Face it, the IOC is perfectly OK with corruption, oppression, censorship, and spying, as long as committee members get their payoffs, a pleasant facade is maintained while cameras are rolling, and nobody but Jews get killed. Russia wishes they could have the all encompassing monitoring that Beijing had, but they just don't currently have the resources. Keeping the athletes in segregated housing simply makes it easier to ensure that every single area is bugged, and each and every person there that the participants can possibly come in contact with is engaged in intelligence collecting.
Where this technology will really make a difference is remotely-fired platforms - drones and robotic gun mounts. The operator paints the target with the laser, hits a selector when the beam hits a good point, and commands the platform to fire. The computer figures out the rest. Fragile meat people aren't exposed to take the shot.
It's expensive now, but this is the introductory enthusiast version. The open source v3 equivalent will be have plans online using easily acquired inexpensive components and a 3d printer.
(As scary as this can be, part of me thinks this is awesome - but then I always play riggers in Shadowrun.;) )
That was my immediate thought, too. Against pure trolls, IP only companies that don't actually make anything, this would be worthless. Companies would just spin off their portfolios to new "independent" IP entities who produced nothing but lawsuits to avoid the defensive response.
Exactly. Changes to tax codes to try to screw "the rich" will almost never touch them, other than to take some productive money out of the system and waste it on lobbyists, lawyers, and accountants when it could have been put somewhere useful. If I was facing a $2 Billion tax bite, you better damn well believe I'd spend some fraction of that money to find a way to get out of paying the rest. Even the so-called "Buffet Tax" isn't actually designed to go after the places Mr Buffet himself actually hides his cash from the taxman, it's just a feelgood measure to stir up populist votes while screwing those middle class folks who suddenly find themselves "rich" but don't have enough cash to pay for the accountants needed to skate.
I'm with you - the one idea that the big box stores absolutely refuse to contemplate is competing based on _service_ instead of _price_. Most of them already used low prices to kill off the local small stores that provided real service to the shopper and community, now that they're getting creamed by Amazon they suddenly are all about supporting the local store.
You want to be the "local" store, Mr. Big Box Chain? Try some actual service. Stores that make sense, staff that understands the product and wishes to help rather than just upsell warranty packages, "sale" prices that are actually below the normal price that I need less than 2 seconds to find with my phone. Some products I really want to be able to touch and examine with my Mark 1 eyeball, which I just can't do online. Or ask questions in real time, with the product in front of me. Make that happen, make the experience pleasant, and I'll buy from the physical store over the online store if the prices are even close.
Too often I go into a place like Best Buy absolutely intending to buy a specific thing and fail. The stores are laid out to some layout designed to make you walk past as many impulse purchase racks as possible, rather than getting you right to the thing you actually want to buy. The staff isn't judged on whether they are helpful or even friendly - their metrics are all about sales, without teaching them any skills at interaction that might make sales happen. The item might not be in the place it should be, but good luck finding a minion to check the system for where it is, or whether it is out of stock. Forget service, try to go to Best Buy and not get angry.
As long as the brick and mortar guys lose on both sales and service to the online retailers, they're inevitably going to die, unmourned. I acknowledge that they probably can't win on price. How about, just for giggles, trying service, just once?
Hey, up until 5 years or so ago there was still a brand-new, never sold, never left the lot, Studebaker sitting in the dealer showroom right in front of a huge window.
Of course, the dealer had died decades earlier and the heirs were *still* arguing about the inheritance and kept it in limbo, so the property was kept untouched all those years, gathering dust and fading under the sun. Not too far outside Pittsburgh, I saw it a few years before it finally disappeared. My dad used to drive past it every time he was in the area visiting family or on a business trip, from well before I was born up until he went by a few years back and it was finally gone.
So a factory new Studebaker has actually sold more recently than a copy of Novell WordPerfect.
Wow. More than 30 comments already and no-one has brought up Microsoft killing the cpu if it thinks your copy of the OS is pirated. Must be a slow day.;)
Some of the sites are for designated terrorist entities - it is already illegal to do business with them. (In fact there is a large fine attached.) No 1st Amendment protection in that narrow case, it just isn't enforced worth a damn (hello YouTube and WordPress, I'm looking at you), so maybe British pressure will raise the temperature a little.
Otherwise, no, there probably won't be anything done as lunatics and creeps of all stripes are generally allowed to say whatever the heck they want here in the US. It isn't freedom if only the right kind of speech is protected.
You missed the extra special terror for the agoraphobics who are already panicky about traveling in the first place: they're not so limited as the acrophobics, they freak out over all three dimensions.
When a legitimate torrent of [insert your Linux distro of choice here] can run 700MB? I think not. What has been noted ad nauseum in threads all over is that the real problem is lack of investment in bandwidth - "Hey! the suckers have no choice but to accept it, and we make money hand-over-fist."
250 GB means you have to download 12 of those Linux distro torrents every day, 30 days a month. Do you really have a legitimate need to do that? I'm on Comcast, and I'm damn relieved to see that the nebulous high usage cap has been written out as such a large number. I'm pretty sure that I've blown past 8 GB in a single day before, but I'm nowhere near to averaging that sort of usage. Even with my usenet service and p2p traffic. I can certainly wish that there were less periods where my dl speeds lagged due to network congestion, and Comcast's customer service is generally totally useless (unless you submit a BBB complaint, at which point they send a thundering herd of escalation techs to fix anything even a little bit off), but kicking off folks with usage over such a huge number isn't going to hurt me at all.
I wouldn't bet real money that EA won't add multiplayer in an expansion pack in the next 12 months if the demand is high. Depends on how the DRM fight plays out I'd suppose, but if the core game sells well, we'll be in for add-ons out the wazoo, like The Sims. All of the non-DRM complaints I've seen have been "I like x, but I wish it had more options/better ai/extra something". To me that says, we laid the framework in the original, but we're gonna charge you extra for all the pieces you thought were missing. Compared to MMOs that bill you every month, they may think that gamer budgets can cough up a stream of funds rather that once and done or waiting for major upgrades.
Maybe end users have changed miraculously from when I was still doing desktop support, but I doubt it. IT doesn't develop policies limiting supported configurations just to be mean (generally). They do it because that's all they can in fact support given existing staffing and support metrics. Maybe you can get small numbers of users to be sufficiently knowledgeable that they can support themselves, but the overwhelming majority of users don't know enough, and don't *want* to know enough, to do this. They'd come to rely on some absurdly obscure or broken application, then call IT when it doesn't do what they want it to, and IT would have no idea how to fix it. Plus they'd end up with massive amounts of pirated material. The techs aren't going to memorize the manuals for every possible bit of code a user might take a fancy to, and they certainly can't test every possible combination of applications to test for incompatibilities.
Letting end users choose their own machines and apps sounds like a lovely and empowering idea, right up until the point where they need to call tech support. And find out that it might be days before IT can fix whatever is broken, since they are starting with zero idea what is wrong because of the wacky config. Those days of lost productivity can be hugely expensive compared to the costs of testing a few specific configs that can be easily and quickly supported. Some tech hours of advance testing and some possible minor losses of productivity from using applications that aren't the user's favorite choices are far cheaper than having an employee turn in no billable hours for several days because his computer is down.
The main thing I'd want lawmakers to borrow from software development is a content management system. For every sneaky loophole or badly written clause, I want to know exactly which person checked it in and when. No hiding garbage in monster bills and then denying responsibility - every word, every revision, all clearly identifiable by editor.
Can someone please explain how submitting a standard to a standards board is anti-competitive? Even if OOXML is accepted as a standard, no-one is obliged to use/support it. I know that folks hate Microsoft, but this is just silly. Yes, they gamed the voting. Of course they did, it was in their interest to do so. Did that show magical monopolist powers? No. Every other software vendor or customer in the world is still perfectly free to ignore OOXML, just as MS is free to ignore anyone else's standard when writing their software. The US still uses a standardized foot for measurements, but the rest of the world is permitted to use a meter if they so desire, despite the big mean American's power.
I'd be much more impressed with EU anti-trust efforts if they weren't pretty much aimed at non-EU companies. They're mostly a trade barrier rather than a legitimate regulatory body.
Right. We'll just step up production from our vast hydrogen mining industry. Oh, wait. We don't have anything like that. Mostly we get hydrogen from water, which often means running an electric current through it. Since US enviros oppose nuclear, won't allow new dams for hydro because it upsets the fish, and have fought new natural gas exploration for fear it will damage pristine ecosystems, that probably means that coal is being burned to produce that electricity. Nice, clean, eco-friendly coal. In fact, because of losses creating the hydrogen and then burning it in the engine, it's less efficient than the coal plant, so you have to burn more coal for the energy used.
Hydrogen is eco-friendly *at the point of use*, but unless someone can magically cause it to appear its production isn't environmentally sound at all. You just hide the costs and emissions somewhere that the public hopefully won't notice it. (Same with electric cars. Using electric doesn't pollute. Making it certainly does. Anyone telling you different wants your money or your vote.)
I was one of those testers fixing an enterprise product for y2k. There were a lot of things that needed corrected, not just the 2 digit year problem. For example, correctly knowing that 2000 was a leap year was a lingering problem. Without a large testing and programming effort lots of software would have crashed. It was a non-issue to the world at large because a bunch of geeks kicked ass fixing the bugs before they blew up.
I've never understood the legal basis for whining about "cybersquatting". For any other bit of intellectual property ever recognized by law or treaty, it's first come, first served. If someone else got to the domain first, shame on you for being so slow off the draw. I can't write up a new patent and tell the previous owner "sorry, I was going to do that and just didn't get around to it in time" and expect anything but rude laughter. Why are domains any different? Hell, the things are cheap, companies should bulk buy anything that even sounds a little like their property at the same time they file for copyright or trademark protection. If they can't be bothered, they should have to pay through the nose to get the relevant domains from whoever grabbed 'em first. Call it an idiot tax, stupidity should be painful. When new domains are introduced maybe give IP owners some pad to catch the new domains for their properties since they couldn't be expected to have already gotten them, but otherwise the person who files first is the owner, simple as that.
What idiot came up with the whole retroactive intellectual property argument anyway? How did domain names get such a unique protection?
Is the "just buy a mac" thing becoming some knee-jerk response that just happens in every thread? It's starting to be the equivalent of "first post", "hot grits", or voting for the Cowboy Neal option in the poll.
The question was very specifically about linux. Not mac. I get where you are coming from: M$ bad, Mac good, Linux too hard. Just accept that I understand that without you having to say it again and move on.
Whatever evil conspiracy theory you want to believe about restricting the data that comes out of the USGS, you have to acknowledge that anything even a little bit controversial will be leaked by some of the career staffers on the project. The entire employee pool doesn't get changed out between administrations so that absolutely everyone is a total unthinking tool of the prez. There is always going to be someone who strongly disagrees and dumps the story into the press as a way of sticking it to the man.
Though I agree that all of the science on climate change should be available. All of it. Including the data and methods used to create the hockey stick model. I wonder what *that* guy is hiding.
Big corporations are going to take months if not a year or more to actually start a large-scale rollout of any major software change, much less a new operating system. MS and everyone else releases to them early so they can start the process. (Well, and it makes the companies feel special.) The corps will test on boxes that approximately match what they think will be on the desks when the new system would go into production, not what is there now. They're the ones that drive the patches and the service packs, testing with so many possible interactions with different application packages. Small companies and home users will likely just be running common stuff that is tested for in the QA lab, and they'll still find bugs anyway.
And the biggest corps of all will ask for lame features just to prove how big and powerful they are, to get MS to give in to something stupid. Better to get those out of the way before you release to manufacturing. (You thought it was the 5 employee legal office that asked for the 3 pages of menus to set all those intricate rules for bullet points in Word? It was probably the secretary of some high level exec at a customer with several thousand desks to push software to.)
Of course they'll wait for a big patch package or SP before they'll roll out. It gives them time for other people to find the bugs by hitting them first, so they don't have to. If that sounds mean, consider that this QA model is pretty much how a lot of open source projects work, the lots-of-eyeballs model. It's still herding sheep through the minefield looking to see what goes boom. OSS guys just feel better about finding a flaw, like they are part of the team.
As an aside, I used to be a QA guy. I liked actually getting paid to find bugs, not simply doing it because it made me feel warm and tingly. I reported a bug to Real Networks once, looking to see if they had a fix. They wanted me to walk through the steps to reproduce the error since they hadn't see it before, I told them what my rates were. The phone call ended pretty soon afterward.
Why on Earth would the USPS care about convenience? If they started to go with kiosks, they might have trouble justifying the nearby full-service office. Which would result in postal employees getting laid off, which would reduce the tiny empires of the pocket dictators who have no other purpose than to justify their *own* existence. Which can never ever be allowed.
As a poor downtrodden American seeing the second season way behind my British counterparts, I just have one question about the Christmas Invasion episode: weren't the Sycorax a total rip-off? Am I the only one who thought that once the leader took his helmet off he looked and sounded like the aliens from Enemy Mine?
I have no big problem with regging for sites that I'll likely hit more than once. But I'm certainly not going to use my real info - I use a throwaway email address that I cycle out every few months depending on spam volume, and I fill in all the rest of the blanks with data that looks real enough that it won't get filtered out automatically.
Look, databases of your user data are only as valuable as the data is useful. The best way to protect privacy in the long term is to make selling information no longer profitable, because of the signal/noise ratio in the databases. I either use the address of a church of scientology in Austin, TX (those guys just bug me), or I gen one with a perl script I wrote a few years back. I've got a datafile with all zipcodes in use, with the associated city, state, and phone area code. That's the mechanism most filters use to catch fake data, so as long as those fields match up your bogus info will likely sneak through. Add in a random generator of good looking fake names, ages, and street addresses, and you're good to go. Fill thoses databases with likely looking crap enough times, and the market for the databases will dry up - they just won't be worth anything. Make capitalism work for you.
Sure, you could just use the address for any SCO or MS office in the world, but repeats would start to get noticed and filtered. The key is to be sneaky.
Several of the comments made in the article seem to indicate that the author is living in a happy dream world, where clever users are oppressed into mere drones by MCSE's and MS software. He acknowledges that it is a best practice in the Wintel world to lock down machines as much as possible to minimize support costs, yet seems to think that Unix will "empower users" (from a sidebar) without causing any problems at all.
Is he crazy? The reasons that machines are locked down is that the endusers are stupid. They know nothing about computers, and ideally they shouldn't have to - they are just tools to do their real jobs. Any extra capabilities will just allow them to break more things. Sun can only support so many users per admin by locking systems tighter than most MSCEs could dream of - the answers to what is wrong are so easy because there are no other options. The users aren't empowered, they are chained down as much as possible. All to the good; but believing you can take the same idiot endusers from a windows shop, give them magic Lintel boxen and some responsibility and rights to manage their own systems, and get *fewer* support calls is just delusional.
And thinking that it's the OS that is driving all those fast upgrades to physical machines is also absurd. A huge portion of all business desktop and laptop upgrades is driven by vanity, not need. Good luck thinking that a rational OS decision based on security and TCO will quickly stop "mine's bigger" purchasing. You think execs sending email, looking at excel spreadsheets, and playing solitaire need those multi-thousand dollar laptops? You think that running linux they'll stop buying them?
I liked the approach of the author, to look at the practices that will be reflexive to existing support staff and the effect they will have on a Linux implementation. But his take on the reflexive approaches of the *users* is completely unrealistic, and renders his article mostly useless. Face it, most of the people here on Slashdot have dealt with those endusers - you think the majority will agree that they will miraculously become wise if just given a chance? Or will the/. crew decide that the author is living a dream?
The federal government has a monopoly on the delivery of first class mail (letters). By monopoly, I mean that they are the only entity legally allowed to be in the business of delivering such mail. Not just the MicroSoft really-big-slice-of-the-market definition of monopoly, the real thing: absolutely no-one else is allowed to enter the market under penalty of *criminal*, not just civil, law. All letters - in fact anything delivered to a mailbox - are the sole domain of the federal government. No exceptions, they have even threatened kids delivering letters on their bikes with jail time. (The postal inspectors seem to be the fastest moving employees in the whole organization.)
Slashdot Mirror
Face it, the IOC is perfectly OK with corruption, oppression, censorship, and spying, as long as committee members get their payoffs, a pleasant facade is maintained while cameras are rolling, and nobody but Jews get killed. Russia wishes they could have the all encompassing monitoring that Beijing had, but they just don't currently have the resources. Keeping the athletes in segregated housing simply makes it easier to ensure that every single area is bugged, and each and every person there that the participants can possibly come in contact with is engaged in intelligence collecting.
Where this technology will really make a difference is remotely-fired platforms - drones and robotic gun mounts. The operator paints the target with the laser, hits a selector when the beam hits a good point, and commands the platform to fire. The computer figures out the rest. Fragile meat people aren't exposed to take the shot.
It's expensive now, but this is the introductory enthusiast version. The open source v3 equivalent will be have plans online using easily acquired inexpensive components and a 3d printer.
(As scary as this can be, part of me thinks this is awesome - but then I always play riggers in Shadowrun. ;) )
That was my immediate thought, too. Against pure trolls, IP only companies that don't actually make anything, this would be worthless. Companies would just spin off their portfolios to new "independent" IP entities who produced nothing but lawsuits to avoid the defensive response.
Exactly. Changes to tax codes to try to screw "the rich" will almost never touch them, other than to take some productive money out of the system and waste it on lobbyists, lawyers, and accountants when it could have been put somewhere useful. If I was facing a $2 Billion tax bite, you better damn well believe I'd spend some fraction of that money to find a way to get out of paying the rest. Even the so-called "Buffet Tax" isn't actually designed to go after the places Mr Buffet himself actually hides his cash from the taxman, it's just a feelgood measure to stir up populist votes while screwing those middle class folks who suddenly find themselves "rich" but don't have enough cash to pay for the accountants needed to skate.
I'm with you - the one idea that the big box stores absolutely refuse to contemplate is competing based on _service_ instead of _price_. Most of them already used low prices to kill off the local small stores that provided real service to the shopper and community, now that they're getting creamed by Amazon they suddenly are all about supporting the local store.
You want to be the "local" store, Mr. Big Box Chain? Try some actual service. Stores that make sense, staff that understands the product and wishes to help rather than just upsell warranty packages, "sale" prices that are actually below the normal price that I need less than 2 seconds to find with my phone. Some products I really want to be able to touch and examine with my Mark 1 eyeball, which I just can't do online. Or ask questions in real time, with the product in front of me. Make that happen, make the experience pleasant, and I'll buy from the physical store over the online store if the prices are even close.
Too often I go into a place like Best Buy absolutely intending to buy a specific thing and fail. The stores are laid out to some layout designed to make you walk past as many impulse purchase racks as possible, rather than getting you right to the thing you actually want to buy. The staff isn't judged on whether they are helpful or even friendly - their metrics are all about sales, without teaching them any skills at interaction that might make sales happen. The item might not be in the place it should be, but good luck finding a minion to check the system for where it is, or whether it is out of stock. Forget service, try to go to Best Buy and not get angry.
As long as the brick and mortar guys lose on both sales and service to the online retailers, they're inevitably going to die, unmourned. I acknowledge that they probably can't win on price. How about, just for giggles, trying service, just once?
Hey, up until 5 years or so ago there was still a brand-new, never sold, never left the lot, Studebaker sitting in the dealer showroom right in front of a huge window.
Of course, the dealer had died decades earlier and the heirs were *still* arguing about the inheritance and kept it in limbo, so the property was kept untouched all those years, gathering dust and fading under the sun. Not too far outside Pittsburgh, I saw it a few years before it finally disappeared. My dad used to drive past it every time he was in the area visiting family or on a business trip, from well before I was born up until he went by a few years back and it was finally gone.
So a factory new Studebaker has actually sold more recently than a copy of Novell WordPerfect.
Wow. More than 30 comments already and no-one has brought up Microsoft killing the cpu if it thinks your copy of the OS is pirated. Must be a slow day. ;)
Some of the sites are for designated terrorist entities - it is already illegal to do business with them. (In fact there is a large fine attached.) No 1st Amendment protection in that narrow case, it just isn't enforced worth a damn (hello YouTube and WordPress, I'm looking at you), so maybe British pressure will raise the temperature a little.
Otherwise, no, there probably won't be anything done as lunatics and creeps of all stripes are generally allowed to say whatever the heck they want here in the US. It isn't freedom if only the right kind of speech is protected.
You missed the extra special terror for the agoraphobics who are already panicky about traveling in the first place: they're not so limited as the acrophobics, they freak out over all three dimensions.
When a legitimate torrent of [insert your Linux distro of choice here] can run 700MB? I think not. What has been noted ad nauseum in threads all over is that the real problem is lack of investment in bandwidth - "Hey! the suckers have no choice but to accept it, and we make money hand-over-fist."
250 GB means you have to download 12 of those Linux distro torrents every day, 30 days a month. Do you really have a legitimate need to do that? I'm on Comcast, and I'm damn relieved to see that the nebulous high usage cap has been written out as such a large number. I'm pretty sure that I've blown past 8 GB in a single day before, but I'm nowhere near to averaging that sort of usage. Even with my usenet service and p2p traffic. I can certainly wish that there were less periods where my dl speeds lagged due to network congestion, and Comcast's customer service is generally totally useless (unless you submit a BBB complaint, at which point they send a thundering herd of escalation techs to fix anything even a little bit off), but kicking off folks with usage over such a huge number isn't going to hurt me at all.
I wouldn't bet real money that EA won't add multiplayer in an expansion pack in the next 12 months if the demand is high. Depends on how the DRM fight plays out I'd suppose, but if the core game sells well, we'll be in for add-ons out the wazoo, like The Sims. All of the non-DRM complaints I've seen have been "I like x, but I wish it had more options/better ai/extra something". To me that says, we laid the framework in the original, but we're gonna charge you extra for all the pieces you thought were missing. Compared to MMOs that bill you every month, they may think that gamer budgets can cough up a stream of funds rather that once and done or waiting for major upgrades.
Maybe end users have changed miraculously from when I was still doing desktop support, but I doubt it. IT doesn't develop policies limiting supported configurations just to be mean (generally). They do it because that's all they can in fact support given existing staffing and support metrics. Maybe you can get small numbers of users to be sufficiently knowledgeable that they can support themselves, but the overwhelming majority of users don't know enough, and don't *want* to know enough, to do this. They'd come to rely on some absurdly obscure or broken application, then call IT when it doesn't do what they want it to, and IT would have no idea how to fix it. Plus they'd end up with massive amounts of pirated material. The techs aren't going to memorize the manuals for every possible bit of code a user might take a fancy to, and they certainly can't test every possible combination of applications to test for incompatibilities.
Letting end users choose their own machines and apps sounds like a lovely and empowering idea, right up until the point where they need to call tech support. And find out that it might be days before IT can fix whatever is broken, since they are starting with zero idea what is wrong because of the wacky config. Those days of lost productivity can be hugely expensive compared to the costs of testing a few specific configs that can be easily and quickly supported. Some tech hours of advance testing and some possible minor losses of productivity from using applications that aren't the user's favorite choices are far cheaper than having an employee turn in no billable hours for several days because his computer is down.
The main thing I'd want lawmakers to borrow from software development is a content management system. For every sneaky loophole or badly written clause, I want to know exactly which person checked it in and when. No hiding garbage in monster bills and then denying responsibility - every word, every revision, all clearly identifiable by editor.
Can someone please explain how submitting a standard to a standards board is anti-competitive? Even if OOXML is accepted as a standard, no-one is obliged to use/support it. I know that folks hate Microsoft, but this is just silly. Yes, they gamed the voting. Of course they did, it was in their interest to do so. Did that show magical monopolist powers? No. Every other software vendor or customer in the world is still perfectly free to ignore OOXML, just as MS is free to ignore anyone else's standard when writing their software. The US still uses a standardized foot for measurements, but the rest of the world is permitted to use a meter if they so desire, despite the big mean American's power.
I'd be much more impressed with EU anti-trust efforts if they weren't pretty much aimed at non-EU companies. They're mostly a trade barrier rather than a legitimate regulatory body.
Right. We'll just step up production from our vast hydrogen mining industry. Oh, wait. We don't have anything like that. Mostly we get hydrogen from water, which often means running an electric current through it. Since US enviros oppose nuclear, won't allow new dams for hydro because it upsets the fish, and have fought new natural gas exploration for fear it will damage pristine ecosystems, that probably means that coal is being burned to produce that electricity. Nice, clean, eco-friendly coal. In fact, because of losses creating the hydrogen and then burning it in the engine, it's less efficient than the coal plant, so you have to burn more coal for the energy used.
Hydrogen is eco-friendly *at the point of use*, but unless someone can magically cause it to appear its production isn't environmentally sound at all. You just hide the costs and emissions somewhere that the public hopefully won't notice it. (Same with electric cars. Using electric doesn't pollute. Making it certainly does. Anyone telling you different wants your money or your vote.)
I was one of those testers fixing an enterprise product for y2k. There were a lot of things that needed corrected, not just the 2 digit year problem. For example, correctly knowing that 2000 was a leap year was a lingering problem. Without a large testing and programming effort lots of software would have crashed. It was a non-issue to the world at large because a bunch of geeks kicked ass fixing the bugs before they blew up.
I've never understood the legal basis for whining about "cybersquatting". For any other bit of intellectual property ever recognized by law or treaty, it's first come, first served. If someone else got to the domain first, shame on you for being so slow off the draw. I can't write up a new patent and tell the previous owner "sorry, I was going to do that and just didn't get around to it in time" and expect anything but rude laughter. Why are domains any different? Hell, the things are cheap, companies should bulk buy anything that even sounds a little like their property at the same time they file for copyright or trademark protection. If they can't be bothered, they should have to pay through the nose to get the relevant domains from whoever grabbed 'em first. Call it an idiot tax, stupidity should be painful. When new domains are introduced maybe give IP owners some pad to catch the new domains for their properties since they couldn't be expected to have already gotten them, but otherwise the person who files first is the owner, simple as that.
What idiot came up with the whole retroactive intellectual property argument anyway? How did domain names get such a unique protection?
-reemul
Is the "just buy a mac" thing becoming some knee-jerk response that just happens in every thread? It's starting to be the equivalent of "first post", "hot grits", or voting for the Cowboy Neal option in the poll.
The question was very specifically about linux. Not mac. I get where you are coming from: M$ bad, Mac good, Linux too hard. Just accept that I understand that without you having to say it again and move on.
Whatever evil conspiracy theory you want to believe about restricting the data that comes out of the USGS, you have to acknowledge that anything even a little bit controversial will be leaked by some of the career staffers on the project. The entire employee pool doesn't get changed out between administrations so that absolutely everyone is a total unthinking tool of the prez. There is always going to be someone who strongly disagrees and dumps the story into the press as a way of sticking it to the man.
Though I agree that all of the science on climate change should be available. All of it. Including the data and methods used to create the hockey stick model. I wonder what *that* guy is hiding.
Big corporations are going to take months if not a year or more to actually start a large-scale rollout of any major software change, much less a new operating system. MS and everyone else releases to them early so they can start the process. (Well, and it makes the companies feel special.) The corps will test on boxes that approximately match what they think will be on the desks when the new system would go into production, not what is there now. They're the ones that drive the patches and the service packs, testing with so many possible interactions with different application packages. Small companies and home users will likely just be running common stuff that is tested for in the QA lab, and they'll still find bugs anyway.
And the biggest corps of all will ask for lame features just to prove how big and powerful they are, to get MS to give in to something stupid. Better to get those out of the way before you release to manufacturing. (You thought it was the 5 employee legal office that asked for the 3 pages of menus to set all those intricate rules for bullet points in Word? It was probably the secretary of some high level exec at a customer with several thousand desks to push software to.)
Of course they'll wait for a big patch package or SP before they'll roll out. It gives them time for other people to find the bugs by hitting them first, so they don't have to. If that sounds mean, consider that this QA model is pretty much how a lot of open source projects work, the lots-of-eyeballs model. It's still herding sheep through the minefield looking to see what goes boom. OSS guys just feel better about finding a flaw, like they are part of the team.
As an aside, I used to be a QA guy. I liked actually getting paid to find bugs, not simply doing it because it made me feel warm and tingly. I reported a bug to Real Networks once, looking to see if they had a fix. They wanted me to walk through the steps to reproduce the error since they hadn't see it before, I told them what my rates were. The phone call ended pretty soon afterward.
Why on Earth would the USPS care about convenience? If they started to go with kiosks, they might have trouble justifying the nearby full-service office. Which would result in postal employees getting laid off, which would reduce the tiny empires of the pocket dictators who have no other purpose than to justify their *own* existence. Which can never ever be allowed.
As a poor downtrodden American seeing the second season way behind my British counterparts, I just have one question about the Christmas Invasion episode: weren't the Sycorax a total rip-off? Am I the only one who thought that once the leader took his helmet off he looked and sounded like the aliens from Enemy Mine?
Could just be me.
I have no big problem with regging for sites that I'll likely hit more than once. But I'm certainly not going to use my real info - I use a throwaway email address that I cycle out every few months depending on spam volume, and I fill in all the rest of the blanks with data that looks real enough that it won't get filtered out automatically.
Look, databases of your user data are only as valuable as the data is useful. The best way to protect privacy in the long term is to make selling information no longer profitable, because of the signal/noise ratio in the databases. I either use the address of a church of scientology in Austin, TX (those guys just bug me), or I gen one with a perl script I wrote a few years back. I've got a datafile with all zipcodes in use, with the associated city, state, and phone area code. That's the mechanism most filters use to catch fake data, so as long as those fields match up your bogus info will likely sneak through. Add in a random generator of good looking fake names, ages, and street addresses, and you're good to go. Fill thoses databases with likely looking crap enough times, and the market for the databases will dry up - they just won't be worth anything. Make capitalism work for you.
Sure, you could just use the address for any SCO or MS office in the world, but repeats would start to get noticed and filtered. The key is to be sneaky.
-reemul
Several of the comments made in the article seem to indicate that the author is living in a happy dream world, where clever users are oppressed into mere drones by MCSE's and MS software. He acknowledges that it is a best practice in the Wintel world to lock down machines as much as possible to minimize support costs, yet seems to think that Unix will "empower users" (from a sidebar) without causing any problems at all.
/. crew decide that the author is living a dream?
Is he crazy? The reasons that machines are locked down is that the endusers are stupid. They know nothing about computers, and ideally they shouldn't have to - they are just tools to do their real jobs. Any extra capabilities will just allow them to break more things. Sun can only support so many users per admin by locking systems tighter than most MSCEs could dream of - the answers to what is wrong are so easy because there are no other options. The users aren't empowered, they are chained down as much as possible. All to the good; but believing you can take the same idiot endusers from a windows shop, give them magic Lintel boxen and some responsibility and rights to manage their own systems, and get *fewer* support calls is just delusional.
And thinking that it's the OS that is driving all those fast upgrades to physical machines is also absurd. A huge portion of all business desktop and laptop upgrades is driven by vanity, not need. Good luck thinking that a rational OS decision based on security and TCO will quickly stop "mine's bigger" purchasing. You think execs sending email, looking at excel spreadsheets, and playing solitaire need those multi-thousand dollar laptops? You think that running linux they'll stop buying them?
I liked the approach of the author, to look at the practices that will be reflexive to existing support staff and the effect they will have on a Linux implementation. But his take on the reflexive approaches of the *users* is completely unrealistic, and renders his article mostly useless. Face it, most of the people here on Slashdot have dealt with those endusers - you think the majority will agree that they will miraculously become wise if just given a chance? Or will the
The federal government has a monopoly on the delivery of first class mail (letters). By monopoly, I mean that they are the only entity legally allowed to be in the business of delivering such mail. Not just the MicroSoft really-big-slice-of-the-market definition of monopoly, the real thing: absolutely no-one else is allowed to enter the market under penalty of *criminal*, not just civil, law. All letters - in fact anything delivered to a mailbox - are the sole domain of the federal government. No exceptions, they have even threatened kids delivering letters on their bikes with jail time. (The postal inspectors seem to be the fastest moving employees in the whole organization.)
-reemul