If you're talking about needing to "be able to release something every day" and you're talking about Ubuntu then the first few days are simple to sort, and I'm sure you could continue a pattern that would keep 90% of Ubuntu users happy:
Day 1: Lighten purple in default background Day 2: Darken orange in default background Day 3: Darken purple (but not enough to be back to original shade of purple) Day 4: Put orange back to what it was Day 5: Make all window buttons red instead of red and grey Day 6: Put all window buttons back on the right side of the window Day 7: Add a clock widget that uses bold Day 8: Bundle a load of random pictures, slap Ubuntu logos on them and call them "The Ubuntu Desktop Pack" (see Gnome-Look.org for examples) Day 9: Change the cursor theme so that it turns into an Ubuntu logo when hovering over a title bar - that's a feature, right?...
I'd kinda know that, what with being British and all;)
Instead of asking for your "numbers" they'll ask for your "numerics".
You know some weird-arse Brits, then! I've never heard anyone say "numerics". You can say "it was numeric", since "it was numbers" makes you sound stupid.
IP addresses are numeric in as much as they are made of numbers, but that is a description of the format of the IP address and not an alternative word to be used in place of "address". Alternatively you'd say "a numeric IP address", but given that you can't have "a textual IP address" then it is a bit redundant (you can have hex encoding, but that's just a different numeric base).
"IP holder" was partly a confusion in the context about IP - they're talking about copyright, so "IP holder" normally means "Intellectual Property owner", or "the litigious bugger who would rather sue than modernise his ways" - but also just an oddity in the language - there is no property for you to hold or lease. You can be a leasee or assignee of an IP address, but "IP holder" just jarred a bit.
Having being on the end of what I felt was a hugely over-stretch request to stop using a trademark (others in the community got a full C&D, I got a "friendly" warning from the company boss - read: barely veiled threat of lawyers) then people change their behaviour because they can't afford not to.
Yeah, I could have risked it and said "you're in the US, I'm in the UK, and I think your argument is tenuous at best given that your trademark is a noun and an agent noun that I am using in a descriptive manner for a similar product, so lets see what you do next", but a) I can't afford to fight it if the lawyers were subsequently drafted in and b) even if I could have fought it, I don't have enough faith in the legal system that I'd win - after all, in this case then the generic term had already been allowed as a trademark.
Moral indignation and protestation is all well and good, but at the end of the day then it is usually "he with most money doth win the contest".
Is that the free tooth extractions with pliers, or the other dental plan where they help your teeth stay in your mouth (the one done by not hitting you in it if you pay up)?
The Solicitors Regulators Authority said the two Davenport Lyons lawyers 'knew that in conducting generic campaigns against those identified as IP holders whose IP numeric had been used for downloading or uploading of material that they might in such generic campaigns be targeting people innocent of any copyright breach.'
(My highlighting)
"IP numeric"? "IP holders"? They obviously aren't techies or tech-aware...which makes you wonder how they can ever be trusted to know what they're doing with these legal threats. Oh, yes, that's right, the whole things is a bit dodgy anyway - that explains the lack of technical awareness.
I guess it was all sold to managers without a clue by lawyers without a clue, just a scent of blood (or money, whichever pays better).
Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?
Erm, that depends. If "out-innovated" means "finally caught up to with motion-control designs" (albeit ones that either look stupid or probably require much bigger rooms, like the PS2 EyeToy used to) then yes. If "out-innovated" keeps its old definition of "now have a smaller share of original features that they implemented first and are seen as lacking because of it" then I wouldn't be so sure.
True, it probably is just a human thing. I guess it is how affairs and other things happen - the person often won't feel sorry about their actions (at least not substantially sorry) until they get caught. Granted, there'll be exceptions to the rule in that example, but it is generally accurate.
Whether it is a mess or not is, however, a separate issue from whether it has a feeling of remorse for its actions (or at least pretends to feel remorse for the sake of public image);)
I got lazy and went to the www and "found" something. Bleary-eyed I didnt notice it was copy written and reordered some of it.
Now there's an excuse: "I went on the WWW, completely ignored the fact that everything is copyrighted as soon as it is written, whether it says '@ copyright 20XX [insert person]' or not, and just copied and altered it anyway"
Let me correct that for you: "gov "sorry" = gov "we got caught".
Wherever you are, the government is only sorry when it gets caught. If it is cheaper or has some other benefit and doesn't get caught then they don't care. Such is the way of politics.
How what is supposed to work? I thought the whole idea of MessageLabs was that they were supposed to be "anti-spam" in some way and so should stop the messages before they get flagged as being evil.
Even if they assumed that all activity was legit, it'd still be good to have noticed you had unusual behaviour before you get blacklisted (or at least before people notify you that you've been blacklisted).
I think that's just bad phrasing. My reading is that they only found out that the customer had been "hacked" because they were blacklisting (i.e. 'hacking' occurred, blacklisting occurred, awareness of blacklisting occurred, and finally awareness of 'hacking' occurred).
Granted, I did have to look it up, but you seem to have only a vague notion of what the English language is. Carburetter is the proper (i.e. English) way to spell it;)
They also have co-conspirators: Cheap Domain Sales (previously Domain Tasting, but I think they cut down on that). You can't kill an IP because you may take innocents with it (and a domain would just shift to another IP) and you can't kill a domain because they'll just buy another domain for a few days.
Just wait until we have to play whack-a-mole with IPv6 spammers - now there's a huge range to try blocking via blacklists!
I mean you don't turn on your car and get on the freeway with nary a clue how it works do you? Why on earth should you get on the information superhighway when you don't even what a processor or memory is?
I've only got a vague notion of what the carburetter is/does, and I probably couldn't identify it if asked to point it out. I do, however, know about petrol, oil, tire tread, lights and general driving. Does that mean that I shouldn't drive? Yes, knowledge of computers is good and people somehow assume that they don't need it, but processors and memory isn't important knowledge - how to "drive safely" and what the essential maintenance points are is the important bit, plus what a computer sounds/behaves like normally (whether there are odd clunks coming from the engine).
There's pranks and then there's cover-up/abuse. How much of a celebrity's info should be protected compared to a person? And how much is it in the public interest to know, even if it would be considered "private" for 'normal' people? Ditto politicians.
As for face recognition, even if they do have it then what if I sign up for a new account because I find someone has been mis-using my info? Or if I don't sign up at all? I don't have to have a photo of me tied to my account to be able to complain about someone else's use of my personal data or image.
But information technology could also be used to improve our privacy over the pre-Internet world
And if the EnCoRe project gets its implementation right then we'll have controls that will help even more. It is basically a research project looking at "Ensuring Consent and Revocation" with the ideal of having informed people using certified services that provide certain guarantees about how they deal with, process and dispose of your data.
On the DRM point, I think that it is one of the few places where it is reasonable. DRM on corporate documents and data makes sense - they'll probably already have legal contracts in place to limit what they should do, and the DRM enforces it. Unfortunately it seems to be one of the places where it isn't enforced, probably because companies don't want to end up opening up their DRM servers to the world so that all of their business partners can authenticate against them.
Erm, in a similar way to false DMCA take-down notices - claim that you're in a photo that you're not. Companies have been filing DMCA take-downs for stuff that they don't own the copyright for, so what is to stop people claiming that they are in a photo when they're not?
Product reviews on a site selling a product aren't so bad, especially since a lot are "don't buy this product, it is crap because I'm too stupid to get it to work or got the one bad one in a million". Doing the same thing on social sites is where it gets a bit creepy.
I think the only new thing here is that Cisco has made a product out of it. I know of services that have done this before.
Personally, I don't like it. If I want the company to try to sweet-talk me into thinking their wonderfully fantastic then I'd contact them. If I wanted a problem solved then I'd try their tech support. If it isn't something that either of them can help with (like "how do you do X?" or "which are the best drivers for Linux?" or "this is terrible, has anyone else had the same problem?") then it goes somewhere public and I sure as hell don't want someone trying to astroturf the situation.
Isn't this what customers want, though? I'm rather serious about that.
Not in the slightest. I've had companies jump out on me after a vague hint at their brand and say "can we help you? (because we want to hide any potential problem and make it look like we're always fantastic by virtue of shutting you up)" and I found it hugely creepy.
Note that people will do this even if the company does -not- in fact have an account at these social networking sites.
That's their own stupid fault. If I want to target things at company X then I find their account and reference them. If they don't have an account then I'd tell them directly *and* rant publicly. Then again, I'm not one of the drooling masses who thinks that Twitter is for telling the world what you had for breakfast.
(and Cisco's is hardly the first).
I agree. I know of services that have been developed to do this before. I think the ones I know of may have had some degree of sentiment analysis as well.
There's "wakes you up" and there's "jerks you awake suddenly in a way that makes you feel you've had a bad night even if you didn't". Maybe that's just me, though, since I don't struggle with getting up once my alarm goes off. The shrill beeps that my phone does is something that I avoid unless I have to (e.g. I'm on a work trip).
As a more extreme example, think of the old mechanical alarm clocks with the two bells and the hammer. My wife thought one of those would be nice, until three days of feeling stressed/jumpy/terrified when the alarm went off *really* load. It went not long after.
I'm under thirty and I don't use my phone as an alarm. You can now consider that you "know" me;) Two reasons - 1) my clock radio gives me, you know, radio - something interesting, different and relevant each day (local news and a song or two) and 2) my phone is a phone, so the alarm is horrendous. Some of us can't afford these overpriced smart gizmos and have to make do with 10 year old £15 clock radios.
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If you're talking about needing to "be able to release something every day" and you're talking about Ubuntu then the first few days are simple to sort, and I'm sure you could continue a pattern that would keep 90% of Ubuntu users happy:
Day 1: Lighten purple in default background ...
Day 2: Darken orange in default background
Day 3: Darken purple (but not enough to be back to original shade of purple)
Day 4: Put orange back to what it was
Day 5: Make all window buttons red instead of red and grey
Day 6: Put all window buttons back on the right side of the window
Day 7: Add a clock widget that uses bold
Day 8: Bundle a load of random pictures, slap Ubuntu logos on them and call them "The Ubuntu Desktop Pack" (see Gnome-Look.org for examples)
Day 9: Change the cursor theme so that it turns into an Ubuntu logo when hovering over a title bar - that's a feature, right?
Profit may be in there somewhere as well.
Where's the "+1 scary in that it could be true" rating? And I don't just mean "insightful" ;)
I'd kinda know that, what with being British and all ;)
You know some weird-arse Brits, then! I've never heard anyone say "numerics". You can say "it was numeric", since "it was numbers" makes you sound stupid.
IP addresses are numeric in as much as they are made of numbers, but that is a description of the format of the IP address and not an alternative word to be used in place of "address". Alternatively you'd say "a numeric IP address", but given that you can't have "a textual IP address" then it is a bit redundant (you can have hex encoding, but that's just a different numeric base).
"IP holder" was partly a confusion in the context about IP - they're talking about copyright, so "IP holder" normally means "Intellectual Property owner", or "the litigious bugger who would rather sue than modernise his ways" - but also just an oddity in the language - there is no property for you to hold or lease. You can be a leasee or assignee of an IP address, but "IP holder" just jarred a bit.
Having being on the end of what I felt was a hugely over-stretch request to stop using a trademark (others in the community got a full C&D, I got a "friendly" warning from the company boss - read: barely veiled threat of lawyers) then people change their behaviour because they can't afford not to.
Yeah, I could have risked it and said "you're in the US, I'm in the UK, and I think your argument is tenuous at best given that your trademark is a noun and an agent noun that I am using in a descriptive manner for a similar product, so lets see what you do next", but a) I can't afford to fight it if the lawyers were subsequently drafted in and b) even if I could have fought it, I don't have enough faith in the legal system that I'd win - after all, in this case then the generic term had already been allowed as a trademark.
Moral indignation and protestation is all well and good, but at the end of the day then it is usually "he with most money doth win the contest".
Is that the free tooth extractions with pliers, or the other dental plan where they help your teeth stay in your mouth (the one done by not hitting you in it if you pay up)?
(My highlighting)
"IP numeric"? "IP holders"? They obviously aren't techies or tech-aware...which makes you wonder how they can ever be trusted to know what they're doing with these legal threats. Oh, yes, that's right, the whole things is a bit dodgy anyway - that explains the lack of technical awareness.
I guess it was all sold to managers without a clue by lawyers without a clue, just a scent of blood (or money, whichever pays better).
Erm, that depends. If "out-innovated" means "finally caught up to with motion-control designs" (albeit ones that either look stupid or probably require much bigger rooms, like the PS2 EyeToy used to) then yes. If "out-innovated" keeps its old definition of "now have a smaller share of original features that they implemented first and are seen as lacking because of it" then I wouldn't be so sure.
True, it probably is just a human thing. I guess it is how affairs and other things happen - the person often won't feel sorry about their actions (at least not substantially sorry) until they get caught. Granted, there'll be exceptions to the rule in that example, but it is generally accurate.
Whether it is a mess or not is, however, a separate issue from whether it has a feeling of remorse for its actions (or at least pretends to feel remorse for the sake of public image) ;)
Now there's an excuse: "I went on the WWW, completely ignored the fact that everything is copyrighted as soon as it is written, whether it says '@ copyright 20XX [insert person]' or not, and just copied and altered it anyway"
That "some guy" wouldn't happen to be Martin Luther, "founder" of the Protestant section of Christianity, would it?
Let me correct that for you: "gov "sorry" = gov "we got caught".
Wherever you are, the government is only sorry when it gets caught. If it is cheaper or has some other benefit and doesn't get caught then they don't care. Such is the way of politics.
How what is supposed to work? I thought the whole idea of MessageLabs was that they were supposed to be "anti-spam" in some way and so should stop the messages before they get flagged as being evil.
Even if they assumed that all activity was legit, it'd still be good to have noticed you had unusual behaviour before you get blacklisted (or at least before people notify you that you've been blacklisted).
I think that's just bad phrasing. My reading is that they only found out that the customer had been "hacked" because they were blacklisting (i.e. 'hacking' occurred, blacklisting occurred, awareness of blacklisting occurred, and finally awareness of 'hacking' occurred).
Granted, I did have to look it up, but you seem to have only a vague notion of what the English language is. Carburetter is the proper (i.e. English) way to spell it ;)
They also have co-conspirators: Cheap Domain Sales (previously Domain Tasting, but I think they cut down on that). You can't kill an IP because you may take innocents with it (and a domain would just shift to another IP) and you can't kill a domain because they'll just buy another domain for a few days.
Just wait until we have to play whack-a-mole with IPv6 spammers - now there's a huge range to try blocking via blacklists!
I've only got a vague notion of what the carburetter is/does, and I probably couldn't identify it if asked to point it out. I do, however, know about petrol, oil, tire tread, lights and general driving. Does that mean that I shouldn't drive? Yes, knowledge of computers is good and people somehow assume that they don't need it, but processors and memory isn't important knowledge - how to "drive safely" and what the essential maintenance points are is the important bit, plus what a computer sounds/behaves like normally (whether there are odd clunks coming from the engine).
There's pranks and then there's cover-up/abuse. How much of a celebrity's info should be protected compared to a person? And how much is it in the public interest to know, even if it would be considered "private" for 'normal' people? Ditto politicians.
As for face recognition, even if they do have it then what if I sign up for a new account because I find someone has been mis-using my info? Or if I don't sign up at all? I don't have to have a photo of me tied to my account to be able to complain about someone else's use of my personal data or image.
And if the EnCoRe project gets its implementation right then we'll have controls that will help even more. It is basically a research project looking at "Ensuring Consent and Revocation" with the ideal of having informed people using certified services that provide certain guarantees about how they deal with, process and dispose of your data.
On the DRM point, I think that it is one of the few places where it is reasonable. DRM on corporate documents and data makes sense - they'll probably already have legal contracts in place to limit what they should do, and the DRM enforces it. Unfortunately it seems to be one of the places where it isn't enforced, probably because companies don't want to end up opening up their DRM servers to the world so that all of their business partners can authenticate against them.
Erm, in a similar way to false DMCA take-down notices - claim that you're in a photo that you're not. Companies have been filing DMCA take-downs for stuff that they don't own the copyright for, so what is to stop people claiming that they are in a photo when they're not?
Product reviews on a site selling a product aren't so bad, especially since a lot are "don't buy this product, it is crap because I'm too stupid to get it to work or got the one bad one in a million". Doing the same thing on social sites is where it gets a bit creepy.
I think the only new thing here is that Cisco has made a product out of it. I know of services that have done this before.
Personally, I don't like it. If I want the company to try to sweet-talk me into thinking their wonderfully fantastic then I'd contact them. If I wanted a problem solved then I'd try their tech support. If it isn't something that either of them can help with (like "how do you do X?" or "which are the best drivers for Linux?" or "this is terrible, has anyone else had the same problem?") then it goes somewhere public and I sure as hell don't want someone trying to astroturf the situation.
Not in the slightest. I've had companies jump out on me after a vague hint at their brand and say "can we help you? (because we want to hide any potential problem and make it look like we're always fantastic by virtue of shutting you up)" and I found it hugely creepy.
That's their own stupid fault. If I want to target things at company X then I find their account and reference them. If they don't have an account then I'd tell them directly *and* rant publicly. Then again, I'm not one of the drooling masses who thinks that Twitter is for telling the world what you had for breakfast.
I agree. I know of services that have been developed to do this before. I think the ones I know of may have had some degree of sentiment analysis as well.
There's "wakes you up" and there's "jerks you awake suddenly in a way that makes you feel you've had a bad night even if you didn't". Maybe that's just me, though, since I don't struggle with getting up once my alarm goes off. The shrill beeps that my phone does is something that I avoid unless I have to (e.g. I'm on a work trip).
As a more extreme example, think of the old mechanical alarm clocks with the two bells and the hammer. My wife thought one of those would be nice, until three days of feeling stressed/jumpy/terrified when the alarm went off *really* load. It went not long after.
I'm under thirty and I don't use my phone as an alarm. You can now consider that you "know" me ;) Two reasons - 1) my clock radio gives me, you know, radio - something interesting, different and relevant each day (local news and a song or two) and 2) my phone is a phone, so the alarm is horrendous. Some of us can't afford these overpriced smart gizmos and have to make do with 10 year old £15 clock radios.