Because we take the word of the conglomerates as the word of God, that's why. People see a price tag and they just accept it as reality. Most people are uninterested in shopping around for better service, better prices, etc. It's just easier to plop the good old CC down and have it paid automatically every month.
When one is presented with a single high-speed internet access option (as happened to me in BOTH of the previous places I used to live), all one can do is choose the existing option or stick with dial-up.
Eight years ago, when I first signed up for it, USWests's 640k RADSL was the only option, and it was a HUGE jump forward from a V.90 modem connection (and the static IP was also a nice touch).
When I subsequently moved four years ago from one Minneapolis suburb to another to a townhouse which had TimeWarner RoadRunner available but which had no COs within range for DSL, the cablemodem option was a much better deal for me than dropping back to a modem connection.
People don't realize that 1500/256 is crappy service for DSL and that 5000/384 is just as bad.
When compared to what could bemade available in a perfect world, you're right. But those are very good compared to what we had previously).
People say, ooooh, Cable is faster than DSL and less money! They don't bother looking into the hidden restrictions and commonplace bullshit that the ISPs pull (such as UNLIMITED SERVICE - as long as you don't pass over our unknown bandwith usage threshold).
There was no such threshold when I was a customer with TimeWarner, and I have no such limit with my current Charter account. Don't map your negative experiences to the entire universe...
Some people say, "but there is no alternative." Sure there is... Become active and do something about it. Oooh, but that would take away from your time watching Survivor and The Apprentice. Perhaps the Cable company would even come and shut off your precious mind-numbing TV delivered drugs. Wah.
I DID do something about it -- that's one reason why Qwest finally corrected the DSL situation at my second residence. However, all things considered, I found my cable connection to be a better deal overall than the DSL connection, so I stayed with cable.
OS/2 had this over ten years ago, and it still isn't an option in Windows. It's sometimes nice to be able to quickly open a program's original directory to look at documentaton or whatever.
When I drag and drop a folder C:\FOO in Windows Explorer to any destination, all it says is
"Copying From 'FOO' to 'FOO'"
in the status dialog.
Which drive did I drop it on? It doesn't say.
Where in the tree on that drive is FOO actually being copied? The message given is the same even if I drop it in radically different places, so there's no way I can tell if I dropped it in the wrong place.
And why not provide some sort of file count or byte count instead of the simplified "x seconds remaining"?
The difference here is that Microsoft isn't letting you use Office for free with the stipulation that so long as you use the free licence you do not engage in any reverse engineering.
From the sound of it, though, Tridge did not actually run BitKeeper at any time -- he performed the act of reverse engineering by studying the datafiles.
That would make BK's license irrelevant as it did not apply to him (a non-user).
It also makes the fact that BK is available for free to some users irrevant.
Who plays Doom3? I'd rather play UT2004 any day, or perhaps a good game of TA/TAUCP.
The software choice is yours, so the platform choice is also yours based on the software you want to run. If you choose to run XP for whatever reason, the fact that XP patches are problematic is something you've chosen to live with.
If they really cared about their users being able to apply patches and have a secure system, they would create smaller patches against individual Windows subsystems that a user could mix and match accordingly.
Instead, they insist on releasing ONE mega-patch containing security patches, slipstreamed feature updates, and other items not related to security.
SP2 is only available as a large monolithic patch, which means it's an all-or-nothing proposition.
If they were to break the patch up into various smaller patches against individual areas of the OS, the chances are good that most of them would work at a given site.
It's the overly-simplistic approach that Microsoft takes to system fixes that helps to cause this type of problem...
$45 - Palm m105 (8MB, mono) with serial cradle and leather case. $5 - Palm folding keyboard. $30 - PalmPix camera for m100/m105. $20 - 8MB Flash card (Northstar MemorySafe) for m105.
Doesn't do color or multimedia, but I don't care -- it's a wonderful PDA, it uses standard AAA alkaline or NiMH batteries, and I don't have to replace the batteries very often (four weeks for NiMH, 6-8 weeks for Alkaline). And it plays a good game of chess, hearts, solitaire, blackjack, and scrabble (along with maybe 40 other games)!:-)
> For others who may also think this has purely accounting applications instead > of any tech implications...
I didn't say it had no tech implications -- I said that I currently don't *see* any, at least in the area of the company where I currently work.
> Companies are expected to be able to retain (and possibly audit) their e-mail > in case they are required for court purposes
Interesting. When I worked at Northwest Airlines, we used to keep mail around for years (since we did a certain amount of informal software design via e-mail with analysts in other buildings), but in 1999 or 2000 corporate legal told us that the new policy was to retain 90 days maximum, and that anything older than that should be printed out and removed from the server. They even set up an auto-purge to enforce this limit.
I wonder if that policy will be changing in light of this legislation?
> Ahh, but given that what right do you have to watch the program you've recorded?
I paid for the cable connection to obtain the original show, and US Copyright Law explicitly allows certain types of analog recording for noncommercial use.
> I believe there is a reasonable expectation here that those ads _should_ > persist with the recording.
You don't understand how ReplayTV functions. The entire show (ads and all) is still present on the recording, but ReplayTV marks the stard and end points of recognized commercial message blocks and optionally skips over those during playback.
> So, until there is some other way of paying to view programs, > all we have is the advertising model currently in use.
I already pay by cable company to view programs.
Broadcast channels are the exception, not the rule, and I don't view their signals gratis over the air waves.
I mean, it's bad enough that some webmasters tie their menu functionality to the proprietary Flash protocol, making their sites almost impossible to navigate from certain platforms (regardless of browser) due to a lack of current plugins.
Now Flash being used to track people against their wishes.
True, you paid for the music, but you did not pay to have the "right to use the music". You paid to *listen* to the music.
That depends on several factors, actually.
As a US citizen, I *do* have the right to make unlimited personal copies (either analog or digital) of music I've purchased on analog media (e.g., LP's and cassette tapes) for my own noncommercial use.
As I also happen to own an SCMS-compliant digital CD recorder, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 explicitly gives me the right to make first-generation copies of digital music (that is, CD's), again for my own personal use.
Since I already have an explicit right to create a precise digital copy in one format for personal use, how is the creation of a digital copy in another digital format any different?
I *could* use my SCSM-compliant record in analog mode to generate an analog copy of the CD first, then rip the CD to MP3 format if I wanted to be absolutely squeaky clean, since the right to perform those actions (a digital-to-analog copy and then an analog-to-anything copy) are both explicitly granted to me under current US copyright law, but why do the extra step?
For the past 4-5 years, however, I've been limiting my CD purchases to used CD's on HALF.COM and elsewhere, and I've been totally avoiding the online digital music scene (preferring instead to concentrate on slowly ripping my collection and burning it in MP3 form to data CD's).
Why should I continue to support an industry which (a) treats me like a crook and (b) won't give me what I want?
What do I want? Digital music files that I can play, store, and convert however the hell I want to. I paid for the right to use the music -- GIVE ME THAT RIGHT.
Since open-source licenses (including the GPL depend on copyright law for their enforcement, most open source advocates seem to have no problem with existing copyright laws as it applies to software.
Sometimes formal QA is needed, sometimes not.
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When I worked in a mainframe group at a major airline writing code for internal use in flight ops, we had a small team of a dozen or so experienced programmer/analysts (perhaps 15 years of experience on average) who each knew their business/application area rather well in addition to being quite competent technically.
We also tended to work directly with a dedicated set of business analysts who were also quite experienced, being dedicated "end users" from various operational areas, and it was a collaborative effort to design and implement projects large and small.
After years of working with the same experienced people, the system worked *very* well. We had processes in place to help ensure that proper testing and documentation was done and that no unauthorized production loads were made -- otherwise, we basically trusted people to use their best judgement.
Since the folks who were writing the code were also supporting the application 24x7 on a rotating basis, they had a vested interest in keeping the system stable.
I think that demonstrated (at least to me) that sometimes a full-blown separate QA process isn't required. By doing things in a somewhat abbreviated way, however, the group was a lot more agile, and quality fixes could literally be coded and loaded in a matter of hours (in some cases).
When I worked for Unisys on application development for paying customers, however, we had a much more formalized process. We had dedicated business analysts writing the func specs, programmer/analysts to write code to those specs, and dedicated QA people who designed and helped implement formal test scripts (both manual and automated) before the product was rolled out.
The size of the group and the nature of the product made that level of QA more important, I think, but it was also implemented knowing that the software development cycle in place was a slow and deliberate process.
Moral of the story: Maintaining a local system for internal corporate use is sometimes a VERY different process from developing commercial software for external customer use, and the two situations can sometimes differ greatly in approach while still maintaining a very high level of quality.
I also think it depends quite a bit on the quality of the people you have in place, and also on the level of experience those people have with the product, the technology, and in working with each other. Experienced people can work wonders if you let them.
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Because we take the word of the conglomerates as the word of God, that's why. People see a price tag and they just accept it as reality. Most people are uninterested in shopping around for better service, better prices, etc. It's just easier to plop the good old CC down and have it paid automatically every month.
When one is presented with a single high-speed internet access option (as happened to me in BOTH of the previous places I used to live), all one can do is choose the existing option or stick with dial-up.
Eight years ago, when I first signed up for it, USWests's 640k RADSL was the only option, and it was a HUGE jump forward from a V.90 modem connection (and the static IP was also a nice touch).
When I subsequently moved four years ago from one Minneapolis suburb to another to a townhouse which had TimeWarner RoadRunner available but which had no COs within range for DSL, the cablemodem option was a much better deal for me than dropping back to a modem connection.
People don't realize that 1500/256 is crappy service for DSL and that 5000/384 is just as bad.
When compared to what could bemade available in a perfect world, you're right. But those are very good compared to what we had previously).
People say, ooooh, Cable is faster than DSL and less money! They don't bother looking into the hidden restrictions and commonplace bullshit that the ISPs pull (such as UNLIMITED SERVICE - as long as you don't pass over our unknown bandwith usage threshold).
There was no such threshold when I was a customer with TimeWarner, and I have no such limit with my current Charter account. Don't map your negative experiences to the entire universe...
Some people say, "but there is no alternative." Sure there is... Become active and do something about it. Oooh, but that would take away from your time watching Survivor and The Apprentice. Perhaps the Cable company would even come and shut off your precious mind-numbing TV delivered drugs. Wah.
I DID do something about it -- that's one reason why Qwest finally corrected the DSL situation at my second residence. However, all things considered, I found my cable connection to be a better deal overall than the DSL connection, so I stayed with cable.
OS/2 had this. I *like* creating custom icons for my programs and folders.
OS/2 had this over ten years ago, and it still isn't an option in Windows. It's sometimes nice to be able to quickly open a program's original directory to look at documentaton or whatever.
When I drag and drop a folder C:\FOO in Windows Explorer to any destination, all it says is
"Copying From 'FOO' to 'FOO'"
in the status dialog.
Which drive did I drop it on? It doesn't say.
Where in the tree on that drive is FOO actually being copied? The message given is the same even if I drop it in radically different places, so there's no way I can tell if I dropped it in the wrong place.
And why not provide some sort of file count or byte count instead of the simplified "x seconds remaining"?
Who designed that status dialog???
The difference here is that Microsoft isn't letting you use Office for free with the stipulation that so long as you use the free licence you do not engage in any reverse engineering.
From the sound of it, though, Tridge did not actually run BitKeeper at any time -- he performed the act of reverse engineering by studying the datafiles.
That would make BK's license irrelevant as it did not apply to him (a non-user).
It also makes the fact that BK is available for free to some users irrevant.
That's the way the mainframe OS that my employer uses is patched -- one subsystem at a time.
Some Linux variants require no tinkering (like the version of Coyote Linux I use for my firewall).
It even has a Windows configuration wizard for those who are unwilling to use Linux scripts.
Who plays Doom3? I'd rather play UT2004 any day, or perhaps a good game of TA/TAUCP.
The software choice is yours, so the platform choice is also yours based on the software you want to run. If you choose to run XP for whatever reason, the fact that XP patches are problematic is something you've chosen to live with.
I choose to avoid that cesspool...
...about monolithic patches.
If they really cared about their users being able to apply patches and have a secure system, they would create smaller patches against individual Windows subsystems that a user could mix and match accordingly.
Instead, they insist on releasing ONE mega-patch containing security patches, slipstreamed feature updates, and other items not related to security.
SP2 is only available as a large monolithic patch, which means it's an all-or-nothing proposition.
If they were to break the patch up into various smaller patches against individual areas of the OS, the chances are good that most of them would work at a given site.
It's the overly-simplistic approach that Microsoft takes to system fixes that helps to cause this type of problem...
Some of us are running OSes other than Windows on x86 hardware, believe it or not. :-)
$45 - Palm m105 (8MB, mono) with serial cradle and leather case.
:-)
$5 - Palm folding keyboard.
$30 - PalmPix camera for m100/m105.
$20 - 8MB Flash card (Northstar MemorySafe) for m105.
Doesn't do color or multimedia, but I don't care -- it's a wonderful PDA, it uses standard AAA alkaline or NiMH batteries, and I don't have to replace the batteries very often (four weeks for NiMH, 6-8 weeks for Alkaline). And it plays a good game of chess, hearts, solitaire, blackjack, and scrabble (along with maybe 40 other games)!
> For others who may also think this has purely accounting applications instead
> of any tech implications...
I didn't say it had no tech implications -- I said that I currently don't *see* any, at least in the area of the company where I currently work.
> Companies are expected to be able to retain (and possibly audit) their e-mail
> in case they are required for court purposes
Interesting. When I worked at Northwest Airlines, we used to keep mail around for years (since we did a certain amount of informal software design via e-mail with analysts in other buildings), but in 1999 or 2000 corporate legal told us that the new policy was to retain 90 days maximum, and that anything older than that should be printed out and removed from the server. They even set up an auto-purge to enforce this limit.
I wonder if that policy will be changing in light of this legislation?
> Ahh, but given that what right do you have to watch the program you've recorded?
I paid for the cable connection to obtain the original show, and US Copyright Law explicitly allows certain types of analog recording for noncommercial use.
> I believe there is a reasonable expectation here that those ads _should_
> persist with the recording.
You don't understand how ReplayTV functions. The entire show (ads and all) is still present on the recording, but ReplayTV marks the stard and end points of recognized commercial message blocks and optionally skips over those during playback.
> So, until there is some other way of paying to view programs,
> all we have is the advertising model currently in use.
I already pay by cable company to view programs.
Broadcast channels are the exception, not the rule, and I don't view their signals gratis over the air waves.
I mean, it's bad enough that some webmasters tie their menu functionality to the proprietary Flash protocol, making their sites almost impossible to navigate from certain platforms (regardless of browser) due to a lack of current plugins.
Now Flash being used to track people against their wishes.
What next? Flash-based worms?
I'm just a programmer/analyst working on developing and supporting one of our products -- I don't deal with the finance end of things. :-)
Is it having an impact on IT resources that I can see? No, not really. I'd never heard of it until this story, in fact.
They were given their time slot when the show was aired and transmitted over the air or over cable.
:-)
That doesn't give them the right to take up that space on my recording of the event.
This episode makes me happy that I have a ReplayTV and not a Tivo.
Or a skydiver. :-)
One can be unfamiliar with LAN or common Linux/Unix issues (or PC-related issues at all) and be quite competent in their area(s) of IT expertise.
A lack of knowledge doesn't always imply incompetence. Sometimes it's simply a lack of knowledge.
That depends on several factors, actually.
As a US citizen, I *do* have the right to make unlimited personal copies (either analog or digital) of music I've purchased on analog media (e.g., LP's and cassette tapes) for my own noncommercial use.
As I also happen to own an SCMS-compliant digital CD recorder, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 explicitly gives me the right to make first-generation copies of digital music (that is, CD's), again for my own personal use.
Since I already have an explicit right to create a precise digital copy in one format for personal use, how is the creation of a digital copy in another digital format any different?
I *could* use my SCSM-compliant record in analog mode to generate an analog copy of the CD first, then rip the CD to MP3 format if I wanted to be absolutely squeaky clean, since the right to perform those actions (a digital-to-analog copy and then an analog-to-anything copy) are both explicitly granted to me under current US copyright law, but why do the extra step?
For the past 4-5 years, however, I've been limiting my CD purchases to used CD's on HALF.COM and elsewhere, and I've been totally avoiding the online digital music scene (preferring instead to concentrate on slowly ripping my collection and burning it in MP3 form to data CD's).
Why should I continue to support an industry which (a) treats me like a crook and (b) won't give me what I want?
What do I want? Digital music files that I can play, store, and convert however the hell I want to. I paid for the right to use the music -- GIVE ME THAT RIGHT.
What does "mc" mean?
Since open-source licenses (including the GPL depend on copyright law for their enforcement, most open source advocates seem to have no problem with existing copyright laws as it applies to software.
Patents are another issue altogether.
What does it mean??!? :-( :-)
When I worked in a mainframe group at a major airline writing code for internal use in flight ops, we had a small team of a dozen or so experienced programmer/analysts (perhaps 15 years of experience on average) who each knew their business/application area rather well in addition to being quite competent technically.
We also tended to work directly with a dedicated set of business analysts who were also quite experienced, being dedicated "end users" from various operational areas, and it was a collaborative effort to design and implement projects large and small.
After years of working with the same experienced people, the system worked *very* well. We had processes in place to help ensure that proper testing and documentation was done and that no unauthorized production loads were made -- otherwise, we basically trusted people to use their best judgement.
Since the folks who were writing the code were also supporting the application 24x7 on a rotating basis, they had a vested interest in keeping the system stable.
I think that demonstrated (at least to me) that sometimes a full-blown separate QA process isn't required. By doing things in a somewhat abbreviated way, however, the group was a lot more agile, and quality fixes could literally be coded and loaded in a matter of hours (in some cases).
When I worked for Unisys on application development for paying customers, however, we had a much more formalized process. We had dedicated business analysts writing the func specs, programmer/analysts to write code to those specs, and dedicated QA people who designed and helped implement formal test scripts (both manual and automated) before the product was rolled out.
The size of the group and the nature of the product made that level of QA more important, I think, but it was also implemented knowing that the software development cycle in place was a slow and deliberate process.
Moral of the story: Maintaining a local system for internal corporate use is sometimes a VERY different process from developing commercial software for external customer use, and the two situations can sometimes differ greatly in approach while still maintaining a very high level of quality.
I also think it depends quite a bit on the quality of the people you have in place, and also on the level of experience those people have with the product, the technology, and in working with each other. Experienced people can work wonders if you let them.