Sorry, the words "hard" and "soft" do not describe the metals used in tooling. They describe how two different types of punch press machines perform their function.
"Hard" tooling of sheet metals means making two large pieces of metal, one with a bunch of holes and the other with a matched set of punches. They operate by stamping a blank sheet of metal in a single stroke and producing an entire pierced and formed part. The press can stamp a high quality part out in seconds. Thus, the savings when making a large run of parts.
"Soft" means that the punches are not necessarily shaped like the holes in the case. They're little "nibbling" tools that a computer drives around like a pair of scissors in the shape of the desired holes. The press has to spend lots of time driving the tool bits around the sheet metal. Thus, the expense when making a large run of parts.
Making a custom punch and die to stamp a part out of a sheet takes a craftsman a long time, and a lot of effort. Thus, the high startup expense. Changes are also expensive. You can't just slide a set of holes around a big chunk of metal.
Nothing needs to be "made" for a soft tooling setup. You buy a set of preformed tool bits, load them into the computer controlled punch, and it starts cutting parts now. Thus, the low startup expense. And changes are quick and easy. CNC machines are perfect for making test parts, or keeping production up when the punch and die are being serviced.
The quality difference between "soft" and "hard" results from the nibbling process used in soft tooling. Nibbling does not make a "clean" cut. Think of it as the difference between a paper cutter making one quick, long straight cut while scissors make many slow, small jagged cuts.
The "hard" vs. "soft" decision is usually an economic gamble. Will you make so many parts that investing thousands of dollars in a custom punch and die will be cheaper than investing minutes per piece in a CNC machine?
[ You might just be perpetrating a clever troll, or you might just be misinformed. Sorry in advance if I spoiled any trolling... ]
Although I suppose I should admit to being somewhat grateful to them for taking the anti-consumer backlash DRM bullet for the industry. Without their infecting thousands and thousands of boxes with C-Dilla, the public might not have known just how evil DRM will be.
Of course, that's like thanking the burglars who drove you to install an alarm system that protected you from a devastating fire; or thanking the muggers who beat you up and put you in the hospital where the doctors incidentally went on to discover and treat a cancer.
I doubt seriously we will see Microsoft similarly apologize for the Trusted Computing platform. (At least not until that one comedian is thanking our new penguin-loving overlords.)
[ This is an exact copy of the letter I sent them (minus my last name.) You can imagine that TaxCut is the place to look for my money next year, although I have to admit I was somewhat surprised by their apology. ]
I am much less than unlikely to use TurboTax next year. The reason is the secretive, unasked-for and unwanted installation of C-Dilla. I AM NOT A THIEF, NOR DO I STEAL OR SHARE SOFTWARE. Yet you installed not only a rent-a-cop on my computer, but you included a parole officer. I resent the implication so much that I would spit on the screen if I thought it would help.
You violated a cardinal rule of customer relationships. You didn't trust me.
I don't care if you apologize. I don't care if it now magically uninstalls itself. I don't care if you send me coupons, rebates, or offer me free downloads and upgrades for life. I would rather do my books and taxes manually than spend one more nickel on a product bearing the Intuit taint.
Please feel free to post my comments on your company's bulletin boards and in the employee cafeteria. Consider it my final gift to you. I think it would be a service to all your employees to see how some customers react when you treat them as thieves. Perhaps they'll learn something before you produce next year's product, if you're still in business.
Most Sincerely, John Xxxx Former Customer
Re:GIMP ain't half bad
on
GIMP goes SVG
·
· Score: 1
Thank you for that link!!!
Excellent resource!
GUIs are about organization
on
GIMP goes SVG
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
My first exposure to "decent" quality paint programs was Photoshop LE (packaged free with a scanner.) I found the GUI confusing.
I then installed The GIMP. I found its GUI confusing.
I then bought Paint Shop Pro on the recommendation of a digital photography book I respected. Again, I found the GUI confusing, but at least the book got me started on what I should be looking for. I think if I had read such a book about Photoshop earlier I'd probably be a Photoshop fan right now.
I now switch back and forth between The GIMP and Paint Shop Pro. The GIMP does some things better (script-fu is really slick) and PSP does some things better (scratch and dust repair, contrast enhancement.) But I still have to hunt through confusing menus, pop-up toolbar things, etc. I've simply come to expect that any powerful photo editing program is going to have a confusing interface, and that any program is going to take an investment of time to learn. Paint Shop Pro has some hand-holding tutorials that I found to be excellent at getting me up to speed. I'm sure these things exist for the other programs as well.
Anyway, it's all still easier than the old days with a camelhair brush and hand spotting negatives and prints.
Rendering (in Windows parlance) typically means "outputting to a display device." Once you've rendered the data, the only way to get it back out of a window like that is with some really clever GDI tricks. If they're not operated by a person, rendering would be a costly extra step. Why spend the time downloading IMG tags for doubleclick, for example? I seriously doubt they're going to that effort.
The SHDocVwCtl COM objects provide an InternetExplorer interface for operating IE from within a program. They can request a URL and retrieve it as a Document. They can get tags and attributes from that Document automatically. But rendering the page would be counterproductive if a human isn't there to watch the screen.
I certainly believe you that they'd use the COM interface to IE. I am sure they examine the attributes of the tags coming back, looking for mailto: URIs. I also believe they'd look at the text surrounding every "@" sign or "mailto:" phrase they encounter, trying to simply determine whether or not they might be part of a valid email address. But I don't think they'd render, and I really don't think they'd execute javascript.
I forgot how illiterate spammers are; that they can't write their own socket programs and instead point'n'click VB calls to IE.
Even so, please tell me they don't actually render these pages they're fetching. Or are these things really designed to be "operated" by a person? Seems horribly inefficient for an industry based solely on volume.
Sorry, but that "don't munge" page is hopelessly outdated, and its advice is useless at best (although I have to admit being highly amused by the "if you munge your address then the terrorists have already won" attitude!)
Back when the 'net was young, and there was hope for stopping spam before it snowballed out of proportion, it was hoped that this naive "nip it in the bud" attitude might work. It hasn't. Spammers have proven as resilient as cockroaches, and more prolific.
Keep in mind who is paying for spamming: get-rich-quick losers. There's more than one born every minute. They're typically not successful, but there certainly are a lot of them. By the time one of them has realized they're not "getting rich quickly" and give it up, half a dozen more have started up their own "get rich quick" schemes.
Legislation, anti-spam hassling, RTBLs, threats, ISP cut-offs, they all serve to shut these fools down one at a time. But the population growth of fools far outpaces the ability to shut them up.
I agree that address munging "breaks" how things are supposed to work. The reality of spam dictates that many of us have given up how we want things to be, and instead deal with things as they are. I can't afford to fight every stinking spammer in my inbox, and those are the ones that have successfully run a couple of anti-spam gauntlets. Automated spam reporting tools proved useless to me years ago -- and now the anti-spam RTBL sites are busy collapsing. Bayesian filtering has been mostly effective for me so far, but I still find good mail in my spam box. Changing email addresses helped dramatically at home, but is not an option at work. So, if munging helps reduce the spam, it's just another useful tool in my kit. And if you think address munging prevents someone useful from contacting me, you simply have no idea of the depths of my apathy.
"Address harvesters" in this context are not people sitting in front of web browsers. They are programs, and they are not based on rendering engines such as Mozilla or IE. These programs are dedicated web crawlers that open sockets to web servers, pull in data, recognize a limited subset of tags that represent links to more pages, and attempt to perform character recognition on text strings that resemble valid email addresses. When they find text that looks like this: href="mailto:myaddress@myserver.dom" they've hit the jackpot. These programs don't execute javascript, they don't pull in IMG tags, they simply scan for text strings that smell like foo@bar.baz and follow links that might lead them to more addresses.
I have noticed that people do tend to forget that there are other schemes for harvesting addresses that have nothing to do with web page encoding or mailto: URIs.
One of the most productive sources of addresses for spammers are copies of chain letters. You've probably received some sent by well-meaning but clueless relatives. "Here's an ASCII snowball, throw it at your friends!!!" Your friend clicks "Forward", then clicks on every name in her address book. When a spammer gets a bonanza like this, they have not only a To: line containing all the entries in your friends' address book, but all the To: lines contained within that have survived a dozen forwardings.
Whats next? "This page left intentionally blank" in help files?
No, that they copyrighted.
Therefore, according to the DMCA, you should either sit there and wait for the Ashcroft SS to burst through your door, or cut a deal with the BSA in which you agree to pay $50 for every page on which you've ever read those words.
Damn, I quoted you. Forgive me, Ashcroft, for I have sinned... it has been $150 since my last copyright violation...
And at our house the phrase is "Google is the font of all knowledge." Google is also known as The One True Search Engine.
I agree about feeling guilty about not dragging my son to the library, but fortunately the schools still teach our kids to hit the "media center" (formerly known as the school library) to answer their questions.
Like the author of the original article, I am still awestruck when I realize just how net-dependent I have become. I've been in the library maybe a half-dozen times since 1996, mostly for meetings with other people. Never for research. Of course, that might be because I head immediately for Barney Snowball instead of the library and buy the books, but still, The One True Search Engine is usually my first and only stop.
Under Linux you can get cheap diversity and very little administration overhead by running redundant servers under two different hardware architectures (Intel + PowerPC for instance). once the kernel has booted the administration of the two machines is virtual identical, but they might as well be from different planets as far as a worm is concerned.
While it will probably help slow the spread of worms, "diversity" is not a total guarantee.
I was looking at my Apache logs the other day, and for kicks was looking at a series of attacks from someone who still has Code Red (or Nimda, or one of those other stupid microsloth worms.) The worm itself launched over a dozen independent attacks, testing for many different vulnerabilities in the various versions of IIS.
If version X.Y of any application has a hole, it has a hole that could probably be exploited regardless of the platform beneath it. Buffer overruns don't go away magically simply by porting the code to PowerPC. Anyone able to exploit it on an Intel Linux server could probably muster up the code required to also exploit it on a PowerPC running OS X as well. A multi-pronged attack would be able to strike multiple platforms. Since we're talking broadband speeds for most of the problems these days, fat binary worms would go almost as unnoticed as the svelte single-platform worms.
This is, of course, the worst-case scenario. Most defacement hackers aren't going to go to the trouble of generating i386, PPC and SPARC fat-binary worms. But the biggest point of Geer & Co's* report was that a monoculture leads to national security issues. A well-funded, determined, malicious attacker (I hesitate to invoke the "T" word) intent on delivering an internationally crippling blow to the 'net might take the extra time to add exploits for many various platforms and OSes. The weaknesses inherent in a monoculture extend not just to OSes, but to applications as well.
Oh, I agree that this is absolutely the worst action they could have taken. The life cycle of their business flows pretty much like this: At any random corporation, members of the board hear "we need a computer security audit" from the stockholders (many of whome have recently been infected by Welchia.) Managers write "perform a security audit" on their checklists. They then ask their Senior Technical People With Clues (STPWC) to recommend firms who audit security. Technical people turn to places like comp.risks, slashdot, etc., which all figure into their mental balance sheet of companies to recommend. They then suggest the names they recognize as having good reputations.
@Stake just sold their reputation to Microsoft, lock, stock and barrel. If you need a "clean bill of health" security audit to hand to the shareholders and you're a 100% Microsoft shop, you now know where to find a friend: @Stake. If you're actively interested in security, rather than simply checking a box off on your manager's list, @Stake doesn't have any whuffie left.
My prediction is whatever is left of @stake after this fiasco will be purchased by Microsoft by assumption of debt, probably in the next two years or so.
@Stake has always looked good in the past. They sure looked brilliant this week when this paper came out. And now, it appears that all this time their talent was locked up inside their CTO. So they threw the baby out and kept the bathwater. They're not looking so good anymore.
Flip comments aside, many people's employment contracts stipulate "no negative comments about the company, and don't say negative things about anyone while publicly under the corporate banner. Violation is grounds for termination." And typically the higher you go in the company, the more restrictive the clauses become. You should check yours. I had to sign such a contract the last time I received a promotion.
Mr. Geer sat on that dais with a nametag reading "Dan Geer, CTO @Stake" and it certainly appears that he was speaking with the authority given a CTO of a company; it is quite obvious he was not invited just because he used to be a l33t h4x0R.
Remember, companies can not VIOLATE your right to free speech. You have the right to get on TV and shout "Company X sucks! Don't do business with Company X!" if you want. You can not be jailed for it. But they also have the right to fire you. You simply have to be willing to trade your voluntary employment contract with them to continue speaking.
[ Perhaps the most interesting part of this is the chilling side effect: might I get fired if I present this committee's article to my director? She's very pro-Microsoft... ]
Speak Freely is still around. The source is public domain. Feel free to keep using it forever; John just said you won't be be downloading it from fourmilab.ch after next Jan 15th.
His announcement was just a bit of drama to post a loud "you idiots are f'ing up the internet with NAT and firewalls!" I see this mostly as him sacrificing Speak Freely publically so hopefully people will think it's worth it to preserve some bit of p2p. I doubt it will do much good, but hey, if he's looking for an out, that's his prerogative too.
I've used Speak Freely on and off since 1995, but mostly off because of the firewall at work. I long wanted to have been able to offer vendors and others the ability to contact me directly over the network, but even when I approached the guy who was running our firewall he said "no way in Hell am I going to open up a port." Even back then he recognized the danger of letting unrequested inbound connections through the firewall.
Personally, I don't think it's strictly the fault of NATing; I think it's firewalling in general. I also think of the security issues that would arise if we weren't all cowering behind firewalls. Given the recent worming of the net, consider the damage that might have been done if Speak Freely were running by default on every installation of Windows XP. How many more security holes would have opened and closed? How many more worms would have propagated if ports 2074-2076 were left open by default?
I'm sure there was a lot of "I'm done with it" in his decision and that he may have been looking for an excuse, but he's right in that firewalls in general have long been the bane of peer-to-peer apps.
Anyway, I'll miss LWL. It reminded me a lot of the old days of ham radio.
A buddy is going in for his technician's test tomorrow, and just mentioned at lunch Wednesday that one of the licensing requirements is "no previous violations." That's the only one real concern here. And for most people, that's probably no big deal, but being a geek it might make you think before you transmit.
And he mentioned repeated flagrant violations can land you in some serious hot water. Fines, jail, etc. "So hey, let's be careful out there."
I live in Minnesota, and have had one hanging on my roof for the last 16 years. I just took it off two weeks ago when I repainted (it was for an old "wireless cable" system that folded ten years back. Somewhere around the 900 MHz range, as I recall.) It was in fine shape right up until the time I threw it the 25 feet to the ground, unlike the crappy Radio Shack TV yagi mounted on the same mast. I didn't examine its condition when I chucked it in the neighbor's dumpster, but the dumpster is still there for anyone who's interested...
Hmm... I can see my office tower from my roof, and it's about 15 miles... hmm...
Slashdot Mirror
To answer your question, stamping punches and dies are typically made from cold-working tool steels that are designed to be hardened.
"Hard" tooling of sheet metals means making two large pieces of metal, one with a bunch of holes and the other with a matched set of punches. They operate by stamping a blank sheet of metal in a single stroke and producing an entire pierced and formed part. The press can stamp a high quality part out in seconds. Thus, the savings when making a large run of parts.
"Soft" means that the punches are not necessarily shaped like the holes in the case. They're little "nibbling" tools that a computer drives around like a pair of scissors in the shape of the desired holes. The press has to spend lots of time driving the tool bits around the sheet metal. Thus, the expense when making a large run of parts.
Making a custom punch and die to stamp a part out of a sheet takes a craftsman a long time, and a lot of effort. Thus, the high startup expense. Changes are also expensive. You can't just slide a set of holes around a big chunk of metal.
Nothing needs to be "made" for a soft tooling setup. You buy a set of preformed tool bits, load them into the computer controlled punch, and it starts cutting parts now. Thus, the low startup expense. And changes are quick and easy. CNC machines are perfect for making test parts, or keeping production up when the punch and die are being serviced.
The quality difference between "soft" and "hard" results from the nibbling process used in soft tooling. Nibbling does not make a "clean" cut. Think of it as the difference between a paper cutter making one quick, long straight cut while scissors make many slow, small jagged cuts.
The "hard" vs. "soft" decision is usually an economic gamble. Will you make so many parts that investing thousands of dollars in a custom punch and die will be cheaper than investing minutes per piece in a CNC machine?
[ You might just be perpetrating a clever troll, or you might just be misinformed. Sorry in advance if I spoiled any trolling... ]
The "who" might be the hardware hacker, constantly adding and/or changing parts.
The "who" might be the device driver author, inserting and removing PCI cards.
The "who" might be a handicapped person with a lifting limitation.
The "who" might be a whole lot of people who might have a whole lot of valid reasons for wanting a lighter case.
And yes, The "Who" might also be the world's loudest rock band, but I wasn't going there first.
Anyway, just keep in mind: "Hell is Other People Posting to Slashdot."
As Statler said so eloquently to Ebeneezer Scrooge in The Muppets Christmas Carol, "Leave comedy to the bears!"
That review would have been more appropriate if it had been sarcastically commenting on anything but a comedy book. As it was, *pfft*. Nothing.
Although I suppose I should admit to being somewhat grateful to them for taking the anti-consumer backlash DRM bullet for the industry. Without their infecting thousands and thousands of boxes with C-Dilla, the public might not have known just how evil DRM will be.
Of course, that's like thanking the burglars who drove you to install an alarm system that protected you from a devastating fire; or thanking the muggers who beat you up and put you in the hospital where the doctors incidentally went on to discover and treat a cancer.
I doubt seriously we will see Microsoft similarly apologize for the Trusted Computing platform. (At least not until that one comedian is thanking our new penguin-loving overlords.)
[ This is an exact copy of the letter I sent them (minus my last name.) You can imagine that TaxCut is the place to look for my money next year, although I have to admit I was somewhat surprised by their apology. ]
I am much less than unlikely to use TurboTax next year. The reason is
the secretive, unasked-for and unwanted installation of C-Dilla. I AM
NOT A THIEF, NOR DO I STEAL OR SHARE SOFTWARE. Yet you installed not
only a rent-a-cop on my computer, but you included a parole officer. I
resent the implication so much that I would spit on the screen if I
thought it would help.
You violated a cardinal rule of customer relationships. You didn't
trust me.
I don't care if you apologize. I don't care if it now magically
uninstalls itself. I don't care if you send me coupons, rebates, or
offer me free downloads and upgrades for life. I would rather do my
books and taxes manually than spend one more nickel on a product bearing
the Intuit taint.
Please feel free to post my comments on your company's bulletin boards
and in the employee cafeteria. Consider it my final gift to you. I
think it would be a service to all your employees to see how some
customers react when you treat them as thieves. Perhaps they'll learn
something before you produce next year's product, if you're still in
business.
Most Sincerely,
John Xxxx
Former Customer
Excellent resource!
I then installed The GIMP. I found its GUI confusing.
I then bought Paint Shop Pro on the recommendation of a digital photography book I respected. Again, I found the GUI confusing, but at least the book got me started on what I should be looking for. I think if I had read such a book about Photoshop earlier I'd probably be a Photoshop fan right now.
I now switch back and forth between The GIMP and Paint Shop Pro. The GIMP does some things better (script-fu is really slick) and PSP does some things better (scratch and dust repair, contrast enhancement.) But I still have to hunt through confusing menus, pop-up toolbar things, etc. I've simply come to expect that any powerful photo editing program is going to have a confusing interface, and that any program is going to take an investment of time to learn. Paint Shop Pro has some hand-holding tutorials that I found to be excellent at getting me up to speed. I'm sure these things exist for the other programs as well.
Anyway, it's all still easier than the old days with a camelhair brush and hand spotting negatives and prints.
The SHDocVwCtl COM objects provide an InternetExplorer interface for operating IE from within a program. They can request a URL and retrieve it as a Document. They can get tags and attributes from that Document automatically. But rendering the page would be counterproductive if a human isn't there to watch the screen.
I certainly believe you that they'd use the COM interface to IE. I am sure they examine the attributes of the tags coming back, looking for mailto: URIs. I also believe they'd look at the text surrounding every "@" sign or "mailto:" phrase they encounter, trying to simply determine whether or not they might be part of a valid email address. But I don't think they'd render, and I really don't think they'd execute javascript.
I forgot how illiterate spammers are; that they can't write their own socket programs and instead point'n'click VB calls to IE.
Even so, please tell me they don't actually render these pages they're fetching. Or are these things really designed to be "operated" by a person? Seems horribly inefficient for an industry based solely on volume.
Back when the 'net was young, and there was hope for stopping spam before it snowballed out of proportion, it was hoped that this naive "nip it in the bud" attitude might work. It hasn't. Spammers have proven as resilient as cockroaches, and more prolific.
Keep in mind who is paying for spamming: get-rich-quick losers. There's more than one born every minute. They're typically not successful, but there certainly are a lot of them. By the time one of them has realized they're not "getting rich quickly" and give it up, half a dozen more have started up their own "get rich quick" schemes.
Legislation, anti-spam hassling, RTBLs, threats, ISP cut-offs, they all serve to shut these fools down one at a time. But the population growth of fools far outpaces the ability to shut them up.
I agree that address munging "breaks" how things are supposed to work. The reality of spam dictates that many of us have given up how we want things to be, and instead deal with things as they are. I can't afford to fight every stinking spammer in my inbox, and those are the ones that have successfully run a couple of anti-spam gauntlets. Automated spam reporting tools proved useless to me years ago -- and now the anti-spam RTBL sites are busy collapsing. Bayesian filtering has been mostly effective for me so far, but I still find good mail in my spam box. Changing email addresses helped dramatically at home, but is not an option at work. So, if munging helps reduce the spam, it's just another useful tool in my kit. And if you think address munging prevents someone useful from contacting me, you simply have no idea of the depths of my apathy.
I have noticed that people do tend to forget that there are other schemes for harvesting addresses that have nothing to do with web page encoding or mailto: URIs.
One of the most productive sources of addresses for spammers are copies of chain letters. You've probably received some sent by well-meaning but clueless relatives. "Here's an ASCII snowball, throw it at your friends!!!" Your friend clicks "Forward", then clicks on every name in her address book. When a spammer gets a bonanza like this, they have not only a To: line containing all the entries in your friends' address book, but all the To: lines contained within that have survived a dozen forwardings.
Where does this money go? Lawyers.
What business is congress in? Law.
Who runs one of the largest, best funded lobbying organizations? Trial lawyers.
And you want congress to shoot the horse they rode in on? Are you on drugz?
No, that they copyrighted.
Therefore, according to the DMCA, you should either sit there and wait for the Ashcroft SS to burst through your door, or cut a deal with the BSA in which you agree to pay $50 for every page on which you've ever read those words.
Damn, I quoted you. Forgive me, Ashcroft, for I have sinned ... it has been $150 since my last copyright violation ...
I agree about feeling guilty about not dragging my son to the library, but fortunately the schools still teach our kids to hit the "media center" (formerly known as the school library) to answer their questions.
Like the author of the original article, I am still awestruck when I realize just how net-dependent I have become. I've been in the library maybe a half-dozen times since 1996, mostly for meetings with other people. Never for research. Of course, that might be because I head immediately for Barney Snowball instead of the library and buy the books, but still, The One True Search Engine is usually my first and only stop.
While it will probably help slow the spread of worms, "diversity" is not a total guarantee.
I was looking at my Apache logs the other day, and for kicks was looking at a series of attacks from someone who still has Code Red (or Nimda, or one of those other stupid microsloth worms.) The worm itself launched over a dozen independent attacks, testing for many different vulnerabilities in the various versions of IIS.
If version X.Y of any application has a hole, it has a hole that could probably be exploited regardless of the platform beneath it. Buffer overruns don't go away magically simply by porting the code to PowerPC. Anyone able to exploit it on an Intel Linux server could probably muster up the code required to also exploit it on a PowerPC running OS X as well. A multi-pronged attack would be able to strike multiple platforms. Since we're talking broadband speeds for most of the problems these days, fat binary worms would go almost as unnoticed as the svelte single-platform worms.
This is, of course, the worst-case scenario. Most defacement hackers aren't going to go to the trouble of generating i386, PPC and SPARC fat-binary worms. But the biggest point of Geer & Co's* report was that a monoculture leads to national security issues. A well-funded, determined, malicious attacker (I hesitate to invoke the "T" word) intent on delivering an internationally crippling blow to the 'net might take the extra time to add exploits for many various platforms and OSes. The weaknesses inherent in a monoculture extend not just to OSes, but to applications as well.
[ * Tongue firmly planted in cheek here. ]
I never even heard of him before this /. story. At least now I know he exists.
Not that I'm going to rush out and buy his SPD (Shiny Plastic Disc), but they got his name out there.
@Stake just sold their reputation to Microsoft, lock, stock and barrel. If you need a "clean bill of health" security audit to hand to the shareholders and you're a 100% Microsoft shop, you now know where to find a friend: @Stake. If you're actively interested in security, rather than simply checking a box off on your manager's list, @Stake doesn't have any whuffie left.
My prediction is whatever is left of @stake after this fiasco will be purchased by Microsoft by assumption of debt, probably in the next two years or so.
@Stake has always looked good in the past. They sure looked brilliant this week when this paper came out. And now, it appears that all this time their talent was locked up inside their CTO. So they threw the baby out and kept the bathwater. They're not looking so good anymore.
We already are.
Flip comments aside, many people's employment contracts stipulate "no negative comments about the company, and don't say negative things about anyone while publicly under the corporate banner. Violation is grounds for termination." And typically the higher you go in the company, the more restrictive the clauses become. You should check yours. I had to sign such a contract the last time I received a promotion.
Mr. Geer sat on that dais with a nametag reading "Dan Geer, CTO @Stake" and it certainly appears that he was speaking with the authority given a CTO of a company; it is quite obvious he was not invited just because he used to be a l33t h4x0R.
Remember, companies can not VIOLATE your right to free speech. You have the right to get on TV and shout "Company X sucks! Don't do business with Company X!" if you want. You can not be jailed for it. But they also have the right to fire you. You simply have to be willing to trade your voluntary employment contract with them to continue speaking.
[ Perhaps the most interesting part of this is the chilling side effect: might I get fired if I present this committee's article to my director? She's very pro-Microsoft... ]
Oh, wait, sorry. Halliburton is only available for lease, not for sale. Guess you'll have to find your own damn voting machine.
His announcement was just a bit of drama to post a loud "you idiots are f'ing up the internet with NAT and firewalls!" I see this mostly as him sacrificing Speak Freely publically so hopefully people will think it's worth it to preserve some bit of p2p. I doubt it will do much good, but hey, if he's looking for an out, that's his prerogative too.
Personally, I don't think it's strictly the fault of NATing; I think it's firewalling in general. I also think of the security issues that would arise if we weren't all cowering behind firewalls. Given the recent worming of the net, consider the damage that might have been done if Speak Freely were running by default on every installation of Windows XP. How many more security holes would have opened and closed? How many more worms would have propagated if ports 2074-2076 were left open by default?
I'm sure there was a lot of "I'm done with it" in his decision and that he may have been looking for an excuse, but he's right in that firewalls in general have long been the bane of peer-to-peer apps.
Anyway, I'll miss LWL. It reminded me a lot of the old days of ham radio.
And he mentioned repeated flagrant violations can land you in some serious hot water. Fines, jail, etc. "So hey, let's be careful out there."
I live in Minnesota, and have had one hanging on my roof for the last 16 years. I just took it off two weeks ago when I repainted (it was for an old "wireless cable" system that folded ten years back. Somewhere around the 900 MHz range, as I recall.) It was in fine shape right up until the time I threw it the 25 feet to the ground, unlike the crappy Radio Shack TV yagi mounted on the same mast. I didn't examine its condition when I chucked it in the neighbor's dumpster, but the dumpster is still there for anyone who's interested...
Hmm... I can see my office tower from my roof, and it's about 15 miles ... hmm ...