You might get the Mac setup a bit faster, but you've really already paid for someone to do it for you. For the price of a desktop Mac, I can have a far more powerful PC, and still have hundreds of dollars left over to have a topless chick come over to set up the PC, clean my apartment, and just dance around. I still only put 15 minutes of my own effort into it and the same money, but I have a faster computer, a clean apartment, and a topless woman.
For the extra money Apple wants for their machines, they damn well better be easy to setup - they ought to magically appear, install themselves, and pull my desktop preferences for color and wallpaper out of my head through telepathy. Anything short of that, you paid too much.
Which system did Ramen infect? I'm pretty sure it wasn't a Microsoft platform.
Software has bugs. They get found, they get fixed, move on. The only reason MS exploits get more press and greater impact than Linux exploits is that MS is on more boxes. If, as you claim to desire, Linux takes off, the same people shrieking to the sky about what a crappy system MS has will be defending Linux and saying, hey, it happens. Stupid users who don't patch aren't Bill Gates' fault.
It's just the same crap from folks who attack NT as buggy and crashprone (which is almost always due to 3rd-party drivers) while extolling the stability of Linux, which they keep rebooting because they have wonky drivers. A ha! they say, I was using a beta driver, its to be expected. Well, that driver has been in beta for over a year, that's as good as it gets. Software has bugs, move on.
You want to ignore your own faults and start a religious war? I'm betting you can get some cheap flights to Tel Aviv right now. Knock yourself out.
-reemul
who wishes 2k wasn't so buggy, either, but doesn't want to hear the bitching from folks who need 2 hours and a phone call to a friend to get a soundcard working
SJ was also one of the first on the net
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I'm surprised that nobody remembered that Steve was also one of the first to take his business to the net, before there was even a web. I used to have a telnet account with Illuminati online starting back in the early 90's. His Metaverse (a MUD equivalent) was almost an early portal, with several organizations, including the EFF, having an online presence inside of it. And then IO became a full blown ISP, with service in at least two cities in Texas. Not too bad for someone the government did their level best to squish.
He may not be making the buckets of cash he deserves to, but SJ has been net-savvy longer than almost anyone around. Its just a shame that he can't find some aging gamer geek with a CPA to help him do all that nasty money stuff.
-reemul
who, by an amazing coincidence, happened to be chatting with SJ in the Metaverse when the settlement check from the Secret Service came in
Well, not/everything/ is LDS controlled. I visited there on a business trip about a year and a half back, and stayed at a hotel just up the street from the university stadium where the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies will be held. An adopt-a-highway sign on the road directly across from the stadium noted that that particular stretch had been picked up by the united pagans. I laughed myself stupid. I'm sure that somehow a different group will have that bit of road before the cameras get there, but I can't wait for the Olympics just in case they missed it.
And the roads need all the help they can get. Utah had the worst highway construction I've ever imagined. They had done some new contruction/repair on some long stretches I hit going cross-country, and they had signs up asking big rigs to drive in specific lanes so as to help smooth the surface. I thought it was a prank until I saw the second one. Can't you folks afford steamrollers? Big rigs tend to make roads a bit lumpy - y'know, wheel grooves? - so depending on them to level out a badly laid road is just dumb. A brother-in-law in road construction here in Texas said that if his company walked away from a road in that condition almost anywhere else in the US, they'd never get another public job again, even if they survived the lawsuits. Yet Utah had that level of poor quality over roads across the whole state. Very nice. I've been to places where weather beat the roads up, and where the state just let them stay bad; but never where crews came out and resurfaced, and it didn't help.
I didn't intend to cover personal data under the GPL, I just called it the GNU Privacy License as a bit of a joke. It would be an entirely new license. Involving GNU or Stallman would be a good idea though - not only adds a big name proponent to the effort, but keeps RMS busy and off the streets, which is generally a good thing.
And I was a little leery, too, of using real phone numbers, but I wanted my fake data to be as close to perfect as possible. Maybe the best way to accomplish it to build a big database of businesses and groups that annoy me, and randomly choose one of those addresses and phone numbers. McDonalds, Baby Bell business offices, aluminum siding salesmen, Scientologists, that sort o' thing. Just like when I registered a bunch of goofy domain names on a free reg service and used addresses for Graceland, a Dairy Queen in Janis Joplin's hometown, &etc. Maybe I'll do an Ask Slashdot on it.
One of the biggest problems of privacy now is that once we give out some information, we have mostly lost control over that data forever. Whoever got the data can largely do as they like with it, because we have retained no control over it. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Why can't we treat personal data like any other intellectual property, and instead of simply giving the data away to businesses,/license/ it to them. There are enough privacy mavens and licensing gurus lurking around here on/. that they should be able to put there heads together and come up with some legal boilerplate for this. Anyone allowed to use a person's data under such a license could not resell it, transfer it, print it on bumper stickers, &etc. without violating the terms. Legal remedy would work through tried and true contract law, instead of iffy untested privacy statutes. The license would state that the given data could only legally be used by a specific entity, for specific purposes, with no unannounced policy amendments, forever and ever amen. It couldn't be sold off to creditors of a dead dotcom, because the dotcom never owned it.
(I know that the slashdot crowd hates restrictions on IP, but lets make it work for us for once. Just think of the irony...)
Once such a thing exists, simply refuse to give correct demographic data or personal information to any entity that does not explicity acknowledge that your data is yours, and is only licensed to them (and only them) under the terms of the (GNU Privacy License?). If site somenewsmonkey.org wants me to go through a registration process to access their site, they either let me give them use of the data through the license, or I'll fill in all the blanks with crap. Simple as that. If they want useful data for their internal (and explicity specifed) purposes, they'd better go along with the license.
As an aside, the fake data should be as pristine as possible, so that the company can't just filter it out. (That's what caught the perl guy who tried to rig the online baseball allstar vote a few years back.) If I can't stop them from selling the data, I can gut its resale value and make the database worthless. I'm working on a site that will generate fake people data with a correct set of city/state/zip/areacode, if anyone has suggestions email me at bob_dobbs_666 at-sign hotmail dot-thingy com. I am also still looking for a copy of the area code / exchange database so I can build better fake phone numbers. This lets me know if, say, area code 777 has any 333-xxxx phone numbers. I've found sites that allow one-off lookups, but no sign of the full database.
Regards,
reemul
who registers software to J. R. "Bob" Dobbs using the address of a church of scientology in Austin, TX.
I still wonder how much mail they get for him.
Jehovah's Witnesses are fun to mess with. Best story of thwarting their spread I heard was an SCA guy I knew a long time ago. He'd been getting pestered by them for a while, and they just didn't seem to be taking no for an answer. So the next time they came by, he took his battle axe and did the "Here's Johnny" thing: he chopped a hole in his own front door, stuck his head through the hole, and asked them what the hell they wanted.
Expensive, since he had to replace the door, but very very effective.
-reemul
Everything I know, I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
A basic contract, or amendment to an existing contract, will work fine for binding the employee. Just state that if the employee leaves before (1yr, 2 yr, whatever) he/she must reimburse the company for the pro-rated value of the training. So if they quit immediately, they have to pay the full amount, if they leave halfway through the period they pay half, and if they leave after the time is up, wave at them as they head out the door. Such a contract is pretty firmly binding - you aren't saying they can't leave, you're just saying that if they do so before a certain period they owe you money.
A nice balance between value to the employer and value to the employee is struck. If an employee feels that their new skills are sufficiently valuable elsewhere to make up for the monies owed their current boss, more power to them.
Such an arrangement has been fairly common at places I've been when dealing with likely-to-move positions and pricey in-demand training. And I've never heard of anyone successfully challenging the contract after they've received the training.
I can't believe that the/. crowd missed the best detail: Mr. Bill Gates himself in a FPS environment! Sure, they think they've gotten all the guns out, but that just makes it more of a challenge for the hackers. Even if you have to get him into the elevator shaft, you too can frag the Man. Wow. The mind boggles.
If France was actually taking the path of righteousness here, I'd applaud them. However, they are primarily upset because it's not their system. Most of their civil service is wildy inefficient - often by design, since it allows them to hire more civil servants - but their own spies are top notch. And they don't have laws against bribery to gain foreign contracts, such as the US has for its companies. Its not the privacy concerns that bother the French here, its getting caught.
French foreign policy since WWII has mostly been based on repeated iterations of the question "Will it piss off the English-speakers?" I'll admit that this approach is probably as valid as anything else, and they have certainly been consistent and fair in its application, but basing relations with the rest of the world on a grudge over holding a losing ticket in the dominant culture sweepstakes is not terribly praiseworthy. Sorry.
You mean, more clueless newbies than they already have? Where would they _find_ them? Cloning? Putting AOL devices in zoos for the chimps to play with? The mind boggles....
Well, they have to list it as censorship for consistency, since this is exactly what Microsoft went after Slashdot for in the Kerberos flap. And since they called it censorship then, if they didn't call it censorship now they'd look like a bunch of knee-jerk anti-M$ whin...um...oh.
Apple is in an entirely different position from Intel, so of course they approach it differently. They are getting creamed in the market and most folks know what a small percentage of all boxes out there are from Apple, so covering up all the Intel boxes would be too obvious. The absence of Intel boxen would be far more noticeable than just letting them be. Apple instead wants to show that consumers have a choice, and that some of the folks (they'd like to say the cool ones, but, well, no) chose to use a Mac. Lots of places have only Intel, so boxing the cute little cubes from Mr. Jobs is not so obvious, and they'd prefer covered Macs to showing that folks have a choice and some chose Macs. Behavior of the small guy vs. behavior of the big guy.
Same thing really as Coke vs. Pepsi. I see all of these ads where Pepsi claims this or that to be in some way superior to Coke, including a rebirth of the oh-so-annoying Pepsi-challenge. But you don't ever see Coke talking about being better than Pepsi in their ads. Or even mentioning Pepsi at all. THEY DON'T HAVE TO. They can just talk to a Coke dominated world and everything is OK.
By the way, Apple funding of schools is not just altruism, schools are one of their best markets, and getting kids to grow up using Mac is one of the only ways they have continued to even be relevant, much less successful. I'd bet if you did a poll, an amazingly high percentage of all Mac users in the workforce used Apples in school, and just stuck with what they were comfy with.
And Harvard uses Macs as much because they hate M$ as because they actually like iMacs. A valid choice, but their IT system is seriously odd and buggy because they just knee-jerk pick the other guy rather than actually thinking it through. (My company sold a software package to them, and they were a very needy customer, much worse than sites with 10x the deployed seats.) I'm surprised Intel was funding them.
Sealand is vulnerable because of its weak physical presence and dubious sovereign status. It wouldn't take much for a small private group to knock them out, much less a real government. I actually know a guy who used to do underwater demolitions in the North Sea, who could probably be talked into it just for the BANG it would make, but then I have some very weird acquaintances. And if the US got mad at them, a passing AEGIS destroyer on its way to visit some friendly Brits could just point its radar array at them and zorch most of the network uplinks. Oops, sorry. What we need instead for a datahaven is a group which is recognized as sovereign, but doesn't actually have any sovereign territory: the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
You might be more familiar with them as the Knights Hospitaler. Since Napoleon kicked them off of Malta in 1798 they haven't had any territory of their own, but they are still acknowledged as a sovereign entity, and have full diplomatic relations with several countries (putting them in the unique position of having only their embassies as native soil).
From the webpages of the US organization, at http://www.smom.org "The Order is still recognized under international law as a "sovereign entity"; and exchanges ambassadors and diplomatic representatives with over 80 countries. On August 24, 1994, the Order was admitted to the United Nations by being granted "Permanent Observer" status. This status, similar to the status granted to the international Red Cross and other relief organization, allows the Order to participate in the discussions of the General Assembly of the United Nations."
Being a monastic order of the Catholic Church, they would undoubtedly have problems with most if not all porn, but they might be amenable to handling nice clean money and data for a cut of the profits. After all, their 900 year history includes a generous helping of literal piracy, of the fast-galleys-and-angry-men variety. Well, they prefer 'corsair' to pirate, but you get the idea. And membership in the higher ranks still requires actual noble blood, so they are likely to be very sympathetic to tax and inheritance issues.
So, if we could get the SMOM to provide the service, we could put servers in nice clean treaty-protected embassies throughout the world. Intercepting the traffic would be a violation of international law. Fun, eh?
-reemul who has always thought that the legal precedent of the SMOM being sovereign without having any territory would be the basis for some global corps getting extranational status. Just a matter of time.
Most of the sites that filter on the User-Agent do so because a) they rely heavily on proprietary features only present in certain browsers, so spoofing the UA just wastes your time and theirs -or- b) is an attempt to block bots from bulk-downloading the site and sucking up all the bandwidth. In neither case is their really a good reason to spoof around it. I spoof my UA for privacy purposes, but my fake UA is sufficiently similar to the real thing that I get the proper services.
B'sides, your post is not only off-topic, but a troll. Lucky for you some moderator decided to reward you for the non sequitor anti-M$ drivel. Happy birthday.
Well, sure, you get booted. But then you file the form to say "I was unjustly accused", which would be in fact true, and then when Metallica or Dre or whoever doesn't pursue you and you get let back in, you are probably safe from future action. Sort of a get-out-of-jail free card, perhaps.
Wrong. Just like with any other intellectual property, its just the first copy that has all those development costs associated with it. The second and successive copies just cost whatever it takes to print and ship them. Regardless of whether its just 10 copies or 10 million, all of them after that first one cost just the disc, the box, and the gas to get it to the store.
And calling claims you disagree with 'FUD' is pathetic. Instead of indicating a significant, concerted effort to cause harm, you and folks like you have watered it down to mean some data you don't like, like your lousy Jr. High report card. Knock it off.
The TLD is from outside the US. The HOSTING is not..CC is owned by Clear Channel Communications now, even though it was orignally for the Cocos Islands. Y'know, the company that is probably running a vanilla corporate rock station near you?.TV is only licensed from the tiny island nation of Tuvalu rather than wholly owned, but don't think that this means that they have any web servers there. A lot of those islands don't even have electricity, much less bandwidth. All you gain from using these domains is forcing anyone trying to track you down to use whois one, maybe two, more times to find where your data resides. Hmm, tricky.
Doesn't matter who provides the domain services, its where your server is.
You're missing the point - you wouldn't have a "blondes" or "asians" directory, you'd just have files where "girl-girl" = true. Then just a simple query would find all the pics where "asian" = true, "transexual" = true, and "sure,let my parents see it" = false.
Sorry, but this is another one that comes down to money. In a lot of cases, the rights revert to the author when the book goes out of print (depends of course on the contract), and the author can still hope to get it printed / filmed / whatever in the future by somebody else, and get paid for it. Which won't happen if the text becomes freely available simply because the original publisher didn't want to print any more. Once a book goes out of copyright, all bets are off, but until then you'd be ripping off the person who should get the bulk of the credit, the author. Good authors are hard to find, and should be treated with care in hopes that they have at least one more good book in them.
And for books that _are_ out of copyright, the answer is the same as with Open Source software: DO IT YOURSELF. Scan them. Type them. Give money to the electronic Gutenburg foundation. Every bit you do helps everyone else. Don't wait for the Library of Congress/Microsoft/your mommy to do it for you and present it wrapped in a bow (and a license agreement). Go find some book or play or essay that is out of copyright that you think should be free for absolutely everyone, and get to work.
If you want more information on the intellectual property rights issues here, this was thrashed out at length on the Lois Bujold mailing list. Check the archive at Dendarii.com for this thread about a year back, especially posts by Patricia Wrede, an author and former accountant.
Actually, I don't think M$ has any interest in writing ASP support code for any other web server than IIS on NT/2K. ASP support on other platforms is entirely the province of third-parties, such as ChiliSoft. Their ChiliASP lets Netscape or even Apache servers serve ASP pages, though they still have some quirks. My company's web-based offerings require ASP, but using ChiliASP we don't require IIS. Unfortunately, we still use COM under the hood, so we still have to host on NT. We're getting there...
Umm...C'mon folks, lets at least read up before going with the kneejerk anti-MS flame.
MSSQL 7 does support row level locking.
MSSQL 6+ support online backup and restore, better than any of the others - you can backup the DB while it is still up and running, instead of making a copy of the DB and backing _that_ up. (No idea why they have this and at least Sybase, who had the same codebase, don't. Some Microserf must've briefly channeled a code deity. Weird.)
What the hell did you need raw I/O for anyway? You get a perf boost using it under some OSes, but only because of quirks in the given OS. Raw I/O != better for all systems.
MSSQL has its roots in the Sybase code. Be fair, slap them too if you don't like where they came from. As if several years ago history were in any way relevant...
MSSQL can and does support enterprise applications - I've installed apps for many Fortune 1000 companies, and it's done as well or better for us than Oracle or Sybase, even when those are running on Un*x boxen. Don't get me wrong, for the serious datacrunching, you've got to go with Oracle or Sybase on the big iron, but for anything other than monster projects it'll do what you need.
Yes, like any product, it's got bugs. But so do Oracle and Sybase, and I'm sure all the others though I don't have the first hand experience with those.
I'm not a M$ bigot, nor have I ever worked for them. I just can't stand folks who just fire off mindless salvos against a product just because of the logo on the box. Especially when they don't know what they're talking about.
-reemul If you want to attack M$, find me the bastard who thought a talking paperclip was a neat idea!
Please, everyone, there are no hidden APIs. Period. This conspiracy stuff is what makes me hate to admit to liking Linux. Microsoft hires thousands of developers. Lots of them cycle through fairly quickly, and a lot of the ones that leave don't feel too warm and fuzzy toward MS. Do you really think that of those thouands of snarky ex-devs, not one of them would have had access to those 'hidden APIs' and disclosed them after they left? Not a single one? I'm sure they could leak them 'anonymously' to some anti-MS dev house, like Oracle or Sun, with no problem whatever. Heck, no NDA would stop them, not when the simple fact of Microsoft pursuing the ex-employee over the data would be a crippling admission of guilt. This is another stupid net myth, mindlessly parrotted by folks who really want to believe it, or who cannot be bothered to think for themselves. Just one more ludicrous conspiracy theory, an inheritor of an inglorious history stretching back from the Kennedy assassination all the way back to the trial of the Templars (actually the first historical example, and one that is still argued about several hundred years later.)
Rationally, there is no such thing as a secret when several thousand people know it. Sorry. MS is not in the business of being nice, and they do a lot of shady and ruthless things. But keeping that sort of thing secret doesn't involve shady practice, it would have to involve mind-control. And if they had that, the recent legal announcement would have been rather different...
Are you serious? Exchange at this level of usage would be absolutely nuts, but Notes? Puh-leeze.
Nobody buys Domino for the mail capability, they buy it for the groupware and application system, and they *accept* the mail function that comes with it. The client UI is so amazingly bad that a UI design site did an in-depth critique, attacking pretty much the entire app. (http://www.iarchitect.com/lotus.htm)
The server is difficult to administer; the user directory is flat, slow and scales badly; and a given user's mail store only *looks* hierarchical, but is actually just one big lump of data which must be read in its entirety, first-in-first-out, for many applications, especially connectivity with third-party apps attempting to access the VIM subsystem (which is itself pretty awful) for messaging. This means that anything attempting to read a Notes message will read every single thing in the mailfile in order of its creation until it finds what it is looking for, including any archived, sent, and deleted items.
The client is difficult to navigate, crash-prone, and really beats the hell out of a network.
Hopefully the newer versions are not so bad as 4.1, but I was involved in a rollout of Notes to a mere 600 users at a chemical plant two years ago. Notes was hosted on a single high end NT/Intel box, which should be sufficient for the intended usage. Users were sent to training classes on Notes in small groups twice a day, and their machines were converted to the new mail system while they were in the class. So we knew how many users would be on the system on any given day throughout the rollout. The guy onsite from Bay Networks and I made a bet on when the network would crash from the load - I was within an *hour*. We didn't even get halfway through the deployment before the net died. Not the server, the network. Admittedly, the network was sufficiently stressed and just plain odd at the best of times, which is why the Bay guy had a desk, but 300 casual mail users should not kill a production network.
(One of the plant managers was upset by the burning fuse I drew up on a whiteboard in the MIS room and updated daily. After I was proven to be exactly correct in my forecast, he bought us lunch.)
Domino is not a mail system. If you don't need all of the other whiz-bang features of Notes/Domino, don't do it. For groupware it kicks some serious ass, really doesn't have any serious competition, but for straight mail you are better off with nearly anything else. Except Exchange.
-reemul who dumped Notes 5 testing on someone else just this morning, and is still smiling
Slashdot Mirror
You might get the Mac setup a bit faster, but you've really already paid for someone to do it for you. For the price of a desktop Mac, I can have a far more powerful PC, and still have hundreds of dollars left over to have a topless chick come over to set up the PC, clean my apartment, and just dance around. I still only put 15 minutes of my own effort into it and the same money, but I have a faster computer, a clean apartment, and a topless woman.
For the extra money Apple wants for their machines, they damn well better be easy to setup - they ought to magically appear, install themselves, and pull my desktop preferences for color and wallpaper out of my head through telepathy. Anything short of that, you paid too much.
-reemul
Which system did Ramen infect? I'm pretty sure it wasn't a Microsoft platform.
Software has bugs. They get found, they get fixed, move on. The only reason MS exploits get more press and greater impact than Linux exploits is that MS is on more boxes. If, as you claim to desire, Linux takes off, the same people shrieking to the sky about what a crappy system MS has will be defending Linux and saying, hey, it happens. Stupid users who don't patch aren't Bill Gates' fault.
It's just the same crap from folks who attack NT as buggy and crashprone (which is almost always due to 3rd-party drivers) while extolling the stability of Linux, which they keep rebooting because they have wonky drivers. A ha! they say, I was using a beta driver, its to be expected. Well, that driver has been in beta for over a year, that's as good as it gets. Software has bugs, move on.
You want to ignore your own faults and start a religious war? I'm betting you can get some cheap flights to Tel Aviv right now. Knock yourself out.
-reemul
who wishes 2k wasn't so buggy, either, but doesn't want to hear the bitching from folks who need 2 hours and a phone call to a friend to get a soundcard working
I'm surprised that nobody remembered that Steve was also one of the first to take his business to the net, before there was even a web. I used to have a telnet account with Illuminati online starting back in the early 90's. His Metaverse (a MUD equivalent) was almost an early portal, with several organizations, including the EFF, having an online presence inside of it. And then IO became a full blown ISP, with service in at least two cities in Texas. Not too bad for someone the government did their level best to squish.
He may not be making the buckets of cash he deserves to, but SJ has been net-savvy longer than almost anyone around. Its just a shame that he can't find some aging gamer geek with a CPA to help him do all that nasty money stuff.
-reemul
who, by an amazing coincidence, happened to be chatting with SJ in the Metaverse when the settlement check from the Secret Service came in
Score -1 for lame "all your base" joke. Hell, its already been used in a *national comic strip*, it could not be more dead. Let it go.
-reemul
everything I know, I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains
Well, not /everything/ is LDS controlled. I visited there on a business trip about a year and a half back, and stayed at a hotel just up the street from the university stadium where the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies will be held. An adopt-a-highway sign on the road directly across from the stadium noted that that particular stretch had been picked up by the united pagans. I laughed myself stupid. I'm sure that somehow a different group will have that bit of road before the cameras get there, but I can't wait for the Olympics just in case they missed it.
And the roads need all the help they can get. Utah had the worst highway construction I've ever imagined. They had done some new contruction/repair on some long stretches I hit going cross-country, and they had signs up asking big rigs to drive in specific lanes so as to help smooth the surface. I thought it was a prank until I saw the second one. Can't you folks afford steamrollers? Big rigs tend to make roads a bit lumpy - y'know, wheel grooves? - so depending on them to level out a badly laid road is just dumb. A brother-in-law in road construction here in Texas said that if his company walked away from a road in that condition almost anywhere else in the US, they'd never get another public job again, even if they survived the lawsuits. Yet Utah had that level of poor quality over roads across the whole state. Very nice. I've been to places where weather beat the roads up, and where the state just let them stay bad; but never where crews came out and resurfaced, and it didn't help.
-reemul
I didn't intend to cover personal data under the GPL, I just called it the GNU Privacy License as a bit of a joke. It would be an entirely new license. Involving GNU or Stallman would be a good idea though - not only adds a big name proponent to the effort, but keeps RMS busy and off the streets, which is generally a good thing.
And I was a little leery, too, of using real phone numbers, but I wanted my fake data to be as close to perfect as possible. Maybe the best way to accomplish it to build a big database of businesses and groups that annoy me, and randomly choose one of those addresses and phone numbers. McDonalds, Baby Bell business offices, aluminum siding salesmen, Scientologists, that sort o' thing. Just like when I registered a bunch of goofy domain names on a free reg service and used addresses for Graceland, a Dairy Queen in Janis Joplin's hometown, &etc. Maybe I'll do an Ask Slashdot on it.
Regards,
reemul
One of the biggest problems of privacy now is that once we give out some information, we have mostly lost control over that data forever. Whoever got the data can largely do as they like with it, because we have retained no control over it. But it doesn't have to be this way.
/license/ it to them. There are enough privacy mavens and licensing gurus lurking around here on /. that they should be able to put there heads together and come up with some legal boilerplate for this. Anyone allowed to use a person's data under such a license could not resell it, transfer it, print it on bumper stickers, &etc. without violating the terms. Legal remedy would work through tried and true contract law, instead of iffy untested privacy statutes. The license would state that the given data could only legally be used by a specific entity, for specific purposes, with no unannounced policy amendments, forever and ever amen. It couldn't be sold off to creditors of a dead dotcom, because the dotcom never owned it.
Why can't we treat personal data like any other intellectual property, and instead of simply giving the data away to businesses,
(I know that the slashdot crowd hates restrictions on IP, but lets make it work for us for once. Just think of the irony...)
Once such a thing exists, simply refuse to give correct demographic data or personal information to any entity that does not explicity acknowledge that your data is yours, and is only licensed to them (and only them) under the terms of the (GNU Privacy License?). If site somenewsmonkey.org wants me to go through a registration process to access their site, they either let me give them use of the data through the license, or I'll fill in all the blanks with crap. Simple as that. If they want useful data for their internal (and explicity specifed) purposes, they'd better go along with the license.
As an aside, the fake data should be as pristine as possible, so that the company can't just filter it out. (That's what caught the perl guy who tried to rig the online baseball allstar vote a few years back.) If I can't stop them from selling the data, I can gut its resale value and make the database worthless. I'm working on a site that will generate fake people data with a correct set of city/state/zip/areacode, if anyone has suggestions email me at bob_dobbs_666 at-sign hotmail dot-thingy com. I am also still looking for a copy of the area code / exchange database so I can build better fake phone numbers. This lets me know if, say, area code 777 has any 333-xxxx phone numbers. I've found sites that allow one-off lookups, but no sign of the full database.
Regards,
reemul
who registers software to J. R. "Bob" Dobbs using the address of a church of scientology in Austin, TX.
I still wonder how much mail they get for him.
Jehovah's Witnesses are fun to mess with. Best story of thwarting their spread I heard was an SCA guy I knew a long time ago. He'd been getting pestered by them for a while, and they just didn't seem to be taking no for an answer. So the next time they came by, he took his battle axe and did the "Here's Johnny" thing: he chopped a hole in his own front door, stuck his head through the hole, and asked them what the hell they wanted.
Expensive, since he had to replace the door, but very very effective.
-reemul
Everything I know, I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
A basic contract, or amendment to an existing contract, will work fine for binding the employee. Just state that if the employee leaves before (1yr, 2 yr, whatever) he/she must reimburse the company for the pro-rated value of the training. So if they quit immediately, they have to pay the full amount, if they leave halfway through the period they pay half, and if they leave after the time is up, wave at them as they head out the door. Such a contract is pretty firmly binding - you aren't saying they can't leave, you're just saying that if they do so before a certain period they owe you money.
A nice balance between value to the employer and value to the employee is struck. If an employee feels that their new skills are sufficiently valuable elsewhere to make up for the monies owed their current boss, more power to them.
Such an arrangement has been fairly common at places I've been when dealing with likely-to-move positions and pricey in-demand training. And I've never heard of anyone successfully challenging the contract after they've received the training.
just my $.02
-reemul
I can't believe that the /. crowd missed the best detail: Mr. Bill Gates himself in a FPS environment! Sure, they think they've gotten all the guns out, but that just makes it more of a challenge for the hackers. Even if you have to get him into the elevator shaft, you too can frag the Man. Wow. The mind boggles.
-reemul
If France was actually taking the path of righteousness here, I'd applaud them. However, they are primarily upset because it's not their system. Most of their civil service is wildy inefficient - often by design, since it allows them to hire more civil servants - but their own spies are top notch. And they don't have laws against bribery to gain foreign contracts, such as the US has for its companies. Its not the privacy concerns that bother the French here, its getting caught.
French foreign policy since WWII has mostly been based on repeated iterations of the question "Will it piss off the English-speakers?" I'll admit that this approach is probably as valid as anything else, and they have certainly been consistent and fair in its application, but basing relations with the rest of the world on a grudge over holding a losing ticket in the dominant culture sweepstakes is not terribly praiseworthy. Sorry.
-reemul
You mean, more clueless newbies than they already have? Where would they _find_ them? Cloning? Putting AOL devices in zoos for the chimps to play with? The mind boggles....
-reemul
Well, they have to list it as censorship for consistency, since this is exactly what Microsoft went after Slashdot for in the Kerberos flap. And since they called it censorship then, if they didn't call it censorship now they'd look like a bunch of knee-jerk anti-M$ whin...um...oh.
-reemul
kissing karma goodbye, oh well
Apple is in an entirely different position from Intel, so of course they approach it differently. They are getting creamed in the market and most folks know what a small percentage of all boxes out there are from Apple, so covering up all the Intel boxes would be too obvious. The absence of Intel boxen would be far more noticeable than just letting them be. Apple instead wants to show that consumers have a choice, and that some of the folks (they'd like to say the cool ones, but, well, no) chose to use a Mac. Lots of places have only Intel, so boxing the cute little cubes from Mr. Jobs is not so obvious, and they'd prefer covered Macs to showing that folks have a choice and some chose Macs. Behavior of the small guy vs. behavior of the big guy.
Same thing really as Coke vs. Pepsi. I see all of these ads where Pepsi claims this or that to be in some way superior to Coke, including a rebirth of the oh-so-annoying Pepsi-challenge. But you don't ever see Coke talking about being better than Pepsi in their ads. Or even mentioning Pepsi at all. THEY DON'T HAVE TO. They can just talk to a Coke dominated world and everything is OK.
By the way, Apple funding of schools is not just altruism, schools are one of their best markets, and getting kids to grow up using Mac is one of the only ways they have continued to even be relevant, much less successful. I'd bet if you did a poll, an amazingly high percentage of all Mac users in the workforce used Apples in school, and just stuck with what they were comfy with.
And Harvard uses Macs as much because they hate M$ as because they actually like iMacs. A valid choice, but their IT system is seriously odd and buggy because they just knee-jerk pick the other guy rather than actually thinking it through. (My company sold a software package to them, and they were a very needy customer, much worse than sites with 10x the deployed seats.) I'm surprised Intel was funding them.
-reemul
Sealand is vulnerable because of its weak physical presence and dubious sovereign status. It wouldn't take much for a small private group to knock them out, much less a real government. I actually know a guy who used to do underwater demolitions in the North Sea, who could probably be talked into it just for the BANG it would make, but then I have some very weird acquaintances. And if the US got mad at them, a passing AEGIS destroyer on its way to visit some friendly Brits could just point its radar array at them and zorch most of the network uplinks. Oops, sorry. What we need instead for a datahaven is a group which is recognized as sovereign, but doesn't actually have any sovereign territory: the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
You might be more familiar with them as the Knights Hospitaler. Since Napoleon kicked them off of Malta in 1798 they haven't had any territory of their own, but they are still acknowledged as a sovereign entity, and have full diplomatic relations with several countries (putting them in the unique position of having only their embassies as native soil).
From the webpages of the US organization, at http://www.smom.org
"The Order is still recognized under international law as a "sovereign entity"; and exchanges ambassadors and diplomatic representatives with over 80 countries. On August 24, 1994, the Order was admitted to the United Nations by being granted "Permanent Observer" status. This status, similar to the status granted to the international Red Cross and other relief organization, allows the Order to participate in the discussions of the General Assembly of the United Nations."
Being a monastic order of the Catholic Church, they would undoubtedly have problems with most if not all porn, but they might be amenable to handling nice clean money and data for a cut of the profits. After all, their 900 year history includes a generous helping of literal piracy, of the fast-galleys-and-angry-men variety. Well, they prefer 'corsair' to pirate, but you get the idea. And membership in the higher ranks still requires actual noble blood, so they are likely to be very sympathetic to tax and inheritance issues.
So, if we could get the SMOM to provide the service, we could put servers in nice clean treaty-protected embassies throughout the world. Intercepting the traffic would be a violation of international law. Fun, eh?
-reemul
who has always thought that the legal precedent of the SMOM being sovereign without having any territory would be the basis for some global corps getting extranational status. Just a matter of time.
Most of the sites that filter on the User-Agent do so because a) they rely heavily on proprietary features only present in certain browsers, so spoofing the UA just wastes your time and theirs -or- b) is an attempt to block bots from bulk-downloading the site and sucking up all the bandwidth. In neither case is their really a good reason to spoof around it. I spoof my UA for privacy purposes, but my fake UA is sufficiently similar to the real thing that I get the proper services.
B'sides, your post is not only off-topic, but a troll. Lucky for you some moderator decided to reward you for the non sequitor anti-M$ drivel. Happy birthday.
-reemul
Well, sure, you get booted. But then you file the form to say "I was unjustly accused", which would be in fact true, and then when Metallica or Dre or whoever doesn't pursue you and you get let back in, you are probably safe from future action. Sort of a get-out-of-jail free card, perhaps.
Oh, yeah, IANAL. (Or should that be I-ANAL...)
-reemul
Wrong. Just like with any other intellectual property, its just the first copy that has all those development costs associated with it. The second and successive copies just cost whatever it takes to print and ship them. Regardless of whether its just 10 copies or 10 million, all of them after that first one cost just the disc, the box, and the gas to get it to the store.
And calling claims you disagree with 'FUD' is pathetic. Instead of indicating a significant, concerted effort to cause harm, you and folks like you have watered it down to mean some data you don't like, like your lousy Jr. High report card. Knock it off.
-reemul
The TLD is from outside the US. The HOSTING is not. .CC is owned by Clear Channel Communications now, even though it was orignally for the Cocos Islands. Y'know, the company that is probably running a vanilla corporate rock station near you? .TV is only licensed from the tiny island nation of Tuvalu rather than wholly owned, but don't think that this means that they have any web servers there. A lot of those islands don't even have electricity, much less bandwidth. All you gain from using these domains is forcing anyone trying to track you down to use whois one, maybe two, more times to find where your data resides. Hmm, tricky.
Doesn't matter who provides the domain services, its where your server is.
-reemul
You're missing the point - you wouldn't have a "blondes" or "asians" directory, you'd just have files where "girl-girl" = true. Then just a simple query would find all the pics where "asian" = true, "transexual" = true, and "sure,let my parents see it" = false.
See, easy.
-reemul
Sorry, but this is another one that comes down to money. In a lot of cases, the rights revert to the author when the book goes out of print (depends of course on the contract), and the author can still hope to get it printed / filmed / whatever in the future by somebody else, and get paid for it. Which won't happen if the text becomes freely available simply because the original publisher didn't want to print any more. Once a book goes out of copyright, all bets are off, but until then you'd be ripping off the person who should get the bulk of the credit, the author. Good authors are hard to find, and should be treated with care in hopes that they have at least one more good book in them.
And for books that _are_ out of copyright, the answer is the same as with Open Source software: DO IT YOURSELF. Scan them. Type them. Give money to the electronic Gutenburg foundation. Every bit you do helps everyone else. Don't wait for the Library of Congress/Microsoft/your mommy to do it for you and present it wrapped in a bow (and a license agreement). Go find some book or play or essay that is out of copyright that you think should be free for absolutely everyone, and get to work.
If you want more information on the intellectual property rights issues here, this was thrashed out at length on the Lois Bujold mailing list. Check the archive at Dendarii.com for this thread about a year back, especially posts by Patricia Wrede, an author and former accountant.
-reemul
Actually, I don't think M$ has any interest in writing ASP support code for any other web server than IIS on NT/2K. ASP support on other platforms is entirely the province of third-parties, such as ChiliSoft. Their ChiliASP lets Netscape or even Apache servers serve ASP pages, though they still have some quirks. My company's web-based offerings require ASP, but using ChiliASP we don't require IIS. Unfortunately, we still use COM under the hood, so we still have to host on NT. We're getting there...
-reemul
Umm...C'mon folks, lets at least read up before going with the kneejerk anti-MS flame.
MSSQL 7 does support row level locking.
MSSQL 6+ support online backup and restore, better than any of the others - you can backup the DB while it is still up and running, instead of making a copy of the DB and backing _that_ up.
(No idea why they have this and at least Sybase, who had the same codebase, don't. Some Microserf must've briefly channeled a code deity. Weird.)
What the hell did you need raw I/O for anyway? You get a perf boost using it under some OSes, but only because of quirks in the given OS. Raw I/O != better for all systems.
MSSQL has its roots in the Sybase code. Be fair, slap them too if you don't like where they came from. As if several years ago history were in any way relevant...
MSSQL can and does support enterprise applications - I've installed apps for many Fortune 1000 companies, and it's done as well or better for us than Oracle or Sybase, even when those are running on Un*x boxen. Don't get me wrong, for the serious datacrunching, you've got to go with Oracle or Sybase on the big iron, but for anything other than monster projects it'll do what you need.
Yes, like any product, it's got bugs. But so do Oracle and Sybase, and I'm sure all the others though I don't have the first hand experience with those.
I'm not a M$ bigot, nor have I ever worked for them. I just can't stand folks who just fire off mindless salvos against a product just because of the logo on the box. Especially when they don't know what they're talking about.
-reemul
If you want to attack M$, find me the bastard who thought a talking paperclip was a neat idea!
Please, everyone, there are no hidden APIs. Period. This conspiracy stuff is what makes me hate to admit to liking Linux. Microsoft hires thousands of developers. Lots of them cycle through fairly quickly, and a lot of the ones that leave don't feel too warm and fuzzy toward MS. Do you really think that of those thouands of snarky ex-devs, not one of them would have had access to those 'hidden APIs' and disclosed them after they left? Not a single one? I'm sure they could leak them 'anonymously' to some anti-MS dev house, like Oracle or Sun, with no problem whatever. Heck, no NDA would stop them, not when the simple fact of Microsoft pursuing the ex-employee over the data would be a crippling admission of guilt. This is another stupid net myth, mindlessly parrotted by folks who really want to believe it, or who cannot be bothered to think for themselves. Just one more ludicrous conspiracy theory, an inheritor of an inglorious history stretching back from the Kennedy assassination all the way back to the trial of the Templars (actually the first historical example, and one that is still argued about several hundred years later.)
Rationally, there is no such thing as a secret when several thousand people know it. Sorry. MS is not in the business of being nice, and they do a lot of shady and ruthless things. But keeping that sort of thing secret doesn't involve shady practice, it would have to involve mind-control. And if they had that, the recent legal announcement would have been rather different...
-reemul
Are you serious? Exchange at this level of usage would be absolutely nuts, but Notes? Puh-leeze.
Nobody buys Domino for the mail capability, they buy it for the groupware and application system, and they *accept* the mail function that comes with it. The client UI is so amazingly bad that a UI design site did an in-depth critique, attacking pretty much the entire app. (http://www.iarchitect.com/lotus.htm)
The server is difficult to administer; the user directory is flat, slow and scales badly; and a given user's mail store only *looks* hierarchical, but is actually just one big lump of data which must be read in its entirety, first-in-first-out, for many applications, especially connectivity with third-party apps attempting to access the VIM subsystem (which is itself pretty awful) for messaging. This means that anything attempting to read a Notes message will read every single thing in the mailfile in order of its creation until it finds what it is looking for, including any archived, sent, and deleted items.
The client is difficult to navigate, crash-prone, and really beats the hell out of a network.
Hopefully the newer versions are not so bad as 4.1, but I was involved in a rollout of Notes to a mere 600 users at a chemical plant two years ago. Notes was hosted on a single high end NT/Intel box, which should be sufficient for the intended usage. Users were sent to training classes on Notes in small groups twice a day, and their machines were converted to the new mail system while they were in the class. So we knew how many users would be on the system on any given day throughout the rollout. The guy onsite from Bay Networks and I made a bet on when the network would crash from the load - I was within an *hour*. We didn't even get halfway through the deployment before the net died. Not the server, the network. Admittedly, the network was sufficiently stressed and just plain odd at the best of times, which is why the Bay guy had a desk, but 300 casual mail users should not kill a production network.
(One of the plant managers was upset by the burning fuse I drew up on a whiteboard in the MIS room and updated daily. After I was proven to be exactly correct in my forecast, he bought us lunch.)
Domino is not a mail system. If you don't need all of the other whiz-bang features of Notes/Domino, don't do it. For groupware it kicks some serious ass, really doesn't have any serious competition, but for straight mail you are better off with nearly anything else. Except Exchange.
-reemul
who dumped Notes 5 testing on someone else just this morning, and is still smiling