This decision will undoubtably be revisited when two corporations wind up battling over the thoughts of a single ex-employee. Imagine that Mr. Brown had his idea, then worked at HP, and then moved to IBM. Both could then lay claim to the knowledge in his head and neither (based on this case) could demonstrate a greater claim.
Unfortunately, that will be unlikely to benefit Mr. Brown or anyone else that has ever been in a similar situation.
Frankly, much of this is re-inventing the wheel. The issue isn't so much journaling or other standard features - its making the file-system more accesible for both end users and application programmers.
The filesystem in BeOS made many applications virtually obsolete. Managing MP3s, photos - even email was trivial using its standard file manager. Any mime-type could be assigned a set of default attributes which were then indexed (in real time) and could be searched on.
Searches could be saved and were updated in real time - thus the same search for any mail from a collegue over the past 5 years that might take minutes in Outlook, was instanteous merely using Be's file browser.
If the open source movement wants to look forward, it should look beyond MS and Apple to the real innovators (the once that get crushed by Microsoft before ever becoming a threat.)
It strikes me that you could reverse the words "proprietary" and "open" throughout the entire screed and it would make as much sense.
It seems highly unlikely that the programmers that wrote Windows NT did so without references to UNIX, books on UNIX, or other materials. It seems even less likely that they had never worked on UNIX machines. Yet our friend would give them a pass because their source is closed...
I have a Brother MFC-8420, its a $400 laser printer/sheet-fed copier/scanner/printer. It comes with PaperPort software (which you need to upgrade to PDF capabality.) I use it to scan journal articles, notes and bills and it does a great job.
You absolutely aren't going to find a solution under $500 that does turn you into 10c/hour slave.
Big ad inserted in the column advertising a sub-side of the authors site called FreeVBCode.net
Welcome to FreeVbCode.Com, the place on the Web for the highest quality, free visual basic code. Currently, there are 2896 code examples and articles on this site. New code is added every day. Be sure to submit your code for inclusion.
That sure looks like safe, high quality stuff to me!
You used to be able to download a Boingo server and become a node. In exchange you were able to roam across their WiFi network. I assume they dropped it because it didn't work financially.
If I'm in the airport on business, and I can have complete access to my email, the web and the company's VPN - then its worth a lot more than $10 an hour. My company will cheerfully pay $0 for an extra hour of my time. If I'm on a consulting gig then I can bill for an extra hour of work. Its a no brainer.
For friends who do primarily consulting work and don't maintain an office, $10 an hour isn't a bad price to pay for a place to sit, work, have a cup of coffee and use have high speed internet access. I can't quite see McDonalds as a player, but Starbucks certainly is.
On the other hand, would I pay an extra $10 along with my $1.50 for a coffee so that I could surf the net -- just 'cuz I happened to have my notebook with me? Of course not.
Don't compare net access to entertainment - its a utility and its value can be substantially higher, or lower, depending on the individual's needs.
The fact that you are student shouldn't affect how much to expect to get paid, but it will affect how the prospective employer sees your time.
Students aren't generally used to contract work, focusing in on a single task for a whole day, tracking time and expenses etc. You shouldn't worry about this, and the employer is going to doubt that you will want to learn.
Not knowing you, they may also be concerned about what sort of bills they may wind up seeing - they don't know anything about your productivity, how well you can implement certain tasks etc.
Instead, offer them a set price to implement the features they need. If you continue to work for them, occasionally you'll be over, occasionally under and usually it will work out. It frees you from accounting, and builds faith from the employer and in the end will give you more freedom.
Its interesting that other professions actually have a duty to inform others of their vulnarability - while in IT you can be punished for it.
As a physician, if I find that a patient presents a danger to another person (for example, a man has a psychotic break and intends to kill his wife), I have a legal and ethical obligation to inform that person (whom I have never met.) If I fail to do so, I can be thrown in jail.
Its not hard to envision a future scenario in information security where one could have legal obligations both to inform and _not_ inform -- thus finding a security hole would guarentee punishment no matter the road taken.
HotMail allows you to programatically send email via your accout. Holy Shit! My god, if someone had only though of this sooner! Oh wait - its called SMTP...
Yes, this means that spammers can create free accounts, instead of having to bay to create one that supports SMTP, but the difference is trivial. Especially since spammers already known how to script web submissions via HotMail.
This really isn't about SCO lawsuit - SCO has enough cash in the bank to pursue it.
Microsoft recently came the realization that one of their products "Services for Unix" wasn't licensed according to their new aggressive IP stance - ie, anything that is Open Source exposes you to liability and needs to be avoided.
Purportedly, the product derives code from BSD. Rewriting the code would remove the copyright issues, but not the underlying IP issues that Microsoft is sowing FUD about.
So the only solution is to push their liability onto someone else - ie, SCO. SCO now claims ownership for Unix's IP and gives Microsoft cover. Microsoft can now use IP issues to attack mainframe *Nix -> Linux/BSD migration and pose Windows Server as a fully IP safe alternative. The SCO lawsuit is just icing on the cake.
Given that the Klez worm doesn't forge its return addresses, that means the poster was infected with the worm - at the very least it should be cause for embaressment.
I'm a physician (in addition to being a part owner of tech company) - the average working hours for a young MD is 90-100. A number of studies have shown that concentration and performance decline appreciably. One study show a positive relationship between number of hours of work and number of automobile accidents.
Whether this is applicable to other fields is debatable - but if you were to apply it anywhere, programming would probably be a good place to start. That said, most of my employees work 60-70 hours a week. The difference is they pick their hours, and obviously infrequently work more that 15 in a row (during training, physicians routinely work 36+ hours in the hospital.)
Actually, its a perfect analogy for distributed computing. Computers don't use 100% of their CPU at any given time, people don't use 100% of their brain at any moment in time.
Usually its a bad, analogy, but this time its actually appropriate.
Not that I'm a fan of MS's security, but the null password was fixed (literally) years ago. SQL Server 2000 requires a password for the sa account when you set it up. You can override it if you really want, but thats not MS's fault.
... how fast everyone forgets that Microsoft hasn't always had a near monopoly on the browser.
When RealNames was founded, Netscape still held a hefty chunk of the market, and there were still others chomping at the bit to get a share. RealNames had a browser plug-in for Netscape and plans to get themselves integrated into all the browsers (whether this was good for the 'net or not is a different subject.)
Teare's point is that Microsoft could bitch-slap them around because there was no longer competition. If MS had only half the market share, they couldn't dump RealNames and replace it with their own version since the rest of the browser makers wouldn't go along.
With the demise of Netscape, Microsoft no longer had any reason to continue to do business with RealNames. Nor do they have any reason to do business with any other company that makes a product that could potentially become a standard.
This is a _classic_ example of why Microsoft's monopoly supresses innovation and growth -- classic in the sense you can never, ever prove the negative theorem that MS caused something not to succeed. Would these guys have been succesfull in a fair market? Maybe, maybe not. Would Netscape? Maybe, maybe not (although even the angriest Slashdotters are starting to forget the actually timelines and buy into MS revisionist history.) Microsoft will always point to these examples and say "not the best product and management screwed up a few times - don't blame the fact we have a monopoly for putting them out of business."
Its this sort of subtle effect that MS's monopoly has on the market, and the one we are most likely to overlook - yet in the long run its the one that will do the most damage.
My god - Microsoft really did it. They pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. Netscape actually made money selling browsers - that was their friggin' business. Microsoft gave away IE (called "product dumping" when done by the Japanese) and claimed that Netscape's browser was "free". This was bullshit - MS managed to confuse the press and hell of a lot of savvy people and get them to believe that because a product was available for download (or available at no charge for education use) that it was "free."
Netscape had a viable business selling Navigator - but we'll never know how far they would have gotten because NS acted in a flagrently anticompetitive way,
Any for the record, I payed $40 for Navigator 3.0.
10 years ago I was a hot shot programmer who was as talented as all the older guys - and I couldn't figure out why someone else with the same skills could be more valuable.
Guess what? Years later I'm much better at the same sort of things, yet my skills are rustier.
Real experience is invaluable - that means being on the job for several years, learning how to make decisions, how to work with all sorts of people, how to get things done etc etc.
If I was hiring (and I am, oddly enough), I'd be really unlikely to hire someone without real world experience, unless they were a genius. Given we seem to be all out of geniuses this year, I'm sticking to people who were hot shots 5 years ago, and are now great tech people with maturity and experience.
Basically, the Palm cradle will fry certain serial port hardware. It happened to a co-worker of mine and it took _long_ time on the phone with both Dell and Palm before an engineer at Palm said "oh, that problem.... " and blamed the fry-age on Dell.
Its a real problem, and Palm knew about it.
I haven't actually played with Passport, but I implmentented and used the original version (firefly) that Microsoft bought several years ago. At the very least, the original was designed to protect your privacy, and member web sites couldn't get at _any_ of your data without your explicit permission (even your username.)
Basically firefly stored profile information in a central database. A new user a member web site could enter their firefly username and password and instruct the site to retrieve their information from the central server. The member site would get back only data that the user had previouslly specified to be shared (and this is where the P3P stuff started to come in, firefly met Microsoft and world domination was engendered.)
The member site would then be able to synchronize certain subscribed data with the central server.
As someone who runs a site with a half million registered users, I can tell you that a) I was pretty comfortable pushing ahead with firefly, and b) there's no way in hell I could ask my users to make there information available to Microsoft. Firefly provided an authentication and data storage service - Microsoft runs competing web services, advertising, software sales etc etc etc. Even if I trusted them, I don't think my users would.
Anyway, there _is_ a place for a trusted third-party system. If Yahoo was smart, they would be rolling something like this out - mass matters and they are probably the only ones with enough existing mass to counter MS.
Notice the closest we come to any hard data in this article is a "preliminary study" - a study that wasn't randomized, blinded or controled (like a lot of Japanese medical research, but thats a different issue.)
The rest of the article is hyberbole and conjecture -- but ends with a comment from the only expert cited in the article that in reality says the exact opposite from the thesis of the article (people are forgetting because they are storing too much crap that should be externally stored.)
This is simple journalistic sensationalism. It has no place here.
Slashdot Mirror
This decision will undoubtably be revisited when two corporations wind up battling over the thoughts of a single ex-employee. Imagine that Mr. Brown had his idea, then worked at HP, and then moved to IBM. Both could then lay claim to the knowledge in his head and neither (based on this case) could demonstrate a greater claim.
Unfortunately, that will be unlikely to benefit Mr. Brown or anyone else that has ever been in a similar situation.
Frankly, much of this is re-inventing the wheel. The issue isn't so much journaling or other standard features - its making the file-system more accesible for both end users and application programmers.
The filesystem in BeOS made many applications virtually obsolete. Managing MP3s, photos - even email was trivial using its standard file manager. Any mime-type could be assigned a set of default attributes which were then indexed (in real time) and could be searched on.
Searches could be saved and were updated in real time - thus the same search for any mail from a collegue over the past 5 years that might take minutes in Outlook, was instanteous merely using Be's file browser.
If the open source movement wants to look forward, it should look beyond MS and Apple to the real innovators (the once that get crushed by Microsoft before ever becoming a threat.)
It strikes me that you could reverse the words "proprietary" and "open" throughout the entire screed and it would make as much sense.
...
It seems highly unlikely that the programmers that wrote Windows NT did so without references to UNIX, books on UNIX, or other materials. It seems even less likely that they had never worked on UNIX machines. Yet our friend would give them a pass because their source is closed
I have a Brother MFC-8420, its a $400 laser printer/sheet-fed copier/scanner/printer. It comes with PaperPort software (which you need to upgrade to PDF capabality.) I use it to scan journal articles, notes and bills and it does a great job.
You absolutely aren't going to find a solution under $500 that does turn you into 10c/hour slave.
Big ad inserted in the column advertising a sub-side of the authors site called FreeVBCode.net
Welcome to FreeVbCode.Com, the place on the Web for the highest quality, free visual basic code. Currently, there are 2896 code examples and articles on this site. New code is added every day. Be sure to submit your code for inclusion.
That sure looks like safe, high quality stuff to me!
You used to be able to download a Boingo server and become a node. In exchange you were able to roam across their WiFi network. I assume they dropped it because it didn't work financially.
Here in Massachusetts, most of the cop cars have notebooks mounted to the dash.
Will California cops have to arrest themselves?
The question is to whom.
If I'm in the airport on business, and I can have complete access to my email, the web and the company's VPN - then its worth a lot more than $10 an hour. My company will cheerfully pay $0 for an extra hour of my time. If I'm on a consulting gig then I can bill for an extra hour of work. Its a no brainer.
For friends who do primarily consulting work and don't maintain an office, $10 an hour isn't a bad price to pay for a place to sit, work, have a cup of coffee and use have high speed internet access. I can't quite see McDonalds as a player, but Starbucks certainly is.
On the other hand, would I pay an extra $10 along with my $1.50 for a coffee so that I could surf the net -- just 'cuz I happened to have my notebook with me? Of course not.
Don't compare net access to entertainment - its a utility and its value can be substantially higher, or lower, depending on the individual's needs.
'nuf said.
... the NY Times reports ...
Its like a game of telephone. Problem is that Google hasn't actually rejected the offer, and there is no new news since the original NY TImes article.
The fact that you are student shouldn't affect how much to expect to get paid, but it will affect how the prospective employer sees your time.
...
Students aren't generally used to contract work, focusing in on a single task for a whole day, tracking time and expenses etc. You shouldn't worry about this, and the employer is going to doubt that you will want to learn.
Not knowing you, they may also be concerned about what sort of bills they may wind up seeing - they don't know anything about your productivity, how well you can implement certain tasks etc.
Instead, offer them a set price to implement the features they need. If you continue to work for them, occasionally you'll be over, occasionally under and usually it will work out. It frees you from accounting, and builds faith from the employer and in the end will give you more freedom.
2c from someone who hires folks like you
Oh my god!!!! Google keeps web server logs.
....
OH MY F#@*&*(@# GOD! Somebody call John Ashcroft!
Better keep this quiet, other companies might start keeping server logs as well
Its interesting that other professions actually have a duty to inform others of their vulnarability - while in IT you can be punished for it.
As a physician, if I find that a patient presents a danger to another person (for example, a man has a psychotic break and intends to kill his wife), I have a legal and ethical obligation to inform that person (whom I have never met.) If I fail to do so, I can be thrown in jail.
Its not hard to envision a future scenario in information security where one could have legal obligations both to inform and _not_ inform -- thus finding a security hole would guarentee punishment no matter the road taken.
Nor an exploit.
...
HotMail allows you to programatically send email via your accout. Holy Shit! My god, if someone had only though of this sooner! Oh wait - its called SMTP
Yes, this means that spammers can create free accounts, instead of having to bay to create one that supports SMTP, but the difference is trivial.
Especially since spammers already known how to script web submissions via HotMail.
This really isn't about SCO lawsuit - SCO has enough cash in the bank to pursue it.
Microsoft recently came the realization that one of their products "Services for Unix" wasn't licensed according to their new aggressive IP stance - ie, anything that is Open Source exposes you to liability and needs to be avoided.
Purportedly, the product derives code from BSD. Rewriting the code would remove the copyright issues, but not the underlying IP issues that Microsoft is sowing FUD about.
So the only solution is to push their liability onto someone else - ie, SCO. SCO now claims ownership for Unix's IP and gives Microsoft cover. Microsoft can now use IP issues to attack mainframe *Nix -> Linux/BSD migration and pose Windows Server as a fully IP safe alternative. The SCO lawsuit is just icing on the cake.
Given that the Klez worm doesn't forge its return addresses, that means the poster was infected with the worm - at the very least it should be cause for embaressment.
I'm a physician (in addition to being a part owner of tech company) - the average working hours for a young MD is 90-100. A number of studies have shown that concentration and performance decline appreciably. One study show a positive relationship between number of hours of work and number of automobile accidents.
Whether this is applicable to other fields is debatable - but if you were to apply it anywhere, programming would probably be a good place to start. That said, most of my employees work 60-70 hours a week. The difference is they pick their hours, and obviously infrequently work more that 15 in a row (during training, physicians routinely work 36+ hours in the hospital.)
Actually, its a perfect analogy for distributed computing. Computers don't use 100% of their CPU at any given time, people don't use 100% of their brain at any moment in time.
Usually its a bad, analogy, but this time its actually appropriate.
Not that I'm a fan of MS's security, but the null password was fixed (literally) years ago. SQL Server 2000 requires a password for the sa account when you set it up. You can override it if you really want, but thats not MS's fault.
- N
... how fast everyone forgets that Microsoft hasn't always had a near monopoly on the browser.
When RealNames was founded, Netscape still held a hefty chunk of the market, and there were still others chomping at the bit to get a share. RealNames had a browser plug-in for Netscape and plans to get themselves integrated into all the browsers (whether this was good for the 'net or not is a different subject.)
Teare's point is that Microsoft could bitch-slap them around because there was no longer competition. If MS had only half the market share, they couldn't dump RealNames and replace it with their own version since the rest of the browser makers wouldn't go along.
With the demise of Netscape, Microsoft no longer had any reason to continue to do business with RealNames. Nor do they have any reason to do business with any other company that makes a product that could potentially become a standard.
This is a _classic_ example of why Microsoft's monopoly supresses innovation and growth -- classic in the sense you can never, ever prove the negative theorem that MS caused something not to succeed. Would these guys have been succesfull in a fair market? Maybe, maybe not. Would Netscape? Maybe, maybe not (although even the angriest Slashdotters are starting to forget the actually timelines and buy into MS revisionist history.) Microsoft will always point to these examples and say "not the best product and management screwed up a few times - don't blame the fact we have a monopoly for putting them out of business."
Its this sort of subtle effect that MS's monopoly has on the market, and the one we are most likely to overlook - yet in the long run its the one that will do the most damage.
No one ever made any money selling browsers??!!?
My god - Microsoft really did it. They pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. Netscape actually made money selling browsers - that was their friggin' business. Microsoft gave away IE (called "product dumping" when done by the Japanese) and claimed that Netscape's browser was "free". This was bullshit - MS managed to confuse the press and hell of a lot of savvy people and get them to believe that because a product was available for download (or available at no charge for education use) that it was "free."
Netscape had a viable business selling Navigator - but we'll never know how far they would have gotten because NS acted in a flagrently anticompetitive way,
Any for the record, I payed $40 for Navigator 3.0.
10 years ago I was a hot shot programmer who was as talented as all the older guys - and I couldn't figure out why someone else with the same skills could be more valuable.
Guess what? Years later I'm much better at the same sort of things, yet my skills are rustier.
Real experience is invaluable - that means being on the job for several years, learning how to make decisions, how to work with all sorts of people, how to get things done etc etc.
If I was hiring (and I am, oddly enough), I'd be really unlikely to hire someone without real world experience, unless they were a genius. Given we seem to be all out of geniuses this year, I'm sticking to people who were hot shots 5 years ago, and are now great tech people with maturity and experience.
Funny, huh?
Basically, the Palm cradle will fry certain serial port hardware. It happened to a co-worker of mine and it took _long_ time on the phone with both Dell and Palm before an engineer at Palm said "oh, that problem .... " and blamed the fry-age on Dell.
Its a real problem, and Palm knew about it.
I haven't actually played with Passport, but I implmentented and used the original version (firefly) that Microsoft bought several years ago. At the very least, the original was designed to protect your privacy, and member web sites couldn't get at _any_ of your data without your explicit permission (even your username.)
Basically firefly stored profile information in a central database. A new user a member web site could enter their firefly username and password and instruct the site to retrieve their information from the central server. The member site would get back only data that the user had previouslly specified to be shared (and this is where the P3P stuff started to come in, firefly met Microsoft and world domination was engendered.)
The member site would then be able to synchronize certain subscribed data with the central server.
As someone who runs a site with a half million registered users, I can tell you that a) I was pretty comfortable pushing ahead with firefly, and b) there's no way in hell I could ask my users to make there information available to Microsoft. Firefly provided an authentication and data storage service - Microsoft runs competing web services, advertising, software sales etc etc etc. Even if I trusted them, I don't think my users would.
Anyway, there _is_ a place for a trusted third-party system. If Yahoo was smart, they would be rolling something like this out - mass matters and they are probably the only ones with enough existing mass to counter MS.
Notice the closest we come to any hard data in this article is a "preliminary study" - a study that wasn't randomized, blinded or controled (like a lot of Japanese medical research, but thats a different issue.)
The rest of the article is hyberbole and conjecture -- but ends with a comment from the only expert cited in the article that in reality says the exact opposite from the thesis of the article (people are forgetting because they are storing too much crap that should be externally stored.)
This is simple journalistic sensationalism. It has no place here.