Or a faxed signature, either one will do. If it works for pizza delivery it should work for money transfers.
Oh, and you could also block VOIP services from western union and what not until they will vouch for the identity of their users.
Anonimity on the 'real' phone network is much easier to get than on a VOIP phone, the 'IP' bit will take care of that quite nicely, as long as you can map back between a phone number at any given moment and an IP number.
It's a bit like a DHCP lease by a provider or a WIFI access point, if you know the timestamp and the ID used you should be able to work backwards to get more info out of the system.
pity I don't have mod points having already posted, but especially (A) is one of my pet peeves (and another one is that to download some minor package it wants to upgrade my whole bloody KDE over a modem)
After reading tfa I simply have to say this guy really gets it. And I've been saying this for years, I'll promote linux because I'd rather try than give up, but I feel it's a losing battle because of fragmentation.
There's strength in 'polymorphy', true, but *real* strength is in unity, not caring so much about you and your contribution to the grand plan but about the long term vision and it's high time - if not too late - that all these people pulling the oss wagon in 15 different directions (low estimate) start pulling it in the same direction or we'll be using windows 2009 one day... (or at least those who make a living programming).
It's all fun and games to debate one distro or another until you have a family to feed, and binary compatibility would go a long long way towards getting commercial vendors on board.
Oh, and for the real die hards: I'm a programmer, and if the price is right I don't give a damn about the source, as long as it works as advertised. If the source is available so much the better, but if all that happened is that if a corp goes out of business or abandons a piece of code that they'd open source it that would be more than enough for me.
I'd rather download a binary driver than the kernel sources to get one to compile for my kernel version, as if that should matter. Especially considering that I'm on dialup here.
Missing out on a micro kernel base for Linux was imho the biggest mistake ever made. Such an opportunity to start with a clean slate and all we end up with is a 60's os.
If he'd please be so kind as to put hard realtime into the kernel I'd personally kiss lt's ass...
transplanting from PHP to ASP is more then a little bit of work, Apache leaves IIS in the dust, so you need more hardware.
If I can't even get decent performance in the 'lab', and the tools don't let me tune the server to perform at least as good under BSD (or linux for that matter) then why bother throwing it in front of the lions ?
What happens in the open source world is something like this: Developer X is working on some project, needs a feature (say server-status in apache), adds it to the source, compiles and tests it until it works for him, submits the DIFF to the apache crew so he won't need to do it again next time he rebuilds the latest souces, it gets accepted, he feels good, they feel good, the product just got better. You try to get MS to include one of your 'improvements' or even a suggestion of one into IIS. Good luck:)
If you throw enough hardware at the problem it will eventually go away, I don't doubt that (and besides Ebay there are quite a few other large companies that can 'afford' to run windows as their server platform).
It's just that *I* can't afford that strategy and for a small operation like the one we are running (but with a significant web presence) windows is simply not an option due to the above concerns.
Big companies have less of a problem with wasting some money, some are actually quite good at it !
And I really gave it a good try, came away quite disappointed.
FWIW I'm handling some 2000 database driven hits on pages per SECOND.
I'm sure EBAY does a lot more than that but not on a puny little farm like mine.
The only piece of software that will ever mean anything if they 'shared source' it will be the office suite, specifically excel and word because of file compatibility.
It is my guess that they'll open source the whole of windows long before they'll 'shared source' the office file formats. The lock in of the market is based on this file compatibility and you'll never have 100% as long as those formats are not public.
Myself, I'm for forced legislation that states that as soon as a certain file format gains common acceptance, either because it's better or because of unfair marketing or whatever other reason the company that produces the file format will be required to produce two pieces of code, a reader/viewer and a writer for that file format and place it in the public domain. Files are like protocols (another area like that), where software will always have to interface to other software, the moment you use that as a lock in you should be accusable of anti competitive behaviour.
That way you have a choice, use 'open' file formats, or roll your own but be forced to open up.
I used to have a really good contact with Microsoft, we were running FreeBSD at the time (Linux nowadays) and were quite happy, they suggested we port our stuff to NT so we could 'evaluate' the whole windows thing, they'd pay our way.
So, free NT licenses and MSDN subscriptions and all the other goodies we're slaving away to make this thing work, just to give them the benefit of the doubt (I'm all for looking at the evidence) and guess what ? YOU CAN'T DO IT. If you're used to a unix environment and all the seamless integration between tools and the ability to tune the server there is absolutely NO WAY you are going to port any major web application over to Windows in any form, especially using Microsoft SQL and not end up with a server farm that's twice the size of what you had before. Also you will never ever be as stable, for one you have more hardware, so your mtbf goes down and secondly the Windows core isn't as stable as FreeBSD or Linux on the same hardware.
I don't know why they can't get their act together, I don't give a damn about whether it's open source or not - I just want the best environment for my application to be built on, and it seems that the open source side wins that argument hands down.
The rules and regulations an IPSP has to put up with border on the draconian, whereas a department store has as much or more vulnerable information lying around and don't even have minimum oversight.
It's interesting to see VISA and Mastercard do everything they can to push responsibility away from themselves whereas they are the *only* party that has the information to stop online fraud in its tracks.
I was abroad for a few weeks and in the meanwhile paypal got it into their heads that we needed to confirm some corporate details or we'd have our account frozen. When I got back the deadline had expired and they froze our account for 180 days before finally releasing the funds. F'ing bastards... PayPay == a bank. I know they have been ruled not to be one, but if I can keep my money there and they call it 'an account' then as far as I can see they might as well be a bank and they should be regulated as such. The amount of dough that goes through there it's a bloody shame it's not properly regulated.
what they forget to mention is that visa ALSO is usually not liable for fraud, they try everything they can to push it down the chain assuming they are never to blame. So, in cases of ID theft where visa could have known of this being the case based on weird purchase patterns they happily push the burden on to the merchant, who really has NO other way to figure out if a card is legit other than calling visa and getting an OK. Then 6 weeks later they have to pay it back or lose their merchant accounts... Especially in card not present situations this will happen easily enough (see my post above).
sure it's secure... chargebacks are a great way to deal with this, simply charge back any and all purchases that were non-swipe... card not present end of story. $25 they assume the risk is small enough to absorb it, but if you do that systematically I highly doubt it will live.
The biggest problem with coding flightdeck was that it was 'realtime', everything happened on a clock so in essence it had a mini operating system built in to schedule all the tasks. Pretty complicated core for a game of that vintage...
I don't think I could get my hands on a working ST if my life depended on it, let alone a copy of flightdeck (published by 'AackoSoft', long since defunct)... This is the dark ages of my computing career, the oldest stuff I still have lying around dates back to '86 or so... and I still use it every now and then ! Most of the assembler stuff was so strongly tied to a specific platform that there really was no point in keeping it around so, regrettably, the flightdeck dir was deleted long ago.
you're pulling me out of context there, note the 'FOR LITTLE $' at the end...
Amiga's were out of my budget... I guess I could afford one today:)
ST was an ok piece of hardware with pretty lousy system software, but when you're writing games you pretty much provide your own os anyway, so that hardly mattered...
Hehe, that reminds me, a long long time ago in a country far far away from the present one I was a game writer, and one of the games I worked on (the code bit) was a game called 'FlightDeck'.
Now, flightdeck was the most boring game you could imagine, and one night after a hard days work a couple of guys sat in the place where we worked and decided to liven things up a bit. Every so many thousand games one of the elevators in the carrier would go down, a guy would stand on it, the elevator would go up again, he'd strip on the deck and jump off the ship...
This lead to the most baffling support calls of people that really could literally not believe that they'd just seen what they'd seen, and of course we never let the support guys in on the joke...
to give you an idea of how long ago this was, the atari ST was the best machine you could get for little $, 68 K assembler was the way to go for fast games and the Dire Straits had just released "Brothers in Arms":)
Slashdot Mirror
Or a faxed signature, either one will do. If it works for pizza delivery it should work for money transfers.
Oh, and you could also block VOIP services from western union and what not until they will vouch for the identity of their users.
Anonimity on the 'real' phone network is much easier to get than on a VOIP phone, the 'IP' bit will take care of that quite nicely, as long as you can map back between a phone number at any given moment and an IP number.
It's a bit like a DHCP lease by a provider or a WIFI access point, if you know the timestamp and the ID used you should be able to work backwards to get more info out of the system.
I doubt it :)
I take it you're an expert on Amsterdam and Heroin then ?
pity I don't have mod points having already posted, but especially (A) is one of my pet peeves (and another one is that to download some minor package it wants to upgrade my whole bloody KDE over a modem)
After reading tfa I simply have to say this guy really gets it. And I've been saying this for years, I'll promote linux because I'd rather try than give up, but I feel it's a losing battle because of fragmentation.
There's strength in 'polymorphy', true, but *real* strength is in unity, not caring so much about you and your contribution to the grand plan but about the long term vision and it's high time - if not too late - that all these people pulling the oss wagon in 15 different directions (low estimate) start pulling it in the same direction or we'll be using windows 2009 one day... (or at least those who make a living programming).
It's all fun and games to debate one distro or another until you have a family to feed, and binary compatibility would go a long long way towards getting commercial vendors on board.
Oh, and for the real die hards: I'm a programmer, and if the price is right I don't give a damn about the source, as long as it works as advertised. If the source is available so much the better, but if all that happened is that if a corp goes out of business or abandons a piece of code that they'd open source it that would be more than enough for me.
I'd rather download a binary driver than the kernel sources to get one to compile for my kernel version, as if that should matter. Especially considering that I'm on dialup here.
If he'd please be so kind as to put hard realtime into the kernel I'd personally kiss lt's ass...
Building 'brains' is easier than training them it seems. In fact, you can do so with absolutely unskilled labour
in the good old days code unreadability was directly proportional to job security :)
that's all nice and good, personally I think files that were never meant to be indexed make for the best reading by far !
transplanting from PHP to ASP is more then a little bit of work, Apache leaves IIS in the dust, so you need more hardware.
If I can't even get decent performance in the 'lab', and the tools don't let me tune the server to perform at least as good under BSD (or linux for that matter) then why bother throwing it in front of the lions ?
What happens in the open source world is something like this: Developer X is working on some project, needs a feature (say server-status in apache), adds it to the source, compiles and tests it until it works for him, submits the DIFF to the apache crew so he won't need to do it again next time he rebuilds the latest souces, it gets accepted, he feels good, they feel good, the product just got better. You try to get MS to include one of your 'improvements' or even a suggestion of one into IIS. Good luck
If you throw enough hardware at the problem it will eventually go away, I don't doubt that (and besides Ebay there are quite a few other large companies that can 'afford' to run windows as their server platform).
It's just that *I* can't afford that strategy and for a small operation like the one we are running (but with a significant web presence) windows is simply not an option due to the above concerns.
Big companies have less of a problem with wasting some money, some are actually quite good at it !
And I really gave it a good try, came away quite disappointed.
FWIW I'm handling some 2000 database driven hits on pages per SECOND.
I'm sure EBAY does a lot more than that but not on a puny little farm like mine.
It is my guess that they'll open source the whole of windows long before they'll 'shared source' the office file formats. The lock in of the market is based on this file compatibility and you'll never have 100% as long as those formats are not public.
Myself, I'm for forced legislation that states that as soon as a certain file format gains common acceptance, either because it's better or because of unfair marketing or whatever other reason the company that produces the file format will be required to produce two pieces of code, a reader/viewer and a writer for that file format and place it in the public domain. Files are like protocols (another area like that), where software will always have to interface to other software, the moment you use that as a lock in you should be accusable of anti competitive behaviour.
That way you have a choice, use 'open' file formats, or roll your own but be forced to open up.
No more file incompatibilities.
I used to have a really good contact with Microsoft, we were running FreeBSD at the time (Linux nowadays) and were quite happy, they suggested we port our stuff to NT so we could 'evaluate' the whole windows thing, they'd pay our way.
So, free NT licenses and MSDN subscriptions and all the other goodies we're slaving away to make this thing work, just to give them the benefit of the doubt (I'm all for looking at the evidence) and guess what ? YOU CAN'T DO IT. If you're used to a unix environment and all the seamless integration between tools and the ability to tune the server there is absolutely NO WAY you are going to port any major web application over to Windows in any form, especially using Microsoft SQL and not end up with a server farm that's twice the size of what you had before. Also you will never ever be as stable, for one you have more hardware, so your mtbf goes down and secondly the Windows core isn't as stable as FreeBSD or Linux on the same hardware.
I don't know why they can't get their act together, I don't give a damn about whether it's open source or not - I just want the best environment for my application to be built on, and it seems that the open source side wins that argument hands down.
The rules and regulations an IPSP has to put up with border on the draconian, whereas a department store has as much or more vulnerable information lying around and don't even have minimum oversight.
It's interesting to see VISA and Mastercard do everything they can to push responsibility away from themselves whereas they are the *only* party that has the information to stop online fraud in its tracks.
you got it... do this at wally world and home depot and they'll be so happy with the new system, do NOT do it to your corner store
I was abroad for a few weeks and in the meanwhile paypal got it into their heads that we needed to confirm some corporate details or we'd have our account frozen. When I got back the deadline had expired and they froze our account for 180 days before finally releasing the funds. F'ing bastards... PayPay == a bank. I know they have been ruled not to be one, but if I can keep my money there and they call it 'an account' then as far as I can see they might as well be a bank and they should be regulated as such. The amount of dough that goes through there it's a bloody shame it's not properly regulated.
what they forget to mention is that visa ALSO is usually not liable for fraud, they try everything they can to push it down the chain assuming they are never to blame. So, in cases of ID theft where visa could have known of this being the case based on weird purchase patterns they happily push the burden on to the merchant, who really has NO other way to figure out if a card is legit other than calling visa and getting an OK. Then 6 weeks later they have to pay it back or lose their merchant accounts... Especially in card not present situations this will happen easily enough (see my post above).
sure it's secure... chargebacks are a great way to deal with this, simply charge back any and all purchases that were non-swipe... card not present end of story. $25 they assume the risk is small enough to absorb it, but if you do that systematically I highly doubt it will live.
The biggest problem with coding flightdeck was that it was 'realtime', everything happened on a clock so in essence it had a mini operating system built in to schedule all the tasks. Pretty complicated core for a game of that vintage...
I worked with Steven Coarse, Simon Davies, Maurice Pezotta, Matt Notermans and a whole slew of other people there
who is this then ??
mail me if you want, j@ww.com , stjoes! in the email somewhere will get you through my spam filter
Amiga's were out of my budget... I guess I could afford one today
ST was an ok piece of hardware with pretty lousy system software, but when you're writing games you pretty much provide your own os anyway, so that hardly mattered...
Now, flightdeck was the most boring game you could imagine, and one night after a hard days work a couple of guys sat in the place where we worked and decided to liven things up a bit. Every so many thousand games one of the elevators in the carrier would go down, a guy would stand on it, the elevator would go up again, he'd strip on the deck and jump off the ship...
This lead to the most baffling support calls of people that really could literally not believe that they'd just seen what they'd seen, and of course we never let the support guys in on the joke...
to give you an idea of how long ago this was, the atari ST was the best machine you could get for little $, 68 K assembler was the way to go for fast games and the Dire Straits had just released "Brothers in Arms"