It is not a 'dodgy' concept. It is intellectual property. I wasn't speaking to his prison sentence. I was speaking to his refusal to follow his supervisors instructions. I would immediately fire someone like this.
As to who would work for those people? I already work for similar people as do most IT staff. They have the technical skill and their mgmt typically does not. You do your best to explain consequences and concepts but in the end, it is their decision, not yours and not his.
I would have surrendered the passwords as instructed and that would have been the end of it. If things went to hell and a handbasket as a result, they would have had nothing on him. This is where that 'high ground' kind of falls to the wayside considering his criminal record. It's just not believable from a character perspective that he took the moral high ground.
Do I agree with his sentencing and time spent in prison? I don't know what the penalties are for things like theft, but 7 months doesn't seem all that unusual considering the potential financial impact of the information he carries.
Fortunately, computer geeks are a minority. Joe User doesn't care about attrib.exe. He wants his e-mail to work and his browser to be easy to use and his Facebook to not crash. His idea of a 'computing experience' most certainly is NOT about opening a terminal window and using CP or whatever. Of course your typical/. user will love that type of post above. The average user wouldn't even know what your talking about.
Just because someone is young doesn't make them curious about a terminal window. You have to have a bent (pun intended) for being a computer geek. It takes an odd mix of curiosity, intelligence, a smidgen of mechanical aptitude, and preserverance.
You make it sound like the youth of today are natural hackers. Are they computer savvy? Yes. Do they know their way around a terminal window as a result? Not likely.
If a GUI is properly designed, it should remove the need for a terminal window. It is a natural evolution to move from a command line to a GUI and a more object oriented interface. The typical human is very object/visually oriented. I think Apple has done a good job at that. The OS has a nice polish and refinement to it.
Linux is also getting to the point where a terminal window isn't needed for most day to day work. Of course there will always be those that prefer it, but it isn't necessary to make it through the day.
THAT and the cost is what makes Linux more attractive to the Windows crowd and it probably scares the hell out of MS. Not only it's stability, low system requirements and speed, but it's ease of use as well. 3 years ago you would have to drag a windows user kicking and screaming. They didn't consider it an alternative. The GUI's lacked polish, the apps all looked 'home made' and getting a windows app to run under linux was a pipe dream. Not so much an issue these days.
It seems to me that he has no legal standing. IANAL, but if his supervisor tells him to give them the passwords, it is not his place to decide who it is 'safe' to give them to and who is not safe. That is his employers decision.
His colored past aside, he could be a very upstanding citizen and he would still be completely in the wrong for not releasing the information that his employer tells him to. He gained that information in the employee of the city and that information is the city's property.
In my opinion, he has some sort of conflict with his employer and he's using the passwords to leverage grief against them, not trying to protect the fiber network.
That said, the charges about the modems seem a bit far fetched as it sounds like they were there for perfectly legitimate reasons. Hopefully he has documentation to back his claims up that they were job related. I don't think they'll be to forgiving given his past record.
Why don't cell phones come with the option to turn off international roaming? For instance I can turn off Data Roaming on my iPhone. Why don't they simply add an option to turn off Call Roaming? This should be a standard on all phones IMO.
I actually agree with this guy. They just converted PC magazine to a digital format. Initially I thought I would hate it, but I've found it's just much more convenient to read on my laptop. I can also refer to old magazines now without carrying them around with me in the real world, their search-able, and I don't have to type out those long as URL's for something of interest in the magazine;)
Much like the streaming video is starting to cause a hit for the cable companies since people can simply view what they want to see when they want to see it online, it just makes better sense.
This is about the people/models in the photo's, not the one's wanting to see it. It wasn't designed to protect minors from adult pornography, but to protect minors from predatory pornographers. I have to agree that the restrictions were far to onerous to be useful. The whole 'fantasy' of pedophiles is purported to all be based on appearance. If someone looks to be a little long in the tooth, then why force them to maintain a pointless record verifying that aren't hot to a pedophile?
It then comes down to who decides what looks 'legal' and who doesn't. I can see this turning into the same mess as ID verification for Alcoholic beverages (anyone over 30 ID'd). Somewhat of a joke since you can't really tell everyone age with any accuracy from looks.
If the law is too difficult or to sweeping to enforce without unnecessarily restricting someone's first amendment rights, then it should be overturned as unconstitutional. We have those protections for a reason.
They should find a better way to put the sick bastards away who peddle child porn.
The TFA would disagree with you, as it states that write performance does indeed drop, sometimes up to half the original performance or more due to wear leveling and write combining techniques used. Your talking read access times, where we're talking write/erase access times.
So in effect, instead of 'burning' out a specific section of an SDD, they will simply burn out the entire disk at once due to wear leveling? Seems to me they are Robbing peter to pay Paul and the end result is still the same, albeit with far more fragmentation. If you are then forced to defragment your SDD to get the peformance back, you are in effect killing your SDD due to all the erase/writes that defragging will cause.
I think I prefer the slow and progressive method rather than waking up some morning to find that it's burned out once wear leveling can't find any good blocks to erase.
That leads to another few questions. What about data that is stored in a location that was written to for a final time? (say the 10th erase/write cycle in that block using the analogy above). The data is still retrievable right? It simply can't be written to again?
I wonder if the wear leveling algorithms will also store files that are read-only in nature in blocks that are close to failure?
Last but not least, do the OS's turn off the 'last accessed' property that is commonly used across most OS's? Seems that would leave to much more rapid failure.
I'm just sitting here thinking. Doesn't an SSD have a preset number of writes in it due to it's nature?
Does it really matter if they spread these writes around on the hard drive when the number of writes the drive is capable of doing is still the same in the end?
To drastically oversimplify, lets say that each block can be written to twice. Does it really matter if they used up the first blocks on the drive and just spread towards the end of the drive partition with general usage rather than jumping all over to try to spread the writes around?
Am I thinking about this the wrong way? What benefit does it give them to spread the writes around if the total number of writes doesn't change? Doesn't it just further fragment the files with little gain?
Surely it's not the block size. I know nothing about filesystems beyond basics. Windows could specify the block size to be used. I assumed that Linux did the same? I have no idea about OS X either.
Are there standard block sizes in use for Linux and OS X filesystems? Can they be modified when they are formatted? If so, and the issue really is due to blocksize and fragmentation as a result, this would seem like an easy fix. Linux and OS X already resist fragmentation. I won't speak to MS's efforts there as they state NTFS does, but the implementation seems to be very different in the real world.
Some of you FS guru's fill us in here. How hard is it to implement something like variable block sizes, or to allow you to specify block size at format time?
Microsoft doesn't innovate. They are like an amoeba. They enclose, absorb, and move on to the nextd target. They haven't innovated for years. They simply buy competing products and add those ideas to their own. Oddly enough, much like the Borg (do I get Geek points for that?).
There is nothing wrong with that. It's been a hugely successful business for MS, but I think it tends to leave them a bit stale when it comes to innovation. They are always a few years behind the times. This is why they fail so badly against Apple when it comes to the "Must Have It" factor.
Sure they could clone the iPhone, or put their own OS on it, but by that time, people will have moved on to something else. Whatever MS puts out might do well enough, but MS won't have the home field advantage when they move outside of the OS arena.
Oddly enough, the need companies like Apple. They are the perfect thorn (ouch..bad paraphrasing) in Microsoft's side. They gave Microsoft ideas for Zune, and whatever other products MS eventually buys from other companies or clones and then sells to the public.
I have a new (er) Macbook Pro. The batter is easily removed by pushing up on two tabs on the back cover much like any standard laptop battery setup. I take it the newest (released in Jan?) aren't accessible in this fasion?
Did you ever consider that Sims 2 may not have implemented Quicktime to Apples standard? Since nothing else appears to have broken, then it is also possible that Sims 2 has a poor or improperly coded implementation.
As a designer, I'v done this myself a few times by not following the documentation.
Actually it's both. The laws were put on the books to allow competition, and to allow those holding the copyrights to get a return investment on their design/art/idea, etc.
The idea was that the inventer would gain profit for a set period of time, after which the idea could be adopted by others. This had the net affect of reducing the price through competition, increasing quality, and innovating new ideas based off of the original.
The laws have been twisted so far from their original intent it's just rediculous.
Disney is a great example of copyright gone wrong.
Every time their copyrights are about to expire they pump millions into congress to get them extended for another 20 years or so.
So I take it the bigger shops like nVidia and ATI typically either have better lawyers or do more of their product in-house?
I suppose that makes sense. Sucks all the same though.
I'm a little confused as to why S3 isn't more open with the Linux community? They are obviously not top of the line and the technology they use isn't going to be snapped up by nVidia or ATI. I doubt that the big two are beating down their doors trying to plant industrial spys.
Why won't they release specs? I know nothing about graphics hardware. Would releasing the specs expose them to corporate espionage of some sort?
And you feel that others shouldn't enjoy the same tools that you do?
The very things you love about Linux are the very things you would end up denying others simply because they would never find it, or the barrier for entry would be to high.
Why can't they use a unified packaging system between all of the distros? In the end, the packaging doesn't matter at all, but rather the content and that it works. These arguments are rather silly.
I also find the argument that Linux doesn't need market share rather short sighted. If there is no public interest due to irrelevance, then Linux will die a long quiet death. You must have interest from both vendors, businesses, and the general user community. Market share gets you that and it is a good indicator of how well you are doing gathering that interest.
I also have to laugh at these Windows jibes regarding all of their 'distros' when in fact, they are all the same base OS, with only the packages installed differing. That is what I see as a critical difference between Windows, OS X, and Linux. Any version compatible software will install and be expected to run on Windows or OS X. The same is not true for Linux.
The community needs to stop stroking themselves so heavily and unite behind a few basic standards like common interfaces for configuration, hardware, networking, packaging. Set a standard that developers, vendors, and users can always assume will be consistent, and then customize on top of those standards.
APP (ala OSX) for Linux would be wonderful. A standard package that could be used across all distros. Drop it anywhere and it just works.
I think that,above all else, would encourage even more development if there were a standard for packaging as well as ease the entry barrier for end users new to Linux.
Every person I know, also knows that I work on PC's. They would never 'pay' to get it fixed. If they had a hard drive failure, they would call and I would fix it. If they needed an HD, I would buy it, and install whatever OS they are currently using.
You are probably also thinking of PC repair from an IT perspective. I have many friends still using old Pentium 3's without issue. Other than the occasional bad power supply or hard drive failure, they get along just fine and easily last longer than 6 years.
You're also assuming that storage would cost the same per megabyte than their current solution does, which is definitely not the case. They can pick up an 'older' model of a hard drive for extremely cheap either online or at a local shop. I just replaced my fathers hard drive when it started going south. I picked up an 80 GB drive for less than 40 bucks.
John and Jane Doe don't' need to do this for themselves. Almost every family out there typically has some slashdotter geek to do the work for them only for the cost of parts.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easier to install the Chromifox addon for Firefox. Same GUI, with plugins, and it works on any OS that supports firefox ;)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8782
It is not a 'dodgy' concept. It is intellectual property. I wasn't speaking to his prison sentence. I was speaking to his refusal to follow his supervisors instructions. I would immediately fire someone like this.
As to who would work for those people? I already work for similar people as do most IT staff. They have the technical skill and their mgmt typically does not. You do your best to explain consequences and concepts but in the end, it is their decision, not yours and not his.
I would have surrendered the passwords as instructed and that would have been the end of it. If things went to hell and a handbasket as a result, they would have had nothing on him. This is where that 'high ground' kind of falls to the wayside considering his criminal record. It's just not believable from a character perspective that he took the moral high ground.
Do I agree with his sentencing and time spent in prison? I don't know what the penalties are for things like theft, but 7 months doesn't seem all that unusual considering the potential financial impact of the information he carries.
Fortunately, computer geeks are a minority. Joe User doesn't care about attrib.exe. He wants his e-mail to work and his browser to be easy to use and his Facebook to not crash. His idea of a 'computing experience' most certainly is NOT about opening a terminal window and using CP or whatever. Of course your typical /. user will love that type of post above. The average user wouldn't even know what your talking about.
Just because someone is young doesn't make them curious about a terminal window. You have to have a bent (pun intended) for being a computer geek. It takes an odd mix of curiosity, intelligence, a smidgen of mechanical aptitude, and preserverance.
You make it sound like the youth of today are natural hackers. Are they computer savvy? Yes. Do they know their way around a terminal window as a result? Not likely.
If a GUI is properly designed, it should remove the need for a terminal window. It is a natural evolution to move from a command line to a GUI and a more object oriented interface. The typical human is very object/visually oriented. I think Apple has done a good job at that. The OS has a nice polish and refinement to it.
Linux is also getting to the point where a terminal window isn't needed for most day to day work. Of course there will always be those that prefer it, but it isn't necessary to make it through the day.
THAT and the cost is what makes Linux more attractive to the Windows crowd and it probably scares the hell out of MS. Not only it's stability, low system requirements and speed, but it's ease of use as well. 3 years ago you would have to drag a windows user kicking and screaming. They didn't consider it an alternative. The GUI's lacked polish, the apps all looked 'home made' and getting a windows app to run under linux was a pipe dream. Not so much an issue these days.
You can run just about any flavor of Linux on an Intel mac. I tripple boot Mac, Ubuntu, and XP on mine. It's very easy to do with ReFIT, and Bootcamp.
It seems to me that he has no legal standing. IANAL, but if his supervisor tells him to give them the passwords, it is not his place to decide who it is 'safe' to give them to and who is not safe. That is his employers decision.
His colored past aside, he could be a very upstanding citizen and he would still be completely in the wrong for not releasing the information that his employer tells him to. He gained that information in the employee of the city and that information is the city's property.
In my opinion, he has some sort of conflict with his employer and he's using the passwords to leverage grief against them, not trying to protect the fiber network.
That said, the charges about the modems seem a bit far fetched as it sounds like they were there for perfectly legitimate reasons. Hopefully he has documentation to back his claims up that they were job related. I don't think they'll be to forgiving given his past record.
Why don't cell phones come with the option to turn off international roaming? For instance I can turn off Data Roaming on my iPhone. Why don't they simply add an option to turn off Call Roaming? This should be a standard on all phones IMO.
I actually agree with this guy. They just converted PC magazine to a digital format. Initially I thought I would hate it, but I've found it's just much more convenient to read on my laptop. I can also refer to old magazines now without carrying them around with me in the real world, their search-able, and I don't have to type out those long as URL's for something of interest in the magazine ;)
Much like the streaming video is starting to cause a hit for the cable companies since people can simply view what they want to see when they want to see it online, it just makes better sense.
Why not just remove the Firefox exception from your Security / Exceptions so that it prompts for every addon you install, regardless of source?
This is about the people/models in the photo's, not the one's wanting to see it. It wasn't designed to protect minors from adult pornography, but to protect minors from predatory pornographers. I have to agree that the restrictions were far to onerous to be useful. The whole 'fantasy' of pedophiles is purported to all be based on appearance. If someone looks to be a little long in the tooth, then why force them to maintain a pointless record verifying that aren't hot to a pedophile?
It then comes down to who decides what looks 'legal' and who doesn't. I can see this turning into the same mess as ID verification for Alcoholic beverages (anyone over 30 ID'd). Somewhat of a joke since you can't really tell everyone age with any accuracy from looks.
If the law is too difficult or to sweeping to enforce without unnecessarily restricting someone's first amendment rights, then it should be overturned as unconstitutional. We have those protections for a reason.
They should find a better way to put the sick bastards away who peddle child porn.
The TFA would disagree with you, as it states that write performance does indeed drop, sometimes up to half the original performance or more due to wear leveling and write combining techniques used. Your talking read access times, where we're talking write/erase access times.
Excellent. Thanks ;)
So in effect, instead of 'burning' out a specific section of an SDD, they will simply burn out the entire disk at once due to wear leveling? Seems to me they are Robbing peter to pay Paul and the end result is still the same, albeit with far more fragmentation. If you are then forced to defragment your SDD to get the peformance back, you are in effect killing your SDD due to all the erase/writes that defragging will cause.
I think I prefer the slow and progressive method rather than waking up some morning to find that it's burned out once wear leveling can't find any good blocks to erase.
That leads to another few questions. What about data that is stored in a location that was written to for a final time? (say the 10th erase/write cycle in that block using the analogy above). The data is still retrievable right? It simply can't be written to again?
I wonder if the wear leveling algorithms will also store files that are read-only in nature in blocks that are close to failure?
Last but not least, do the OS's turn off the 'last accessed' property that is commonly used across most OS's? Seems that would leave to much more rapid failure.
I'm just sitting here thinking. Doesn't an SSD have a preset number of writes in it due to it's nature?
Does it really matter if they spread these writes around on the hard drive when the number of writes the drive is capable of doing is still the same in the end?
To drastically oversimplify, lets say that each block can be written to twice. Does it really matter if they used up the first blocks on the drive and just spread towards the end of the drive partition with general usage rather than jumping all over to try to spread the writes around?
Am I thinking about this the wrong way? What benefit does it give them to spread the writes around if the total number of writes doesn't change? Doesn't it just further fragment the files with little gain?
Damn you /. ;)
Surely it's not the block size. I know nothing about filesystems beyond basics. Windows could specify the block size to be used. I assumed that Linux did the same? I have no idea about OS X either.
Are there standard block sizes in use for Linux and OS X filesystems? Can they be modified when they are formatted? If so, and the issue really is due to blocksize and fragmentation as a result, this would seem like an easy fix. Linux and OS X already resist fragmentation. I won't speak to MS's efforts there as they state NTFS does, but the implementation seems to be very different in the real world.
Some of you FS guru's fill us in here. How hard is it to implement something like variable block sizes, or to allow you to specify block size at format time?
Microsoft doesn't innovate. They are like an amoeba. They enclose, absorb, and move on to the nextd target. They haven't innovated for years. They simply buy competing products and add those ideas to their own. Oddly enough, much like the Borg (do I get Geek points for that?).
There is nothing wrong with that. It's been a hugely successful business for MS, but I think it tends to leave them a bit stale when it comes to innovation. They are always a few years behind the times. This is why they fail so badly against Apple when it comes to the "Must Have It" factor.
Sure they could clone the iPhone, or put their own OS on it, but by that time, people will have moved on to something else. Whatever MS puts out might do well enough, but MS won't have the home field advantage when they move outside of the OS arena.
Oddly enough, the need companies like Apple. They are the perfect thorn (ouch..bad paraphrasing) in Microsoft's side. They gave Microsoft ideas for Zune, and whatever other products MS eventually buys from other companies or clones and then sells to the public.
I have a new (er) Macbook Pro. The batter is easily removed by pushing up on two tabs on the back cover much like any standard laptop battery setup. I take it the newest (released in Jan?) aren't accessible in this fasion?
Did you ever consider that Sims 2 may not have implemented Quicktime to Apples standard? Since nothing else appears to have broken, then it is also possible that Sims 2 has a poor or improperly coded implementation. As a designer, I'v done this myself a few times by not following the documentation.
Actually it's both. The laws were put on the books to allow competition, and to allow those holding the copyrights to get a return investment on their design/art/idea, etc.
The idea was that the inventer would gain profit for a set period of time, after which the idea could be adopted by others. This had the net affect of reducing the price through competition, increasing quality, and innovating new ideas based off of the original.
The laws have been twisted so far from their original intent it's just rediculous.
Disney is a great example of copyright gone wrong.
Every time their copyrights are about to expire they pump millions into congress to get them extended for another 20 years or so.
So I take it the bigger shops like nVidia and ATI typically either have better lawyers or do more of their product in-house? I suppose that makes sense. Sucks all the same though.
I'm a little confused as to why S3 isn't more open with the Linux community? They are obviously not top of the line and the technology they use isn't going to be snapped up by nVidia or ATI. I doubt that the big two are beating down their doors trying to plant industrial spys. Why won't they release specs? I know nothing about graphics hardware. Would releasing the specs expose them to corporate espionage of some sort?
And you feel that others shouldn't enjoy the same tools that you do?
The very things you love about Linux are the very things you would end up denying others simply because they would never find it, or the barrier for entry would be to high.
Why can't they use a unified packaging system between all of the distros? In the end, the packaging doesn't matter at all, but rather the content and that it works. These arguments are rather silly.
I also find the argument that Linux doesn't need market share rather short sighted. If there is no public interest due to irrelevance, then Linux will die a long quiet death. You must have interest from both vendors, businesses, and the general user community. Market share gets you that and it is a good indicator of how well you are doing gathering that interest.
I also have to laugh at these Windows jibes regarding all of their 'distros' when in fact, they are all the same base OS, with only the packages installed differing. That is what I see as a critical difference between Windows, OS X, and Linux. Any version compatible software will install and be expected to run on Windows or OS X. The same is not true for Linux.
The community needs to stop stroking themselves so heavily and unite behind a few basic standards like common interfaces for configuration, hardware, networking, packaging. Set a standard that developers, vendors, and users can always assume will be consistent, and then customize on top of those standards.
I can't agree more.
APP (ala OSX) for Linux would be wonderful. A standard package that could be used across all distros. Drop it anywhere and it just works.
I think that,above all else, would encourage even more development if there were a standard for packaging as well as ease the entry barrier for end users new to Linux.
Every person I know, also knows that I work on PC's. They would never 'pay' to get it fixed. If they had a hard drive failure, they would call and I would fix it. If they needed an HD, I would buy it, and install whatever OS they are currently using.
You are probably also thinking of PC repair from an IT perspective. I have many friends still using old Pentium 3's without issue. Other than the occasional bad power supply or hard drive failure, they get along just fine and easily last longer than 6 years.
You're also assuming that storage would cost the same per megabyte than their current solution does, which is definitely not the case. They can pick up an 'older' model of a hard drive for extremely cheap either online or at a local shop. I just replaced my fathers hard drive when it started going south. I picked up an 80 GB drive for less than 40 bucks.
John and Jane Doe don't' need to do this for themselves. Almost every family out there typically has some slashdotter geek to do the work for them only for the cost of parts.
Hmm..lets see...
$40 dollar repair, or $600 dollar PC...