"But the firm now says Windows Messenger probably isn't necessary for home users, and future versions of its Windows software will come with the service turned off."
There are some pretty impressive claims in this paper. The rebuttal looks good, too. I don't know who's right, but I was hoping to see some debate on that here. Instead, there's all this back-and-forthing about the motivations of capitalists (see parent post) vs. environmentalists, or anecdotal evidence about how it's obvious that it's getting warmer ('cos a) we all know how the scientific method pales before anecdotal evidence, and b) for the love of God, the M&M paper did not say that temperatures hadn't risen in the last hundred years -- merely that that rise wasn't unprecedented).
Sorry, getting less coherent as I go on. There arediscussions
here on the data. But c'mon! I may be overly optimistic here. I realize this is Slashdot, but surely someone here is willing to help me find out what I think:-).
Someone else has already mentioned this, but here's my two cents.
I used to work at the helpdesk at a small dial-up ISP. I ended up taking care of abuse complaints, and SpamCop came in handy many times. For a while we had a spammer sign up once a month for a throwaway account, and the very first indication was always SpamCop. I flatter myself that after being shut down a few times in a row, he went elsewhere.
SpamCop is easy to use, quick, and it provides the admin with all the information she needs. If you've got rogue ISPs (hate to use the phrase, but it's appropriate), then they're not gonna pay attention to anything less than the 153rd Airborne. (Not a bad idea, actually.) But for places that do care, it's excellent.
"Previously, my students could only do what I'd describe as 'proof'
animations small, low-resolution and not presentation quality," Paul
said. "With access to this computing power, the students will be able to
ship their software files of instructions to the Linux cluster, and it
will come back in three or four hours with modeling, lighting and
animation. Students will get to experience the whole thing in terms of
scale and presence, and they can do longer animations."
Interesting...like what used to happen with print jobs. How long 'til a
student goes to the sysadmin on duty asking for their animation job to
be niced down a point or two?
In some ways, these Free Software Foundation "enforcement actions"
can be more dangerous than a typical copyright spat, because usually
copyright holders seek money--say, royalties on the product that
infringing companies are selling. But the Free Software Foundation
doesn't want royalties -- it wants you to burn down your house, or at the
very least share it with cloners.
There has been more than one story about Microsoft and IBM using
licensing or patent disputes in order to screw competitors. SCO's
entire existence seems to depend on wanting you "to burn down your own
house". Oracle's in there for completeness. I'm sure there's other
examples.
2) And holy FSOF, since when did complying with the license the
software is released under become such an onerous act? When it
forbids you to release benchmarks of.NET software (MS)? When it
includes clauses saying "If you're in Europe, and you have the right to
reverse engineer this software, you explicitly give up that right even
though you don't have to" (Synplicity or Matlab, I forget which --
installed recently at work)? Evidently these crack-induced clauses are
perfectly acceptable; why, then, does Forbes' writer swallow a camel and
strain at a gnat?
As a first step, organisations including South Korea's Industry Promotion Agency and Korea Association of Information and Telecommunication will switch to open source software such as the Linux operating system and Mozilla web browser for both desktop PCs and servers.
I've just been to two websites in the last five minutes (www.iams.com and www.thefermentedgrape.com) that did not cooperate with Mozilla. Iams' had a text version; the other is a wine brewing store just down the street, so I'll be able to talk to them directly (gak! RealWorld!). Perhaps -- I'm the overly optimistic sort sometimes -- a country with 48 million people switching to Mozilla (yes, government != joe user) will make the odd web developer realize that not fucking everybody uses IE.
(ObDisclaimers: I realize that two web sites are not a huge deal. Most of the time I'm happy to write off the site in question and move on. The instructions did specifically state that I shouldn't taunt Happy Fun Ball.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "No one's made use of it before"... No one else could make use of it (in.com and.net), Verisign is, as I said, a monopoly.
Bad choice of words: As you mentioned, I understand that other TLD registrars have made use of this before. Amended sentence: no one in this position of power (.com and.net being what they are) has made use of this before.
This:
This is no different from ISPs randomly redirecting users to their own branded search engine when you type in "www.google.com", or an ISP's employee intercepting passwords and using them to steal money.
and this from the comment below:
I do....I, and all the other sysadmins out there, decide whether SiteFinder works or not.
are exactly what I'm talking about when I say that this debate is fascinating. In all honesty, I'd give a lot to sit down w/whoever at Verisign and ask them these same questions -- not necessarily to provoke the answer that I feel is right, but just to see how separate groups of intelligent people come to utterly different answers about these questions.
Some people suggest that administration of the DNS is a public trust, and that VeriSign is merely the caretaker of this system, not its owner. And now VeriSign has abused that trust. That may be true. Before a few days ago it didn't matter whether VeriSign was the owner or a caretaker. Now it matters a lot. VeriSign kicked a sleeping dog. It's a bizarre thing to do. Was it really VeriSign's decision to make, unilaterally? Did it need permission to make this decision? If so, what entity has the authority to grant such permission?
If you think about this from a social point of view, not just technical, this is absolutely fascinating (rather than just irratating/punch-provoking): here's an ability, that was theoretically possible all along, to have this big effect on something lots and lots of people use. No one made use of it before. Now someone has, and it's
(presumably) made a bunch of money for those who did it, and
pissed off a lot of -- but not all -- people.
Who's responsible? Who gets to say "No, you can't do that", or "Yes, you can"?
I know what I think is the right answer, and it's what (probably) the rest of you think. But the final answer isn't up to you and me, or at least not you and me alone. Watching that process of who-gets-to-decide is going to be at least as interesting and precedent-setting as what the final decision ends up being.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND - In what one observer termed a "trial balloon", the ISO today released a white paper proposing a mandatory licensing fee for the use of "amino acids, proteins, and all derivatory compounds...for the use, creation, furtherance and sustaining of life on Earth."
Critics were quick to denounce the proposal, but admitted that the "cash-grab" move was unlikely to provoke any real backlash.
"Once they got that whole country and money code license fee put through, it was game over," said one US government official on condition of anonymity. "Now they're just, like, 'Well, what else can we charge for?'"
ISO distanced itself from the white paper, saying that it was "a modest proposal" put forth by an intern. "However, we will consider the ideas within as we would any other source," said Dr. Oliver Smoot, president of ISO. "And if there should happen to be megabucks within those ideas, we are most definitely there. W00t!"
Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman was unavailable for comment. However, those close to the computing guru said that he had been prepared for such an eventuality. "Richard switched long ago to non-carbon amino-like compounds," said one source close to Stallman. "It took some work to come up with a Free organic chemical basis for life, but he thought it was worthwhile. Looks like he was right."
My title is Network Administrator. I work at a small (20 people) software shop. Half our systems run FreeBSD, half run W2k, and we've got one XP box. Here's what I can remember, off the top of my head, of what I've done in the last few weeks:
Arranged for electrical and phone contractor visits to wire up a room in our office.
Called local telcoms to price T1s.
Patched W2K (2x), Office 2K, SSH (2x), and Sendmail.
Purchased new computers and set them up with FreeBSD (2x) and W2K (2x).
Split our NIS netgroup to get around the verdammt 1024-character limit.
Set Nagios and MRTG to watch our stuff.
Purchased office supplies and a new hard drive to replace one that took a walk.
Taught one of the new managers how to use CVS (which truly was a case of the blind leading the blind).
Fixed a bug in the build process (one particular environment variable wasn't getting set during build, but had been statically coded by Yours Truly).
Attempted to get a handle on what software licenses we need to get, and how much that might cost us.
Discovered that "Print to PDF" in the version of OpenOffice we have means "Print to PostScript"; made vague plans for upgrade to latest version.
Tested OpenVPN, found it Good.
Set up new rackmount switches to replace the zip-tied ones we had previously; half-cleaned up the rat's nest of wiring.
Moved one guy's home directory to another computer so he wouldn't fill up the partition he was on; made vague plans to replace the old server.
And I love it all. In all honesty, I'm having the time of my life doing all this. Beats the living fuck out of helpdesk.
In fact, I was going to post this in Morse code, but the lameness filter caught me. I hereby suggest that Slashdot switch to Morse code entirely.
Ahem...anyhow, you could argue that being a ham operator is like joining the Army: you're making yourself and your abilities available to your country/neighbours/fellow humans if necessary. Morse code is intelligible when packet radio and voice are not. Multiple, redundant channels of communication are Good Things, especially when disaster strikes...why allow one of those channels to wither and die?
What's the difference between these remarkle advertising vehicles? Don't
be left without the proper knowledge when sending out your offering to
the masses. Along with our other various How Tos, learn the difference
before any mailing.
I have never felt so good to be part of the Slashdot effect.
BTW, as pointed to in the article, a
list of members was posted to Usenet w/a list of memberships. There was
also a link to an archive of the contents of the site; here's a link:
Slashdot Mirror
Shame, really. I was looking forward to a long, hard talk about things with him...
I gotta know. Who ported cluestick to Windows? :-)
Windows Messenger service != pop-up browser windows. How did this get modded informative?
--Nice: You don't have any information, but that doesn't stop you from throwing mud.
Why is no one discussing the claims of the paper and how valid they are or aren't? Or the reply from the authors of the original paper as mentioned in this comment?
There are some pretty impressive claims in this paper. The rebuttal looks good, too. I don't know who's right, but I was hoping to see some debate on that here. Instead, there's all this back-and-forthing about the motivations of capitalists (see parent post) vs. environmentalists, or anecdotal evidence about how it's obvious that it's getting warmer ('cos a) we all know how the scientific method pales before anecdotal evidence, and b) for the love of God, the M&M paper did not say that temperatures hadn't risen in the last hundred years -- merely that that rise wasn't unprecedented).
Sorry, getting less coherent as I go on. There are discussions here on the data. But c'mon! I may be overly optimistic here. I realize this is Slashdot, but surely someone here is willing to help me find out what I think :-).
I used to work at the helpdesk at a small dial-up ISP. I ended up taking care of abuse complaints, and SpamCop came in handy many times. For a while we had a spammer sign up once a month for a throwaway account, and the very first indication was always SpamCop. I flatter myself that after being shut down a few times in a row, he went elsewhere.
SpamCop is easy to use, quick, and it provides the admin with all the information she needs. If you've got rogue ISPs (hate to use the phrase, but it's appropriate), then they're not gonna pay attention to anything less than the 153rd Airborne. (Not a bad idea, actually.) But for places that do care, it's excellent.
Interesting...like what used to happen with print jobs. How long 'til a student goes to the sysadmin on duty asking for their animation job to be niced down a point or two?
There's a United Nations World Robotics Survey, and I wasn't told about it?
--Homer Simpson
I've put up another copy of the book at http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/bbv :-).
. Let's see who gets a cease-and-desist first
Completely correct.
1) Hah! Let's try:
There has been more than one story about Microsoft and IBM using licensing or patent disputes in order to screw competitors. SCO's entire existence seems to depend on wanting you "to burn down your own house". Oracle's in there for completeness. I'm sure there's other examples.2) And holy FSOF, since when did complying with the license the software is released under become such an onerous act? When it forbids you to release benchmarks of .NET software (MS)? When it
includes clauses saying "If you're in Europe, and you have the right to
reverse engineer this software, you explicitly give up that right even
though you don't have to" (Synplicity or Matlab, I forget which --
installed recently at work)? Evidently these crack-induced clauses are
perfectly acceptable; why, then, does Forbes' writer swallow a camel and
strain at a gnat?
Grr, this is going to bug me all day...
I wish they didn't have anything to talk about.
I've just been to two websites in the last five minutes (www.iams.com and www.thefermentedgrape.com) that did not cooperate with Mozilla. Iams' had a text version; the other is a wine brewing store just down the street, so I'll be able to talk to them directly (gak! RealWorld!). Perhaps -- I'm the overly optimistic sort sometimes -- a country with 48 million people switching to Mozilla (yes, government != joe user) will make the odd web developer realize that not fucking everybody uses IE.
(ObDisclaimers: I realize that two web sites are not a huge deal. Most of the time I'm happy to write off the site in question and move on. The instructions did specifically state that I shouldn't taunt Happy Fun Ball.)
Bad choice of words: As you mentioned, I understand that other TLD registrars have made use of this before. Amended sentence: no one in this position of power (.com and .net being what they are) has made use of this before.
This:
This is no different from ISPs randomly redirecting users to their own branded search engine when you type in "www.google.com", or an ISP's employee intercepting passwords and using them to steal money.
and this from the comment below:
I do....I, and all the other sysadmins out there, decide whether SiteFinder works or not.
are exactly what I'm talking about when I say that this debate is fascinating. In all honesty, I'd give a lot to sit down w/whoever at Verisign and ask them these same questions -- not necessarily to provoke the answer that I feel is right, but just to see how separate groups of intelligent people come to utterly different answers about these questions.
Some people suggest that administration of the DNS is a public trust, and that VeriSign is merely the caretaker of this system, not its owner. And now VeriSign has abused that trust. That may be true. Before a few days ago it didn't matter whether VeriSign was the owner or a caretaker. Now it matters a lot. VeriSign kicked a sleeping dog. It's a bizarre thing to do. Was it really VeriSign's decision to make, unilaterally? Did it need permission to make this decision? If so, what entity has the authority to grant such permission?
If you think about this from a social point of view, not just technical, this is absolutely fascinating (rather than just irratating/punch-provoking): here's an ability, that was theoretically possible all along, to have this big effect on something lots and lots of people use. No one made use of it before. Now someone has, and it's
Who's responsible? Who gets to say "No, you can't do that", or "Yes, you can"?
I know what I think is the right answer, and it's what (probably) the rest of you think. But the final answer isn't up to you and me, or at least not you and me alone. Watching that process of who-gets-to-decide is going to be at least as interesting and precedent-setting as what the final decision ends up being.
Critics were quick to denounce the proposal, but admitted that the "cash-grab" move was unlikely to provoke any real backlash.
"Once they got that whole country and money code license fee put through, it was game over," said one US government official on condition of anonymity. "Now they're just, like, 'Well, what else can we charge for?'"
ISO distanced itself from the white paper, saying that it was "a modest proposal" put forth by an intern. "However, we will consider the ideas within as we would any other source," said Dr. Oliver Smoot, president of ISO. "And if there should happen to be megabucks within those ideas, we are most definitely there. W00t!"
Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman was unavailable for comment. However, those close to the computing guru said that he had been prepared for such an eventuality. "Richard switched long ago to non-carbon amino-like compounds," said one source close to Stallman. "It took some work to come up with a Free organic chemical basis for life, but he thought it was worthwhile. Looks like he was right."
- Arranged for electrical and phone contractor visits to wire up a room in our office.
- Called local telcoms to price T1s.
- Patched W2K (2x), Office 2K, SSH (2x), and Sendmail.
- Purchased new computers and set them up with FreeBSD (2x) and W2K (2x).
- Split our NIS netgroup to get around the verdammt 1024-character limit.
- Set Nagios and MRTG to watch our stuff.
- Purchased office supplies and a new hard drive to replace one that took a walk.
- Taught one of the new managers how to use CVS (which truly was a case of the blind leading the blind).
- Fixed a bug in the build process (one particular environment variable wasn't getting set during build, but had been statically coded by Yours Truly).
- Attempted to get a handle on what software licenses we need to get, and how much that might cost us.
- Discovered that "Print to PDF" in the version of OpenOffice we have means "Print to PostScript"; made vague plans for upgrade to latest version.
- Tested OpenVPN, found it Good.
- Set up new rackmount switches to replace the zip-tied ones we had previously; half-cleaned up the rat's nest of wiring.
- Moved one guy's home directory to another computer so he wouldn't fill up the partition he was on; made vague plans to replace the old server.
And I love it all. In all honesty, I'm having the time of my life doing all this. Beats the living fuck out of helpdesk.Well done, Mr. Buzbee.
Ahem...anyhow, you could argue that being a ham operator is like joining the Army: you're making yourself and your abilities available to your country/neighbours/fellow humans if necessary. Morse code is intelligible when packet radio and voice are not. Multiple, redundant channels of communication are Good Things, especially when disaster strikes...why allow one of those channels to wither and die?
D'oh! And I hosed my own server w/ab just a little while ago, too...(check journal for details.) Good one!
(hangs head in shame) Excellent points...don't know why I didn't think of that.
Truly, you are the better Slashdotter. I bow to your greatness, and I am arranging the transfer of my karma to your Swiss Slashdot account. :-)
What's the difference between these remarkle advertising vehicles? Don't be left without the proper knowledge when sending out your offering to the masses. Along with our other various How Tos, learn the difference before any mailing.
I have never felt so good to be part of the Slashdot effect.
BTW, as pointed to in the article, a list of members was posted to Usenet w/a list of memberships. There was also a link to an archive of the contents of the site; here's a link:
http://jscript.dk/2003/8/thebulkclub.com.zip
and a mirror:
http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/thebulkclub.co m/thebulkclub.com.zip
A list of the files in the archive can be found here:
http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/thebulkclub.co m/contents.txt
Grab a copy and post your own links!