects" code if you take the existing GPL structure and add to it.
I hate to reply to myself, but I have an "oh by the way":
From wikipedia:
Viral phenomena are objects or patterns able to replicate themselves or convert other objects into copies of themselves when these objects are exposed to them.
So, as you see, the GPL is clearly not viral. All it says is that you make derivative works with GPL works and distribute those works, you have to GPL them too, thus respecting the rights of the person who owns the code you are redistributing. You get the same thing with "closed" products too: you purchase a license to redistribute something, but the actual product you are redistributing has to stay closed.
Furthermore, you can run all kinds of closed source stuff on a GPL system. Very many websites are run on apache and very few of them are GFDL, for example. Vbulletin and CXOffice are good software examples. TiVo is another one, as much as it vexes us all. Closed source can come into contact with open source all day long without "contracting" the GPL.
But I really don't know what to do short of writing probably useless letters to Steve Jobs and Michael Dell.
This is going to sound overly simplistic, but why don't you stop buying consumer electronics if it really bothers you? I mean, nobody needs an iPod or a PC at home...
Slashdot Mirror
Every single work written by arguably the greatest author in the English language (Shakespeare), just like every single work written by the arguably greatest author in the French language (Molière) heavily incorporated elements from previous authors well beyond the standard that we would call "copyright infringement" today. All modern scientific progress is built on the works of others. True human genius is cumulative.
Now, I understand the logic behind copyright and patent laws in modern society: we wish to give an incentive to creators to create by giving them unfettered rights to what they create. I also agree that we need to have a system in place to encourage creation.
However, it seems to me that we are reifying the practice: something that we as a society have constructed and continue to construct is being treated as a right in and of itself. I think that JK Rowling and all of the people associated with the "Harry Potter" machine have made enough that the objective of our copyright laws is being fulfilled. It is time for them to let it go.
But they won't. And that is what is scary: our culture is being taken from us and given to corporations. There is no legitimate reason that Mickey Mouse, which is part of our culture and should be free for us all, should still be covered under copyright. Walt Disney is dead. His children are rich (sort of).
The process is hardly conducive to the creation of more culture. Look at the music industry, where this process has advanced the most: has any really good music been published on a wide scale lately? No? Then lets get rid of the institution that no longer fulfill its purpose.
I have a right to my culture. You have a right to your fan fiction, to your culture.
That's OK. The vast majority of people are not "knowledgeable individuals", neither do they have the patience, and as such, will not bother with figuring out how to save these comics. It's the same principle that keeps movie people encrypting DVDs long after DVD Shrink became available: most people will by a new copy of a DVD rather than figure out how to make a backup before they destroy it.
All you need is a minimum of security through obscurity on your product and most people will either pay for it or do without.
I though that was pretty sweet at the time, but I have since done my fair share of SQL database work, including a couple that I designed and built from scratch, and I have since learned that implementing this kind of compartmentalized permission system is pretty trivial... almost automatic since every db system I have ever used requires you to actively assign permissions to new users.
So, uh, where did you work? I think I might shoot a resume their way.
Bingo, and as my company's IT guy, I am not going to tell my employer to spend his resources training people who will only be with the company for a few years how to "word process" and "spreadsheet" when he can just hire people off the street who know Word and Excel. An MS Office license costs my company about 400 euro per machine. I have to renew that 400 euro every five years or so to upgrade.
Teaching people stuff, however, is very expensive. When we migrated from Access to MySQL recently, I spent 3 business days teaching the company's three data entry people how to use the OpenOffice Base front-end. Assuming that we average 12 euros an hour take-home (to which you have to add about 8 euro an hour in taxes that my company pays), we spent 1920 Euro on training alone, plus the amount that my boss had to pay me to spend a few weeks redesigning, migrating, and testing the new database. I still have to teach the two bosses how to use it, and their time is very expensive. Every time we get a new data-entry employee (about once a year), I or one of the data-entry girls will spend three days or so teaching that person to use the database (so, about 500 euro a year maintenance costs). So, over the first five years, the move will have cost us just under 4000 euro as a low-ball estimate. For each fiver years after that, it will cost around 2500 euro. Compare that to Access: training took one business day because access works just like all the other MS programs and people pick it up quickly, plus the 3 licenses comes out to 1800 every five years.
Now, I can justify this cost because Access wasn't doing what we needed, and MySQL is truly a better solution that will allow us to save time and money on other tasks, but what about office? With MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint we can:
- Expect even the interns to know how to use it to make professional looking documents/presentations
- Expect people that we send documents to to be able to open them, including formatting and macros
- Expect to be able to open documents people send us, including formatting and macros
- Have working internationalization-- but now I am getting into gripes
Those four factors right there cost us a lot less money than the few thousand euro every few years we need for the licenses. Now, I know that somebody is going to read this and think "well, you should be exporting documents to something like pdf if you want it to look the same, not using a silly word processor". I agree. However, in the real world, people use Word.The problem is indeed education, but it doesn't make business sense for this company to try to change the world.
-
Miguel interviewed for a job at MS
-
However, they could finance him to subvert linux
-
This is all documented information
-
He's the kind of guy they like -- not a US citizen and willing to work cheap
The assertions are plausible, but without just one reference, one piece of evidence, it doesn't really advance the conversation any more than "LOL M$ suxors!!!111!"I've heard that, but without, oh I dunno... a reference, it isn't that informative.
Just one piece of evidence? Possibly an insightful statement... but conspiracy theories without evidence are little more than that.
WHERE???
That sounds like unfounded xenophobia to me. You have to have a reference for a statement like that. How much did he want? Was it less than an American doing his job would earn?
I bought a VW Golf TDI in 2002. Since that time, it has had electrical problems forcing it into the shop about every three months on average: It needs a new glow plug about once a year; there was a short in the computer that was causing the transmission to slip badly (that one took over a year for the mechanics to find); the motors that roll the windows up and down burned out, one after the other, about two months apart (this is a separate issue from the brackets that hold the window that broke, but that part has been recalled); the panel electronics just stopped working one day (bad soldering under the dashboard);...
I don't know much about cars, but I know that linux is way more reliable than a Golf.
>What's the return for a Linux developer?
Linux developers work for money, just like apple and windows developers.
Since Cannonical is based on the Isle of Man, that would put our benevolent Ubuntu sponsors in a prime position to execute said slander lawsuit...
Seriously, why did this take so long?
I see this more as an indication of wide-spread management failure in the industry than of money per se.
Ironically, (unreasonably) high wage demands typically have more to do with the non-tangible compensation that a job offers than the actual amount of money employees make. That is, when people are happy with their job, when they enjoy the social contacts, when they get to work in a nice environment and, above all, when they have a sense of purpose, then they make reasonable wage demands. When the job sucks, they spend 8 hours a day thinking "I don't get paid enough for this shit." In that case, no wage will be high enough.
One of those things that management should be doing is ensuring that their employees have the intangibles to keep them happy and productive. That is something that our much derided PHBs learn to do in their MBA programs. However, I think that the IT industry is having issues in this arena because the skill set required to perform the job is so specialized that programmers who get promoted to managers never bother to acquire "managerial" skill sets (or they just don't put any value in managerial skill sets) and people who do have managerial skill sets are so wildly incompetent in IT that you would not dream of hiring them to manage coders or SAs.
just my $.02
-mat
Meanwhile, while I sit in Europe trying to irk my way through grad school living off of dollars I saved while I was in the army(and a part-time job doing IT stuff for a small business), I watch their value and my immediate standard of living drop.
For everybody on a fixed income, including retirees and people like me, this sucks. Seriously, parity with the CAD? No, this is not a good thing.
As for the idea that discouraging foreign workers is a good thing, might I ask in what universe you live in? Do you actually want to pay 25 bucks for a meal in a cheapish restaurant? That is what will happen if the immigrant labor leaves.
Some are complaining that they can't get to the server, so here is the text:
...
Special to INTELLIGENT DAILY LIFE
Surrounded by buzzing robots that end the session by performing in an orchestra, James McLurkin, a PhD student at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, talks about distributed robotics and swarm behavior to a packed house. His work has its roots in "swarm intelligence"--the study of collective behavior in decentralised, self-organised systems. Think of ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, fish schooling, and many other examples in nature.
During the last few hundred million years, nature has perfected such interactions. Now, scientists such as McLurkin want to get a better understanding of how these biological processes work and apply this knowledge to programming robots for doing complex tasks in groups. Perhaps, this is the ultimate interpretation of the Wisdom of Crowds thesis: individuals don't have to be smart to produce very smart group outcomes. Did somebody mention Wikipedia?
Early on, McLurkin pulls up a slide of Isaac Asimov's famed three laws of robotics, intended to forestall a robot revolt against humanity. "Well, robots don't know how to read, so those laws are not particularly useful", he smiles. Robots are not even smart enough to travel from the stage to the audience: they would get trapped in wires or collapse to the floor. For all the talk about robotics, today an average squirrel can still do more than any robot, he says.
He points to a number of philosophical, not just engineering problems, in his field. Problem number one is that we don't know what intelligence is, nor how to define it. Should we subject the robots to some upgraded version of the Turing test (which says that if a judge can't tell whether he is talking to a machine or a person, the machine passes the intelligence test)?
Can intelligence emerge from interactions of unintelligent components? That is a second philosophical question. As we are all built from molecules, continues McLurkin, either intelligence is something that results from interactions, or molecules are intelligent.
The third and final question is whether an intellect needs a body. Can a brain in a vat understand and experience the world without anything to relate to? Can we build such an intellect?
That slide with the three philosophical questions is subtitled "things that make you go "hmmm", and one can hear half of the audience "hmming".
Having finished with the philosophy, McLurkin gives a brief overview of earlier efforts to mass-build robots, presenting quite a few models, from iRobot Roomba to Honda Asimo to iRobot Packbot, all of them having different looks and different functionality. And, of course, NASA's successful launch of two robots on to Mars.
Quite naturally, he makes a transition to his own work. He has 112 robots in his arsenal and he is trying hard to make them work together. In his view, robots are best at jobs that are dangerous, dirty, or dull: "What if we sent 20 robots to work in hot spots around the world? What if we sent 200 robots to look for surivors after an earthquake? What if sent 2,000 robots to explore Mars?".
It's this last question he wants to address with his on-stage demonstration. McLurkin turns to a few dozen robots that he has on stage (he controls them with a remote). As a starter, he asks the robots to form a line; surely enough, they do. Next, he orders the robots to spread out. They do this too. The demonstration proceeds quite smoothly.
One thing that the robots don't know yet is how to define boundaries of the network, so they often spread out from the center and then get disconnected. The robots can communicate via one another (they know the neighbors, but don't know about everybody else) but
In his second dispatch from the Idea Festival in Louisville, Evgeny Morozov watches a podium-full of robots buzz around like bees, ask each other questions, find an orange, leave the room, form an orchestra, and prepare one day to save your life
No, implementing good security practices saves time, every time.
It requires an upfront investment of time to implement and maintain the system, but it beats the hell out of spending your week re-ghosting all of the computers in the accounting department because some ex-employee decided it would be funny to install a back door, and now you have to lock down every system he had access to and also try to figure out what he could have leaked so you can notify your soon to be ex-customers of what you lost. Feel free to repeat every month or so, depending on the size of your organization.
Or, you could give users a limited access account (which is easy to do even in windows), implement a sane permission system on your servers, implement something like a kerberos server, and make your employees read and sign a "good security practices" memo once a year so that they understand your policy and why it is important.
Security is time well invested.
I would really like to do this (it would make my life as the company IT guy so much easier), but I can't find a drop-in replacement for MS Access. dammit.
Of course, if anybody knows a good data management program similar to MS Access that I can use to interface with a mysql server over an ssh tunnel, that would help us a lot.
I'm 28, athletic, and my first +5 post (or at least, the first one I remember) was in defense of windows security, which indicates that at least 4 other people agreed that windows is OK as an OS. I don't wear glasses and I am married to a woman who is pretty high on the physical attractiveness scale (and yes, I have had sex with her).
I think I am probably also pretty indicative Slashdotters. I think that the slashdot comment system is a pretty good way to hold authors accountable for what they write, and anonymity is no shield since the moderation system is pretty good at filtering bullshitters out (although not perfect).
It sounds to me like this author is your typical tech journalist who graduated with a C average from some no-name school, has brought the same mediocre performance to his job, and has been called for it on slashdot. Now, he's bitter.
I hear you. I work for a small business, and we have our email handled by our ISP. They won't cut off other users who are spamming, and so their mail server is now starting to show up on spam blacklists. It is really embarrassing to have to call our partners and customers and tell them to check their spam box for our email, and then we are lucky if it is even there. We will be changing ISPs soon... I hope.
It is delivered as a Trojan. People don't discuss removal techniques because the answer is so painfully obvious that most here don't think it is worth mentioning. Norton, AVG, clamAV, any anti-virus on the market or available for free will detect storms various incarnations, and most of them will disable it. Problem is, there are just millions and millions of (windows) users who don't bother with the most basic security.
Belgium is the country (a noun), Belgian is the adjective. Being that I live in the country, this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
You may now mod me offtopic, and rightly so.
I don't see this as a particular setback. It's just a good business decision: stable and tested over flashy and new. If they were going to go with Linux, they would probably choose etch over lenny.
Don't worry, Vista will supplant XP over time.
They obviously have the money to pay. But the point (or one of the points) of these lawsuits is to make people's lives hell, to make examples, to discourage copyright infringement by others. Here, they are trying to make show that even if you fight and win, you still lose.
And just to clarify, viral marketing deserves the term because it invades pre-existing social networks with self-perpetuating processes, such as kewl videos or catch phrases. (yes I ripped that off from wikipedia), whereas the GPL only "infects" code if you take the existing GPL structure and add to it.
At least, that is my understanding of the issue.
From wikipedia: So, as you see, the GPL is clearly not viral. All it says is that you make derivative works with GPL works and distribute those works, you have to GPL them too, thus respecting the rights of the person who owns the code you are redistributing. You get the same thing with "closed" products too: you purchase a license to redistribute something, but the actual product you are redistributing has to stay closed.
Furthermore, you can run all kinds of closed source stuff on a GPL system. Very many websites are run on apache and very few of them are GFDL, for example. Vbulletin and CXOffice are good software examples. TiVo is another one, as much as it vexes us all. Closed source can come into contact with open source all day long without "contracting" the GPL.