Disney's marketing practices thoroughly enrage me. When I first got a Disney DVD and it made me watch Disney home video ads before my movie, I was immediately pissed off.
I buy a lot of DVDs. There are far more old movies that I want on video than I can afford to buy at any given time, and I have no particular order that I feel I need to buy them in. So, if a studio makes nice releases of their movies on DVD, I'm inclined to look for movies from them next time. If they make lousy releases, I'm inclined to look elsewhere.
So Disney is pretty low on my purchase priority list. Every time I see a Disney DVD in the store, or on Amazon, that I'm interested in, I think "Hmm, I'd like to have that movie, but it'll have ads on it, and they'll probably come out with a deluxe edition in six months anyway. I'll get it some other time." And I buy two Warner Brothers DVDs instead because they're cheap.
the fact remains that a majority of its plot holds true to what the internet is today.
Actually, I think it's probably more true to the Internet of today than to computing in 1982... at the time, the concept of so many computers around the country being connected together was vaguely absurd to the common viewer. Now it's commonplace.
It's kinda funny, I picked this nickname for Slashdot in a moment of sillyness, and hadn't seen the movie in quite a few years, but I since bought the DVD and found that I actually like the movie much more as an adult than I did as a kid. I guess I'll have to get the new deluxe set and give my old DVD to my cousins.
Kazuo Yamafuji's words: 'I would hand over my patent for one dollar if Mr. Kamen admitted that we were first.'
Since I think Kamen actually cited Yamafuji's invention in his patent application, that rather implies that he does acknowledge that Yamafuji was first. I don't get what Yamafuji is upset about.
Under the circumstances I'd try the US embassy, and the office of the Attorney General of the state that the phone number is in. (You can determine that by the area code as long as it's not a toll-free number.)
Your local police may still be willing to get involved, and may be willing to deal with the US authorities for you.
All you have to do is modify your mailserver to reject any message that does not include a valid PGP signature.
And how am I going to get email from my clients who don't use PGP, and aren't going to? Go back and read what I wrote. Nobody is going to use an email system that cuts them off from almost everyone.
And any descent mail client already supports it.
Funny, but in 12 years on the Internet I don't think I've ever used a mail client that supported it natively.
Try calling your state's attorney general's office and explaining the situation to them. Sometimes they can be surprisingly helpful, particularly if you can do a good job of explaining yourself (like pointing out repeatedly that they're doing this *incredibly* *loathesome* thing in *your* *name* and that it's just *destroying* the good name of your business) and can come off as genuinely hurt and confused.
If you got any threatening complaints about the spam, you could bring those up too, and claim that you fear for your life because of what this person is doing in your name.
The police might be willing to help, too.
You have public law enforcement resources. Use them. It's not just the RIAA and MPAA that have a right to call in the cops. You do too. Go for it. If THEY catch the spammer, and prosecute them for identity theft, defaming you, or whatever, the spammer will be in for a lot worse than having their relay shut down.
Are there any ways to find out who sends these out without incurring a large expense?
Sure. Dial the number, say you're interested, and ask for their address so you "can mail them a check." It won't work every time, but in a lot of cases if they think they've got a sucker on the line they'll tell you where to send money.
Anyway I'm sure the state attorney general's office can make the phone company cough up an address where the bill for that number is sent, if you get them interested.
Remember that if the address is a PO box, the post office has the physical address of the boxholder.
Isn't the only advantage of an authenticated email format that the recipient can easily find out who the sender really is?
Well, not exactly. You're right in that that's all it technically does for us. However, this leads us to two potential advantages:
When the spammer is identifiable, they don't tend to last long because the volume of incoming complaints tends to overload the ISP.
It makes it easier to create a groupware blocking system - for example, 10,000 people subscribe, and the system requires three subscribers to complain about an address before it's blocked. A spammer sends spam and it hits 8237 of the subscribers. The first three to see it click the "this is spam" button, and the system automatically removes the mail from the inboxes of the other 8234 subscribers who got it and blocks all future email from the sender.
Knowing who the sender is doesn't prevent spam being sent from spam friendly servers abroad.
You're right, but again, the volume of incoming complaints (and denial of service attacks) tends to make the ISPs balk at hosting spammers. Once they're tracable, the attacks begin, and the ISPs dump the spammers.
The problem is, we need a completely new email system with authentication, and we need mail clients that handle both it and the current standard seamlessly... because practically nobody is going to make a hard switch over to a new email system that will prevent most of their friends and associates from emailing them, and very few people are going to be willing to run two separate email clients. It would be best if the server-side software supported both standards as well, so server admins don't have to feel that they're getting an additional piece of software to support. Moreover, everything has to support every major platform and some of the more prominent minor ones so it can support a massive switchover and won't piss off users of any particular platform by not properly supporting them.
What if your mother, farther, wife, or kids dies because their diabetes testing materials, or insulin, was irradiated by the USPS in transit to the pharmacy where you bought it and you didn't know about it, and their blood sugar test results are incorrect and they consequently eat too much, or too little, sugar?
What if their prescription medicine has been irradiated and has become toxic (due to chemical breakdown) and it kills them? Or if it just doesn't work any more and they die of what it was supposed to cure them of?
What if your grandmother's medicine arrives in the mail and they DID stick a warning label on it but she can't afford to get it replaced so she takes it anyway, it doesn't work, and she dies?
What would it be worth then?
The point is that they clearly haven't thought out all the consequences of this. They're so eager to prevent any further anthrax cases that they're not considering potential adverse consequences of their concept of a solution.
You're whining that protections against the launch of a biological attack might erase your digital camera pictures?
No. We're whining that the compactflash card that we pay $250 for online could show up damaged at our homes and never work right in the first place, because the postal service chose to do interesting things to its package en route. We're whining that our prescription-by-mail medicine may have been altered in unknown ways and may no longer make us well or may in fact be toxic.
I haven't been to a post office in a couple of weeks. Have they posted large safety orange "WARNING, WE IRRADIATE YOUR MAIL, YOUR FILM AND ELECTRONICS WILL BE DAMAGED AND YOUR MEDICINE WILL BECOME TOXIC" signs everywhere yet?
if you mean to imply that a mere five deaths doesn't warrant this astounding level of inconvenience, then what death toll would be needed to justify these measures? ie, how long would you wait?
How many dozens or hundreds of people die in the United States every year from slipping in the bathtub? what death toll are you waiting for to justify the banning of bathtubs?
You can't legislate away death. Living has risks.
this is a simple, safe, effective, and prudent thing to do.
Tell the folks at the commerce department whose paper gave off toxic gas because it was irradiated that it's safe.
I'm sure ``Sensitive: Do not irradiate'' or something of that nature would work just fine.
I'm sure that'll be very comforting to the terrorists who have been mailing anthrax, to know that they can just write "do not irradiate" on their envelopes full of death. Look, if this is such a wonderful thing like you say it should be done to everything. If it can't be safely done to everything, maybe it shouldn't be done at all: creating a false sense of security is much worse than being insecure and knowing it.
So what you're saying is, this electron beam will kill anthrax, but it's easily blocked... so we all start using electron-beam-proof wrapping... and so does whoever has been mailing anthrax.
Gee, now I feel safe.
If what you're saying is right, what this means is that we're all just going to have to pay for more expensive wrapping for our mail, particularly for film, medicine, or electronics, for no actual benefit.
The difference between Microsoft making everything including the kitchen sink part of their operating system and Apple's behavior is that Apple is enclosing applications on their machines, not making them part of the system. Microsoft made IE an un-removable part of their OS... Apple lets you throw out iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto, and you can replace them with whatever you like. With my powerbook, iMovie didn't even come on the same CD as the OS any more. I installed it because I thought I might play with it sometime, but I haven't, so I'll probably just delete it.
There actually *are* commercial apps that do the things these apps do, in some cases better, and unlike in cases of Microsoft melding their apps into their system, on the Mac you can throw out the apple software (quickly, easily, and painlessly) and use fully functional alternatives. On Windows, you try making Netscape your browser for everything. IE will still come up regularly like it or not. On the Mac, IE is also the default browser but it took me about a minute to switch completely to Netscape once I'd configured my network. Most of that minute was remembering which control panel to make the change in. I threw IE out.
Apple can be accused of bundling software. (Whether they meet the legal definition of having done so or not, I have no idea, but I think we can agree that they give enough of the appearance of having done so that they could be accused of it.) However, they haven't displayed the heinous behavior of forcing you to *use* it.
It also doesn't hurt that Apple's software is usually easy to use and actually works.
Look, I'm a consultant. Staying employed requires that I make my clients happy, and part of doing that is making them feel that doing business with me is an effortless task.
Clients, unconsciously, have a scale in their head that weighs how much they've put into me versus how much they've received back from me. Every little thing I ask them to give me or do for me reduces their perception of the benefit/cost ratio, and reduces the likelyhood they'll use my services again. Really, clients generally want me to come in and pull a completed job out of thin air with no assets from them, and much as they technically understand that they have to give me stuff to work with they don't actually like it.
So, I make a point to bend over backward for the client on the little stuff so that when I do have to ask the client for something, it's always something that's really important to the project. Convincing them to support free software does not constitute "important to the project".
I can just imagine telling a client I can't read their Word file. They'll think I'm incompetent for being improperly equipped and replace me.
Like it or not I'm stuck with Word unless a court breaks up the Microsoft monopolies and businesses start using more of a variety of software. I can give my clients PDFs, but that isn't going to change their file habits anytime soon.
Auto numbered lists always got munged in Word every time I've tried to make any substantial use of them, so it hardly comes as a surprise that they'd be odd when exported...
iBook will not have bigger screen than Titanium.
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New iMac Announced
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The titanium doesn't have a 1280x1024 screen. They're not going to make an iBook with a screen with more real estate than the titanium. It would create a bad perception of their premier business portable.
Regard the DVD format. Essentially, it offers us nothing that wasn't achievable with the old laservision format, and consumers were perfectly happy with VHS tapes (you may not have been, but any number of studies showed it was true as a generality), but DVD was pushed on us by both movie studios and electronics manufacturers. It has the so-called "copyright protection" technology that causes any amount of inconvenience. It forces us to watch ads and obnoxious threats about copyright law before we get to see our videos, and doesn't allow us to fast forward through it. It costs more. Yet, it has caught on, not because it's better than the previous technology in any way consumers especially care about, but because it has been heavily advertised and everything is coming out in the format now. Indeed, I have friends who don't have DVD and they're complaining that it's starting to get difficult to find what they want in VHS.
Ogg Vorbis doesn't excite the consumer, in general. I've compared it to MP3 and prefer OV, but most consumers just want to "suck their music into the computer" and don't understand or much care how that happens. Even most of my slashdotter-type friends don't give a damn and say that mp3 is good enough. However, I reiterate that it's not consumers who will make this decision, it's industry.
Electronics manufacturers may start getting interested in making portable music devices that use the Ogg Vorbis format because they may find it easy enough to add, and free. It lets them claim their product supports one more format than the competition or that it's "new and improved". Software companies may decide that it's a good format that they can use for free and just go with it... look at Apple, which tends to use whatever codec seems best to them. If the right people at Apple decided that Ogg Vorbis is best, I can easily imagine it becoming the default audio codec for Quicktime.
Look at WMA. It's not really that great, and consumers don't really care about it, but it's so widely supported (because the monopoly operating system manufacturer ships it in every system and because they've either convinced or bullied hardware manufacturers into supporting it) that it's just becoming used anyway. Ogg Vorbis could easily achieve success through the same processes.
I had an employer tell me outright that they knew they were paying me less than half what I was worth and that they agreed that I was consequently not receiving a market competitive salary and that I did superb quality work and that they had absolutely no complaints about me, but that they had no intention of paying me a market-competitive salary because it galled the boss to hand a $70k salary to a 24-year-old, so I should shut up and take the $30k I was getting and be grateful they were offering me a $3k raise because that's all I deserved at my age.
I looked into age discrimination law, and discovered that in Massachusetts we're protected against being discriminated against for being too old, but not for being young.
So, I left the company. It was the worst thing I could do to them. They were going to have to pay a lot more to get a competent person, and I was better not to have the stress.
I got my first professional job at 16. I was offered the position at 14 but didn't accept it for two years. I did data analysis, 3d rendering, and helped a bit with some programming. I also did some general IT work.
I'm 29 now and it's still on my resume. I also have a letter of reference from my employer to prove it.
Nothing is more frustrating to the young person who takes his or her parents' advice and goes and gets a real job to get real experience than to have people tell them they must be a liar.
I advise you to remember that these sorts of things do happen occasionally, and a much better attitude than "I don't believe you, prove it!" would be "here is how you can document your experience".
For the young person in question, my advice is to talk to your direct supervisor(s), past and present if necessary, and get a letter of reference on company letterhead. These letters not only can be produced at any review or termination proceedings (give them a *copy*, not the original), but also can be of excellent use in future jobhunting: when an employer gets 20 resumes for a job, the one with several letters from past employers saying the person did a good job stands out, and such letters have gotten me several jobs in the past. (One employer looked at my letters and called to offer me the job.) If you actually do good work, usually the boss is more than happy to write you such a letter upon request.
I do see where somebody might want to exchange clothes. They are meant to be worn and if they don't fit right or that style doesn't suit you I can see an exchange.
These are preventable problems which, of course, are resolved by exercising a certain amount of care and thoughtfulness regarding the person you're getting a gift for.
You can ask their spouse, children, parents, or siblings what size they are. You can even ask them what size they are and write it down so you'll always know. (I find that if I ask six months in advance, they generally forget that I ever asked.) You can observe what styles and colors they wear and think hard about what would look good on them. You can ask them what their favorite color is. (Really, it tells them nothing about what you're getting them that you asked that.)
Family and friends make great resources for helping you determine the perfect gift for someone you care about.
I wanted to give a gift this year to a woman whose tastes I don't know too well. I visited her son and asked "I'm making a lot of people hats this year. Do you think she'd like a hat? What's her favorite color. Oh, blue, do you think she'd like a light blue? How about this yarn, is it the right color? Do you know if she wears an average hat size or do I need to make it small or large? Do you think she'd like a pompom on the end to make it look fun or no pompom to make it look dressy?" I ended up with a hat that she liked enough that she put it on as soon as she unwrapped it, and I felt great that I was able to do that for her... thanks to her son's help.
On christmas morning we unwrap all of our gifts in a wild spree of flying gift wrap, and end up with our piles of new treasures that other people picked out for us. How on earth do they think they're going to get the public to accept the idea of having nothing under the tree to unwrap? Who do they think is going to go for this?
My crowd has a few obsessive shoppers in it who insist on getting started with their christmas shopping very early (this year it was in early July but it gets earlier every year - we're waiting for it to span to prior to the previous christmas) and want a complete list of everything you want for Christmas so they can coordinate lists with each other and ensure that you get what you want. Even that bugs the heck out of me because I get things I like but not necessarily what they would choose for me on their own, so the gift doesn't say anything to me about them. (As soon as I'm done unwrapping I have no clue who got me what because I picked it all out.) Also, it means you know precisely what you're getting for christmas. This year I made a point to give them an enormous list so they'd have to choose stuff because they couldn't possibly get it all.
For most of my friends (*), I made christmas gifts this year. I knit hats and scarves and I sewed hats, scarves, and mittens. I also bought chocolates. They can't return anything if they don't like the color, but dammit whenever they put it on they're going to think of me because they know I made it just for them with my own two hands and that I did it because I care enough to want them to be warm and comfortable.
If someone tried to give me a gift that wasn't even there with a big option to exchange it in advance, I'd be grateful for their willingness to spend money on me but try to politely encourage them to please just exercise their own taste and get me whatever they feel like whenever they may feel like giving me anything. I've never returned a gift, and would rather get an occasional dud (and there have been very few) than turn christmas any further into a celebration of consumerism instead of family, friendship, love, and religion.
Tom
* I have two friends that I always give something made of glass. They didn't get anything handmade, but I do spend a lot of time trying to choose the perfect piece of glass for them. They've never returned anything I've given them.
not at all... you just make each image map to a keyboard character. You could even display the character in the corner of each image. That way, users could use either the keyboard or the images as they're comfortable with. Of course, it's just not enough images to map to all the possible keyboard combinations, but presumably keyboard-centric users aren't going to care that much about the pictures.
If I want to use an underscore in my password I don't care that my password becomes Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, Seurat's Lady Powdering, Dali's Eggs on a Plate Without a Plate, underscore, Van Gogh's Starry Night, Munch's The Scream.
Really, you should pay attention to what you reply to...
Really, your mother should have taught you better manners. I understood the original author's point. My point, however, is that the anecdote has nothing to do with the consequences of lax computer security and therefore doesn't make a good example for their argument.
What if the rumor were true, and there was illegal information on your web server (put there by a skript kiddie), and the cops were smart?
If the rumor had been true, prosecuting them would probably have been justifiable if I remember correctly what the rumor was. If the cops were smart, they would have tried just looking into the matter before raiding the place, and also would have realized that the owner of the computer isn't necessarily responsible for the actions of every script kiddie who attacks it.
Bluntly, I think it's just a lousy example for this particular discussion.
Shall I bring up the episode of Steve Jackson Games as an indication of the kind of risk that operators of public computer systems face when security is not a primary concern?
Really, you shouldn't.
As I recall, they didn't get raided because of anything to do with their system security, and indeed their computers had nothing to do with it at all (other than that they were taken in the raid) - they published, on paper, an entirely fictional game about computer hacking that any sane person should have been able to tell was a game (the game rules should be a big hint) and didn't constitute a criminal instruction guide, and they got raided for it because the Secret Service apparently wasn't able to make that distinction.
Sooner or later the legal system will change to catch up with technology.
This isn't about technology. This is strictly about the legal system. If I rented a storefront and put up a neon sign that says "Come here to discuss TI calculators" and used the place to hold nightly discussion groups at no charge, and their legal department found out about it, they'd probably get just as upset and pull exactly the same nonsense. The only difference is they're not likely to actually see a sign like that so it's likely beneath their attention, while they can easily search all the domain names and generate a list of people to threaten.
I'd like to see innocent people who get these stomp letters from the lawyers start initiating lawsuits against the company for harassing them. Perhaps it would make companies sit up and take a little notice of what their corporate lawyers are doing and perhaps even put a leash on them for a change if a few corporations could be made to pay out large settlements because their lawyers tried to intimidate someone into giving up their right to free speech.
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce Boxleitner isn't the only Tron/B5 connection. Peter Jurasik, B5's Londo, is in it too.
Yes, it drives me absolutely nuts.
Disney's marketing practices thoroughly enrage me. When I first got a Disney DVD and it made me watch Disney home video ads before my movie, I was immediately pissed off.
I buy a lot of DVDs. There are far more old movies that I want on video than I can afford to buy at any given time, and I have no particular order that I feel I need to buy them in. So, if a studio makes nice releases of their movies on DVD, I'm inclined to look for movies from them next time. If they make lousy releases, I'm inclined to look elsewhere.
So Disney is pretty low on my purchase priority list. Every time I see a Disney DVD in the store, or on Amazon, that I'm interested in, I think "Hmm, I'd like to have that movie, but it'll have ads on it, and they'll probably come out with a deluxe edition in six months anyway. I'll get it some other time." And I buy two Warner Brothers DVDs instead because they're cheap.
It's kinda funny, I picked this nickname for Slashdot in a moment of sillyness, and hadn't seen the movie in quite a few years, but I since bought the DVD and found that I actually like the movie much more as an adult than I did as a kid. I guess I'll have to get the new deluxe set and give my old DVD to my cousins.
Since I think Kamen actually cited Yamafuji's invention in his patent application, that rather implies that he does acknowledge that Yamafuji was first. I don't get what Yamafuji is upset about.
Under the circumstances I'd try the US embassy, and the office of the Attorney General of the state that the phone number is in. (You can determine that by the area code as long as it's not a toll-free number.)
Your local police may still be willing to get involved, and may be willing to deal with the US authorities for you.
Try calling your state's attorney general's office and explaining the situation to them. Sometimes they can be surprisingly helpful, particularly if you can do a good job of explaining yourself (like pointing out repeatedly that they're doing this *incredibly* *loathesome* thing in *your* *name* and that it's just *destroying* the good name of your business) and can come off as genuinely hurt and confused.
If you got any threatening complaints about the spam, you could bring those up too, and claim that you fear for your life because of what this person is doing in your name.
The police might be willing to help, too.
You have public law enforcement resources. Use them. It's not just the RIAA and MPAA that have a right to call in the cops. You do too. Go for it. If THEY catch the spammer, and prosecute them for identity theft, defaming you, or whatever, the spammer will be in for a lot worse than having their relay shut down.
Anyway I'm sure the state attorney general's office can make the phone company cough up an address where the bill for that number is sent, if you get them interested.
Remember that if the address is a PO box, the post office has the physical address of the boxholder.
Well, not exactly. You're right in that that's all it technically does for us. However, this leads us to two potential advantages:
- When the spammer is identifiable, they don't tend to last long because the volume of incoming complaints tends to overload the ISP.
- It makes it easier to create a groupware blocking system - for example, 10,000 people subscribe, and the system requires three subscribers to complain about an address before it's blocked. A spammer sends spam and it hits 8237 of the subscribers. The first three to see it click the "this is spam" button, and the system automatically removes the mail from the inboxes of the other 8234 subscribers who got it and blocks all future email from the sender.
You're right, but again, the volume of incoming complaints (and denial of service attacks) tends to make the ISPs balk at hosting spammers. Once they're tracable, the attacks begin, and the ISPs dump the spammers.The problem is, we need a completely new email system with authentication, and we need mail clients that handle both it and the current standard seamlessly... because practically nobody is going to make a hard switch over to a new email system that will prevent most of their friends and associates from emailing them, and very few people are going to be willing to run two separate email clients. It would be best if the server-side software supported both standards as well, so server admins don't have to feel that they're getting an additional piece of software to support. Moreover, everything has to support every major platform and some of the more prominent minor ones so it can support a massive switchover and won't piss off users of any particular platform by not properly supporting them.
Java, anyone?
What if your mother, farther, wife, or kids dies because their diabetes testing materials, or insulin, was irradiated by the USPS in transit to the pharmacy where you bought it and you didn't know about it, and their blood sugar test results are incorrect and they consequently eat too much, or too little, sugar?
What if their prescription medicine has been irradiated and has become toxic (due to chemical breakdown) and it kills them? Or if it just doesn't work any more and they die of what it was supposed to cure them of?
What if your grandmother's medicine arrives in the mail and they DID stick a warning label on it but she can't afford to get it replaced so she takes it anyway, it doesn't work, and she dies?
What would it be worth then?
The point is that they clearly haven't thought out all the consequences of this. They're so eager to prevent any further anthrax cases that they're not considering potential adverse consequences of their concept of a solution.
No. We're whining that the compactflash card that we pay $250 for online could show up damaged at our homes and never work right in the first place, because the postal service chose to do interesting things to its package en route. We're whining that our prescription-by-mail medicine may have been altered in unknown ways and may no longer make us well or may in fact be toxic.
I haven't been to a post office in a couple of weeks. Have they posted large safety orange "WARNING, WE IRRADIATE YOUR MAIL, YOUR FILM AND ELECTRONICS WILL BE DAMAGED AND YOUR MEDICINE WILL BECOME TOXIC" signs everywhere yet? How many dozens or hundreds of people die in the United States every year from slipping in the bathtub? what death toll are you waiting for to justify the banning of bathtubs?
You can't legislate away death. Living has risks. Tell the folks at the commerce department whose paper gave off toxic gas because it was irradiated that it's safe. I'm sure that'll be very comforting to the terrorists who have been mailing anthrax, to know that they can just write "do not irradiate" on their envelopes full of death. Look, if this is such a wonderful thing like you say it should be done to everything. If it can't be safely done to everything, maybe it shouldn't be done at all: creating a false sense of security is much worse than being insecure and knowing it.
So what you're saying is, this electron beam will kill anthrax, but it's easily blocked... so we all start using electron-beam-proof wrapping... and so does whoever has been mailing anthrax.
Gee, now I feel safe.
If what you're saying is right, what this means is that we're all just going to have to pay for more expensive wrapping for our mail, particularly for film, medicine, or electronics, for no actual benefit.
The difference between Microsoft making everything including the kitchen sink part of their operating system and Apple's behavior is that Apple is enclosing applications on their machines, not making them part of the system. Microsoft made IE an un-removable part of their OS... Apple lets you throw out iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto, and you can replace them with whatever you like. With my powerbook, iMovie didn't even come on the same CD as the OS any more. I installed it because I thought I might play with it sometime, but I haven't, so I'll probably just delete it.
There actually *are* commercial apps that do the things these apps do, in some cases better, and unlike in cases of Microsoft melding their apps into their system, on the Mac you can throw out the apple software (quickly, easily, and painlessly) and use fully functional alternatives. On Windows, you try making Netscape your browser for everything. IE will still come up regularly like it or not. On the Mac, IE is also the default browser but it took me about a minute to switch completely to Netscape once I'd configured my network. Most of that minute was remembering which control panel to make the change in. I threw IE out.
Apple can be accused of bundling software. (Whether they meet the legal definition of having done so or not, I have no idea, but I think we can agree that they give enough of the appearance of having done so that they could be accused of it.) However, they haven't displayed the heinous behavior of forcing you to *use* it.
It also doesn't hurt that Apple's software is usually easy to use and actually works.
Look, I'm a consultant. Staying employed requires that I make my clients happy, and part of doing that is making them feel that doing business with me is an effortless task.
Clients, unconsciously, have a scale in their head that weighs how much they've put into me versus how much they've received back from me. Every little thing I ask them to give me or do for me reduces their perception of the benefit/cost ratio, and reduces the likelyhood they'll use my services again. Really, clients generally want me to come in and pull a completed job out of thin air with no assets from them, and much as they technically understand that they have to give me stuff to work with they don't actually like it.
So, I make a point to bend over backward for the client on the little stuff so that when I do have to ask the client for something, it's always something that's really important to the project. Convincing them to support free software does not constitute "important to the project".
I can just imagine telling a client I can't read their Word file. They'll think I'm incompetent for being improperly equipped and replace me.
Like it or not I'm stuck with Word unless a court breaks up the Microsoft monopolies and businesses start using more of a variety of software. I can give my clients PDFs, but that isn't going to change their file habits anytime soon.
Auto numbered lists always got munged in Word every time I've tried to make any substantial use of them, so it hardly comes as a surprise that they'd be odd when exported...
The titanium doesn't have a 1280x1024 screen. They're not going to make an iBook with a screen with more real estate than the titanium. It would create a bad perception of their premier business portable.
Regard the DVD format. Essentially, it offers us nothing that wasn't achievable with the old laservision format, and consumers were perfectly happy with VHS tapes (you may not have been, but any number of studies showed it was true as a generality), but DVD was pushed on us by both movie studios and electronics manufacturers. It has the so-called "copyright protection" technology that causes any amount of inconvenience. It forces us to watch ads and obnoxious threats about copyright law before we get to see our videos, and doesn't allow us to fast forward through it. It costs more. Yet, it has caught on, not because it's better than the previous technology in any way consumers especially care about, but because it has been heavily advertised and everything is coming out in the format now. Indeed, I have friends who don't have DVD and they're complaining that it's starting to get difficult to find what they want in VHS.
Ogg Vorbis doesn't excite the consumer, in general. I've compared it to MP3 and prefer OV, but most consumers just want to "suck their music into the computer" and don't understand or much care how that happens. Even most of my slashdotter-type friends don't give a damn and say that mp3 is good enough. However, I reiterate that it's not consumers who will make this decision, it's industry.
Electronics manufacturers may start getting interested in making portable music devices that use the Ogg Vorbis format because they may find it easy enough to add, and free. It lets them claim their product supports one more format than the competition or that it's "new and improved". Software companies may decide that it's a good format that they can use for free and just go with it... look at Apple, which tends to use whatever codec seems best to them. If the right people at Apple decided that Ogg Vorbis is best, I can easily imagine it becoming the default audio codec for Quicktime.
Look at WMA. It's not really that great, and consumers don't really care about it, but it's so widely supported (because the monopoly operating system manufacturer ships it in every system and because they've either convinced or bullied hardware manufacturers into supporting it) that it's just becoming used anyway. Ogg Vorbis could easily achieve success through the same processes.
I had an employer tell me outright that they knew they were paying me less than half what I was worth and that they agreed that I was consequently not receiving a market competitive salary and that I did superb quality work and that they had absolutely no complaints about me, but that they had no intention of paying me a market-competitive salary because it galled the boss to hand a $70k salary to a 24-year-old, so I should shut up and take the $30k I was getting and be grateful they were offering me a $3k raise because that's all I deserved at my age.
I looked into age discrimination law, and discovered that in Massachusetts we're protected against being discriminated against for being too old, but not for being young.
So, I left the company. It was the worst thing I could do to them. They were going to have to pay a lot more to get a competent person, and I was better not to have the stress.
I got my first professional job at 16. I was offered the position at 14 but didn't accept it for two years. I did data analysis, 3d rendering, and helped a bit with some programming. I also did some general IT work.
I'm 29 now and it's still on my resume. I also have a letter of reference from my employer to prove it.
Nothing is more frustrating to the young person who takes his or her parents' advice and goes and gets a real job to get real experience than to have people tell them they must be a liar.
I advise you to remember that these sorts of things do happen occasionally, and a much better attitude than "I don't believe you, prove it!" would be "here is how you can document your experience".
For the young person in question, my advice is to talk to your direct supervisor(s), past and present if necessary, and get a letter of reference on company letterhead. These letters not only can be produced at any review or termination proceedings (give them a *copy*, not the original), but also can be of excellent use in future jobhunting: when an employer gets 20 resumes for a job, the one with several letters from past employers saying the person did a good job stands out, and such letters have gotten me several jobs in the past. (One employer looked at my letters and called to offer me the job.) If you actually do good work, usually the boss is more than happy to write you such a letter upon request.
Tom
These are preventable problems which, of course, are resolved by exercising a certain amount of care and thoughtfulness regarding the person you're getting a gift for.
You can ask their spouse, children, parents, or siblings what size they are. You can even ask them what size they are and write it down so you'll always know. (I find that if I ask six months in advance, they generally forget that I ever asked.) You can observe what styles and colors they wear and think hard about what would look good on them. You can ask them what their favorite color is. (Really, it tells them nothing about what you're getting them that you asked that.)
Family and friends make great resources for helping you determine the perfect gift for someone you care about.
I wanted to give a gift this year to a woman whose tastes I don't know too well. I visited her son and asked "I'm making a lot of people hats this year. Do you think she'd like a hat? What's her favorite color. Oh, blue, do you think she'd like a light blue? How about this yarn, is it the right color? Do you know if she wears an average hat size or do I need to make it small or large? Do you think she'd like a pompom on the end to make it look fun or no pompom to make it look dressy?" I ended up with a hat that she liked enough that she put it on as soon as she unwrapped it, and I felt great that I was able to do that for her... thanks to her son's help.
On christmas morning we unwrap all of our gifts in a wild spree of flying gift wrap, and end up with our piles of new treasures that other people picked out for us. How on earth do they think they're going to get the public to accept the idea of having nothing under the tree to unwrap? Who do they think is going to go for this?
My crowd has a few obsessive shoppers in it who insist on getting started with their christmas shopping very early (this year it was in early July but it gets earlier every year - we're waiting for it to span to prior to the previous christmas) and want a complete list of everything you want for Christmas so they can coordinate lists with each other and ensure that you get what you want. Even that bugs the heck out of me because I get things I like but not necessarily what they would choose for me on their own, so the gift doesn't say anything to me about them. (As soon as I'm done unwrapping I have no clue who got me what because I picked it all out.) Also, it means you know precisely what you're getting for christmas. This year I made a point to give them an enormous list so they'd have to choose stuff because they couldn't possibly get it all.
For most of my friends (*), I made christmas gifts this year. I knit hats and scarves and I sewed hats, scarves, and mittens. I also bought chocolates. They can't return anything if they don't like the color, but dammit whenever they put it on they're going to think of me because they know I made it just for them with my own two hands and that I did it because I care enough to want them to be warm and comfortable.
If someone tried to give me a gift that wasn't even there with a big option to exchange it in advance, I'd be grateful for their willingness to spend money on me but try to politely encourage them to please just exercise their own taste and get me whatever they feel like whenever they may feel like giving me anything. I've never returned a gift, and would rather get an occasional dud (and there have been very few) than turn christmas any further into a celebration of consumerism instead of family, friendship, love, and religion.
Tom
* I have two friends that I always give something made of glass. They didn't get anything handmade, but I do spend a lot of time trying to choose the perfect piece of glass for them. They've never returned anything I've given them.
not at all... you just make each image map to a keyboard character. You could even display the character in the corner of each image. That way, users could use either the keyboard or the images as they're comfortable with. Of course, it's just not enough images to map to all the possible keyboard combinations, but presumably keyboard-centric users aren't going to care that much about the pictures.
If I want to use an underscore in my password I don't care that my password becomes Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, Seurat's Lady Powdering, Dali's Eggs on a Plate Without a Plate, underscore, Van Gogh's Starry Night, Munch's The Scream.
Really, your mother should have taught you better manners. I understood the original author's point. My point, however, is that the anecdote has nothing to do with the consequences of lax computer security and therefore doesn't make a good example for their argument. If the rumor had been true, prosecuting them would probably have been justifiable if I remember correctly what the rumor was. If the cops were smart, they would have tried just looking into the matter before raiding the place, and also would have realized that the owner of the computer isn't necessarily responsible for the actions of every script kiddie who attacks it.
Bluntly, I think it's just a lousy example for this particular discussion.
Really, you shouldn't.
As I recall, they didn't get raided because of anything to do with their system security, and indeed their computers had nothing to do with it at all (other than that they were taken in the raid) - they published, on paper, an entirely fictional game about computer hacking that any sane person should have been able to tell was a game (the game rules should be a big hint) and didn't constitute a criminal instruction guide, and they got raided for it because the Secret Service apparently wasn't able to make that distinction.
This isn't about technology. This is strictly about the legal system. If I rented a storefront and put up a neon sign that says "Come here to discuss TI calculators" and used the place to hold nightly discussion groups at no charge, and their legal department found out about it, they'd probably get just as upset and pull exactly the same nonsense. The only difference is they're not likely to actually see a sign like that so it's likely beneath their attention, while they can easily search all the domain names and generate a list of people to threaten.
I'd like to see innocent people who get these stomp letters from the lawyers start initiating lawsuits against the company for harassing them. Perhaps it would make companies sit up and take a little notice of what their corporate lawyers are doing and perhaps even put a leash on them for a change if a few corporations could be made to pay out large settlements because their lawyers tried to intimidate someone into giving up their right to free speech.