Re:Another Idea - Keep it open to all
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Just mod apache or whatever server it is to put the login/pass at the top of every page it spits out. Let people edit whatever they want, but this will always be there. And for the love of god, don't give out SHELL ACCESS!
How 'bout we (the free software community) challenge NVIDIA to a driver-writing contest. NVIDIA writes their binary-only drivers, and releases specs on the chipset to facilitate writing drivers. Then our elite task force of driver geeks can take a crack at writing our own open-source drivers, and we can get a little competition going for best performance, smallest code size, best stability, etc. Sounds like fun to me! Any takers? Anyone at NVIDIA willing to release the chip programming specs? Seems like this could be a good proving grounds for the merits of open-source development, showing that we can write drivers for a complex system better (hopefully) than the creators of that system.
I heard on NPR yesterday that Clinton was calling for a big push to increase privacy in the coming years, because there is so much data tracked on people. Just go use a credit card, ya kno? And your info is in some database somewhere...
Anyone have the skinny on this? I didn't catch the whole thing.
I see this as further evidence that our lawmakers are incompetent when it comes to creating legislation that affects the computer and Internet world. How can we expect them to make sensible laws when they don't even have the most BASIC understanding of what they are regulating?
I'll say again what I've said in a previous posting on/., that we need to have schools that specificially train people in computer law, and that these people need to advise and lobby our lawmakers, they need to educate them in the technology and the subtleties of it so they can be effective at their jobs.
I've always been scared when I hear of ANY new computer-related law coming out, because I know that 80% of them don't make any sense from the technology perspective that the geeks have. There needs to be a balance between the geek view and the corporate view and the political view. Right now it is too heavily weighted towards the political and corporate views, because they don't know any better.
If the laws keep getting worse, I'm gonna move to the Falkland Islands to raise sheep, and give up computers entirely! =)
Situations like this further strengthen my idea of going back to school to get a law degree, and specialize in computer and technology law.
It seems that Multimegacorps and our political leaders are too old to fully grasp the true potential and existing state of technology in the world. There is potential to forever change the world for the better, opening lines of communication and sharing of ideas, bridging cultural gaps and the like. But the laws that are proposed and sometimes passed, and the methods used by Multimegacorps to position themselves for Multimegaprofits are all OLD IDEAS. They are based on physical restrictions, where location matters and distance matters.
In the world of digital information, there are no locations, and there are no distances, and there are no limitations (in many ways). Instead of changing their practices and embracing new modes of operation, they are trying to stuff the square of the Internet into their triangle of operations, and it's raising hell.
I've felt for so long that we need to have lawyers that are schooled specifically in technology law. Geeks, people who truly *understand* what this is all about at a fundamental level. Law schools should create course tracks for computer law study, and should promote it heavily. There is an obvious need and demand, so finding employment with this kind of degree shouldn't be a problem.
With lawmakers and lawyers that are well versed in computer issues, eventually the old-school political thinking will change (perhaps without needing to wait for the computer-savvy generation to get into office). Multimegacorp would have some serious competition in the courtrooms.
Are there any shcools that offer this kind of training? Is it being promoted? We need it, we need more soldiers on OUR side of the battlefield. We're outnumbered, and unless something major comes along, within ten years or so the net will be molded into a tool for feeding corporate greed, and will loose its potential to change and evolve the world for the better.
Stay away from Okidata unless you only print text. Their greyscale and photographic quality is pretty bad; the pixels are not evenly distributed and the images get spotty.
Brother printers are pretty low quality as well... I remember a brother 960 (i think) a few years back that had a defective power regulator component in it (worked for a brother service center at the time). We saw tons of them come in with the same problem, and it took the company almost a year to fix it.
Hewlett Packard has always performed well in my experience, and I usually reccomend them to anyone who asks. Their drivers are funky tho, you will want to uninstall all the 16-bit status monitor apps and whatnot. Lexmark makes good printers, but the Optra E+ that I have has problems rendering text at the right sizes; stuff is just a leeeetle bit off and it's annoying. The problem goes away if you tell the driver to RIP everything on the host first and print as an image. The HP 5L we have works great.
Beware the WinPrinters! The Oki 4W printer works ONLY with Windoze 9x, no NT, no *nix, no DOS. The 4W means FOR WINDOWS. Plus, after about two thousand pages, they can't feed paper worth anything (went through THREE of them, replaced for this same problem).
Heh, 'mindnumbingly stupid' applies many times to corporate purchasing decisions--I've seen plenty of instances in my line of work as an integrator. However, it is important to remember that when a company purchases a product from a vendor, they can choose to find the lowest price for the product, or they can pay a higher price for the product and get good support with it. We always tell our customers that they aren't just buying the product, but our company along with it. Sometimes, especially with custom software or software still in source form, the support of experienced engineers is a *necessity* to make it work. As such, GPL'd software does *not* kill the ability to make money from a product, as there will always be plenty of companies out there that/need/ to pay for it because they need the support they will get along with it.
One wonders what could happen when the generation of people living with open source development and Internet (i.e. open) communcations start filtering into political positions of power (and corporate for that matter). We may start to see a slow change from the traditional closed business model to a more open and flexible one, and also a similar change in the political views of all the world's countries.
Now, us Americans generally think of China as a more closed country, whether this is true or not. Us Americans are also known to make comments without being very informed beforehand! But it is not only the 'traditionally' closed countries that would benefit from being a little more open; all of them would. Do you think America would up and give away military secrets for the good of the world or open development? I don't think so. And I'm also not saying we should right now.
What I'm getting at is the slow change in the world that will be brought about by all this wonderful technology. Corporations have seen the potential for this (and seen it as a threat to the corporate way of life), and have already moved to squish it quickly, with little success. Ditto with the government, although we have to be a little more concerned there with an entity that can make laws. It seems that this technology has the potential to forge change towards an open world, and it seems to be in many ways unstoppable.
I love hearing from people in other countries that have taken on a love for all this technology, and that are in their own small way a part of changing the world! With enough effort aroun the globe, some good shit is gonna happen!
--forgive me if this sounds weird in any way; i wrote it as i just woke up and my brain is still booting... =)
At the shop where we have a few servers and a handful of workstations, we have always used creative names for them, and will continue to (because I make the descision darnit!!) Some of the notable names include Phoenix for a server that was resurrected from a terribe hard drive crash that had us down for a week reconstructing data from our shoddy backups (oops, learned that one the hard way, raid baby!) and ShitBoxFromHell for a workstation that has given us hell for a year straight. That name is acutally now reserved for any machine that fits this bill, and may be inherited by a new workstation that refuses to cooperate... Just an interesting note...
This is another sad example of people sluffing off their responsibility to themselves and other people by allowing something/someone else to think for them (some poorly documented computer algorithm in this case). When are people going to realize they need to look at themselves before looking at everything else and placing blame? If people would start taking responsibility for their lives, we would live in a world free of Columbines and "evil detector" computer programs. Oy vey.
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Just mod apache or whatever server it is to put the login/pass at the top of every page it spits out. Let people edit whatever they want, but this will always be there. And for the love of god, don't give out SHELL ACCESS!
How 'bout we (the free software community) challenge NVIDIA to a driver-writing contest. NVIDIA writes their binary-only drivers, and releases specs on the chipset to facilitate writing drivers. Then our elite task force of driver geeks can take a crack at writing our own open-source drivers, and we can get a little competition going for best performance, smallest code size, best stability, etc.
Sounds like fun to me! Any takers? Anyone at NVIDIA willing to release the chip programming specs? Seems like this could be a good proving grounds for the merits of open-source development, showing that we can write drivers for a complex system better (hopefully) than the creators of that system.
I heard on NPR yesterday that Clinton was calling for a big push to increase privacy in the coming years, because there is so much data tracked on people. Just go use a credit card, ya kno? And your info is in some database somewhere...
Anyone have the skinny on this? I didn't catch the whole thing.
I see this as further evidence that our lawmakers are incompetent when it comes to creating legislation that affects the computer and Internet world. How can we expect them to make sensible laws when they don't even have the most BASIC understanding of what they are regulating?
I'll say again what I've said in a previous posting on /., that we need to have schools that specificially train people in computer law, and that these people need to advise and lobby our lawmakers, they need to educate them in the technology and the subtleties of it so they can be effective at their jobs.
I've always been scared when I hear of ANY new computer-related law coming out, because I know that 80% of them don't make any sense from the technology perspective that the geeks have. There needs to be a balance between the geek view and the corporate view and the political view. Right now it is too heavily weighted towards the political and corporate views, because they don't know any better.
If the laws keep getting worse, I'm gonna move to the Falkland Islands to raise sheep, and give up computers entirely! =)
We need properly trained lawmakers! Help us!
Situations like this further strengthen my idea of going back to school to get a law degree, and specialize in computer and technology law.
It seems that Multimegacorps and our political leaders are too old to fully grasp the true potential and existing state of technology in the world. There is potential to forever change the world for the better, opening lines of communication and sharing of ideas, bridging cultural gaps and the like. But the laws that are proposed and sometimes passed, and the methods used by Multimegacorps to position themselves for Multimegaprofits are all OLD IDEAS. They are based on physical restrictions, where location matters and distance matters.
In the world of digital information, there are no locations, and there are no distances, and there are no limitations (in many ways). Instead of changing their practices and embracing new modes of operation, they are trying to stuff the square of the Internet into their triangle of operations, and it's raising hell.
I've felt for so long that we need to have lawyers that are schooled specifically in technology law. Geeks, people who truly *understand* what this is all about at a fundamental level. Law schools should create course tracks for computer law study, and should promote it heavily. There is an obvious need and demand, so finding employment with this kind of degree shouldn't be a problem.
With lawmakers and lawyers that are well versed in computer issues, eventually the old-school political thinking will change (perhaps without needing to wait for the computer-savvy generation to get into office). Multimegacorp would have some serious competition in the courtrooms.
Are there any shcools that offer this kind of training? Is it being promoted? We need it, we need more soldiers on OUR side of the battlefield. We're outnumbered, and unless something major comes along, within ten years or so the net will be molded into a tool for feeding corporate greed, and will loose its potential to change and evolve the world for the better.
oy vey.
Stay away from Okidata unless you only print text. Their greyscale and photographic quality is pretty bad; the pixels are not evenly distributed and the images get spotty.
Brother printers are pretty low quality as well... I remember a brother 960 (i think) a few years back that had a defective power regulator component in it (worked for a brother service center at the time). We saw tons of them come in with the same problem, and it took the company almost a year to fix it.
Hewlett Packard has always performed well in my experience, and I usually reccomend them to anyone who asks. Their drivers are funky tho, you will want to uninstall all the 16-bit status monitor apps and whatnot. Lexmark makes good printers, but the Optra E+ that I have has problems rendering text at the right sizes; stuff is just a leeeetle bit off and it's annoying. The problem goes away if you tell the driver to RIP everything on the host first and print as an image. The HP 5L we have works great.
Beware the WinPrinters! The Oki 4W printer works ONLY with Windoze 9x, no NT, no *nix, no DOS. The 4W means FOR WINDOWS. Plus, after about two thousand pages, they can't feed paper worth anything (went through THREE of them, replaced for this same problem).
Heh, 'mindnumbingly stupid' applies many times to corporate purchasing decisions--I've seen plenty of instances in my line of work as an integrator. /need/ to pay for it because they need the support they will get along with it.
However, it is important to remember that when a company purchases a product from a vendor, they can choose to find the lowest price for the product, or they can pay a higher price for the product and get good support with it. We always tell our customers that they aren't just buying the product, but our company along with it. Sometimes, especially with custom software or software still in source form, the support of experienced engineers is a *necessity* to make it work.
As such, GPL'd software does *not* kill the ability to make money from a product, as there will always be plenty of companies out there that
One wonders what could happen when the generation of people living with open source development and Internet (i.e. open) communcations start filtering into political positions of power (and corporate for that matter). We may start to see a slow change from the traditional closed business model to a more open and flexible one, and also a similar change in the political views of all the world's countries.
Now, us Americans generally think of China as a more closed country, whether this is true or not. Us Americans are also known to make comments without being very informed beforehand! But it is not only the 'traditionally' closed countries that would benefit from being a little more open; all of them would. Do you think America would up and give away military secrets for the good of the world or open development? I don't think so. And I'm also not saying we should right now.
What I'm getting at is the slow change in the world that will be brought about by all this wonderful technology. Corporations have seen the potential for this (and seen it as a threat to the corporate way of life), and have already moved to squish it quickly, with little success. Ditto with the government, although we have to be a little more concerned there with an entity that can make laws. It seems that this technology has the potential to forge change towards an open world, and it seems to be in many ways unstoppable.
I love hearing from people in other countries that have taken on a love for all this technology, and that are in their own small way a part of changing the world! With enough effort aroun the globe, some good shit is gonna happen!
--forgive me if this sounds weird in any way; i wrote it as i just woke up and my brain is still booting... =)
At the shop where we have a few servers and a handful of workstations, we have always used creative names for them, and will continue to (because I make the descision darnit!!) Some of the notable names include Phoenix for a server that was resurrected from a terribe hard drive crash that had us down for a week reconstructing data from our shoddy backups (oops, learned that one the hard way, raid baby!) and ShitBoxFromHell for a workstation that has given us hell for a year straight. That name is acutally now reserved for any machine that fits this bill, and may be inherited by a new workstation that refuses to cooperate... Just an interesting note...
This is another sad example of people sluffing off their responsibility to themselves and other people by allowing something/someone else to think for them (some poorly documented computer algorithm in this case). When are people going to realize they need to look at themselves before looking at everything else and placing blame? If people would start taking responsibility for their lives, we would live in a world free of Columbines and "evil detector" computer programs. Oy vey.