I've recently taken a job at a small software company and occcasionally I have to take a support call or two. We deal with school districts and our software is used primarily by special education administrators. These are people with multiple master's degrees and I'm amazed every day by their lack of techno-savvy. If very bright highly educated people don't recognize pop-up windows as advertisements then how can we expect the "average" person to recognize the bigger issue surrounding spam? I think the fact is that most people really don't care that much. They just accept spam the same way they accept junk snail-mail.
I have an HP Pavilion zt1180 laptop with similar wierdness. Runs linux fine but forget about sound. Also there is no way to set the video memory (it has a shared memory system) without windows xp so removing in entirely is out of the question. I've been trying to get to the right group at HP to acquire the specs on this bios so that it would be possible (for someone more skilled than I) to write the necessary driver / interface to modify these settings. So far i've had no success.
What about the (admittedly paranoid) consideration that this crack is a fake. What if you were Microsoft and wanted to have grounds to challenge the rights of distribution of open-source products that can be substituted for your products? Releasing your own code (in a way that makes you appear to be a victim) into the wild would provide the grounds to establish such challenges. Samba, Wine, Koffice, Open Office, and many others could be accused of using Microsoft proprietary methods to achieve their stated goals.
I know it sounds like a plot dreamed up by Chris Carter but you must admit that it's an interesting possibility. After all, Microsoft initially decided to investigate the breakin themselves. Maybe they needed to establish a more realistic appearance of a crack. And It's difficult for me to believe that a company whose products are so easily back-doored would have anything but the latest virus detection and prevention measures in place or that they would leave any sensitive materials on a network that wasn't very carefully administered by their absolute best IT personell.
Then again, I'm a little tired and the upcoming election has me on edge so...
I am one of those slashdot readers who knows nothing about H-1B visas but I do know that the processing of applications and the granting of visas takes taxpayer dollars to complete. I also know that there are bright, talented American citizens who are not participating in the technology industry due to lack of exposure to technology in our public education system.
Why don't we put those dollars to better use and turn them within to elevate our educational standards and broaden the exposure to technology (and everything else for that matter) provided to our young people. This is not meant to be nationalistic hype but the world is divided in to counties and each has its own economy. The global marketplace has yet to change this fact. It seems like an obvious decision to bolster our own citizens before we bring more in from other countries.
The idea of the melting pot is a very old one that was established at a time when the U.S was just starting out. Now that we are not only an established country but arguably the driving global force behind technology and science we may need to reconsider the imigration policies and focus our energies on building a workforce from the raw materials (smart kids) that we already have.
Or we can continue to give accolades to the highschool athletes while ostrasizing the quiet, bright individuals and import our geeks from elsewhere.
There seems to be a concensus among proprietary computer hardware and software makers that the complex nature of their products should be protected by law to prevent "geeks, hackers and techno-whizzes" from exposing their inner-workings to the masses.
This assumption is akin to the auto manufacturers demanding that the aftermarket part makers stop providing performance enhancing equipment that any shade-tree mechanic can install.
It's very similar to the system created by the real-estate or legal professions. If they keep the interface to their processes complex enough then the general populace can't gain access to the inner workings. After all, if we can all DIY then how will they profit. The proprietary mindset requires mass ignorance to make money.
But once an enterprising geek, hacker or techno-whiz decodes the mumbo-jumbo and simplifies it for others to use, doesn't his solution become his intellectual property? IP that he or she should be allowed to distribute as he or she sees fit?
And how did these guys get to be CEO and President when they write like this. Common errors but someone who's carreer depends heavily on communication should know better.
Any professional and serious developer will understand the following:.........Unfortunately the Linux Community could of(could have)inadvertently created the WINDOW for the BIG companies to come in and control and profit from this process we have created. So if M$ or some other company decides to do what you are doing *for profit" and DigitalConvergence allows the open source group to continue with out proper licenses, DigitalConvergence could loose(lose)its ability to effectively stop them. The Linux Community would of(would have)actually had a DIRECT HAND in creating what it stands most vehemently against!
But according to DiGiorgio, who in an interview said he has serviced automated control systems on Navy ships for
the past 26 years, the NT operating system is the source of the Yorktown's computer problems. NT applications
aboard the Yorktown provide damage control, run the ship's control center on the bridge, monitor the engines and
navigate the ship when under way.
"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will
be in our favor," DiGiorgio said.
Pacific and Atlantic fleets in March 1997 selected NT 4.0 as the standard OS for both networks and PCs as part of
the Navy's Information Technology for the 21st Century initiative. Current guidance approved by the Navy's chief
information officer calls for all new applications to run under NT.
Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office,
said there have been numerous software failures associated with NT aboard the Yorktown.
"Refining that is an ongoing process," Redman said. "Unix is a better system for control of equipment and
machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined
and there are times when we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT."...
The Yorktown has been towed into port several times because of the systems failures, he said.
"Because of politics, some things are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do, like
Windows NT," Redman said. "If it were up to me I probably would not have used Windows NT in this particular
application. If we used Unix, we would have a system that has less of a tendency to go down."
Although Unix is more reliable, Redman said, NT may become more reliable with time.
If you believe that a guy with 26 years of control system experience knows what he's talking about then you must agree that NT caused the failures.
Or if you think that a man who's achieved the position of deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office must have some technical knowledge of computer operating system, then you should probably conclude that NT caused the problems.
Or you could continue to play devil's advocate for the fun of appearing impartial and blame the "inept journalist". Whatever floats your boat.
How did a group of guys that put out the Garage Days ep (specifically the controversial Green Hell) end up acting so suit-like. This is just another example of "blame the tool" mentality gone awry. Although I agree that distributing bootleg copyrighted material is a violation of the agreement that the original purchaser made by making the purchase, I don't see how Napster can be blamed. It analogous to suing a city because I got rear ended. After all if they hadn't provided the street then it never would have happened. Additionally we have to consider the actual financial impact on this particular group of millionaires. They have a fairly large calalog of music and anyone likely to buy a Metallica album is probably going to make the purchase even after they find their favorite singles with Napster or one of its imitators. Mp3 format still requires a PC or some special hardware and burning CD's is still not mainstream enough to believe that people are going to be using bootlegged media in more traditional settings like their cars and living rooms. Combine that with the inconvenience of downloading a 5 minute song with the 56k modems that most of us still connect to the internet with and the $12 or $13 doesn't seem so bad. Frankly I think that the ability of Napster users to check out a few singles on line probably has a positive financial effect on artists, profit hungry or otherwise.
What you want is atomicity. However, rollback sort of goes hand in hand with it. If you try to group together a select and a delete from one table with an insert into another table and your insert should fail for any reason, the dbms must roll back the select and the delete. While I agree that transactions (atomicity) would be nice the developers will need to implement at least an internal rollback mechanism in order for it to work. I'm sure it's been mentioned here already but do check out PHOTO.NET. Philip explains it all and he's funny too.
I have recently gone through several hosting companies. I started with pagecreator and finally had to leave because they couldn't administer their mysql server well enough for me to be able to create tables in my own databases. I moved on to cihost just before their dns servers died. I gave them the benefit of the doubt for a while but the last straw was when I was finally able to log in again only to find my home directory gone and them with no backup. Both of these companies gave me a hard time getting my credit card reimbursed when I cancelled even though I was withing the trial period. I have since settled on phpwebhosting and am very happy with the service. Their online sign up is great. You simply fill out the form and they create your account automatically. You instantly have a mysql database with the same name as your username which you log into with your selected password. Within 10 minutes of signing up you can log into http://yourname.phpwebhosting.com which will always be available in case you opt not to get your own domain. They transferred my domain for me within 3 days. You can pay month to month or anually which gives you a small discount. Storage and bandwidth are unlimited and the whole package is only $9.95/month. My site is still very much a work in progress so I can't comment on performance but I recently ftp'd all the packages required to install linux from scratch from all over the web to my directory on their server and then down to my local machine and was very happy with the speed in downloading 145MB. Suffice it to say that I'm pleased with the service.
Things die. That's just how it goes. It's unfortunate that a fashion trend should lead to an extinction but like it or not human beings are just another part of the global ecosystem. Nature has taken it's course and the system has spent the past 79 years adapting to the loss of Huia bird. Any change that humans deliberately make now will throw a heavy wrench into the works of the delicate eco-balance.
Many of us in the technical community are so enthusiastic over the miraculous results that we lose sight of the results of our actions. The far reaching effects on systems like the global eco-system are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict. It is a far different thing to prevent the slaughter of a species than to revive one long since gone.
The same is true for many fields of science. As medical science extends the life expectancy of humans and we continue to pop out offspring at an ever increasing rate, what will happen to our resources? Where will we all live? What do Huia birds feed on primarily? How has the comunity of Huia food bugs adapted to the extinction of the birds? What else feeds on Huia food bugs? What will happen if the Huia returns?
It really is about survival of the fittest. Just be happy that you're among the most fit to survive.
I've tried Front Page 98, Dreamweaver, and Hotmetal. Hotmetal offers the most flexiblity of any of these and has a great accessibility checker that evaluates your code and tells you what features you have used that may not be renderable on certain browsers. It has three different editing modes. The common WYSIWYG, a great context senstive text mode, and a tags on WYSIWYG mode. In tags on mode you see small graphical representations of your html tags in the WYSIWYG display. This allows you to easily grab a tag and modify attributes or move it to another section of the document. Also, unlike Frontpage and Dreamweaver, Hotmetal doesn't insert any elements that you don't ask for. (try inserting a horizontal rule in Frontpage, you get a leading and following paragraph tag). SoftQuad also offers free updates to the rules files which allows you to update the html checker to the latest standard while still maintaining compatibility with the lowest level browser that you choose. It supports CSS in a convenient way (although it could be a little smarter) and comes packaged with a huge collection of media which SoftQuad calls "assets". You get many customizable javascripts, applets, animated gifs and more. It also comes with Unlead PhotoImpact and Unlead gif Animator. Plus you get a nice little server on which you can test your pages locally. The editing environment also provides nice site management and publishing features. Can you tell that I like it?
Way to call a spade a spade. I have never been able to wrap my mind around such backward thinking. I know that many of us go through a stage in our college years when we may believe that marxist ideas are good ones. Then most of us grow out of it and finally we become productive because we are MOTIVATED (financially) to do so.
This article fails to make a very important distinction between the consumer products that result from ideas and knowledge and the ideas and knowledge themselves. The idea of intellectual property in no way implies that the creator of mental products is exempt from competition. It only implies that he not be required to educate his potential competitors. The same is true of any craft. A master carpenter can train an apprentice in his art but is not required to do so. So although a would be competitor can examine the end product and imitate its features, he is not entitled to information about the process by which it is created.
Granted one of the nice things about the open source movement that is afoot is that we all can learn from superior programmers. However, I for one am more interested in the quality of the end product than in the process used to create it. If someone hords their own knowledge and manages to create a superior product then I'll choose on product merit, not philosophy.
This is simple capitalism. Knowledge is the basis of ideas and knowledge adds value to the professional person.
I don't care what anyone else does but unless they do what I do they're nuts. Get SuSE 6.0 and upgrade KDE. Just kidding. It's just nice to know that you can just download any package and run it no matter what distro the author is using. Now if only the license is strong enough to resisty the babble of the US court system we can continue to have standards.
Slashdot Mirror
hmmm. you make an excellent point.
I've recently taken a job at a small software company and occcasionally I have to take a support call or two. We deal with school districts and our software is used primarily by special education administrators.
These are people with multiple master's degrees and I'm amazed every day by their lack of techno-savvy. If very bright highly educated people don't recognize pop-up windows as advertisements then how can we expect the "average" person to recognize the bigger issue surrounding spam?
I think the fact is that most people really don't care that much. They just accept spam the same way they accept junk snail-mail.
vi
KDE
Mac
Kerry
pirate.
Duh!
I have an HP Pavilion zt1180 laptop with similar wierdness. Runs linux fine but forget about sound. Also there is no way to set the video memory (it has a shared memory system) without windows xp so removing in entirely is out of the question. I've been trying to get to the right group at HP to acquire the specs on this bios so that it would be possible (for someone more skilled than I) to write the necessary driver / interface to modify these settings. So far i've had no success.
What about the (admittedly paranoid) consideration that this crack is a fake. What if you were Microsoft and wanted to have grounds to challenge the rights of distribution of open-source products that can be substituted for your products? Releasing your own code (in a way that makes you appear to be a victim) into the wild would provide the grounds to establish such challenges. Samba, Wine, Koffice, Open Office, and many others could be accused of using Microsoft proprietary methods to achieve their stated goals.
I know it sounds like a plot dreamed up by Chris Carter but you must admit that it's an interesting possibility. After all, Microsoft initially decided to investigate the breakin themselves. Maybe they needed to establish a more realistic appearance of a crack. And It's difficult for me to believe that a company whose products are so easily back-doored would have anything but the latest virus detection and prevention measures in place or that they would leave any sensitive materials on a network that wasn't very carefully administered by their absolute best IT personell.
Then again, I'm a little tired and the upcoming election has me on edge so...
I am one of those slashdot readers who knows nothing about H-1B visas but I do know that the processing of applications and the granting of visas takes taxpayer dollars to complete. I also know that there are bright, talented American citizens who are not participating in the technology industry due to lack of exposure to technology in our public education system. Why don't we put those dollars to better use and turn them within to elevate our educational standards and broaden the exposure to technology (and everything else for that matter) provided to our young people. This is not meant to be nationalistic hype but the world is divided in to counties and each has its own economy. The global marketplace has yet to change this fact. It seems like an obvious decision to bolster our own citizens before we bring more in from other countries. The idea of the melting pot is a very old one that was established at a time when the U.S was just starting out. Now that we are not only an established country but arguably the driving global force behind technology and science we may need to reconsider the imigration policies and focus our energies on building a workforce from the raw materials (smart kids) that we already have. Or we can continue to give accolades to the highschool athletes while ostrasizing the quiet, bright individuals and import our geeks from elsewhere.
There seems to be a concensus among proprietary computer hardware and software makers that the complex nature of their products should be protected by law to prevent "geeks, hackers and techno-whizzes" from exposing their inner-workings to the masses.
.........Unfortunately the Linux Community could of (could have) inadvertently created the WINDOW for the BIG companies to come in and control and profit from this process we have created. So if M$ or some other company decides to do what you are doing *for profit" and DigitalConvergence allows the open source group to continue with out proper licenses, DigitalConvergence could loose (lose) its ability to effectively stop them. The Linux Community would of (would have) actually had a DIRECT HAND in creating what it stands most vehemently against!
This assumption is akin to the auto manufacturers demanding that the aftermarket part makers stop providing performance enhancing equipment that any shade-tree mechanic can install.
It's very similar to the system created by the real-estate or legal professions. If they keep the interface to their processes complex enough then the general populace can't gain access to the inner workings. After all, if we can all DIY then how will they profit. The proprietary mindset requires mass ignorance to make money.
But once an enterprising geek, hacker or techno-whiz decodes the mumbo-jumbo and simplifies it for others to use, doesn't his solution become his intellectual property? IP that he or she should be allowed to distribute as he or she sees fit?
And how did these guys get to be CEO and President when they write like this. Common errors but someone who's carreer depends heavily on communication should know better.
Any professional and serious developer will understand the following:
The article says exactly the following...
But according to DiGiorgio, who in an interview said he has serviced automated control systems on Navy ships for the past 26 years, the NT operating system is the source of the Yorktown's computer problems. NT applications aboard the Yorktown provide damage control, run the ship's control center on the bridge, monitor the engines and navigate the ship when under way.
"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said.
Pacific and Atlantic fleets in March 1997 selected NT 4.0 as the standard OS for both networks and PCs as part of the Navy's Information Technology for the 21st Century initiative. Current guidance approved by the Navy's chief information officer calls for all new applications to run under NT.
Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office, said there have been numerous software failures associated with NT aboard the Yorktown.
"Refining that is an ongoing process," Redman said. "Unix is a better system for control of equipment and machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT."...
The Yorktown has been towed into port several times because of the systems failures, he said.
"Because of politics, some things are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do, like Windows NT," Redman said. "If it were up to me I probably would not have used Windows NT in this particular application. If we used Unix, we would have a system that has less of a tendency to go down."
Although Unix is more reliable, Redman said, NT may become more reliable with time.
If you believe that a guy with 26 years of control system experience knows what he's talking about then you must agree that NT caused the failures.
Or if you think that a man who's achieved the position of deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office must have some technical knowledge of computer operating system, then you should probably conclude that NT caused the problems.
Or you could continue to play devil's advocate for the fun of appearing impartial and blame the "inept journalist". Whatever floats your boat.
How did a group of guys that put out the Garage Days ep (specifically the controversial Green Hell) end up acting so suit-like. This is just another example of "blame the tool" mentality gone awry.
Although I agree that distributing bootleg copyrighted material is a violation of the agreement that the original purchaser made by making the purchase, I don't see how Napster can be blamed. It analogous to suing a city because I got rear ended. After all if they hadn't provided the street then it never would have happened.
Additionally we have to consider the actual financial impact on this particular group of millionaires. They have a fairly large calalog of music and anyone likely to buy a Metallica album is probably going to make the purchase even after they find their favorite singles with Napster or one of its imitators. Mp3 format still requires a PC or some special hardware and burning CD's is still not mainstream enough to believe that people are going to be using bootlegged media in more traditional settings like their cars and living rooms. Combine that with the inconvenience of downloading a 5 minute song with the 56k modems that most of us still connect to the internet with and the $12 or $13 doesn't seem so bad.
Frankly I think that the ability of Napster users to check out a few singles on line probably has a positive financial effect on artists, profit hungry or otherwise.
On his photonet site Philip has an article on Using CVS for Web Development. I haven't read it but I have read his Guide to Web Publishing and if that is any indication you'd be wise to follow his advice.
What you want is atomicity. However, rollback sort of goes hand in hand with it. If you try to group together a select and a delete from one table with an insert into another table and your insert should fail for any reason, the dbms must roll back the select and the delete. While I agree that transactions (atomicity) would be nice the developers will need to implement at least an internal rollback mechanism in order for it to work. I'm sure it's been mentioned here already but do check out PHOTO.NET. Philip explains it all and he's funny too.
I have recently gone through several hosting companies. I started with pagecreator and finally had to leave because they couldn't administer their mysql server well enough for me to be able to create tables in my own databases. I moved on to cihost just before their dns servers died. I gave them the benefit of the doubt for a while but the last straw was when I was finally able to log in again only to find my home directory gone and them with no backup. Both of these companies gave me a hard time getting my credit card reimbursed when I cancelled even though I was withing the trial period. I have since settled on phpwebhosting and am very happy with the service. Their online sign up is great. You simply fill out the form and they create your account automatically. You instantly have a mysql database with the same name as your username which you log into with your selected password. Within 10 minutes of signing up you can log into http://yourname.phpwebhosting.com which will always be available in case you opt not to get your own domain. They transferred my domain for me within 3 days. You can pay month to month or anually which gives you a small discount. Storage and bandwidth are unlimited and the whole package is only $9.95/month. My site is still very much a work in progress so I can't comment on performance but I recently ftp'd all the packages required to install linux from scratch from all over the web to my directory on their server and then down to my local machine and was very happy with the speed in downloading 145MB. Suffice it to say that I'm pleased with the service.
Arnold from "Happy Days"?
Things die. That's just how it goes. It's unfortunate that a fashion trend should lead to an extinction but like it or not human beings are just another part of the global ecosystem. Nature has taken it's course and the system has spent the past 79 years adapting to the loss of Huia bird. Any change that humans deliberately make now will throw a heavy wrench into the works of the delicate eco-balance.
Many of us in the technical community are so enthusiastic over the miraculous results that we lose sight of the results of our actions. The far reaching effects on systems like the global eco-system are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict. It is a far different thing to prevent the slaughter of a species than to revive one long since gone.
The same is true for many fields of science. As medical science extends the life expectancy of humans and we continue to pop out offspring at an ever increasing rate, what will happen to our resources? Where will we all live? What do Huia birds feed on primarily? How has the comunity of Huia food bugs adapted to the extinction of the birds? What else feeds on Huia food bugs? What will happen if the Huia returns?
It really is about survival of the fittest. Just be happy that you're among the most fit to survive.
I've tried Front Page 98, Dreamweaver, and Hotmetal. Hotmetal offers the most flexiblity of any of these and has a great accessibility checker that evaluates your code and tells you what features you have used that may not be renderable on certain browsers. It has three different editing modes. The common WYSIWYG, a great context senstive text mode, and a tags on WYSIWYG mode. In tags on mode you see small graphical representations of your html tags in the WYSIWYG display. This allows you to easily grab a tag and modify attributes or move it to another section of the document. Also, unlike Frontpage and Dreamweaver, Hotmetal doesn't insert any elements that you don't ask for. (try inserting a horizontal rule in Frontpage, you get a leading and following paragraph tag). SoftQuad also offers free updates to the rules files which allows you to update the html checker to the latest standard while still maintaining compatibility with the lowest level browser that you choose. It supports CSS in a convenient way (although it could be a little smarter) and comes packaged with a huge collection of media which SoftQuad calls "assets". You get many customizable javascripts, applets, animated gifs and more. It also comes with Unlead PhotoImpact and Unlead gif Animator. Plus you get a nice little server on which you can test your pages locally. The editing environment also provides nice site management and publishing features. Can you tell that I like it?
Way to call a spade a spade. I have never been able to wrap my mind around such backward thinking. I know that many of us go through a stage in our college years when we may believe that marxist ideas are good ones. Then most of us grow out of it and finally we become productive because we are MOTIVATED (financially) to do so.
This article fails to make a very important distinction between the consumer products that result from ideas and knowledge and the ideas and knowledge themselves. The idea of intellectual property in no way implies that the creator of mental products is exempt from competition. It only implies that he not be required to educate his potential competitors. The same is true of any craft. A master carpenter can train an apprentice in his art but is not required to do so. So although a would be competitor can examine the end product and imitate its features, he is not entitled to information about the process by which it is created.
Granted one of the nice things about the open source movement that is afoot is that we all can learn from superior programmers. However, I for one am more interested in the quality of the end product than in the process used to create it. If someone hords their own knowledge and manages to create a superior product then I'll choose on product merit, not philosophy.
This is simple capitalism. Knowledge is the basis of ideas and knowledge adds value to the professional person.
I don't care what anyone else does but unless they do what I do they're nuts. Get SuSE 6.0 and upgrade KDE. Just kidding. It's just nice to know that you can just download any package and run it no matter what distro the author is using. Now if only the license is strong enough to resisty the babble of the US court system we can continue to have standards.
Whoa!!!
Did anyone see that joke go by?
Some geeks tend to be so literal minded.