That's probably because you shouldn't be bouncing mail like that. If the local address is unknown or the message triggers a spam filter, the mailserver should respond with a 500-series SMTP error (probably 550). Note: this only works on machines receiving SMTP connections directly from the world. If you know there's another machine between you and the world (eg. external server receives mail, queues it and then passes it along to a second machine that runs the spam filters and delivers the mail to mailboxes), SMTP errors cause other problems.
I see the major flaw in Intel's idea right there where they say their network would be optimized for web services. Umm, what if web services aren't the big thing in a couple of years? IBM optimized SNA for the kinds of networks they knew were going to be built, but we don't see much SNA outside mainframe data centers. Corporate America doesn't have a very good track record of predicting how things will actually turn out. The Internet's strength is that it isn't optimized or designed for any one application, so while it may not be ideal for any one application it's at least usable for all of them. I'd be wary of changing that.
As far as worm outbreaks, those don't require fundamental changes in the Internet. Stopping them requires the people responsible, the ordinary users, to get a clue. It doesn't even have to be much of a clue, just something on the level of "Running that red light at a busy intersection might be a bad idea." or "Putting my hand on the red-hot stove burner might hurt.". That's not asking that much. (NB: that wasn't in the nature of a question.)
You know, instead of just filing a counter-notice, victims like this should take a different approach. Copyright law has penalties for trying to usurp or interfere with another person's copyrights. When a blatantly false notice like this is filed demanding the material be taken down, the victim should treat it as an ordinary attempt to falsely claim ownership of their copyrighted material and pursue it as such. Put the RIAA and MPAA on the receiving end of a copyright-infringement suit for a change.
When the politicians and the voting-machine makers start on their spiel about no paper trails, I think we need to ask them one question:
"Why exactly are you so dead-set against being able to verify the results without having to assume the results are right?"
Without an audit trail that's exactly what they're asking. We ought to be holding their feet to the fire on that question, making them answer it every time they try to say we don't need an audit trail.
They can, but they can only sue for infringement that happens after they acquire the copyrights. They don't want that, because to force the transfer of the copyrights they have to identify the code they're claiming copyright on, and by the time the ruling comes down the Linux developers will have removed any questionable code and SCO'll be left holding a handful of air.
The last thing SCO wants is to file a contract suit against Novell here. The only ones they could file that would touch on the copyrights at all would all involve a claim of "They're obliged to transfer the copyrights, make them.". If they don't make that claim, there's nothing else in the APA to hang a case on. If they do make that claim, they instantly kill all their other cases because it's an admission that they don't own the copyrights right now.
At least in this specific case, and even under the tight rules that apply in California. Seagate's not even asking that he be barred from working at WD, just working for them doing exactly what he was doing at Seagate, and they're only asking for it for 2 years (about 10 percent of the time he was working for them). Even under California rules that's specific and limited-time enough to have a pretty good chance of passing muster.
Then the company isn't entitled to any of the experience the employee got before coming to work for them when they go and hire someone with 17 years of prior experience? Same argument, just different position in time.
He signed a non-disclosure agreement, not a non-compete agreement. If he'd signed a non-compete, Seagate is entirely in the right here. With just an NDA, though, the burden's on Seagate. Without a non-compete, they can't prohibit him from working for WD period. All they can do (and it sounds like what they are doing) is claiming that if he works for WD then violation of the NDA is inevitable. The burden's on them to demonstrate that, but that may not help him.
I think Mr. Ellis needs to go get an independent consultant to double-check the software contractor's results. If users are just filing e-mail, then saving meta-data should be automatic. All the e-mail programs I use commonly that let me file messages in folders (Pine, Evolution, Mozilla Mail, Thunderbird) save the complete SMTP headers with the meta-data in question automatically. If the company Mr. Ellis is getting his "solution" from charges extra for saving what's commonly saved automatically, they're probably gouging him on more than just that.
I think you're right, but I don't think it'll work out like the big boys might want. The Dutch auction method changes the dynamics of an IPO. Traditionally IPO shares are bought to get in on the initial bounce. With that dynamic things would work exactly as you describe. But the initial bounce has already been priced into Google's shares by the auction method. The people looking for that initial rise aren't going to be buying Google shares at IPO. The ones buying will be the ones who figure Google shares will be valuable for things other than their price, eg. dividends, splits and other return over the long term. Those people won't sell just because of a 6-month downturn in the price, the price isn't the reason they're holding the stock. If Google's revenue or cash reserves go down then they might sell, because those affect why they bought the stock, but price bobbles won't have a major effect. If this is the case, then an attempt to force Google's price down will be a disaster for the ones trying it and won't, in the end, affect Google much at all.
Just ask one question: what is the most common text input device on a computer? The answer is probably "The keyboard.". That right there says that typing is a useful skill, because the faster you can use that keyboard the more work you can get done.
Now, lots of the ancillary stuff that went with typing when we were using real typewriters, things like knowing line spacing, how to deal with corrections, that stuff isn't needed anymore (unless you have to deal with a real typewriter). But the basics of hitting the keys still applies to computer keyboards just as much as it did to the old Underwood.
Actually it's not an exception in the agreement. They should have given you, along with that agreement, a copy of the relevant sections of California labor law. The law basically says that it doesn't matter what the agreement says, here's what's legally allowable and any agreement that purports to claim more than that is void to the extent it exceeds the legal boundaries. I'll have to dig out my copy of the paperwork, but IIRC the section also says the company has to give you a copy of the relevant section of the law with any agreement related to their claims to your ideas, not just make a reference to it.
Most of the places here that have background music playing (or at least most of the big stores) get their music through the Muzak service. Muzak has filing-cabinets with all the paperwork on their licenses to do exactly what they're doing with the music and records of payments for those licenses. Try this stunt on one of their clients, said client will just call them and give them your name and their lawyers will pay your lawyers a visit.
Some annoying things in the other direction
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Are You Annoying?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
As an IT person, I find a few of the complainers annoying. Take, for example, Ellen Gottesdiener's statement that business people have a right to change their minds. Yes, they do, and I don't mind that. Change is a fact of life. What I find highly annoying, though, is that those same business people refuse to acknowledge that they changed their minds. They change their minds, don't bother to tell me they have or what the new decision is, then squawk when I'm still working based on the old decisions and then squawk more when I tell them the changes will take more time because I've got to go back and re-do work that's already done.
Another is Gerry McCartney. Certainly often there's no one right answer. The problem is, usually IT doesn't get the luxury of budget and schedule to cover every possible answer. At that point it's supposed to be the business people's responsibility to decide which answer they want to go with, so IT can get on with the job of implementing it. It's horribly annoying when they won't do that, or even indicate priorities so IT can work on the most important (to the business people) stuff first.
The final annoyance is when business people expect me to respect them but they refuse to respect me in return. I was hired to solve technical problems. The business people were hired to solve business problems. If you've got business constraints on the acceptable solutions, don't come to me asking only for the technical solution and then whine when my answer isn't the one you have to have. If there's constraints, tell me what they are so I can factor them in. And be prepared if I have to tell you that there aren't any solutions to your problem that'll actually work that also meet the constraints (real-world example: you want a vehicle with 3750 cubic feet (25x15x10) and 80,000 pounds of cargo capacity, under the constraint that it has to fit into a compact-car parking space). If there's non-technical factors that dictate the solution then don't bother asking me, and don't blame me if the dicatated solution doesn't work.
I think the handling of this problem demonstrates the difference between Microsoft software and other software like Mozilla. In Mozilla, the problem didn't even require a real patch to fix, just a quick config setting to tell it not to pass things along to the shell: handler. My bet is that fixing Word etc. will require not just multiple registry changes but actual new code to allow shell: to be disabled. And odds on the first thing they try is to just add filters, and we'll see half a dozen iterations of exploits of this using different ways past the filters until MS finally includes a patch to allow it to be disabled.
Actually I'm glad my cel-phone company does charge for receiving. That means I've got a line on my bill documenting financial damage from the unsolicited message. That's very helpful when filing a small-claims action against the originating company when they won't knock it off. It's also helpful when dealing with the FCC since the cel-phone company and the commissioners can't fob it off as "Oh, but you're not paying for that message." and if they suggest buying an unlimited plan I can respond "Oh, so I should pay more for a service I don't need just to avoid having to pay for someone else's advertising?".
Leave the FCC and the cel-phone companies to argue about how the cel-phone companies are going to pick up the tab and pretty quick the cel-phone companies will do something about the problem at the source.
X11, XDM login and sessions. Walk up to any X11 computer, select your server/desktop and log in on it. Your applications open up, the ones that support sessions open exactly where you left them. When you're done you save the session during logout.
This was the way computers were expected to work back before one company/OS ingrained "one computer, one user" in it's products.
No, there's a complete cel-phone handset built into the can.
As far as the military's concerned, though, whether it's two-way or not doesn't matter. The problem from their perspective is that it can transmit. If it can transmit, it can in theory transmit anything. You can see the obvious problem with a device in a sensitive area transmitting a wide-angle video and audio feed of all the documents and discussions about the latest tweaks to the Sidewinder target-seeker algorithms, for example. Given the state of cryptography and steganography, the only way to prevent this is to go to the source and stop all transmissions out of sensitive areas. No exceptions, because as soon as you make an exception you just know one of the bad guys will start working on a way to sneak his stuff into that exception in a hard-to-detect way.
Actually my Linux box is immune to this. The outbound modem devices are set writable only by root. The programs that would access them are either suid-root and have their configurations alterable only by root, or are behind a wrapper that demands the root password before it'll run the programs with appropriate privileges to access the device. A dialer program, even if it got itself installed on my system, would be stuck getting "permission denied" errors until it finally gave up.
The big problem with stock options isn't accounting for costs in the financial statement, since issuing options, or even actual shares, doesn't cost a company money. What needs to be addressed is the effect of unredeemed options on share dilution. Don't force companies to expense options, make them account for the options as tenatively issued shares of stock, with the resulting effect on per-share revenue and dividends and the like. That would more accurately reflect the actual situation.
The EFF picked the wrong subject for their pseudo-lawsuit to illustrate the idiocy of the law. A better choice would have been a lawsuit against Sony (Beta) and JVC and Panasonic (VHS) over their introduction of the VCR. Joe Sixpack probably doesn't know the iPod from Adam's off ox, but he knows what he records the football game on and how inconvenient it'd be if he couldn't.
The only thing that worries me about SP2 is the firewall. I already have a non-MS firewall installed on my machines. I not only don't want the MS firewall turned on upon installing SP2, I can't allow it to be turned on because it'll interfere with the already-active non-MS firewall. The SP2 installer should be smart enough to detect the presence of a firewall. Any bets on whether it actually will or not?
My thought is that lack of backwards compatibility will kill them in the first 6 months. That's when the XBox Next's library will be thin. Backwards compatibility adds to the library. Someone who doesn't own an XBox will be looking at shelling out $300 for an XBox Next with maybe two or three games on it, or shelling out for an XBox or PS2 for half that with hundreds of games available. And if you have an XBox already, it means having to keep it around even after you've got the XBox Next so you can continue to play the games you already bought. Compare that to the PS3, which from all indications will play PS2 games nicely and let people upgrading to a PS3 sell their old PS2 for some cash and still keep their game library. Unless XBox Next has a really killer "Must Have!" game in the first 3-4 months of it's life, it's going to kind of hang around as another Sega Dreamcast as people stick with the consoles with more games available and wait for the PS3.
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That's probably because you shouldn't be bouncing mail like that. If the local address is unknown or the message triggers a spam filter, the mailserver should respond with a 500-series SMTP error (probably 550). Note: this only works on machines receiving SMTP connections directly from the world. If you know there's another machine between you and the world (eg. external server receives mail, queues it and then passes it along to a second machine that runs the spam filters and delivers the mail to mailboxes), SMTP errors cause other problems.
I see the major flaw in Intel's idea right there where they say their network would be optimized for web services. Umm, what if web services aren't the big thing in a couple of years? IBM optimized SNA for the kinds of networks they knew were going to be built, but we don't see much SNA outside mainframe data centers. Corporate America doesn't have a very good track record of predicting how things will actually turn out. The Internet's strength is that it isn't optimized or designed for any one application, so while it may not be ideal for any one application it's at least usable for all of them. I'd be wary of changing that.
As far as worm outbreaks, those don't require fundamental changes in the Internet. Stopping them requires the people responsible, the ordinary users, to get a clue. It doesn't even have to be much of a clue, just something on the level of "Running that red light at a busy intersection might be a bad idea." or "Putting my hand on the red-hot stove burner might hurt.". That's not asking that much. (NB: that wasn't in the nature of a question.)
You know, instead of just filing a counter-notice, victims like this should take a different approach. Copyright law has penalties for trying to usurp or interfere with another person's copyrights. When a blatantly false notice like this is filed demanding the material be taken down, the victim should treat it as an ordinary attempt to falsely claim ownership of their copyrighted material and pursue it as such. Put the RIAA and MPAA on the receiving end of a copyright-infringement suit for a change.
When the politicians and the voting-machine makers start on their spiel about no paper trails, I think we need to ask them one question:
"Why exactly are you so dead-set against being able to verify the results without having to assume the results are right?"
Without an audit trail that's exactly what they're asking. We ought to be holding their feet to the fire on that question, making them answer it every time they try to say we don't need an audit trail.
There is, specifically the Sony Betamax case that the recent Grokster decision turned on.
They can, but they can only sue for infringement that happens after they acquire the copyrights. They don't want that, because to force the transfer of the copyrights they have to identify the code they're claiming copyright on, and by the time the ruling comes down the Linux developers will have removed any questionable code and SCO'll be left holding a handful of air.
The last thing SCO wants is to file a contract suit against Novell here. The only ones they could file that would touch on the copyrights at all would all involve a claim of "They're obliged to transfer the copyrights, make them.". If they don't make that claim, there's nothing else in the APA to hang a case on. If they do make that claim, they instantly kill all their other cases because it's an admission that they don't own the copyrights right now.
At least in this specific case, and even under the tight rules that apply in California. Seagate's not even asking that he be barred from working at WD, just working for them doing exactly what he was doing at Seagate, and they're only asking for it for 2 years (about 10 percent of the time he was working for them). Even under California rules that's specific and limited-time enough to have a pretty good chance of passing muster.
Then the company isn't entitled to any of the experience the employee got before coming to work for them when they go and hire someone with 17 years of prior experience? Same argument, just different position in time.
He signed a non-disclosure agreement, not a non-compete agreement. If he'd signed a non-compete, Seagate is entirely in the right here. With just an NDA, though, the burden's on Seagate. Without a non-compete, they can't prohibit him from working for WD period. All they can do (and it sounds like what they are doing) is claiming that if he works for WD then violation of the NDA is inevitable. The burden's on them to demonstrate that, but that may not help him.
I think Mr. Ellis needs to go get an independent consultant to double-check the software contractor's results. If users are just filing e-mail, then saving meta-data should be automatic. All the e-mail programs I use commonly that let me file messages in folders (Pine, Evolution, Mozilla Mail, Thunderbird) save the complete SMTP headers with the meta-data in question automatically. If the company Mr. Ellis is getting his "solution" from charges extra for saving what's commonly saved automatically, they're probably gouging him on more than just that.
I think you're right, but I don't think it'll work out like the big boys might want. The Dutch auction method changes the dynamics of an IPO. Traditionally IPO shares are bought to get in on the initial bounce. With that dynamic things would work exactly as you describe. But the initial bounce has already been priced into Google's shares by the auction method. The people looking for that initial rise aren't going to be buying Google shares at IPO. The ones buying will be the ones who figure Google shares will be valuable for things other than their price, eg. dividends, splits and other return over the long term. Those people won't sell just because of a 6-month downturn in the price, the price isn't the reason they're holding the stock. If Google's revenue or cash reserves go down then they might sell, because those affect why they bought the stock, but price bobbles won't have a major effect. If this is the case, then an attempt to force Google's price down will be a disaster for the ones trying it and won't, in the end, affect Google much at all.
Just ask one question: what is the most common text input device on a computer? The answer is probably "The keyboard.". That right there says that typing is a useful skill, because the faster you can use that keyboard the more work you can get done.
Now, lots of the ancillary stuff that went with typing when we were using real typewriters, things like knowing line spacing, how to deal with corrections, that stuff isn't needed anymore (unless you have to deal with a real typewriter). But the basics of hitting the keys still applies to computer keyboards just as much as it did to the old Underwood.
Actually it's not an exception in the agreement. They should have given you, along with that agreement, a copy of the relevant sections of California labor law. The law basically says that it doesn't matter what the agreement says, here's what's legally allowable and any agreement that purports to claim more than that is void to the extent it exceeds the legal boundaries. I'll have to dig out my copy of the paperwork, but IIRC the section also says the company has to give you a copy of the relevant section of the law with any agreement related to their claims to your ideas, not just make a reference to it.
Most of the places here that have background music playing (or at least most of the big stores) get their music through the Muzak service. Muzak has filing-cabinets with all the paperwork on their licenses to do exactly what they're doing with the music and records of payments for those licenses. Try this stunt on one of their clients, said client will just call them and give them your name and their lawyers will pay your lawyers a visit.
As an IT person, I find a few of the complainers annoying. Take, for example, Ellen Gottesdiener's statement that business people have a right to change their minds. Yes, they do, and I don't mind that. Change is a fact of life. What I find highly annoying, though, is that those same business people refuse to acknowledge that they changed their minds. They change their minds, don't bother to tell me they have or what the new decision is, then squawk when I'm still working based on the old decisions and then squawk more when I tell them the changes will take more time because I've got to go back and re-do work that's already done.
Another is Gerry McCartney. Certainly often there's no one right answer. The problem is, usually IT doesn't get the luxury of budget and schedule to cover every possible answer. At that point it's supposed to be the business people's responsibility to decide which answer they want to go with, so IT can get on with the job of implementing it. It's horribly annoying when they won't do that, or even indicate priorities so IT can work on the most important (to the business people) stuff first.
The final annoyance is when business people expect me to respect them but they refuse to respect me in return. I was hired to solve technical problems. The business people were hired to solve business problems. If you've got business constraints on the acceptable solutions, don't come to me asking only for the technical solution and then whine when my answer isn't the one you have to have. If there's constraints, tell me what they are so I can factor them in. And be prepared if I have to tell you that there aren't any solutions to your problem that'll actually work that also meet the constraints (real-world example: you want a vehicle with 3750 cubic feet (25x15x10) and 80,000 pounds of cargo capacity, under the constraint that it has to fit into a compact-car parking space). If there's non-technical factors that dictate the solution then don't bother asking me, and don't blame me if the dicatated solution doesn't work.
I think the handling of this problem demonstrates the difference between Microsoft software and other software like Mozilla. In Mozilla, the problem didn't even require a real patch to fix, just a quick config setting to tell it not to pass things along to the shell: handler. My bet is that fixing Word etc. will require not just multiple registry changes but actual new code to allow shell: to be disabled. And odds on the first thing they try is to just add filters, and we'll see half a dozen iterations of exploits of this using different ways past the filters until MS finally includes a patch to allow it to be disabled.
Actually I'm glad my cel-phone company does charge for receiving. That means I've got a line on my bill documenting financial damage from the unsolicited message. That's very helpful when filing a small-claims action against the originating company when they won't knock it off. It's also helpful when dealing with the FCC since the cel-phone company and the commissioners can't fob it off as "Oh, but you're not paying for that message." and if they suggest buying an unlimited plan I can respond "Oh, so I should pay more for a service I don't need just to avoid having to pay for someone else's advertising?".
Leave the FCC and the cel-phone companies to argue about how the cel-phone companies are going to pick up the tab and pretty quick the cel-phone companies will do something about the problem at the source.
X11, XDM login and sessions. Walk up to any X11 computer, select your server/desktop and log in on it. Your applications open up, the ones that support sessions open exactly where you left them. When you're done you save the session during logout.
This was the way computers were expected to work back before one company/OS ingrained "one computer, one user" in it's products.
No, there's a complete cel-phone handset built into the can.
As far as the military's concerned, though, whether it's two-way or not doesn't matter. The problem from their perspective is that it can transmit. If it can transmit, it can in theory transmit anything. You can see the obvious problem with a device in a sensitive area transmitting a wide-angle video and audio feed of all the documents and discussions about the latest tweaks to the Sidewinder target-seeker algorithms, for example. Given the state of cryptography and steganography, the only way to prevent this is to go to the source and stop all transmissions out of sensitive areas. No exceptions, because as soon as you make an exception you just know one of the bad guys will start working on a way to sneak his stuff into that exception in a hard-to-detect way.
Actually my Linux box is immune to this. The outbound modem devices are set writable only by root. The programs that would access them are either suid-root and have their configurations alterable only by root, or are behind a wrapper that demands the root password before it'll run the programs with appropriate privileges to access the device. A dialer program, even if it got itself installed on my system, would be stuck getting "permission denied" errors until it finally gave up.
The big problem with stock options isn't accounting for costs in the financial statement, since issuing options, or even actual shares, doesn't cost a company money. What needs to be addressed is the effect of unredeemed options on share dilution. Don't force companies to expense options, make them account for the options as tenatively issued shares of stock, with the resulting effect on per-share revenue and dividends and the like. That would more accurately reflect the actual situation.
The EFF picked the wrong subject for their pseudo-lawsuit to illustrate the idiocy of the law. A better choice would have been a lawsuit against Sony (Beta) and JVC and Panasonic (VHS) over their introduction of the VCR. Joe Sixpack probably doesn't know the iPod from Adam's off ox, but he knows what he records the football game on and how inconvenient it'd be if he couldn't.
The only thing that worries me about SP2 is the firewall. I already have a non-MS firewall installed on my machines. I not only don't want the MS firewall turned on upon installing SP2, I can't allow it to be turned on because it'll interfere with the already-active non-MS firewall. The SP2 installer should be smart enough to detect the presence of a firewall. Any bets on whether it actually will or not?
My thought is that lack of backwards compatibility will kill them in the first 6 months. That's when the XBox Next's library will be thin. Backwards compatibility adds to the library. Someone who doesn't own an XBox will be looking at shelling out $300 for an XBox Next with maybe two or three games on it, or shelling out for an XBox or PS2 for half that with hundreds of games available. And if you have an XBox already, it means having to keep it around even after you've got the XBox Next so you can continue to play the games you already bought. Compare that to the PS3, which from all indications will play PS2 games nicely and let people upgrading to a PS3 sell their old PS2 for some cash and still keep their game library. Unless XBox Next has a really killer "Must Have!" game in the first 3-4 months of it's life, it's going to kind of hang around as another Sega Dreamcast as people stick with the consoles with more games available and wait for the PS3.