The real question is whether you have told the other company that you would take their offer. Since an offer is part of a negotiation, you may always decline. But if you have indicated an acceptance, you are ethically bound to take the job.
I once moved jobs for a 9% increase. By the time I actually made the move, it was about 1%; they had given across-the-board increases to match industry pay scales. But I had comitted to them, so I went.
The second question is why your current employer a) hasn't increased your salary and 2) is willing to do so now, simply because you've had a better offer. I had one boss who, when he found out I was looking to transfer to another group, gave me a promotion so he could block further attempts. But he did *nothing* about the reasons I was looking in the first place.
There is only one way to fix this problem: hire only trustworthy employees. This idea that bad private behavior can be separated from public office is absurd; should a man who makes "inapropriate intimate contact" with a subordinate be given the nuclear launch codes? If he cannot make good decisions on minor things, shall we trust him on major things?
Jefferson wrote that the best disenfectant is daylight.
I've noticed that Western society likes to try and fit every analysis into a Judeo-Christian mold. (Or is it Jedi-o - Christian?)
I read a lot of analyses of "The Matrix", where they tried to recast Neo into a messiah. First, it's just a movie which tells it's own story. And second, it fits Buddhist teachings just as well. (I.e., the Buddha is the 'awakened one'; you obtain Nirvana by denying the world.)
Iblack was right; these things can be twisted to fit any interpretation.
I must be old. Am I the only one who remembers that Microsoft already built a product called "Modular Windows"? This was way back before Microsoft Windows Version 3.1.
Microsoft likes to enshrine products by stamping the name into a paving stone for their campus. I've seen a photo (somewhere) of the paver for Modular Windows. If I remember correctly, they built it, but never shipped it.
You'd think the States would have sent someone to snap that picture, showing that Microsoft themselves think this is a good idea.
My company (a chip maker) uses Solaris for all our engineering work. The real problem we have is that our primary CAD tools, made by CADENCE, will only run in 8-bit PseudoColor. I end up using VNC just to run the CADENCE tools (since I really do like having 24-bit TrueColor visuals).
We'd love to have more graphics power, but until CADENCE gets around to reading their X manuals, we won't be spending money on these. (How hard is this? I mean selecting and using X Visuals was completely explained in a 1989 paper that's included with the X11R5 distribution! You'd think CAD tools would want all the colors they could get.)
For most documentation, I like either texinfo or *roff. Both will convert to either HTML or Postscript. Texinfo gives you Info docs as well, and does a better HTML conversion.
For simpler documents, roff works just fine. And it follows the Unix philosophy, so you get pic, tbl, and eqn for special-purpose formatting.
Our internal docs needed to use Framemaker (in order to be compatible with a vendor tool), and we had a program to take a simple mark-up and turn it into MIF. I replaced this with a groff to HTML and Postscript system. The HTML pages had a 'print' link that would load the Postscript and give the user a nice looking document.
Some of the implications of P=NP were explored by the UK author Charles Stross in "Antibodies". You can read it in "Year's Best S.F.:18" ed. by Gardner Dozois.
This looks like flame bait. Or, as his name implies, just a troll. In the off chance it isn't, here's a response.
Fire your lawyers. They obviously can't read a simple license. The GPL requires that if you distribute your changes, you must also distribute your source. So don't distribute your software. Linus will accept binary-only device drivers in the kernel, so you may be able to hide your work there.
The acronym GPL stands for General Public License, just as it says in the license itself. Did you read it?
The output of a compiler is yours alone. The courts have ruled this way over and over.
If you don't like the GPL, don't use it. There are plenty of other Free Software licenses available. You might like to run *BSD and use a BSD-style license instead.
'Defrag' is something you do in Microsoft Windows. Ext2 manages fragmentation automatically. If you must defrag manually, you can use the defrag tool written by the ext2 authors.
Since you don't seem to value Freedom, why post on Slashdot? You want to take the Linux kernel and hoard it. That's not the way Free Software works. If you don't want to play by those rules (or learn them), go away.
This whole argument reminds me of The Great Renaming.
The USENET managers had to balance freedom against anarchy, so they kept tight control of the comp., rec., etc. groups and gave alt. over to anyone who wanted to create a newsgroup.
We should let ICANN keep control of their TLD's, and they should create a.alt TLD that allows anyone to register a subdomain.
If I understand this, the University wants a free license to use student work anyway they see fit. At the same time, we have professors at UCLA bringing copyright infringement suits against students who publish their own class notes?
I'm impressed. You are one of the few parents that care enough to actively raise a child.
Raising a child means being involved in that child's life. There is no ethical or moral problem with parenting your child by monitoring their online use.
I'd suggest you use a proxy that logs all page requests. You can then review the logs and see where the child has been going. You should also correlate the times to dial-up activity (e.g., look at/var/log/messages); if there is a time gap in the web log vs. the dial-up, someone just learned how to bypass your proxy.
If you go to the vendor web site, you'll find that they will sell this product to anyone who has the price. I don't know where Reuters got the 'Top Secret' designation, as there is no indication that it was ever used for classified work. All these guys got was source code to a commercial satellite control system. Big deal.
The original version of Colossal Cave is the most beautiful work I've ever seen. You can download it
here. Be sure to get the original; the site hosts many versions.
My reasons for recommending this code are:
Written in FORTRAN IV, which offers no help to the programmer
No complex data structures, yet he makes them clear and readable
Branches limited to arithmetic if statements
Closest I've ever come to the brandy-and-cigar ideal
This is clearly the work of a professional programmer, yet it was a game he was working on in his spare time. I use this as a standard in my own work.
MS would rather offer this as a "new feature", rather than fix their pitiful security.
This underscores the idea that the software industry is a service industry that thinks it's a manufacturing industry. If MS would admit that it's really a service industry, they'd fix all the Outlook holes instead. But since they think they are a manufacturer, they have to sell new products. This means that they spend their time adding "features" instead of servicing the existing code.
Hopefully, the.NET strategy will move them towards a business model based on service. Then users can get things that work, rather than new features that are bolted on to bad code.
I've had to tell friends not to bother with N6. While I fully support Netscape and a GPL'ed browser, it's just not ready for daily use.
I tried to install to/usr/local (the N6 default location), but of course you need to be root to do that. After installing and running it as root, I tried to run it as a normal user. Instant segfault. Changing permissions to o+rx for everything lets it run for anyone.
BUT...If you bring up preferences, you'll see lots of buttons and other widgets with no labels! My guess is that you need write privileges to get those working. It's another permissions problem, since everything works fine for root.
Obviously, I could set everything to rwx for everyone; but that kinda defeats the purpose of access controls, doesn't it?
Since I do want N6 to work, I've not just bitched here - I sent a bug report to them.
As a side note, trying to download themes gives an 'Error loading URL' message. I suspect there is something wrong with the page, rather than the server.
All this does make me wonder how much testing they've done. But I suspect the N6 final was a political, rather than technical, decision.
The first line of the article? You mean, where it says,
"There are a few books which most sysadmins will mention in hushed tones when discussing reading material, and one of those is the famous "Red Book", the second edition of this book (the new edition's purple).
"?
You probably meant to say the title of the post, which may or may not be the title of a book (and, in any case, was added by Slashdot - not the reviewer). My point was that a review should include title, publisher, and author in the article. The text of the review never got around to naming what it was reviewing. Simply calling it "the Red Book" is only meaningful to those who have no need of a review.
Fortunately, one of the replies had a link to the publisher's web page.
It is traditional in book reviews to list the title of the book being reviewed, the authors, and the publisher.
While from the comments it seems that some people know exactly what "The Red Book" is, I doubt I can go to my local Barnes and Noble and ask for it by that name.
If you would adjust the review to include the above information, I would find it more useful.
From following the DeCSS case, it appears that the CSS system was designed to control usage of the material, rather than to protect copyrights. That is, CSS controls how users access the material (e.g., via the Region Code), rather than simply allowing/denying the access. This violates the first sale doctrine, and I would think eliminates any relief the plaintiffs would be entitled to under the DMCA.
Does this reasoning hold up? And would it be profitable to argue in court? If not, why not?
Links to pirated material would be controlled under the "contributory infringement" clause. Basically, if you help someone else infringe on a copyright (or copyleft), you are legally liable.
At what point a link is contributory is the real issue that must be settled. I feel that if you know full well that those links go to prohibited material, you should be held accountable. There is a case in Utah concerning the publishing of LDS material on the web in which the defendants pulled the material and substituted links to other sites. These people clearly knew they were still facilitating a copyright violation.
But, clearly, not all links to pages that violate copyright are illegal. For example, in the DeCSS case against 2600 it has not been shown that DeCSS infringes any copyright. Therefore, links should be permitted until such time as the court decides a violation has occurred.
Spaf is absolutely correct that 'Open Source' has no bearing on security. Free software is about freedom, and Open Source is a marketing ploy. Neither philosophy has anything to say about security.
I disagree that a trusted system must be designed from a specification. I assume Spaf is not foolish enough to think that a spec is any more magic than Free software in terms of assuring security. He seems to imply that a trusted system must be designed and built from scratch. This is most certainly not true. Reimplementing an OS from scratch is hardly necessary to ensure security. Certainly, it is necessary to have a formal specification that can guarantee the security of your system meets the proper criteria.
NSA uses COTS OS'es for classified work. What they have is a process which certifies that an OS meets some level of security. They also test the actual installation of the system, including covert channel analysis. While I am sure the NSA has 'purchased' a source license to all Microsoft products, there is hardly a need for them to build an OS from scratch.
Whether you use Windows, Unix, VMS, or Spaf's Trusted OS, the process for securing your system is the same.
The use of personal electronic devices on aircraft has been debated a lot in the literature. The issue is resonance. An aircraft cabin is basically a long metal tube. So if your laptop hard disk puts out the right frequency, the signal may be amplified and interfere with the electronics. One result I've seen (I think this was IEEE Spectrum) is that a laptop hard disk put out the same frequency used by navaids. There is no consensus on this, so the FAA takes a conservative stance.
As for Hemos' suggestion of Faraday cages, the issue is really cost. How much more are you willing to pay in ticket prices to haul around a cage so that a few passengers can play Doom? Also, remember that the flight instruments are housed in the same metal tube, so you'd have to put a second cage around that section of the aircraft. And I suspect it is far easier to say, "put a cage around it" than it is to actually do so. For one thing, people kind of like those pesky windows...
Weight is such a big factor that aircraft manufacturers went to Kapton wiring because the insulation weighed less. And yes, all the wiring is sheilded. But I can tell you from firsthand experience that even twisted, sheilded pairs driven by differential transceivers are affected by impressed noise.
Have you ever seen an RC plane take a 'radio hit' from some else's transmitter? Same deal with PED's; you'll never know what frequencies are being emitted, so why take chances?
Slashdot Mirror
I once moved jobs for a 9% increase. By the time I actually made the move, it was about 1%; they had given across-the-board increases to match industry pay scales. But I had comitted to them, so I went.
The second question is why your current employer a) hasn't increased your salary and 2) is willing to do so now, simply because you've had a better offer. I had one boss who, when he found out I was looking to transfer to another group, gave me a promotion so he could block further attempts. But he did *nothing* about the reasons I was looking in the first place.
Use of the sextant is still required for obtaining masters papers. And the last time I was on a cruise ship, they were actively using their pelorus.
There is only one way to fix this problem: hire only trustworthy employees. This idea that bad private behavior can be separated from public office is absurd; should a man who makes "inapropriate intimate contact" with a subordinate be given the nuclear launch codes? If he cannot make good decisions on minor things, shall we trust him on major things?
Jefferson wrote that the best disenfectant is daylight.
This may be the final impetus to prompt widespread adoption of mass transportation.
I read a lot of analyses of "The Matrix", where they tried to recast Neo into a messiah. First, it's just a movie which tells it's own story. And second, it fits Buddhist teachings just as well. (I.e., the Buddha is the 'awakened one'; you obtain Nirvana by denying the world.)
Iblack was right; these things can be twisted to fit any interpretation.
Microsoft likes to enshrine products by stamping the name into a paving stone for their campus. I've seen a photo (somewhere) of the paver for Modular Windows. If I remember correctly, they built it, but never shipped it.
You'd think the States would have sent someone to snap that picture, showing that Microsoft themselves think this is a good idea.
We'd love to have more graphics power, but until CADENCE gets around to reading their X manuals, we won't be spending money on these. (How hard is this? I mean selecting and using X Visuals was completely explained in a 1989 paper that's included with the X11R5 distribution! You'd think CAD tools would want all the colors they could get.)
For simpler documents, roff works just fine. And it follows the Unix philosophy, so you get pic, tbl, and eqn for special-purpose formatting.
Our internal docs needed to use Framemaker (in order to be compatible with a vendor tool), and we had a program to take a simple mark-up and turn it into MIF. I replaced this with a groff to HTML and Postscript system. The HTML pages had a 'print' link that would load the Postscript and give the user a nice looking document.
Most of this stuff is a matter of taste.
Some of the implications of P=NP were explored by the UK author Charles Stross in "Antibodies". You can read it in "Year's Best S.F.:18" ed. by Gardner Dozois.
Fire your lawyers. They obviously can't read a simple license. The GPL requires that if you distribute your changes, you must also distribute your source. So don't distribute your software. Linus will accept binary-only device drivers in the kernel, so you may be able to hide your work there.
The acronym GPL stands for General Public License, just as it says in the license itself. Did you read it?
The output of a compiler is yours alone. The courts have ruled this way over and over.
If you don't like the GPL, don't use it. There are plenty of other Free Software licenses available. You might like to run *BSD and use a BSD-style license instead.
'Defrag' is something you do in Microsoft Windows. Ext2 manages fragmentation automatically. If you must defrag manually, you can use the defrag tool written by the ext2 authors.
Since you don't seem to value Freedom, why post on Slashdot? You want to take the Linux kernel and hoard it. That's not the way Free Software works. If you don't want to play by those rules (or learn them), go away.
The USENET managers had to balance freedom against anarchy, so they kept tight control of the comp., rec., etc. groups and gave alt. over to anyone who wanted to create a newsgroup.
We should let ICANN keep control of their TLD's, and they should create a .alt TLD that allows anyone to register a subdomain.
It's worked once...
All the engineers started making comments like, "When do we go fully unmanned?" Our PHB had no clue what we were talking about.
I have to tell you that it was a bit eerie, though.
If I understand this, the University wants a free license to use student work anyway they see fit. At the same time, we have professors at UCLA bringing copyright infringement suits against students who publish their own class notes?
Raising a child means being involved in that child's life. There is no ethical or moral problem with parenting your child by monitoring their online use.
I'd suggest you use a proxy that logs all page requests. You can then review the logs and see where the child has been going. You should also correlate the times to dial-up activity (e.g., look at /var/log/messages); if there is a time gap in the web log vs. the dial-up, someone just learned how to bypass your proxy.
Good job. Too bad you don't get her more often.
Remember Byron!
My reasons for recommending this code are:
This is clearly the work of a professional programmer, yet it was a game he was working on in his spare time. I use this as a standard in my own work.
Is it just me, or did anyone else notice the Windows code in the screenshots? I.e., "GetDlgItemText(hDlg...)"
MS would rather offer this as a "new feature", rather than fix their pitiful security.
This underscores the idea that the software industry is a service industry that thinks it's a manufacturing industry. If MS would admit that it's really a service industry, they'd fix all the Outlook holes instead. But since they think they are a manufacturer, they have to sell new products. This means that they spend their time adding "features" instead of servicing the existing code.
Hopefully, the .NET strategy will move them towards a business model based on service. Then users can get things that work, rather than new features that are bolted on to bad code.
I tried to install to /usr/local (the N6 default location), but of course you need to be root to do that. After installing and running it as root, I tried to run it as a normal user. Instant segfault. Changing permissions to o+rx for everything lets it run for anyone.
BUT...If you bring up preferences, you'll see lots of buttons and other widgets with no labels! My guess is that you need write privileges to get those working. It's another permissions problem, since everything works fine for root.
Obviously, I could set everything to rwx for everyone; but that kinda defeats the purpose of access controls, doesn't it?
Since I do want N6 to work, I've not just bitched here - I sent a bug report to them.
As a side note, trying to download themes gives an 'Error loading URL' message. I suspect there is something wrong with the page, rather than the server.
All this does make me wonder how much testing they've done. But I suspect the N6 final was a political, rather than technical, decision.
Fortunately, one of the replies had a link to the publisher's web page.
It is traditional in book reviews to list the title of the book being reviewed, the authors, and the publisher. While from the comments it seems that some people know exactly what "The Red Book" is, I doubt I can go to my local Barnes and Noble and ask for it by that name. If you would adjust the review to include the above information, I would find it more useful.
From following the DeCSS case, it appears that the CSS system was designed to control usage of the material, rather than to protect copyrights. That is, CSS controls how users access the material (e.g., via the Region Code), rather than simply allowing/denying the access. This violates the first sale doctrine, and I would think eliminates any relief the plaintiffs would be entitled to under the DMCA.
Does this reasoning hold up? And would it be profitable to argue in court? If not, why not?
Links to pirated material would be controlled under the "contributory infringement" clause. Basically, if you help someone else infringe on a copyright (or copyleft), you are legally liable.
At what point a link is contributory is the real issue that must be settled. I feel that if you know full well that those links go to prohibited material, you should be held accountable. There is a case in Utah concerning the publishing of LDS material on the web in which the defendants pulled the material and substituted links to other sites. These people clearly knew they were still facilitating a copyright violation.
But, clearly, not all links to pages that violate copyright are illegal. For example, in the DeCSS case against 2600 it has not been shown that DeCSS infringes any copyright. Therefore, links should be permitted until such time as the court decides a violation has occurred.
Spaf is absolutely correct that 'Open Source' has no bearing on security. Free software is about freedom, and Open Source is a marketing ploy. Neither philosophy has anything to say about security.
I disagree that a trusted system must be designed from a specification. I assume Spaf is not foolish enough to think that a spec is any more magic than Free software in terms of assuring security. He seems to imply that a trusted system must be designed and built from scratch. This is most certainly not true. Reimplementing an OS from scratch is hardly necessary to ensure security. Certainly, it is necessary to have a formal specification that can guarantee the security of your system meets the proper criteria.
NSA uses COTS OS'es for classified work. What they have is a process which certifies that an OS meets some level of security. They also test the actual installation of the system, including covert channel analysis. While I am sure the NSA has 'purchased' a source license to all Microsoft products, there is hardly a need for them to build an OS from scratch.
Whether you use Windows, Unix, VMS, or Spaf's Trusted OS, the process for securing your system is the same.
The use of personal electronic devices on aircraft has been debated a lot in the literature. The issue is resonance. An aircraft cabin is basically a long metal tube. So if your laptop hard disk puts out the right frequency, the signal may be amplified and interfere with the electronics. One result I've seen (I think this was IEEE Spectrum) is that a laptop hard disk put out the same frequency used by navaids. There is no consensus on this, so the FAA takes a conservative stance.
As for Hemos' suggestion of Faraday cages, the issue is really cost. How much more are you willing to pay in ticket prices to haul around a cage so that a few passengers can play Doom? Also, remember that the flight instruments are housed in the same metal tube, so you'd have to put a second cage around that section of the aircraft. And I suspect it is far easier to say, "put a cage around it" than it is to actually do so. For one thing, people kind of like those pesky windows...
Weight is such a big factor that aircraft manufacturers went to Kapton wiring because the insulation weighed less. And yes, all the wiring is sheilded. But I can tell you from firsthand experience that even twisted, sheilded pairs driven by differential transceivers are affected by impressed noise.
Have you ever seen an RC plane take a 'radio hit' from some else's transmitter? Same deal with PED's; you'll never know what frequencies are being emitted, so why take chances?