Doesn't he have to be a licensed Star Wars toy distributor?
I imagine as long as he does not use any LucasFilm trademarks he is ok. My guess is that Lucas never bothered to trademark the lightsaber. Even if they did, on his web site Parks never refers to Star Wars, or the word "Light Saber" - it's just a "Parks Saber".
I would also guess that this product is high end and niche enough that it does not directly compete with any officially licensed products. So it's unlike that LucasFilm would try to pursue the issue legally.
It is not an IT responsibility to make sure that business users are saving their data to a network drive that is backed up. Your only responsibility is to provide the network space, make sure everyone can access it, make sure the backups work, and notify the business users as to the risk of not saving things to this location.
It's up to the owners of critical data to make sure that critical documents and their revisions are being saved to a Network drive and not "C:\My Documents"
Yet another webzine discovers Cyc, and yet another crop of slashdotters hasn't heard of it... If you read the article, the damned thing asked if it was human in 1986. This is news?
I have been following this thing for at least 5 years, and they have continually been just a few years away from real world applications. One of the things they have been talking about for a long while was Cyc approaching the ability to "read" for itself, and gather new information for it's database from the web, newspapers, or any other authoritative source. They've been talking about it for a long time and it hasn't happened yet.
It is a very interesting application, but will probably never amount to anything near human intelligence - a very versatile expert system at best.
We need a new way of conducting business. If you used off the shelf components and standard programming environments I cannot possibly imagine how you could spend 1.7 billion and under deliver. I imagine that Raytheon decided that in order to enrich the corporate coffers they needs some proprietary hardware and weird development environments noone but Raytheon employees are familiar with.
It's a shame really. Yes, this a complex problem, but it's just not a billion dollar problem. The issue is that the government's been asking the wrong people to solve it.
What they should have done is approached some small to midsized software design shops and asked them for initial estimates and designs. Give the top 10 of those $1 million each to flesh out the design and prototype it.
Then take the pick of the litter and run with it. I betcha the end result would work better and cost less than the POS raytheon delivered.
Everyone keeps saying "but there are like three gopher servers left out there". This is not the point. Any buffer overflow in the IE client code which is exploitable is a huge problem. It doesn't matter that there are damned few servers left that use the exploitable protocol. A malacious server need not even be a fully functioning gopher server, it just needs to listen for requests on the right port and respond appropriately. A worm'ed IIS server could fit the bill quite nicely.
A smart worm could: 1. Infect an IIS server via some unfixed hole, or backdoor left by another worm. 2. Open up a dummy gopher port which responds to all requests with the exploit. 3. Replace links on the web site the IIS server serves with links to the gopher server exploit. 4. The worm installs itself on all client machines that click the gopher links and begins scanning for vunerable servers. 5. Goto 1.
None of this has anything to do with the number gopher servers left on the Internet.
I believe it was in 1990. My campus did not have direct access to the Internet, but it had a Vax, and a 9600 bps leased line to Western Michigan University, which had some limited access to the Internet via a bizarre customized terminal server hookup. If I entered the right incantations at the terminal server prompt I could telnet out of the system, to anywhere - well, at least a certain percentage of the time, and it seemed many sites where not reachable.
I had a friend from high school who had somewhat less resitricted access to the Internet in California. Luckily I was able to telnet into his account and gain access to all sorts of wonderful things. Usenet, chat, and MUDs... I think I lost a year to a wonderful little place at MIT called "The End of the Line".
A year later we got dialup access and a Unix system and I was able to enjoy all of this, plus line noise at 1200 bps.
I guess my point (if I have one) is that things are accelerating. I now sit at the end of my own dedicated 1.5 Mbps pipe on a laptop which is probably something like 100 times faster than that Vax I used to access the Internet. This after only 12 years. TV hasn't changed much in 50.
The real reason is that CDs no longer good value for your entertainment dollar, in a world where a 2 hour DVD can be had for $15-$20 and I can listening to streaming audio (legally) all day long for free.
Try as they might to change the crumbling economics of their situation, technology has moved on and there are better, cheaper options to the CD. The music industry must get over the fact that the goose that laid the golden egg has been slaughtered, and they are never going to be able to make as much money as they once did.
If you want to talk backwards, compatible, I have DESK ACCCESSORIES from 1985 that run without a problem on my iBook and iMac today. Try that, Windows boys;-)
Actually I've run Windows 1.0 in a window on top of windows 2000. The applets, write.exe, calc.exe, and paint.exe - all work fine. No overlapping windows though - damn that Apple lawsuit...
It's equivalent to the import directive in java. As far as I'm concerned, the only time that using shouldn't be used to import the std namespace is when a conflict is likely to occur (most environments have coding standards making collision almost impossible).
Hmmmm... Someone should talk to Sun about these coding standard. Try:
import java.util.*; import java.sql.*; . . . Date sellDate = new Date();
Won't compile. Always bugs the hell out of me... I defy you to come up with a way of getting around this that doesn't either added tons of new more specific imports at the top of the code, or force you to write out java.util.Date all over the place. Thanks Sun.
Quite a few people have quoted the Teraflops/sec of Seti@home for comparision, perhaps suggesting that there is a better way of attacking these sorts of problems. I think if this sort of problem were amenable to a "widely distributed" computing attack we'd already all be running a covert client as part of our new windows XP installation (at least us windows users).
Simulating nuclear explosions however is the sort of problem that requires the generation of massive amounts of data and intensive communications between computing nodes. Not something that's going to work well over a dialup connection...
Creating common APIs allows seperate development projects to proceed at their own pace. You don't need OO for this, but it helps.
I think one of the reasons that Linux has been so successful is because Linus decided long ago to take a modular approach to designing his monolithic kernel.
At work: 1. Do like to work on specific concrete projects or do you enjoy a more unstructured work environment? 2. Do you like being interrupted while you work? 3. Do you like work that is challenging, or unchallenging and easy?
Every single person I know (most of whom are not geeks) would answer: 1. Structure 2. no 3. challenging
Who doesn't hate it when a promised project get's shitcanned?
Who likes to be constantly interrupted from productive work?
What percentage of *all* employees are interested in promotion management? In my experience IT people are no less likely to want to be promoted to management.
Who doesn't like work that is challenging, but achievable?
And as far as IT workers enjoying a "project focus" - doesn't everyone? It's nice to have some structure, a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't think a desire for such structure is unique to geeks.
The points the book makes are very general management principles, and don't apply to only "Einsteins".
It's a freaking management issue ok. If employees are jerking off in the bathrooms, taking too much time on smoke breaks, running their own consulting business out of their cubicle or chatting all day long with lonely housewives in Australia, its a MANAGEMENT issue.
Get it? Technology cannot cure the ills of your torpid, sclerotic 1960s era management structure. If you don't know what you employees are doing, or even if they have enough work to do, no amount Internet logging/blocking is going to stop them from wasting your money and their time at work.
That's ridiculous. Email can be easily forged. And I would think a legally binding contract would somehow involve a lawyer.
Then it was incumbent upon the seller to demonstrate that the email was in fact forged. Such was not the case, he did not contest that the emails were in fact from him, he merely argued that the emails do not represent a legally binding contract.
I think the seller and his lawyer would have been wise to contest the emails on the grounds of forgery (wise, though sleazy). Lacking a real signature it is impossible to prove the emails are not fogeries.
I think this is also a point of warning for people who use email to discuss the terms of a contract, although such emails may at some point be legally binding, such a contract would be very weak in the face of an attack on the grounds of forgery.
The point of the original article was hidden in the last few paragraphs. He was making a point about various government's attempts at universal surveilance, i.e. attempting to log all packet traffic, etc...
His discussion of web search techniques was to illustrate the nature of the problem these would be omnisicents face. Because the data they collect does not have the richly linked nature of web content, all that these governments government entities will be left with is mountains of meaningless data. They will be stuck using AltaVista like searching and matching techniques.
And we all know how useful Altavista is these days.
I think this is the future of all content. Realize that piracy is a given. Make piracy just hard enough that not everyone can do it, and create a tiered pricing structure with incentives for upgrade. Chances are that current 'student discount' sales are going to lead to future full price sales as a person's income and responsibilities increase.
The same model can also apply to other digital content. Sell crappy MP3 for cheap on the web, the CD costs more, the DVD audio version even more. Allow people to pay what they can and exchange lower quality/convenience for lower prices, instead of trying to lock your content behind steel bars with one fixed price.
Ok, think about this, you can probably keep using the same monitors forever, and replace the PC for something like $500 and run all the apps you'd ever want to run in a computer lab. Now, start adding up the Windows licenses you'll need for each PC, plus the Citrix licensing, plus the monster server(s) you'd need to support 300 Citrix clients...
For ease of administration, use ghost to create disk images for each PC configuration. Something goes wrong? Wipe the PC and restore the image.
The thing is that hardware is getting cheaper by the day, software isn't.
One of the key points the reviewer makes is that this distro does not take the 'everything but the kitchen sink' approach to software it includes. It only includes apps and libraries that are known to work, and work in combination.
Some people might like that other distros give you the option of 5 different CD players, some of which may be in beta, or pre-beta - but most people just want a CD player that works. Ditto with other application categories. It's better to include solid software that is known to work, but might not have every last bell and whistle.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't he have to be a licensed Star Wars toy distributor?
I imagine as long as he does not use any LucasFilm trademarks he is ok. My guess is that Lucas never bothered to trademark the lightsaber. Even if they did, on his web site Parks never refers to Star Wars, or the word "Light Saber" - it's just a "Parks Saber".
I would also guess that this product is high end and niche enough that it does not directly compete with any officially licensed products. So it's unlike that LucasFilm would try to pursue the issue legally.
-josh
It is not an IT responsibility to make sure that business users are saving their data to a network drive that is backed up. Your only responsibility is to provide the network space, make sure everyone can access it, make sure the backups work, and notify the business users as to the risk of not saving things to this location.
It's up to the owners of critical data to make sure that critical documents and their revisions are being saved to a Network drive and not "C:\My Documents"
-josh
Yet another webzine discovers Cyc, and yet another crop of slashdotters hasn't heard of it... If you read the article, the damned thing asked if it was human in 1986. This is news?
I have been following this thing for at least 5 years, and they have continually been just a few years away from real world applications. One of the things they have been talking about for a long while was Cyc approaching the ability to "read" for itself, and gather new information for it's database from the web, newspapers, or any other authoritative source. They've been talking about it for a long time and it hasn't happened yet.
It is a very interesting application, but will probably never amount to anything near human intelligence - a very versatile expert system at best.
-josh
We need a new way of conducting business. If you used off the shelf components and standard programming environments I cannot possibly imagine how you could spend 1.7 billion and under deliver. I imagine that Raytheon decided that in order to enrich the corporate coffers they needs some proprietary hardware and weird development environments noone but Raytheon employees are familiar with.
It's a shame really. Yes, this a complex problem, but it's just not a billion dollar problem. The issue is that the government's been asking the wrong people to solve it.
What they should have done is approached some small to midsized software design shops and asked them for initial estimates and designs. Give the top 10 of those $1 million each to flesh out the design and prototype it.
Then take the pick of the litter and run with it. I betcha the end result would work better and cost less than the POS raytheon delivered.
-josh
Everyone keeps saying "but there are like three gopher servers left out there". This is not the point. Any buffer overflow in the IE client code which is exploitable is a huge problem. It doesn't matter that there are damned few servers left that use the exploitable protocol. A malacious server need not even be a fully functioning gopher server, it just needs to listen for requests on the right port and respond appropriately. A worm'ed IIS server could fit the bill quite nicely.
A smart worm could:
1. Infect an IIS server via some unfixed hole, or backdoor left by another worm.
2. Open up a dummy gopher port which responds to all requests with the exploit.
3. Replace links on the web site the IIS server serves with links to the gopher server exploit.
4. The worm installs itself on all client machines that click the gopher links and begins scanning for vunerable servers.
5. Goto 1.
None of this has anything to do with the number gopher servers left on the Internet.
-josh
I hear Sony is working on a Super Audio CD format that can played on my quadra-phonic eight-track. Now that'll be impressive.
-josh
I believe it was in 1990. My campus did not have direct access to the Internet, but it had a Vax, and a 9600 bps leased line to Western Michigan University, which had some limited access to the Internet via a bizarre customized terminal server hookup. If I entered the right incantations at the terminal server prompt I could telnet out of the system, to anywhere - well, at least a certain percentage of the time, and it seemed many sites where not reachable.
I had a friend from high school who had somewhat less resitricted access to the Internet in California. Luckily I was able to telnet into his account and gain access to all sorts of wonderful things. Usenet, chat, and MUDs... I think I lost a year to a wonderful little place at MIT called "The End of the Line".
A year later we got dialup access and a Unix system and I was able to enjoy all of this, plus line noise at 1200 bps.
I guess my point (if I have one) is that things are accelerating. I now sit at the end of my own dedicated 1.5 Mbps pipe on a laptop which is probably something like 100 times faster than that Vax I used to access the Internet. This after only 12 years. TV hasn't changed much in 50.
-josh
Ok, I don't know how VOIP and video on demand have much to do with the anime page linked to in the story header.
This is the same Everything over IP story the pundits have been whipping for the last 4 years. Nothing new here, move along.
-josh
The real reason is that CDs no longer good value for your entertainment dollar, in a world where a 2 hour DVD can be had for $15-$20 and I can listening to streaming audio (legally) all day long for free.
Try as they might to change the crumbling economics of their situation, technology has moved on and there are better, cheaper options to the CD. The music industry must get over the fact that the goose that laid the golden egg has been slaughtered, and they are never going to be able to make as much money as they once did.
-josh
If you want to talk backwards, compatible, I have DESK ACCCESSORIES from 1985 that run without a problem on my iBook and iMac today.
Try that, Windows boys
Actually I've run Windows 1.0 in a window on top of windows 2000. The applets, write.exe, calc.exe, and paint.exe - all work fine. No overlapping windows though - damn that Apple lawsuit...
-josh
It's equivalent to the import directive in java. As far as I'm concerned, the only time that using shouldn't be used to import the std namespace is when a conflict is likely to occur (most environments have coding standards making collision almost impossible).
Hmmmm... Someone should talk to Sun about these coding standard. Try:
import java.util.*;
import java.sql.*;
.
.
.
Date sellDate = new Date();
Won't compile. Always bugs the hell out of me... I defy you to come up with a way of getting around this that doesn't either added tons of new more specific imports at the top of the code, or force you to write out java.util.Date all over the place. Thanks Sun.
-josh
Quite a few people have quoted the Teraflops/sec of Seti@home for comparision, perhaps suggesting that there is a better way of attacking these sorts of problems. I think if this sort of problem were amenable to a "widely distributed" computing attack we'd already all be running a covert client as part of our new windows XP installation (at least us windows users).
Simulating nuclear explosions however is the sort of problem that requires the generation of massive amounts of data and intensive communications between computing nodes. Not something that's going to work well over a dialup connection...
-josh
Creating common APIs allows seperate development projects to proceed at their own pace. You don't need OO for this, but it helps.
I think one of the reasons that Linux has been so successful is because Linus decided long ago to take a modular approach to designing his monolithic kernel.
-josh
Ok, submit this survey to the general public:
At work:
1. Do like to work on specific concrete projects or do you enjoy a more unstructured work environment?
2. Do you like being interrupted while you work?
3. Do you like work that is challenging, or unchallenging and easy?
Every single person I know (most of whom are not geeks) would answer:
1. Structure
2. no
3. challenging
-josh
Who doesn't hate it when a promised project get's shitcanned?
Who likes to be constantly interrupted from productive work?
What percentage of *all* employees are interested in promotion management? In my experience IT people are no less likely to want to be promoted to management.
Who doesn't like work that is challenging, but achievable?
And as far as IT workers enjoying a "project focus" - doesn't everyone? It's nice to have some structure, a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't think a desire for such structure is unique to geeks.
The points the book makes are very general management principles, and don't apply to only "Einsteins".
-josh
It's a freaking management issue ok. If employees are jerking off in the bathrooms, taking too much time on smoke breaks, running their own consulting business out of their cubicle or chatting all day long with lonely housewives in Australia, its a MANAGEMENT issue.
Get it? Technology cannot cure the ills of your torpid, sclerotic 1960s era management structure. If you don't know what you employees are doing, or even if they have enough work to do, no amount Internet logging/blocking is going to stop them from wasting your money and their time at work.
-josh
That's ridiculous. Email can be easily forged. And I would think a legally binding contract would somehow involve a lawyer.
Then it was incumbent upon the seller to demonstrate that the email was in fact forged. Such was not the case, he did not contest that the emails were in fact from him, he merely argued that the emails do not represent a legally binding contract.
I think the seller and his lawyer would have been wise to contest the emails on the grounds of forgery (wise, though sleazy). Lacking a real signature it is impossible to prove the emails are not fogeries.
I think this is also a point of warning for people who use email to discuss the terms of a contract, although such emails may at some point be legally binding, such a contract would be very weak in the face of an attack on the grounds of forgery.
-josh
The point of the original article was hidden in the last few paragraphs. He was making a point about various government's attempts at universal surveilance, i.e. attempting to log all packet traffic, etc...
His discussion of web search techniques was to illustrate the nature of the problem these would be omnisicents face. Because the data they collect does not have the richly linked nature of web content, all that these governments government entities will be left with is mountains of meaningless data. They will be stuck using AltaVista like searching and matching techniques.
And we all know how useful Altavista is these days.
-josh
I think this is the future of all content. Realize that piracy is a given. Make piracy just hard enough that not everyone can do it, and create a tiered pricing structure with incentives for upgrade. Chances are that current 'student discount' sales are going to lead to future full price sales as a person's income and responsibilities increase.
The same model can also apply to other digital content. Sell crappy MP3 for cheap on the web, the CD costs more, the DVD audio version even more. Allow people to pay what they can and exchange lower quality/convenience for lower prices, instead of trying to lock your content behind steel bars with one fixed price.
-josh
Verbatim from the GPL:
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. "
This gooble-de-gook is by no means the 'preferred form' for making modification, thus it is not source code under the GPL.
Get another job, this company is going down.
-josh
'nuf said.
-josh
I think you meant perhaps "panacea"?
Definitions:
placebo
panacea
-josh
Ok, think about this, you can probably keep using the same monitors forever, and replace the PC for something like $500 and run all the apps you'd ever want to run in a computer lab. Now, start adding up the Windows licenses you'll need for each PC, plus the Citrix licensing, plus the monster server(s) you'd need to support 300 Citrix clients...
For ease of administration, use ghost to create disk images for each PC configuration. Something goes wrong? Wipe the PC and restore the image.
The thing is that hardware is getting cheaper by the day, software isn't.
-josh
Hang on to those old PCs folks. Sooner than you think might be illegal to use them under the DCMA.
They'll pry my TI99/4A from my cold, dead fingers.
One of the key points the reviewer makes is that this distro does not take the 'everything but the kitchen sink' approach to software it includes. It only includes apps and libraries that are known to work, and work in combination.
Some people might like that other distros give you the option of 5 different CD players, some of which may be in beta, or pre-beta - but most people just want a CD player that works. Ditto with other application categories. It's better to include solid software that is known to work, but might not have every last bell and whistle.
-josh