So lets install a GPS on a laptop so we know where it is at all times. Hmmmm... Since I know who the owner of the laptop is, I can trace their position at all times.
I see you have been to the local brothel this week... We have morality clauses for our employees, your fired!
With the Internet, databases, and computers galore, privacy of information is lost. Do we really need to take this a step furthur?
On the other hand, how do you track down a stolen laptop without invading the users privacy? Does the loss of privacy outweigh the benefits of keeping your data secure?
I see you have created the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock. Since Microsoft stock has been dropping lately, Larry Ellison is ready to pass him (if he hasn't by the time you read this). If so, will it be time for the Larry Ellison Personal Wealth Clock?
Which will bring us to next generation satellites (if they already aren't in existence).
This is the conspiracy theorist in me, but I'm waiting to satellite that can determine objects based on topography anomalies. For example, if the ground is at 1500 ft bove sea level, and the satellite spots an object at 20,000 ft. The satellite would know that the object is not part of the landscape. So that object would be tracked. What would be really neat if the precision could be taken to the level of detecting vehicles painted black could be detected.
Such a project would require heavily detailed maps and large processing power to spot anomalies. But would be a neat project to work with.
We are starting to see manufacturers are being held responsible for products they create even if they are used out of the scope of their original design. Look at the gun movement.
Manufacturers do have some (but not complete) responsiblity for what they create. If you create a product which is designed to do X, but with no effort can also do illegal activity Y. Then the company should be held responsible for being a part in criminal activity. Gun cases are iffy, but lets look a more realistic ficticious (and outrangeous)example.
Lets say you own multiple cars but hate carrying multiple car keys. A company will sell you a master key which will allow you to open and start any car. The intention is for you to only use that key on your car, but it can start any car. A criminal buys the key and starts stealing cars with no effot. Should the company be held liable?
If I'm not mistaken, there's a clause in some law that says service providers aren't liable for things done on their servers.
I'm curious to see how long such a clause could last. Why? Because the ISP should be doing some monitoring of their network, some of the monitoring would include running(or stumbling) across illegal activity. Which raises the question, if a sysadmin runs across illegal activity on a network, what should the sysadmin do? Does the sysadmin report it? If the sysadmin does not report, and allows the illegal activity to continue, could the sysadmin be held liable to laws similar to good samaritan laws, which state that if one witnesses a crime and does not help or try to help, that person may also be held liable for a crime.
Or does a sysadmin have the rights similar to a priest or lawyer, the right to confidentiality?
Answers to these questions would set precendent on an ISP's liablity for issues like this.
If you look at some of the philosphies of business ethics, it is not a companies responsibility to act ethically. A companies purpose is to make as much money as possible while following the rules of the game. The game being the law. Since a companies main goal is to make money, they should take any means needed. This does not mean that companies must be evil and do wrong to be profitable. People still have the choice to buy or not buy from a company for their own reasons. One of the reasons could be charity. For example, If I want to buy a computer from company A or company B. Company B's computer is 5% more expensive, but also donates a portion of every PC sale to charity. Some may be more inclined to buy from company B than A. If you loosely extrapolate, if all buyers were socially conscious, then company B would sell many more computers than company A and company A would have to revise their business model to be more socially friendly. Other companies may see this trend as a way to attract more business and the worl would be a better place.
Of course the following assumptions were built into this example:
Pure capitalism works
Buyers are socially aware and will choose accordingly
Before a user can place a new skin on an application. The default skin must have the same look and feel as the OS. Netscape 6's, which I am using right now, current UI would be nice as a skin but sucks as the default UI. How to access (and how they are clicked) the menus are not with the standards of Win32. (Yes I use Win95, sue me, some people don't have a choice). Any application should be consisent with the look and feel of the OS. Mac was great with this in the "old days". Are they still (Just a question, not implying anything)?
Anyways, onto my original rant. I like skins, I like that you can change the UI easily, sometimes without any programming effort. It can let people who know UI focus on UI. UI is the most important aspect of a system. If the user can't use it, the application is worthless, regardless of what the app can do.
I'm not sure what the problem is. I can hook my DVD player up to the TV, then use the video outs on the TV to go to my VCR and voila, copied DVD tape. Just using conventional technology, no computer (PC that is), no PS2. The average joe could easily do this. Thank the personal video recorder industry for that hack.
Sounds like the media trying to hype up a problem that exists in many other places already.
Agreed. There was no preview of the processor or no new "News" in that article. No specs, no simulations. It looked liked AMD marketing trying to get people to talk about the product and raise awareness.
They have a product called Manila which is a Web authoring tool. I don't know much about it, but you can set up your ????.registereddomain.com using the software to create a new web site. While it is not the same as what this situation is, there may be enough prior art involved to not allow this patent.
Its all about getting a job out of college. If you want to do game programming, you can have the standard degree which to get it you have to learn all of the programming concepts, OR you can learn all of your programming from a gaming point of view. In the arena of gaming there are probably "hundreds" of programming tricks/tips/algorithms/problems which one will never see in their typical classwork. By doing a specialized program, they will see these tricks in the classroom before a coop/intern/real world setting. It makes you more prepared and more marketable.
This may be the beginning of specialized degrees. ERP work is where a lot of big money also is and graduate schools are beginning to tailor theor courses so you may specialize in ERP work.
An analogy to use would be getting a physics degree then getting hired to be mechanical engineer. You would be unqualified even though you know all most of the theory behind mechanical engineering. There may be a potential out there to offer different tracks of the CS degree, similarly as there are different engineering degrees available.
DLL Hell is when you have need different versions of the same dll on the same machine because some version of some dlls break other applications. I believe W2K gets around this by required new software to install all of the dlls they need in its own application directory.
So your app uses MSVB500.dll? Then your target machine will get an extra copy of it. Have 5 different applications (from 5 different vendors) which each use MSVB500.dll, then you will have 5 copies of MSVB500.dll. This sounds like the road to true bloat but at least you end up with a more robust application because other peoples' installations of common dlls won't break your app. With this automatic symbolic linking, much of the hard drive space which could have been wasted by redundant dlls can now be reclaimed. This could be a real good thing.
After posting this, I notice the comment submitted before me said the same thing I just wrote. (The comment after me also says the same thing) It would be nice if we were allowed to delete our own comments to save some moderators some redundant moderating.
So I can break into an office, copy all of the information in the filing cabinets with a copier and as long as I replace the toner and paper I used and restored everything to its original condition, then its not illegal?
Is banning Napster censorship? Or is it banning an application which hogs bandwidth from users who may need it?
Networks are expensive to maintain and bandwidth is also expensive on the scale a university needs. If a significant percentage of bandwidth can be eliminated without affecting academics (remember the piece of paper after 4+ years of school is the purpose of being in college), then what is the problem?
Remember the primary purpose of any campus network is for acadmic purposes. Show the university admins academic reasons for using banned software and the ban should be lifted. (Boy is that last sentence wishful thinking)
Hate to be a pessimist but there are some reasons this will fail.
First, people working on this in their free time time will not match the quality or technology of a firm which does do chip design. Remember that fixing and rereleasing buggy code is much easy than fixing a chip. Once a chip is made, its made. And AFAIK, most chips don't really have any problems, or at least problems which cannot be resolved.
There are tons of chip patents out there waiting to get stepped on. To get around these hurdles will be a nightmare because there is no way to disprove you are violating a patent. (unless you can prove that patent is invalid)
The technology curve will be lagging compared to chip firms. This point could be voided if a grad school(s) took this project under its wing. I believe Carnegie Mellon takes care of MACH and does tons of research in trying to make it better. But I think a lot of that research is sponsored by companies who may get some rights to the technology discovered. (any know those issues?) This could be a good starting point for grad school students to try new designs on a chip to see what happens.
Exactly. So this game was going to go national or worldwide wouldn't there be other copies of the game which can be restored? Even if they had to "kill" everything, didn't anyone every hear of a backup?
That episode had more holes in it than all the holes made by the (boring) machine gun fire.
Color is definitely one of those things to get the PHB's to buy a Palm Pilot but it serves no real purpose yet. It only has 256 colors and the resolution is still horrible. If they can crank up the resolution and number of colors to be more paper looking, then we have something worthwhile.
In the meantime, its nice that PALM is putting more RAM into the PDA's. But on the other hand, isn't 2MB more than you will ever need?
Software engineering is far from dead. If it were, people would stop refining on UML. Granted, for small projects, object orientedness may not be needed, but when the scope begins to get large and you users include more than yourself, you have to ensure your system will work. That takes engineering, not code hacking. For a large system, most of the time will be spent in requirements and design. Coding should be done by a monkey because the design should fill in almost all the blanks to restrict the programmers freedom to be creative. (Oh let the flame war begin). But when your design is locked down to restrict coding freedom, there is less room for misinterpretation. And any misinterpretations between the designer and coder will yield a one off implementation which will work in most cases, but in the excpetion cases, your life becomes a nightmare of support.
If you are on the road only one month and have a computer which can suffer through the install, then use one of those free AOL cds for a free billion(or whatever number they are up to) hours use for the first month of use. They probably have the best coverage in the US to make all your calls local.
Then after your trip is over, cancel AOL and you haven't paid any money.
Slashdot Mirror
I see you have been to the local brothel this week ... We have morality clauses for our employees, your fired!
With the Internet, databases, and computers galore, privacy of information is lost. Do we really need to take this a step furthur?
On the other hand, how do you track down a stolen laptop without invading the users privacy? Does the loss of privacy outweigh the benefits of keeping your data secure?
I see you have created the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock. Since Microsoft stock has been dropping lately, Larry Ellison is ready to pass him (if he hasn't by the time you read this). If so, will it be time for the Larry Ellison Personal Wealth Clock?
use strict;
Always put that line in all your code. It will save you hours of headaches.
$rSub = \&mySub
Now I should be able to say: someSub(@someArgs) = \&mySub
This allows someSub to figure out some stuff and let me assign the appropriate sub reference.
This is the conspiracy theorist in me, but I'm waiting to satellite that can determine objects based on topography anomalies. For example, if the ground is at 1500 ft bove sea level, and the satellite spots an object at 20,000 ft. The satellite would know that the object is not part of the landscape. So that object would be tracked. What would be really neat if the precision could be taken to the level of detecting vehicles painted black could be detected.
Such a project would require heavily detailed maps and large processing power to spot anomalies. But would be a neat project to work with.
Manufacturers do have some (but not complete) responsiblity for what they create. If you create a product which is designed to do X, but with no effort can also do illegal activity Y. Then the company should be held responsible for being a part in criminal activity. Gun cases are iffy, but lets look a more realistic ficticious (and outrangeous)example.
Lets say you own multiple cars but hate carrying multiple car keys. A company will sell you a master key which will allow you to open and start any car. The intention is for you to only use that key on your car, but it can start any car. A criminal buys the key and starts stealing cars with no effot. Should the company be held liable?
I'm curious to see how long such a clause could last. Why? Because the ISP should be doing some monitoring of their network, some of the monitoring would include running(or stumbling) across illegal activity. Which raises the question, if a sysadmin runs across illegal activity on a network, what should the sysadmin do? Does the sysadmin report it? If the sysadmin does not report, and allows the illegal activity to continue, could the sysadmin be held liable to laws similar to good samaritan laws, which state that if one witnesses a crime and does not help or try to help, that person may also be held liable for a crime.
Or does a sysadmin have the rights similar to a priest or lawyer, the right to confidentiality?
Answers to these questions would set precendent on an ISP's liablity for issues like this.
Of course the following assumptions were built into this example:
Pure capitalism works
Buyers are socially aware and will choose accordingly
Government has no involvement.
Just some food for thought.
Anyways, onto my original rant. I like skins, I like that you can change the UI easily, sometimes without any programming effort. It can let people who know UI focus on UI. UI is the most important aspect of a system. If the user can't use it, the application is worthless, regardless of what the app can do.
Sounds like the media trying to hype up a problem that exists in many other places already.
In case you didn't read the header: How does a first post get marked as redundant?
Agreed. There was no preview of the processor or no new "News" in that article. No specs, no simulations. It looked liked AMD marketing trying to get people to talk about the product and raise awareness.
An example of this product in practice is at: http://www.editthispage.com/
This may be the beginning of specialized degrees. ERP work is where a lot of big money also is and graduate schools are beginning to tailor theor courses so you may specialize in ERP work.
An analogy to use would be getting a physics degree then getting hired to be mechanical engineer. You would be unqualified even though you know all most of the theory behind mechanical engineering. There may be a potential out there to offer different tracks of the CS degree, similarly as there are different engineering degrees available.
So your app uses MSVB500.dll? Then your target machine will get an extra copy of it. Have 5 different applications (from 5 different vendors) which each use MSVB500.dll, then you will have 5 copies of MSVB500.dll. This sounds like the road to true bloat but at least you end up with a more robust application because other peoples' installations of common dlls won't break your app. With this automatic symbolic linking, much of the hard drive space which could have been wasted by redundant dlls can now be reclaimed. This could be a real good thing.
After posting this, I notice the comment submitted before me said the same thing I just wrote. (The comment after me also says the same thing) It would be nice if we were allowed to delete our own comments to save some moderators some redundant moderating.
Robust links may be great but I can't connect to the site to learn more about it.
So I can break into an office, copy all of the information in the filing cabinets with a copier and as long as I replace the toner and paper I used and restored everything to its original condition, then its not illegal?
Networks are expensive to maintain and bandwidth is also expensive on the scale a university needs. If a significant percentage of bandwidth can be eliminated without affecting academics (remember the piece of paper after 4+ years of school is the purpose of being in college), then what is the problem?
Remember the primary purpose of any campus network is for acadmic purposes. Show the university admins academic reasons for using banned software and the ban should be lifted. (Boy is that last sentence wishful thinking)
First, people working on this in their free time time will not match the quality or technology of a firm which does do chip design. Remember that fixing and rereleasing buggy code is much easy than fixing a chip. Once a chip is made, its made. And AFAIK, most chips don't really have any problems, or at least problems which cannot be resolved.
There are tons of chip patents out there waiting to get stepped on. To get around these hurdles will be a nightmare because there is no way to disprove you are violating a patent. (unless you can prove that patent is invalid)
The technology curve will be lagging compared to chip firms. This point could be voided if a grad school(s) took this project under its wing. I believe Carnegie Mellon takes care of MACH and does tons of research in trying to make it better. But I think a lot of that research is sponsored by companies who may get some rights to the technology discovered. (any know those issues?) This could be a good starting point for grad school students to try new designs on a chip to see what happens.
That episode had more holes in it than all the holes made by the (boring) machine gun fire.
Let me rephrase for the humor impaired. Isn't 640Kb more memory than you will ever need?
In the meantime, its nice that PALM is putting more RAM into the PDA's. But on the other hand, isn't 2MB more than you will ever need?
Software engineering is far from dead. If it were, people would stop refining on UML. Granted, for small projects, object orientedness may not be needed, but when the scope begins to get large and you users include more than yourself, you have to ensure your system will work. That takes engineering, not code hacking. For a large system, most of the time will be spent in requirements and design. Coding should be done by a monkey because the design should fill in almost all the blanks to restrict the programmers freedom to be creative. (Oh let the flame war begin). But when your design is locked down to restrict coding freedom, there is less room for misinterpretation. And any misinterpretations between the designer and coder will yield a one off implementation which will work in most cases, but in the excpetion cases, your life becomes a nightmare of support.
Then after your trip is over, cancel AOL and you haven't paid any money.