Re:Isn't It Ironic - Don't You Think?
on
More MyDoom Gloom
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· Score: 1
(noting that Microsoft doesn't offer a PowerPoint reader for Linux)
It's a symptom of the monoculture that you only thought to look for a PowerPoint reader from Microsoft.
HTML isn't at all suited to a discrete page format. Acrobat makes some sense, but is getting worse with every new version. Neither can reproduce animations that were created in a presentation application, which are sometimes useful or necessary to convey meaning (sure, they're massively abused, but you can really communicate by covering up one image with another, bringing in the answer after you've asked the question, etc.) *.ppt, however, thanks to a certain OS project, is pretty much universal.
Re:but there's an open source version of the virus
on
More MyDoom Gloom
·
· Score: 1
Ok you have need of an editor like say EMACS which you can use to mow the lawn, make breakfast, consume a few terabytes of drive space and several gig of ram, clone earthlings, teleport monkey's to mars and traverse the known universe. Well good for you.
Personally I prefer to use a powerful text editor, like vi for instance.
Or, you can use ViM, and get a powerful text editor *and* breakfast with monkeys on Mars.
End users always complain about this attitude without understanding the reasons behind it.
First of all, thank you for quoting me out of context.
Second, thank you for assuming I have never been on that side of the counter. I was the entire help desk for about 200 people, in an office environment with several industry-specialized applications. I took all service calls, provided all tier-1 support, and filled out all service tickets for our two techs. We also supported the phone system.
Yes, it would increase the number of possible causes... it might be the Netscape, IE, or Mozilla cache that needed to be cleared. It might be the coding on the site, which was IE compliant but not HTML compliant. It might be that the browser brought the whole system to its knees... or the user might be running Mozilla.
Truth is, (1) If IE is still an option, most people will use it because they are familiar with it. (2) If you remove IE as an option, you don't have an additional application to support and you reduce the number of ridiculous things that can happen (but you annoy some users who don't want to use something unfamiliar, no matter what the reason). But at the end of the day, if you give your users (who are students doing a lot of research via the web) only the choices of IE or Netscape 4.77 (I'm not kidding here) to save yourself work, you're not servicing your customers.
That was the point of the profile anecdote... this four-person team admins a lab of 60 computers with about 150 registered (and paying... $40/quarter plus printing) users, a lending library of about 7 laptops and four projectors, and about 50 desktops in various offices throughout the building, along with hosting a low-hit-rate, primarily static-content website. The sysadmin guy *might* have a heavy workload. The Audio-visual services guy definitely doesn't, and still can't seem to get better than 90% reliability on getting to a room with a laptop and projector *before* the class starts. The hardware guy would have about a full-time workload if he had the budget to replace or repair broken computers. The web admin would rather make many other people learn to code Cold Fusion than learning to admin PHP (no, he doesn't develop the content... that's up to volunteers and contractors).
I've spent a lot of time educating my fellow students about how to get help from the lab... i.e. have some clue what you're asking for, be specific, listen to what they say... but it goes both ways.
Doom worm currently reeking havoc across the globe.
So it's a smelly worm? Or are they trying to say that Windows stinks?
I was thinking about sending the authors this link... but maybe it would be more useful to send the/. community this one, since I'm almost halfway down the page at +2 and this is the first mention of it...
At home, I don't touch IE. Here at school, and at work, it's not actually possible for me to either (a) install Mozilla or (b) convince anyone else to install it. Believe me, I've tried.
Until IE becomes fully usable or fully unusable, there will be a lot of otherwise competent users out there who are stuck with these problems in certain environments.
for every person who constantly bitches about "pop-ups" or something messing up my computer related to IE. I'd retire. All I say is go to mozilla.org and leave me the hell alone.
Yeah... now tell me how I get the sysadmins in the computer lab at school to go to mozilla.org. "But, then we'd have to *support* it!" which would be oh-so-hard... it would cut into their smoke breaks something awful. (and they'd have less to clean up than with IE.)
These are the same folks that just "got rid of" profiles on all computers, because they were "too much hassle..." so every time I log in, it's three clicks to get started ("Click Start to begin!" "Take a Tour of Windows XP!" "Clean up your desktop!") Four or five clicks to get through the browser prompts ("You're trying to send data... are you sure?" "Would you like me to remember this for you and send it without your knowledge?" "Ok, I know I asked you if you wanted to send data already, but this site is secure..."). And so on.
Not everyone has control of every computing environment they use. So, yeah, until IE crashes and burns hard enough that people really will stop using it, some of us will complain.
Good legal representation would bring in a senior IT consultant (or two) to explain how it would be completely negligent not to have a bullet-proof procedure for protecting such assets.
Pre-trial motions, where decisions about what is admissible as evidence are made, don't have witnesses. You might have witnesses about the credibility of such evidence after it's presented, but in order for it to be dismissed as ridiculous in the first place, the judge needs to understand that it's not reasonable.
If not, and you go to a jury trial (which is how a lot of civil matters are decided), then it's up to whether or not the jury gets warm fuzzies from the experts you bring in.
Preach on, brother. I wish some sysadmins would get a clue and realize that with viruses spoofing the From: address, there is no fscking point in sending the "you sent me a virus" panic mail. All it does is bother the wrong people.
I think UCLA finally got a clue. After er... was it Klez? Some big virus, anyway... when I got hundreds of copies of the virus, and hundreds of messages saying "Hey! Don't send viruses!" they now have antivirus software on the mail server that simply doesn't *send* emails with virus-infected attachments. Instead, you get a message that gives you the headers of the email, and a link to where you can view it (along with a username and password that are randomly generated). And I haven't gotten any "Stop sending viruses!" emails since they implemented this system.
Well, since SCO seems to prefer a world full of Windows, why else whould they try to destroy Linux, they are given a sneak peek of what it whould bring them. This will cause them to give MS back all the money they got from them, because they are enabling terrorist actions against them. It is a Windows virus after all. They will find out how wrong they were. They will convert and tomorrow we will seem Darl hugging Linus and all will be well again.
Hm... you didn't, say, have anything to do with writing this virus, did you?;-)
Basically, I don't think this hurts the Linux community. Imagine that I use Windows (ha!) or code for M$ (also ha!). Then I go and murder fifteen people. Does that reflect poorly upon me? Yes! Does that reflect poorly on M$? No.
But if you go around serially murdering OSS developers? That might.
If your actions are not targeted, no worries. If they are, then people will draw conclusions in the absence of information.
Working for a Fortune 500 company, I can say this is no excuse. Typically, source files for any major company is kept off-site by a 3rd party backup/vault company.
Yeah... but you're counting on the *judge* knowing this.
Looking at the bill- it seems to me that it protects the actual collection effort not the data itself. If someone else wants to go out and collect the same information they can- they just can't steal your collection. I guess I'm missing why this is so bad.
So you collect information into a database. I want to be able to use that data also. I go to the trouble of collecting it myself, too.
Then you sue me, because I have the same collection you do. Sure, I may be able to document my efforts and prove that I actually went about collecting it myself, but you cannot tell from examining the work whether it is a copy or an original. That is the fundamental reason why, heretofore, collections of facts have not been protected by copyright.
Consider the cost of defending yourself in court, especially in a civil action where the case is decided on a preponderance of evidence, NOT by "beyond a reasonable doubt." If someone sues you for having the same collection they do, you have to be able to put forth more evidence than they do. How will these cases be decided? By who has a bigger budget.
The thing is, "databases" like GrokLaw are the ones that don't need this protection. Why make a public database public if you don't want people to use the data? It makes no sense.
I think you've got the poster completely backwards. It's not the Groklaw would be protected, but that for-profit law indexes would prosecute sites like Groklaw under this law. It doesn't matter if they're infringing or not... the reason facts are not currently subject to copyright is that it's darn hard to tell whether someone copied them or went out and got the info themselves.
Private databases aren't shared, so they don't need it. Public databases *are* shared, so (as far as I can tell) they don't need it, or shouldn't be shared.
What about proprietary, for-sale databases? They are neither private nor public. Instead, they are a saleable item. If I want shapefiles of all US ZIP codes to drop into GIS, chances are I'll have to pay for them. But that's just because I don't know someone who already has the data and can give it to me.
You seem to be stuck on the notion that databases are either used only internally or are completely public and free. Lexis-Nexis would beg to differ.
Note that the law does not protect the individual bits of data in the database, just a "quantitatively substantial part of the information" and only if...
It seems like one of the possible goals of this legislation, from what you've repeated here, might be another way to prosecute spammers. If they buy a database of email addresses, they no longer have the right to distribute that database.
However, there are a lot of other cases where this could have a seriously chilling effect. For example, there's the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey, which is served up on the web by the University of Michigan (though they don't compile the data). The most recent year's data is never available on the web, only prior years... you have to pay about $300 for a CD-ROM to get the last go-round. Still, if that database is copyrighted, and I use it to generate some statistics for something someone doesn't like (such as finding that there's a negative correlation between education and going to church), now there's a mechanism to quash my findings. If the compilation of the data is protected under copyright, then derivative works are also under the purview of the copyright holder, and statistics derived from a compilation of data would probably be derivative works.
This seems like it would be mostly used by companies that sell marketing information, and stuff like GIS data. I guess currently it's perfectly legal for me to buy some data from ESRI and then export it to CSV and send copies to all my friends, but this law would prevent that.
Then the question is, should that be legal? Maybe it shouldn't, but it's hard to see how you could really implement a law to protect it without it being wide open for abuse.
Actually, the first plants started using water to move their "seeds": it was more like some kind of sperm that male plants would release into water in hope they would reach female ovules. This was the very first method used by plants to reproduce (actually, we, humans, are using this exact same method).
Ohhhhhh... so *that's* why mom said to stay out of the hot tub...
97% pure micronized silver 75-80% silver content by weight
I sure as hell don't remember any of my crayons saying "micronized silver." Which is probably just as well, considering how much we used to chew on them.
Easily solved. Smash into 190 pieces. Throw 75 away (removing obvious evidence of connection). Then 'find' them in different locations. Presto! 25 meteorites.
How about the Pac-Man, Frogger, and Qbert watches?
Ah, yes.... I got a Pac-Man watch for my birthday one year... same year we went to Universal Studios. My friend Melanie and I got separated from everyone because we were walking along, me playing Pac-Man, her watching. My mom was furious. My take on it was, she had nothing to be all bent out of shape about... after all, she did give me the watch.
Does anyone else recognize Slashdotters by their sigs more often than their user names?
Slashdot Mirror
(noting that Microsoft doesn't offer a PowerPoint reader for Linux)
It's a symptom of the monoculture that you only thought to look for a PowerPoint reader from Microsoft.
HTML isn't at all suited to a discrete page format. Acrobat makes some sense, but is getting worse with every new version. Neither can reproduce animations that were created in a presentation application, which are sometimes useful or necessary to convey meaning (sure, they're massively abused, but you can really communicate by covering up one image with another, bringing in the answer after you've asked the question, etc.) *.ppt, however, thanks to a certain OS project, is pretty much universal.
Ok you have need of an editor like say EMACS which you can use to mow the lawn, make breakfast, consume a few terabytes of drive space and several gig of ram, clone earthlings, teleport monkey's to mars and traverse the known universe. Well good for you.
Personally I prefer to use a powerful text editor, like vi for instance.
Or, you can use ViM, and get a powerful text editor *and* breakfast with monkeys on Mars.
Hey moron, it's a freakin' BOOK. Would you like me to explain why you can't hyperlink to a book?
I can link to all kinds of books. What's so difficult about that?
Hi! :)
;-)
Someone please mod my husband offtopic
End users always complain about this attitude without understanding the reasons behind it.
First of all, thank you for quoting me out of context.
Second, thank you for assuming I have never been on that side of the counter. I was the entire help desk for about 200 people, in an office environment with several industry-specialized applications. I took all service calls, provided all tier-1 support, and filled out all service tickets for our two techs. We also supported the phone system.
Yes, it would increase the number of possible causes... it might be the Netscape, IE, or Mozilla cache that needed to be cleared. It might be the coding on the site, which was IE compliant but not HTML compliant. It might be that the browser brought the whole system to its knees... or the user might be running Mozilla.
Truth is, (1) If IE is still an option, most people will use it because they are familiar with it. (2) If you remove IE as an option, you don't have an additional application to support and you reduce the number of ridiculous things that can happen (but you annoy some users who don't want to use something unfamiliar, no matter what the reason). But at the end of the day, if you give your users (who are students doing a lot of research via the web) only the choices of IE or Netscape 4.77 (I'm not kidding here) to save yourself work, you're not servicing your customers.
That was the point of the profile anecdote... this four-person team admins a lab of 60 computers with about 150 registered (and paying... $40/quarter plus printing) users, a lending library of about 7 laptops and four projectors, and about 50 desktops in various offices throughout the building, along with hosting a low-hit-rate, primarily static-content website. The sysadmin guy *might* have a heavy workload. The Audio-visual services guy definitely doesn't, and still can't seem to get better than 90% reliability on getting to a room with a laptop and projector *before* the class starts. The hardware guy would have about a full-time workload if he had the budget to replace or repair broken computers. The web admin would rather make many other people learn to code Cold Fusion than learning to admin PHP (no, he doesn't develop the content... that's up to volunteers and contractors).
I've spent a lot of time educating my fellow students about how to get help from the lab... i.e. have some clue what you're asking for, be specific, listen to what they say... but it goes both ways.
I was thinking about sending the authors this link... but maybe it would be more useful to send the
Anyone can do it.
DON'T use IE!
As I just posted irritably in another response...
At home, I don't touch IE. Here at school, and at work, it's not actually possible for me to either (a) install Mozilla or (b) convince anyone else to install it. Believe me, I've tried.
Until IE becomes fully usable or fully unusable, there will be a lot of otherwise competent users out there who are stuck with these problems in certain environments.
for every person who constantly bitches about "pop-ups" or something messing up my computer related to IE. I'd retire. All I say is go to mozilla.org and leave me the hell alone.
Yeah... now tell me how I get the sysadmins in the computer lab at school to go to mozilla.org. "But, then we'd have to *support* it!" which would be oh-so-hard... it would cut into their smoke breaks something awful. (and they'd have less to clean up than with IE.)
These are the same folks that just "got rid of" profiles on all computers, because they were "too much hassle..." so every time I log in, it's three clicks to get started ("Click Start to begin!" "Take a Tour of Windows XP!" "Clean up your desktop!") Four or five clicks to get through the browser prompts ("You're trying to send data... are you sure?" "Would you like me to remember this for you and send it without your knowledge?" "Ok, I know I asked you if you wanted to send data already, but this site is secure..."). And so on.
Not everyone has control of every computing environment they use. So, yeah, until IE crashes and burns hard enough that people really will stop using it, some of us will complain.
Good legal representation would bring in a senior IT consultant (or two) to explain how it would be completely negligent not to have a bullet-proof procedure for protecting such assets.
Pre-trial motions, where decisions about what is admissible as evidence are made, don't have witnesses. You might have witnesses about the credibility of such evidence after it's presented, but in order for it to be dismissed as ridiculous in the first place, the judge needs to understand that it's not reasonable.
If not, and you go to a jury trial (which is how a lot of civil matters are decided), then it's up to whether or not the jury gets warm fuzzies from the experts you bring in.
That is like, the silliest thing I have ever heard. If you are not trolling, then I pity your utter lack of thought on the matter.
/. really needs a "-1, didn't get the joke" mod... ;-)
The international date line isn't some magical gateway that adds or subtracts from your date. It doesn't work like that.
Preach on, brother. I wish some sysadmins would get a clue and realize that with viruses spoofing the From: address, there is no fscking point in sending the "you sent me a virus" panic mail. All it does is bother the wrong people.
I think UCLA finally got a clue. After er... was it Klez? Some big virus, anyway... when I got hundreds of copies of the virus, and hundreds of messages saying "Hey! Don't send viruses!" they now have antivirus software on the mail server that simply doesn't *send* emails with virus-infected attachments. Instead, you get a message that gives you the headers of the email, and a link to where you can view it (along with a username and password that are randomly generated). And I haven't gotten any "Stop sending viruses!" emails since they implemented this system.
Well, since SCO seems to prefer a world full of Windows, why else whould they try to destroy Linux, they are given a sneak peek of what it whould bring them. This will cause them to give MS back all the money they got from them, because they are enabling terrorist actions against them. It is a Windows virus after all. They will find out how wrong they were. They will convert and tomorrow we will seem Darl hugging Linus and all will be well again.
;-)
Hm... you didn't, say, have anything to do with writing this virus, did you?
Basically, I don't think this hurts the Linux community. Imagine that I use Windows (ha!) or code for M$ (also ha!). Then I go and murder fifteen people. Does that reflect poorly upon me? Yes! Does that reflect poorly on M$? No.
But if you go around serially murdering OSS developers? That might.
If your actions are not targeted, no worries. If they are, then people will draw conclusions in the absence of information.
Working for a Fortune 500 company, I can say this is no excuse. Typically, source files for any major company is kept off-site by a 3rd party backup/vault company.
Yeah... but you're counting on the *judge* knowing this.
Looking at the bill- it seems to me that it protects the actual collection effort not the data itself. If someone else wants to go out and collect the same information they can- they just can't steal your collection. I guess I'm missing why this is so bad.
So you collect information into a database. I want to be able to use that data also. I go to the trouble of collecting it myself, too.
Then you sue me, because I have the same collection you do. Sure, I may be able to document my efforts and prove that I actually went about collecting it myself, but you cannot tell from examining the work whether it is a copy or an original. That is the fundamental reason why, heretofore, collections of facts have not been protected by copyright.
Consider the cost of defending yourself in court, especially in a civil action where the case is decided on a preponderance of evidence, NOT by "beyond a reasonable doubt." If someone sues you for having the same collection they do, you have to be able to put forth more evidence than they do. How will these cases be decided? By who has a bigger budget.
The thing is, "databases" like GrokLaw are the ones that don't need this protection. Why make a public database public if you don't want people to use the data? It makes no sense.
I think you've got the poster completely backwards. It's not the Groklaw would be protected, but that for-profit law indexes would prosecute sites like Groklaw under this law. It doesn't matter if they're infringing or not... the reason facts are not currently subject to copyright is that it's darn hard to tell whether someone copied them or went out and got the info themselves.
Private databases aren't shared, so they don't need it. Public databases *are* shared, so (as far as I can tell) they don't need it, or shouldn't be shared.
What about proprietary, for-sale databases? They are neither private nor public. Instead, they are a saleable item. If I want shapefiles of all US ZIP codes to drop into GIS, chances are I'll have to pay for them. But that's just because I don't know someone who already has the data and can give it to me.
You seem to be stuck on the notion that databases are either used only internally or are completely public and free. Lexis-Nexis would beg to differ.
Note that the law does not protect the individual bits of data in the database, just a "quantitatively substantial part of the information" and only if...
It seems like one of the possible goals of this legislation, from what you've repeated here, might be another way to prosecute spammers. If they buy a database of email addresses, they no longer have the right to distribute that database.
However, there are a lot of other cases where this could have a seriously chilling effect. For example, there's the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey, which is served up on the web by the University of Michigan (though they don't compile the data). The most recent year's data is never available on the web, only prior years... you have to pay about $300 for a CD-ROM to get the last go-round. Still, if that database is copyrighted, and I use it to generate some statistics for something someone doesn't like (such as finding that there's a negative correlation between education and going to church), now there's a mechanism to quash my findings. If the compilation of the data is protected under copyright, then derivative works are also under the purview of the copyright holder, and statistics derived from a compilation of data would probably be derivative works.
This seems like it would be mostly used by companies that sell marketing information, and stuff like GIS data. I guess currently it's perfectly legal for me to buy some data from ESRI and then export it to CSV and send copies to all my friends, but this law would prevent that.
Then the question is, should that be legal? Maybe it shouldn't, but it's hard to see how you could really implement a law to protect it without it being wide open for abuse.
Actually, the first plants started using water to move their "seeds": it was more like some kind of sperm that male plants would release into water in hope they would reach female ovules. This was the very first method used by plants to reproduce (actually, we, humans, are using this exact same method).
Ohhhhhh... so *that's* why mom said to stay out of the hot tub...
What's this "Interesting" crap? This is one of my few legitimate uses of the abbreviation "LOL."
S is sulphur.
In which case, it might be actual S... they didn't test for sulphur!
Yeah and remind me to sue crayola too for not including any real silver in their silver crayons, those damned cheapskates.
From CompUSA's product info:
97% pure micronized silver
75-80% silver content by weight
I sure as hell don't remember any of my crayons saying "micronized silver." Which is probably just as well, considering how much we used to chew on them.
Who do all these people who are concerned about false labelling go to for enforcement?
;-)
I dunno... I always use Arctic Silver Thermal Compound, so I'm perfectly happy with the results of this test
Easily solved. Smash into 190 pieces. Throw 75 away (removing obvious evidence of connection). Then 'find' them in different locations. Presto! 25 meteorites.
190 - 75 = 25...
More new Martian Math!
The Martian Spies will go after our calculator watches next...
"Homo" is "same", "hetero" is "different".
You're absolutely right. As in "everyone has the same religion" or "people have different religions."
How about the Pac-Man, Frogger, and Qbert watches?
Ah, yes.... I got a Pac-Man watch for my birthday one year... same year we went to Universal Studios. My friend Melanie and I got separated from everyone because we were walking along, me playing Pac-Man, her watching. My mom was furious. My take on it was, she had nothing to be all bent out of shape about... after all, she did give me the watch.
Does anyone else recognize Slashdotters by their sigs more often than their user names?
No kidding... all the time.